Fish swim. Birds fly. Human minds think.
Each of these activities, though, requires a medium. Fish swim in water. Birds fly in air. What do our minds think in?
This question sounds absurd––”In the brain, of course!” But I wonder if there isn’t some common sub-stratum, some word we could give to that space where our thoughts swim and soar. Part of the absurdity of this question is the irregularity of that preposition “in.” We think about things, don’t we? Not in them.
Let’s say that thought begins as phantom senses. We think of a friend, and the phantom of their face flashes on the mind. We think of ice-cold water, and its phantom stings our fingers. We consider memories of freshly baked bread, and the specter of its smell arises as a thought in the nose.
Having spent our lives speaking, reading, and writing, words also live as ghosts inside us, appearing in our thoughts here and there. And words are strange creatures, reaching their long fingers through time and space to create phantom senses of things we’ve never seen, felt, or smelled ourselves.
Words make thinking seem more complicated than it is. They’re not just long-fingered ghosts, but also strict formulae, pieces of a puzzle that must follow certain rules to build coherent pictures. It’s so easy to get lost in their game that we miss entirely what is happening when we think. We miss that thought is nothing more than a motion through relationships.
Fish swim in water. Birds fly in air. Human minds think in webs of relationships.
I think of a friend, and the face I relate with them appears in my mind’s eye. I think of ice-cold water, and I relate the sharp sting I’ve felt on my skin when I’ve touched it. I consider my mom’s homemade bread, and my nose reviews the smells it recalls.
Thought flows through chains of association.
As speaking creatures, we must, over and over, give voice to our thoughts so that others can think with us along some chain of association we’ve discovered. We often call this “explanation,” but the more honest term is “storytelling.” “Explanation,” much like “fact,” falsely connotes complete truth. “Story,” though, implies perspective. Using the term “storytelling” leaves more room for doubt and interpretation than does its dry cousin, “explanation.”
We never simply explain our thoughts. Instead, after drifting through some chain of association, we tell the story of how we think.
Stories don’t just come out of us, though––they come to us from others, too. Each story we receive expands the network of relationships in our minds. The strongest stories, the ones that provoke our sense of realness, have the ability to repattern the mind completely.
An example: in American society today, many have been taken by the story of QAnon. Some government insider, they say, has revealed that the government is infested with members of a Satanic, child-eating cult. Let’s set the truth aside for a moment and consider the effect of this story. If a mind’s sense of realness is provoked by the QAnon tale, it repatterns their relationship with the world around them so powerfully that they come to act in ways that others deem absurd.
Let’s call narratives that repattern the mind, “Big Stories.”
To be Big, a story must apply to everyone. If QAnon adherents were correct, then we’d all feel a strong moral obligation to bring down these child-kidnapping villains who live at the center of power. Many of the longest lasting Big Stories derive their power from their universal claims on all people, and we tend to call them “religions,” a word that has been said to have originated in the idea of binding. To be religious, then, implies the binding of one’s patterns of thought and/or behavior to the course & logic of a Big Story that claims to be applicable to everyone. In this sense, QAnon followers are religious.
“Science,” at least the way it functions in our conversations and news articles, is yet another Big Story––the tale that some people out there, “scientists,” hold the keys to true knowledge, and that sensible people (a type of character in this story) trust scientists. Those who don’t are cast as insensible. In our time, public norms tend to bind themselves to the religion of Science more than any other.
A division between the sensible and the insensible is another common feature of Big Stories, all of which draw firm, but vastly different, boundaries between sanity and madness, righteousness and villainy.
“But some Big Stories are built on facts and others on falsehoods!”
We have to remember that facts are always manufactured. Once a story is Big enough, it builds factories to produce weapons of mass persuasion: informational grenades meant to burst the foundations of the other Big Stories against which it competes: new items for the mind to link through its network of relationships so that an individual’s thoughts, once they are familiar with the “facts,” easily float along chains of associational patterns that run parallel with the Big Story’s tale.
“But what about Truth?”
The necessary question. I can’t answer in any way that satisfies me fully. Do I believe in Truth? Yes. There are features of reality beyond our control, and our best stories convey those features clearly.
My complaint, though, is that while humanity has improved the stories it tells about the physical world to the point that we can communicate through invisible waves of light, launch ourselves to the moon, and cure all kinds of diseases, I don’t think we’ve much improved the stories we tell about ourselves and each other.
And so I remain deeply doubtful of the Big Stories––the isms––progressivism, liberalism, Marxism, conservatism, and all the rest––and I squeeze my eyes in skepticism at the contradicting facts their followers make.
The better way, I think, is not to swallow whole the facts we encounter in books, conversations, media, and TV. Doing this often leads blindly down the path of one Big Story or the next. Much better, I think, to take hold of whatever facts intrigue us, shake off the stories they’ve been molded to fit, and subject them to our own essay.
What do I mean by that? Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more.
Until next week,
Josh
On Big Stories
I appreciate the sense of selection implicit in the solution you propose, taking hold of facts, shaking them loose, detaching them from the bigger stories into which they have settled and viewing them in the context of the other facts that have intrigued us, arranging them all into a new story, a story of our own. Among other things, it reminds me of the line from Emerson's Spiritual Laws, "A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes." Excited to see how you think of the product of that activity, the essay, which must be a kind of alternative to or replacement of religion.
A question I had: you say all Big Stories draw a firm line between sanity and madness, or what we can simply call the "in" and the "out." Is that true? Are there are any Big Stories or big story traditions in which it is a central and enduring impulse to blur that line, to erase the (traditionally built-up) distinction? For example, the early Christian church seems to have been animated by a desire to erase distinctions like one between the "righteous" and the "villainous" or "rejected," or generally between the "in" and the "out." In fact, this remains a strand of Christianity to the present day. If so, are they a counterexample to your conception of big stories or were and are they not adherents of what you would call a Big Story? Why not? This leads me to wonder if your problem is not with big stories as such but a rigid interpretation, enforcement and weaponization of them.