Myths get in the way of valid knowledge

Read "Mrs. Trollope's America" by Kipling Buis, winner of Vanity Fair's 2007 essay contest, and published in the June 2007 issue of the magazine. The contest "asked young Americans to define our national reality. To be more specific: In a country defined by video games, reality TV, and virtual friendships, with a White House that has perfected the art of politics as public relations, what is reality to Americans today? And did we ever have a grasp of it?"

Mr Buis writes:

Mrs. Trollope rather cruelly poked us in both of our sore spots by invoking the two thoroughly repugnant crimes of our early history—namely, the enslavement of Africans and the massacre of the native population. (She would not have been surprised to learn that the U.S. government eventually violated nearly all of the innumerable "most solemn treaties" signed with various tribes.) Yet her criticism was (and is) easily dismissed with a version of the handy old saw about not being able to fry an omelet without breaking a few eggs. So today, nearly 200 years later, America continues to boast about its "exceptionalism" while Europe continues to resent hearing lectures about freedom and justice from a country founded on slavery and genocide.

Comment: U.S. schools teach the myth of American exceptionalism and U.S. media reinforce that teaching. They make it hard to recognize that the United States is full of people much like the people of other countries, and some of them do bad things when given the chance. It also distracts attention from the historical fact that sometimes our leaders do not live up to the myths of a nation that stands for freedom against tyranny, for democracy against totalitarianism, for the downtrodden against poverty, for the planet against environmental degradation. Not when doing so would be bad for business, or detract from some other interest of those politicians.

In the context of this blog, however, I would point out a critical problem for knowledge for development. National myths would seem to play a key role in building a sense of national identity, and thus in building nations. There are all sorts of reasons why nations are good for social and economic development. But when myths get in the way of accurate knowledge and understanding, the result can be very harmful. The people who got the United States into occupying Iraq believed some myths that turned out to be false, and the result is grave damage to this country and catastrophe for Iraq. JAD