The Story Wins
(Some reflections after reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari)
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”—Hamlet/Shakespeare
We are all familiar with the sensation of receiving a blow to some treasured delusion of self-importance, and the methodical process by which our panicky egos right the overturned cart, twist the unwelcome charges away, inflict the blame elsewhere, and put our little brat-selves back on the throne. It is the same acrobatic mental work that enables us to consume fiction: Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”
Harari dates the appearance of the genus Homo at 2.5 million years ago. The species sapiens appeared on the scene about 200,000 years ago. He dates the so-called Cognitive Revolution at 70,000 years ago, and notes that from somewhere around 13,000 years ago, sapiens was the only surviving human species.
The Cognitive Revolution was, obviously, a great leap in brain power, and among other advances led to the emergence of fictive language, which Harari sees as a key engine driving the development of modern humans. Then there was the Agricultural Revolution, 10,000-12,000 years ago—when hunter-gatherers became peasants in permanent settlements—then kingdoms, early precursors of writing, money, polytheistic religions, and, 6,000 years ago, writing itself. The Scientific Revolution dates to a mere 500 years ago, driven by the epiphany of humans—well, some humans—recognizing their own ignorance, and gave us a means of investigating our peculiar situation. The Industrial Revolution, and the capitalism that fueled it, when states and markets took the nurturing place of families and small communities, vastly increased wealth and human misery, belched millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and wiped out countless life forms, dates to only 200 years ago.
The key change of the Cognitive Revolution, to me, was a drastic shift in human perception of time and space. The earliest states needed to think ahead, and keep records of the past; and the growth of intellect, and its concomitant technology, generated movement (the mass exodus of sapiens out of Africa occurred at about the same time), and a general enlargement of the feel of reality. Through the eons, the stage on which our drama is being enacted has steadily expanded, and we the actors steadily shrunk. Today, as we deal with billions of, maybe infinite, galaxies in an expanding universe, humans as the center of the universe is a hard sell. And we’ve come to realize that a protracted sense of time leads to chronic anxiety, and people spend vast sums on therapy and various disciplines to block out the mental narrator of their time travels and do what pre-modern humans did effortlessly: live in the present. It could be a chicken or egg thing, but I would bet this shift was critical in the eons-long evolution of consciousness. By creating “the past” and “the future,” our brains not only accommodated records of crops, debts, payments, planting strategies, and so forth, but allowed us to reconstruct and project scenes and narratives not immediately present. Add a sense of the past to a scientific admission of ignorance, and you get several college majors. Our ability to project possible dangers better enables us to avoid them. There’s a reason we imagine the worst. Whether cause or consequence I don’t know, but along with this shift in the perception of time came an increased sophistication of language, and the birth of stories. And, happily for all of us, storytelling.
Harari discusses how grand narratives enabled people to work in large groups, accomplish great projects, fight wars, forge empires. The lives of sapiens have mainly been centered in small groups, and still are, but thanks to the bonding power of the big stories we buy into—patriotism, religion, money, class stratification, whatever—we can suspend disbelief and believe that ourselves and thousands, or millions, of strangers comprise a single group, even if in place of knowing other people we substitute categorizing and objectifying them.
Thus humans have achieved two modalities of reality: the material, and the fictitious. To us they are so intertwined we can’t really separate them. Like everything that used to seem simple, “reality” has become impossible to define. What’s “real” is what your brain decides is real.
To me, the grandest narrative of all is this split of our perception of reality into the material and the immaterial, or spiritual. It was really inevitable with the growth of abstraction itself, even if we need to remember that an objective material reality is itself an abstraction: the one that drove the Scientific Revolution.
Story, or myth, has the power to put its illusion at the apex of our sense of reality.
Plato thought the concept of something was more real than its physical manifestations. Think of the blueprint of a house—not even the blueprint but the idea the blueprint represents. From the blueprint you can build any number of more or less identical houses, all of which in time will succumb to decay and ultimately cease to exist. But the idea, in this way of thinking, cannot decay or die. It is more real. And it’s interesting that the more we delve into the essence of matter today, the less like a thing, and the more like an idea, it seems.
All religions owe their existence to that distinction. Christianity divides reality into the material (the things of man and earth), and the spiritual (the things of God and Heaven), and tells us to believe in the latter but not the former, a cast of mind which gave subjugated ancient Hebrews, and us today, a way of bearing the miseries of life. The Gospel of Matthew records the response of Jesus to Peter when Peter objected to Jesus’ foretelling of his suffering and death and resurrection: “Get thee behind me, Satan . . . thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of man.” He didn’t mean that Peter was literally Satan, just that he had the wrong story.
Buddha saw the root of human suffering in craving, and resisted the abstraction which engenders it. Like much oriental philosophy, he emphasized the material, the unmythologized, the present. With its aversion to consumption, it is no wonder Buddhism, the bureaucratization of his insights, didn’t become the religion of Rome and from there, the capitalistic west. The way modern Christianity, at least around me, has been warped and skewed to accommodate materialism and made something like an upscale subdivision out of the Kingdom of Heaven is not surprising. It is the winning story.
You know life is ephemeral and ultimately meaningless. But you believe it is richly meaningful and lasts forever.
When knowing and believing are in conflict, believing always wins.
That is, the story wins.
*
Consider the current fracture in American society. I personally think the two sides want essentially the same thing—a comfortable, economically secure, meaningful, guilt-free life. The problem is, they don’t share the same story.
Or as I see it, they don’t both have one.
The political right clearly understands that politics are not about facts, but emotions. They have a story. The political left opposes most of what the right stands for, but has no moving vision of what there should be instead. The left has no common story. The reason for that is that there isn’t one. Anybody who gives the matter much thought knows we can’t survive living as we have—but how to get to the situation where we embrace and control the inevitable changes while continuing as a country—nobody knows. Time itself will bring the changes, but you can’t help but wonder if the idea of a country, or at least this country, still means anything. A country, after all, is just another story. This country has always been driven by opposing stories—as Lincoln said, a house divided. The seeds of the Civil War were there from the beginning—we were in danger of one after the British were defeated—and we didn’t reunify after the actual Civil War. The same mindsets are still in place. And a group no longer unified by a single story won’t survive.
Like “morning in America,” the right paints a picture of mythical Fifties white America, the goal of our quest: bustling towns, booming industries and farms, safe streets, minorities safely in their place, a benevolently armed populace, no muddle over life and death, gender, religion in public life, stem cells, or carbon emissions. They have a clear villain—Them—harebrained, elitist, scolding, progressive loons. These are things people—that is, some people—feel. It’s a screenplay.
The left has its own vision, and certainly its own vivid Them, but I don’t think its vision makes it all the way to story. The left dwells on issues and policies, poor material for screenplays, when it should be telling a story.
Would it be something like this?—A future where the line between human and machine becomes impossible to draw, where human and artificial intelligence can’t really be differentiated, where DNA profiles rather than resumes serve as job applications, where the ancient bond of man and woman will become just one of many options, where sex itself will be more a matter of personal expression than procreation, where humans themselves will be significant engineers in the nature of their offspring, and the idea of “playing God,” along with God, will no longer mean anything, where the “races” blur with each other and that concept too becomes meaningless, where life itself is conceived of in a way we can’t even imagine, and the idea of one human/one soul will have about the same status as sprites and nymphs and gnomes have for us, where technology continues to solve many of the problems it created to begin with, immersing us ever deeper in the process begun in the Agricultural Revolution, and accelerated ever since, barreling us toward our unimaginable fate.
Inevitable or not, who wants to hear that?
It’s easy to tell a story that draws its material from the past; difficult, when from the future.
Science depends on the premise “I don’t know.” Science can’t do its work if we confuse believing with knowing.
But stories can.
March 12, 2020