What Are You Wearing?
The ancient Greeks mythologized fate in this way: “The three Fates spin one’s existence into being. Clotho spins the thread. Lachesis measures it, and Atropos cuts it. One’s destiny was considered a woven fabric or a garment” (Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche).
One’s life is as a length of cloth; and clothing, like a mask, can be seen as incarnation, a form that holds the self. It’s easy to extend this metaphor to say that some are born with fine clothes, while for others, the clothing may be ill-fitting; some clothing allows little comfort for the wearer.
A dressmaker knows to cut the cloth somewhat larger than the body measurements. This difference is referred to as ease—the room to move that must be built into any article of clothing, to make it both comfortable and functional (note that either too much or too little room will decrease comfort and function). Where clothing equates to fate, and also to one’s cultural role, ease is free will, or the range of motion that one has, relative to fate. Ease is the space where events and outcomes are in play.
You can strategize about where you are free to move and where you are not, and you can strive to make skillful use of that “space of possibility.” Potentially, the skillful use of your freedom can create more freedom; but if you don’t have such space, or don’t make use of it—if you are compliant rather than engaged—then your fate is sealed. The more your role is defined by social convention, the more fixed your fate. If you must wear a suit of armor, or a corset; a prison uniform or a military uniform; a crown, or simply rags…the clothing will undoubtedly shape the experience.
Culture goes deeper than clothing that you can put on or take off, however. Cushman (Constructing the Self) says this:
Culture is not indigenous ‘clothing’ that covers the universal human; rather it is an integral part of each individual’s psychological flesh and bones. In Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s famous phrase, culture, through everyday social practices, is ‘sedimented’ in the body. This is what is meant by the social ‘construction’ of the individual. For instance, an ‘accent’ is an example of how a social practice, language, sediments a culture in the body of the speaker. Each language requires the production of certain sounds, while other sounds are never used; the Xhosa click, or the Hebrew letter chet are just two among a multitude of examples. Although the human speech apparatus is initially capable of performing all human sounds, after years of performing only certain sounds, a speaker experiences increasing difficulty making sounds particular to other languages, and in fact may find it impossible. It is as if the mouth has been trained in such a way that it loses its capacity to accomplish what it was once capable of. The physical body has thus been shaped by the language it performs: it has been constructed by social practices.
Themis, the Greek goddess of social conscience, is philologically synonymous with the English word “doom,” so that fate can be understood as what society compels. But, don’t we, as individuals, construct society? Aren’t we free to “create change,” by standing up or digging in, speaking out or refusing support? To some extent, of course: I guess we do what we can. But a culture is not simply the sum of individuals. It may seem that social leaders harness a tremendous amount of will and determination to reach their positions, and it must surely be so. Yet, a public figure is more likely to be carried along by the will of the collective, and may have reduced opportunity for individual expression. Visionaries and leaders “give up their personal lives and visions for collective ones” (Colman, Up from Scapegoating). Cult heroes may find their social masks difficult to remove, may even feel they have no choice but the role they fill.
If leaders are restricted in their expression of free will, how then does cultural transformation happen? There’s good news and there’s bad news, and it’s the same news:
Even a powerful leader doesn’t fully control a culture. Culture is only changed by the efforts, conscious and unconscious, of many people. And culture, lest we forget, is always contained and influenced by the larger world—beyond people. The complexity of that equation makes outcomes unpredictable and uncontrollable.
All cultures construct meaning through myth. We can’t “be rid” of mythological thinking, unless we can know everything; and, as long as we are alive, we don’t and can’t know everything. It’s mythic understanding — the cultural construct that connects what we know with what we don’t know—that mediates this space between us, and a mythic framework that holds pluralistic views together.
Where this “myth-making” happens is “in between”— it’s not you OR me, but it’s you AND me. This liminoid, undefined space is sometimes called “the third.” When the cultural third is damaged or inaccessible (such as when options are reduced to T/F good/bad etc) opportunity for the playful negotiation and sharing of meaning breaks down and cultural cohesion is lost. Yet, the cultural third can be rehabilitated. It depends upon sharing the experience of the unknown.
Play and imagination enter into our lives through the unknown, where we are curious, willing, and able to explore. Then we begin to narrativize and theorize, and this is how we find and/or create meaning, as well as solutions. Problems arise, however, when we become dogmatic about our narratives and our theories; by literalizing them, we move them, often inappropriately, out of the third and into the realm of “True” and “False” thinking. It is appropriate to make distinctions between science and myth, but only if we remember that those distinctions are not absolute and must be open to reassessment. It is not desirable to refuse mythological thinking by trying to shut down the space where it arises, the cultural third. Being alive includes risk and unknown outcomes. Allowing cultural space for the social exploration of the unknown has positive consequences for our future.
Transformation needs imagination; and cultural transformation needs shared imagination. Preserving the unknown (including anomalies and ambiguities) as a real cultural category is essential to free will and transformation. A shared experience of the unknown is crucial to cultural transformation.
This essay is a revision of material previously published in Crafting the Mythos-Sphere, M Lounsbury © 2018.
