> This helps to explain why we invest so much time and energy into fiction, far more than did any of our ancestors.
Is this true? I think story-telling has been generally prioritized by humans at most place and times. It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it.
But the OP is some interesting ideas, I'm still trying to figure out the implications.
> Our moral evaluations of the main big actions that influence our world today, and that built our world from past worlds, are still up for grabs. And the more we build such shared evaluations, the more we’ll be able to tell satisfying stories set in the world in which we live, rather than set in the fantasy and historical worlds with which we must now make do.
Hmm. I think some of the best stories help us work out our moral evaluations and build shared ones. This isn't just something that happens outside of fiction and then affects our consumption of fiction -- fiction, for the reasons the OP outlines in fact, is one of our tools for working it out. We build shared evaluations by telling stories. Story-telling is fundamental to how humans make sense of the world, moral and otherwise, but moral too. I think OP would agree? That is in fact why we fight over it, because we know how powerful it is in this area? Not sure.
As a devotee of speculative fiction, I'm a bit offended at the framing that it is something we must "make do" with out of our moral confusion. Like any other genre, there is good and bad, but I think at it's best SF can be a notably valauble tool in helping us self-reflect and develop our moral sensibilities, it is in fact a power that SF has particularly. Sure, there's plenty of lazy SF that avoids reflection or difficult questions, but at it's best it has a particular power to challenge in a way that builds new understandings, precisely by inviting the reader to look at things with fresh eyes instead of the comfort of the familiar and legible.
It's actually a major thesis of the book Sapiens that the use of fictive language is what allowed Homo Sapiens to become the dominant species. Shared stories helped solidify social groups and allowed disparate tribes to recognize each other. The most important stories and myths are obviously religious ones. And I think to your point, ancient peoples debating those stories with far more fervor than any flame war on a Star Wars forum.
I say this pretty comfortably as an atheist but even if you're a believer than at least everyone else's religious myths are fiction.
You may think that we believers are all that way, but we aren’t. As a Discordian, I believe that everyone else’s religious myths are true. Even the false bits are true in a dialectic sense. Such is life here in Plato’s Cave.
Stories are also deep magick for Discordians. They are perhaps the only tool we can use to get someone to change their mind about something important. It is only when, at long last, the fiction weaves its spell to transplant your sense of identity elsewhom that you feel true sympathy.
Hang on. Everything is true even contradictory things "in a dalectic sense" but then you embrace tools to get somebody to change their mind. So you get people to change their mind from one true thing to another true thing. This is just word mush.
Are you... serious? I am really not sure how to ask this question without it sounding offensive. I am not sure, and wikipedia suggests that Discordianism is a parody of a religion.
> According to self-proclaimed "crackpot historian" Adam Gorightly, Discordianism was founded as a parody religion. Many outside observers still regard Discordianism as a parody religion, although some of its adherents use it as a legitimate religion or as a metaphor for a governing philosophy.
Although I doubt many people consider it a religion, it's certainly an interesting philosophical view and makes as much (or as little) sense as many other schools of philosophy or theology.
I have heard Discordianism described as "a religion for people who think ALL religions are parodies" and that seems largely accurate. The internal contradictions are an essential part of it.
I think the most likely situation is that everyone's religious myths are false. But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true, and the least likely is that one is true and the rest are false. I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before.
> But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true... I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before.
You have to expand your understanding of "truth" when it comes to religious myths to make that work, because of course some contradict on their face.
But yeah, I have seen it advocated in several ways. From the sort of liberal platitude "all religions are just different paths to the same underlying diety", to a certain kind of neo-pagan constructivist "We make religions true by believing in them." I lean toward the latter.
Certainly, more people have advocated for the first position than I have.
You’ve heard the allegory of blind men in a dark room trying to describe an elephant to each other, right? Each one holds a different part of the animal. The person holding a leg thinks it’s a tree, the one holding the tail thinks it’s furry, and so on. They can all be right while calling each other wrong.
What definition of "right" are you using? Words have meaning. It sounds cool to say everything can be true but it's rubbish. The man who thinks the elephant leg is a tree is wrong. Is this so difficult to understand?
"Right" in this case means that the evidence each man has gathered is all correct, even if it appears to contradict the stories that others are telling. The conclusions are wrong, but their mode of interacting with the elephant is consistent.
The whole idea of divinity is that it is beyond us. Many cultures say they have knowledge of the divine, but each culture interacts with it differently. And if the thing they are interacting is really some 11-dimensional being, why not both?
So you can conclude that it's a bunch of shared delusions, because it appears to be uncorrelated. But what if it's not? Sometimes, it does seem correlated. Here is where the leap of faith is. (It's always hidden in there somewhere.) What if, instead, they're describing different aspects of the same font of divinity?
Sorry but this is just an example of word mush. It's not complicated. The men are blind. They are not reliable witnesses. The probability of them being correct about any observation they make is very low.
It just sounds cool. Blind men, elephants etc. Mystical woo.
What is important about any model is it's ability to predict the future. The blind men are evidently unable to do this and thus are independently worthless as oracles.
Of course the men could pool their experiences and admit they were wrong about individual predictions and using prior knowledge about objects known in the world would be able to come to the conclusion about the elephant.
However as an allegory about the divine this fails because there is no prior evidence to conclude that there are any such divine objects exist. We don't know what a divine object is.
You then will end up falling back to some variation of Pascal's wager where an infinite value multiplied by zero evidence somehow produces something you sell shares in.
> It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it.
Of course it is obvious. People waste their lives away consuming fiction in the way of books, netflix, video games, politics. The luxury of doing that en masse simply was not possible if we go ways back. Hell, just in my lifetime this has changed. 25 years ago I heard of no one watching ten episodes of a series in one sitting.
I believe most people now spend far more time with and engaged in fictions than reality. People even think that the fictions media create are real. Most news are editorialized and fictionalized. What is presented is not reality. What people spend most of their time on a phone on, social media, are to a high degree fiction. That is not reality you are engaging with.
Reality is closer to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid than the top.
25 years ago, so 1996? Yeah people did that with VHS tapes. Console games, both solo and parties, were things that carried on into the night. Civilization on the PC was infamous for "one more turn" in to the wee hours of the morning.
In 1996 the average household watched about 5.5 hours of TV per day.
The peak of TV watching was actually around 2010, it's gone down since then (although still above 1996 levels!) -- replaced of course with internet use of various kinds, including kinds that could be considered "fiction consumption" as well as not (social media I would only consider fiction consumption as a joke!).
Another thing that has gone down since 1996 is leisure reading time (again they don't usually count social media as leisure reading though).
I don't have numbers on how much time a medievel European peasant spent listening to stories, plays, or narrative music.
People may have on average more leisure time than they had 500+ years ago! As you say, "The luxury of doing that en masse simply was not possible." But now we're talking about a different thing, the OP's claim was that "we invest so much time and energy into fiction, far more than did any of our ancestors" because of a crisis of moral shared meaning, not simply because of an increase of leisure time.
The leisure time of people in different social positions in different times and places is another (interesting) question, but I think people have always chosen to use much of their leisure time (time not required for material survival) and energy on fiction.
OK, people didn't watch the same program 10 times in a row, but they did watch 6 hours a night of brainrot TV (2 hours of which were commercials), from returning from their job to going to bed.
The TV dinner was popular over 50 years ago -- people didn't have time to actually eat without consuming fiction
No handwringing, I do not give a fuck what people spend their time on, it is their life. Just saying I think people are wholly absorbed in fictions these days in ways rivals anything in the past. Today fictions permeates everything, and most seem unable to separate it from reality. Half the US population even believes outlandish conspiracy theories.
If we go “ways back” then we don’t have much hard data on how people spent their time. It doesn’t seem at all obvious to me that people consume more fiction now than they used to, though they certainly do it in different ways.
Through all of history, history was proverbially "written by the victors". However, the permanence of a pervasive digital memory might be playing the spoiler to that would-be whitewashed history. And in some perverse sense, it may be blocking us from developing any history.
A side issue, but I think it may be just cause to wonder who the victors of that conflict actually were in the end... turns out, it may have been 'white people' generally on 'both sides', after a brief period of "reconstruction" that could have ended differently but didn't. All those statues were erected after that period -- indeed they do look kind of like victory statues, curious isn't it? Who won what before erecting those statues, hmm?
The proverb of course isn't literally always true, it isn't only "the victors" who write history. But the powerful do have a disproportionate (but not exclusive) influence on what gets remembered how (what gets remembered how is a factor of both what historical record is left and who can advance their interpretation of it). The victors tend to be more powerful than the vanquished, if they don't appear to be then there might be some confusion over who won what exactly.
I haven't heard that interpetation of history. It sounds dubious to me... after all, slavery was abolished, and the Fourteenth Amendment was passed. And the South was set way back, economically, compared to the North.
It is a period of history absolutely essential for understanding how we got to where we are, which is often not taught at all to schoolchildren.
It began with Black elected legislators and city council members and increased Black economic activity and equality and integration. It ended with the return of de facto Black serfdom and disenfranchisement in the South. And that's when they started putting up the statues. (Who is "they"? It wasn't Black people putting up the statues, was it? So who won and who lost?)
Heather Cox Richardson (who has gained recognition lately with her daily posts on politics) is actually a historian, her book is titled "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America"
Here's a New Yorker article by Adam Gopnick with the same title, which is actually a review of a different book by Henry Louis Gates. It gives you an overview of how Reconstruction went.
> One mistake the North made was to allow the Confederate leadership to escape essentially unscathed. Lincoln’s plea for charity and against malice was admirable, but it left out the third term of the liberal equation: charity for all, malice to none, and political reform for the persecutors. The premise of postwar de-Nazification, in Germany, was a sound one: you had to root out the evil and make it clear that it was one, and only then would minds change. The gingerly treatment of the secessionists gave the impression—more, it created the reality—that treason in defense of slavery was a forgivable, even “honorable,” difference of opinion. Despite various halfhearted and soon rescinded congressional measures to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from returning to power, many of them didn’t just skip out but skipped right back into Congress.
These are the people who had the resources and power to put up those statues...
Thank you for the explanation, I see what you mean.
I wouldn't describe it as the South "winning", but the North clearly didn't solidify the win quickly enough. I wonder whether that was a bad idea, or whether it came from some real fragility of the North's win, or the fact that it was a civil rather than a foreign win?
I tend to take position that history is made by the present “victors” or “powerful”.
Right now, Hitler was evil, Jesus was good, Ghandi is good, Rome was important, Greek philosophy matters, etc
But in some future time or different place, history is different. Columbus used to be a hero, now he’s a far more controverisal figure. Maybe some fascistic future would see Hitler cast as a hero much like George Washington. History will have changed.
The past happened how it happened, but how that past is filtered and turned into the narrative we call history happens in the present
One of the most insightful Internet comments I’ve read. Science Fiction can illuminate questions of moral reasoning by abstracting away all of the pesky complications that make the answer to most real moral dilemmas “it’s complicated.”
I appreciate the compliment, but your analysis makes me worry! The pesky complications that make things complicated is part of moral reasoning, abstracting them away to simplicity can be a dangerous recipe for immoral and instrumentalizing reasoning!
I think of it instead like SF can give us an "alien anthropologist's" view of ourselves, seeing ourselves from a different perspective for a momentary forgetting of assumptions that may not be serving us or... maybe we were over-simplfying abstracting away the complexities when we shouldn't have been! Then like in a planet of the apes moment, "But it's our planet after all!" SF can be complexifying as much as simplifying!
I wonder if part of the reason could be copyright. In the past if you thought that Beowulf, King Arthur, or Robin Hood should have ended different you were free to publish a version with your preferred ending. Today, our shared cultural stories are owned by corporations who get to decide who gets to tell them.
The Bible and other holy books aren't copyrighted. Anyone is free to publish their preferred version of the Bible or the Quran. Yet disagreements over the meaning of these texts have been happening for millenia.
I think the metaphor there is similar. The church did not historically take kindly to individuals publishing "their version" of holy texts without sanction of the church.
This speaks to me as someone who's critical of many of the hit stories in our popular culture. In the last decade, I've often wondered why our relationship to the future has changed so much since the first days of Star Trek. The easy answer would be to cite all the impending ways the planet is doomed. However, living through the cold war felt, in many ways, more pressingly dire, and Star Trek happened at basically the same time as the cuban missile crisis.
In the context of this essay, our moral future is far less certain. The cold war had an old narrative to it, with easy villains. The world of today makes it more difficult to avoid the nuance. It can even explain why so many AAA game titles fall back to derivative, Tolkien-esque settings.
I wonder that as well. When I ask the question out loud, people usually answer "Well, everything looks so much worse now". I don't think that's the real reason -- Star Trek aired as the Vietnam War heated up, during an era of high-profile political assassinations, and it reached mass popularity in the 70s, which no one at the time regarded as a high point.
What's changed is that we no longer believe in the future, that the future could be better than the present.
Could it just be luck? Some author writes a hit story. That story influences followers. If the original story was a downer then suddenly there are more downer followers. It becomes a kind of culture or bubble that most people are unaware they're viewing everything through that lens.
Further, modern media takes that even further. Plenty of producers, marketing people, people with the purse strings just want more of whatever was popular last year. Which creates a trend to produce more of the same.
Yes, real life events are also an influence but similarly, one extremely popular title can influence followers for years/decades.
To put it another way, if there was no Walt Disney would there be 150+ famous family oriented feel good animated movies that have influenced so much of our culture OR, would we have some entirely different culture because one artist (or team of artists) works didn't have that particular level of influence.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea what we primarily like stories that take place in familiar (moral) universes. For a lot of pop-fiction that's surely true but generally works we think of as being of merit challenge the reader.
A lot of Borges stories come to mind. Stanislaw Lem's work like Solaris, on moral issues surely Nabokov's Lolita or Ada or Ardor. The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union, Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness with takes on sexuality way ahead of their time and so on. If I go through my list of favourite books there's a lot of those.
Not addressing the moral relativism of the article, but I’ve seen arguments over dungeons and dragons and Tolkien that share so much in common with religious and political arguments, to the extent that I now suspect political and religious arguments as equally about fictions. Further, once you consider that businesses, money and property are termed “legal fictions,” it is both alarming and impressive how little time and space concrete reality takes in our minds and affairs, comparatively. The rampant falsities flying around the last few years and their diehard adherents made me wonder what percentage of an average persons beliefs are strictly false, but for which there are no negative consequences. In a lot of ways, brains seem to prefer false things, and societies insulate from reality and protect individuals from their false beliefs.
Anyway, I suppose the title made me hope for something even more Neo-meets-Morpheus mind-bending.
We have a built in illusion that morality is discovered, not invented. But our moral flexibility over time is huge, and can encompass things like slavery and genocide. It could as easily encompass farming and eating live babies, or other horrors up to and including human extinction.
To the extent that fiction acknowledges and explores such moral spaces it's natural for it to be contentious. Exploring alternative moralities is necessarily immoral to the prevailing morality. A culture of profound tolerance is required for such explorations, and such cultures are evanescent and poorly distributed.
The morality of fictional universes is dictated by how the author constructs the options which their characters might choose. When the characters reflect on their choices and consider the effects of their actions, then they exhibit morality.
I think you've missed the point of the article, which is that authors usually construct the options in such a way that the morality thereby displayed is ultimately an easy and comfortable one for the reader. The article is a paean to fiction that is uncomfortable and therefore capable of helping us push at the boundaries of our increasingly outdated ideas of morality.
The author and I have different definitions of morality. To the author, morality is only available for humans. However, I subscribe to Pirsig's morality, which means that I believe that atoms are moral too: Their morality is the laws of chemistry.
Viewed this way, the typical human is exhorted to "do what they want" (Pirsig's MoQ [0]) or "do what they will" (Discordianism) and the morals which the author is discussing are arbitrary cultural artifacts.
Of course, however, Pirsig's morality is neither easy nor comfortable, because it is the morality of pragmatists. To choose to do something is to choose for the effects of what one has done to be real in the world.
Is this true? I think story-telling has been generally prioritized by humans at most place and times. It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it.
But the OP is some interesting ideas, I'm still trying to figure out the implications.
> Our moral evaluations of the main big actions that influence our world today, and that built our world from past worlds, are still up for grabs. And the more we build such shared evaluations, the more we’ll be able to tell satisfying stories set in the world in which we live, rather than set in the fantasy and historical worlds with which we must now make do.
Hmm. I think some of the best stories help us work out our moral evaluations and build shared ones. This isn't just something that happens outside of fiction and then affects our consumption of fiction -- fiction, for the reasons the OP outlines in fact, is one of our tools for working it out. We build shared evaluations by telling stories. Story-telling is fundamental to how humans make sense of the world, moral and otherwise, but moral too. I think OP would agree? That is in fact why we fight over it, because we know how powerful it is in this area? Not sure.
As a devotee of speculative fiction, I'm a bit offended at the framing that it is something we must "make do" with out of our moral confusion. Like any other genre, there is good and bad, but I think at it's best SF can be a notably valauble tool in helping us self-reflect and develop our moral sensibilities, it is in fact a power that SF has particularly. Sure, there's plenty of lazy SF that avoids reflection or difficult questions, but at it's best it has a particular power to challenge in a way that builds new understandings, precisely by inviting the reader to look at things with fresh eyes instead of the comfort of the familiar and legible.