The Mythology inside The Wizard of Oz

It is a story about a hero who left the homeland, and encounters three companions, takes a long trek, and defeats an evil being. It is also a story about mortals and goddesses, the real world and a wonderland.

You may think that I am talking about an ancient myth, but in fact this is a famous 1930’s film, The Wizard of Oz.  It is based on the well-known novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The story is about a girl called Dorothy leaves her home in Kansas and somehow goes to the land of Oz. She comes across Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, finds the Wizard of Oz, defeats the Wicked Witch and comes back home. This classic film is often seen as a fairy tale. But if we look into the film more deeply, we will find its mythological core. By combining ancient western mythological elements, The Wizard of Oz creates a new age mythology belonging to American culture. 

Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse—The Loneliness after the Doom

What will a post- apocalypse world feel like, after the doom of human civilization? Cormac McCarthy answered this question in his Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel The Road.

McCarthy’s language is simple, calm but serious, like an old man telling a story that is full of vicissitudes and desolation. The novel has two parallel but complementary lines. One is a moving family story about a long journey of a father and his son, and the other is a stock-still epic of the world after apocalypse. McCarthy’s apocalypse is a feeling of loneliness which emerged from the doom of civilization, society, and humanity. 

Disease and the Other

Epidemic diseases have been existing in human civilizations for thousands years. They raged through human society, spread among different communities, and had a great impact on humankind. Because of these social attributes of epidemics, people often thought diseases come from human themselves. People blamed diseases on “others” who come from different classes, religions, races, ethnicities or nations. As if they can avoid those horrible and sometimes disgraceful diseases by doing that.

Epidemics

 

Epidemics have always played an important role in our history. They are disasters, but they are also part of human civilizations. Every epidemic told a story, which was full of sorrow, evil, horror, but also humanity. Through the comparison of the descriptions of epidemics, we can see how the epidemics raged through the human civilization.

Kiss of Judas

The fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel painted by Renaissance artist Giotto is world famous. Enrico Scrovengi was the patron of the Arena Chapel. Because his father was a banker who made a lot of money and “he took over his father's lucrative business and had amassed a fortune by lending money at high rates, a practice that the church and fellow citizens saw as sinful”, “Enrico had built the chapel thinking it would guarantee him a place in heaven” and wash away his sins,. Since “Enrico Scrovengi was one of Padua's best known and wealthiest citizens” , it is likely that he also wanted to build the chapel to show his wealthiness to public. Another possible reason he built the chapel may have been for convenience.

Pragmatic Approach to Laws

In her essay “Pragmatic Laws”, Mitchell rejects the normative and paradigmatic approach to laws. As she said, she is not going to define what law is, but to discuss the “understanding” of the usage of generalization in science. Firstly, Mitchell discusses about the traditional view of laws, the normative approach. In normative approach, scientists need to find or create strict laws that can be applied generally. By inputting different initial conditions, these laws will generate specific outcomes that meet the phenomena of natural world. If people cannot find such laws in biology, then it means there are no laws in biology. The normative approach ignores the degree of contingency. Mitchell argues that many laws, especially biology laws, do not have clear distinction between university and contingency. Next, Mitchell discusses the paradigmatic approach. In this approach, scientist will compare the generalization in biology with the laws in physic or other science to see if there is a match. If the generalizations in biology are like the law in other science, then there are laws in biology. The paradigmatic approach fail to define laws in some “unsystematize space” where no physical laws can be referred.

What is a “Law”?

According to Hung, the law of nature should be universally true and both informative (empirical) and necessary. The initial requirements are both “universality” and “truth” (133). To be a law, a statement at least should be true. If the statement is wrong, such as “earth is cube shape”, then it is not a law whatsoever. Universality means a law should be applicable “throughout time and space” (133). For example, “The tree in my backyard is an oak” is not a law.

“Species are nature’s only objective taxonomic units”

Gould thinks that species are objective. He says populations do “branch from their ancestors, evolving, interbreeding and “maintain common ecological niche” (20).  In addition, there is strong evidence to show that species are “mental abstractions embedded in culture practice or packages in nature” (20). Gould gives examples of the classification method of organisms by people from other cultures, including New Guinea and Tzeltal. These “folk taxonomies” (20) show striking consistency with our more “scientific” Linnaean catalog. Thus, he argued that nature really is divided into discrete species. Gould claimed that most of the time, species stay in steady lineage. Evolution is rather a “rapid transition” than “slow transformation” (26). Our nature is more likely to be “structure and legitimate distinction”. He points out that “species are the units of nature’s morphology” (26).

Breeding populations as “biological individuals”

In order to define species as individuals, Sober takes the first step to argue that breeding populations are “biological individuals”. By this he means, breeding populations, “a set of local demes linked to each other by reproductive ties but not so linked to demes outside the set” (156), can be defined as individuals.