Creating a Living Myth

“Society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.”- Ernest Becker

We find many examples of society’s wish to create significance in what it does. One easily observable example is in the way we use language.

We like to give honorific names to people to set them apart. There is a whole elaborate etiquette behind who you call “Your Excellency” or “Your Honor.” We dole out a lot of “Honorables” in front of the names of politicians, for instance, who are most undeserving of the label.

This desire to give people a special title is older than the country of America itself and stretches across many different cultures. But we found this comment funny, from an English traveler, Edward Kimber, writing in 1746:

“Wherever you travel in Maryland (as also in Virginia and Carolina) your ears are constantly astonished at the number of colonels, majors and captains that you hear mentioned: in short, the whole country seems at first to you a retreat of heroes.”

Indeed it does. We know many people who go to great lengths to affix some honorific before or after their names. This strikes us a way to create meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence.

We also find the creation of euphemisms another way to shield us from the idea that we really don’t amount to much.

As H.L. Mencken once observed:

“The American, probably more than any other man, is prone to be apologetic about the trade he follows. He seldom believes that it is quite worthy of his virtues and talents; almost always he thinks that he would have adorned something far gaudier.”

A garbage man is a sanitation engineer, don’t you know?

The absurd man, we think, does not trouble himself with these things. He may indulge in titles and give fancy names for what he does, but he does so with the full knowledge that it means nothing at the end of the day. He does so only because it pleases him. To put more stock in such things than this is, in Becker’s phrase “a defiant creation of meaning.”

The Sage of Baltimore was Absurd

The following are snippets from H.L. Mencken’s Minority Report, one of our favorite books. The great Mencken needs no comment, as he is quite an eloquent and forceful writer. Enjoy the following, though as absurdists, we really could not care less whether you do or not:

“All of us, to be sure, cherish delusions, but it is at least possible for a rational man to avoid the more gross and obvious ones. No one blames a man for believing that his wife is beautiful, but it is impossible to avoid disgust in the presence of one who believes that he has an immortal soul of some vaguely gaseous nature, and that it will continue to exist four hundred million years after he has been shoveled away. Such ideas are not only erroneous; they are in a very true sense offensive. It is not possible to hear them stated without a kind of revulsion.”

“One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions must be respected. It is largely to blame, I suspect, for the slowness with which sound ideas are disseminated in the world. The minute a new one bobs up some faction or other of theologians falls upon it furiously, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologians, for the only really useful defense is an all-out offensive. But the convention aforesaid protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. That they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.”

And this:

"Of all varieties of men, the one who is least comprehensible to me is the fellow who immolates himself upon the altar of what he conceives to be the public interest - in other words, the reformer, the uplifter, the man, so-called of public spirit. What I am chiefly unable to understand is his oafish certainty that he is right - his almost pathological inability to grasp the notion that, after all, he may be wrong. As for me, I am never absolutely certain that I am right, and for the plain reason that I am never absolutely certain that anything is true. It may seem to me to be true, and I may be quite unable to imagine any proof of its falsity - but that is simply saying that my imagination is limited, not that the proposition itself is immovably sound. Some other man, better born that I was or drinking better liquor, may disprove it tomorrow... I know of no so-called truth that quite escapes this possibility. Anything is conceivable in a world so irrational as this one."

This last snippet is from another part of the Minority Report, and is therefore a clean break in thought from the above. We put it here because the statement is highly absurd and we believe correct. We will have more to say on role of humor in the future.

“Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”

One last comment: Reading Mencken is like sweeping the clutter in your brain. We expect we’ll share more from the Sage of Baltimore in future missives.