William H. McNeill

Myth lies at the basis of human society. That is because myths are general statements about the world and its parts, and in particular about nations and other human in-groups, that are believed to be true and then acted on whenever circumstances suggest or require common response. This is mankind's substitute for instinct. It is the unique and characteristic human way of acting together. A people without a full quiver of relevant agreed-upon statements, accepted in advance through education or less formalized acculturation, soon finds itself in deep trouble, for, in the absence of believable myths, coherent public action becomes very difficult to improvise or sustain.

The lights of nineteenth-century liberalism that Lord Grey saw going out all over Europe on the night of August 3, 1914, dimmed and sputtered toward extinction during the years of furious war that followed. But new lights flared up during the war itself which have since continued to elaborate an electrified wonderland which no man of 1914 could easily have imagined. The new landscape is still unfamiliar: things change even as we look at them. Remote controls and energies entirely alien to ordinary, age-old sensory experience inform our electric power grids and make them function. The same seems true of modern societies, imparting vastly enlarged capabilities to leaders who sometimes seem not to know how to use them.