Lessons from Our Living Past

Plot

from the introduction- For Parents and Teachers: To a greater or lesser degree, every civilization idealizes its past. In our own country, for example, children learn in school of a republic established by men imbued with the highest moral purpose and bent upon giving universal social and political form to an abstract principle of individual liberty; or of a civil war waged nobly by two foes, the one struggling to vindicate a principle of human equality, the other to defend a proud and cultivated way of life. These visions of history, which are essentially mythological in nature, contain a large measure of distortion, but an equally large measure of truth: ideal truth. viewed through the lens of mythology, the actual events and figures of history assume inflated proportions; as if at the necessary bidding of society itself, they undergo a crucial and far-ranging fictionalization. Men in the mythic vision become heroes, perfect and whole in their character, altogether consistent in behavior-and in nothing more consistent or more perfect than in their unyielding devotion to inflexible principle. Events themselves, shedding the skin of circumstance and accident, stand forth in their boldest and most compelling aspect: they become turning points, inevitable, unique, laden with significance, prefigurative of the future course of history. But if inflation is one characteristic of the mythologizing impulse, simplification is another. The great myths and legends do not on the whole concern themselves with complexities of human motivation-with the shades and nuances of individual personality, the subtle maneuvers of the spirit and the discriminating actions of consciousness. They tell a simple, if grandiose, tale.