The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [512]
Nowhere, however, was the balance of power more intractably one-sided than in that country allied to America which had only come into being because of a story: Israel. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Jews of Europe had become the supreme example of `below the line' victims, first persecuted and driven into exile by the Russian empire, then falling prey to the genocidal madness which possessed Hitler's Nazis, the darkest tyranny of the age. But in the second half of the century, the aftermath of this astonishing tragedy was to be an uncanny reenactment of that story recounted through much of the Old Testament when, following the arrival of `the children of Israel' in their `promised land, they had found it inhabited by all those people for whom it was already their home. In ancient times this had led to all those centuries of violence which were only to end when, first, the Jewish people were taken into captivity in Babylon, and then, after their return, saw their homeland taken over by the Roman empire, which in 70 AD sent them again into an exile which was to last for nearly two thousand years.
After 1948 when, with the aid of terrorism, those European Jews who had been returning to Palestine since the 1890s set up their new state of Israel in the land which for centuries had been home to the Palestinian Arabs, they provided yet another example of what can happen when people once `below the line' then manage to rise `above the line' to a position of dominance. The new state displayed towards the dispossessed Palestinians all the archetypal characteristics of a tyrannical ruling power. It was now the turn of the Arabs to be cast in the role of victims, as Israel created a society just as firmly divided into two groups, above and below the line, as that of South Africa during the years of apartheid. Inevitably such one-sidedness threw a shadow across the Middle East which lay at the heart of much of the tension and instability which was to plague that region through the next half century, leading to five successive wars - and which perpetually threatened one day to explode into a catastrophe which could draw in much of the rest of the world.18
All this leads on to a third way in which the understanding of stories can help to shed light on the state of mankind at the start of the twenty-first century. If we are to look on the entire history of the human race as itself a colossal story, what is the archetypal pattern which is shaping that story? How is the story likely to end?
The starting point must be that Homo sapiens is the one form of life on earth which has stepped outside the instinctive frame of nature to develop egoconsciousness. It is this which, to an ever greater degree, has enabled it to enjoy such success in bending the powers of nature to its own advantage. But with every advance in consciousness it has lost more of its innocence and cast an ever longer shadow. There is always some price to be paid. Each time consciousness has expanded, so in another sense it has become more limited. And eventually its ingenuity has created the potential to destroy all life on earth, including itself. Although mankind has no obvious external rival, apart from the power of those humblest of organisms, viruses and bacteria, its greatest potential enemy is its own divided nature.
Looked at from another perspective, this breaking out of from a state of nature has been like an ever-greater act of rebellion against the unity of nature. And if we see characters behaving like this in a story, we know that such hubris will in the end contrive to bring about its own nemesis, so that cosmic balance can be restored. Which brings us back to the story of Loki, the original stealer of the ring which inspired Tolkien's story: the ring of ego-consciousness which gives great power but carries with it the fatal curse which, in Wagner's version, eventually brings about the twilight of the gods and the ending of the world.
In the original Norse version, the