4 ms·

Reading the book right now. What's concerning to me is that we are currently seeing the dissolving of myths across the board, whether it be religion, faith in p

Reading the book right now. What's concerning to me is that we are currently seeing the dissolving of myths across the board, whether it be religion, faith in public institutions, or facades that we kept before social media existed. Is the breakdown of social cohesion a consequence? Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good, but can we survive it?

86carr 8y ago
You should check out RS Bakker or Peter Watts. https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/ https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/ https://www.rifters.com/ https://www.rifters.com/
- nyolfen 8y ago
  bakker has some thoughts of his own on harari: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/visions-of-the-semantic-apocalypse-a-critical-review-of-yuval-noah-hararis-homo-deus/ https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/visions-of-the-sem... https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now-what/ https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now... > The biological origins of narrative lie in shallow information cognitive ecologies, circumstances characterized by profound ignorance. What we cannot grasp we poke with sticks. Hitherto we’ve been able to exapt these capacities to great effect, raising a civilization that would make our story-telling ancestors weep, and for wonder far more than horror. But as with all heuristic systems, something must be taken for granted. Only so much can be changed before an ecology collapses altogether. And now we stand on the cusp of a communicative revolution even more profound than literacy, a proliferation, not simply of alternate narratives, but of alternate narrators. > If you sweep the workbench clean, cease looking at meaning as something somehow ‘anomalous’ or ‘transcendent,’ narrative becomes a matter of super-complicated systems, things that can be cut short by a heart attack or stroke. If you refuse to relinquish the meat (which is to say nature), then narratives, like any other biological system, require that particular background conditions obtain. Scranton’s error, in effect, is a more egregious version of the error Harari makes in Homo Deus, the default presumption that meaning somehow lies outside the circuit of ecology. Harari, recall, realizes that humanism, the ‘man-the-meaning-maker’ narrative of Western civilization, is doomed, but his low-dimensional characterization of the ‘intersubjective web of meaning’ as an ‘intermediate level of reality’ convinces him that some other collective narrative must evolve to take its place. He fails to see how the technologies he describes are actively replacing the ancestral social coordinating functions of narrative.
joe_the_user 8y ago
The debunking of myth began quite a while ago, maybe the 19th century even but certainly, the mid 20th century showed what horrors could be produced by the nation state. Moreover, the majority of Western Europe could be called irreligious and lives more or less equivalently well and "morally" to the United States. Indeed, the United States has always been uniquely religious for an advanced society. We are now also set-up by a wide variety of unique social ills. There might not be any relation between but then again there might be.
embwbam 8y ago
The book Homo Deus also introduces this idea, but calls them “intersubjective realities”, and they include not only religion, but capitalism. He claims that the strongest of these today is humanism, and even those who are religious usually share the humanist dream. He then goes on to talk about how we will continue to create new ones, some of which are terrifying. I think that term makes it easier to see how they will continue.
imglorp 8y ago
Partial agree: I think there's a bifurcation in society. One part _is_ dissolving myths, using the tools of science and education and curation of knowledge. Another part is regressing into myth: look at antivax, idiocracy, tribalism/xenophobia, and all the political theocracies sprouting up.
jimbokun 8y ago
"Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good, but can we survive it?" We never let go of myths, we just create new ones. And yes, I would say the breakdown of social cohesion is an inevitable consequence when you have competing, incompatible myths causing different groups to see and understand the world differently.
kansface 8y ago
> seeing the dissolving of myths across the board I believe you are incorrect - we are replacing the old with the new.
_bxg1 8y ago
The modernist movement which started around a century ago assumed that "Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good", but I think that's naiive and I think we're starting to grasp that fact. Certainly some myths are destructive, and many of them are limiting, but myths are also a fundamental construct that we require to be able to function. Knowing where to draw the line and learning how to suspend your disbelief as needed is a great challenge, but an important one. Tolkien (along with C.S. Lewis), a vocal anti-modernist, had interesting thoughts on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories "Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the "perspective" of a different world. Tolkien calls this "recovery", in the sense that one's unquestioned assumptions might be recovered and changed by an outside perspective...Tolkien [also] asserts that a truly good and representative fairy story is marked by joy: "Far more powerful and poignant is the effect [of joy] in a serious tale of Faerie. In such stories, when the sudden turn comes, we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through."" He and Lewis even - despite being practicing Christians - had the wisdom to see even their own religion as a kind of fairy-story, not cheapening it but orienting it within the important role that fictions play in the human condition.

86carr 8y ago

You should check out RS Bakker or Peter Watts. https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/ https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/ https://www.rifters.com/ https://www.rifters.com/

nyolfen 8y ago
bakker has some thoughts of his own on harari: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/visions-of-the-semantic-apocalypse-a-critical-review-of-yuval-noah-hararis-homo-deus/ https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/visions-of-the-sem... https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now-what/ https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now... > The biological origins of narrative lie in shallow information cognitive ecologies, circumstances characterized by profound ignorance. What we cannot grasp we poke with sticks. Hitherto we’ve been able to exapt these capacities to great effect, raising a civilization that would make our story-telling ancestors weep, and for wonder far more than horror. But as with all heuristic systems, something must be taken for granted. Only so much can be changed before an ecology collapses altogether. And now we stand on the cusp of a communicative revolution even more profound than literacy, a proliferation, not simply of alternate narratives, but of alternate narrators. > If you sweep the workbench clean, cease looking at meaning as something somehow ‘anomalous’ or ‘transcendent,’ narrative becomes a matter of super-complicated systems, things that can be cut short by a heart attack or stroke. If you refuse to relinquish the meat (which is to say nature), then narratives, like any other biological system, require that particular background conditions obtain. Scranton’s error, in effect, is a more egregious version of the error Harari makes in Homo Deus, the default presumption that meaning somehow lies outside the circuit of ecology. Harari, recall, realizes that humanism, the ‘man-the-meaning-maker’ narrative of Western civilization, is doomed, but his low-dimensional characterization of the ‘intersubjective web of meaning’ as an ‘intermediate level of reality’ convinces him that some other collective narrative must evolve to take its place. He fails to see how the technologies he describes are actively replacing the ancestral social coordinating functions of narrative.

joe_the_user 8y ago

The debunking of myth began quite a while ago, maybe the 19th century even but certainly, the mid 20th century showed what horrors could be produced by the nation state. Moreover, the majority of Western Europe could be called irreligious and lives more or less equivalently well and "morally" to the United States. Indeed, the United States has always been uniquely religious for an advanced society. We are now also set-up by a wide variety of unique social ills. There might not be any relation between but then again there might be.

embwbam 8y ago

The book Homo Deus also introduces this idea, but calls them “intersubjective realities”, and they include not only religion, but capitalism. He claims that the strongest of these today is humanism, and even those who are religious usually share the humanist dream. He then goes on to talk about how we will continue to create new ones, some of which are terrifying. I think that term makes it easier to see how they will continue.

imglorp 8y ago

Partial agree: I think there's a bifurcation in society. One part _is_ dissolving myths, using the tools of science and education and curation of knowledge. Another part is regressing into myth: look at antivax, idiocracy, tribalism/xenophobia, and all the political theocracies sprouting up.

jimbokun 8y ago

"Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good, but can we survive it?" We never let go of myths, we just create new ones. And yes, I would say the breakdown of social cohesion is an inevitable consequence when you have competing, incompatible myths causing different groups to see and understand the world differently.

kansface 8y ago

> seeing the dissolving of myths across the board I believe you are incorrect - we are replacing the old with the new.

_bxg1 8y ago

The modernist movement which started around a century ago assumed that "Letting go of myths seems like an inherent good", but I think that's naiive and I think we're starting to grasp that fact. Certainly some myths are destructive, and many of them are limiting, but myths are also a fundamental construct that we require to be able to function. Knowing where to draw the line and learning how to suspend your disbelief as needed is a great challenge, but an important one. Tolkien (along with C.S. Lewis), a vocal anti-modernist, had interesting thoughts on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories "Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the "perspective" of a different world. Tolkien calls this "recovery", in the sense that one's unquestioned assumptions might be recovered and changed by an outside perspective...Tolkien [also] asserts that a truly good and representative fairy story is marked by joy: "Far more powerful and poignant is the effect [of joy] in a serious tale of Faerie. In such stories, when the sudden turn comes, we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through."" He and Lewis even - despite being practicing Christians - had the wisdom to see even their own religion as a kind of fairy-story, not cheapening it but orienting it within the important role that fictions play in the human condition.