The Good Samaritan is a biblical parable about valuing proximity more highly than ingroup status when extending compassion.
Reynard the Fox was a popular character in medieval England whose flanderised personality trait was using cunning to defeat the might of the bear, the lion, and other anthropomorphised animals.
Toy Story is a parable about jealousy, rage, and accepting how the passage of time and shifting social dynamics might change your role in society.
Thanks. I suppose all those technically count as myths, but none of them are what comes to my mind when I think of “myths”. These feel to me more like fringe examples than “core” examples.
Can you think of any examples that more obviously “feel” like myths? Because it still seems to me that most myths do not match the description.
When I think about semantically central “myths” seen through a western lens, I’m guessing you’re meaning religious stories from the Romans, Greeks, or an oral nativist tradition. Maybe instead of thinking about centrally pedagogic things that also happen to be myths it would be more helpful to think about centrally mythical things that might also happen to be pedagogic.
I’m not a religious scholar, but my perception is that the thing that those three types of story have in common is that they often centre on applying a cognitive model to natural phenomena. Sacrificing a goat to invite a happy fortune is a case of overfitting a dubious cognitive model onto reality.
Perhaps the perennial lesson underpinning say, Poseidon overthrowing the titans in his rise to power, is that the appropriate preparatory heuristic when approaching something as mysterious and dangerous as the ocean is to treat it as though it has hostile intent—to take fewer risks and to prepare for adversity as though it were controlled by a force that is much more familiar than tidal dynamics and meteorological patterns—that of the thought process of an abusive tyrant.
Perhaps Athena cursed Medusa because there are utile reasons why celibacy is important to the orderly relationship between religion and the rest of society.
What I would caution however is that when we’re backfilling justifications why certain narratives exist the way they do, it’s possible to backfill a wide range of frames. These ideas are definitely not the most popular explanations.
Ideas and stories survive on account of evolutionary pressure, not on account of utilitarianism or any inherent wisdom. Most knowledge is eventually proven wrong. Sacrificing goats because you overfitted the mind model onto a random phenomenon is a cost of doing business.
Something I’m less familiar with that I think would be worth your further investigation is oral storytelling traditions in tribal cultures. The written word allows various people to write all sorts of things with less evolutionary pressure about what survives. Oral traditions are limited to memory, and so I would imagine pedagogic stories holding greater weight.
I’m not sure “proximity” is the best word to describe the Good Samaritan’s message. I think “ability to help” would more centrally describe what it’s getting at, though of course prior to the creation of modern telecommunications, globalized financial systems, etc. “proximity” and “ability to help” were very strongly correlated.
One element of the Good Samaritan message is about moral foundations. Jesus is telling his people, “The kind of ‘goodness’ I’m interested in is more about concretely helping than it is about purity or authority or group loyalty. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick up on the care/harm axis around here. You can get a long way towards building a higher-trust society by focusing more attention on care/harm. We’re way oversupplied on authority and purity around here anyway.”
(Oh no, I’m doing Bible study on Less Wrong; multiple of my past selves are screaming right now.)
The Good Samaritan is a biblical parable about valuing proximity more highly than ingroup status when extending compassion.
Reynard the Fox was a popular character in medieval England whose flanderised personality trait was using cunning to defeat the might of the bear, the lion, and other anthropomorphised animals.
Toy Story is a parable about jealousy, rage, and accepting how the passage of time and shifting social dynamics might change your role in society.
Thanks. I suppose all those technically count as myths, but none of them are what comes to my mind when I think of “myths”. These feel to me more like fringe examples than “core” examples.
Can you think of any examples that more obviously “feel” like myths? Because it still seems to me that most myths do not match the description.
When I think about semantically central “myths” seen through a western lens, I’m guessing you’re meaning religious stories from the Romans, Greeks, or an oral nativist tradition. Maybe instead of thinking about centrally pedagogic things that also happen to be myths it would be more helpful to think about centrally mythical things that might also happen to be pedagogic.
I’m not a religious scholar, but my perception is that the thing that those three types of story have in common is that they often centre on applying a cognitive model to natural phenomena. Sacrificing a goat to invite a happy fortune is a case of overfitting a dubious cognitive model onto reality.
Perhaps the perennial lesson underpinning say, Poseidon overthrowing the titans in his rise to power, is that the appropriate preparatory heuristic when approaching something as mysterious and dangerous as the ocean is to treat it as though it has hostile intent—to take fewer risks and to prepare for adversity as though it were controlled by a force that is much more familiar than tidal dynamics and meteorological patterns—that of the thought process of an abusive tyrant.
Perhaps Athena cursed Medusa because there are utile reasons why celibacy is important to the orderly relationship between religion and the rest of society.
What I would caution however is that when we’re backfilling justifications why certain narratives exist the way they do, it’s possible to backfill a wide range of frames. These ideas are definitely not the most popular explanations.
Ideas and stories survive on account of evolutionary pressure, not on account of utilitarianism or any inherent wisdom. Most knowledge is eventually proven wrong. Sacrificing goats because you overfitted the mind model onto a random phenomenon is a cost of doing business.
Something I’m less familiar with that I think would be worth your further investigation is oral storytelling traditions in tribal cultures. The written word allows various people to write all sorts of things with less evolutionary pressure about what survives. Oral traditions are limited to memory, and so I would imagine pedagogic stories holding greater weight.
I’m not sure “proximity” is the best word to describe the Good Samaritan’s message. I think “ability to help” would more centrally describe what it’s getting at, though of course prior to the creation of modern telecommunications, globalized financial systems, etc. “proximity” and “ability to help” were very strongly correlated.
One element of the Good Samaritan message is about moral foundations. Jesus is telling his people, “The kind of ‘goodness’ I’m interested in is more about concretely helping than it is about purity or authority or group loyalty. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick up on the care/harm axis around here. You can get a long way towards building a higher-trust society by focusing more attention on care/harm. We’re way oversupplied on authority and purity around here anyway.”
(Oh no, I’m doing Bible study on Less Wrong; multiple of my past selves are screaming right now.)