Or, what I did this weekend.
Pacifica held a conference on Myth & Politics this weekend that I was fortunate enough to attend. There’s so much to think about on this topic, especially in a hot election season, but a couple of things really stood out for me so far (looking at notes):
- I need to find some way in the midst of all the reading I’m already doing for school to tutor myself on the Classics (as in the ancient Greeks). There were a lot of references in the talks to Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, et al, and while they came with enough context to understand, there’s clearly a wealth of material there that would be good to know in the context of my graduate program.
- I should not be allowed anywhere near a bookstore run by Pacifica. They ported a good chunk of the campus bookstore over to this event, and as usual, I walked away with many more books than I currently have time to read.
- More seriously, Glen Slater gave a really insightful talk about fundamentalism. I keep rolling over in my mind his main thesis that fundamentalism, at its core, is not a religious enterprise. It is rather (in his formulation) an attempt to fill in the missing mythos in our culture that the rationality of the Enlightenment introduced—a turning of the mythos into logos by insisting on the factuality of the myth (as in biblical literalism).
All of the presentations were strong and they covered a lot of ground on the topic. I took a lot of notes, but am hopeful that Pacifica or the speakers will make the papers they presented available; the level of thought and references were deep, and I would love another chance to read through them.
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