Myths in a Time of Uncertainty

Were Europe still in the past, there would be no need for myth-making. From the time of Asterix to the present day, the Gauls would still be the French, the Britons the British, the Goths the Germans, and Hispania the Spain of today. In a time when ‘only one small village of indomitable Gauls still held out against the Roman invaders’, the Bretons already played rugby, and the Hispanians were even more addicted to bull-fighting and Flamenco. Such are the thoughts of present-day national nostalgia, though seldom with the wit of Goschinny and Uderzo, both of whom, in writing and illustrating the adventures of Asterix, were as quick to unsettle the stereotypes of nationality as to parody them to absurdity. According to Goschinny and Uderzo, all the polities of that past were muddled by the quirkiness of difference and similarity; the ‘Britons’, says Goschinny, were actually ‘just rather like the Gauls’, even if their speech was riddled by a peculiarity or two: ‘Goodness gracious! This is a jolly Rum thing, eh, What?’

Obtained from Asterix in Britain, available at: http://www.intrepidtravel.com/adventures/asterix-history/

 But the myths of nations, as absurd as they may be, trigger anger and fear more often than jollity and irony. Many of us are all too carried away by the spectacle of uniqueness and difference, which lies at the heart of one of the main trends of myth-making in Europe. The other lies with the lovers of the left.

That said, lovers of nations and of the left, despite their incommensurate differences, are all united in their struggle against the status quo. No matter how they present themselves aesthetically, as either nationalists or leftist revolutionaries, those who oppose the status quo do so not by looking to the future, but by invoking myths.

Obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muralbelfast2.jpg

The status quo of today is no longer criticised for ignoring the future, characterised by the looming inevitability of a classless society or the rise of a superior race, but rather because it is no longer consistent with the past, whatever that was and whomever it served. Whereas progress - be it national, economical, technological or social– was once taken to be the organising principle from which to organise distinctive political views, ideologies and parties, today the opposition in both Europe and the United States centre their protests on their unswerving adoration of the past. Of course, lovers of the past have always existed, even at a time in which progress – liberal, Marxist, feminist, imperial, national-socialist – was acclaimed to be the main, if not the single, organising principle of political action; against progress spoke conservatives of various forms, whom Marxist and Liberals alike portrayed as visceral reactionaries.

Now, however, the status quo encompasses those who still harbour ideas of progress, albeit in a less energetic manner. Indeed, those who favour the status quo speak, although sometimes timidly, of their past love for progress. Today’s technocrats of the European Union (EU) no doubt look forward to a time in which Europe and the EU will be taken as synonyms without hesitation, and when technology and technocratic regulation, coupled with market competition, finally bring the much awaited prosperity of old. The status quo of the present day is then obviously defended by the victors of past disputes over progress. If only they were better opposed.

In any case, progress as it was once taken is increasingly questioned in the present age. Uncertainty reigns. And in these times of uncertainty, when the Gauls are no longer French, when progress is questioned, past myths offer unrelenting reassurance, especially when no language is yet able to make sense of changing times, and when we have no new set of ideas to give new meaning to the present. Indeed, when myths remain too strong a force to forget, they also remain the central pillars by which to make sense of the present.

So the challengers of the status quo are harbingers of myths. One of those harbingers rests upon trenchant nationalists, looking nostalgically at the world of Asterix, though with less humour than anger. For them the world was once clear and neatly split amongst Gauls and non-Gauls. It is that version of the mythical past which they seek, though they are (unadmittedly) riddled by as many quixotic idiosyncrasies as Goschinny and Uderzo’s Asterix. For was a Gaul not a Celt? And were the Gauls not also Romans and was French not also derived from Latin? Of course, such questions trouble lovers of past-nations, who prefer the clear-cut distinctions of a bygone age; it is not so much the past they love, however, but the myth. It thus becomes the means by which to dispute the status quo. If Brussels remains unable to make sense of the present, we Britons (whoever we are) and we Gauls (whoever we are) will bring order where there is none, all made by ourselves for ourselves, so long as the Gauls remain Gauls and the Britons remain Britons.

It is precisely that treasured simplicity of myths which makes them so deceptively reassuring and so easy to embrace instead of the present, because ‘myths’, says Georges Sorel, ‘have to be judged as the means of acting on the present.’ They gain their violent force by way of splitting society ‘into two camps, and only into two, on a field of battle.’ When times remain uncertain, the power of the imaginative past, however misleading, makes the present meaningful again, triggering action along the way.

But the era of nations is not the only compelling form of present-day myth-making and opposition, although perhaps the most dangerous. The other version lies with the so-called ‘lovers of the left’. These sceptics, like the lovers of nations, hark back to the Marxist ideas of impending struggle in order to offer clarity where there seems to be none, and thus reveal yet another myth from which to divide society into quarrelling, uncompromising camps. The form is the same, though with distinctive content. Where the lovers of nations speak of impending threats to an apparently ordered and foregone community, the lovers of the ‘left’ revamp the slogans of old revolutions, appealing (ironically) for more national sovereignty, the will of the people (in a time of universal suffrage), class struggles, and the invisible though pernicious structure of power, which apparently wreaks havoc across Europe: neo-liberalism, free markets, multinationals and big capital. Such slogans, for that is all they are, are relentlessly put forth by the lovers of the left. They return to tales of class struggle and the fight against Capitalism for which Marxism, in all its variants, became renowned. Just as there was the bourgeois and the proletariat, now there is the poor bourgeois (and some proletariat), who fight against the same capitalists. And the mythical language of the past does not persist only in speech, but extends to the realm of aesthetics, a strategy that once served well the sincerer left of the past. Like James Keir Hardie, who refused to wear a frock coat and top hat upon being elected to the British Parliament in 1892, that same practice of leftist protest continues to the present day. The suit remains, but the left has now got rid of the tie – and so the capitalists tremble. Likewise, and even more ironically, commodified images of Che Guevara and the semblance of Guy Fawkes make headway, as symbols of the past remain the means with which to efface the status quo.

Either way, the myth-making of the lovers of the left, in their ready adoption and reproduction of Marxist language, do nothing other than galvanize divisions, just like the lovers of nations. For how does big, perhaps paternalist, government - and thus larger bureaucracy – become a solution to multinationals and so on? Is that not precisely the problem of the status quo and of the ever growing, opaque Brussels in particular? Apart from the pernicious practices of present-day finance, how would nationalisation replace one big interest group with another? Would bureaucrats and politicians be as enlightened as the CEOs? How also would mobilising street parades, such as Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London among other urban movements, change the status quo, if that same status quo consists of multi-nationals that buy in rural Indonesia, manufacture in suburban China, lobby in Brussels, finance themselves in central London, sell in the Midlands and headquarter themselves somewhere in the outskirts of Stockholm?

And yet, myth as a distortion of the past remains all too compelling in a time of uncertainty. Sadly, however, the actions that it inspires provide more confusion than clarity. The present and the status quo remain unintelligible, but fraught with the specter of ever growing division.