The Mythopoeic Moment: A View from Georgia

I know, I know: but this is the eternal dilemma of small countries close to bigger ones. The list runs from Sparta to Wales to Cyprus to Norway (even) and to Ukraine. Georgia belongs to this club. Such peoples tend to be courageous and nationalistic and that is good. But unfortunately considerations of realpolitik are those which drive the making of treaties and peace-making — the essential engines of peace.

But there are several other really important things to be aware of. One is that we live in a ‘mythopoeic’ age. This may be because religion has not absorbed vast social energies as it did in the past, and we may have found a life where there are always well-stocked supermarkets and cheap flights just a shade too bland a panacea for our souls. The distinguished Jungian psychiatrist Alan McGlashan, who died in 1997 aged 98 and treated Princess Diana and Prince Charles among others, predicted this coming ‘mythopoecization’ — if we can call it that, in the generations he foresaw arising in the new millennium. Having tattoos or a certain hair-style or wearing black are really obvious examples of mythopoeic behaviour, when we are driven my some slightly irrational impulse but one which derives, in a certain sense, from the ‘collective unconscious’ — as Jung termed it — of a given age or era.

These mythopoeic eras are a double-edged sword. Because on the one hand, a huge flood of creativity and thinking is released. Current achievements in all areas of science and astronomy are dazzling. There is a glut of magnificent young pianists (many from Russia) and architecture is innovative with materials and green solutions; only in literature, I think, is the planet not firing on all four cylinders just now (and perhaps in musical composition). Look at archaeology. Immensely rich discoveries all over the place, the latest being a lead sarcophagus under Notre-Dame de Paris which non-invasive techniques have shown to contain an exceptionally well-preserved Bishop from about 1400.

I was astonished at the dull and frankly ignorant comments in the Daily Telegraph’s report of this. It’s as if life has no beauty, meaning, excitement or significance for millions of people; and they just see it as a slightly-more-interesting-than-average computer game, where you get to be rewarded with swimming pool villas, MacDonald’s hamburgers (unless you live in Moscow!) and good sex. So there is a myopia in these new generations XYZ — they *know* everything but *intuit* nothing; they know the *price* of everything but the *value* of nothing. As a Philosophy tutor once quipped to an eternally interrupting lady in the evening class: ‘You have a question for everything!’

My younger students too — I am thinking now of two excellent people of 19, one Georgian, one Romanian — point out that a widespread ignorance of what nuclear bombs could do is similarly based on a multi-tasking, technocratic, hedonistic, self-centered, isolated-from-others contemporary mindset. People can think magnificently in Java or Business Studies, master languages well, are precocious, skilled, cosmopolitan, charming and well informed. But’s what’s lacking is the *self-awareness and wisdom* to see the *significance* of what is going on around us; to foresee consequences, and to to read not just the minds but also the hearts of others.

In such a context, Georgian zeal and patriotism is inevitably mythopoeic. Georgians should not be criticized for that zeal, but one of the cardinal attributes of success both individually and collectively is to show ‘moderation in all things’. Clearly, when — for example — you apply trade sanctions, realpolitik says that you do not do so at the expense of the well-being of your own country. Ideas are never worth dying for, or fighting for on the *collective* scale. The Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War ─ and the two World Wars (to name only some of the most pointless) have proved that ; but what we *do* need to do is to form and try out new modes of dialogue and show maximum warmth and tolerance and create and foster an understanding of how we have got to this point; giving intelligent (and not merely rhetorical) thinking to how we might ‘row back from it’.

So Number One, don’t think mythopoeically *by accident* or *without realizing that you are doing so*. Think back to Diana’s spectacular — although that sounds cruel and I don’t mean it that way — spectacular death in 1997, the year McGlashan died, that death of a patient who had not continued treatment with him long enough, he wrote, to work through more eirenic and insightful solutions to the royal problem of the time ( a clash of cultures, expectations, and a sad expose of the callousness of the ‘Establishment’).

She died in Paris, to come back to that for a moment, the place where the great kings of Europe had been crowned and laid to rest; she even died under the Seine, that glorious river which sets off Notre-Dame so wonderfully and has watered the imaginations of countless generations of irrepressible genius from Perotin and the earliest European Church Music in the twelfth century, to that of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the Cafe de Flore in the years in which the ‘trentes annees glorieuses’ were being forged in a fantastic and new country, bitter with the salt of defeat, but striving in the most wonderful way with Jean Monnet — this is often forgotten — to forge an alliance into the future *which would work for peace against any totalitarian oppressors*. In recent days, it has showed its true colours quite inspiringly! Let’s just hope that it remains sanguine! Because in a nuclear conflict *all* that would be destroyed, and if there were any survivors in a later age, they’d read out cultural treasures, and all our triumphs of the human spirit — East and West — as we now read Mayan inscriptions and dinosaur footprints.

That dystopian moment has not yet come — dear Georgians, my friends and protectors, my occasional sparring-partners and the warmest of hosts. Georgia, you will come out of this well. It may seem gratuitous to the argument, but as I said of the *Russian people* in my Letter to Putin, ‘We love you to bits’. And President Macron said in his inspiring address on 2 March: ‘We are not at war with Russia’.

How can I say something so outrageous? Because love, in the end is the only anti-viral that works, ideally the mRNA version! If you’ve followed me so far, I thank you for your attention. A great moment of peace-making may not be far off and I urge you all to look closely at all positives, pray for their spectacular growth, and pray also for reasonable and just political solutions to be found. Yes, it’s a terrible mess and a great collective trauma for us all. But as Seamus Heaney wrote in his last text message to his wife Marie from the Dublin hospital, when the end was in sight, ‘Noli timere’ — Be not afraid.

And that, of course, was said in the Upper Room to the scared and locked down Apostles.

What *The Guardian* wrote of him in concluding its obituary article on 2 September 2013 is very resonant at the moment of the Ukraine War — and I implore everyone to find this spirit even in everyday, local, careful, delicate, generous small gestures that same love, that same searing vision.

We can begin right now — or, more likely (because you will have thought of this) continue! God bless everyone on the Planet — and as the Psalms repeatedly insist, may a lasting peace come to our shattered — but paradoxically magnificent — world!

Putin’s latest rant, with its extraordinary metaphors of self-purification and the spitting out of mosquitoes accidentally swallowed, would have interested Jung.

The point is made.