Browsing a frequently visited site the other day I ran across a quote that inspired this post. “Any large-scale human cooperation-whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe, is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination…”
The author, Yuval Noah Harari, for those unfamiliar with his work, is a historian, professor and writer of several best-selling books including Sapiens, Homo Deus, and A Brief History of Humankind. He is also a supremely rational and some might say contrarian thinker. His writings reflect that perspective, among other things, rejecting the idea that human beings are evolution’s greatest success story, and asserting that life itself is bereft of meaning.
Perhaps you may find such ideas off-putting and indeed some may react squeamishly to the contention that religions are founded on myths but let me suggest a slight substitution in phrasing to test the idea further. What if I said religions (and all other human institutions and conventions) are founded on stories that are based only on people’s shared belief? Now, I don’t want to be accused of sophistry, but I do want to cast Harari’s thesis in a more neutral light so that we can move beyond the emotional context that so often accompanies discussions of faith, the existence of God, much less the preeminence of one religion, people or nation over another.
Let me also admit that I was relatively young when it first occurred to me that history and mythology were more than kissing cousins. It is not a novel epiphany of course. The point is that both are a set of stories recounting events and beings which may or may not be proven to be factual. Nor is the existence of ancient manuscripts that curate those stories compelling evidence of fact. The acceptance of those stories by multitudes of believers is the single thread by which so-called reality hangs.
Put simply, that is Harari’s contention. The faithful sustain the faith through their collective investment in a common story. We might add that it is irrelevant whether one considers those stories fact or fiction. We are free to accept or reject the legitimacy of any set of stories, it comes down to our personal beliefs. By way of example, those who question the gospels, at least one of which was written within the span of a human lifetime from the dates on which the events occurred, accept without question the existence of people and events reported by historians living hundreds and even thousands of years after the facts they report. What lends credence to ancient historians but denies it to testament authors?
Even the history of our own country is questionable, a record that selectively includes or excludes events to accomodate a favorable narrative. After all, isn’t that precisely what we see happening today in attempts to excise our nation’s racial history and ban books that contain stories of our checkered past from our schools? It is no wonder then that people question even present-day events such as the outcome of elections, without need for supportable proof and in the face of more than ample contradictory evidence. A common myth, rooted in some people’s collective imagination sustains these beliefs.
It is not a stretch to extend this thesis to our laws and their underpinnings. The framework on which they hang is both Western and Abrahamic practice and specifically our Constitution. But what sustains these conventions? The Constitution is not definitive as we might suppose, but malleable and open to interpretation by the courts as we have seen. It is by no means inconceivable that the people of this country could be convinced of alternative beliefs that favor a very different way forward for our nation than was envisioned by its founders. I don’t wish to be an alarmist, but that possibility is as plausible today as a politician refusing to accept the will of the people in a free and open election. If large numbers of people can accept one fairy-tale, they can certainly accept another. If reality rests on such a slender thread, how then are we to discern the validity of any story?
The great Christian Apologetics writer, C.S. Lewis writing on the subject of Jesus’ divinity put forth a trilemma as a way to address this very question. He argued that Jesus could only have been one of three things: a lunatic, a liar or the Lord. It is a restatement of an argument dating to the mid 18th century in response to those who dismissed Jesus as a great moral but entirely human teacher. In his book, Mere Christianity, Lewis makes clear that Jesus left no room for equivocation when he stated that he alone had the authority to forgive sins, that he had always existed and would come back to judge the world at the end of time. Lewis’ challenge to disbelievers eliminates the convenient middle ground. Either accept Jesus as the Son of God or dismiss him as a savvy con man or delusional, you cannot have it any other way.
Setting aside theological debate it seems to me that humanity is faced with a similar trilemma with regard to its own future. Either we accept that humans are endowed with an innate and inborn sense of right and wrong, that we are entirely lawless by nature and constrained solely by force and convention, or that a force greater than ourselves ultimately guides the outcome of the universe. The actions we will take in the days to come depend on which of these faiths, these ‘myths’, we collectively hold to be true
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