What are our new common myths?

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“Stories tell us where we’ve been and where we’re going. They make sense of the senseless and bring order to disorder. They transmit our values across generations and affirm our ideals. They skewer the powerful, expose the fraudulent, and give voice to the disenfranchised. In many cultures, the storytelling act invokes magical powers to heal spiritual and physical sickness and to transform the profane into the sacred. Evolutionary biologists believe the storytelling thirst is hardwired into our genes: stories are what make us human.”

I started a new book recently, Fourteen Days, and ran across this quote in the prologue. It’s a collaborative novel by 30 writers living in New York City during the pandemic; the quote is part of an explanation of why they embarked on the project. Simply put, they believe that when we are confronted with frightening things, we tell stories to sort out our feelings and push back against the larger narrative. 

“Stories” are all I’ve been thinking about since I relaunched Sharp Skirts; in particular, what that word means in the context of finding your voice and putting it out there to be consumed by others. Everyone’s excited about Sharp Skirts, its overall vibe and potential to turn into something great. But it seems there’s a sizable gap between excitement and actually putting things on paper and/or saying them out loud. What planks of wood can we throw down to cover that gap? Or logs or rope swings or whatever conveyance you want to take to the other side.

The book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was a big hit a few years ago for its unique exploration of how we evolved as a species and what that has meant for current society. The author, historian Yuval Noah Harari, asserts that stories, myths, and gossip were key in forming early human societies; that the first appearances of fiction enabled “large numbers of strangers to cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.”

Common myths are the scaffolding of society. Religions, political systems, sexuality, gender, race—all social constructs built on top of a tenuous frame of myths. Why tenuous? As Harari writes: 

“An imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.”

If you step outside of the trauma and horrors of the last decade and look objectively, what has happened in American society is pretty astounding. Virtually all of our common myths are collapsing around us. This is upsetting, to be sure, but it also provides a once-in-a-millennia opportunity to build new scaffolding. 

What are the new common myths of justice, equality, morality, honesty? How do we rebuild feminism into a construct that accounts for all the ways it has failed so many of us? What considerations must be included in these new concepts? I’m thinking specifically of climate change and the fact that population centers will shift considerably over the next few decades. That will have a significant effect on all our social constructs. 

This is all a high-minded way of saying, we’ve been given a chance to start over. So let’s do something amazing with it. Let’s take the stories of living during the decline of our current age and use them to inform the shaping of the next era. 

The fantastic Anne Helen Petersen wrote a banger of a piece on feminist exhaustion recently that I haven’t stopped thinking about. 

“Right now, feminism feels too exhausted to push forward: it’s too politically weakened, too vulnerable to others’ manipulation, and ill-equipped to confront a moral arc that is not bending towards justice.”

She proposes we ‘let the land lie fallow’ while we rest and regroup. I don’t disagree. But I think it’s beyond important to focus on the ‘regroup’ part of that. While we rest, let’s continue gathering and talking, trading our stories. Laying those planks down to help each other cross. Collectively, they’ll construct our way forward.

Join the Sharp Skirts Slack channel to start the journey.