The future today: myths within contemporary sociological imagination

The paper aims at illustrate three couple of solutions historically developed, respectively in Antiquity and Modernity, to answer some existential questions, starting from the three dimensions of Sociological imagination along C.W.Mills, ie biography, society and history. This three-dimensionality of social reality is in close analogy with K.Marx “three lives”, ie individual, social and general. In joining the two formulas, we find three great existential thèmata: the position of individual within his/her own environment, the relationship between the individual and the other individuals, the knowledge surviving individuals’ idiosyncrasies. In Antiquity, we find three myths personifying the three solutions, showing what were estimated as social values: Gaia (the Beautiful, a pathos as harmonious individual existence within nature); Kronos (the Good, an ethos as respect of the historical order constituted); and Athena (the True, a logos as the divine sight thrown over the world). In Modernity, these myths were countered and de-personalized in three other myths. The first one is reductionism, along which the totality (brain, knowledge, matter, organism, society) is nothing more than a sum of its single parts (neurons, bits, genes). The second one is narcissism, as it is well described by both C.Lasch, and by N.Elias. The last one is relativism as it can be traced from authors as Montesquieu, Pascal to the romanticism and contemporary cultural relativism. All in all, the three couples of myths can unveil implicit models in public policies and innovation and understand the drivers of the public perception of science and technologies.