By Rayarama Das Brahmachary

Recently, some college students ardently proclaimed a certain comic book writer to be their modern mythmaker, in honor of his exciting and weird superhero tales. This proclamation led me to reflect that, after all, a myth is supposed to be something that people believe in, or once did. My Webster's Dictionary defines the word like this: "a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people, or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon … an ill-founded belief held uncritically especially by an interested group."

Clearly. comic book stories don't fit this definition because they never pretend to be, or to have been, real. They are tales, but not exactly myths. If we want to consider the actual mythology of modern times, we have to look into the present beliefs which are "held uncritically" by modern man. There are many such beliefs, and the strongest and most fixed would seem to be typified by the commercial slogan: "Doctors recommend." For this is the Day of Science. Science rules supreme in judgement and in reverence over civilized man's every thought, word and deed, just as the oracles, omens and stars once influenced the lives of the Babylonians and Greeks. In education, for example, tremendous amounts of money are going towards scientific research, to the almost utter neglect of other areas of learning. In fact, many large corporations find that their top scientific minds can't write reports in simple intelligible English.

In an article entitled 'The Humanist Heartbeat Has Failed," in the May 24, 1968 issue of LIFE, Professor James H. Billington remarks that. "A paltry one out of every thousand dollars of government funds given for basic research in 1966 went to the humanities. The much smaller amount given by private foundations to support research and teaching was some 23 times greater in the sciences than in the humanities." These are big odds, and it isn't rash to draw the conclusion that science is today valued above all other studies and pursuits.

Science itself, of course, is neither bad nor good. It is a tool, like a scalpel: and if it's used for cutting throats instead of cancers, the fault lies in the heart and mind of the man-or men-who are controlling it. Science-the attempt to comprehend and adjust to, or control, material Nature-has accomplished some nice feats: disease control, communications, heating, transportation. It would be as senseless to condemn these things as it would be to put a scalpel on trial for murder. At the same time, it would be equally senseless to laud these things as though they had given life some meaning, as though they had contributed to any real advancement in the human condition of consciousness. This would be like awarding the Nobel Prize to an iron lung.