Myth And Essential Truth

Writes New Yorker music critic and blogger Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise:

As several essayists have observed in recent days, the Frey case exemplifies a diseased attitude toward truth in American society, which is visible all across the cultural spectrum and goes straight to the top. Bush's argument for a war in Iraq discarded literal truth in favor of essential truth. There's another name for essential truth: myth. Totalitarianism depends upon it.

On first reading, I determined I'd take a pass on making any comment on this at all, for to make even brief comment can lead to treatise-long essays on the nature and definition of fact and truth and their interconnectedness or lack of same; an exercise I've no inclination to engage in, most particularly not on this blog.

My determination notwithstanding, however, Alex's statement kept gnawing at me, and we all know just how painful that can be. So, in an attempt to make that gnawing cease and desist, I would only remind Alex that while totalitarianism depends unquestionably on untruth in the form of tendentious fictions, fictions, tendentious or otherwise, are not the same as myths, nor is myth a synonym for fiction as it, more often than not, is used and understood today. Genuine myth does indeed embody essential truths; truths inexpressible and / or ungraspable directly. That's, in fact and in truth, the first requisite, principal hallmark, and very definition of genuine myth. And while totalitarianism is, as I've already noted, unquestionably dependent on tendentious fictions to achieve its full force and effect, it is genuine art — lasting, meaningful art — in all domains that's unquestionably dependent on myth, created and / or received, for its full force and effect. That's true of all genuine art: from the time of the cave paintings at Lascaux and almost certainly before, right down to this very day. And so will it be in saecula saeculorum et in perpetuum.

There. Now do cease your niggling gnawing, and leave me be.