Anthropomorphism appears to me to be the essential issue. The need to make the universe (multiverse) subtly subordinate to the existence of our own consciousness is an emotional narcotic. When creating the gods of our imagination we devalue the ground of being itself if we concretise them in our lives, Campbell absolutely knew this when he said, "I don't know what you mean by 'God'. God is a metaphor which is transcendent of all things, it even transcends the metaphor itself."

If the construction of a language of metaphor is an evolutionary mechanism by which the 'tender human psyche' can reconcile its position between the unexplainable and the incomprehensible, thus protecting itself from psychosis, surely we have to ask where this metaphorical language starts and ends. Our problem here is that our addiction to the narcotic of self-consciousness creates illusions and thus deprives us of the ability to decide which is our language and which is the ground of being.

The possibility we can step beyond ourselves is not open to us, no matter what the mystics say for they are human to, and if the truth is beyond that "point at which words turn back" perhaps all we can aspire to is our own contentment with a deep understanding of our fundamental ignorance. In such a scenario what is it that we can give ourselves to traverse these difficult times of local mythic disassociation?

Certainly, any claim of a spiritual or religous truth, or worse, an insistence that all people must accept such claims as universal and unavoidable, simply does not stand the test of the most basic intellectual examination. So it would seem that having a depth perspective, grasping Campbell's insight into the essential role of mythic construction in the human psyche, is probably one of the most sane activities of any mind seeking balance and harmony.

This more so in the twenty first century when the Sumo-Babylonian cultural complex with all its local warlike threshold guardians is passing away and a new metaphoric structure of belief is in formation; a global sense of humanity. If we are to transcend the challenges of this moment then we need our creativity driving the process and in the recognition of the function of metaphor, its creation and its use, we recognise our creative abilities as more important than our need for absolute truths. If we look to globalise absolutes; mono-cultures, then we are looking to manufacture our own extinction. Of that there can be no doubt. But where and how is it that we begin to change the dangerous and vicious animal of the local kingdom, the alpha males of self.

We start by deeply understanding that we are animals, natural beings which have evolved a consciousness that opens creative possibilities other forms do not enjoy. We move ourselves from the centre of the universe in the same way that more than six hundred years ago we realised our landscape was not flat and entered a round world. If we retain the idea of our own uniqueness, if we persist with our own sense of superiority to all around us, if we cannot relinquish our belief in the supremacy of local identities then we cannot globalise successfully. Understanding Campbell helps us to globalise. That is why Campbell is so important for our times now.

In his sense of the mono-myth is the release from the custody of the past. We can understand that our human population contains a variety of languages of metaphor that express within different cultural psyches, in appropriate forms and styles based on an immediate environment, a description of the state and ground of being which is our one unifying experience. That's the model for globalisation because it brings us together without denying our individual or cultural identities. Campbell tells us that our languages of metaphor are all describing exactly the same thing, our common human experience, and thereby the hierarchy evaporates.

All we have to do next is work out how to deal with those for whom initiating conflict means huge increases in their personal wealth and the cost of a hundred thousand lives at any moment has no moral import with them. But in this situation we do have creativity on our side which means we can be more adaptable, less rigid, more imaginative, more responsive and much better at metaphor than those who murder and plunder like Assyrian kings. Perhaps we should start by sending these slow cumbersome beasts from our past a complete set of The Masks of God.

extract from "The Supertanker Theory of History" by Jack Adams
This work will be published in January 2010.

Jack Adams holds an M.A. in Public History and Popular Memory, is a Churchill Fellow and the project leader for HumanRightsTV.