Monkeys

[andrewducker]

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart have suggested that rather than being called Homo Sapiens (wise man) we should instead be called "Pan narrans" - the storytelling chimpanzee. Recent genetic results would tend to also place us extremely closely (within 1%) with Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus, the two other strains of Chimpanzee currently in existence.

In many ways the name Pan narrans clearly highlights a problem I see on a frequent basis. On the one hand we are animals, creatures evolved to fit a series of niches over millions of years, with brains and bodies tuned for various strategies that worked well enough for our ancestors to propagate. On the other hand we tell amazing stories to help the world make sense to us - spinning everything from simple dramas about not trusting Uncle Bob with the whisky bottle since the incident last Christmas to hugely complex mathematical epics concerning the origins and fate of the universe.

There are certain kinds of stories that particularly appeal to us - ones with a clear Right and Wrong, ones where the hero (or heroine) succeeds against tremendous odds (whether success be in vanquishing an enemy, getting the perfect job or finding their One True Love), ones where everything goes wrong - but only so the hero can learn from the experience and come out of it a better person.

There are, of course, other stories - ones where everyone dies, ones where nobody learns anything, ones which deliberately play against type, or where the point is that there is no point (see Andy Warhol's films for one example of this last type). These, however, tend to be less popular - they don't comfort people, and their appeal tends to be towards those people who are either interested on a meta level (i.e. with the fact that the stories themselves are being played with) or who find it impossible to suspend their belief enough to enjoy stories which tell them that everything is going to be alright.

Sometimes we tell stories so simple, reassuring and hard to disprove that they become insanely widespread - helped by the fact that people will try very hard to believe something if it means they can stop thinking about something discomforting. Religion, for instance, deals fantastically well with the worries of meaning and death - meaning is gained from God's will, and by following God's will we will all be rewarded after death.

The problem being that in our modern secular world, people still feel this instinctual need to make their life into stories, and we've done a pretty good job of weakening (and in some case removing) several of the threads that were most commonly used to construct those stories. This problem isn't helped by the fact that we are surrounded by more stories than ever before - TV, books, comics, movies, theatre, radio - all pumping out vast numbers of stories, the vast majority of which reinforce the feeling that things will turn out ok, that life has meaning, that the world has patterns we fit into, that there is something more.

All of this leads us to feel that our lives are lacking something because they aren't leading anywhere, that there is some grand design, if only we could see it (and the corrollary - that there are people out there controlling this grand design and excluding us from it), that some day we will understand and find something meaningful that will suddenly let us know exactly what we need to do to be happy.

It took me a few years to realise that my search wasn't going to turn anything up, because there was no intrinsic meaning or grand design. Reading between the lines of Dave Sim's insanity, it seems that he too was looking for meaning, but when he realised that the direction he was heading in wasn't heading for a pinnacle of epiphany but rather for the blank freedom of nihilism he ran screaming to unquestioning belief. Some people find meaning in helping others, in children, in achievement or in the search itself. Others do without meaning, either finding other ways to keep themselves happy, or anaeshetise themselves against the lack they feel.

The problem comes when people want something more - and don't realise that this something more is going to have to come from within. We define our own meaning - we write our own stories - we find our own path. Living for someone else's meaning is going to bring you as much happiness as attempting to enforce your meaning on others will bring to them.

Stories can help you deal with life, but they aren't real. We're not the centre of the universe, the centre of the only story, headed for revelations and a nice conclusion that wraps things up. We're monkeys, surviving any way we can, mucking about in the middle of a chaotic planet in the middle of nowhere. We're not special, and expecting the universe to treat us as so is just going to lead to disappointment and a constant sense that things aren't going the wya they're 'supposed to'.

"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." - Kurt Vonnegut

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

We're monkeys, surviving any way we can, mucking about in the middle of a chaotic planet in the middle of nowhere

I'm fairly certain that I said this to you in around 1998/1999 and you disagreed, probably due to whatever Big Theory Pop Science book/article you were reading ;-)

You saw the thing on Hannah's livejournal about monkeys and economics, I presume. It was about monkeys, money and Adam Smith. Not that one, the other one. The one who isn't renowned for liking monkeys.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

Interesting post. I agree with a lot of this, I think.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Yes. I'm sure we've talked about this many times over the years.

We should not change "Homo Sapien". It's largely accepted than humans are little more than special apes, mostly because religious loons had until recently backed off, so it seems pointless.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

so how much do you believe THIS story, rate it from 0 to 100%, where 0 would be not at all, this tale of meaning as a little light in the endless void has quite a poignant pull so more than that i guess, where 100% is completly believe, but this is a story about stories, an arabian nights for the soul, so you can't completely believe a story about how all stories are just stories, so it can't be quiet 100%, so how much are you believing your story, now, right now, in the amber of the moment (fade out on Julian Cope singing, "until you realise, its just a story, until you realise, it's just a stor...")

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

Not so sure about the monkey stuff. I'll need to read more around that but it seems agreeable. Generally agree with the life/meaning stuff though.

I do, however, err towards a slight belief in fate/luck. This is irrational as far as I can tell. Luck doesn't exist in a metaphysically quantifiable way - its just probabilities - luck isn't something you can have more or less of but I wise man once told me that 'you make your own luck' or rather 'its up to the individual to put themselves in front of and take positive opportunities. It is in this sense that I believe in luck. As for fate: well, its a bit more complicated. I had, while at university, what my christian friends call a 'religious experience'. Lets call it a supernatural experience - its something that a large chunk of the populace can expect to have in one way or another before they die and which cannot immediately be explained away by science. Who knows? Maybe I just had a brain fizz. Maybe the circumstances were just right for my mind's psychological and my brain's chemical states to produce what I experienced all by itself. It was not an epiphany that drastically changed my worldview but rather, it simply saved me from the overwhelming circumstances I was in. Regarding fate, I still, frequently, keep running into situations that I've dreamed about in detail previously. Recently, they centre around weird banal telephone conversations at work where the setting and subject are exactly the same but that I've dreamed as part of a larger dream months before. It triggers a terrible, sinking sense of deja vu. There are also instances in my life where the arrangement of people and events just seem too 'lucky' to have been a simple 'being in the right place at the right time'. Maybe I was just making my own luck.

Who knows? Its stuff like this that religious bodies thrive on. The last outposts of Things That Science Can't Explain Yet.

[in-thy-bounty.livejournal.com]

I found this very interesting. I've often struggled with the correlation of books, films and music with my own life with the end result that I often find it very difficult to be happy unless things are grandly exaggerated in a suitable manner.

p.s. - I hear that Andy Warhol did a film involving lesbian vampire sisters. How can that be considered pointless? HOW? HOW?!?!?!?!?!?!

[diotina.livejournal.com]

This ability of human beings to tell bloody good stories touched a chord in me recently while watching Samurai Jack (the episode with the multicultural mythology) - when I realised, that for the longest time, all I had wished for was for mythology to be true. Obviously, as a rational adult, I realise that these are only narratives to help us construct and understand the world, but with that also comes the realisation that many don't. Which, in its way, astounds me...because even though meaning might be 100% subjective, truth isn't.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

instinctual need to make their life into stories,

I think another probem with making lives into stories is that common reaction to other people's misfortune: 'you must have done something wrong', as if bad results are a reflection of moral badness, like they are in stories. As Oscar Wilde says 'The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily - that's what fiction means'. Unfortunately, a lot of people think the world itself works like that. You can see it in the reaction to Katrina 'Those dumb people were asking for it', 'They chose to be poor', 'This is god's judgement' and so on. A comforting lie.

Religion and oversimplification

[seebs.livejournal.com]

What's interesting here is that your description of religion actually fits perfectly with the thing that makes bad religion so effective; the desire to trivialize people with whom one disagrees.

The fact is that, for nearly all of us, there exists someone smarter and better educated than us who disagrees with us about religion, and for good reasons we have not adequately considered.

I am glad that you have found a view of life that allows you to interact with it; however, your smug dismissal of alternatives doesn't strike me as improving matters much.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

You wanna watch that heavy thinking or you'll end up a crazy as me :-)

Funny, I was thinking to day that people hand over the job of god/equivalent to something/someone else because it's such a tough bloody job being actually in charge of your existence (and knowing it).

As I have said to you before, the universe is arranging itself for my convenience so presumably, yours is for yours. Whether you are aware of it or not.

And I don't want anything more than what is - not that I can think of, anyway.

But we all (me included) get a bit too caught up in the story sometimes, I think....

[lord-caramac.livejournal.com]

I think what the world needs is more sex. People who are underfucked tend to think too much of the wrong kind of thoughts.