Who’s Up for Building a Cathedral?
Ecocentric Human Development, the Hero’s Journey, and Cultural Regeneration, Part I
Friday, March 31, 2023
This is the first part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).
The Hero’s Journey is perfectly legitimate myth with a valid place among many others in the pantheon. However, it is not appropriate today as a primary guide for civilization. The main problem is not that it is male-gendered and needs to be neutered or balanced by a female equivalent. It is that the Hero is a boy archetype, not a man archetype. We need to source guidance from more mature archetypes, which comprise the masculine, feminine, and non-gendered.
I agree with much here. Take, for example, Joseph Campbell’s framing of the Hero’s Journey. [1] Campbell, the Western world’s most famous twentieth-century mythologist, describes the Hero as what I, too, think of as an immature male human — for sure an admired, celebrated, and in some ways public-spirited hero but nonetheless a version of what I would name an egocentric adolescent, someone who bravely battles prodigious foes, prevails, rescues the damsel or saves the village, and receives his reward. [2] Adolescent hero themes include the ordeal courageously faced, the triumph, the boon brought back for the people, and the public acclaim. The focus of the story is on the solo superstar. Egocentric.
Adolescent heroism can serve society — and life more generally. But it can also, often unwittingly, be life-harming (consider, for example, the heroes of unjust wars, ecocidal commerce, or toxic technology). Viewed psychospiritually, the adolescent hero narrative might at times, in some societies, encapsulate an important developmental episode for some adolescent males (and even some adolescents otherwise gendered or non-gendered) while at other times be quite detrimental to both the hero and his more-than-human community. But either way, the adolescent hero story contrasts in significant ways with more mature varieties of initiatory odysseys.
While reading my words here, it’s essential that you know that when I use the specific word adolescence, I’m not referring to an age range, like 13 to 19, but to a developmental life stage that begins with psychosocial puberty and does not necessarily end before death. A person can be aged 30, 50, or 80 and still be in the psychological stage of adolescence — even in the first half of adolescence or “early adolescence.”
Please also note that I’m not using the term adolescence in a pejorative way. There’s nothing the least bit regrettable or undesirable about adolescence. Not only is it an essential stage in a human life, but it is also a stage — in its whole, healthy version, anyway — that offers priceless gifts to our human community, the sorts of gifts that people in earlier or later stages are not able to offer as well, gifts such as exuberant and fiery creativity in style, music, art, fashion, and language. [3]
And consider this: Adolescence appears to be a relatively new stage in human development, a stage that may hold the key to the next phase in the evolution of our species. For example, adolescence, fully embraced and inhabited, affords a cultivation of our uniquely human imagination beyond what most people have been capable of in the past. [4] The fact that humanity as a whole has not yet understood what adolescence is for and has so far not taken advantage of its species-shifting potentials does not in any way imply there’s something wrong with it — or with people who are in that developmental stage.
Adolescence itself is not a problem. Rather, pathological versions of adolescence, or overly prolonged adolescence — and the consequent scarcity of true adults and elders — that’s a problem, a world-class misfortune, perhaps the root crisis we now face on this planet. [5]
That Campbell’s rendering of the Hero might be an adolescent framing is not really surprising. He, after all, was a product of not only his time but, like all of us, of his culture, essentially the kind of culture most all contemporary people on Earth now live in and have for many centuries: cultures in which the personal development of a majority of its members is arrested in what I have come to understand as an unhealthy variety of early adolescence, namely egocentric adolescence — a stage whose center of gravity revolves around not just what’s-in-it-for-me (egocentrism) but also competition/ dominance, conformity (and its close cousin, rebellion), consumerism, the pursuit of (mostly superficial) social status, and the dynamic of ingroups/ outgroups, and, consequently, a society — and a world — overrun by materialism, racism, classism, anthropocentrism, endless war, and, for far too many, poverty and mere survival, if that. This is adolescence gone wrong. Very wrong.
