FALO, Fantasy, and the Flattening World

by K. L. Van der Veer

The fantasy genre has been growing in popularity and more and more fantasy roleplaying groups are springing up. Why is there such a surge in fantasy interest, and what role does “living fantasy” groups such as Fantasy and Legends Organization (FALO) play in this growing subculture? It is my belief that thriving fantasy is related, at least in part, to the changing face of the world....

I’ve been reading about the flattening of Earth in Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat.” Technology is changing the landscape, and the rest of the world is no longer hidden beyond the curved line of the horizon. As a result, our economy is changing. What affects one country affects us all. Likewise, the political arena has also changed. As Friedman noted, a political bastion may no longer encompass all the entities that are supposed to support it and for which it is expected to provide a foundation.

But economy and politics are only two dimensions of a three dimensional world, the X and Y axes, if you will. What about the Z-axis, usually invisible if you are looking at the X-Y plane but no less potent in defining shape and form. This Z-axis is the religious dimension. Just as ways of conducting business and politics are changing, so are our perceptions of the divine and, consequently, the way we come into our personal beliefs, which in turn determines how we conduct business and politics.

Since the beginning, define it how you will, people have been on a spiritual quest. We have explored polytheism, pantheism, monotheism, mysticism, rationalism, transcendent illumination, and a rejection of religion and the divine, altogether. And always, religion has changed as it came into contact with other cultures and beliefs. Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are certainly not the same now as when they began. If nothing else, when each came into being, there was just that one way. Now there are many ways. Folk religions change to encompass new ideas as rural cultures bump up against more developed societies. The Nature religions have always, as a broad category, encompassed many paths, and, with our modern technology, those paths can interconnect like never before. Even atheism has changed over the centuries depending on how the divine is defined by the dominant culture.

From the above, it's clear to me that our beliefs are not immune to the effects of flattening. We are more aware of other religious beliefs than ever before; however, I don’t believe that the flattening forces in the world are affecting religion in quite the same way, or perhaps just not at the same rate, as they are affecting economics and politics. People are willing to change their style of doing business if it will change their standard of living. They are less willing to change their beliefs.

We may be aware of different religions and beliefs but we don’t have a clear understanding of what to do with that awareness. So, what has manifested is a hypersensitivity to religious presence. We are so afraid of excluding a belief, or really that our own views might in some way be overlooked or trivialized, that if every belief cannot be incorporated into something, than none can. To enforce this, an army of protesters sits waiting to pounce on any symbol, prayer, gesture, word, or other glimmer of faith, driving the quest for meaning and enlightenment into segregated meeting places and shuttered homes like a disease or distasteful habit. Yet ads for business or political campaigns are just part of the landscape, and religious politics seeks to preserve the beliefs of select groups in court rulings, legislative decisions, and even open warfare.

We are caught up between the natural tendency to let our beliefs guide all our actions and our desire to separate religion from politics and economics. Once, religion and culture were closely tied together. The people in a culture built up a body of stories that incorporated their beliefs and ideals. Through the sharing of those stories, the essence of that culture was reinforced and passed on to subsequent generations. This interweaving of belief and story formed that culture’s myth base. In “A History of God,” Karen Armstrong links the word myth to the Greek musteion, meaning to close the eyes and mouth and ties it to an experience of darkness and silence. It is in those dark, quiet places that we each find our personal truths and place in the world.

But in a flattened world of many religions and hypersensitive suppression of religious expression, we are slowly losing our body of stories, and myth has come to mean something that is simply made up. Instead of sitting quietly in the dark, looking for our essence, we switch on a flashlight and rush onward in artificial illumination, thinking we have found the way. Without myth, we run in well lit circles, or worse, in the wrong direction. Without our stories, our mythology, we lose our frame of reference and our ground of being.

The essence of faith and belief is often indefinable, ineffable. Just as words are merely tangible vehicles for conveying intangible thought, so stories are vehicles for conveying the entire inner journey of a culture or individual. Through myth, the ineffable is brought together with cultural foundation to create events and actions which form context and a point of departure for our personal journeys.

This, finally, is where fantasy enters the picture. Fantasy is allowed to create whatever culture it wants, whatever ordering force it wants, whatever gods it wants. In fantasy, we can explore our own belief or pull together something that speaks to many beliefs from a common foundation. Because we create new worlds and new cultures, nothing in this world is threatened.

And so, here we are. Fantasy and Legends Organization. We have always made a point of emphasizing that we are not a platform for religion and politics. That leaves the economy, and judging by our treasury, economics is not our platform, either. In truth, through fantasy, we are about all of it, and our members come from a broad cross-section of our triaxial society. We put this world, with its fears and misperceptions, aside and open up the dark, silent places of the mind to build a new mythology that speaks across the flattened void with a voice pitched to each, individual ear.