The Tragedy of Small Dreams and Ambitions

Where is the stuff of inspiration in contemporary America?

A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By and have since been revisiting the work of that legendary scholar of mythology, who applied the insights of psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung to get at the essential archetypes of the human psyche, expressed in the stories we tell to propel our individual lives and by sum all of humanity, into the future.

The book is based on a series of free (free!) lectures that Campbell had been giving at New York City's Cooper Union during the 1960s and 1970s. The third to last chapter is a meditation on schizophrenia and mental illness where Campbell remarks that the individual who has dissociated from the day-today world experiences the life of the shaman or mystic but that while the enlightened master swims in such seas, the mentally damaged person drowns in it. This chapter is called "The Journey Within."

The next chapter is about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. It is called "The Outward Journey." While Campbell's exploration of schizophrenia is a guide for sufferers to use the archetypal visions for healing (because the whole journey within matches up with his hero's journey narrative), his "outward journey" is all about hope, wonder and optimism -- three things that he worried society was losing back in 1970 and that we seem bereft of right now.

*Sitcom celebrity cameo voce*: “Jos-eph Campbell!”

From Campbell's vantage in 1970, putting people on the moon, rendering the mythic home of souls waiting to be reborn a place where our understanding of reality applies in, as Emmanuel Kant would have put it, in an a priori way, was clearly an early step on a fantastic journey. We would soon go to Mars, he believed, and Jupiter and Saturn. Some young people alive as he addressed his audience, he said, would live on the moon. Others would participate in journeys on great starships, like in the movie 2001.

But, we didn't get there. While the National Aeronautic and Space Administration has done fantastic things, like sending probes to the surface of Mars, we are now a quarter century beyond when 2001 took place and it still seems like the far future. We have sent probes into space well beyond our solar system, but those were all developed and launched decades ago. Space programs, manned and unmanned, have been largely privatized to serve the defense and telecommunications industries. The romance of the heroic astronaut doesn't loom large culturally and budgets are constrained in favor of dealing (or not) with problems here at home.

As we build our scientific understanding of the world, our aims grow exceedingly practical, which can undermine the idea that we are all collectively doing great things and which may be a source for nostalgia in America's life and politics.

"We have from all over the world innumerable myths of the capturing of fire;" writes Campbell. "and in these it is usual to represent the adventure as undertaken not because anyone knew what the practical uses of fire would be, but because it was fascinating. People would dance around it, sit and watch it. Also, it is usual to represent the separation of mankind from the beasts as having followed upon that fundamental adventure."

Think about your community and how local leaders are addressing issues and I think you'll sense that we are no longer a culture out for collective adventures. Traffic is a massive problem in Manhattan right now, for example. The government's proposed solutions are to charge a congestion pricing toll and to mark more streets as pedestrian only. These are technocratic fixes that use nudges and incentives to alter behavior rather than to build anything new. An older way of looking at things, one which I think people remember fondly even if it is now impractical, would be for the government to see all the cars on the street and say, "people obviously want more and better roads to drive on!"

Again, I'm not arguing for or against a policy here, just pointing out that a society that addresses problems through rules and tinkering is fundamentally different, and less poetic and inspiring, than one that builds railways, interstates and landlines.

Going back to Campbell, he describes what, "seized the priestly watchers of the night skies of Mesopotamia about 3500 b.c." was a measurable cosmic order by which they developed the structure of the first non-nomadic societies. "Not economics, in other words, but celestial mathematics were what inspired religious forms, the arts, literatures, sciences, moral and social orders which in that period elevated mankind to the tasks of civilized life -- again fooling us out of our limits, to achievements infinitely beyond any aims that mere economics, or even politics, could ever have inspired."

When folks lament that we don't "make things in America anymore," they aren't so much wishing for bygone assembly line jobs, because they know that work was hard and dangerous, but they are looking for a way of making a living by doing something worthwhile beyond its commodity value. The long and complicated story of Henry Ford isn't just that he routinized work to get Model A's off the line faster but that he helped to create a consumer class to buy his cars and that he sold the idea of the car as a tool to bring people freedom, autonomy and adventure.

There's a lot of debate about whether innovation has peaked. Since the popularization of the Internet, which was really "invented" many decades ago, all the new services it has enabled have been riffs on a theme, like social media as a way to use the internet rather than as an invention on par with it. That's not to say that wild things aren't happening in spaces like alternative energy or in biotechnology (where advances in gene editing will make whatever is going on in AI seem rather minor, if not cute).

What we lack in our economy and society are symbols that energize us, give us hope and help us find meaning. We have been good at questioning our own cultural myths but bad about preserving what needs to be preserved. We have faced the truths of Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés and colonialism in general, but tossed the idea that brave people risking their lives at sea to expand their knowledge of the world and footprints upon it was a good thing. We face the environmental consequences of our carbon economy but have stopped celebrating the freedom of the car, the train and the plane.

We are alive now where there are no unexplored surface portions of the world, where ecological concerns require efficiency over abandon and where financial concerns require restraint and highly targeted public investment. Our switch from an economy of great machines to one of services has empowered both public and private sector bureaucracies that punish rebellion and reward conformity. Our search for meaning is at the service of the economy and politics, though it should be the other way around.

That, whether people know it or not, is why some of your neighbors will vote to restore a country that you're pretty sure never existed -- they want the freedom to do work that nourishes the psyche.