What Joseph Campbell Might Have Said About This Global Pandemic

March 19, 2020

We have an opportunity now to remember the core story of our era: we are a single, global community.

Naturally, as I sat with my therapy clients this week and last, the theme of social and global despair kept arising. As we all wrestle with our own unrelated traumas, grief, and heartbreaks, this chaos of the pandemic and the uncertain economy is exacerbating suffering. People’s anxiety and despair are on the rise. The sense of meaninglessness and fear of apocalypse are rampant. And the simultaneous need for quarantine and “social distancing” for the health of our communities can evoke emotional isolation and a fear of others. But this needn’t turn us into fearful monsters. I find solace, amidst my preparation and changing plans, in some soulful thinkers who sought the deeper story behind the madness of their times.

Some of that wisdom that has helped to calm my heart this week are the thoughts of mythologist Joseph Campbell in the late ‘80s, shortly before his death. As a man who had spent his life devoted to the foundational stories of many cultures, he believed the coming time would call for a new, global one.

Myths, Cambell said, “come from realizations...that have to find expression in symbolic form. And the myth, the only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that’s talking about the planet. Not ‘this city,’ not ‘these people,’ but the planet and everybody on it.”

When asked, in the beloved interview series with Bill Moyers, about the “Earthrise” image that Apollo 8 took of our planet from the Moon, Campbell reflected on our collective opportunity to wake up to how deeply connected we are, not in fear but in solidarity. To remember our fundamental kinship.

“You don’t see any divisions there of nations or states or anything of the kind,” Campbell said, reflecting on the image of the Earth from space. “This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the ‘country’ that we are going to be celebrating, and those are the people that we are one with.”

While climate change has started to move us towards awakening to our true lack of divisions on this earth, the shock of a pandemic may get us there faster. Where there has been a slow coming-to-consciousness through global warming, COVID-19 gives us our crisis moment. Behind the panic and fear, there is a chance for a deep reminder of our common humanity and a commonly shared planet. But it is not all doom. There is always another side to the coin. There is also opportunity. From the pain, we might emerge with a greater sense of unity than we’ve had in many years of intense polarization within individual nations, and globally. 

However ironic it may seem, it helps me to sit with this underlying symbolism of our connections, and that a pandemic may provide a shocking reminder that can wrestle us out of a collective stupor.

We have an opportunity, as happens in sudden disasters, to experience spontaneous compassion and spontaneous acts of service. We can be reminded of our interconnection not through technology, but in the old religious sense: shared humanity, a shared life, and shared biology.  We are connected in ways we had forgotten. This pandemic, as devastating as it will continue to be to many people’s lives and livelihood, can on spiritual and psychological levels bring out the best in us. It can help us to join together in a way we may have forgotten was possible. 

Right now, this interconnectedness is rattling our sense of personal security and rattling the markets. But if we can also see this as an extraordinary reminder of how to build a common future together, then this is an opportunity to find an appropriate balance of preparedness with open-heartedness. We don’t need to indulge in hoarding and protecting only our own families or our own people, whomever they may be. We don’t need another round of nationalism or even another cycle of blaming and fighting the nationalists. We don’t need any “us” or “them.” This is a moment of simply, purely: us.

Strong leadership and coordination are deeply needed right now, but no president, elected or hopeful, is going to single-handedly save us from this. Each of us has agency and compassion. We can each resist the pull to descend into fear and anxiety—or to descend for a time to find the resources, creativity, and wisdom we might have forgotten were in us. We can find, in this time of contraction and introversion, whatever practices keep us engaged in feelings of love, soul, creativity, and kindness. This supports the immune system. It also enhances the felt sense of safety in day-to-day life. And as the dust eventually settles, it will help all of us, as a global community, move forward from this moment to embrace our lack of divisions on this planet in new ways.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute