Myth Supports Relativism - Kevin Crowley

The Value of Myth

It has long been recognized how stories have incredible influence over people’s minds and cultures. From being passed down orally in ancient days, to written scrolls and books, to movies and shows of our day, it doesn’t take much pondering to grasp the significance stories and myths have on human psychology and culture. Like many of our readings have suggested, whether the story really happened or not is irrelevant. What the story is trying to convey, the moral lesson, is the point. The problem I see with this is how the myths interact with values and ethics, which is what I’m sure we will be exploring in much detail throughout this course. Myths can convey whatever the author desires, so one could rationally come up with a good story to illustrate why it is okay to murder or cheat on your spouse. With an unlimited supply of circumstances and characters at one’s literary disposal, a creative mind can come up with about anything to justify just about anything.

Also, interpretation is another problem we run into when trying to understand the axiology of myths. This is indeed especially a huge problem for religious texts as well, of how two people can read the same passage out of the Bible, for instance, and get two separate meanings and universal truths out of it. It then becomes a matter of what the reader is looking for when he opens a book up, that combined with one’s own past and thoughts and how they relate to the material being read. With all of that being said, the values and ethics of myth is an unstable and insubstantial thing, resting solely on the creator’s purpose combined with the reader’s very own understanding of it.

However, one thing that needs to be considered is the collective understanding of myth. It usually so happens that when there is an agreement of the intended purpose of a story, whatever particular understanding dominates becomes the winning interpretation and is thereafter taught on and spread to the masses, thus becoming the correct meaning of that piece of literature. But this doesn’t hold true for everyone, for there is always opposition when it comes to deciphering morality from a story. This is why English teachers love asking their students what they, individually, got out of a story that the whole class read. It’s fascinating to witness how each student takes their turn giving their view and interpretation that somehow differs from one another, after reading the same work.

So the axiology of myth runs into a problem, since meaning can be both created and extracted in any way imaginable. This seems to chop out the “universal” in universal truths, and replaces it with “relative”. Myths then become the quintessential supporter of relativism, as people and their myths work together to establish a moral code for its people, but not for the whole of humanity.