To Reconcile The Contradictions
Received an email from a friend yesterday informing me of his enthusiasm for Antonio Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things. The work is about the importance of story telling. To say that story telling is important is to greatly underestimate the matter. I do not think it is possible to understand how our stories serve to make us human or obstruct our potential. Unlike our fellow creatures we are superlatively sentient and live in a ocean of meaning, the product of the mind’s work to make sense of sense experience.
The quality of our biological health, our friendships, and our love affairs depend greatly upon the stories that we have learned, and are enabled to tell ourselves. There is nothing more lethal than ignorance, a restricted range of vocabulary, and syntax for the creation of one’s world story where one is the leading character. Logic is a fine tool. The scientific method, the ability to imagine and conduct a double blind experiment is also very important. But these are not enough. Life is essentially paradox. A story must be brought to bear to reconcile the differences.
Here are a few quotations from a futuristic story, entitled American War by Omar El Akkad that I am reading. It is a story about a second Civil War set in 2075.
This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin. –Sarat Chestnut, narrator
But my father was a doctor, and he wanted me to study medicine. He used to say the only truly stable profession is blood work—the work of the surgeon, the soldier, the butcher. –Albert Gaines
But somewhere deep in her mind an idea began to fester. Perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence–a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home? –Sarat
I sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for–be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness–you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what you they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words change by the day, changes like the weather.
Do you think we’re wrong? Sarat asked.
If you did, if you knew for a fact that we were wrong, would it be enough to turn you against your people,? asked Gaines. –Albert Gaines
He sat the stone on the table in front of Sarat, and then he guided her hands until they held the knife against the coarse side.
“Resistance and stress,” he said. “All it takes is resistance and stress.”
He moved her hands with his. The knife scraped against the stone, even and rhythmic. The sound of it filled the room.
“How do you know when it is ready?’ asked Sarat.
“It’s ready,” said Gains, “when it does what you need it to do.”
4 thoughts on “To Reconcile The Contradictions”
“The quality of our biological health, our friendships, and our love affairs depend greatly upon the stories that we have learned, and are enabled to tell ourselves.”
Personally I equate stories, within the context of the quote above, to the filters that we use to justify our own subjective version of truth. Stories give personal context to our own lives, both in the past and for the future, but they are just that, personal narratives that both enhance and obstruct how we view our environment. The subject of “What is Truth” is something that has been discussed for hundreds of years in millions of conversations, but we are still stuck in a quagmire of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. This will not change until we specify the definition of the word truth and take responsibility for our own subjectivity. I doubt if this will happen in my lifetime because humans, for the most part, want to believe that their vision/version of life is based on succinct and irrefutable facts, definitive notions of human nature and of nature itself.
Personally I believe, in essence, we are all blind, wandering through a desert of existence fooling ourselves into believing what we see, hear, smell, taste and feel are tantamount to pure and unadulterated reality. In this context I continually go back to Plato’s Cave to assess our own personal version of the real. But I suppose that we could now begin arguing about the definition of reality. And that is for another time.
What you have written makes sense to me. The points coincide with my story. As you indicate, others with fundamentally different stories possibly would not understand your point. Or if they understood would reject the subjective quality of the mind’s work as absurd. I think that story telling is important, and listening well is more important.
Plato’s Cave is a helpful reference. Plato thought that it was possible to leave the cave. Granted leaving is always existentially difficult. Who wants to be an outlier, differently minded than his or her fellows? I do not think this is a project for the solitary individual. We all need help.
You comment of “There is nothing more lethal than ignorance” causes me to wonder about the 10s of thousands of years we came so far immersed in ignorants. I think some learning has lead to awful things that have done.
Yes, learning is not a unambiguous benefit. Good and evil possibilities are increased by knowledge. But who would be an advocate for ignorance?