When Modern Man Thinks Mythically
When an entire category of events and people and ideas becomes immune from criticism, we are in the presence of a religious phenomenon; a distinction is being established between a sacred sphere and a profane one. In secular religion (and also in the totalitarian State, for the two are connected) this phenomenon is recognizable by the active presence of a faith, and of myths and dogmas.
According to Vico a myth is the ‘representation’ natural to primitive man. Georges Sorel goes a step farther; for him it is the natural representation of men whose affective situation has made them primitive. He points out that modern myths are connected with war: national myths with wars of nations, and social myths with class war. This is because pure emotivity enjoys a preeminence in war situations which it loses in times of peace. In war, modern man is menaced—like primitive man— by incomprehensible powers and unforeseen dangers. Many men today experience in war a state of strict dependence comparable to that in which technically primitive societies live. If myth is the ‘thought of primitive man’, the thought of modern men becomes mythical when they have been made primitive by a sufficiently vivid affective situation. Violent emotion sets up an internal vibration which will in due course impress upon the myth that grows out of it, as man from the living germ, the stamp of life itself.
For this reason, if a myth is reduced to intellectual terms its essence is missed. The strength of the myth lies elsewhere, in the fact that it is a vital response to an affective situation. In the crowd psychological situation the barriers which the personality’s organization opposes to suggestion and affective invasion are lowered, and this makes such crowd situations ideal conductors of myths, which explains why there are myths wherever there are masses, and why the 19th century, the age in which the masses appeared on the scene, was also—one has only to compare it with the 18th century—an age of myths. To the extent that affectivity is a preponderant feature of mass phenomena, so also are myths. The historic upheavals which mobilize and release the primarily affective elements in society give rise to myths at the same time. For example, the ‘explosive’ social situation which dates back to the French Revolution (when the train of powder was lit) began to break down the partitions of society and precipitated myths as well as masses in the resulting ‘effervescence’ (these words are used intentionally in the sense in which they apply to chemical reactions). Speaking of the faculties of the ancient poets, Vico says: To that human indigence, the peoples, who were almost all body and almost no reflection, must have been all vivid sensation in perceiving particulars, strong imagination in apprehending and magnifying them, sharp wit in referring them to their imaginative genera, and robust memory in retaining them. It is true that these faculties appertain to the mind, but they have their roots in the body and draw their strength from it.’ ‘If this is so,’ comments Georges Sorel, ‘it is not easy to see how the domain of imagination, the use of the will in representation, and the faculty of creating imaginative genera, could disappear.’
Modern life, especially in the great cities, has a harmful aspect; and there comes a point where the frustrated man, however docile he may remain in appearance, becomes an irreconcilable. He cannot become a rebel because the springs of his rebelliousness are broken. This, however, is not the condition of the active section of the proletariat; it is that of the unemployed proletarians and of the various other types of un-employed—the floating plebs of the great capital cities, uprooted people, human particles set free by the collapse of social barriers, whose freedom is the freedom to drift. Masses of such people are rescued from dereliction and reinstated in society by the secular religions which cater for them. They are the typical development of proletarianized man in the first half of the 20th century.
It sometimes happens that the victim of frustration, when he has reached the point of being incapable either of revolt or of reconciliation, draws a line, like a man who has added up a bill. He has reached the total, and it is too big ever to be paid in the world as it is. The offence that has hurt him, the humiliation that has degraded him, have become inexpiable. When the irremediable, to this degree, has become general throughout a collectivity, then the time may appear ripe for a totalitarianism—a complex social phenomenon, of which the triumph of a secular religion appears to be an integral part. This is what happened in Germany in the 1930s; and in this sense religious phenomena certainly are ‘conditioned’, in so far as they are also social phenomena, by the economic structure; but condition must not be confused with cause.
The modern myths are directed towards control of the future, even though they may appeal to the past. They are prospective, and not retrospective like the nostalgia of the past, which always peters out in literature. They are tools fashioned to grip the present and impose a certain shape upon the future. Their activity, one might almost say their volcanic activity, erupts in deeds, and not in musical choruses which relieve emotion by sublimating its vitality in misty sentiment. And although myths give rise to the poetry of the ‘impossible, yet conceivable’, this poetry pours forth like lava from a volcano. If the myth is a valid one, it is a faith for those who create it and live and die by it—and a tool for those who make use of it.
The ideologies preached by secular religions exhibit typically this compromise between the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality principle’, between fiction and truth, and between myth and science. In a society where science is supreme, no ‘system of illusions’ can be acceptable unless it wears a scientific livery; and that is why, at the present time, religious myths are being increasingly replaced by ideologies with a similar function but a different content. These ideologies do not appeal so directly to the emotions; but their similarity of function is revealed in the fact that they can no more be refuted than the myths could be. It is useless to criticize them on the scientific level, because their strength lies elsewhere. The true nature of ideology is also revealed in the contradiction between theory and practice which is so familiar today in the form of incompatibility between ends and means. The ideology is used to justify acts which are incompatible with the aspirations it officially represents.
-excerpted from “Sociology of Communism” by Jules Monnerot (1949)