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Can we, at such a crisis as this, fall back on a racial myth on the off-chance that it is a tool that has not yet outlived its usefulness? Let us interpret, for our purposes, the story of the Tower of Babel. I propose to use this story in a manner analogous to the use to which a scientist might put an already existing formula of mathematics. The mathematical construction may have been invented without any intention that it should be used as the scientist proposes to use it, or indeed without any intention that it should be used at all. Yet the scientist, despite the mathematician's avowal that his formula has no meaning at all, may decide that he has found a realization that is the counterpart of the mathematical formulation and will use the formulation accordingly. This I shall now do with the story of the Tower of Babel.
First, I decide that the story is formulated in Genesis, but I might as easily decide to write my own version. This story I do not interpret: I use it to interpret a problem of mine. When I say I might decide to write my own version, I do not mean that the basic elements of the story can be altered. Some transformation is necessary which is not an interpretation of the story, nor yet a sophistication. It is not an operation such as Freud proposes for the elucidation of a dream: it consists in a recognition first that the story is a social version of the phenomenon known to the individual as a dream – it even has some resemblance to the consciously sought selected fact; it is an emotional experience that has been subjected to α-function.
There must be many such myths that are not recognized at all, except in a pejorative sense in which some unlikely story, or one that the listener does not wish to believe, is dismissed as a ‘myth’. We cannot now say how they started, nor are we able to observe the process of myth-formation, if any, at work in our midst. If an individual, some anonymous genius, invented it, then we may suppose that the process is one