FROM THE EDITOR: What Unites Us
These are trying times for all. The key to moving forward is in embracing three great American myths.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Each Christmas season, I revisit the story of Jesus’ birth. It’s a practice that emerged post-graduate school when a former classmate invited me (and others) to join a Facebook group on which we were asked to write commentaries throughout the month of December on individual sections of the Jesus birth story in Luke.
It’s a tradition that we collectively practiced for nearly 20 years, and one that I’ve since continued in private.
What flummoxed those who knew the people taking part in the online exercise was that we were all agnostics and non-church-goers. Why would we annually spend time on a story that none of us believed was factually true?
For the same reason that people read the Iliad and the Odyssey, though most likely none believe in the gods who drive the epic poems’ narratives, and people read the Epic of Gilgamesh which continues to inspire as a guide to the importance of serving others.
There is truth in mythology that transcends the factual realities of the lives we live. That’s what Joseph Campbell meant when he wrote in The Power of Myth:
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.
The tumultuous year about to pass, and the potentially stormy year ahead, have been front-of-mind as I’ve reread the Jesus birth myth this holiday season, because the story forces us to ask, What unites us?
In speaking with and interviewing local leaders, everyday citizens, nonprofit workers, and educators this year, it has been apparent that many are working to answer that question.
The divisions in the country are well-trodden, and this year the Advance has written at length about the ways in which those divisions have affected us locally.
At a Christmas party last week, those divisions led to a conversation with a fellow attendee about how we hold ourselves together as a people. We debated two societal level possibilities — culture and religion.
Neither proved a satisfactory solution, because regardless how one defines culture or religion, boundaries are erected that exclude people who do not wish, or cannot honestly, accept the definitions.
Mythology offers another way to think about what unites us. Myths don’t require our belief, rather, they provide an avenue to discover what we share. And when those myths are under attack, as they are now, they give us something to hold to as we work to find our way back to center.
Three American myths stand out for their longevity, and their appeal to people regardless of ideology or background:
The Myth of Tolerance
The Myth of Institutionalism
The Myth of Innovation
The Myth of Tolerance
As a nation, our record of tolerating opposing views is not a great one. Any number of groups have fought against blatantly racist ideas from the beginning of the republic. Blacks, Chinese, Italians, Germans, Indians, Japanese, and Latinos have at varying times not only been popularly understood as less-capable intellectually than whites, but many have lived in communities that codified that racism.
And yet, even in the most disturbing periods of American history, the ideal outlined in the constitution that “all mean are created equal” has managed to stay alive and serve as a check on our worst instincts.
Jon Meacham in his new biography of Abraham Lincoln, And There Was Light, highlights how a commitment to toleration can breed hope in even the darkest of days. Meacham captures such a moment when Lincoln embraced toleration and carried the nation — as well as two of its greatest leaders — forward.
Offered the opportunity to save the union and avoid war by making concessions to slavery, Lincoln refused. Urged to abandon emancipation to increase his chances of reelection in 1864, he declined. Both decisions offer tangible evidence of Lincoln’s antislavery convictions and of his devotion to democracy in the battle against a race-based autocracy. “I do not despair of this country,” Frederick Douglass said. “The fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be Light,’ has not yet spent its force.”
It was a turning moment in the American story. Not that it solved the problem, but that it no longer allowed the thought of living in an intolerant society to run unchecked.
Government cannot change people’s hearts, but through legislation it can help ensure that intolerant attitudes don’t stand in the way of people’s pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
Toleration is not the ideal. Ideally, we would all learn to see one another as equals.
But toleration serves the common good, allowing people to strive to become their best in spite of the shortcomings of those around them.
The Myth of Institutionalism
Institutions are not static entities — they are living organizations whose guidelines are continuously being adjusted to meet our changing society’s needs. This happens in monumental moments — women’s suffrage; the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments; and the ways we run elections. And it happens in small ways regularly by adjusting legislation to address unintended consequences.
Yet, historically, there is an awareness that reflexive changes to institutions should be approached cautiously — it’s an instinct that has served the democracy well.
This defense of institutions does not know political boundaries. In 1937, Democrats stood against President Franklin D. Roosevelt to prevent his efforts at packing the Supreme Court. And just recently, Republicans in Indiana rebuffed President Trump’s push to redistrict the state mid-decade for the sole person of giving Republicans a better opportunity to hold on to the House in November.
The Myth of Invention
If there is a thread through Western life since the Industrial Revolution, it’s the unrelenting ability of people to invent solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. The country is defined by these leaps forward — for good and for ill.
Effectively ending deadly childhood diseases, Norman Bourlag and the Green Revolution, closing the hole in the ozone, creating the first sustained nuclear reaction, and landing on the moon are all examples of the expansive bursts of innovation humans have demonstrated over the past three centuries.
This commitment to invention is at the core of the sense of optimism that has long defined the American mindset. And our society has been structured to further innovation. Business, medicine, the arts, education, and more thrive on innovation and invention.
A Challenging Time
Across the country, and across our readership area, each of these core American myths are facing challenging times.
Over the past year, the Advance has chronicled intolerance across the region — from the vile accusations reported recently against Spotsylvania Schools Superintendent Clint Mitchell, to the gross mistreatment of a citizen library board member in Stafford County and the deportation of a beloved community member just last week.
Assaults on institutions at the federal level have had a profound impact on local residents who have lost jobs and careers as the president has run roughshod over rules governing the firing of government employees.
And declining confidence in invention is evident in pushback against the cutting-edge digital infrastructure that would define the area’s economy for the next 40 to 50 years.
One could make the case that our collective faith in America’s myths is lower than it has been in some five decades. But the time we are in is not unique.
Virginia was among the most intolerant states in America during the 1950s and ‘60s, with some school systems shuttering public schools rather than integrate. And yet, the myth of toleration did not die.
In the 1890s, President Harrison played as cynical a game with the admission of Western states to the union as President Trump is now playing with mid-decade redistricting. And yet there are signs that belief in decennial redistricting is not dead — Indiana’s legislative body has bucked Trump’s request. In 2026 we will see if Virginia’s legislature will likewise stand with institution.
Finally, during the 1920s evolutionary theory was rejected by large swaths of the American society. Reason, and reality, won out in the end.
These are trying times we are in. Finding our way back begins with rediscovering the myths that have relentlessly pushed the nation forward.
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