We Need a New National Myth

Richard Slotkin has dedicated his professional career to looking at national myths. These are the “truths” that we tell ourselves as a nation to explain what we do. They guide a culture and give us the results that we experience. And they are extremely difficult to change. You can create new ones, but rarely kill off existing ones.

Slotkin’s book “A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America” talks about five national myths that the US has. I wrote a review of the book about a year ago. You can read it here. I highly recommend the book and see it as one of the most important books written to understanding the US, its culture, why we elect the politicians we elect, and how we deal with (or don’t deal with) the challenges we face.

One of those myths is the oldest myth – it’s the myth of the frontier. The frontier myth at its core is this – It’s the idea that there’s always somewhere to expand to in order to solve our problems. Early in the life of the US we did that literally expanding West. Never mind that we took lands that didn’t belong to us and removed the people who inhabited those lands. That’s a whole other issue and set of psychological problems that I’m not addressing today.

And as the “West” was consumed and there was nothing left to move to, we kept the myth going – reaching to technology as our new frontier, and space, and the Internet, etc. Always searching out a frontier to solve our problems. But do you see the problem with that? If we are always looking somewhere else to solve our problems, we are never actually looking at our problems and why they exist in the first place. Are we afraid to look inward? Are we afraid of what we will discover? Are we afraid to look in the mirror? Given our history, there’s good reason for that. Instead we prefer the story of American exceptionalism, rather than the reality of a people with a mixed record of great achievements and horrible actions against others. So much easier to keep looking “out there” for the answer. It’s like a drug that helps us dull the pain that we clearly have.

I think this is partly why that as a nation and a culture, we are terrible at grief. Even communities of faith are terrible at grief. Churches are great at funerals, but terrible at grief. Funerals are events that we can prep for, work on, take place, and clean up from. They are regimented in some way. They have a definite end. And we tell ourselves that the funeral is the end of the grieving. The reality is that the funeral is just a communal opportunity to start grieving – it is a sanctioned acknowledgement of the hurt and pain that exists in the community. In reality, it is the beginning of grief. It sets us on a path. But as a nation and a culture, we have decided that the national myth is more important than what humans actually need – time and opportunity to grieve.

Other cultures have done a better job of grieving and we could learn a great deal from them. But I think we choose not to do this for a few reasons. Grief reveals things about ourselves. And that’s hard work and uncomfortable. Grief takes time and our culture has an extremely short attention span. Grief causes us to feel. Grief doesn’t follow our commands. Grief doesn’t cause us to look outward for a solution, but rather inward for reality.

We have a grief problem in America, and we have never known what to do about it – so we ignore it, pretending that doing so will make it go away. But here’s the thing, grief doesn’t go away. If it is ignored, it just builds up under the surface. And at some point, it will become unavoidable. The only question is when that takes place.

The frontier myth will eventually collapse. Not everyone will recognize it. Plenty will continue to pretend that it is working. Humans are pretty resilient like that. Some will absolutely resist acknowledging unresolved grief.

And here’s what I struggle with – it’s always better having gone through the grieving process than ignoring the need for grief. The only way I can describe it is to say that it’s more “real.” But it’s not an easy process. It is painful in many ways. And you don’t feel like you are in control. We aren’t in control anyway. We never have been and we never will be.

I struggle with our culture’s obsession with avoiding things directly. Gun violence takes place and we don’t look at the real problem – our relationship with violence and how we have turned weapons into some kind of symbol of our identity. Instead we latch onto the frontier myth by insisting that we have better doors, or need a ball room with better security, or something else. The solution must be “out there” after all – in the frontier.

Examine any problem that we currently face and you’ll see the pattern. We have a problem, and we avoid looking inward and at reality, in favor of looking to the frontier to solve our problem.

We have an energy problem, we don’t examine our consumption and culture and lifestyles and the desires of those in power that consume so much. Rather, we look to see how we can tap more energy. And the cost is that we will never be satisfied.

Look at how we treat LGBTQ+ people in our society – as if they are a problem that needs a solution. That’s the whole basis of conversion therapy. That’s the reasoning for the various laws against people. The problem exists, so we look out there in the frontier to solve it rather than turning inward and seeing what’s going on inside each one of us. The people who are the most anti-LGBTQ+ often have their own unresolved sexuality to deal with. And instead of doing that, they look to the frontier myth to find an outside solution to be imposed.

The list goes on. Take some time to think about how we deal with war, or poverty, or homelessness, or drugs and addiction, or work, or the justice system, or our politics, or financial matters, or race, or immigration, or national security, etc. The pattern is the same. It always is. It is rare when we actually address something directly. For a nation that likes to present itself as strong, it sure does invest a whole lot in covering up its biggest weakness – looking inward. The frontier myth may have served a purpose – although the cost has been high.

If we have to live by national myths, I wonder if we can start a new one: a myth of self-reflection. A myth that works for both individuals and for a society. I’m not going to hold my breath on that though. National myths offer easy answers. Self-reflection isn’t easy or quick. In many ways it is counter cultural.

So the next best option is this – for enough people to just discard the myth, not to fight it. This is an important distinction. There are different types of fights. The fight I’m talking about relates to ideas and beliefs. You don’t kill off a belief, an idea, or an identity by fighting those beliefs head on. That may seem counter intuitive considering a few paragraphs ago I talked about my not understanding why we don’t just deal with our problems head on. Dealing with problems head on is one thing. Dealing with myths head on is something else. I’m not sure why.

Myths aren’t defeated by doing a frontal assault on them. Where do you even do that? There is no front for an idea or belief or identity. Rather you defeat these things by replacing them – you suck the life out of them. You make them unnecessary to the point that they just get discarded. You create new habits, new language, new culture. You replace a myth not by describing the negative, but rather by filling the space with an alternative that addresses the need.

Slotkin states in his book that national myths offer justification for all sorts of things – violence, revolution, individualism, capitalism, peace, etc. They are powerful. And the good news is that we have added myths as this nation has gone on. Which means we can add more. And maybe, just maybe, replace myths that no longer serve us (if they ever actually did).