Myths can help us to step outside of our complex world and see the bigger picture, says Mark Vernon

In the latest Letter from the Editor, Tom wrote about AI redundancies and how, in a sane world, you wouldn’t lose your job when the AI was helping out, you’d just work a bit less.

Of course, we don’t live in a sane world and it feels there’s endless talk of global uncertainty and, here in the UK, of British decline.

But in the midst of all this, it made me think that perhaps one of the things we lack is vision. There’s a bigger story that isn’t just about facts, or events, or what’s happening. In a way, we have too much of that. What we don’t have is a wider context that’s as much imaginative as it is theoretical. Myths and visions, these wider stories, can help us in times such as the ones we’re in.

This mix of fact and fiction, the kind of story that can peer over the horizon, that can take us into a world that’s not quite here, but somehow might affect us in the world that we’re in.

It might be a religious myth, it might be one that’s widely celebrated, and there’s even a whole culture around it. It might be an old myth that’s half forgotten. It might be a myth that’s very local to where you are.

Perhaps this is something about folklore as well. They’re not really explanations; they maybe carry a little bit about expression, but they do enable you to be in a kind of state of uncertainty. You’re not forced to grasp at half-truths and try to make them the whole truth. You’re not forced to cling to predictions about what’s going to happen or isn’t going to happen. There’s so much of that that leads to rage and despair and cynicism and too much intensity.

Instead, I think myths enable us to have a bigger story within which we can see something of our story, and this helps us sustain hope, because myths know more about the situation than we do. We’re in the middle of it, but myths know that there’s a beginning and an end. And they’ll often tell you that the good wins out, even if for the time being it’s slipped over the horizon. Myths fire the imagination. They enable us to escape to the wilderness when it feels like things are falling apart.

I’ve been influenced in these thoughts by the wonderful myth-teller and sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin. She was fascinated by myths, and found them very satisfying. She says, “fearful and suspicious as it is, the human mind yet yearns towards a greater belonging, a vaster identification. Wilderness scares us because it is unknown, indifferent, dangerous. Yet it is an absolute need to us. It is that animal otherness, that strangeness, older and greater than ourselves, that we join or rejoin if we want to stay sane and stay alive.”

Myth can bring that to us.

So find your myth. Hold on to your myths in this time of what feels like trouble. With too many facts, things can go crazy. There is another strangeness, another wilderness, that your imagination can touch.

Get hold of your myth and maybe it will help you.

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