These pseudoscientific ideas went on to inform Western medicine for centuries. They formed the basis for the Nazi eugenics program of racial cleansing and the Holocaust. Although it has been known for at least 70 years that race is undeniably a social construct and that those 18th-century thinkers were misguided in their assumptions, many scientists still labor under the belief that race is biologically real.
The story embedded itself so firmly that even when it became clear that we are one genetically indivisible human species, it remained difficult for many researchers to look beyond it.
The old narrative looms too large in their imaginations. Scientists themselves fanned these flames of misinformation by wondering out loud whether genetic differences between races might have played a role in mortality rates despite there being next to no data to support that assertion. Social determinants of health, including poverty, geography, and occupation, were woefully overlooked.
That was, until the murder of George Floyd in the spring of Suddenly there was a palpable shift in the narrative around race and health. The scientific facts remained the same: Race was as much a social construct as it ever was.
But now there was a global conversation on what race really meant and how the explicit and implicit effects of racism so viscerally impact the body. Physicians, I noticed, began to call for more research on socioeconomic status, diet, toxic environments, and prejudice in health care.
I was invited to speak about my work on bias in science at medical schools and scientific institutions across the globe. These developments prove that the political environment has enormous influence on the questions scientists ask and the answers they give. When the backdrop to our human story is one of natural group difference, researchers inevitably will look to genetics and innate factors first.
That subtle realignment helps us to diagnose the problem where it is rather than where we might imagine it to be. We are still in a battle over the story of human difference. Far-right groups and ethnic nationalists scour scientific journals for scraps of evidence they can cherry-pick to support their claims that the course of human history has been decided by genetically stronger races and that social inequality today is simply a product of these innate differences between populations.
But when the errors are this egregious, one has to wonder what has taken scientific publishers quite so long. Equally, we need to ask how they managed to get published in the first place. Perhaps it comes down to the stories that some scientists want to believe, even in the face of undeniable evidence.
Academics often claim that they are led by data, not by politics. For decades, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health benefited from a research fund originally created to study eugenics. The school says the fund will be repurposed to repudiate its past, perhaps by establishing an anti-racist institute.
But of course, there are always those who will want to retain the old stories. Our origin stories, our traditional ways of seeing the world, can feel like security blankets in troubled times. We may cling to them against our better judgment.
Scientists need to be careful about which over-arching narrative they serve. All these motifemes need not be present in one tale, but those that are will always appear in the same sequential order. The understanding of classical mythology can be made both easier and more purposeful if underlying structures are perceived and arranged logically. The recognition that these patterns are common to stories told throughout the world is also most helpful for the study of comparative mythology.
Walter Burkert has attempted a synthesis of various theories about the nature of myths, most important being those having a structuralist and a historical point of view. To support his synthesis, he has developed four theses:. Oral and Literary Myth. Many insist that a true myth must be oral and anonymous.
The tales told in primitive societies are the only true myths, pristine, timeless, and profound. The written word brings contamination and specific authorship. We disagree with such a narrow definition of mythology. Myth need not be just a story told orally. It can be danced, painted, and enacted, and this is, in fact, what primitive people do.
Myth is no less a literary than an oral form. Despite the successive layers that have been grafted onto Greek and Roman stories and their crystallization in literary works of the highest sophistication, comparative mythologists have been able to isolate the fundamental characteristics that classical myths share with other mythologies, both oral and literate.
Joseph Campbell. A comparative mythologist, perhaps best known for his series of PBS interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell did much to popularize the comparative approach to mythology. Though his attention was largely devoted to myths from other traditions, many of his observations, as he himself was well aware, can be profitably applied to classical mythology.
Feminist critical theory focuses upon the psychological and social situation of female characters in terms of the binary nature of human beings, especially in the opposition or complementary relationship of female and male. Feminist scholars have used the critical methods of deconstruction to interpret myths from their points of view about political, social, and sexual conflict between men and women in the ancient and modern world.
Their conclusions are sometimes determined by controversial reconstructions of two major topics: the treatment and position of women in ancient Greece and the theme of rape. Here are four out of many observations that could be made about the treatment and position of women in Greek society:. What are we today to make of classical myths about ardent pursuit and amorous conquest?
Are they love stories or are they all, in the end, horrifying tales of victimization and rape? The Greeks and the Romans were obsessed with the consequences of blinding passion, usually evoked by Aphrodite, Eros, or Dionysus and his satyrs, and of equally compulsive chastity, epitomized by a ruthless Artemis or one of her nymphs.
The man usually, but by no means always, defines lust and the woman chastity. Often there is no real distinction between the love, abduction, or rape of a woman by a man and of a man by a woman.
Stories about abduction, so varied in treatment and content, have many deeper meanings embedded in them, e. The supreme god Zeus may single out a chosen woman to be the mother of a divine child for a grand purpose, and the woman may or may not be overjoyed. Thus the very same tale may embody themes of victimization, sexual love, and spiritual salvation, one or all of these conflicting eternal issues or more. Romantic critics in the past sometimes chose not to see the rape; many today choose to see nothing else.
It's all in there. The story of Aeolus and The Bag of Winds allows for an exploration of rulership in a debate between autocracy and democracy; the section with Tiresias and the Underworld brings prophecy, the nature of one's future and one's control over it into the classroom; the wonderful story of the Sirens has one of the most profound and sophisticated metaphors for freedom and desire that has ever been outlined either in fiction or by philosophers.
For me, the most rewarding part of teaching philosophy through the Odyssey is seeing the children respond so positively to an ancient story and connect with the characters. Choice moments that seem to really affect the children include: when Odysseus and his men reach the bay where their families await them but then, due to their own hubris, they are blown back out to sea by the winds that had been trapped by Aeolus' bag; the children's responses are unforgettable when Odysseus descends into the underworld to speak to Tiresias and is devastated to discover his own mother there, having died of a broken heart waiting for him; and, of course, the children share with Odysseus a sense of achievement when they reach the end — it's not just Odysseus that has completed an 'Odyssey.
When we are exploring the existential angst facing Odysseus upon meeting with the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, one primary-aged boy said to me: "What have monsters got to do with real life? Working with children and Greek culture like this has also made me think more about the nature of stories, why they are important to us, how to work with them.
Storytelling creates a direct line of communication between the teacher and their pupils. Telling the Odyssey seems to make the story happen in the room and in real time not some three thousand years ago. By considering these and other fictional, narrative situations in a story such as the Odyssey, the children have an opportunity to rehearse how they might respond to a similar situation, such as a dilemma, that they may find themselves faced with in real life.
And what's more, using a story or narrative, allows extremely complex situations to be put before the children that would otherwise be far too complex to describe in isolation.
When it is told in the context of the story of the Odyssey complex situations are easily understood by the children, the existential bite is then all the more easily felt. This teaches the children the trials of leadership by having felt its sting in the safety of a fictional, hypothetical setting.
Peter Worley is the chief executive and co-founder of The Philosophy Foundation. How to use the enduring power of Greek myths in your classroom.
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