Musings on Manichean Mythistory...

Manichean history, a variety of mythistory and a history grounded in the notion that there is good and there is evil in history, has been around for a long time. Its origins probably lie in ancient Persia with its apocalyptic myth of the struggle between a good god and a evil god. It was incorporated into nascent Judaism during the Persian exile. It entered and became central to Christianity thanks to Paul who believed that Jesus would be returning soon, perhaps even within his lifetime, and thanks to its sometimes Zoroastrian like binary between god and the devil. 

Given the influence of Christianity on Mediterranean culture and the culture of the West, manichean mythistory has long been at the heart of Western culture and the settler societies that grew out of Western European culture thanks to Western European imperialism and colonisation. One variation of this unalloyed good versus unalloyed evil "reading" of history is the great man and evil man "theory" of history. In the twentieth century the template for the latter has, of course, been Adolf Hitler.  Ever since World War II those categorised and classified as evil by the purveyors and regurgitators of manichean mythistory have often been seen as metaphors if not embodiments or incarnations of Hitler. During the two Iraq wars, for instance, Saddam Hussein was, compared by several commentators to the Austrian, and as a result, portrayed as a madman out for world domination, a villain seemingly right out of a James Bond film. The latest iteration of Hitler and occasionally Stalin, who probably takes second place in the evil man of history twentieth and twenty-first sweepstakes and perhaps first for those who came of cultural and ideological age during the anxious and anxiety causing Cold War or who have bought into the myth that Russia stole the election for Trump, is, of course, the leader of Russia. That Putin is more Tsar than commissar is irrelevant to the demagogues and the media who purvey the manichean myth that Putin is the latest embodiment or incarnation of evil in the modern and postmodern world.

Great men, of course, have populated mythistory and the mythistory that passed for academic history for years. The American civil religion, for example, celebrates George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin as the founding fathers of an American nation the civil religion preaches to Americans is holy and tends to whitewash the less that righteous behaviour of these secular saints including slaveholding, Deism, and having children by their slaves. American comic books have long been populated by superheroes who seem to be the secular equivalent of the Christian saints of Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Even Protestants, who did away with the religious saints of Roman Catholicism after the Reformation, have continued to populate their mental and material culture worlds with secular saints who are engaged in the global fight of good against evil for control of the universe. Many regard celebrities, whether from the entertainment, political, sports, or business worlds, as, thanks in part, to the media propaganda machine, secular saints. The latest to enter this pantheon of manichean grounded sainthood, thanks in part to Western propaganda and the media propaganda machine and thanks to his use of the manichean melodrama he undoubtedly learned from the media, is the president of the Ukraine. He is, after all, a former TV star.

Interestingly, the postmodern era of the late twentieth century in the core nation world has seen the rise of a less myth based history, a history that looks at reality warts and all, a history that has proven to be extremely controversial in a postmdern world characterised by a culture war between modern traditionalists and postmodernists, and the advent of media organisations that have merged traditional media sensationalism with digital gotcha culture, cultural cynicism, cultural skepticism, and cultural snark. Postmodernism with its fragmentary and diverse culture has given rise to the kind of pendulum swing Michel Foucault argued tended to occur in manichean binary cultures. It has led to a media hunger for and a mass frenzy for investigative gossip about the foibles of its secular saints, particularly its entertainment, political, and sports celebrities, which now includes those who have become celebrities thanks to the new digital media and unreal "reality" television. In the comic book world this new postmodernist culture of sensationalist gotcha cynicisim, skepticism, and snark has led to the return of the Great Depression era noirish Dark Knight vigilante and the Soviet Red Son Superman, a reflexive comic book that interrogates cultural manicheanism and its secular saints. In film it has given us films, particularly independent films in the US, that explore, in an often non-judgemental way, the dark side of human life and which often celebrate the anti-heroes or outlaws that populate its film frames. 

Despite all of this we need to remember, as Foucault notes, that while the binary may get somewhat messy in postmodern snark media like TMZ, in postmodern comic books like the Dark Night series of graphic novels, and in the contemporary postmodern American independent cinema, it still undergirds a lot of the culture of the West not only in its manichean form but also in its often manichean anti-form. Additionally, the manicheanism, melodrama, and saint making and evil making culture of propaganda surrounding the Russian and Ukrainian war should remind us once again how prevalent manichean culture with its mythistory still is in the West. Finally, it should point up to the empirically minded how effective it still is in manipulating the masses, who undoubtedly knew and still know little about the broader contexts of the Russian and Ukrainian conflict and who probably couldn't find the Ukraine on a map a few weeks before the conflict began.

But is there some truth in a manichean mythistory that divides the world between the good and the bad, the saintly and the demonic, the godly and the devilish? That issue seems to me to be more a question for theologians and social ethicists who ground their ethics and morality in some metaphical first mover or entity. What empirically oriented social scientists can say is that humans have, over the course of human history, exhibited behaviours theologians and theological ethicists would describe as good and they have exhibted characterists theologians and theological ethicists would describe as bad. Given this, it would seem more accurate for the empirically inclined to conceptualise human behaviours as lying along a continuum rather than as entirely distinct components of an either/or binary. It would thus appear to be more empirically accurate to conceptualise humans as capable of behaviours that theologians and theological ethicists would regard as both good and bad simultaneously.