Do origin myths matter?
On how we simplify our complex history
My time in Geel reminded me of my time in Winnipeg. They have a few things in common, like how they’re both in areas famous for being flat. They have some things that are pretty different, like how Winnipeg became a city in 1873, while Geel became a city while I was a baby in the 1980s1.
The connection comes from my experience when visiting Winnipeg’s Saint-Boniface Museum and Geel’s Gasthuismuseum. Both museums are former convents which contained hospitals, among other social services. A religious order in a larger city (Montreal and Antwerp) sent nuns (and monks, in the case of Geel’s co-ed institution). Winnipeg’s first hospital / school / orphanage / nursing home was founded in 1844 following what seems to be essentially the same system as Geel’s first hospital / orphanage / nursing home which dates to the early 1200s. That’s six generations and something like six hundred ninety four generations ago.
I arrived in each museum thinking I had a basic understanding of local history and left feeling completely baffled. The Saint-Boniface Museum tells a tidy story that allows the various groups living in Winnipeg today to make peace with their city’s brief history. The Gasthuismuseum tells a tidy story of how a medieval peasant village became an internationally known haven for adult foster care within an accepting community. My experience at museums was me looking at the wall cards explaining the displays I was looking at and looking at the supportive evidence I was looking at and finding them wildly contradictory. Only at the Gasthuismuseum there was the fun twist of all the wall cards being in Flemish, making it a bit more effort to make sense of things.
After visiting the Saint-Boniface Museum I called everyone I knew who’d grown up in Winnipeg to ask them about their visits to the museum and what they’d been taught about local history. This was, not shockingly, not a topic they had spent much time considering since they’d passed their last quiz in third grade. Folks in Geel were similarly unconcerned with the creative license taken regarding their city’s history, shrugging and reminding me that it’s a fairy tale.
The past is far more complicated than any of us have patience for. Much of the truth has been irretrievably lost. Having an accurate understanding of history does and does not matter. Regardless of how we make sense of our history, we’re still where we are today.
The history of the founding of Winnipeg is not full of the nice Canadianness the city wants to be known for today. The history of how Geel came to be a center for mental health care is also not particularly nice. One of the questions we need to ask is how much the origins of a system matter. Does it change if the origins are from the 1200s or the 1800s? For those of you who’ve seen The Good Place, I imagine plenty of our childhood heroes would be in the Medium Place with Mindy St. Claire. Do you get points for things that happen a thousand years after your death?
Modern Winnipeg and modern Geel are places that strive to be accepting, welcoming, and compassionate. They have created myths of their past that support those ideals. There’s a certain beauty in knowing that we can rewrite our histories, they can be obviously nonsensical, and people will simply shrug and get on with their lives. It’s not about the facts of our past, it’s about the values those myths profess.
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On dealing with grief by losing ourselves in the moment
In England, the NHS has been working with Care Volunteer Responders since the pandemic began
Geel had exponentially more hospital beds than Winnipeg in 1871. Granted, Winnipeg had 241 and four hospital beds, so it’s easy to have exponentially more than four.
I’m going out on a limb here because I’ve visited neither place/museum. They can matter, if the myths perpetuate harm by making the broader, less negatively affected population feel that the past is over and we’re all moving into a brighter future together, when maybe we aren’t: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(22)00203-0/fulltext#:~:text=Nowadays%2C%20Indigenous%20people%20face%20systemic,school%20in%20Canada%20in%201996.