Use the Force, Lucas

I've been given another free month of Netflix, and I'm watching Joseph Campbell: Mythos, a collection of lectures Campbell gave shortly before he died as a way to summarize the main points of his lifelong scholarship. I first learned about Campbell long ago (in this galaxy) from watching a documentary on the Star Wars phenomenon in which George Lucas relates how his writing of Star Wars was essentially a telling of what Campbell called the "hero's journey."* Campbell's theory attempts to bridge psychology, culture, and social structure. It's a grand undertaking--and one at which I think he ultimately, but nobly, fails--but it got me thinking about the heuristic nature of psychoanalytics. Freud and his disciples got the psyche wrong because they mistook their own models for the way that the brain actually functions. Neuroscience has thoroughly debunked the ego-id-superego theory. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't practical utility in that theory as a heuristic device for making sense of the mind so long as we don't confuse the mind with the brain. After all, "The map is not the territory" (Alfred Korzybski).

As I started to make sense of it, an analogy came to mind that I think helps to understand disciplinary pursuit on a continuum. Take a shopping mall. One can learn about what goes on there by wandering around and observing the shops, the cafeteria, and the walkways with almost no understanding of the architectural knowledge that was necessary to build the structure itself, and conversely, understanding the architecture tells one almost nothing about what goes on in the place. In the same way, an architect need only the most rudimentary understandings of mechanical physics to build a safe structure. She doesn't need a full understanding of quantum mechanics to make sure that the walls will stand and the roof won't collapse. We can stretch the metaphor even further. Understanding what goes on in one shop tells us nothing about what goes on in the others. Knowing that Rite Aid is a pharmacy doesn't tell me what goes on at Claire's. Additionally, understanding one mall doesn't tell me much about what goes on at all the other malls. While there is a continuity through different levels of analysis, each level (i.e. discipline) can generally behave independent of the others. Contrary to what many theoretical physicists might believe, understanding the quark does not explain society.

* - Despite my interest, I was discouraged from reading Campbell in graduate school and was told to remove him from my qualifying (a.k.a. comps) exam reading list. Though unfortunate, I now understand that Campbell is widely unknown and unread in sociology, likely because of his indirect ties to Freud through Jung. I believe that he should be reintroduced to the Sociology of Religion canon.

Bellah on Religion and Humans

The Immanent Frame has a new essay from Robert Bellah titled "Where Did Religion Come From?" that is a must-read for all sociologists and all scholars of religion. Bellah argues that, in the evolution of modern human beings, we first copied each other (i.e. mimesis), then, we communicated with each other (i.e. language), and finally, we tried to make sense of the world (i.e. myth). These three stages lead respectively to ritual, symbolism, and sense-making. Bellah quotes Merlin Donald, who defines myth as an attempt at causal explanation, prediction, and control of the world. Bellah is quick to remind us, though, that myth is not an imperfect attempt at science. Instead, science is an attempt to understand the world in all its complex messiness, which requires hyper-specialization on the part of scientists, but myth is about universal comprehensibility, albeit imperfect. In other words, religion is the way that we deal with meaning in a way that all of us can share; science, on the other hand, is not so all-encompassing or graspable.

I have to include this quote from the piece in which Bellah makes an elegant argument for the innate socialness of language and, thus, human beings.

Language acquisition in the individual is social: even if there were such a thing as a language module [in the brain], which neither Donald nor I for a minute believe, it could only become operative in a socially provided linguistic context. Isolated children do not learn spontaneously to speak. Jerome Bruner, as Donald reminds us, has shown convincingly that language learning requires an external support system, a linguistic milieu, to be effective.

If only I could be this pithy lecturing to my Intro to Soc course.

And Heeeeeeerrrrrre's Ronnie!

Bob Herbert over at the NYT Opinion Pages has a cool review of the forthcoming documentary Reagan about the former president. Here are a few points-of-fact that I particularly enjoyed:

He [Reagan] was a tax-cutter who raised taxes in seven of the eight years of his presidency. He was a budget-cutter who nearly tripled the federal budget deficit.

The biggest problem with Reagan, as we look back at his presidency in search of clues that might help us meet the challenges of today, is that he presented himself — and has since been presented by his admirers — as someone committed to the best interests of ordinary, hard-working Americans. Yet his economic policies, Reaganomics, dealt a body blow to that very constituency.
...

What we get with Reagan are a series of disconnects and contradictions that have led us to a situation in which a president widely hailed as a hero of the working class set in motion policies that have been mind-bogglingly beneficial to the wealthy and devastating to working people and the poor.

The historical Reagan was a complex, contradictory fellow. The mythologized hero Reagan is much more mundane but can tell us a lot more about ourselves.

Random Thought on Myth-making

The recent events in Tuscon have given rise to a few questions for me. Does having challenges make one a good person? Does dying make one a hero? Too often, the eulogizing around tragedies (atrocities?) is actually retrospective mythologizing, that is, we tend to give meaning to anxiety-inducing incidents after the fact. Sociologically, it figures: we are reassured if we can give meaning to that which seems senseless; however, I fear that often such mythologizing can have problematic consequences. Not everyone who struggles deserves respect, and not everyone who dies unexpectedly is worthy of reverence. Moreover, there are plenty of those among us, the living, who go unrecognized.