Myths Of World View Essay - 1,890 words

MYTHS OF THE POLITICAL-ECONOMIC WORLD VIEW A MYTH IS a traditional story that offers an explanation of some fact or phenomenon. Myths are neither wholly true nor wholly untrue. They may have been more true in the past than now, but people act as if they are still true, even when they no longer really believe in them. Some modem usages of the word have connotations that suggest that myths are irrelevant or wrong, but this is not necessarily so. Myths are of considerable importance to people, and for some, they may reflect ultimate personal truth.


The critical need is for people to be given the opportunity to find out which myths are meaningful and which are not. A myth is a mental model with which people try to interpret reality and respond to it. Myths have value in enabling us to organize the way we perceive facts and see ourselves and the world. Myths speak through rich symbols, helping to bring order into what may otherwise be a chaos of personal experience. Whether true or not, myths help us make sense of what is going on around us.


Myths can provide a valuable doorway into the value structure of a society or culture and may give insights that are difficult to achieve by more conventional means. Some myths, like belief in fairies, are probably harmless. Others may be dangerous if they distort the way we see the world and the ways we deal with problems. How does one tell the difference? How does one help people recognize the existence of other perspectives of reality without offending deeply held beliefs?


One good way to start examining a myth is to find out what it meant to those who created it (the process of exegesis). Many social and scientific myths of the twentieth century originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so this is not difficult to do. The next task is to find out what the present-day followers of the tradition of a myth mean by it (the process of hermeneutics). The final task is to compare the myth with the reality it seeks to represent.


This stage often runs into trouble with adherents because to them, a myth cannot be questioned without challenging the believer's self. Most myths present themselves as authoritative and able to account for facts, no matter how completely at variance they may be with the real world. A myth gains its authority not by proving itself but by presenting itself. And the greater the political authority that lies behind the myth and the more often it is presented, the less likely it is to be challenged. Such is the case with many political and scientific myths of the twentieth century. Over the past two hundred years, Western societies have cast aside many of the myths and institutions that had served them for hundreds of years.


The great belief systems-the idea of a divine lawgiver; the sanctity of the family kin group, or tribe; the rituals, customs, conventions, ceremonies, and festivals that gave meaning and purpose to the smaller communities of earlier times-are mostly in ruins. But in the haste to throw off apparently outmoded burdens, people also lost the valuable side of those myths and institutions. The feelings created by people's confidence in their place in nature and in the stability of the social systems that supported them have been vandalized. Many people are left with nothing but the despair engendered by new myths that they do not understand, often because the myths have been imposed on them without explanation. 1 Throughout history, people have felt it necessary to organize life's activities by constructing a frame of reference within which to fit them a world view that explains the hows and whys of daily existence. Such processes have been the essential ingredient of many cultures' responses to the world they perceived. A world view is usually so internalized, from childhood on, that it is seldom challenged.


In the Western world, the belief that neutral and impersonal laws govern what can be done in society and the world is deeply embedded in technology and economics. 2 But if that sort of belief is dominant, things are taken out of the political arena that properly belong there. Such is the outcome of taking seriously many assumptions of mainstream political economics. In reality, most of the assumptions are myths: partly true and partly false. They must therefore be treated with considerable caution. The prime myth in the context of this book claims that lower grade resources will always be available to humankind in a continuing and virtually endless sequence. Since exploitation of resources always, and without exception, requires expenditure of available and accessible energy, as I pointed out in chapter 3, this myth is critically dependent on the continuing availability of energy resources.


For that reason, I will reword it into a more specific form: Lower grade energy resources will always be available to humankind in a continuing and virtually endless sequence. Nicholas George scu-Roger, a trenchant critic of the myth, states: "The favorite thesis of standard and Marxist economists alike... is that the power of technology is without limits. We will always be able not only to find a substitute for a resource which has become scarce, but also to increase the productivity of any kind of energy and material. " 5 William Cotton exposes further flaws in this "favorite thesis": Two non-repeatable achievements had made possible four centuries of magnificent progress. Those two achievements were (I) the discovery of a second hemisphere, and (2) development of technology that could unearth and exploit the planet's energy savings, its fossil fuel deposits. [Humankind's increasingly relentless search for new s ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: political economic, energy resources, twentieth century, b c, world view

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