Before the genus Homo there were no stories. The world does
not operate by narrative, but humans do [1]. Therein lies the essence of a conflict (an element of
narrative!) that is poised to manifest as an event of geologic importance.
Historical geology is concerned, broadly, with the condition
of the earth over the whole span of its existence; not only its rocks and
landforms, but also the larger conditions of climate and the chemical and
biochemical processes of the surface and atmosphere (including the living
things). Humans have made these
changes into a story.
But there is no story, no narrative operating the
earth. There is no place in the
design of the earth, solar system, galaxy or universe to store the story, and a
story must be stored in some tangible form from which it can be reconstructed
and told anew. In fact, it is the
very repetition of a narrative that insures its disassociation from reality.
Narrative begins, before human consciousness, in a molecule,
or better, a molecular system, the nexus of DNA and protein: because an
organism is nothing more that a story ‘told,’ as a biological construction,
over and over again, from the stored form in the DNA. The beauty of this form of limited narrative is its intimate
and system based association with the non-narrative events of the universe
(especially as manifest on the surface of this little planet). The “fit” of the ‘story’ to the events
and conditions of the planet is mediated by the processes of evolution, which
have become timed to the typical rates of change associated with this tiny piece of the universe.
The biophysical stories that are living things are directly
limited by the laws of physics and chemistry, limited by having to fit the
narrative into the designs of a single molecular system that has the singular
process of biological growth to implement its design. But even then the range of possibilities is staggering:
viruses to blue whales, slime molds to peacocks, honey bees to humans; with vast
numbers of archaebacteria and the dinosaurs thrown in for good measure. But this is really all the same story,
told over and over again, with many slightly varied alternative endings.
One of those slightly varied endings as been an organism
with a new design for creating, storing and implementing pure narrative; the
creation of true narrative out of the quasi-narrative of life; just as life
formed as a quasi-narrative from the fixed relations of physics and chemistry
[2].
This is not an elective understanding, not just one of
the many options for how one might view the human condition. This is like
relativistic formulas for gravity and space travel: it is like knowing basic
blood chemistry when deciding tissue donors.
More generally, a narrative is a map, a pattern that allows
the actual randomness and arbitrariness of the world to be organized into a
form to which we can respond with some degree of prescience. Many animals have
the capacity to map various degrees of detail and amounts of physical space in
such a way that they can move “purposely” in that space; human narratives serve
to allow such “purposeful” movements in time also, a capacity that, for other
animals, has been under genetic (instinctual) control for the whole of life’s
existence on the earth.
Returning to the first sentence of the above paragraph: the
stories that we tell, giving order to the processes and events of the
biophysical world, vary on two dimensions: (1) the degree to which they predict
correctly and (2) the degree to which the details of the stories correspond to
the detailed functioning of the world.
These are correlated dimensions, but by no means are they in
lockstep. It has been most common
in human history for stories to be created that guide with reasonable
precision, stories that are utterly without veridical correspondence to
underlying processes. It is also
possible, and has happened many times, that elements of a story can match
closely biophysical reality, but be put together in ways that fail to comport
with that reality. However, in
general, the greater the degree to which the details of our stories have basis
in details of environmental reality, the more likely the conclusions, as
represented in our actions, will be successful.
This last generality has one major, almost overwhelming,
exception. When a society
has composed an integrated complex story that functions in an social/ecological
bubble, then it is possible and even likely that more veridical story details
will be rejected. That is the
situation in which we find ourselves today.
The present story that we tell of ourselves, and that is the
map to our future, is patently foolish, but foolishness does not naturally
disqualify a social narrative. No
sane thoughtful person can believe that economic expansion can continue on
forever – or in any recognizable form, beyond the end of population growth and
the peaking of mineral and energy resources; all only one generation away – and
yet belief in such growth is a major element of our story.
No sane thoughtful person can believe that a non-material
being holds all the universe in some consciousness-like form manipulating it
for some purpose – and yet such a belief (or public statement of such a belief)
is an absolute requirement to be in government and other occupations in much of
the world and certainly in the USA [3], And there are some places in the world
where public agreement with this element of story is required so as not to be
injured or killed.
No sane thoughtful person can believe that humans are
supposed to dominate, or even can dominate, the world’s ecology without the
catastrophic failure of local ecologies and the collapse of the biophysical
systems that support complex life on the earth – and yet the belief in human
exceptionalism underlies almost everything we have done and continue to do.
No sane thoughtful person can fail to recognize that humans
have incredible power to change the environment in which they live, that that
power for change is proportional to our technological development – and yet our
story tells us that the earth is infinite either in fact or in light of
economic concepts (a detail of story) of substitution.
No sane thoughtful person can believe that they and their
“tribe” are a chosen people – and yet, American Exceptionalism is a national
religion not to challenged, many Jews hold Palestine as their natural right and
many, if not most, human societies have, at least, a secret belief in their
subtle superiority.
The fit of our present story to the real world processes and
events surrounding us has become unsurpassed in its incapacity. And in a natural paradox, among a
legion of paradoxes, the degree of unfitness makes it even harder to move on to
a better story; so many people have come to depend, both materially and emotionally,
on the present story – and the distance has become so great to any other story
that even begins to make sense – that there is no clear way forward. In other words, the improbability of
the stories we might construct for how to move to more satisfactory national
narratives seems crushing.
But such a problem only exists when your personal story
requires that you take some responsibility for the national narrative. It may well be that the most and best
you can do it is to try and free yourself from the dominate narrative when it
is recognized as destructive. And
then make that courage a part of your story, sufficient to tell the story of
your discovery.
[1] I suppose that we could, if we wished, call the physical
laws a narrative (that is, claim that making them part of our story makes them
a story in the first place), they are utterly unlike human narratives or what
humans are doing when they tell stories.
It is possible, though unlikely, that real stories have only ever
existed here on the earth, and only for a few hundred thousand years on this
tiny planet located on an out-of-the-way arm of this galaxy; less than a blink
in 13.7 billion years and in such a vanishingly small part of ‘it all’ as to
not even be here.
[2] The narrative capacity, once formed, could escape into
other designs. The Consciousness
System of Order (CSO) capacity is not dependent on the human brain; it is only
there that it began. The primary
functional aspects of CSO can eventually be made to work in what we call machines,
but these workings would be without the foundational structure of a biological
instinctual platform – I can imagine almost nothing more dangerous.
[3] Of course, it is much worse than that! In the USA it
required that a politician publicly believe (regardless of personal behavior)
that a semi-non-material being came to earth to mitigate the wrath of a
vengeful father who was actually him, in the first place, and some other thing
called a Holy Ghost. The details
of belief that expand out from this delicate beginning are nothing short of
mind boggling.
