Herodotus is said to have called an end to the time of myth and opened the period of history, at least here in the West. This is still an age of myths, as if we belonged to the era Herodotus had already left behind – the time of the epic, of great causes and triumphal victories. The mythical age is not over – it lingers yet in the war without end which opened more than two years ago – itself the continuance of what perhaps the word ‘war’ cannot reach: an unsettled and impersonal struggle that has long spread across all the nations on the globe. Yes, it is still mythic, this war, for as long as Bush pretends to be the conscience of the world.
And Blair? Who is Blair pretending to be? ‘Do you pray together?’ Jeremy Paxman asked him of his relationship to Bush in a studio not far from here? ‘No we don’t pray together, Jeremy’, said Blair. Then I remember Alistair Campbell’s comment of the PR machinery that surrounds the Prime Minister: ‘we don’t do God.’ What do they do instead? Appeal to the great end which would justify the means: democracy for the Middle East, an end to a destructive regime etc.: a humanitarian cause. Impressive if it were true – but we are too sceptical to believe that and to believe anything from our politicians. There is a strange severing of the populace from their leaders. A dream: the public becomes unpredictable, wayward; apathy gives way to militancy; there is a general refusal of myth.
And the Enlightenment dream that myth will disappear? This is perhaps our hope, and it may be a vain one: the great evil against which we are enlisted to struggle will be exposed as the last shadows of an ancient myth. And the great good? The great humanitarian cause? Wake up, sober up: the broken, humilated body of the Iraqi prisoner refuses to be reappropriated by a mythical humanitarianism. Do not try and justify torture as royal road to happiness for all. This would be to accede to oldest theodicean and cosmodicean myth which survived right up to the concentration camps: everything will be justified, everything will come right in the end.
Is it the absence of myth that we see in the photographs of the tortured bodies of Iraqi prisoners? Will others see it, too? This is the time of the digital camera and the internet. Of technology and the atom bomb. Horrible and wonderful, it could be the new technology which allows us to witness evidence of the tortured and the dead which will finally drive myth from the world. This is naive, hopelessly so – who would counterpose myth and technology in any simple minded way when it was technicians who designed the great places of extermination? And why should one expect the public to believe incidents of torture are anything but exceptional?
Dream of the end of the myth, of a new age in which a utopian future does not justify terror in the present. When every day is as the last day, the day of judgement and no theodicy or cosmodicy could justify a present injustice.
Lars Iyer's Blog 