Tech/Myth Project Snapshot: July 2020

In common parlance, to call something a myth is to damn it as a pernicious false belief. A few dusty scholars might take myth to mean a traditional, transcendental story that made sense of the world to a specific group of people. I am interested in myth not because I care about debunking illusions, or studying cultural history, but because we live in a mythical world. This post outlines my current thinking about the Tech & Myth project. 

A layer model of myth

Myth is part of a cloud of related concepts, each with a huge academic literature. As a first approximation, I think of them as arranged in two fuzzy and intersecting layers, with the lower-level concepts aggregating into the higher-level ones.

War historians debate myths

John Mosier's essay War Myths (2005) contends that myths "are believed because they provide us with coherent and convincing explanations of complex events." His paper is the opening volley in a debate with several colleagues that has helped me think further about the definition of myth, and the roles of logos, mythos and pathos in argumentation.

Objectivity, subjectivity and myth

In my recent post Counterparts to logos, I wrestled with the characteristics of logos and mythos-pathos: empiricism and logical proof vs. intuition, feelings, and experience. It occurs to me that the logos/mythos axis might align with the objective/subjective binary.

Counterparts to logos

A Talking Politics podcast about the challenges of political journalism in a deeply polarized age (“Facts vs Opinions,” June 4, 2020) increased my confusion about logos (reason, rationality) vs. mythos. While I’ve been puzzling over how profoundly logos-inflected tech reporting and policymaking seem to be, current events are swamping logos-based journalism with pathos (passion, emotion, sentiment). This post is groping towards ways of thinking about what’s going on today.