Hissssstory
The power of misstatement
Humans are inveterate storytellers. We all enjoy hearing stories and positioning ourselves within them. We like to win out, to feel good about our contributions and those of people we care about. If not heroes, the people in question at least need to be worthy of praise of some sort, even if that amounts to some kind of a meritorious inversion of goodness.
We come from somewhere and in the course of our lives we continue on in order to go elsewhere. This can involve symbolic and conceptual processing as well as means of enjoying improved physical conditions.
Storytelling is our way of understanding and of gaining guidance. Knowing how others have dealt with conditions they have faced, both in terms of nature and society, helps us to know what to do where we are confused otherwise. The whole question of processes wain support of this was a matter of great interest to Alfred North Whitehead and his student, James Grier Miller. Miller documented the similarity of such processes in all levels and scales of living systems, from tiny cells to very large societal and political groups as can be seen in the following image, supplemented by Al-Khalil and McFadden.
All of these kinds of living systems use information in similar ways. They have ways of bringing information inside in some form, modifying such forms for internal use, transmitting such “markers” as Miller calls them, decoding them as needed, associating them with other information, and storing them. Then, the information is made available for decision-making within the systems in question, after which the result is encoded and made available both within and without. This is how stories are constructed in living systems at all levels, using different languages, as you might call them. As information following such patterns interacts with similar processes of matter and energy, life persists, there is health, and cycles of life are carried on.
Hissssstory breaks these rules. It implies legitimacy because people are likely to expect the kinds of processes that are otherwise found in nature are in effect. This is where the slithery snakes come in. Rather than carrying out exhaustive activity to validate and recode inputs, they lean into interpretations based on preconceived notions. Alternatively, they may just as likely make things up, pretending that there is an external source of data. Such trickery can lack valid means of transcoding meanings when contexts change. There may not be a free flow of information and coding and decoding are ignored, skewed, or just poorly done. The deciding may be maligned or ignored and further association and distribution may be distorted.
As to journalism itself, there are many problems that can only be resolved responsibly and with adequate processes in place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards).
Such kinds of shortcomings bring disease, malfunction, and death to lower levels of living systems. This is what causes cells to underperform and die, for organs to malfunction, and for organisms themselves to lose viability. Many diseases we all suffer from are more a matter of inadequate information flow and management within our bodies. Diseases of society are similarly founded in imbalances and inadequacies within. Nature provides checks and balances even in small cells that are of breathtaking intricacy and importance. We can see that organization and management of our stories in the higher living forms are similarly important.
Hissssstorical militarization is venomous. In it, we see dangers everywhere. Who is it that conjures up such stuff? Keep in mind the point in “The Princess Bride,” a source of much wisdom if not merriment. There are people who work to cause wars and tumults; that is their profession, as it were. These are the geopolitical bagmen of our times. Out of almost eight billion people on Earth, it doesn’t take very many of them to foul things up, especially when it becomes their business model and they can use technologies to spread the effects of such vile deeds.
It is surprisingly easy to create and spread Hissssstory. You just need two potential antagonists, two contrasting colors, and some kind of insult generator. Start the fight and people will come.
People are highly susceptible to such methods. Americans are especially vulnerable. Tabloids are a problem, as is unbridled rants that are enabled by the “blinking cursors” of social media. Various televised sources of information that imply that they carry out journalistic processes based on shared societal goals but do not are a major source of the problem. There is no responsible coding and associating and deciding under such conditions. The results of this are pernicious in large part because if they succeed in slithering in, they can be persuasive.
Here are some poisonous presumptions resulting from sneaky storytelling that do not stand up:
There is more than one civilization. Carl Sagan wrote about the “pale blue dot” that could be seen from the last photograph beamed from the Voyager 1 as it left the Solar System on its way into deep space.
Making reference to ‘more than one civilization’ of humankind is one way of artificially setting up the “other” to fret over and to fear and fight with. In the 1990s, there was much published about a clash among civilizations on Earth. This is a misstatement and it creates misunderstandings as we look at history in the long run. Our differences, both biological and social, are not that great. The societies and cultures that have persisted through time are those that have cultivated cooperation within and that haven’t engaged in ruinous wars. Some of those have had catastrophic effects on the population and have served to end in extinction of some branches of the human family.
This is not to imply that there is one society or should be. This has not shown to be the human way. People like to form associations along familial lines or according to geographical or social preferences, or according to beliefs. This is not only to be encouraged, but to be depended on. This is clearly a precondition to human happiness. Such societies, furthermore, have shown to provide guidance and support as to responsible behavior.
This is a challenging fact, as societies have shown to be able to support pernicious and antisocial behavior as well. Sorting out which is which is a task that leans of the learnings of human civilization while not trampling on them in the process. There are substantial examples in the long history as to how this can be done.
History is short. In a previous article, I demonstrated some mathematical reasoning — out of the Bible — that connoted human history dating to potentially billions of years of human time, based on our orbital and gravitational profile here on Earth. We do not need to go back that far to understand that much of human history has been ignored if not skipped altogether. While people have been arguing over how life began and human societies have propagated, less energy has been spent on coming to understand why our ancestors did not kill each other off entirely.
The primary story is that in modern times, using modern ways, affairs were improved over old times in every aspect. Before Rome, actually similar to Rome, there were old tyrants and slaves and then “turtles all the way down” to steal a perhaps humorous metaphor about how the Earth is situated in space.
The story of the ‘modern’ saving the day from humanity’s ugly past was based on a guessing game by northern Europeans coming out of the Dark Ages and they guessed wrong. Rome wasn’t the thing; Greece wasn’t the thing; Assyria wasn’t the thing; Babylonia wasn’t the thing. There was much that had gone before and now we have access to records from ancient times that provide many of the details. These provide groundings for hope for better things.
There are some governance-oriented ancient wonders that need to be considered once understood. Who, for example, created the “four stoops” of rice-based agriculture that allowed for the success and growth of the Chinese culture over millennia? It seems that this occurred in and around the 2nd century BCE in China, but its provenance is not entirely clear. Sumer’s existence and record, as referred to later, provided many such riddles; how did they achieve their levels of success, and for so long?
Regimes of the last few centuries have allowed for substantial population increase. This is notable. It is also one good reason that we need to look for examples near and far on how we can live better together. I make some reading suggestions about history of civilization later. On this subject, reading “History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History” by Samuel Noah Kramer is a good place to start.
War between competing states is inevitable. This dangerous dose of venom comes from shallow consideration of the famous Sparta vs Athens wars as reported by Thucydides. The dynamics were that Athens’ openness was a challenge to Sparta’s spartan ways. The Spartans couldn’t abide that. Wars happened. Greece itself was weakened, with the result that it acceded to priorities of Macedonia and then Rome both belligerent in their own ways.
The presumption is that such asymmetries can only be resolved through war. This is a common presumption, often referred to as rationale for impending troubles between the United States and China.
Underlying this is another presumption, that Greece was ‘all of that’. To be sure, Greek efforts to avert continual problems brought on by vaguely defined kingships were laudatory and effective. More important than the shadows of Greek governance and the images of the past they were trying to duplicate are the examples of the old ways as can be found in contemporaneous societies, those that have survived the colonial onslaught onto the world. Examples of these can be found around the world and they need to be looked at with respect and humility.
If they in turn are engaged in activities that are universally unacceptable, they need to be held to account along with everyone else. This isn’t to say that they can provide views into the efficacy of civilizational norms that have long proven their value.
Following the Whitehead/Miller view of such matters, we can see that warlike behavior can be viewed as inevitable where isolation is prevalent. It may not be that Sparta felt a need to attack Athens for its opulence so much as Sparta’s inwardness and isolation, which represented some form of limitation on the state with regard to matter-energy and information. Living systems or open systems. If they cease to be open, they do not remain living for long. Isolation of individuals has shown to bring similarly scary prospects.
There is a disconnect between nature and nurture. The main problem here is demonstrated in the disconnect in science between physical and social science as if there was an important difference between them.
Nature expresses organization via processes which create cycles. Life at all levels extends and expands on these, with rippling and undulating effects that result from such repetitive patterns. This was considered earlier in the references to Whitehead and Miller. What applies to living systems as reflected in their work is also applicable to nature generally. The strong societies have demonstrate full embrace of this fact, making them more resilient and adaptable.
There are such things as static conditions. This factor, an outgrowth of the prior one, is the motherload of all problems. Politically, the call is often to return to prior better times. This is couched in the desire to return to a time and a condition of perceived happiness or a state of satisfaction or confidence that is currently lacking. This is often thought of as an event.
This can be considered in light of car restoration. The enthusiast may work to bring back his ’56 Chevy to that time when he had one as a boy or wished that he did. There may have been a race. He may have won or lost. There may have been a girl. She may have been impressed or she wasn’t. These can be thought of as states of grace — or not — that may have lasted forever or have introduced some kind of permanent happiness. No. There would have been another day, good or bad. This isn’t to say that there are not those key moments or events that set important directions in the individual and collective lives of people. Those don’t happen every day. Life is a matter of the constant and continual grind of activities, mundane in a lot of ways.
As a performer, I envy artists. They can create paintings or sculpture or buildings and the like and let them stand on their own. These can last for a very long time in some cases, we can see and enjoy works from thousands of years ago. As an artist, you can go off and get lazy or give it up and the thing stands on its own. Some performers get the same effect by recording their work if it is considered really good or great. The same can be said for movie actors; they can become immortal in this way.
If you perform music or engage in anything of the like, you have to gin it up every time, including warmups and mental efforts to get in the mood. As to history, this is also what we are talking about. All is process. All is cyclical. We need to keep doing this. This isn’t saying that bringing back the ’56 Chevy is not a good thing, but it will not bring back those times, conditions, and choices.
Bad guys win. This isn’t to say that bad guys can’t win. The question here is whether being bad is the thing that causes them to win. I remember the fun quote from the movie “Silverado”, where a key protagonist, Paden, describes an event from the outset where “everybody was pointing a gun except me”. A story about governance and how it can be skewed to the bad, that movie provided one example of how such a regime might end.
This comes down to mortality. How many times has someone, a person with questionable humanity, been able to ‘conquer the world’, while having to leave it all to the inevitability of death? The Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang was of this kind, as was Alexander the Great. They were great, but they utterly exhausted the people and no one wanted to go on after they died.
We see a few of these in contemporary world affairs — would-be autocrats with sketchy long-term prospects. Monarchies result from family plans, and they can succeed indeed where the people and cultures are supportive of them. Each generation has to prove its worth, at least to their primary supporters, who must in turn retain their power. If badness is what promulgates this over goodness and fairness, there is an inherent weakness there that is not present otherwise.
Apart from the poisons just listed, what are to be the goals of societies and how are they to come to understand their histories in meaningful and helpful ways? What are the prospects for desirable “theres”. Can we get “there” from “here”? Without groundings in history from multiple, viable, and reliable sources, it is easy to stumble and fall. It can be the equivalent to slipping on ice due to a lack of traction. As can be seen in the image below, knowledge can serve as a means of gripping our foundations and giving us protection against pernicious storytellers.
There are five historians whose work may be of help in this regard. Each of these considers the long and the short of this important subject. Of course, some may criticize these or any other historians — even scientists, for that matter — as being “x-ist” or “y-ist”, or “z-ist” without knowing even a glint of what they have to offer. That being said, with your dearly-bought public education, you have the tools and capabilities of making such judgments for yourself. You can read such works yourself and make up your own mind. You can engage in association in this way, just like any other kind of living system. You can then be the ‘decider’ as can they. The may not fit into the narrow little worlds of the naysayers, but it can have a decided impact on your widening world.
I recommend Fernand Braudel as a source of enlightening history, who takes on the question of civilization without flinching. All of his works are valuable on this question; particularly his “History of Civilization” and his trilogy “Civilization and Capitalism”. It is clear in his works that he didn’t start out with the “answer,” and he was not afraid of any subject or any source in his work. Eric Hobsbawm’s writings are similarly valuable for similar reasons.
Third is Mark Nathan Cohen, who you might think is too much of a scientist to be a historian, but his work cuts right to the chase as to how people have lived over many millennia. Kees van der Pijl’s works are fresh and illustrative if you can keep up with them — particularly his trilogy “Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy”. If you have cracks that need to be filled, Oxford’s “A very short introduction” series will surely offer balms to ease the pain of ignorance in the area in question. They are all short and sweet and not expensive. You could say that they are Cliff Notes for grownups.
If you want to have a grounded view of our current conundrum, there is no better place than the works of Karl Polanyi, especially his “The Great Transformation”. It is clear in his work that much of what was considered to be modern development was more of a process of quashing what had long been done before. This is particularly true with respect to safeguards for life-supporting needs of individuals as provided by societies. The strong, abiding societies did this. I reiterate that Samuel Noah Kramer’s works are a good place to start with regard to the longer history of civilization.
Finally, I do not believe that the solution to Hissssstory’s poisons is poison at all — which might be effective with regard to building up resistance to snakebites. The antidote is knowledge of the real stories, research and brought up by the people who know, who care, and who have committed their lives to such a cause.