Beginning My Mythmaker Analysis (Long Delayed)

       Back on March 31, 2012, I wrote the first post in this series, entitled "Who Are the Mythmakers and Why Do They Matter?"  In it I discussed the role the Mythmakers played in setting up the moral foundation for the resurgence of civilization in the 27th century.  The Mythmakers were an anonymous group of writers and artists whose works were preserved in the Underground Archives (the system of knowledge preservation undertaken by groups of far-sighted individuals during the Second Dark Age -- see the separate page My Future History for background; it's an excerpt fron my novel "The Termite Queen"). I printed the Twenty Precepts in that post and it would be helpful if you re-read it, or read it for the first time, before you continue here.

 

       I'm don't pretend to be a trained philosopher, social scientist, or historian, and I'm sure professionals in those fields could tear the following presentation to pieces.  I do, however, have my opinions and beliefs, which the Mythmaker ethic reflects, and I feel I have something to contribute to modern thought.  Therefore I'm going to throw my ideas out there and hope they might be reflected upon and even discussed.  It would be great if we didn't have to endure a Dark Age and wait six centuries for these tenets to be accepted and put into practice!

       Since religion plays such an important (and distorted) role in the 21st century, I'm going to start my discussion there.  The Mythmaker ethic is humanist and the resultant 27th-30th century society is based in humanism.  In this post, I'm going to discuss Precepts 1-5, which relate to the idea of gods.   Precepts 10-11 discuss the role and nature of religion and should be considered in tandem with 1-5, but this post was getting too long, so I'll treat those in my next essay into the subject. 

 

1.    No one can know deity; neither can it be proven that it does not exist.

       Right away we establish that the Mythmakers are not atheists.  They simply do not know what god is, or even whether there is a god or gods.  After all, they are called Mythmakers for a reason.  Myth always incorporates ideas of the supernatural.  The supernatural answers a need evolved in the genetic structure of humanity -- the urge to explain the unexplainable, an urge that  is often answered by science as humans advance intellectually.  Ultimately, however, there is always something that science cannot unexplain.  One of the traditional attributes of god is that he/she/it is unknowable.  If you can never know what this entity is, you cetainly can't demonstrate anything about it using scientific methods.  You can neither prove nor disprove the existence of god or define its nature.

       This is exactly what I believe and why I call myself a "spiritual humanist."  I don't reject the possibility of unknowable spiritual forces.  It would be impossible to write fantasy if I did.  There would be nothing to write about.

             
2.    Humans have within themselves the ability to see beyond themselves and hence to act rightly without supernatural stimulus.

3.    Since the purpose of deity for humans, or even whether it had a purpose for humans, is unknowable, it is incumbent upon humans to look within themselves and find the way to right action.       

4. Humans must take responsibility for their own behavior, not seeking to put blame on imposed rules (of deity or human) or on fate, chance, or the intervention or willfulness of deity.
 

       These three introduce the humanist element.  They belong together and reinforce one another. 

       No. 2 emphasizes that the ability to understand  right action is inherent in the human identity; evolution initiated a drive toward altruism, and we don't need a god to tell us what kind of behavior is moral.

       No. 3 emphasizes that since we cannot know (in the scientific sense) the purpose of deity, it becomes even more imperative for human beings to understand that they must look for and find that inherent morality that exists within themselves.

       No. 4 concerns the importance of taking responsibility for one's own actions, a central tenet of all Mythmaker literature.  You can't blame the rules laid down by an external entity for your bad behavior (saying, the gods demand a sacrifice, for example, so killing this woman is justified; or, the government has decreed that practitioners of Judaism are evil, therefore the killing of Jews is justified).  Likewise, you can't say, fate has decreed that we should kill this enemy; the Mythmaker philosophy recognizes free will.  While chance and coincidence do exist, you can't lay blame on those things; you can't say, I have no responsibility for this accident, because chance caused this child to run in front of my car when I was too drunk to stop in time.  And you can't blame or praise a deity for the fact that my house burned and my neighbor's didn't (that indeed is an instance of chance, where no intention can be assigned).  You also can't say, God isn't consistent; it saves one person from the bullets of a crazed assassin and not another.  Therefore, god must be evil or it must simply not care.  Neither can you say, god must love me more than it loves that person and have some special purpose in mind for my life.  You can't make any absolute statements about god; you can't even know if any god  exists, so how can you ascribe any intentions or motives or purposes to deity?  "God" may be simply an underlying Life Force, will-less and indifferent. 

       To summarize: The focal point of these first four Precepts is the phrase "without supernatural stimulus" in no. 2. Human beings have the innate ability to find the Right Way; they don't need an external supernatural being whose nature they cannot know telling them, do this and don't do that. They don't need to have imposed or forced on them a set of Commandments that are purported to come straight from a benevolent divine tyrant. They have to work out their own positive human ethic.

         So might one present the caveat that the 20 Precepts are a set of Commandments?  They are not that at all -- they are a set of ethical guidelines that can be thought about, debated, rejected, or altered. They are not rules laid down by a deity; the Mythmakers are not deities, as Kaitrin Oliva keeps pointing out so vehemently in "The Termite Queen." 

       To call oneself a humanist, one has to remain an incorrigible optimist, especially with the behavior seen in the world today (or for that matter, in any period of history -- it's just that the evils of our own time -- the Aurora theater massacre and the shooting at the Sikh temple are only two examples -- are so much more vivid to us than are the evils that have faded into the dry texts of history, like the Holocaust or the Cambodian atrocities or the Bibighar Massacre of British women and children in 1857 India.  One has to recognize that humanity has the ability to deny the very qualities that make it admirable.  To remain a humanist, you have to believe that human beings really can look within themselves and find the Right Path.  You have to believe that the essential altruism of humanity will prevail.

      Of course, the Mythmakers recognized humanity's shortcomings; they lived in a period when it was all too apparent.  They were realists; they understood that human beings are fallible -- suffering under the rampant ego, as well as from misunderstandings, lapses in judgment, inadequate education, mental and genetic aberrations.  They never expected the attainment of perfection, but they did insist that people keep trying.   Therefore, they demonstrated their compassion and realism by adding the following precept: 

5.   Humans will never succeed absolutely in achieving these goals; nevertheless striving for right action is its own purpose.