Facts, Values, and Myths
In the website article, "The good guy / bad guy myth", Catherine Nichols remarks that contemporary popular culture is obsessed with the battle between good and evil, as witness the film series Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. Contemporary heroes fight for what is right. The reader is left to conclude that contemporary heroes do what is right with minimal prompting and some satisfaction, even if not always easily and with pleasure: In other words, they exhibit virtues. These virtues embody values. People portrayed on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities and values. Nichols remarks that she detects a historic shift in folklore, away from “Who gets Helen of Troy?“ and towards “Who (or whose group) gets to improve society’s values?” Nichols maintains that good guy / bad guy narratives promote social stability but discourage deliberation and moral vision, thereby creating an Ersatz morality. In this view, the Grimm brothers’ collection of Germanic folklore and legends was not just a listing of stories, but a narrative that could help create a sense of nationhood. Nichols maintains that “like the original Grimm stories, [good-guy / bad guy narratives] are a political tool designed to bind nations together.” The reader does struggle to envision Bismarck relying on literary output designed by the brothers Grimm as one more political tool for installing his policies of social security. However, perhaps there was a “third factor” that has affected both folktale culture and political culture in recent centuries.
Professor Arthur F. Holmes [Fact, Value, and God (1997)] maintained that Bacon and Hobbs introduced a strict separation between natural science and teleological notions of human flourishing that culminated in an unprecedented split between fact and value in Western philosophy. The view of Bacon and Hobbs was that both scholasticism and sectarian systems of thought lacked “right reason” in that they used words without empirical definition. The notion of right reason evolved from whatever the sovereign decrees to whatever counts as purely natural-scientific thinking. Even if there are divinely promulgated laws, those laws are accessible only by right reason as defined by public intellectuals and codified by the state. Ultimately, Nietzsche’s nihilism and emphasis on individual autonomy perfected the split between fact and value. Perhaps this split between fact and value was the “third factor” that arrived in time to allow for parallel, albeit intrinsically disconnected, political and folktale cultures.