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

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.