It was a mythical past.

It's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry.

And we have this mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past.

But we have, somehow, in the course of the last few centuries, or even decades, started to cultivate an image of a mythical, rural agricultural past.

At this point, however, relations between China and Russia appear to be far better than the mythical friendship of my childhood. Putin and Xi will do everything to emphasize that.

Similarly, if the US withdraws its largely nominal tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, US Europe strategic ties would weaken. Many Europeans, above all in the new NATO member states, would then demand more protection from the mythical Russian Leviathan.

Its impact on national and international public opinion is broad, but not deep. As the sociologist Norbert Elias put it The spectators of a football match can enjoy the mythical excitement of battles taking place in the stadium, and they know that neither the players nor they will suffer any harm.

The European Constitution has little to do with any of these challenges, but a majority of French people has started questioning the strategy that has long masked France s diminishing status. They are alarmed by what they see as the domination of Anglo Saxon economic principles the last nail in the coffin of France s mythical exception.

The dark skies over the northern Russian coast in Leviathan look ravishing, and Jia even manages to make the concrete and glass jungle of Shenzhen, the monster city between Guangzhou and Hong Kong, look gorgeous. The other thing both films share is a fascination with mythical stories, the Book of Job in Leviathan, and martial arts fiction in A Touch of Sin.

It will not do simply to reaffirm the post war European model of democracy, as if the only alternative were totalitarianism of one sort or another. But we should be clear about where we are coming from, and why and that there was no golden age of European liberal democracy, whether before World War II, in the 1950 s, or at some other mythical point.

Though today s biomedical science claims to search for repairs of nature s defects, too many of its practitioners behave as if their real purpose were only to gain the mythical immortality of precedence, at whatever cost to themselves or others. Denial of the fear of mortality and projection of the suppressed wish to transcend nature are the marks of a masked effort to create a biomedical science at war with its own stated purposes.