https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ITXf5_XTSKo
The first comment question is from Susan, who writes this, Why is it that dragons are treated as dreadful enemies in Western literature, while they are portrayed as sources of strength and creativity in Eastern art? I realize that recent Western fiction has rehabilitated dragons, but that seems partly like a manipulation that disrespects their true power. And then related to that, we got an email from Laura, who asks this, My six-year-old daughter loves the Dragon Master book series, which is an early chapter book series about a group of kids who train friendly dragons. I get that dragons in Western mythology have symbolized pure evil, and it’s interesting to discuss the impact of weakening archetypes or or taking more nuanced approaches to the motivations of villains, as I’m sure we’ll be doing in this upcoming episode, but can’t there be room for just enjoying an imaginative story for what it is? I loved Pete’s dragon as a kid, and I don’t think it hindered my ability to understand symbols or appreciate mythological literature as I got older. Can we take these ideas too seriously? In parentheses, also, didn’t other cultures such as Chinese mythology have dragons that weren’t evil? I’m going to talk about the issue of tameable dragons in our essay segment today, but I thought we could talk at least for a moment in terms of this weakening or altering archetypes, and then maybe also this question of Eastern and Western dragons and the difference between the two of them. So, Jonathan, why don’t you start off on that question? What do you think about this? Well, I think that maybe the most important thing to notice when we talk about dragons is that although it’s true that we have this idea that dragons are evil, we can also see dragons mostly as forces of chaos, and I think that understanding them as forces of chaos is, or like let’s say the the utmost force of chaos, or the biggest force, the most the most untameable force of chaos, let’s say. And if we see them that way, then we can understand why there could be some polyvalence in their representation, which is that in the same way that, let’s say, a wild horse is this kind of wildness on the edge, but if you were able to master it, then they become a potential for creativity or for doing more, and so that’s why I think that in different cultures sometimes dragons are necessarily always seen as evil, though I think they’re always seen as a kind of brute force or, you know, this kind of overwhelming power that is the natural world or that is this chaos that lies at the bottom of the world in terms of the bottom of the primordial ocean in the Leviathan and that kind of those kinds of biblical monsters. I think that that’s the best way to understand that. Now, in terms of the modern vision of dragons, what you see in Pete’s Dragon or what you see in How to Train Your Dragon, there’s a general trope in the modern Western world, which is the defanging of monsters, and this has to do a lot with a cultural move. It’s not just with dragons. We had it with Sesame Street, where these monsters were all our friends here, and the idea of making monsters into your friends has very much to do with a move in society to move towards, let’s say, a looser society, a society that has less value, a society that has less stricture, and it’s a narrative way to do that, and it can go very far because in How to Tame Your Dragons, in the first movie, it starts with dragons as being these dangerous evil things, then they become a kind of potentiality that they can tame and they can use for their own civilization, and then the last movie, the dragons are better than us and we don’t deserve them. There’s a strange inversion that happens in these types of stories where in our modern world, as we idolize our passions and as we idolize the chaos, that’s what we’re going to see happen in stories as well. Yeah, it’s interesting to me. I think in some ways, for instance, this making monsters your friends, I think that probably part of that is the kind of de-othering, and often it might be talked about in terms of, you brought up Sesame Street, and it’s funny, I never actually thought about Sesame Street in these terms, but suddenly it makes total sense. One of the emphases in Sesame Street is people look different, they sound different, and everybody’s different, but everybody can be friends, everybody can be together or whatever. And on the one hand, when you’re talking about people, I think that that’s true, right? Just because someone, for instance, has a different skin color than I do or speaks a different way or whatever, doesn’t mean that they’re my enemy. But I think part of the problem is that we’ve taken elements that should be, to put it in Tolkienian terms, of fairy, namely monsters from the other world, and we brought them into our world and said, hey, it’s okay, everything’s okay, rather than looking at other human beings and simply saying, look at our common humanity. Yeah, but I think what they’re trying to do is, it is exactly what you said, is to defang the issue of the strange. And we tend to see it in terms, of course, of multi-ethnicity and the notion of multicultural society. That’s definitely the way that it’s being framed for us, and it’s understandable because we do live in a culture that has many different ethnic groups co-living together. But we also have to be careful not to totally defang the stranger because you’re still going to tell your kids to be careful of strangers because the strange is that which we don’t know. And it’s not necessarily about cultural groups or skin color, it’s just about the danger of walking into a dark room where you don’t know what’s there. There is danger in walking into something that you don’t know, and we have to, that experience of danger is important to preserve because if we don’t preserve it in a balanced manner, it’s going to come back to us in an insanely disorganized way. And now we have this invisible dragon that we all wear masks to protect us from. We spent the last decades telling everybody to be open and to be open and to be open, and now we’re saying, stay safe, stay safe, stay safe. But it’s just because it’s so disordered. We don’t have a balanced understanding of the relationship between the heart and the stranger, the altar and the narthex. The way in which we encounter that which we don’t know, we have an unbalanced way of doing that. Yeah, and it seems like there’s not, at least on the level of our society, there’s not a way of ritually dealing with evil. In the church, of course, we have this, right? You’ve got asceticism, you have purification in multiple ways. And the ultimate purification of the Eucharist, right? The thing that it’s the antidote to death itself, as St. Ignatius of Antioch calls it, right? But as a society, there is no way of confronting evil and dealing with it, right? I mean, this episode is about dragons, so it’s such a great focus for this. But you did a video, and I think there’s also a podcast version in which you talked about the recent violent protests that have been experienced, especially in the United States. I don’t know if you’ve had, have you had any of that kind of thing going on up in Canada? We’ve had a little bit of it, but it’s not as much. It’s also not an election year here. Yeah, right, right, which kind of just increases the anxiety. This is the most important election of our lifetime. It seems like every single one is. It’s just exhausting. But you talked about the religious, I think it was something like called the religious character of the protests or something like that. And I just thought it was beautiful because, and I recommend everyone go check this one out. You can listen to it. You can also watch it on YouTube. You talked about how the protests themselves have this kind of religious character to them, and there’s these religious elements like expecting people to kneel down, for instance. And there’s these collective explosions of othering going on. And it’s an attempt to expunge an evil feeling or a malaise or whatever it is. And I think that part of what’s happened is because, as you said, we’ve defanged monsters. The problem is, is that monsters are still real. That’s right. So, if you don’t recognize actual evil because of having an absolute, trying to think of the right way to put this, having a basis for reality that comes from God himself, in which he says, this is good and this is evil, then you’re left with this just pressure building up. And so now we’re seeing explosions and so forth. And I think that, you know, like I said, I’m going to talk about this question of the Tameable Dragon a little bit. And I agree with you, Laura, that just because you liked Pete’s Dragon as a kid does not mean that you’re incapable, for instance, of seeing what Smaug is in The Hobbit. I don’t think it renders you incapable, but I might suggest that it does desensitize you a little bit. I think on some level it kind of does, you know. So, I think it’s just something to be aware of. Even if, you know, I wouldn’t say let’s ban How to Train Your Dragon. I mean, I’ll be honest, my kids love it. You know, my wife and I have watched it with them and we generally think that what’s going on in those stories is good. But on the level of kind of mythology, there’s definitely a problem there. There’s definitely a problem. It doesn’t mean we live life without problems, but we have to at least know how to interpret them and what to do about them and talk about, you know, like say to my kids, does it really make sense that dragons would be friendly? Does that really make sense to you? You know, at least bring out that critical element for them on some level. So, yeah.