My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #26, January, 1996

SOMETHING AMYTH

I hate it when I find myself agreeing with William Bennett, (not that it happens all that often, mind you) but there's one thing he is absolutely right about. We need to start telling our children better stories, myths and legends that teach the virtues we admire.

Societies need storytellers to tell them who they are and what they value and how to live and what is worth fighting for. If the storytellers tell of stoicism and courage--like the story of the Spartan mother telling her son to return with his shield or on it--that society will be warlike and stoic; no 12 step recovery programs here. If the stories tell of sister wind and brother wolf, that society will use the fruits of the earth and replenish it.

What Bennett didn't notice, of course, is that our current storytellers are his kind of folks--right-wing talk show hosts and politicians. And the stories they are telling are, I believe, a large part of the reason our society is coming apart.

Our talk show hosts' favorite story is about pure personal freedom, and how government is stealing it from us. There are two problems with this. One is that government is us. If we do not like our government, we have the power to change it peaceably. The other is that personal freedom as a value asserts individual rights over societal rights, selfishness over connectedness, and rights over responsibilities. The people with the fewest societal constraints, after all, are soulless killers. Who could be more free than Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacey?

The other favorite talk show myth is the myth of the Evil Other, the people who are not like us and who are responsible for all our social ills. At various times throughout our history, that Evil Other has been the slaves, who sometimes rebelled and killed their masters. Then it was the Irish immigrants, who fled starvation in unassimilable numbers in the 1840's. Then it was the eastern Europeans (many of them Jews fleeing pogroms) who flooded in between 1880 and 1920. Lately, it has been blacks, illegal aliens, homosexuals, "feminazis" and liberals (like Jesus who threw the moneychangers out of the temple, for instance?).

Think for a moment about a nation of many different ethnic groups and religions and histories, living beside each other for centuries, intermarrying freely. Sound familiar? That's Bosnia we're talking about. That was, of course, before their storytellers, Karadic and Milosevic and their ilk, started telling stories of ancient hatreds amongs the ethnic groups, stories of brutal rapes, pillaging, torture and executions.

It's not that that kind of thing hadn't been happening; it had, and nobody's hands were clean. Croatians and Muslims and Serbs took turns through the centuries as victims and victimizers. But a certain amount of historical forgetfulness is essential if people are to coexist, and Bosnia's storytellers instead reminded people of their hate-filled pasts.

The problem with reminding people of their differences, of course, is that it brings out the worst in human nature. It encourages and justifies hatred and meanness. It turns us into the kind of people who send death threats to Jackie Robinson and Henry Aaron, the kind of people who bomb little girls in Sunday schools, and children in a day care center in a federal building. It turns us into the kind of people we cannot possibly want to be, let alone want our children to become.

But it also discourages us from seeing each other as people with common problems, and working together to solve them. If the chickens are fighting too hard over the few scraps of feed, they aren't going to remember that the larger problem they share is the man who's coming with an ax in his hand.

When you come right down to it, we have the same problems as the people we are being told to despise. We are uncertain of our jobs as our economy is being restructured. We are down at the bottom, watching as the people at the top pull all the ladders up behind them--decent public schools, student loans, earned income tax credit, unions...

So what we need is a better national myth, a myth that makes us better people and better citizens. Not a myth made up from whole cloth, but a myth that is deeply embedded in our history and national character.

There are a lot of stories that Americans have lived by over the years. One is the story of a people who fled religious persecution. There could be useful lessons here about reclaiming one's life and liberty--were it not for the fact that these persecuted people proceeded to persecute their own heretics.

There is the story of the convicts and rebels and indentured servants who were sent to the colonies and who served their time and remade themselves as citizens (my Scots ancestors appeared in this country shortly after the battle of Culloden, which has always led us to believe that the King paid for their transport here). This could be a useful myth, as long as we remember that society and government helped in their remaking. Government gave them cheap land, an army to fight the Indians, and dams to provide water in an arid land. The idea that people made it entirely on their own is neither true nor useful.

There is the story of a nation created by words on documents, words like "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," or "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances." This is a good myth to keep in mind whenever we are tempted to think that this applies to us but not to Louis Farrakhan or gay rights activists or whoever we don't much like. It's good to remember that all of us, at one time or another, have said things that we would have been condemned to death for, in some society in history. It's a myth that challenges us to be as good as the words that formed us. But it's still an incomplete myth, a myth more about rights than responsibilities, more about tolerance than community.

The myth I like is the story of the barnraising. When a piece of land is to be settled, the neighbors come together. The men work together to build the barn, while the women feed the men and tend the children and do the other needful things. When the barn has been built, an individual family has benefited. But society has benefited, because that family has been tied to the community by bonds of property and obligation. They literally have a stake in the well-being of the community, which in turn feels good about itself because of its act of kindness. And the acts of kindness are passed on to the next familes that need it.

This tradition is deeply-rooted in America. Almost as long as there has been an America, there have been volunteer societies dedicated to making things better (over 21,000 of them in the latest Encyclopedia of Associations). We are the nation where abolitionists joined together to force us to face our consciences, and where the Red Cross was born; we are the nation that created the free public school and the free public library so that anyone who wished to could learn all they needed to know; we are the first nation in history to offer a Marshall plan to the people we defeated in battle.

I think of John Ford's classic western, My Darling Clementine. This is a story of two ethics in conflict with each other--the ethic of free and lawless men versus the communitarian ethic of the people who began to make the towns a fit place for the raising of children. At the end of the movie, they are building a church and establishing a school.

The ethic of total freedom had a very real appeal, and John Ford makes that clear. But he also makes it clear that it is not a usable ethic, not an ethic that leads to safety or security or community. You have an uneasy balance at the end of the movie. A strong, tough man has prevailed over the free, amoral bad guys, but he has been harnessed. His violence is now used to enforce the will of the community. Wyatt Earp is like a panther who has chosen to cage himself, a sad but ineffably gallant figure.

All in all, My Darling Clementine is a much better myth than anything Rush Limbaugh has to offer. Where is John Ford when we truly, desperately need him?

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