Hi everyone,
This week, another listener/reader question — but in this case, more of a commentary — this one from a historian/professor of religious studies.
I’m delighted to listen to, read, and disseminate the ideas you have eloquently presented in Beautiful Possibility. I am glad that you agree that Paul and John were quite possibly (probably) lovers. <snip for privacy> The J/P romance hit me like a wall of falling books. I’m convinced. And I do believe that the Beatles, though inadvertently, changed western civilization.
As a historian, I do see some slippage in your analysis: sometimes you’re talking about worldwide change, other times about western civilization. And as a historian of Christianity, I believe you over-generalize, but you validly point out that much of Christian history has been plagued by violence, racism, homophobia, and misogyny.
But I wanted most of all to thank you for your loving and persistent research and your fearlessness. You’re creating a new medium, too. I’m reading AND listening.
Let’s start with her observation about slippage — because she is quite correct re: my inconsistency in sometimes suggesting that The Beatles changed the underlying foundational mythology of Western civilization and other times suggesting that The Beatles changed the underlying foundational mythology of all of human civilization. And the reason for this inconsistency is quite simply that it’s an ongoing struggle to write this story smaller than I believe it to be — which I know might sound odd, so let me explain.
My mythological intuition and my lived experience tells me that the world-changing cultural/mythological earthquake of the Sixties that we talked about at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility is not confined to Western civilization and instead extends to (more or less) the entirety of the globe. Or maybe it’s more that for better or worse, Western civilization has expanded to encompass (more or less) the entirety of the globe — most notably in terms of our expectation of the right to live a life according to our individual preferences, which I suggest in Beautiful Possibility is the most important legacy of the Sixties.
Either way, my intuitive sense of the impact of The Beatles and the Love Revolution may well be correct, but it’s nonetheless an unsupported intuition simply because I haven’t studied the mythological foundations and cultural attitudes towards individualism in every culture in the world throughout history. And because I haven’t yet done that research, I don’t have standing to make that broader claim in Beautiful Possibility — even if I believe it to be accurate.
I do my best to confine the analysis to Western civilization because that’s my culture and I know it best and that’s the mythological tradition that I have studied — but this is a very good example of how subconscious bias works, and how even having an awareness of a bias isn’t a perfect solution to avoiding that bias. Since I feel strongly that The Beatles and the Love Revolution altered the riverbed of all of human culture as a whole, the temptation to make that broader claim sometimes slips through in the text despite my conscious efforts to prevent it.
While we’re on the subject of confirmation bias, it’s worth noticing in passing (and with no criticism intended) that there’s an iteration of confirmation bias in the question itself. And here I mean the questioner’s observation that Beautiful Possibility “validly point(s) out that much of Christian history has been plagued by violence, racism, homophobia, and misogyny.”
Part One of Beautiful Possibility did explore the fear of softness as it relates to homophobia. And we also took a bit of time to talk about “might makes right” as a central feature of both paganism and “suffer now/rewards later” Christian mythology.1
But unless I’m forgetting something major (always possible), I’m fairly sure I haven’t written anything at all linking Christianity to racism/misogyny — not because those aren’t valid critiques of historical (and contemporaneous) Christianity, but because those issues aren’t relevant to what we’re talking about here on The Abbey (or at least they haven’t been relevant so far, tomorrow never knows.)
However, many other people elsewhere in different contexts have indeed pointed these issues out — which is why this is (I think) another good example of confirmation bias. We expect to find racism and misogyny mentioned in a discussion of historical Christianity, even when those mentions aren’t present in the actual text. We see what we expect to see, rather than what’s really there.
And finally, re: the comment about overgeneralizing, it’s understandable that a historian would feel that the “fuzzy” way I sometimes talk about historical events in Beautiful Possibility is overgeneralizing and and/or oversimplifying those events. This is, again, confirmation bias, expecting to see something based on an assumed historical framework. But I am not a historian, and Beautiful Possibility is written not from a historical perspective. I’m a mythologist, and I write from a mythological perspective. And when it comes to mythology, this “overgeneralizing” is entirely intentional.
What a historian would term “overgeneralizing” is one of the most significant distinctions between history and mythology — and it’s a distinction we talked about in some detail in Seven Levels, relative to our example of the story of Dylan turning The Beatles onto cannabis in 1964. In fact, it’s the questioner’s email that inspired the following passage on the relationship between history and mythology —
In the earliest stages of the evolution of a historical event into a mythological story, the complexities of historical fact begin to blur into a simpler — and often internally contradictory — version of the story. Over time — if there’s enough mythological mojo in the story for it to endure in the collective zeitgeist — the small-t truth of a historical event continues to decompose. The fine detail is smoothed over and all but the most vivid and essential details fade, until only the elemental bones of the original historical event remain.
This loss of detail and cohesion tends to make historians uncomfortable, and understandably so. That’s one of the clear, bright lines between history and mythology, and why I keep reminding y’all that I’m not a historian, but a mythologist. Because when it comes to history, this lack of detail and cohesion is a bug. But when it comes to mythology, it’s a defining feature — at least in the early stages.
If that story is vital enough to a culture, and if it affects enough people, over time, those elemental bones re-knit themselves into a new story — a fuzzy, fragmented, and often not-quite-cohesive telling of what used to be a historical event, but is now part of the mythological tradition of that culture.
When I suggested in Part One that history shapes mythology and in turn mythology shapes history, this is part of what I meant. And we could also add that if that mythological story is big enough and consequential enough, it not only shapes, but replaces history by creating the underlying “riverbed” through which that history flows.
One way to understand how this works is to bring it down to a more individual level.
Think of someone you know — a friend or relative or maybe you yourself — who is a particularly adept storyteller. When that storytelling friend or relative tells a story about the past, they instinctively shape that story away from the more prosaic reality of the situation and towards a better story — erasing the boring parts, smoothing over the bumps, and enhancing the best parts, aka the parts that make it a story worth telling in the first place. Oftentimes, the sequence of events is reshuffled to make those events less coincidental and more interconnected — to make it a better story.
Eventually, over repeated tellings, as the actual events that inspired the story fade further into the past, the story of those events becomes more real and more present in our lives than the events themselves — and therefore far more influential than the actual factual events in shaping our perception of — and our reaction to — those events. And when eventually there’s no one left who remembers the actual events, the story itself replaces those actual events in our collective memory. The story replaces the actual lived experience of those events.
In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about how this transmutation happened on a grand scale, relative to the Love Revolution. Within the timespan of less than a decade — and even while it was still in the process of unfolding — the complex and messy history of the 1960s softened and blurred into the simplified, romanticized story of the era that most of us now experience as “the Sixties.” So stunningly fast did this evolution — but really revolution — happen, and so radical was the change that even as it was still happening, the Love Revolution became the new foundational mythology of our culture.2
So thank you for the thoughtful email and for reading and sharing Beautiful Possibility. And also for the comment about The Abbey having created a new kind of medium — listening and reading woven together. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I don’t know if that’s entirely new — but if it is, that is indeed fab.
Until next week.
Peace, love, and strawberry fields,
Faith 🍓
The fuller discussion of what we’re talking about here can be found in Beautiful Possibility episode 1 (“Kairos”).