I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about our cultural fascination with myth-busting, as evidenced not (or not only) by the Mythbusters television program, but by all of its cultural kin, from 60 Minutes to Snopes.com to the backlash against “reality” television.
It would be easy to think and talk about this fascination as a desire for authenticity, as (I believe) others have done. To my mind, it has far more to do with another desire entirely: to win a cultural war over our relationship to stories.
The tenets of what I might refer to as a culturally conservative worldview dictate that we are intended to receive stories passively: as if they are precious containers of either mystery or wisdom handed to us gingerly by the masters who made them. If they hold mystery, furthermore, we are expected to bow before their inscrutability; if they hold wisdom, we are expected to treat it as dogma. This worldview dictates the way in which religious conservatives would have us consider the Bible. It informs the way in which legal conservatives would have us consider the Constitution.
Cultural liberals, like myself, believe it’s important for us to adopt an entirely different relationship to stories: one in which we are free to criticize them, analyze them, adapt them, translate them, refute them, refuse them, and above all else — at least for me — write new stories entirely. We are not intended to passively receive stories but to grab them as they are being handed to us, pore over them, find the mystery and wisdom, find the flaws and biases and inaccuracies, transform them, and ultimately hand them off to the next generation. That’s why we consider the Bible a set of complicated and dangerous and sometimes beautiful and sometimes really badly written stories, rather than the inerrant word of God. That’s why we consider the Constitution a dated document that must continually be renewed by modern minds.
This is what mythbusting does, at least in its best incarnations. (In its worst, it simply destroys the received story in an act of pure anarchy, and I personally have too much reverence for stories to do that, even to those I detest.) This, I believe, is why we love it… and why it’s critical to human development as well.
That’s a really interesting formulation.
Is it a waste of time to try to go back in time and figure out who created the stories that conservatives want to preserve in amber? My informed guess would be that radicals created these stories (particularly as regards the bible and the founding of this country), and they were almost certainly transformed from previous stories.
And if that is true, does it mean that any new or reformulated stories that come out of our generations are just as subject to becoming the ossified dogma of the future?
Over dinner tonight, my wife asked the very same question. Great minds…
I think your guess is probably right, too… but for a different reason. I think the creation of stories is a fundamentally radical/liberal act, given my formulation above, which is why so many creators of culture (myself included) identify as liberals.
I’d even go further to say that we create stories, for the most part, for people who sit on the same end of the spectrum… because we assume that cultural liberals are more interested in new stories in general.
I do think we risk our new stories becoming ossified dogma to be sure. What will Harry Potter be in 500 years? What about Star Trek in 1000? Will there be people who ask (I am not joking here) “what would Harry do?” Will there be people looking for meaning and purpose in the adventures of Kirk and Spock?