Over on NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos And Culture blog, a couple of recent posts caught my eye. Marcello Gleiser, theoretical physicist (which I add, in part, to show that his expertise is not in, say, psychology or biology) writes that “To be human is to believe“:
Humans are believing animals. Perhaps that’s even a way of defining our species: we are the high-functioning primates from planet Earth who have achieved consciousness and, with it, the ability to believe.
…
We seem to be incapable of living our lives without believing that there is something bigger than us, something beyond the “merely” human. Okay, not all of us, but clearly the vast majority of humans.
Barbara King, on the other hand (Biological Anthropologist), describes us as “Homo narrans: Humans as story-tellers (and listeners)“, emphasizing “the deeply ingrained human propensity for story-telling.” (The blog post itself is brief, but King joins in the comments, which are so far removed from “comments” on, say, Fox News, that I really think they are a separate species.)
Are we believers because we are storytellers? Are we storytellers because we are believers? I suppose, in part, it’s all chickens and eggs, and the origins of this aspect of humanity doesn’t fossilize (although King suggests cave paintings as the first illustrations to stories).
My musings, after the jump:
Long, long ago, before “god” was invented
We’d gather together, for friendship and strength
We’d sit singing songs, telling stories and fables
In the gaze of the children, we’d go on at length
The stories might sometimes have heroes or villains,
The tale of a hunt, or a great person’s death,
Practical, sometimes, or just entertainment,
With listeners gathered, all holding their breath
In weaving their stories, creating their legends,
These tellers of tales brought a culture to life
As much as the clothing, or tools, or utensils,
The crudely made bowl, the obsidian knife.
When field archeologists, sifting through artifacts
Pick out some pottery, arrowheads, beads,
Or anything else—it’s a piece of a puzzle—
The job is to see where, exactly, it leads.
If only we could, as we search for the answers,
Uncover the echoes of stories of old
The dusty remains of a song or a story
The remnants of legends so long ago told.
I guess, in a way, we have done this already
But often we don’t know that that’s what we’ve done;
We do see the remnants, the fossils, the echoes
Of tales when our culture was only begun
See, just as the bowls and the knives in your kitchen
Descended from those used so long, long ago
So too, our mythology, current religion
Evolved to the state that we currently know.
The truth is that “gods” were at first just a story
That people repeated like so many more
The heroes and villains are long since forgotten
As well as the purpose the story was for.
A story to tell to the people who gathered;
A tale to enlighten, to lift, to enthrall,
A legend, an epic, a myth, an adventure
But… what is religion? A story. That’s all.
Interesting.
I think that both “believing” and “story-telling” can be understood as ways of “explaining.” Humans have the intelligence and ability to question, to wonder, to seek the answer to “why.” Myths and stories (and that includes religion, of course) are old-fashioned ways of perceiving and describing our world and its origins, especially the parts of it that we didn’t (or still don’t) understand. Modern thinkers rely on science and reason to explain and describe what we know about the world, just as we use science and reason to pursue the answers to “why” and “how.” Modern thinkers are able to see religion, myth, narrative, etc., as archaic means of explanation. Modern thinkers are comfortable with not knowing, and their pursuit of real knowledge is a pleasure. Archaic thinkers are afraid of the unknown, so they continue to rely on old stories that contain “answers” rather than accept the still-questing, still-learning, modern, wondering human mind.
—-
It always amazes me that atheists, particularly scientists, are so often branded as lacking a sense of wonder about the world. I see it as precisely opposite, especially with scientists (of which I am not one): Scientists are motivated by wonder, by love of the real world, by a desire to understand it utterly, because they find it beautiful and endlessly fascinating. I may be projecting by own love for our world, but that’s how it has always seemed to me.
Or, as Terry Prachett put it, Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
“Plenty of creatures are intelligent but only one tells stories. That’s us: Pan narrans. And what about Homo sapiens? Yes, we think that would be a very good idea …”
Studies have shown that we’re predisposed to reorganize our internal memories into coherent (if not factually true) narratives, and have a tendency to make decisions based on emotional cues and then rationalize them later. I can definitely see how this mental bug/feature could expand to a society-level scale, resulting in culturally codified “just-so” explanations for natural events, stories that explicitly or implicitly reinforce the social pecking order, and even historical narratives sanctioned (of course) by the victors. Sounds like religion to me….
I love this poem.
I remember reading that our memories of what our dreams are, are caused by our brains trying to fit flashes of different random items and occurrences into a story.
“Pan narrans” seems like a very good name for us to me.
One of the earliest statuettes I know of is a human with a lion’s head. When I saw it, I didn’t think “god” but “alien”–the first science fiction is as early as representational art.
Very nice poem! “Pan narrans”–I like it. I wonder if the taxonomists will ever put us into the same genus as other chimpanzees, where logically we belong.
I couldn’t agree more!
I’ve posted a comment on another freethought blog that certain stories only work AS stories if they are believed as literally true. They in fact demand such belief to work AS A STORY. Religious myths, many general myths (especially in areas of the unknown, or areas that are specially imagined as unknowns in the narrative), conspiracy theories, and urban legends work this way. Moreover, as audience members of such stories, we want the stories to be GOOD stories, fun stories, meaningful stories, etc, and if the only way the story can be a good story is to believe it is true (regarding religious myths, urban legends, etc), then the farther into the narrative we get, the more we actually believe it. How fun is the story of a conspiracy theory if you think it is not true? However fun it is if we think it is not true, it is certainly FAR more fun (or meaningful) if we think it IS true, and also has the added benefit of making us feel like we figured something exremely important out, and very few others did. (It’s also fun and meaningful to believe we are special.) Besides, these kind of stories are especially tailored for us to believe they ARE true–that’s their whole point. Some of us can play around in alternate cosmologies for the sake of the story, laugh at how we got lost in it, and then go back to reality. Other people can’t make the transition back to reality very easily.
A couple fairly modern examples that come to my mind are the alien abduction book “Communion”, and the movie “The Blaire Witch Project”. The stories are crafted so that the audience must believe these are real events for the stories to work (at least while we are engaged with them)–and I’m not talking about simple suspension of disbelief, but heavy treading in belief territory. Not only does this foster a result where an audience member leaves the story to think (or perhaps FEEL) the story is true, but the storyteller and some audience members can take the myth BEYOND the text and pass it around as true.
…all because the story is so much more fun that way, and so very dull otherwise, by the very nature of the story. I can’t tell you how many times I had to tell my high school students when I was teaching that “Blaire Witch” was made up. Some actually protested because they said the movie said it was based on a true story. But why did they trust the movie to tell them the movie was true? Because it was fun to believe it, and not so much fun believe some film geeks took some cameras up in the woods. And when that movie finally faded in influence, they came out with that “The Fourth Kind” movie and the very same problem popped up again. Many students thought the “actual footage” was real. And why shouldn’t they? They want to believe it, and the story presented it as factual to make the story more fun. Of course, taking two seconds of research debunks the whole thing.
Nice point, Jacobfromlost–
I just talked to colleagues here–I am giving a talk soon, in meatspace, about ghost-hunting–and my colleagues just told me “they are going to hate you!” because I am going to be the one throwing cold water on these things that work better if they are true. I’m glad you wrote this comment; now I just have to figure out where it fits best in my presentation…
http://io9.com/5397359/the-fourth-kind-is-a-hoax
Case in point. Regarding the movie “The Fourth Kind”, this reviewer actually complains that the movie didn’t try hard enough to make the hoax beyond the story more believable–because the movie would have been better if more effort had been put into making it believable. He even complains that the fake websites (that ostensibly confirm the existence of the main character) were too plain, with no contact information to confirm her existence. And an apparently planted “news article” is attributed to a real reporter who, when contacted, said they never wrote that story. Clearly the movie would have been much better if they had worked harder to fake evidence that it was true, lol. How far should they have gone down that rabbit hole? Hire an actress to pretend to be a psychiatrist for a few months, doing tv interviews on Fox News? What about paying off newspaper reporters to write fake stories? Why not? At least the story would be more compelling!
Oh, we SO want to believe our stories.