07/03/2007 Why We Learn More From Fiction Than From History

07/03/2007 Why We Learn More From Fiction Than From History

Re-reading “A Natural History Of Rape” got me thinking about evolution, Evolutionary Psychology and how limited we are. After all, if all we ever do is explain what has happened, it will yield only partial knowledge about that which could happen. Which is the larger category? Our History tells us of that part of the human experience that we have decided to record. But that which is possible is limited only by our imaginations.

The whole idea of recording events, and learning from them, was a humanist idea. This was the culture of the greeks, hundreds or even thousands of years prior to the birth of Christ. (I often wonder that if Christ realized what he was starting, would he have chosen not to start it at all.)

Prior to the Greeks, the idea of recording history was not really an option. And many cultures, of the era and of subsequent eras, opposed the option. These cultures had stories that orally communicated the wisdom that their societies were built upon; actual history was often a threat to that. As Christianity took over Europe, the tide turned and many of the humanist values were regarded as selfish and deemed to be against the word of God. The one true source of wisdom was to be God, and God would only speak through the church. Many of the humanist's texts and ideas were only preserved in secret, by priests who were educated and willing to risk death to preserve them. But the seeds of the return of this humanist value began in the heart of the dark ages by Saint Augustine.

Saint Augustine's philosophies were somewhat of a double-edged sword when viewed through our modern lenses. He was the one who decided that women were passive by nature, where men were dominant. But he also decided that God's word is written into our History. The humanist's vision was coming back through the church itself.

But while this was a landmark occasion for those who love history, it might have been the end of the humanist's vision of a history recorded objectively and then analyzed rationally. The church now has numerous organizations whose purpose is to “spin” history so that it's lessons match their faith. History would then become a political toy. Written and rewritten to match the visions of whomever took power, or a pen (or a blog).

In our country, nothing demonstrates this effect as well as the civil war. During the war, Lincoln reminded us again and again that the first Civil War was not about slavery, but the preservation of the union. The South was largely agricultural, in the vision of Thomas Jefferson, where the north was industrial in the vision of Alexander Hamilton. Many of the senators who debated the slavery issue were open about the fact that they were not so much concerned about slavery as the fact that the South was “winning”, that their vision of an industrial America was falling because of slavery. Lincoln himself was racist, based on his own policies. While he did believe that slavery was wrong, he also believed that the Africans were inferior beings and could never hope to prosper in a country with their more civilized, more capable white counterparts. And he said so often. Had he not been assassinated, he would have signed a bill that would have sent all of the slaves back to Africa.

But years later, when these facts crept into history books, people were outraged. Even those that were old enough to have lived through the period and knew what the books were saying was true were outraged. The history books were rewritten. And to this day, many of the racist statements in Lincoln's speeches are omitted so as not to stir up controversy. The tradition of manipulating history continued in the political arena in 2000, as the successful subversion of democracy was punctuated by the supreme court's order to have the ballots destroyed. (So many people at the time just wanted the issue to go away. Al Gore was the only one who had the resources (6 billion dollars in his coffers from the election) and the motivation to fight the injustice. The people were jaded, as they always are, and I feel that Gore feared that he would look selfish if he fought the decision. But the finger was pointing at him to be the one man who could restore democracy to America and he bitched out. Yes, it would have been the wrong move politically for Gore, but that's the only time it counts. Anyone who has read Gore's report on terrorism, prepared as vice-president for Clinton and subsequently shelved by “W”, knows that Bush's appointment by the aristocracy led directly to 9-11)

Remember, one of the chief motivations of human nature is fear. Once the idea of learning from History became widespread, people had to start using it to try to control their environment. Fiction is not entirely immune to factions of control, but much of it is.

In the realm of the imagination, one can explain not only what is, but what could be. Because many of us now understand that science, history, and fiction are all just functions of the imagination. When we find the limits of nature, we only find the limits of our own minds. And if we can learn to use our minds to study itself, then we cannot accept the limits of that small part that we label objective reality; though, that, in the end, might be the safest place for us.