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As others have
discoursed here, there is a human need to put a face on an enemy. In these
particularly uncertain times, the answer is all too simple for many: identify
an enemy and focus all misbegotten confusion, failure and anger on him/it. This
includes otherwise decent folk, well-educated or not, evangelicals and
secularists. In tracking
down an item in Moyers World of Ideas
this weekend on Jacob Needleman, whose new book, American Soul, I’ve just
checked out of the library, I ran across a pleasant conversation in Vol 2 with
Sam Keen, philosopher and mythologist, who discussed his book Face of the Enemy and the myth of the
enemy run amok. If we consider
that many no longer believe in the myth of progress, and a searching journey to
create a new myth is too painful, then an enemy gives focus to the loss. Here are two
excerpts from that 1990 conversation
with Moyers: Bill Moyers visits with Sam Keen, Philosopher World of Ideas, Vol. II (pages 64– 72, Doubleday, 1990 ISBN
0-385-41664-4/0-385-41665-2) “Like our mutual friend the late Joseph Campbell, Sam Keen has focused
his prodigious energies on how the world’s mythologies affect our daily
lives. His book The Faces of the Enemy, which he made into
a film for PBS, probes the images we create of our enemies – personal or global
– and the serious implications for daily behavior. A prolific writer and popular lecturer, Keen has described
himself as “a lover of questions, a freelance thinker, a man rich in
friendship, and in a former life, a professor.” MOYERS: Last night I watched again your film The Faces of the Enemy, and I was struck by how the decline
of the Soviet Union as our enemy has left so many people with a sense of
loss. Filmmakers and spy novelists
in particular are having trouble finding a common standard villain these days. Where’s the face of the enemy now? KEEN: Well, the politicians don’t have much trouble finding a
face. They filled the vacumn quite
rapidly with the splendid little invasion of Panama, where we used the Stealth
bomber against people who have very primitive armed forces. Or look at how the Pentagon uses the
language of war and warfare in the interdiction of drugs. That’s one place the image of the enemy
has gone. But it’s also moved into
a much more hopeful place, the whole environmental movement, where pollution
and warfare itself are now seen as the enemies. That’s a much more mature and hopeful direction. MOYERS: What’s the role of mythology in all this? KEEN: I use myth to mean the systematic, unconscious way of structuring
reality that governs a culture as a whole, or a people, or a tribe. It can govern a corporation, a family
or a person. It’s the underlying
story. So, for instance, the
underlying story that we all have in common in the Western world is the myth of progress, the belief
that we are going to get better and better in every way, and our children are
going to have a better world, and we are going to engineer our way into a kind
of human utopia. We don’t stand up
and salute that, but in fact, that’s what governs our lives. As the song, “America the Beautiful”
says, we are an alabaster city “undimmed by human tears.” MOYERS: Or as Ronald Reagan said in his final speech “a city upon the
hill.” KEEN: Right. In that sense, you see, we all have a
common myth. But then you realize
that other nations also have their binding myths, and ethnic groups have their
myths. Or you go into a
corporation, and IBM is very different from Apple Computer about the stories
they tell that give structure to that organization. And I think the way we structure and see enemies and evil is
all mythology. The evil is not a
myth, but the glass through which we see it is a mythology. A culture always has a mythology about
evil, because one of the great mythical questions has always been: What is the
source of evil? And if myth tells us who creates evil, it also can tell us who
are not people, and whom we can kill without quilt. We can say there’s one source of evil,
and it’s over there; and if we go clean that up, we can feel
righteous ourselves in the process. and MOYERS: Do you think we can really defuse aggression just by changing
the images? Many people think
there is a certain aggression bred within us that comes with the turf. KEEN: I don’t at all
equate aggression and hostility.
Aggression is very fine. Aggression
merely means the focused use of energy. Right now you and I are being very aggressive in trying to
define ideas and sharpen them.
We’re using the knife of decision and clarity to do that. Writing a book or making television
requires a lot of aggression. Hostility is something else.
Hostility is aggression mixed with some degree of hatred,
paranoia, and fear. So those are
two separate questions. We could
be quite aggressive and never be hostile. MOYERS: And image can turn
aggression into hostility. KEEN: Yes. Probably the clearest example was what
happened during the Second World War, when the United States and Japan had so
hyped each other up with these demonic images that we couldn’t call the war off
when it was really strategically over.
During the lat year of the war, hundreds of thousands of people were killed,
merely because we had demonized each other and we couldn’t find a way to stop
the demonization. MOYERS: It’s so much
easier to arouse people to martial causes. Why is it so hard to inspire a sense of shared national
purpose in the interest of peaceable pursuits? KEEN: The problem is that
the concept of peace lacks drama. I once took a screenwriting workshop in which the teacher
started off by saying that in screenplays things only develop in conflict. This was in the middle of the peace
movement. And I said, “Wait a
minute, here we are talking about peace, and the fact is that we love drama and
we love conflict.” So one of my
answers to that is that we have to have a concept of peace that includes
conflict. Instead of looking at
peace as a state without conflict, look at it as a state in which conflict is
loving conflict. If nothing else, World of Ideas
and the interviews conducted by Moyers and a few others over the years with great
teachers and thinkers in dialogue contribute to what we need much more of,
lively dialogue in mutual respect, benefit and learning, something we manage to
do most of the time on FW. Thank
goodness for the internet. I am not familiar with any of Keen’s work, but here he
discussed the importance of everyone writing his own story, creating his and
her own myths, not just blindly following the shaping myths on which we are
raised. Of course, there are many
wise words written before and since then to this human journey, but I did enjoy
the conversational tone and his predictions about the new emerging ecology/Gaia/feminism
myth, which we now see has blossomed.
If anyone would like to read the complete interview who doesn’t have
access to the book, please contact me.
- KWC |
