Landscapes of the Sacred #2

This reflection is mainly a dispute of the claim Lane makes on page 24 when he says "That which we analyze with thorough objectivity -- turning into psychology, history, or social geography, has ceased to exercise any formative power on us." Lane is speaking here about myth of sacred place, and the axiom that "sacred place is storied place." He argues that myths and stories have a certain power on us, that they are able to create wonder and drive within us. This is obviously true, as anyone who has attempted to or even wanted to climb Mount Everest can tell us. We are all influenced by myth even about our own college campus (don't step on the Santoro Circle or you won't graduate in four years..). These myths literally control our lives, making us sometimes fly long distances to subject ourselves to terrible extremes, or more likely to take a few steps to the left while walking to class. The whole space in between these two examples is where myth can have power over our lives.

Lane continues to argue that this power is defeated when we dive into the psychology or history of a myth, when we begin to try and understand it. I believe this is not always true. Lane himself would certainly not argue that these academic subjects are completely useless and should not be studied, so it is obvious that they must have some ability to impact our lives in a similar way that myth does. Our human attempts to understand our world are usually flawed for a very long time, and only when we discover our error do we balk at what we thought a few decades before. As the time goes on, the beliefs and rationalizations of older generations seem sillier and sillier, until we categorize them as uninformed or stupid. For instance, when one thinks of the backlash against the heliocentric model of the solar system, it is easy to see the society and church especially as idiots for not accepting this idea -- or more importantly, for failing to even examine the possibility. Once we find a new explanation that seems to make sense, though, we very quickly discard with older notions. Our impulse is then to believe, since we have "found the answer," that we are now correct. We fail to realize that the previous hypothesis was a revision of what came before it, and that it at one point seemed completely correct. Thus, the process of balking begins until another truth comes along to revise our correct answer.

I believe that this is why Lane claims that mythical power is defeated by study: often times, we leave no room for mystery and attempt to perfectly explain things. However, this process itself of trying to explain our world is not a bad one. Very often we attempt to do so and find only more things that we don't know. For instance, the discovery of quantum particle mechanics lead scientists to an entire realization that there was a whole world of interactivity that we had no knowledge of before, and knew nothing about. This IS the mystery Lane speaks about, and sometimes we are forced to throw up our hands and say we don't know. By studying things and attempting to understand them we are met with the truth that we rarely have any idea what's going on even in our information-filled society. If we simply think about what it must have been like to encounter these mysteries in earlier years, we can fully understand how myths are created.