It’s popular knowledge these days that a “planetary mythology” or “world religion” is not tenable, because someone can “have” a self-concept or cultural identity only when these are specific. A universal is adequate to its extension class only when it subsumes all class members. Advocates of “My race is human!” and “Everything is God!” are using concepts so generic that they have no content.

For example, you might think that “human” has some definite content—such as having a body with five protuberances that fit the Vitruvian Man proportions, a certain set of internal organs, and so on. But these schemata fail to be adequate to the class because there are people missing limbs and organs and they still count as human. But as we erase criteria for class exclusion, the rule for inclusion becomes so generic that it stops connoting definite quiddity.

Any human that comes to mind will be a particular image. Images, just like real things, are always particulars. Think of the smell of your father’s aftershave and the stubble on his face, the oil around his nose, his dandruff, his voice. A rule can never come to mind as an image, because a rule is a collection of leeways. For example, the head shape can vary in this way only by so much.

A generic mythology would have to be pancultural and, so, transcultural. Everything that is sectarian, or that belongs to only some cultures, must be removed.

In order for a generic mythology to actually work, it would have to be composed of stick figures. And their adventures would have to be very vague. Then we distribute these as black ink drawings on white paper and have children fill them in with the local colors and other particulars. Then we would all know the Great Tales of the heroes—principle driven people who kept their promises, helped others, stopped bullies, and embodied other concrete but universal virtues. We could model our pantheon after the Eight Virtues! The stick figure gods would be called by the same names in every language. We’d pick easy phonemes and simple conjugations.

Same names, same stick figures, same settings, but they would eat local foods and speak local languages. And since they are stick figures, we would all love them.

It would be an Esperanto for the human religious instinct.