The Story Tells the Truth
Thursday, April 26th, 2007A thought has been bouncing around inside my head for a few days now. I’m certain that it’s not wholly original. In fact, I can trace the seed of it to Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth.” I’m sure there are some other really smart people to blame for this mild obsession.
This is as simply as I can summarize it: All of the “explanations” that humans have created for everything are really just narratives that tell the story of an unknowable “all.” Let me explain.
First, let’s look at religions (a lot of this is Campbell). Many of them are bound up in stories whose proof is only in their professing of their own truth. These are narratives that attempt to explain actions, conditions, behaviors, and reason through the use of examples, symbols, and allegories. They are stories that we humans have created to attempt to grasp the capital-T “Truth.”
Religions are probably more effective at this in that many of them are based on some aspect of historical truth. That is, someone named Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed probably did really live. He may have done or said some things that seemed really intriguing and insightful. It’s this nugget of truth which makes the narratives within religion so compelling.
Second, let’s take physics. I don’t know much about physics, which will be painfully obvious rather quickly. It seems, though, that physics spends an awful lot of time trying to explain things for which its previous explanations have simply failed to suffice. Quantum physics nearly rendered the entire subject obsolete when it arrived on the scene. It helped usher in the amazingly oxymoronic Chaos Theory. So, now the story of physics tells us that certain things are immutable: gravity, the speed of light, or the wavelength that makes my wife’s eyes green. Then, in its next chapter, it wants us to wrap our head around the idea that all of that may not matter and in fact can’t matter.
The narrative is being written as we read it. Religion’s narrative is long and like some Xmen comic book has a huge continuity to keep intact, but the narrative of physics gives us a narrative framework in which the continuity is infinitely malleable. That’s very convenient.
Math seems to spend a lot of its opening chapters giving us constants like physics does: 2+2=4 for example. Yet, it strives to so much more because it begs the language of religion to come play along. We are to take on faith the notion that a negative number is somehow something with which we should have some concern.
Math also wants us to believe that there are numbers, like Pi, which we cannot fully comprehend. It’s like the belief that Mohammed asks us to take when his overly convenient revelations say that the Meccans can continue to worship a few lesser gods and still be his followers. Pi never ends and the djinns of the desert still fit into Mohammed’s absolute monotheism.
These are examples of the classic author’s intrusion into the narrative. A sort of deus ex machina for which we must take a leap of faith and simply suspend our disbelief. Whenever the story gets written into a corner, we change the rules a bit to open up new vistas and new locations for our characters to enjoy.
I should say here that there is nothing wrong with any of this. It’s important to try to understand the world around us and our place in it. I applaud the fact that this effort takes the form of a narrative. I believe in the power of stories to help us transcend the earthly bonds and truly grasp some greater commonality. I believe just as strongly that its important to understand these things as stories. We should not only realize that they are narratives crafted by the human hand, but that they are not the only narratives.
The bookshelves at the local Barnes and Noble are full of stories which might illuminate some dimly-lit corner of the human story. No one author or character has the monopoly on the “right” story, or if you must, the “Truth.” Every story is important and valid. Whether it be religion, evolution, math or the latest chick lit, it serves as a reflection of the story of us–all of us.
The upshot of all this is that the conclusion to all these stories is unknowable. In fact, they are mere reflections of the unknowable nature of the cosmos. I don’t trust the man who says, “I know that light moves at 299,792,458 meters per second.” I don’t trust the man who says, “I know that if I died tonight, I would go to heaven with Jesus.” That’s the man who presumes to know who the killer is in a Raymond Chandler novel after only reading the first three chapters.
Again, it’s not wrong to create these narratives, as long as we don’t talk about them in absolutes. We must treat them the way we do a Seamus Heaney poem. We are respectful and gentle, but not afraid to tear it down into its combinant parts in an effort to see past the reflection into the “there.”
There’s certainly more to explore within this idea. I would love to hear some comments on writers, thinkers, musicians who are playing around with this idea. I’ll say it again. I know this is not original thought, so please share with me some of the places I might have picked up pieces of this.
