Michael Ramirez for June 02, 2015

The pope is simply less delusional about the climate change facts. It’s impossible to equate the apocryphal “parting of the Red Sea” story with the broad mass of scientists who are diligently measuring, publishing, and debating climate change. The pope is simply admitting he understands the gravity of the situation. It’s really irrelevant, though. Adaptation should now be the watchword. The species WILL adapt. We always have. What we will NOT be able to do is meaningfully slow down anthropogenic climate change. It looks like that’s already “baked in” to our future.

And demand of the rest of us, “Why didn’t you do something about this?”

There’s science, and then there’s myth….

my money’s on moses – he at least did a few miracles – the holy father – well not so much. though he seems good at bringing divisiveness to situations

I learned in Catholic school back in the ’60s that the literal translation of the reference to the sea Moses crossed in the Bible was he Reed Sea, a sea known to seasonally dry up. The crossing was just before the start of the rainy season. The timing and severity of the events were exaggerated, but still based on historical fact as was most of the Old Testament after the first 3 books.

Is this Ramirez talking about Texas? Where is Moses when you need him?

Balto Bill: I too thought of the Sea of Reeds the myth is based upon. This Pope expresses some intelligence that wisdom CAN be gathered even from myths that do not need to be taken literally.. Gilgamesh, et al.

It’s a bizarre comparison on Ramirez’s part. The miracle of the parting of the Red Sea (mythical or not) was a one-time event affecting one specific location. The pope, on the other hand, is talking about the ongoing, measurable and human-activity-induced alteration of the entire planet’s climate. It’s a poor comic.

@cdwardAmen!

True. Although I suspect the species will survive. It seems probable members of the species would survive these types of events. There will be unanticipated nonlinear events that will prove beneficial. Not enough to support our current success as a population, but enough for the species to survive in some number. My guess is that we will see huge numbers of deaths and large conflicts resulting from the changes…but it is hard to see an extinction for such an adaptive species. Are there circumstances that could cause complete extinction? Absolutely! But it seems less probable than sgiven what we know about what’s happening.

Probably some myths do have a basis in fact or individuals, but many myths are related to ritual practice, and others are used to justify social structures or social practices. So they aren’t necessarily true or false, they are symbolic or useful.

Don’t get me started. Oh, you got me started. Like almost every classicist in North America, I have done my time teaching Greek myth. I got kind of interested in it, even though it’s not the area I was trained in. Here’s a few thoughts.First, Greek myth is not typical of world myth, for at least two reasons. First, there are a lot more mortals in Greek myth than there are typically in world myth, which tends to deal with the gods more. Second, Greek myth tends not to be situated in “once upon a time” (“In illo tempore”, as Mircea Eliade says) but in a time which has a relationship to historical time.Within Greek myth there’s an important distinction to be made between Pan-Hellenic myth (the myths which were known to and interesting to pretty much all the Greeks, no matter where they lived) and local, or epichoric, myth, which was known to and interesting to Greeks from a particular location. An example is the famous (among scholars of Greek myth) story of the Buphonia, which explains why we eat meat, but only within an Athenian context; the story probably wasn’t widely known except in Athens. There was probably a process whereby some myths which started out local gradually became Pan-Hellenic, and as they did so, they lost their connection to local ritual and social structure. The more we can recover their local origins (and often we can’t) the more we find that the myths are woven into the way a community thought about itself, or its particular rituals, or its relationship to its neighbors. As the myths become Pan-Hellenic, they still are interesting, but in ways which have more general relevance to human psychology (or whatever). Good examples can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid tells lots and lots of stories, but he almost always leaves out the local details. The stories are fascinating, but not the way they were fascinating to the original tellers and audience.Okay, that’s enough. One more, I can’t help myself: What do you mean by “metaphorically true”? I generally keep the word “true” for propositions, and I use other words for other forms of meaning (following J. L. Austin a bit here: a performative, such as “I now pronounce you man and wife”, isn’t “true”, but “felicitous”, and so on.) What would it mean to say that something is metaphorically “false”?

I bet that usage differs from person to person. I use “true” for a proposition (or for the sentence that expresses the proposition) and “valid” for an argument, especially a syllogism. For a metaphor, I think I might use “apt”, and at times “beautiful”. I will hunt up some examples, but I have to run off to the dentist. There’s been a lot of work in philosophy of language on metaphor, but I find that the examples chosen are often very dull.

Yes, I see your point, it makes sense. But…Here’s another potato to throw in the pot. Linguists and anthropologists, following the great American linguist Kenneth Pike (“Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior”) make a distinction between the “emic” and “etic” perspectives. (As in “phonemic” versus “phonetic”.) The “etic” is how something looks to an outside observer (say, an athropologist) and the “emic” is how something looks to an insider (say, the people in a group being studied by an anthropologist). From the “etic” perspective, myth isn’t true, but it is true from an “emic” perspective. What say?

That makes sense. But it does leave open the question of what it means to say that myth is metaphorically true.One of the interesting features of ancient Greek myth is that at a pretty early stage some people at least started to ask if it was true or not. Certainly Pindar, who dates from the early 5th century, thinks that some stories are true and others are false. And in Plato’s Phaedrus there’s a brief discussion of the rationalization of myth. By the third century B.C. there’s a lot of skepticism.

Yep, git it. I’m just not sure I want to use the word “true” for that situation. But I could be nit-picking.When people ask “Is that myth true?” I’m not sure they mean what you mean in the above example. Two situations. One, a student in my myth class says, “Is the story of the Trojan War true?” She probably doesn’t mean, “Are all the details of the story accurate?” but rather, “Is there some historical basis for the story?” Two, If someone asks “Is the story of Noah’s flood true?” he probably wants to know if there was a universal cataclysm. In those cases, I would probably say, “Well, maybe, it depends on what you mean”. If someone says, “Is the story of the Garden of Eden true” I would probably say, “No”. If someone says, “Do I have a soul?”, would I say, “Metaphorically, yes”, or would I say, “No”? If someone says, “Did God breathe life and a soul into Adam and Eve?” I would say, “No”.

Ancient men talking, “Y’know, I’ve noticed that each kind of animal just has offspring with others of the same kind, and the kinds stay the same year after year after year. It’s AS IF some god sometime (in fact, our god, at the beginning) created each species individually the way they should be, and that’s the way it always will be.” "Yup, true dat; it is EXACTLY “just-like-that.”" Thus would we say that the the theory of special creation is metaphorically true? If so, would be also be allowed to say that it’s false? Can something be both metaphorically true and false? Is something that is (merely) metaphorically true also false by necessity? After all, if it were simply true we would not need to say that it’s metaphorically true, we would just say that it’s true; so anything that is metaphorically true looks to be not-simply-true, which I assume is false.I’m sounding much more like a positivist than I think I am. But it’s interesting to think about, no matter where we come out.

Here’s something to think about over night. If something can be metaphorically true but also false, then can something be metaphorically false but also true? (What would it mean to be metaphorically false?)

Well, I’m no expert here, but first, traditional logic includes the law of the excluded middle, according to which either a proposition is true or its negation is true. Some kinds of logic require this law — propositional calculus, for instance. But, second, there are other forms of logic which allow for probabilities and other modifications of the binary opposition.In addition, a number of people in the last maybe thirty or forty years have been working in what has come to be called category theory (this is not the same as the branch of mathematics called category theory). A psychologist named Eleanor Rosch is one of the leading figures, but I know it mostly from a book by the linguist George Lakoff, “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.” Category theory includes fuzzy logic, and also Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances, and also some other ideas, such as prototype theory. For instance: traditional logic would say that given a set, either some item of the relevant universe is either inside the set or outside the set, and any member of the set is as good an example of the set as any other member of the set. Think of Venn diagrams. Any integer is either inside the even set or outside the even set, and any even number is as good an example as any other even number (except for the practicalities of writing it down if it’s big.) But category theory says, it’s not so simple. Is a platypus a mammal? Is an ostrich as good an example of a bird as a robin?I find all this pretty interesting, and even though it’s not my area of work, or even close, and there’s lots about it I don’t know, I have found it useful in my own thinking. For instance, literary theorists sometimes get their knickers in a knot because they can’t figure out if some text is a novel or not, or an epic or not, and so on, and I just say, well, it’s a novel, but on the edge of a fuzzy boundary, and certainly not a good prototype of a novel.

I think I’m fundamentally in agreement with this. Levi-Strauss said that a myth is “good to think with.” Maybe there’s a distinction to be made between fiction and myth — fiction resonates more on the personal level, while myth resonates more on the social level? So myths would be judged by collective subjective involvement, if that makes sense. But I wouldn’t want to make too strict a distinction between myth and fiction — a story can migrate. I think the impulse to say “metaphorically true” is well founded, even if ultimately we want to use different terminology. I like what you say about theories versus myths.Good discussion. What’s next?

Well, I’ve never been accused of being post-modern. More often I’m considered a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, because I think that texts have meanings and that sometimes we can even figure out the meaning. Sort of the humanistic equivalent of thinking that theories can be validated, etc.