In the opening pages of  The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong paints two ways of seeing the world. She calls them Mythos and Logos.

Mythos is essentially the premodern way of seeing the world. It is conserving. It lives upon the rich legacy of the past, aware of the fragility of our societies. It conserves what is. building slowly upon it. It is grounded in the stories of the culture, finding meaning and stability, and maintaining stability, in the old stories. Religion is part of its fabric. "Separation of church and state" is almost inconceivable; it is nonsensical.

By contrast, our Logos based culture thrives on this separation. In some nations it is enshrined in law. Logos, she says. is almost rationalistic, certainly deeply rational. It assumes growth. It thrives on change. It is, as I read her, deeply iconoclastic. It has discovered, as a result a way to grow through change. It has found a way to make breaking down and rebuilding a profitable enterprise... something not possible for an agrarian Mythos based society. Logos based society does not need to conserve- or at least so it has seemed until recently. In our culture we have the occupation of "Developer." Such people did not exist in the premodern era. Those who grew were those who had conserved.

That is my first brief reading of Armstrong's first two chapters.

Little wonder then that I, and thousands like me, are conflicted, or depressed, or lost, or dissatisfied, or all of these together. Take me. I grew up in a deeply conservative environment, still strongly Mythos-driven, where women knew their place, and right and wrong were clear. And we were all the way with LBJ, saluted the flag, and revered the Anzacs. Yet even then change was contradicting this. ''You will all earn more than a hundred dollars a week," Mr. Rosenthal told us in Grade Seven. With our fathers earning fifty or sixty dollars a week it seemed inconceivable. Five years later I was at University, living in a co-educational college, studying the philosophy of science, and being taught the wonders of plant breeding and the Green Revolution. IRRI was almost the new church. Fifty percent of us would work overseas, our lecturers said. We were the new secular missionaries of the agricultural world, bringing the salvation of rational thinking, new technology, and more food.

Yet something in all this did not ring true. There was no meaning for me in all this. I could only find meaning in the old stories of the church, albeit soon as an ill-fitting member, who found the conservative nature of much the church did (and does) extremely discomforting. And in my first job, at the end of university, I was not earning one hundred dollars per week, but almost two hundred.

How do I live in all this? The Green Revolution has in many ways failed. The new strains of rice need pesticides and weed killers and fertilisers which are often beyond the means of peasant farmers. They are held at the mercy of multinationals, who hold patents on the seed of staple foods, and provide sterile hybrids. Progress with food is wiped out by war, destroyed by debt, threatened by climate change, and undercut by unfair trade conditions. The arrogance of Logos is clear as the world falls apart.

Nowhere is it more obvious than in the lives of young people who have grown in a Logos driven world and find it deeply dissatisfying. We see it in the constant desire for more consumer goods which always fail to satisfy. My children, and many young people, have high ideals, and yet see no future. They see through the shallowness of consumer culture. They are disillusioned with the transparent self interest of the industrialists and the business community. What is the point of having a job, of studying for a career, when it goes to making others richer at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised?

There is some energy to be gained, and some purpose for living in the critique of the status quo. There is a kind of power and freedom in seeing what is, and in understanding the dynamics of society. But it is not sustaining. It does not endure.  Unless one is devoid of compassion and ethics, and simply exploits the situation, i.e. joins the controllers of society, surely one must be set against it.

I find it hard to live in this time; it is easy to see my job as merely helping the rich get richer. How hard it must be for a young person starting out with high ideals, and the acute nose of the young for hypocrisy, to find some direction to aim at for the future.  All our media and advertising still project the failed myth-ology of constant progress, consumption based happiness, and economic trickle-down theory. It is the basis that underlies TAFEs and, increasingly, much of the University.  How, at 17 or 18, does one hold to some idealism that looks for a different world, when all around is blind greed in the other direction, where the Prime Minister is still basically in denial about global warming, and where much youth employment is little short of indentured labour.

Churches, supposedly a people of Mythos, have little to say to the discerning young.  Old hymns, political views that match the RSL, and a desire to return to the societal norms of the 1950s are the hallmark of many. A sermon on Jesus as a refugee is heckled, and people walk out!   Other churches  have a veneer of modernity with up to the minute music, but are heavily laden with fundamentalist leanings, that are not really a return to Mythos.  They are actually Logos out of control, rationalism taken to extremes to protect a notion of God which does not work when exposed to the light of Logos. They are often more hard-line than the first churches. Logos promises to deal with superstition and foolishness of old religions, and fails. Fundamentalism claims to bring back the power of Mythos- it sees how the extremes of Logos finally fail to nurture the human soul and spirit- but flies in the face of reason, introducing its own stupidities of "creation science," resurgent misogyny, homophobia, and distorting the rights to life as though these would solve our problems.  Somehow Mythos and Logos need to work together.