Why We Fight over Fiction
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
Is this true? I think story-telling has been generally prioritized by humans at most place and times. It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it.
But the OP is some interesting ideas, I'm still trying to figure out the implications.
> Our moral evaluations of the main big actions that influence our world today, and that built our world from past worlds, are still up for grabs. And the more we build such shared evaluations, the more we’ll be able to tell satisfying stories set in the world in which we live, rather than set in the fantasy and historical worlds with which we must now make do.
Hmm. I think some of the best stories help us work out our moral evaluations and build shared ones. This isn't just something that happens outside of fiction and then affects our consumption of fiction -- fiction, for the reasons the OP outlines in fact, is one of our tools for working it out. We build shared evaluations by telling stories. Story-telling is fundamental to how humans make sense of the world, moral and otherwise, but moral too. I think OP would agree? That is in fact why we fight over it, because we know how powerful it is in this area? Not sure.
As a devotee of speculative fiction, I'm a bit offended at the framing that it is something we must "make do" with out of our moral confusion. Like any other genre, there is good and bad, but I think at it's best SF can be a notably valauble tool in helping us self-reflect and develop our moral sensibilities, it is in fact a power that SF has particularly. Sure, there's plenty of lazy SF that avoids reflection or difficult questions, but at it's best it has a particular power to challenge in a way that builds new understandings, precisely by inviting the reader to look at things with fresh eyes instead of the comfort of the familiar and legible.
I think of it instead like SF can give us an "alien anthropologist's" view of ourselves, seeing ourselves from a different perspective for a momentary forgetting of assumptions that may not be serving us or... maybe we were over-simplfying abstracting away the complexities when we shouldn't have been! Then like in a planet of the apes moment, "But it's our planet after all!" SF can be complexifying as much as simplifying!
I say this pretty comfortably as an atheist but even if you're a believer than at least everyone else's religious myths are fiction.
Stories are also deep magick for Discordians. They are perhaps the only tool we can use to get someone to change their mind about something important. It is only when, at long last, the fiction weaves its spell to transplant your sense of identity elsewhom that you feel true sympathy.
> According to self-proclaimed "crackpot historian" Adam Gorightly, Discordianism was founded as a parody religion. Many outside observers still regard Discordianism as a parody religion, although some of its adherents use it as a legitimate religion or as a metaphor for a governing philosophy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism
Although I doubt many people consider it a religion, it's certainly an interesting philosophical view and makes as much (or as little) sense as many other schools of philosophy or theology.
You’ve heard the allegory of blind men in a dark room trying to describe an elephant to each other, right? Each one holds a different part of the animal. The person holding a leg thinks it’s a tree, the one holding the tail thinks it’s furry, and so on. They can all be right while calling each other wrong.
The whole idea of divinity is that it is beyond us. Many cultures say they have knowledge of the divine, but each culture interacts with it differently. And if the thing they are interacting is really some 11-dimensional being, why not both?
So you can conclude that it's a bunch of shared delusions, because it appears to be uncorrelated. But what if it's not? Sometimes, it does seem correlated. Here is where the leap of faith is. (It's always hidden in there somewhere.) What if, instead, they're describing different aspects of the same font of divinity?
It just sounds cool. Blind men, elephants etc. Mystical woo.
What is important about any model is it's ability to predict the future. The blind men are evidently unable to do this and thus are independently worthless as oracles.
Of course the men could pool their experiences and admit they were wrong about individual predictions and using prior knowledge about objects known in the world would be able to come to the conclusion about the elephant.
However as an allegory about the divine this fails because there is no prior evidence to conclude that there are any such divine objects exist. We don't know what a divine object is.
You then will end up falling back to some variation of Pascal's wager where an infinite value multiplied by zero evidence somehow produces something you sell shares in.
Good luck with that on WSB.
You have to expand your understanding of "truth" when it comes to religious myths to make that work, because of course some contradict on their face.
But yeah, I have seen it advocated in several ways. From the sort of liberal platitude "all religions are just different paths to the same underlying diety", to a certain kind of neo-pagan constructivist "We make religions true by believing in them." I lean toward the latter.
Let's just call everything a strawberry.
The confederate are losers, and yet folks after the confederates were able to erect statues commemorating their losses.
It also help create a false notion that only history written by winners create the narrative that everyone accepted.
The proverb of course isn't literally always true, it isn't only "the victors" who write history. But the powerful do have a disproportionate (but not exclusive) influence on what gets remembered how (what gets remembered how is a factor of both what historical record is left and who can advance their interpretation of it). The victors tend to be more powerful than the vanquished, if they don't appear to be then there might be some confusion over who won what exactly.
And after that came succesfull crackdown on their rights. They lost rights, not all the way up to slavery but still very significantly.
And after that came civil rights period.
It is a period of history absolutely essential for understanding how we got to where we are, which is often not taught at all to schoolchildren.
It began with Black elected legislators and city council members and increased Black economic activity and equality and integration. It ended with the return of de facto Black serfdom and disenfranchisement in the South. And that's when they started putting up the statues. (Who is "they"? It wasn't Black people putting up the statues, was it? So who won and who lost?)
Heather Cox Richardson (who has gained recognition lately with her daily posts on politics) is actually a historian, her book is titled "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America"
Here's a New Yorker article by Adam Gopnick with the same title, which is actually a review of a different book by Henry Louis Gates. It gives you an overview of how Reconstruction went.
> One mistake the North made was to allow the Confederate leadership to escape essentially unscathed. Lincoln’s plea for charity and against malice was admirable, but it left out the third term of the liberal equation: charity for all, malice to none, and political reform for the persecutors. The premise of postwar de-Nazification, in Germany, was a sound one: you had to root out the evil and make it clear that it was one, and only then would minds change. The gingerly treatment of the secessionists gave the impression—more, it created the reality—that treason in defense of slavery was a forgivable, even “honorable,” difference of opinion. Despite various halfhearted and soon rescinded congressional measures to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from returning to power, many of them didn’t just skip out but skipped right back into Congress.
These are the people who had the resources and power to put up those statues...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/how-the-south-...
I wouldn't describe it as the South "winning", but the North clearly didn't solidify the win quickly enough. I wonder whether that was a bad idea, or whether it came from some real fragility of the North's win, or the fact that it was a civil rather than a foreign win?
Right now, Hitler was evil, Jesus was good, Ghandi is good, Rome was important, Greek philosophy matters, etc
But in some future time or different place, history is different. Columbus used to be a hero, now he’s a far more controverisal figure. Maybe some fascistic future would see Hitler cast as a hero much like George Washington. History will have changed.
The past happened how it happened, but how that past is filtered and turned into the narrative we call history happens in the present
I think it likely that more is invested from about the time of widespread access to fiction than before, but not sure if it far more.
Of course it is obvious. People waste their lives away consuming fiction in the way of books, netflix, video games, politics. The luxury of doing that en masse simply was not possible if we go ways back. Hell, just in my lifetime this has changed. 25 years ago I heard of no one watching ten episodes of a series in one sitting.
I believe most people now spend far more time with and engaged in fictions than reality. People even think that the fictions media create are real. Most news are editorialized and fictionalized. What is presented is not reality. What people spend most of their time on a phone on, social media, are to a high degree fiction. That is not reality you are engaging with.
Reality is closer to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid than the top.
Handwringing over "time wasting" activities is as old as time, whether it's video games, TV, newspapers/radio or gambling, drinking and dicing.
The TV dinner was popular over 50 years ago -- people didn't have time to actually eat without consuming fiction
The peak of TV watching was actually around 2010, it's gone down since then (although still above 1996 levels!) -- replaced of course with internet use of various kinds, including kinds that could be considered "fiction consumption" as well as not (social media I would only consider fiction consumption as a joke!).
Another thing that has gone down since 1996 is leisure reading time (again they don't usually count social media as leisure reading though).
I don't have numbers on how much time a medievel European peasant spent listening to stories, plays, or narrative music.
People may have on average more leisure time than they had 500+ years ago! As you say, "The luxury of doing that en masse simply was not possible." But now we're talking about a different thing, the OP's claim was that "we invest so much time and energy into fiction, far more than did any of our ancestors" because of a crisis of moral shared meaning, not simply because of an increase of leisure time.
The leisure time of people in different social positions in different times and places is another (interesting) question, but I think people have always chosen to use much of their leisure time (time not required for material survival) and energy on fiction.
In the context of this essay, our moral future is far less certain. The cold war had an old narrative to it, with easy villains. The world of today makes it more difficult to avoid the nuance. It can even explain why so many AAA game titles fall back to derivative, Tolkien-esque settings.
This has the ring of truth to me.
Further, modern media takes that even further. Plenty of producers, marketing people, people with the purse strings just want more of whatever was popular last year. Which creates a trend to produce more of the same.
Yes, real life events are also an influence but similarly, one extremely popular title can influence followers for years/decades.
To put it another way, if there was no Walt Disney would there be 150+ famous family oriented feel good animated movies that have influenced so much of our culture OR, would we have some entirely different culture because one artist (or team of artists) works didn't have that particular level of influence.
What's changed is that we no longer believe in the future, that the future could be better than the present.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-t...
A lot of Borges stories come to mind. Stanislaw Lem's work like Solaris, on moral issues surely Nabokov's Lolita or Ada or Ardor. The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union, Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness with takes on sexuality way ahead of their time and so on. If I go through my list of favourite books there's a lot of those.
Anyway, I suppose the title made me hope for something even more Neo-meets-Morpheus mind-bending.
It also connects to Terry Pratchetts Hogfather quote about kids learning the little lies so they will accept the big ones later.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-...
h/t Gwern's excellent newsletter:
To the extent that fiction acknowledges and explores such moral spaces it's natural for it to be contentious. Exploring alternative moralities is necessarily immoral to the prevailing morality. A culture of profound tolerance is required for such explorations, and such cultures are evanescent and poorly distributed.
Viewed this way, the typical human is exhorted to "do what they want" (Pirsig's MoQ [0]) or "do what they will" (Discordianism) and the morals which the author is discussing are arbitrary cultural artifacts.
Of course, however, Pirsig's morality is neither easy nor comfortable, because it is the morality of pragmatists. To choose to do something is to choose for the effects of what one has done to be real in the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_Metaphysics_of_Qualit...