Myths, Morals, and Facts

Once when I was having dinner at a friend's house, he showed me an antique steamer trunk he had just bought. "You know," he said, "The word 'posh' originated as a label on trunks like this. It was an acronym for 'Port Out, Starboard Home'. Wealthy people had P.O.S.H. printed on their trunks to tell the luggage carriers where to put them on the ship, so it turned into a word about wealth and luxury."

I thought that was a great bit of trivia, and I told people about it every time I heard the word "posh." Not long ago, I heard someone talking about a "posh" home. Hearing my cue, I started telling my story about the word's origin. "Wait a minute." he interrupted, "Are you going to tell me about labels on trunks? You know that's just a myth, right?" Sure enough, I consulted a dictionary and it said "Posh" originated as a slang term for a dandy or fastidious dresser, and that the story about steamer trunks is not true. It is indeed a myth, and I had been passing it along.

That kind of myth is all too common in the modern world. A lot of historical "facts" are really just stories or images that get passed on because they're interesting, even though they aren't true. Marie Antoinette, for instance, never said "Let them eat cake." Her opponents made up the story to stir opposition against her. Vikings never wore horned helmets--some artist drew a picture of burly guy with a horned helmet, and the image stuck. Educated people in Columbus' time didn't think the world was flat. Humphry Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam". And of course, we've all heard the urban myths about dogs choking on severed fingers or people getting cooked in tanning beds. What these images and stories have in common is that they strike chords in our imaginations. We find them fascinating for some reason, whether it's shear morbidness in the case of urban myths, or vividness, like the image of blond warriors with horned helmets. Their appeal outweighs the fact that they aren't actually true, so they get passed on.

Looking up the history of the word "posh", with its real and its mythical origin, I started thinking about the word "myth" itself. People often refer to common misconceptions, like the ones above, as myths. This sense of the word--an appealing and common, but false, story or idea--is different than the other sense of the word; of myth as in mythology. Mythology is myth in the sense of powerful stories of heroes, deities, and the creation and destruction of worlds. There are similarities between the two kinds of myth. Both are perpetuated because of their human appeal, and neither are literally true, at least not entirely. But when we talk about myths in the sense of "mythology", we're not focusing on their falsehood.

We don't study mythology to make fun of the misguided notions of ancient or pre-scientific peoples. We study it because of the power of the myths, and the insights they give us into the common themes of the human imagination; themes of heroes, quests, gods and goddesses, monsters, doomed lovers, and natural disasters, all of which show up around the world. Myths reflect the deepest fascinations and concerns of a culture. They aren't often thought about this way, but I think they evolved, in a way that's analogous, though not identical, to biological evolution. Like species, myths evolved through a process of variation and selective retention. Variation occurred when storytellers would forget parts of a story, or add new twists. Selection was based on how well these variations resonated with the people that heard them. If they were found meaningful and appealing they stuck; they were passed on. This is surely one reason mythology can be so powerful. Myths have evolved to reflect people's deepest curiosities, fascinations, and fears.

Mythology is a fascinating part of the history of human ideas, because it represents the most ancient way cultures interpret the world. Originally, people didn't distinguish literal, emotional, ethical, and aesthetic truth. Pre-scientific mythology was an all-purpose worldview. Myths combined explanations of natural phenomena with religious or ethical lessons, in the form of vivid, memorable stories. In the absence of modern scientific instruments, literal truth was often unattainable anyway. So, the more meaningful or vivid the story, the better. For example, theres an ancient Hindu myth about the primal divinity Purusha. Purusha is the first being, and has no gender at the time. Feeling all alone in the universe, Purusha swells up and splits in two, becoming a man and a woman. They desire each other because they had originally been two halves of one being, but the woman fears it would be incestuous for them to mate (incest is a common mythological theme, since mythic first people are usually related). She tries to hide from him by turning herself into a series of animals, but he follows her. When she turns into a cow, he becomes a bull, and they mate and have offspring. He continues to pursue her, and they reproduce as every animal in turn, thus creating all of the animals on earth.

This story clearly serves many purposes. First, it's beautiful and memorable. It also offers explanations for facts about the world, including the existence of men and women, their mutual attraction, and the origin of the animals. It has an ethical component--the taboo against incest. Myths, then, formed the ideological, explanatory, and poetic background by which primal cultures defined themselves. This kind of worldview had its advantages. Because myths combined artistic, explanatory, and ethical ideas, there was little fragmentation of belief. The entire culture shared the same myths, which gave everyone a common understanding of where they came from, who their gods or spirits were, and how they should act. The only problem was that most myths were not literally true.

In the modern world, we find ourselves in the opposite situation. We have access to all kinds of factual truth (if we can track it down amidst all the nonsense). We now know the sun is a giant nuclear fusion reaction, not Apollo racing his chariot across the sky. Today we have theories about the natural world that are demonstrably more coherent and accurate than the old mythological explanations, so myth has come to be equated with falsehood. The problem is that people no longer share a coherent, poetic view of the world. Our beliefs have become fragmented into compartmentalized disciplines and rival camps. We've attained a great deal of literal truth, but we've lost a worldview.

That's a problem, but I think it's is a necessary step toward a better situation. We can no longer, in good conscience, believe things simply because they're poetic or traditional. We know too much. to the extent that ethical, artistic, and scientific ideas don't overlap in the real world, we need to disentangle them. Mythology is good literature, but it isn't good science. Science is good for describing nature, but it leaves many ethical questions unanswered. We need to differentiate these realms of human inquiry because they have different aims and serve different purposes.

But we can't simply pull them apart and leave it at that. These distinct realms of meaning aren't completely separate. Sometimes they do overlap. For example, our idea of factual truth has ethical implications, because believing something that isn't true can cause ethical mistakes. In many myths, including the one about Adam and Eve in the Bible, there's a theme where men were created first, and women were later, almost as an afterthought. Science offers no evidence for this. If we make the factual mistake that men are primary, we're more likely to make the ethical mistake of treating women as secondary. So, we have to perform a balancing act. We have to differentiate the areas of knowledge--mythology should not be mistaken for science--but then we need to integrate them, to see where they do connect, and how they fit together. Ethics, for example, can be informed by science (and vice versa). To move beyond fragmentation, we have to fit the various realms together, without letting them collapse back upon each other.

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I wrote the first version of this about ten years ago. Here's that version in its original context. http://www.knowledgetreeproject.org/treeknowledgechaptview.htm

The Purusha story in the Upanishads

School Prayer Again: The Good Old Days and Other Fallacies

This morning I saw that a group called The American Family Association of Kentucky has an online petition to the governor of Kentucky, imploring him to return "God's protection to America" by "putting prayer back in the schools." At the top, it shows a pair of praying hands in front of the American flag, and says, "restore student religious liberty." It goes on to say:

Prayer was in our schools for over 200 years before the anti-God forces took it out in 1962. After prayer was removed from our schools, teen pregnancy went up 500%, STD’s went up 226%, violent crime went up 500% and SAT scores went down for 18 years in a row, opening the door for the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture.

I didn't wake up this morning thinking I would write another post about school prayer, but this survey got me thinking about some of the myths and fallacies I keep seeing that surround the issue, and I'm getting pretty tired of them.

The biggest myth (or lie, if you're more cynical) is that prayer was ever entirely taken out of schools. It wasn't. Official, school-sponsored prayer was taken out of schools (though not always successfully--I remember bowing down with all the other seventh grade football players to say the Lord's Prayer before games). Students are still free to pray as long as they aren't disrupting class or doing so as part of an official school function, like cheerleading or speaking at a graduation. School officials can pray, too, but if they want to stay within the law they need to do it silently and discreetly, so that it isn't a promotion of prayer. You can't outlaw silent prayer, and no sensible person wants to anyway.

I've noticed it's incredibly hard to get some people to acknowledge the distinction between "official school prayer" and "voluntary student prayer". It's an important one: the first is illegal, and the second is not. In fact, it's protected, as long as it's not disruptive. There's an inevitable tension in the 1st Amendment between the Establishment Clause, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and the Free Exercise Clause: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". In the case of government institutions and employees, free exercise is restricted, to keep from violating the Establishment Clause. That's why public schools and their employees can't officially support one religion over another. What they do on their own time is up to them.

Which brings us to another fallacy: that restricting official school prayer is a violation of "religious liberty", as the Kentucky petition claims. It isn't, or at least it isn't an unreasonable one. School officials and students acting in official school functions can't expect full religious liberty while they are acting on behalf of the school, because that violates the Establishment Clause. We're back to that official/voluntary distinction. In fact, official Christian school prayers would be a violation of religious liberty, because some non-Christian kids would be forced (or would feel intense pressure) to participate in the prayers of a religion they don't share. There's this strange idea on the religious right these days that religious liberty means being allowed to force others to conform to your religion. It doesn't--that's twisting the word "liberty" into something else entirely. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Another one you hear a lot is that "God has been kicked out of schools." There's an idea in religious right circles that many of today's woes can be traced to the removal of official prayers from school in the early sixties. Those woes aren't just the result of kids not receiving religious instruction, according to this view. They also come from the fact that God has removed his protection from America, as the petition claims. The recent school shootings aren't just happening because the students don't know God. They are also happening because God is letting them happen, because we "kicked him out of the schools."

Now, I'm a little out of my theological depth here, I admit, but these sentiments don't seem to be giving God a whole lot of respect. If God is really omnipotent and omnipresent, as most Christians believe (I think), than it's impossible for mere humans to kick him out of anywhere. Of course, you could argue that the "kicking out" part is just a rhetorical flourish, and what's really happening is that God is simply deciding to leave the schools and withdraw his protection. As Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (the same organization sponsoring the petition in Kentucky) put it when discussing why God let the Sandy Hook school shooting happen:

In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God's word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We've kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you've got to invite me back into your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I am a gentleman."

So...God let a madman gun down little children because...he's a gentleman? Once again, I don't think the word "gentleman" is being used correctly here. This view paints a picture of God as being petty and vindictive, the kind of God who says, "If you don't base your government on one particular religion--conservative Christianity--then I will let terrible things happen to you and your children." Granted, that does resemble the vengeful and jealous God of the Old Testament. But happily, not all Christians see God in those terms anymore (some folks on the religious right seem to have never read the New Testament...except for Revelation, of course). 

But whether this view is true Christian doctrine or not, some of us in this country aren't Christians, and it's our country too. Personally, I think that if God exists at all, he probably doesn't have much to do with human affairs one way or the other, so the whole "God's protection" argument is a moot point. I don't think that's how the world works, and if it is, and God only protects countries with school-sponsored prayer, then he is a petty and callous deity, and certainly no gentleman. Is that a God worthy of worship? I don't think so.

Now, what about the quote from the petition that talks about the ills that have befallen America since "anti-God forces took it out in 1962"? First, that "anti-God forces" part is mostly wrong.  Engel v. Vitale, the court case in 1962 that made official school prayer illegal, was brought by a group of parents including "two Jews, an atheist, a Unitarian, and another Protestant." Only one of those people could possibly be considered "anti-God", though at most an atheist would be anti-religion, because you can't be against something you don't think exists. Maybe they're confusing that case with Murray v. Curtlett, the case that lead to Bible readings being outlawed in 1963. That's the one that involved the famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who was pretty anti-religion, and apparently not a very pleasant person. Many of the court cases that helped remove official religious observances from schools were brought by religious people, many of whom are quite passionate about separating church and state (religious people came up with the idea in the first place, after all). So, it isn't generally "anti-God" forces; it's "anti-official-sponsorship-of-religion" forces, which is a very different thing, and often quite pro-God. 

But what about the claims about teen pregnancy, STD's, and violent crime increasing after 1962? I'm not going to spend a bunch of time tracking the statistics down for Kentucky, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were partly accurate. Those things may have increased in the 60's. Society did see some upheavals then. But that doesn't mean the removal of official prayer from school caused those problems. Jumping to that conclusion is an elementary logical fallacy: the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (it means "after this, therefore because of this"). The fact that an event precedes another event doesn't mean it caused that event. My Dad is a veterinarian, who is always having people tell him that their pets got better because they dewormed them, even when the ailment had nothing to do with worms. He asks, "Did you ever have a flat tire the same day you went to the gas station? Did you decide that going to the gas station causes flats?" (See also "regression to the mean" and "correlation does not imply causation")

There are all kinds of things that might have caused increases in violence, teen pregnancy, etc. in the 60's, and the removal of school prayer is just one (rather remote) possibility. However, I can imagine that both the removal of school prayer and the increasing social ills could have been related to a general societal move away from traditional religious and moral values. That move did really get rolling in the sixties. It's true that belief and morality have grown more diverse in the United States in the last few decades. Some people are moving away from traditional religion, while others are embracing fundamentalism. I do believe it can be a dangerous time when people start questioning their old moral systems, because they may start abandoning rules that are there for very good reasons. That's one reason I write about ethics so much in this blog--people have to have some kind of moral framework that keeps them from doing hurtful things, and I'm trying to figure out what system might make sense, without relying on unproven supernatural claims. 

That's the thing--just because the removal of an old system of morality leads to problems, that doesn't mean the old system was right or good. And that brings me to the good old days. Lots of people, especially those on the religious right, look back wistfully at a glowing golden age when God was in charge and morals were morals. I heard someone recently longing for the time when "God was in the classroom, and there was a paddle in every teacher's desk". People look at "kids today" and shake their heads in despair. But there are some big problems with that view. For one thing, it's been around forever. Back around 700 BC, Hesiod lamented that "When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint." People have said the same things for at least 2700 years, and probably much longer, yet the world has never yet completely gone to hell in a handbasket (it's come close, maybe). Every generation has the rebellious kids and the more obedient kids. Admittedly, things today are a little unusual, because we have seen traditional Christianity lose more of its dominance over western culture. Many Americans, and far more Europeans, are now non-religious (and some of the least religious countries are some of the happiest on Earth). So yes, we are living in an unusually dynamic time, in a moral sense and in pretty much every other sense. 

But that doesn't mean there's no hope for the future, or that we should return to some imagined Golden Age. Things aren't that bad now, and that golden age wasn't so golden. Yes, violent crime started climbing in the 60's, and kept on climbing through the 80's...and then it started declining in the early 90's, and has ever since. We're not down to the levels of the early '60's yet, but we may get there. Most people think violence is increasing, but that's just an illusion based on the way the media plasters the juiciest atrocities across our TV screens day and night. As for teen pregnancy, I don't know about Kentucky, but across the United States, teen pregancy was at its highest in--get this--the fifties. It started declining right around the time prayer was removed from schools (and I won't claim causation) and has mostly declined since then. Sure, we've got some problems these days, but the news isn't all bad, despite what's on the news.

Besides, those good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be. Yesterday I was looking through some microfilms of the local paper (I live in south Louisiana) from 1965. There was an obituary for a black woman who had died at the age of 89. It was tucked at the bottom of the page, in a small section entitled "Negro news". Any article that mentioned a black person would pause to point out their race, as in, "John Doe, negro, was...". In 1965, local schools were separate and distinctly unequal, and the whole region was segregated. Blacks didn't have schools that went past the 8th grade until around 1950, and those schools opened months after the white schools, so that their students could keep working in the sugarcane fields. I read an account of this period by a woman who came home from Xavier University in New Orleans in the 50's and went to the library system (where I now work) to do some research. She didn't see a "Whites Only" sign, so she decided to risk going in. But she was told to go "her people's" library, which was a shelf full of books in the underfunded black high school. 

This doesn't sound like the good old days to me, and I know it doesn't to a black person. Back in the days when "God was in the schools", women and most minorities were treated as second-class citizens, and blacks especially suffered incredible indignities and injustices. But I'm not saying that's because God was in the schools back then. That's just the kind of dodgy reasoning I'm arguing against here. 

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History on Engel v. Vitale

School-Sponsored Prayer: What's the Harm?

Last night I didn't feel like reading, especially not the geeky books I usually read. But there wasn't much else to do. So I watched a geeky video. It was an old Bill Moyers interview, from 1987, called God and the Constitution. Moyers talks to Dr. Martin Marty, a Christian and an expert on the religious views of the founders, and Leonard Levy, a Jewish constitutional scholar who edited The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. All three men are stunningly smart, and I urge everyone to watch it (you can stream it for 3 bucks on Amazon.com, or watch it for free if you have a library card and your local library has Access Video on Demand).

The part that struck me the most was Dr. Levy talking about school-sponsored prayer. (Not voluntary student prayer, which is protected by the First Amendent. I want to make clear nobody is saying kids shouldn't be allowed to pray on their own at school.) Levy offers one of the most powerful and personal arguments I've ever heard for keeping official prayers out of schools. It's more impressive if you watch the video, but here's the transcript:

Moyers: What about school prayer?  

Levy: I think that the state should not promote or sponsor religion.  

Moyers: But there are prayers and "prayers." You grew up in De Kalb, Illinois, right?  

Levy: I did.  

Moyers: 20 Years ago in De Kalb the court said the cookie prayer was unconstitutional.  

Levy: I forgot that it came out of De Kalb!  

Moyers: "We thank you for the flowers so sweet, we thank you for the food we eat, we thank you for the birds that sing we thank you, God, for everything." The court declared it unconstitutional even though the teacher took out the word "God".  

Levy: She did, but the court didn't quite declare it unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court won't agree to review a case, they allow the lower court decision to stand. If that's how you construe it--which is reasonable--yes, the court, in effect, upheld that.  

Moyers: Now, do you think the founding fathers would have thought that little verse an establishment of religion?  

Levy: I think not, but... to begin with, that's a prayer being said in the public school. The founding fathers had no position with respect to this because public schools as we know them did not exist. Prayers do not belong in public schools even though they are sterilized, as in the cookie prayer which is non-denominational, and doesn't even refer to God. I agree with you that religious liberty would not be imperiled if children said the cookie prayer in the public schools.  

Moyers: The teacher said she was only trying to instill a sense of wonder in the children--to make them appreciative of the world around them and of the divine being that made that world. She wasn't trying to persuade or to indoctrinate them.  

Levy: These cases are very complex. That's why the court divides so closely and so frequently. When you say that that teacher wanted to inspire children with a sense of wonderment and you referred to her talking about a supreme being, that is a religious statement. You and I may believe it but there are people who don't believe it. 

Moyers: You think the First Amendment protects atheists?  

Levy: Of course it does! The First Amendment protects religion and non-religion. There are people who are not theists who are in our public schools by the thousands. There are people who are not Christians or Jews or Muslims and they ought not be exposed to that cookie prayer which alludes to a divine being who allegedly created the world. You think so and I think so, but there are people who don't think so and they shouldn't be made to feel like outsiders, as if they don't belong, as if this is not their country. It's their country as much as it is ours. 

Moyers: If I remember correctly you refused to take part in prayers in De Kalb, Illinois, when you were a boy there--1935, 1936. What happened when you said "I can't participate in that prayer."  

Levy: What happened? Well, I was ostracized. No, more than that--I was persecuted. They beat me up regularly as I went home from school. Gangs of kids would jump out and beat the hell out of me and call me a "Jew bastard" and "Christ killer." I loved to play softball, and I was kept off the team. "No kikes on our team," was the motto which had, by the way, some sponsorship from the faculty. When religion is introduced directly into the public schools there is a price that may very well be paid by people who are different. There have often been times when persecution was visited upon children who wouldn't participate in the public school rituals of religion.

Powerful stuff. Of course, the thirties were a very different time, and I don't think that kind of thing would happen to Jewish kids these days. At least not as commonly and openly. But kids can be very cruel when they decide to single out another kid, mobbing them like a bunch of crows. And I can certainly imagine them abusing a Hindu or Sikh kid, or especially a Muslim or atheist kid, for declining to participate in Christian prayers. Even if they didn't (and most often they wouldn't), that kid would be put in a very, very uncomfortable situation. Now, some people will say that this doesn't apply in overwhelmingly Christian areas. But it does. I'm from a small, white, Protestant town smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, but there were a handful of Hindu and Muslim kids even there, and probably more than a handful of non-religious kids. The Hindu and Muslim kids were younger than me, and I don't know if they were ever harassed because of their religion. If so, I would think it was probably minor. But I might be wrong, and I'm pretty sure they would have had a tougher time if they had been put in the position of deciding whether or not to say prayers along with the Christian kids. That could have opened up a can of worms. So why open it? Leaving official prayer and other religious observances out of school keeps the problem from ever arising, or at least from arising because of school policy. And besides, Dr. Levy is right. It's their country, too.