D.I.I.verse Podcast: Will it make the boat go faster?
Join Adam Vasco & Julian Gwinnett as they explore a range of topics under the umbrella of Diversity, Inclusion & Intersectionality through interviews with special guests. D.I.I.verse is a centre of excellence for Diversity, Inclusion & Intersectional approaches brought to you by The University of Wolverhampton. D.I.I.verse aims to lead a strategic vision for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the region and nationally. Through a team of academics, practitioners, and activists we aim to support colleagues in working towards a more equitable society. The podcast explores some of the themes, challenges and approaches in achieving these goals.
D.I.I.verse Podcast: Will it make the boat go faster?
Inclusive Conversations and Mythology
William Pawlett and Julian Gwinnet discuss the importance of myth and mythology for understanding contemporary society, politics, ideology and culture. Myth and mythology are defined, and topics covered include myths of the consumer society, the rise of far right populism and its exploitation of myth and, also, the possibilities for a new, inclusive eco-mythology.
The discussion is based on William Pawlett's new book, 'Myth, Society and Profanation' to be published by Routledge in October.
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We are recording this podcast at the home of Wolverhampton University's Multimedia Journalism degree in the Alan Turing building on City Campus. The radio studio we are sitting in is kitted out to the same standards as places like BBC Radio 4 and 5 Live. It was installed alongside two studios as part of the new Wolverhampton Screen School. If you want to pop in for a guided tour, to discuss booking the studios or to chat about the journalism undergraduate degree, just email the course leader, gareth Owen.
Speaker 2:His address is gowen3 at wlvacuk hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the diverse podcast, where today we're going to be talking about courageous conversations. And to help me discuss this subject, I'm joined in the studio by Anna Vasco and Corenza Hodge, and, corenza, I'm going to hand right over to you to begin this conversation and help us to explore this topic further.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you so much, julian, and I'm so excited to be here today because I think it's going to be one of my favorite subjects and I know that I'm with adam and julian here today and we've looked, we've got a bit of history together, um, in regards to these podcasts. But what really excites me is the idea that, without really realising the podcast going back to the idea of what makes the boat go faster with this podcast has been courageous conversations that we've been listening to on the portal, so to speak. So today we're going to have an up and personal conversation with Adam I'm one of his oldest friends and I will still maintain, because he said that at the university just to discuss this concept of courageous conversations and really the idea to demystify or to retake away the fear of when we talk about the idea of having courageous conversations. So welcome, adam.
Speaker 4:I don't know if I've ever fully introduced myself, so my name is Adam and I'm the Director of Diversity and Inclusion in Professional Practice here at the university, and I'm dual heritage, but I feel that I am part of the black community. That's really important to me. I've gone on my own journey about my sense of identity, but, yeah, dual heritage, I think for me, me, when we're thinking about this idea of of courageous conversations, um, what we're really talking about, I think, is, um, there is some vulnerability, therefore, in having a conversation, um, and it's about maybe speaking with honesty, authenticity which I think if we asked any leader, member of a community family member, anyone we spoke, to do we want people to have honest, authentic conversations uh, we would say yes, the almost by default. From that, I think it does mean that there is a vulnerability to it. As we spoke about that, that power imbalance before, um I, I think that you are right that intersectional lens. I think we would be wrong not to acknowledge that if you maybe come from any type of minoritized group, and I include um sort of polar quintile data, socioeconomics and all those things in there, so it takes a broad group of people in there that that's partly where the vulnerability comes. It's harder to to voice some of the um, some of that, but I think what we're specifically talking about today is that, through that lens of diversity, inclusion, intersection, intersectionality, the sort of the dive or diverse, it's because we're talking about promoting the understanding, fostering or addressing biases and it's about recognising some of those things.
Speaker 4:I talk about cultural competence a lot and there's a journey of unlearning, relearning and those things, and I think these types of conversations are about that really. I think part of it is about creating a safe space, julian. So I think would you agree that probably step one really is that as a institution, as a society, as in our friendship groups, in the community and we say these things flippantly, don't we? So we create safe spaces. That sounds great. I think everyone will agree. We create safe spaces. But if there is a vulnerability to these types of conversations, then that might be easier said than done, perhaps.
Speaker 2:Yes, because I mean that. You say vulnerability, but I mean from my, my perspective already begins with yourself first and foremost, and it begins with understanding that we all of us we're all like a product of our collective experiences. Yeah, but within that, we're also, to a degree, a product of our collective biases.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's about interrogating that yeah and actually being aware of them, but being comfortable with the idea that a lot of what we know and and think about the world is a product of that. You know of those biases and how we have to identify them before we can actually move on beyond them. So there's a lot of preparation that goes into having courageous conversations, because it starts with an interrogation of yourself. It starts with an interrogation of how you understand and experience the world and how that might in some way be influenced by factors that you're not necessarily aware of or conscious of I totally agree and I think it is.
Speaker 4:This is probably where it's really important to to demonstrate some of that vulnerability. So, obviously, um, my job is now I live and breathe this space of you know, the edi space, and that's a really privileged position to be in, um, and I am constantly on that journey of unlearning and relearning all the time. And if I, if I'm honest, so, um, julian, if you don't mind, my friendship with you being is a really good example, so, um, my understanding, um of some aspects of the neurodivergent community, because, julian, you are only one person, you are not representative of the whole neurodivergent community and anyone listening.
Speaker 4:Please don't think that I am yes absolutely and we, we know that, um, but I'm fortunate in that I, I my circle of friends, by definition, continues to diversify more and more and more, and so I hear lots of different experiences which challenge my thinking. So an example of, I guess I'll frame maybe some of the courageous conversations. I know that maybe Julian has, and this will sound like that's not courageous conversation. This is just working through something, but I think these are some of the ways that we start off. So when I worked in the faculty, we piloted that we wanted to send interview questions out in advance because we thought that was a more inclusive thing to do and we spent some time, um evaluating that and, of course, because we, we did it, I was leading it, the the your own bias wants to go. We've done a good thing there and pat yourself on the back.
Speaker 4:We're looking for that affinity bias of yes, we've done the right thing, um, and the attention was good and there was some good outcomes from that. But then, as we started to evaluate more, I was working more with colleagues in the disabled staff network and you get the the correct type of pushback well of. Well, it's okay to send the questions in advance, but your questions are dreadful and actually actually is interviewing the most inclusive way to even find the best person for the job? And, let's be honest, that's what we are doing. We are trying to remove barriers to find the best person for the job and Julian and colleagues in the Disabled Staff Network I think we're really good at being able to. They're really good examples of um, courageous conversations. I think all our staff networks are. Actually I've been able to push back and say, yeah, intention, good. If I think about the offstead thing and I know no one likes to talk about offstead but the intent, the implementation and the impact, the intent to create a more inclusive recruitment system.
Speaker 3:Good. Most of us agree that's important.
Speaker 4:Implementation. Some of that might be valid. So sending questions in advance may be valid, but it needs more work. So the challenge that came back from the disabled staff network of pushing back to saying but those questions just, not only are they not really neurodivergent, friendly, but what particularly are you trying to get out from that is a really good example of, I think, the types of courageous conversations we need. I don't think we need to think all of a sudden that courageous conversations are suddenly debating the most philosophical questions in life.
Speaker 4:It's's about, for us as a team of people who are working about the betterment of, and progression of, our student community, our staff community, our whole university community and beyond how do we achieve those, those common goals? Um, and that was one way we were looking to, and so it's facilitating conversations around that. So I think, coming back to you, carenza, I think there's a really it's really important to not frame this that courageous conversations oh sorry you, julian, that courageous conversations aren't this thing to have about huge. They might be about philosophical things, but actually it's just about intent, implementation, impact and the push back on about huge. They might be about philosophical things, but actually it's just about, you know, intent, implementation impact and the push back on things when we are trying, all of us are trying to do the right thing, but actually sometimes we're we're wider than mark we just, I mean to say, state the obvious.
Speaker 2:We don't know what, we don't know absolutely. Um part of feeding off of that conversation we were just having. Actually, for me, the the one thing that I I remember most intently was is that how institutions end up sort of like, literally, however much we try not to, we end up embracing, like institutional group, think yeah, even when we're consciously trying not to yeah, I think and so much of what.
Speaker 2:How we you know, employment processes are always really, really interesting because, they always focus very, very narrowly on my individuals and individual skill set.
Speaker 2:They're never really sort of like broad-based, and if you ever really wanted to sort of like think about how you might actually improve, increase diversity, increase inclusivity, and if you only ever focused on people answering interview questions related to what they'd done previously throughout their careers, that naturally puts a limit on what they can actually talk about, and I think if all of us as individuals ever sat down and thought to us well, what are we really proud of during our lives? What experiences have we done? What are the things that we've done that we can sit down and say like I'm really, really pleased that I was involved with that, I'm really proud of that. I think most people would probably say that the things they're most proud of or pleased with in life come from outside their work environments, and I think for me it's. We don't focus enough on on the whole person. We focus on the narrow, the narrow snapshot of somebody that we see within our office environments and I guess.
Speaker 4:So I suppose, what we're only talking about. So that's one type of courageous conversation, but they did the other types of courageous conversations yeah, thank you, do require us.
Speaker 4:It's about having the facilitation skills. So yesterday I filled in for Vindarar, associate Director for EDI, related to HR. They're rolling out some Ei training, from organizational development to our line managers, um, and part of that, as we were saying, is, you know, we, we want to create an environment where, uh, staff and students feel comfortable enough to essentially have what we're talking about here. Karenza, you know courageous conversations, um, but it takes. This is where the vulnerability comes in, isn't it so? And your staff will will talk about and students will talk about the.
Speaker 4:The vulnerability I think when you're an institution probably comes from that. We might not always like to admit it, but that power imbalance, it sticking your head above that proverbial parapet and saying something which maybe is, as I say, against the prevailing wind, speaking out in some way, often where it's highlighting some type of maybe prejudice, yeah, maybe discrimination or something around. That is tricky. And therefore, the skills that are needed to be able to to facilitate that conversation, because the thing is about facilitating. It's about being empathetic and showing um compassion, but, by default, one of the biggest things about it is handling discomfort and um going back to that radical candor point of view. That's the thing I think that we all find and, by the way, I absolutely as well.
Speaker 4:I, I physically, now when I'm having a difficult conversation have to. Really, I don't quite think aloud, but I have to. I have to, I have to acknowledge the feelings that are coming in. It's like inside out, you know, when it shows you the different feelings that, um, that are happening and it's going through that step isn't it of going right, actually like let's not react to the, the challenge, because the challenge isn't the point. Have to not center myself in this a minute and knowledge and and that's the, the handling, the discomfort, I think is the bit that takes um, training and actually, uh, really thinking through that type of process. I don't think it's just something that we can say flippantly our jobs are to handle courageous conversations okay then. But it takes some, uh, some real conscious thought to how to do that.
Speaker 3:I think that's quite interesting and I would like to kind of throw something out there. Many moons before I started university, I had the notion that universities were a place for critical thinkers and people were allowed to, you know, say what they want in a sense in the, in the environment, which would have been fed by evidence. So it wouldn't have just been conversations that hurt, it would have been conversations and what we're talking about today courageous conversations, and I think over the years I've kind of been in shock at the reluctance, um, within educational institutes not any, not naming any particular one where they're reluctant to discuss issues that outside the university are discussing, but we're kind of shying away from it. So I'm not sure if this is lost in within university walls and if that calls going back to what you both kind of like.
Speaker 3:I've spoken about the idea of being courageous again, which to me was part of being a university student yeah is it time now that we have to return back and introduce maybe a new framework, maybe not based on the colonized concept of what it is to be critical, but to kind of like change the framework that we're working from, to be able to start that reintroducing people and, as you know, students are encouraged to be critical in their work, and that is obviously like the conversations that we're talking about but within academia, do you feel I'm throwing it out to both of you if it's time that we may need to I don't know start a movement in the sense where we try to bring back this as a form of framework with a diverse lens.
Speaker 4:I think there's a, I think there's almost two things at play there. So I I still would like to believe and still see a really good examples within the university that actually maybe, when in in the format of lectures, talking about something that might be uh, contentious or of interest, that it is possible to facilitate those more contentious conversations when we are talking about bringing through those different, like you say, the criticality, so bringing in different viewpoints, um, yeah, you know, sort of creating your own lines of inquiry with those differing viewpoints. Absolutely that's what higher education, you know, is partly all about, um, and I still think that probably in lectures, that's where we do have staff who are doing a really good job of navigating that. I like to think that's still the case in higher education.
Speaker 4:I think the difficulty is that what we're talking about sometimes and by the nature of our work. So obviously, corenza, in your role as the leader of the community of practice in the that's Me project, which is seeking to eliminate barriers for global majority postgraduate researchers by definition, then there we are. That's an acknowledgement of there are therefore barriers for that group of, uh of people. We know the percentage of, say, black professors in the uk is is still shocking. In my line of work and my previous background education, the number of black teachers, black head teachers etc is is incredibly poor.
Speaker 4:I just draw those as some examples, um, I think they tend to be the the more tricky conversations. I think it is. It is easier when it's framed in a subject, so we are trying to pull something apart in a subject. I do think that, um, we've we've come off the back of a long period of time as a society, um, I won't say anything too political, but 14 years in, essentially, where I think the, the flames I'm going to say faux culture, wars have been found. So we have very dichotomized positions and I think we've lost some of the nuance as a society, brexit being a very key example to here.
Speaker 4:So we stupidly, in my view, labeled people who might have wanted to leave as being bigoted. I think the other side did that. You know, they made lots of judgments about people who voted leave, rather than having a nuanced conversation and pick. Why have that courageous conversation? On the other side of things, those people who wanted to remain are labeled as woke and you know that's become some type of pejorative and even if we look at at politics, everything's framed in left, right and it's these dichotomized positions. And so, therefore, the nuanced conversations perhaps, which I think also is about courageous conversations, because I don't think when we have courageous conversations that we should expect there's going to be a single answer to that. I think it's about trying to understand at least where the other person is coming from, while still obviously keeping your, your viewpoint.
Speaker 4:But to go back to your, your point, I think that's the difference in that higher education great in a subject you know, if I'm studying education or whether it's in the arts, I can, I can tackle some of the the bigger issues within that, because I can really start to unpick so in education about the different takes on behavior, management, behaviorism, and see that there's this side of playing, this side of it, maybe unpick this nuance and really play with it. But if we start to talk about bigger societal issues, then they, they perhaps become um political hot potatoes that people are um a little bit concerned to talk about. Um, and I'm not going to take the podcast down this route. But if we look at the current situation in gaza, that's a really good example of where we have too many people probably who are fearful of talking because they don't want to be Islamophobic, anti-semitic and maybe not quite knowing how to navigate that, when absolutely we should be empowered to be able to speak out about a situation where there are lots of people dying.
Speaker 4:I'm not trying to take the podcast in that direction, but I think it's another example maybe of those types of conversations and maybe the subtle difference between what a university and academia allows us as conversations. And, by the way, I should point out, I saw an amazing academic, uh, barnaby rain, talk about this. So in their context again, the framing of academia he was able to have a conversation I guess a courageous conversation around that and again, maybe being framed because he was a historian. It was much easier to frame the conversation around an issue like Gars in an academic way.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think it's a long-winded version of your of the answer in your question, sally cleanser I'm going to try and come up with a shorter response, and I think I think it's an interesting because it it cuts the heart of what is a university, and I mean that in a in a, in a in a in all seriousness, because my understanding is that universities aren't just factories for learning. They're more than just simply educational institutions that focus on literally providing an individual with the learning experience in order to actually succeed in whatever chosen profession they want to actually go into. They are so much more than that. They are beacons within the communities. They actually serve their supply, literally focal points that actually strike are really important, if In most cases, the most important part in actually sort of like changing the narrative in terms of actually creating a more progressive, more inclusive, more diverse world and actually helping us to actually understand what that actually means in practice and how we can actually achieve it, because the conversations that happen here go outside the walls within this institution and actually disseminate outwards into the world.
Speaker 2:People take forward ideas and actually sort of like become you know, our students, our academics just the ideas themselves, actually sort of like have a really powerful, a really powerful in terms of transforming the communities in which we live so that we can look at the world today and see that it is the, you know, the culmination of lots of other previous worlds that existed and we can see sort of like a form of linear progress, which might not always be evident but you know, it clearly is there and that process will continue and that's the really important part. It will continue so that 10-15 years time it was entirely possible that people might look at the world we're living in today and ask themselves how on earth did this happen?
Speaker 2:did people think and act and behave the way we did. Yeah, but that's a good thing, because that will only be possible when people maintain that critical lens. So we provide people with the means by which to develop a critical lens and also the sort of momentum to like maintain it beyond the experience they have here and they take that forward throughout their entire lives and, I think, also is within. That is weirdly, I suppose. I I do wonder whether and this might be just me as a newer divergent person here is whether, when it comes to different greatest conversations in terms of the difficulty that's sort of like you know, it becomes evident when you are involved in it, particularly when you are challenged, when your views, your weight, what you think you know is challenged and you're having to act actually sort of like look at the situation, say, are we are, am I even? Am I actually wrong? Um, are the other? Yeah, and that's a really difficult thing to embrace really, and I think that's because I think we focus a lot on processes and not on outcomes.
Speaker 2:I think I like to try as best I can and I mean only try is to focus on what those outcomes are. What are the outcomes? The outcome is, ultimately, is literally creating a more diverse, inclusive world for everybody and a more accessible world as well, and that can only really happen if everybody actually feels as though they they are. They actually are present in that world, they actually are there, they belong there. So everybody's viewpoint is is valuable in that conversation. And, yes, it's really difficult, it's really easy to jump to conclusions because, think, when I'm interrogating my own bias, my own bias is that I might struggle sometimes to understand people who, who, um, completely disagree with me on a subject, but that, to some extent, is maybe my bias, yeah, so I think, if we go back, to your question, karenzo.
Speaker 4:And so if we, if what I proposed before is right, that I still think that in academia, the difficult conversations are being had within the, the framing of subjects. I think it's teasing out some of why. I think it links to what julian said. So that's that's allowing for those sessions allow for the time and space to critically reflect, to be challenged, uh, on viewpoints, um, to use research and reading to bring those things. But and that I think is is one of the things that if we are to have courageous conversations, as we are suggesting here, to maybe tackle some of the, the tougher things, I think things why potentially, projects like that's me have, um, an impact is because it again it gives this framing of right. This is the problem and we want to have some time to to have a conversation.
Speaker 4:So if, if we use the Brexit analogy again, we got lost on sort of headlines, bus messages on buses and everything else, and probably someone really needed to sit down and say, okay, there's a conversation that needs to be facilitated here about immigration.
Speaker 4:I have my own view on immigration and it's very liberal, as people will probably assume, but there's 50 percent of the population that voted, or slightly more actually that that have a different view and we probably actually need to facilitate the space not slogans, not messages, not buzzwords, not get brexit done, not 350 million to the nhs, but actually, like you said, julian, listen, listen and recognize that there is a diff. There is definitely a different viewpoint and, as uncomfortable as I might find, as I might find it, it might actually have some validation to it. Where I need to shift in thinking, you need to shift in thinking and I think that, going back to the that you asked, karenza, that academia, when we hold it in subjects, does that because we have to, we're having to take in these views really, but in society in general, sometimes we come, maybe they're not being prepared for a courageous conversation. That's not the place to have it Suddenly walk into a room and suddenly start a courageous conversation without preparation probably isn't the place to do that.
Speaker 4:We need to come in prepared, but and I think it's prepared to be challenged because, as I said before, when I have them I have to reset myself and think about it. Julian, you were just saying then you know that the yes, I've got to think about, I've got to be challenged, but that takes a headspace to get into, doesn't it? Like today, we're going to get into a conversation and I'm going to hear some things which I am absolutely on the opposite side of. But not to dismiss that and I think that that's the, you know, some of the takeaways, I think is the linking to where there are successes, perhaps in in academia, to take that space to facilitate the time for the conversation, to understand you're going to be challenged, um, those types of things do you derive if you feel that at the heart of this issue here is, is um, is um, a decline in in thinking, even outside institutions.
Speaker 2:But you know, the world beyond that, even the world in itself as a whole, is that we seem to have got ourselves into a place where being able to compromise is becoming increasingly rare and also, alongside that as well, being able to disagree agreeably is also increasingly rare, and these two things are very, very, very important to them in terms of addressing many of the issues we talked about do you know, I think?
Speaker 4:I think it's really important that obviously there are there are some issues which um are more black and white I get that but I think some of what we're talking about in courageous conversations is that that it's not necessarily, and it takes um some nuance and compromise to to go. We're not going to change everyone's worldview and belief system, and I'm not entirely sure that's either realistic or anyone's job anyway, but it is about making sure that we don't act on the prejudice, that we don't discriminate against people, because we recognize where that prejudice is is having an impact. That, at least, is a first step towards a more equitable society, and I think that's some of it, and I I'm with julian I do believe we have lost some of the as a society, some of the, the idea of, of compromise, um, and I understand it and I really I I know that um the most radical sort of thinkers and radical ideas have not shown compromise and and that's maybe where the biggest change is made.
Speaker 3:But at the same time, I do think there are plenty of other conversations where it is about a bit of give and take and finding a slightly more um common ground, whilst it not being the case all the time I think, kind of like on the final note, really, I think what we've tapped into, or the theme that I'm kind of like in from this conversation and from other podcasts that we do have done, is that concept again of safe spaces and safe space. And it's quite ironic because, physically, I feel that a lot of people don't feel in a safe space, even if you go back to gaza, which you know, believing in the kind of ecosystem when you're looking at the world not being so safe again, how does it make you feel safe, even the space that you're in and even, like you said, even it's between, like the three of us here and we've come together and we feel quite safe to share these ideas, the idea that I think you touched on previously as well, jul Julian, in regards to belonging, and that is it. How do you feel safe to have that courageous conversations and I think that could be a conversation itself, that bringing it back into context, because all the time we've kind of bumped into it how do people feel safe to say what they're feeling and even to receive information with intent? So what is the intention of the other person? Is?
Speaker 3:We got the kind of operative term here conversations it's never just one way. It's not talking over or projecting as if you're doing a presentation, um, in a seminar, it's more. The idea is a two-way street and it's going to come back at you. So even that kind of idea of having emotional intelligence, that if you're going to give it, then how does it come back? So I think we've retouched in some really just like tender hooks of the concept of courageous conversation. So as we're finishing here and as it's coming to a time, we can look at the idea of maybe just sharing with each other what we believe, based on what we've just spoken about. I've just said, safe spaces is definitely something we need to do to make the boat go faster, to babe, to have these courageous conversations.
Speaker 4:I leave it to you two gentlemen to tell me what you think would make the boat go faster I think you've summed that up beautifully and I think the the key takeaway is definitely to make the boat go faster, exactly what karenza said, uh, creating the safe space and the time. Um, so it needs. The courageous conversations in the main should be planned and give people time and the space and create that space. I think the other thing is, personally, every person who's going into a courageous conversation must be ready to handle the discomfort that you're talking about and be ready to listen, to truly listen actively and acknowledge the feelings of which are likely to be from a different point, or those feelings which are from a different viewpoint, and maybe understand that sometimes it's good to take those on board, reflect, go away and again come back to some more courageous conversations about those things. So I think, just building on what Corenda said, I would just add to it that it's about creating a safe space, being open to challenge, to different opinion, and I will hand over to Julian Wow.
Speaker 2:How do I compete with that?
Speaker 2:I think ultimately for me it's about recognizing that not everything in life is either or and not everything is a zero sum game in which you have to go in and win, otherwise you will lose it's not it's not that black and white that sometimes some of the greatest progresses that ever made is where people with different ways of seeing and understanding the world came together and agreed to compromise in some way or other and and through that compromise they fundamentally learned something about each other, fundamentally learned something about each other. They learned something about each other's experiences, and that challenged their previous preconceptions and it sort of like enabled them to sort of like move forwards and think very differently about the world and and to an extent well, to, hopefully to a large extent learn to actually value and sort of take on board the opinions and views of other people.
Speaker 3:Well, I think that's a perfect note to finish on. So thank you so much for Adam. It's been a privilege to interview you.
Speaker 4:And it's been too long.
Speaker 2:And once again, thank you again, julian for co-hosting and supporting me, as you usually do. Thank you both. Welcome to the first episode of our podcast series exploring the captivating world of myth and mythologies. In this series, we'll delve into the essence of myths and mythologies, examining what sets them apart from other forms of storytelling and how they've shaped our understanding of the world around us. We'll also discuss the revelance of mythologies today. Are they hiding in plain sight or perhaps even masquerading as facts? Looking beyond our own time, we'll contemplate the future of mythologies and ask are they an inevitable part of human culture? Join us as we challenge the preconceptions and consider the value of embracing mythologies rather than dismissing them. I'm delighted to be joined throughout this series by my co-host, dr william paulett. William is currently the course leader for BA on media, film and television and also a senior lecturer in media. So over to you, william. Would you like to quickly introduce yourself to add anything that I've just missed in that very brief introduction? Right? Thank you, julian.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I'm very happy to be here. I have just written a book on myth and society that's coming out in November, so at the moment, myth is the main topic that I'm interested in, so look, forward to the discussion.
Speaker 2:I'm going to start with the obvious. So how would you define mythology for the purpose of this discussion?
Speaker 5:Well, defining myth and mythology is, it's a bit, it's a bit tricky, um, uh. So I define. I define myth, um. Myth is unique, um, a unique form of storytelling as um, as you, as you mentioned, because it doesn't have an author, it's not authored, um, it refers to a time, uh, before any particular author dealt with this subject. So, although lots of different authors, different writers, engage with mythology, the myth itself is already constituted somehow before they come to it, and that's true even of the very earliest writings, homer, for example. He's already referring back to something that exists before him and he's interpreting it, he's presenting it in a way to the reader. So myth is something that refers back to foundations or to deep origins, and it's something that's impersonal, it's not owned by a particular author or writer, it's something that is treated as having always existed. So it's not further, it's not at the beginning of time, it's before time, really, it's before. It's before um history or historicity or temporality come about. It's like a, so a precondition for history to come about.
Speaker 5:I think that's how I would define it. It's been defined like that by the tradition of thought I'm looking at. So, yeah, I think that's one of the things that's really fascinating, really amazing, about myth, its relationship to time and history, about myth its relationship to time and history. So myth is kind of in a non-time, or an eternity, or before time, but also a condition of time coming into being. Um, so, yeah, um, so that's how I define myth something, um, impersonal, not owned by an author, referring back to an earlier and earlier, earlier time, or non-time, before time. Um, and that's something that gives myth an amazing power, I think, amazing grip on our imagination. Um, and one of the uh thinkers I've looked at, schelling, actually argues that languages are what he calls the profane remainder of myth. So language, culture, society, history, time all evolve from myth. Myth is the precondition of all of those things.
Speaker 2:So you said that forget me if I got this wrong you said because this intrigues me. She said so that, uh, almost a precondition of a myth or mythology is that it almost cannot, be sort of like, related to a particular time scale, yeah, particular period in time.
Speaker 5:It can't, yeah, yeah not a particular time or a particular person, or a particular author or a great poet, although the poets of course interpret and reinterpret myth already existing myth.
Speaker 2:So it's almost like a foundational sort of like.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think that's a good word to use foundational, but I think actually I mean in the book I've called it a non-foundation, because what I want to argue is that there are no ultimate foundations for anything, and that's what. So myth provides the appearance of a foundation or it provides the appearance of a ground or grounding. There is no ultimate grounding, so myth comes in and provides that appearance of a grounding, grounding. There is no ultimate grounding, so myth comes in and provides that appearance of a grounding, so I prefer to call it non-foundation or non-ground. Again, that's taken from Friedrich Schelling, who was one of the influences in the book.
Speaker 2:With that in mind. So how do myths then differ from other forms of storytelling? Are they essentially different in any way?
Speaker 5:yeah, I think they are. I think they are essentially different. Yeah, I think they're essentially different from other forms of storytelling in in a number of ways, um, so I've mentioned that, then, that they precede any individual writer or author or poet, um, so there's something impersonal about them. They're not a fabrication of a individual human mind. Um, there's something more than that um and uh. So that's why I talk about them being a part of this kind of essential or inevitable non-foundation of human life. And yeah, so the impersonality of myth is important, but also that myth seems to have something sacred within it, something that really inspires something that's divine.
Speaker 5:So myth is often about divine beings, about gods, goddesses, not just about humans. It's about something that transcends or goes beyond the human. So it's going beyond the human, it's going beyond society, it's going beyond time, but also it provides a foundation or non-foundation for those things. So the sacred element, I think, is really important and that's why it's not just another form of storytelling. So myths can be turned into stories and they can become stories, and they are, in a sense, stories, but they're also more than stories because of this sacred element, the element of the sacred or the element of belief, the element of the divine, and that in itself is something that can't always be put into words. It can't be put into ordinary language. It's something that's set aside, that it's something that's very that eludes language. It's something that eludes language. So there's something about myth that's a very special class of storytelling because in part, it's playing with language even grounding and founding language.
Speaker 5:Language evolves from myth rather than vice versa. I think that's at least the argument that I've been looking at. So myth is very special in that sense it's impersonal, it's non-authored. It has a sacred or divine dimension to it and of course that can get weakened or domesticated or changed over time. You know it can weaken over time. So, um, you get the marvel version of um norse mythology.
Speaker 2:You won't see an awful lot of the sacred or the divine there, but it's residual, I think, even in those recent reworkings of of norse myth so is there a sort of a relationship here to truth, or at least as of like, as of like shared, if you like understanding a truth, if we can even use that word? In a sense? What I'm saying is is that do do myths and mythologists they do, they help us to understand humanity, or do they do perhaps something a little bit more? Do they actually go beyond that even sort of like shape and define what humanity?
Speaker 5:is I? Yeah, I think it's the, I think it's the latter, yeah, I think it's the, that that they shape and define what's possible for a culture or a people or for for humanity to do and to think. So, um, um, so humanity, human history, uh, human culture, national culture, um, is a kind of weakened or pale reflection of mythological themes. I think so, um, so myth is so, myth is grounding or is, is, operates in the place of ground or foundation and makes possible things that are recognizable as culture, which we wouldn't normally call a myth. So culture, you know the ways of life, ways of living. We wouldn't normally call that a myth, but that's enabled by myth, I think normally call that a myth.
Speaker 2:But but that's enabled by myth, I think enabled. So culture is dependent on myth, a large part of mythology. Or if I think back in terms of my, my, my slight, my, certainly secondary school experience, growing up and literally, yeah, it's like doing I forget what they actually called them.
Speaker 2:That's like in history classes, so it's like um, where you focus, for instance, on like sort of like greek mythologies, like um samarians like yeah, so on and so forth. I was thinking a lot of a lot of mythologies defined specifically. You know, a large part of mythology and myths is actual creatures or particular right, if you like. So I mean how what I'm saying here is that do creatures reveal? I mean, do mythological creatures what do they reveal about the values and beliefs of the cultures that created them?
Speaker 5:That's a really good question. I think it's a very, very big question and quite a difficult question to answer. But but yeah, of course you're right that that, yeah, in Greek mythology and, for example, the major mythological systems that we're aware of have that they're full of monsters and titans and various dangerous creatures, uh, the medusa, uh, the furies, um, yeah, they're not just about human beings, of course they're. They're about gods, um, they're about heroes, they're about monsters, they're about, uh, all sorts of dangerous forces, um, so, um, one of the theories about, about the role of mythological creatures is that, um is that myth recounts or deals with, um, the foundations, the necessary foundations for a society to emerge, um, and so society, culture, it has to slay its own demons, it has to slay its monsters, it has to expel its demons, cast them down, it has to go through a process of taming nature, the wild forces of nature, the wild forces of human nature, the wild forces of nature, the wild forces of human nature, and it has to. So it recounts these tales of the great heroes and the gods working together to imprison a demon or expel a demon, or fight a war against monsters, slay monsters, the trials of Hercules, for example, and that is a necessary part of that enables, that is the precondition for a society as we recognize it, a historical society as we would recognize it, a society that is rational, allegedly rational I can say maybe a bit more about that later on but a society that can be ordered, or can appear to be ordered, that has expelled its monsters, expelled its demons, that has tamed nature, that has begun to exploit nature, deny nature, deny human nature and sets up the way for rational or technological development. So you can't, you can't achieve that kind of um, rationalized, ordered, historical society unless you've expelled your satan or beelzebub, or your, your, your set or your um or your typhon. You have to decapitate Medusa before you can begin on that process of humans gaining their priority over nature. And that's what myth recounts.
Speaker 5:It recounts those stories of the conquest of the wildness of nature, the wildness of creatures, and and uh, and the world around us, um, but it. But it doesn't just recount that, it also recounts, I think it also mythology, great mythologies, also recount, um, the dangers of that process, um, so they have a, they have this uh, ambivalence, um, I use use the word ambivalence, which I've taken stolen from, stolen from freud and from derkheim and various batai and various people. But, um, so myths do take the side of the human being, the human hero who expels the, the monsters, kills the monsters, allows human society to be set up. But you can see the violence in that. You can see the way that the Titans and the demons and the monsters are betrayed and they're tricked and they're exploited and they're imprisoned and they're mistreated by the so-called hero.
Speaker 5:So you can see the ambivalence of the human hero in great mythological systems, I think and by saying great mythological systems I really mean all, all the ancient mythologies uh, without trying to pick out one or another, um, um, so, um, yeah, so the hero is, he's a savior, but he's also a threat to the community as well. Things come back and haunt the hero, whether it's Beowulf or Arthur in Arthurian mythology, the hero is not straightforwardly a good against a bad, it's not binary, and I think the great myths show that, um, they, they show that ambivalence, uh, or dualism, very, very well, I think, and that's part of part of their power. And I link that to to the sacred, um, to the idea of the sacred or divine also being dual, ambivalent, made up of two things good and evil together, both, both. They're both in play at the same time.
Speaker 2:Um yeah, so okay, I hope that does that, and presumably on that, on that distinction between good and evil not always obvious or clear, which is which? Um yeah, and you know from my own memories, it's that the, the gods of greek mythology, don't act and behave as God should do. Most of the time, they are just as feckless and just as sort of like material, you know selfish and greedy and vain.
Speaker 5:They're vain, they're selfish. I mean, Zeus is famously a philanderer, isn't he Having loads of affairs?
Speaker 2:And in a way it's more of a symbiotic relationship between us as humans and the gods of mythology, in the sense that we are more intertwined with them as they're more representative of us, our values, who we really are, not an ideological role model to which we should literally radically change our entire life path in order to sort of like follow as best we can.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean that's often seen as the distinction between Greek religion and Christian religion, isn't it? Or Greek and Roman religion and Christian religion. So in Greek religion, greek mythology, the fate of humans is intertwined with the gods, and the gods each needs the other. They seek each other's favors, the jealous is on both sides. It's a very psychological kind of a narrative. And Christianity comes along and kind of imposes a supreme god long and kind of um imposes a supreme god, um, and it's hard to see the um, the intertwining with the fate of human beings and things. That's so, that's, you know, that's that kind of arguments made because you, you can actually challenge the gods.
Speaker 2:I mean it's not.
Speaker 5:You can challenge.
Speaker 2:It's not always advisable to do so on rare occasions you can challenge the gods and they will, sort of like, literally concede to your position.
Speaker 5:Yeah, like you know, they'll banish a figure to the underworld but then allow Dionysus to rescue his mother from the underworld and, you know, live again and things. I'm a little bit suspicious, though, of the overall sort of structure of that sort of argument. I think it applies quite neatly with Greek mythology, compared to sort of Puritan Christianity. So you can certainly make that kind of case, but I think I mean, actually, you know, christianity is not about a single father, god, it's actually, you know, it's actually a trinity. It's actually much more complicated.
Speaker 5:And then there's the role of christ. That seems to be almost separate and yet at the same time not separate from god, the father, um, so I, I would, so I, I would want to take um a very sympathetic reading of of Greek mythology and look at the magnificence of Greek mythology, but I would apply the same, I would, I would try to apply the same courtesy to, to Christian mythology, I think, as well, and look at some of the ambivalences and the strangeness and, and you know, more than one thing happening at once, you know. So, like what, what is happening, um, with what is happening with the crucifixion, then, is it, is it the son? The son takes over from the father and that that's an uncomfortable and violent process. Um that we expect in in mythology.
Speaker 5:So I I would like, I'd like, I want to. Maybe it's a bit it's kind of romantic, sentimental perhaps, but I'd like to take the a kind of sympathetic reading of all and any mythological system. I think that's where I'd want to start. I'd want to start by saying it's not just a form of storytelling. The divine, the sacred, the divine in the human, the way the human beings establish themselves, what's beyond the human, the dangers in being human and defining yourself as human against nature, All of those things I think are common across many mythologies.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I do want to resist a little bit that. So to be less specific and to broaden it out.
Speaker 5:I think, so I think you're right.
Speaker 2:yeah, I think would it be fair at all, fair at all, fair to to maybe say that, um, that the mythologies, or myth and mythologies, is um kind of more about sort of like helping you to make sense and understand the world as it is in its brutal reality and its brutal sort of like impact on you, your, your life, that the person who's unable to sort of like control the weather, the person who finds themselves, it's like, at the mercy of of the elements, at the mercy of like other people or in tribes, and not so much sort of like on the, you know, trying to sort of like recreate the world in some sort of ideal, in some sort of idealized form?
Speaker 5:yeah, I think that's another really, really good question. It's a very big question again and, uh, I'm not sure I can. Uh, I can answer it adequately, but um, I think it's a fascinating question. Um, I, I think there is.
Speaker 5:I think I would support the idea that there's that mythology has. It contains some brutal truths, you know. It contains some harsh truths about human beings and about the desire to unify and order things and create a society and create an ideal order and how that must go wrong with that people. That's there's also there's, there's always going to be disobedience. Wherever you impose obedience, there's always, there's always going to be a dark side or a um, there's, there's always going to be something about nature that's not controllable.
Speaker 5:So I think I would go along with the idea that the great myths teach us quite hard and harsh truths. I wouldn't use the word real or realistic myself. That's just one of my foibles, I'll cross that off. I would definitely say harsh truth. I mean you could say people might say that mythology is very kind of idealized or idealistic and not really material or something like that, or too kind of religious, superstitious, but I don't think that's the case. I mean I think you mentioned Greek, full of, it's full of blood. You can't get much more material than that. It's full of violence, it's full of suffering and revenge. Uh, it's full of the, the human, human energies and drives, and as as with you know, as with um, mythological systems of thought. So I, yeah, I think you're right, I think what the question is getting at.
Speaker 2:I think I agree with you. Yeah, I'm sort of related, but I mean, is the ability for any myth or any mythology to gain traction, does it have to have an element of believability in the sense that it's very, very related to your particular personal circumstances? It doesn't actually hide from the brutality of existence, yeah, the brutality of the world. I think it doesn't. It isn't completely idealized. It's sort of like it reflects the world as it is yeah, um, yeah, I think I think you're right.
Speaker 5:Um, I I wouldn't want to say it reflects the world as it is, because I I don't really believe that's possible to do.
Speaker 2:But I take Reflects the world as you understand it to be.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I take your point.
Speaker 5:And I think you're on a really interesting. I think you're on a really interesting Saying something really interesting there. So, yeah, and I think certainly it says something about who we are. It says something about what we want to be and how we want to see ourselves.
Speaker 5:The idea of character and personality, I think, come from myth. I mean, we all have a myth of ourselves and who we are, and I think myth is an appropriate term to use when we're thinking about our personality or character. How that comes about is really difficult. It seems to the character who we are seems to come about before time, like before. It's uh, it seems to be a process of becoming that's never really, uh, complete or finished. Uh, it does seem to.
Speaker 5:So I would, I would want to, like, um, draw out how much myth there is in psychology and how much myth there is in Freud, of course, and the necessity of myth, the inevitability of myth, and I think it's fair to say we all live within mythology, we all have our own mythologies and we live within them. That's why I'd want to resist this idea that they show us the real world. I think it's more, more than that. It's constitutive, it's constructing who we are, um and um, and there's some, there's some sociology.
Speaker 5:I really like um in um irving goffman. I don't know if you know um goff goffman's work on um symbolic interaction, how he interacts with each other, but he brings in the idea of myth and the sacred and the profane just to everyday interaction and how people want to. You know, people protect their own mythology about themselves in their interactions and then there are these difficult moments where you might feel that your personality or your mythology is and is under threat, is in, might be profaned or might be exposed. Um, so myth is a, a necessary illusion, we could say. I think something like a necessary illusion, but necessary for the self and for the, and for the culture and for the nation and for the people and for the language and the um and I was just people and for the language.
Speaker 5:And I was just aware as soon as I said nation, I was just aware of the right-wing connotations of myths of the nation. Perhaps we could come on to that or maybe for another week.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, that's an important question. I mean, what role exactly, if at all, do myths and mythologies play in defining or creating a society's value and values and identity?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think, yeah, my view is that myth is always essential or inevitable in that process. So a nation is a myth. So so to understand a people as a nation, or for people to understand themselves as a nation or a people, that depends on myth. So there's always something irrational about it, if you like. There's always something very contingent about it, um, and that lends itself um to as as much as to the political right, as to the political left, if perhaps even more so, the political right. So I think perhaps the right, the far right, has been, um, is has been able to, I wouldn't say, understand myth, but but but deploy myth, deploy myth. I think it ruin, ruin myth by deploying it. But, if you like, over deploying operationalizing, you know, crudely operationalizing myth, I would say um and and I think, um. So you get kind of utopianism on the left but you get this kind of mythic purity idea, purification idea, on on the right, um, so, so myth is a dangerous force, it's a power, it's an incredibly powerful force, it's a, it's a dangerous force, um, it, um. But I, I, um, yeah, um, I, I.
Speaker 5:My view is, I think, my, my view is that, um, that far-right fascist myth, there's always a sense in which it's a kind of reducing the power of myth, not enhancing it. It's always a kind of degradation hodgepodge thrown together. Operationalization of myth hodgepodge thrown together. Operationalization of myths so uh, you know, um, so not. Nazism, for example, is a kind of incoherent mishmash of, you know, myths of teutonic crusading knights with a, with some christianity and paganism, kind of you know norse mythology thrown in and hitler, hitler's catholicism, and it's a kind of a. It's a kind of um, self, um serving kind of ragbag of bits of mythology, um, but even in that form mythology is, is very powerful. Even in that really incoherent, thrown together sort of operational form like let's cobble together a myth, even in that really incoherent, thrown together sort of operational form like let's cobble together a myth, even in that form myth is very powerful and very dangerous. Obviously, you know, obviously uh, right-wing, um, ideologies are, are very dangerous and perhaps increasingly so in the world today.
Speaker 2:So presumably, then, the power in this, in the sense that you're talking about, is is is being able to strike, take mythologies and like redeploy them, as you say, but to not be strictly, sort of like acknowledge their source, in a sense, because yeah the power is? Is that the reason why these ideas seem sort of like vaguely sensible?
Speaker 2:is because they, they, they sort of remind us of something that we know, but we're not sure we can't remember where we've heard it. And because we can't remember where we've heard it, it must sound sort of like vaguely plausible. It might, it might, must be something that is obviously true in some sense yeah, in a sense, in terms of how it's sort of like, forms our understanding yeah, um, it is.
Speaker 5:It is a concern for me and as I wrote this book on uh, on myth, uh and mythology, um, and just realizing how, um and during, during the time of writing it took me about four years to write and during that time you feel authoritarian populism growing in force in the UK and elsewhere around the world and how it's built on what we could call myths. We could call myths it's built on. It's built on a kind of myth of purity, purification, kind of expelling others in order to kind of fabricate some notion of purity. So it's, it's clearly part of it's, it's clearly working on a mythical level. But I think it's it's perverting or it's destroying that ambivalence that we were talking about earlier. That in the ambivalence that's in the great mythical systems, in greek mythology, in norse mythology, it's denying that ambivalence, it's denying the fact that the hero is also causes a lot of trouble and that's good.
Speaker 5:Evil are very dependent on each other. You can't just define something as evil and cut it away from society, because the person who does that is doing something evil themselves. So the richness, the ambivalence of the great mythological systems, the fact that they're not owned by anybody, they're not authored by anyone and that they recount something about the divine and the sort of the highest values and that they reveal the violence in human civilization, human culture, the destruction of the titans and monsters and the destruction of um, the the titans and and monsters and the destruction of nature. All of that kind of richness gets flattened out, gets gets kind of beaten out in in um, in in right-wing fascist mythologies, um.
Speaker 5:So myth, myth has a certain power, certain rhetorical power, even in that very reductive form. But what's been lost for me in right-wing mythologies, far-right mythologies, is precisely the most powerful parts of myth the ambivalence, the duality, the two-sidedness, the impurity and the purity, the both together, the good and evil both together. Not always easy to tell them apart. Where it's causing far-right mythologies it becomes Apparently all too easy to tell them apart. You know, tell good from evil and and expel the other. Yeah, so it's very, it's some very big questions there.
Speaker 2:And this is in some way because the reshaping or the repurposing of mythology is so obviously done with a specific purpose in mind, in a way that the original sources themselves, their purpose is sort of like, evolves. It's more granular in a sense.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, that's right 's a. That's a really good point. Yeah, so, like in um, um, in schelling's theory of mythology, for example, it's the, those, the those great mythological systems of, uh, ancient egypt and greece and norse mythology. They, they represent a struggle within, within the human spirit, or within the human soul, um, a struggle between, um, between obedience and disobedience, between um asserting yourself and submitting to others, um and um. There's a, there's. Human beings have to be challenged, um, like the idea of the greek, the greek god, uh, nemesis, there's someone who challenges and enables humans to grow. So, um, you know the idea of um, darkness enabling light to grow, that kind of that kind of thing. Um, um and all of that, yeah, all of that goes, all of that is is knocked away and you get some sort of. I suppose that um, yeah, I suppose that the kind of a historical aspect is still there in um, in far-right myth, isn't it that it's still like things have always been this way or should have always been this way, or we want to go back to the origins, um, but it's a, it's um, it's a purified, narroweded origin that doesn't see its dependence on anything outside of it. So, yeah, it's a difficult question. It's a big question. I keep saying that, don't I and you were talking just then about the kind of inside, the internal, the mental, inner states of it, weren't you? And I think the mythologies that Schelling is talking about, like Greek mythology, enable a personal growth and a kind of internal spiritual growth, and that gets cut out of any you know, modern mythologies, I think.
Speaker 5:And then you get conspiracy theories and you get, you know, all sorts of competing ideologies. Uh, perhaps they're not even myths, perhaps they're just ideologies, perhaps they're, you know, they've lost that connection to anything sacred and or anything to do with personal growth. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're sort of the borderline. So in a way people have become disconnected from the world they live in. They not only don't recognize the world. They are completely and utterly disconnected from that world. They're utterly alienated from it. And these, these, these conspiracy theories, these, these narratives give them a sense of purpose, give them a sense of value, give them a sense of who they should be yeah, I think.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right, yeah, so it's it, and and so, and that's what myth myth does it's? You know, it tries to think on both level of interior I don't want to say individual, but interior growth and development, as well as society, culture, the biggest level. It kind of unites the smallest and the biggest levels together.
Speaker 2:So in a way, you kind of done this already, but I think we've sort of naturally, sort of like, headed in this direction. So is there, I mean, would you agree at all? Is there a distinction to be made between mythologies, that's, you know, um serve a constructive purpose and perhaps ones, such as those you've identified, that are more destructive and dangerous? And, and if so, how do we determine these? How do we determine these categories?
Speaker 5:yeah, yeah, again a very good, very good uh question. Yeah, um, I I don't think really it would be possible to absolutely and safely distinguish one mythology from another mythology in that way.
Speaker 5:I think because, I think, mythologies are touching such a deep level, it's very hard to define criteria um, even though I was doing so earlier, I think. But it's really difficult to define um ultimate criteria for for um distinguishing a constructive from a destructive myth. Because I think, like the, the the most constructive myths, if you like, the most positive myths, or the the greatest myths, or the most long-lasting kind of infinite, inexhaustible myths, perhaps, like norse mythology, greek mythology, um, those myths aren't about just being constructive, they're about understanding the balance between construction and destruction. You know creation and renewal, and and that they're dual, in that sense they're ambivalent, in that sense they have both sides. So it's necessary, you know it's necessary to to drive off the, the dangerous monsters and creatures, um, uh, it's necessary in a way, but it's also destructive, and you have to recognize both things and you have to realize that nature has been destroyed as a condition of you know the Anthropocene of the human era and see both sides of that.
Speaker 5:So I think, with far-right mythology and conspiracy theorists, I would come back to the point that they lack that awareness, that duality. They try to create a myth that's purely constructive for their own narrow purposes and in doing so it is no longer a mythology in the really enriching sense that we've, that we've trying to be tried to to talk about. It's a self-serving, narrow ideological program backed up by myth, rather than a great mythical system. But beyond that, it's really. I mean, that's the danger of myth, that the fact that you can't make absolutely clear-cut divisions. I think so. I mean, there's all sorts of unpleasant things that happen in greek and norse mythology that we wouldn't want to like, endorse as a model of human behavior, but they're part of that, of that of that richest system, um, so yeah, no, it's a really, it's a really. Um, it's a really good question, um, and I feel like I should be able to bring together the book on myth with the book on violence, but I'm afraid it's beyond me at the moment to do that what about some positives?
Speaker 2:okay, so I'm gonna say, say I'm going to say that. Okay, so you talked about how far right by right groups have actually exploited mythology for their own purposes and and, in effect, are quite insular in in terms of both their outlook and how they've actually sort of like devised a strategy based on their own unique interpretation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but one of the things that I sort of like get from sort of like um, looking back at the various mythologies in which I've sort of looked at throughout the course of my life is sort of like shared, sort of like common features, common ideas, things that I mean for instance, how, just how many there are mythologies.
Speaker 2:That explains, like the great flood it's like this, right, I forget which exact period in here is where the, the boss for straight collapses, and the black seas crater there were. We obviously know noah's art, but then there's the legend of gilgamesh. There's plenty of others as well, and I wonder, I mean, as well as being, you know, a myth, uh, what, what, what myth mythology is actually to say, to say about how, how different cultures and, and, the, the feet, the, how they share similar themes, and what does this say about things such as like, how you sort of like, universal human experience?
Speaker 5:yeah, yeah, I mean, the word universal is always a tricky one isn't it.
Speaker 5:Because it can be used to downplay difference. But nevertheless, I think you're getting at an important point. I think I use the phrase quite often in the book, near universal, just to cover myself, just to say not absolutely universal, but um, yeah, I can't. Oh, kind of commonality I, I, you know, I prefer perhaps the word, the word commonality. There there does seem to be a great um commonality between, between mythic systems, um, and this is something again that schelling tried to understand that it does appear that the same sorts of stories are being retold and retold, and retold, and been in many different cultures, that sort of like necessary preconditions for the emergence of, of, of a city-state or a human, human civilization, uh, humans living living together in a bounded area, um, so um, I. That's one of the one of the things I've really enjoyed about researching myth is that it's it's point. It points me towards commonalities in human experience rather than the sort of, the more relativistic accounts of um, you know that, that everyone is absolutely different and almost like they can't communicate. There's, there's a lot, there's an awful lot of commonality. So the commonality, the impersonality, that there's something common to being human that goes beyond reason, or it goes beyond anything that can be clearly articulated. There's something, perhaps internal, that is reproduced in myth, that's expressed in myth, but he's sort of outside of simple kind of scientific ideas or social scientific ideas about humans. It's something deeper.
Speaker 5:I am attracted to the idea that myth expresses something deeper about who we are not wanting to use the word universal, but I kind of I could might call it radical commonality, perhaps that that that, um, that people go through relative similar understand, they experience similar tensions, perhaps similar tensions, similar conflicts, um, yeah, I think I'd put it like that.
Speaker 5:Yeah, and those, those myth expresses those conflicts or it actually maybe even creates those conflicts as things that we can understand about ourselves. Um, so I'm trying to say that myth is constituting human being. It's not something that human beings experience, it's something that is a precondition for the experience of being human. So I do like that kind of wanting to emphasize the foundations, the origins or the non-foundations of myth that we can't do without. Myth and myth will always spring up somewhere and we need to be aware of that, because if we're not, if we try to deny myth and try to just impose a kind of strict rationality, then the sorts of myths that arise will be dangerous ones or divisive ones. Yeah, so yeah, that's's how I put it, I think.
Speaker 2:Would that be in any way? Because if we lived in a think for a second, a completely rational world, a world that existed purely and solely along rational lines, there would be very little in that world that we recognize today, and most a lot of what we think of as being really important, adding value, adding meaning to our, to our, to our, to our lives, perhaps wouldn't exist in such a world yeah, yeah, yeah, I I've always, yeah, I've always felt that that there's a kind of it's not science that's the problem, it's not even technology, perhaps, but it's something to do with the operationalization.
Speaker 5:I use that kind of as before, as an insult, as a kind of pejorative term. It's something about over-rationalizing or something over over coding, some kind of. I do think there's a a narrowness about um, rationality that is always going to I mean the word rationality is always going to provoke irrationality. It's just going to irrationally. Irrationality is always going to haunt rationality. It's just because it's the same word, just twisted against itself.
Speaker 5:It's like you know there's, if you, in an over rationalized, over structured, over systematized, over marketized world, something's gone, badly missing, and that whatever's gone missing, whatever's been suppressed, will come out in some ways.
Speaker 5:You know, um, either, you know in, um, uh, you know that in the 19th century there was the concept of the uncanny came about. So the things that human beings don't want to face up to, want to keep hidden, um, but I kind of know they're there anyway, but they don't want them revealed. That kind of came forward in German idealism and in Freud and in literary studies, this idea of a romantic, a sublime and an uncanny, a sort of a dangerous yet seductive force that haunts reason and rationality. That's always going to be there, and the more we insist that, um, the more we insist on constructing a completely rational, operational working life for human beings and imprisoning them in that, then the more that will be haunted by other dangerous forces, whether you know, uncanny or destructive, or you know whatever is it denying is to deny part of the duality, part of the Ambivalence, part of the two-sidedness that that mythologies have always talked about.
Speaker 2:It's kind of in my head. It's just a weird thing. It's kind of Go with me on this. Yeah, it's kind of in a way, it brings to my mind is it Laplace's sort of like theory of like ultra-determinism. You can live in a world in which, for instance, you can know absolutely everything by just knowing the very exact state of everything that exists at this particular moment in time.
Speaker 2:And that alleged conversation that took place between him and napoleon, where napoleon was saying well, where does god fit into this equation? And his response was well, I have no need for that hypothesis which makes you think well, what else would you just? Literally, you, just you just deny the existence of, you didn't deny the in order to fit within your very rigid system and what are you actually effectively left with?
Speaker 2:if enough, if, if, eventually just a scaffold or very, very sort of like sketchy framework yeah, yeah, I think that's right, yeah, I think, and I think it's.
Speaker 5:It's a sort of epistemological point, but it's also directly political as well. You know, if you, if you force people into a, you know um very narrow kind of um range of options, you know, you, you that if you don't, if you try to get fewer people to go to universities, to get people to go directly into employment, that kind of thing, you know if you, um, um, going back to the authoritarian populism, you know that, um, yeah, that's just not going to work. That will weaken the entire system. It will just provoke different forms of resistance and different forms of rejection of the system. You can't have that narrow, systematized operational world an understanding of the system. You can't. You can't have that narrow, systematized operational world, an understanding of the world. Um, everything, everything is always going to just fight against it. I think.
Speaker 5:And um, um, uh yeah, and myth with myth is always, will always be there, so it'll always. You know I was trying to read, I was reading a new scientist on the Big Bang. I was trying to understand you know what the Big Bang is in popular science, because the real science, if you want to call it that, supposedly is beyond the understanding of ordinary mortals like us. So we only have popular science available to us and if you read a popular science account of the big bang, it really reads like myth. It is, it is just a myth. You know there was an infinitely dense nothing that was there and then, in an infinitely tiny amount of time, there was everything that came from that big bang. And you know it reads like a not really very good myth, like a not very satisfactory myth.
Speaker 2:Because it's punctured with caveats throughout, which is like this is what we know at this moment in time and presumably at some point in the future.
Speaker 5:follow a more follower, understanding will actually develop, yeah, or a completely unified understanding will suddenly come about, but we don't know when or why or how. But um, yeah, that's another, another scientific myth, I suppose. But um, yeah, so I mean I do. I do think myth is, um, there's something unsurpassable and inevitable about, about myth and um, um myth. So myth will always be present. I mean, it's present in everyone, it's present in every culture, every society, every language, and we need to recognize that, we need to be aware of that, and then, when we get people know, people, um developing um kind of um new myths, we can, we can look at what they, what they offer and um, I mean, I think, I think now, just coming back onto politics, that the struck by um, the election debate that's an election debate last night about the green party seems to seem to have a myth of the future.
Speaker 5:They have an actual claim about how the future could be much, much better with massively increased taxation, and I think they're right in the sense that they're offering a myth. They're offering a counter myth, if you like. They're countering the dominant myth that things are necessarily really horrible and they're going to get worse and the world's terrible and everything. They're countering that kind of right-wing myth with a myth. I think the only way to counter a right-wing myth is with a left-wing myth, and I thought the Greens were quite brave to do that and I think I don't know how far we should stray into politics really. But it seemed to me that the labour party didn't really don't have a myth. They seem to think perhaps that um myth is a distortion. You need to throw it away and just rationally manage things. Um, which I, which I don't think is going to work.
Speaker 5:I mean, socialism is a myth and I think it's a myth in the positive sense. It's a dynamic, vital myth and maybe even there's something positive in the right-wing myths showing themselves. Rather than hiding away, they come out into the open, seem to be coming out into the open, seem to be coming out into the open now across europe and in britain. And in the open they can be challenged or they can be, you know, they can expose how you know they, they're exposed to scrutiny and, um, they can and they can be challenged. Maybe that, maybe that's a good thing. Rather than hiding away on the margins um, yeah, sorry, I managed to turn the turn it around into politics, didn't I? Rather than hiding away on the margins yeah, sorry, I managed to turn it around into politics, didn't I?
Speaker 2:No, I mean on that theme, but not so overtly political. Yeah, it's interesting, ray, because actually what you're saying is that myths are particularly sort of like destructive myths, a particularly sort of like um, destructiveness, I mean I'm not not, not. We said we were not going to use that particular characters, but just for the sake of this particular question, let's use it seem to be rather impervious to facts.
Speaker 2:You simply cannot defeat a. You know a, a, uh, an unwise for one of a better phrase in mythology. With simply facts, I mean there's, there's, I mean one if you call it a mythology. But um, is the, the increasing numbers of people in the world today who believe the earth is flat. And on the one hand, you can easily disprove this. You very, very easily. There's so much information, so much scientific, there are countless photographs of the Earth from space that should you know, in theory, easily dismiss this argument. But then what seems to be at the heart of people's willingness or want to be part of this theory, this conspiracy theory, is the aha, is the logic of well, but we've been lied to. So how can you believe anything that?
Speaker 2:anybody says you, you, you are free to believe anything when you believe that you live in a world in which everything you've ever learned, everything you've ever known, is actually fundamentally not true.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think there's a sense in which any myth is impervious to facts. Really, even myths that we might say are positive or nourishing or very rich, and dual or ambivalent myths, I think they're still impervious to facts. I think I remember when I was growing up and I became really interested in Arthurian mythology I call it mythology rather than legend because I think it has got divine or non-human beings in it and I remember seeing Michael Wood, the historian, saying that there, you know, there's, you know a kind of fact looking at the facts behind the myth. And it's never, never, very interesting to look at the facts behind the myth. And the fact and myth is just, they're just not compatible realms of experience at all. So I don't, so I don't think, I don't, I don't know, you can't, you can't use facts against myth.
Speaker 5:No, um, uh, facts won't persuade people against myths. But you can use myth against myth. You know, myths transform, myths are transformed and they develop and change and some myths disappear or they get co-opted and borrow. There are lots of borrowings and things. So myth, myth is always transforming, but um, but you always transforming, but um, but you, I know you, I don't think you encounter myths using, using facts and, as you say, there's a. You know, people today are so, so skeptical about, about facts. You know, this world, world of fact checking and who checks the fact checkers? And everyone seems to think everybody else is biased and everybody else is on someone's payroll. You can't trust anybody. You get hostility against all media outlets and channels. It is a kind of worrying situation because, yeah, facts don't have the power that myth has.
Speaker 2:Is that because facts are impersonal, they don't really tell you anything about you?
Speaker 5:Well, I suppose you'd have to distinguish between a fact and data, because we were saying oh, I, I think you weren't, but I was saying earlier that I mean I mean to go on to the american election at the moment yeah I mean um, we're going back into politics, but it um just to illustrate what I'm.
Speaker 2:What I mean in a sense is that um, um, joe biden is really, really struggling in the polls at the.
Speaker 5:Moment.
Speaker 2:And one of the common reasons for you know, when people use in opinion polls for disliking him, is that the economy is not working. But actually, if you look at data, the economy is working extraordinarily well. But those facts don't really mean anything. They don't really mean anything to individual voters. They're not able to relate those actual facts with what they experienced themselves.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. There's something about myth informing or conditioning lived experience in a way that facts can't. I think you know who we are, our personal mythology, the psychology I mean psyche you know the Greek mythological character conditioning who we are, what we are, in the way that facts simply can't and never have I think, but I think you're right, there's something unique happening right now.
Speaker 5:So, like there's, the Bideniden myth is faltering, isn't it? And the trump myth is just still growing. I think, um and um. I mean, I don't know why exactly, I don't, I don't know why I, but um, um, yeah, there's um. I mean I don't know that, I'm not great, I'm not, certainly not an expert on american politics, but um, I don't even know really what the trump myth would be, or if it's even a, even a myth. It's sort of the myth of the strong leader who doesn't care and says what he thinks. And um, yeah, um, that's what I mean really about the, about the right coming to the fore. At least. Then we can, it can be judged, it can be exposed, it can be held to account, it can be challenged. I don't know whether even that applies in the american, I mean, as much as I'm able to understand the.
Speaker 2:Trump mythology it seems to be something that in itself it doesn't exist, but what it does is it sort of very closely aligns itself with a large number of disaffected people. You feel that the system is so broken that they feel so disconnected from it that they just want to destroy it, and they're not particularly worried about what. What exactly is going to replace it, what might take its? You know what? What?
Speaker 2:might yeah, their primary goal and motivation is to just destroy what all what currently exists yeah, the so-called establishment or the deep state or whatever.
Speaker 5:So that's also not really defined. Is it what? It what they want to destroy? They're angry they're not sure what they're angry about and they want to destroy something. They're not quite sure what.
Speaker 2:Um yeah, but that act of destruction is really quite empowering in a in a way it gives people a sense of agency, a sense of purpose, even though even if they're not really able to actually define or articulate what that purpose actually is yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah um, because, and I think, well, maybe, maybe this, maybe this isn't the case, but in my own mind, I feel that what, going back to that distinction between sort of like myths and facts, is, that is that facts don't really allow you to sort of what you are faced with, a situation which is defined solely by facts.
Speaker 2:You are to, to a large large extent, sort of like literally a passive victim of sort of the circumstances, whereas mythologies, myths and mythologies give you a sense of how you can actually, sort of like go beyond the, the mere the actual sort of like present circumstances, in order to actually be something more than just a passive, you know, to actually gain agency and purpose.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, or even maybe, perhaps something even even deeper than than that that allows agency and purpose as an effect.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So with that in mind, would you say that mythologies play a role in perpetuating ideologies?
Speaker 5:Yeah, well, I mean that would be. That's one tradition of thought that you know. Roll in the bar, uh, work on, work on mythology so. So mythology is um, you know, it's like the deepest layer or the deepest kind of sediment of of myth, of soil that ideologies grow from. Uh, I'm not sure I'm particularly quite would agree with that, though um I um, so I've I've been looking, I looking primarily um at a different tradition of understanding myth, german idealist one, and how that feeds into french uh sociology, um, so how it feeds into um durkheim and and batai and so on.
Speaker 5:Um I I think I'd want to separate myth and ideology out a little bit, and certainly myth, in the deeper sense, or the foundational or non-foundational sense, I think, is quite distinct from ideology. I perhaps would say something like ideology is, perhaps is a remnant of myth or has a, it has an aspect of myth. I think there's a, there is, there's an aspect of myth in in everything that we do and say and in in in politics and human life, um, but it's not um a living or inexhaustible form of myth in the sense I want to sort of get out with what I tried to get out with um with the book. Um, it's cause cause.
Speaker 5:When you, when you use the word ideology, it tends to suggest that the user can see through the ideology, doesn't it? It tends to you know that's that's your ideology, or it's this, this ideology or that ideology. It's kind of implicit in the notion of ideology that the rational, reflective subject can see through the ideology, whereas I'd want to say with myth, that we can't. It's really part of us and inside us and conditions how we understand ourselves. It's not something that can just be seen through easily or or seems to be something we can see through like ideology.
Speaker 2:I'm sure that I'm sure that they're closely connected, but I didn't really want to go too much into that, that way of thinking so I'm aware that this has been a very, very, very long, in-depth conversation, and can I just bring it to a conclusion going back to that, not that I'm going to go back to politics again, but to go back to what you were talking earlier about the Green Party and the Green Party's attempt to form a new narrative, a new mythology about the future.
Speaker 2:And kind of relate that to also what you're talking about, which is how we hard science is is is so far beyond what most and include my, including myself here are capable of actually processing and understanding that we almost need a story to sort of explain it to us in a fact, in a way that's actually makes sense. And you know, we're able to sort of like, sort of like understand in some sort of like, very sort of like um in in a what, in some way um, that you know that perhaps the reason why we're seeing a sort of um in the world today is sort of like a blatant, sort of like a blatant steel, if you like, steel. Using that steel, using the Trumpian language here of mythologies themselves, the reshaping, the repurposing to fit an agenda is because there is a, there is a space, a space that hasn't really existed before the vacuum a vacuum that allows these, these, these, this, this strategy to actually work.
Speaker 2:And what we've sort of seen us base over the last certainly over the course of my adult life, last 30, 30 years, perhaps more is the end of positive, sort of positive stories of the future stories that we can buy into Things like, for instance, the American Dream. They may not have actually had a foundationally true, but offer an inspiring vision of a future. And that future has disappeared, and it quietly disappeared and nothing's replaced it.
Speaker 2:And it quietly disappeared and nothing's replaced it. Nobody in this election campaign, or any election campaign, is really offering an inspiring vision of the future, a collective sort of like inspiring vision of the future. These visions of the future seem to be sort separate and very insular and they're not sort of like seeing how the world. Nobody's really talking about how the world might transform and how we can be part of orchestrating that transformation for the worse.
Speaker 5:I mean people are talking about how it will get worse and worse and worse and worse, but but a positive vision of the future. I think you say yeah, I think you're absolutely right, yeah, no one has that positive myth or positive mythology of the of the future.
Speaker 5:Um, maybe the greens try to a little bit sort of gesture in in that direction, um, but yeah, so we began the conversation by talking about time in the sense of the deep past, and now we should come on to the future. I should have already mentioned the future, really, because the future is implicit in myth, just as the past. I mean, if myth is what enables time and temporality in history, then it's implying both past and future, time and temporality and history, then it's implying both past and future. And I think you're absolutely right, yeah, that we seem to have lost a sense of the future. Yeah, we seem to have lost a sense of the future.
Speaker 5:Like you know, when I was at school, we were told all sorts of things to expect, all sorts of things that you know the world would become developed, the underdeveloped world would develop and there would be equality in the world would become developed, the underdeveloped world would develop and there would be equality in the world and much more even development in the world. I mean, I remember that being taught to me at primary school. And of course, the opposites happen. The divisions have grown and the division between rich and poor within a country and between countries has grown Broadly we could call it the neoliberal period and I think, yeah, the future, the myth of the future, has disappeared, but it could always reappear. I mean just using Baudrillard's ideas here. But anything that disappears can reappear and at the moment there doesn't seem to be a future other than the present continuing, but getting worse and worse, and worse and worse, and the political right seems to be depending on using that as an argument that you know, stick with a strong leader, because things are going to get worse.
Speaker 5:But we do need a myth of the future and it is a myth, it is mythological. The future is inherently mythic. But we do need a positive myth of the future. I don't know what it would look like, apart from the greens I've already mentioned, but yeah, in the last chapter of the book I read various eco-philosophies of the future and none of them really struck me as really being convincing. But yeah, I think you're absolutely right, myth is exclusively situated in the past and we're always going back to the past and rewriting Stephen Fry's, rewriting the myths of the past. But we need some kind of myth of the future, some kind of guide at the future, some kind of guide at least to a better future.
Speaker 2:Do you see a distinction at all here between to go off in a completely different direction in terms of the lack, if you like, of positive myths, positive mythologies about the future that are widespread and unable to gain traction, and an overall sort of like, sort of like declining belief? What, however, you define that almost completely? Um, and is this sort of like a not an inevitable consequence, that um, that we were always going to arrive at this state? Or, if we are allowed to think about the future, right, you know, whatever time scale you want to choose 10, 15, 20, 100 years that this period we're in at the moment might be seen to be very distinct and very unusual, and mythologies will return with abundance and this will be seen to be a very, very strange period in, in our, in our, in our history yeah, quite, quite possible.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, yeah, that's one way of approaching the question. Yeah, I mean you could talk about. You know people might quibble with the idea of our history and they might say well, it's really going to be, it's no longer human history, it's like it's going to be AI or it's, you know, technology. It develops such that we, the human itself, becomes less and less important, and so a new mythology might not be a human mythology. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I've been very interesting question is is I mean we? I mean this? Is we cannot possibly answer this question?
Speaker 2:no, we simply cannot possibly answer this, but let's just entertain the thing just for the sake of just for the sake of entertaining ourselves, if nobody else but um you know, a lot is talked about ai and that the, the um, the supposed inevit inevitability that AI will develop some form of consciousness at some point in either the near or the distant future. But are myths and mythologies an essential component of consciousness? So in order for an AI to develop any form of consciousness, it would also have to develop its own myths and mythologies in order to do so.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think that's right. A myth of itself, a myth of its own self-awareness or self-becoming? Yeah, I think so. So the myth of AI at present is a human myth of AI, isn't it? But for AI to become truly self-aware, it would have a myth of itself.
Speaker 5:I mean, I remember in the 90s, jean Baudrillard saying that AI, artificial intelligence, hasn't mastered artificiality or artifice or pretense, so it can't be intelligent because it's not even artificial. It hasn't yet succeeded in being artificial, let alone intelligent. But according to you know, as far as I can make out from popular science, I've read, um, that that ai has now mastered artifice. It has mastered lying, for example, lying and deception and deceit. Apparently, I don't know, I've no way of knowing whether that's correct or not. It reminds me of the, of the quip about satan deluding people into thinking he no longer exists. So I, I, I has deluded people into thinking it can deceive or something I don't know. But, um, but yeah, I mean, I think that's right. We would have AI would constitute a myth of itself in relation to humans? Yeah, humans as a lower stage or lesser stage of life, or something like that.
Speaker 2:And we, in turn, would develop our own myths and mythologies in order to actually sort of like literally, you know remain in some way sort of like present and relevant in relation to that sort of like AI myth and mythology.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Yeah, a new war of myths, yeah.
Speaker 2:And of which we can only speculate. Yeah, yeah. Okay, unfortunately, for that we've come to a natural conclusion to this conversation.
Speaker 5:I think so yeah.
Speaker 2:Unless there's anything more you want? To add to this?
Speaker 3:No, I think.
Speaker 2:So thank you everybody for listening and, uh, watch out for the next episode, if there is one. Okay, thank you, julian. Thank you, high five, high fives all around, I think. Bye.