Analogismoi Six: Stories

Several weeks ago we discussed how action is the cradle for thought. As we are getting ready to embark on the project of walking through the biblical stories, it is important to stop for a moment and consider how it is that stories come about.

The human story begins some eight million years ago with the split from the chimpanzee common ancestor. Why exactly human’s split and evolved the way they did and chimpanzees stayed the same is something we will discuss more when we are talking about Adam and Eve. For now, however, we can just note that we didn’t fall out of the

trees doing calculus and saying “bless you” when people sneeze. The road to becoming us was very long and filled with a lot of suffering and death. You are the end result of three and a half billion years of successfully reproducing pairs and you are driving, in essence, a machine that is way more complicated than you (or anyone) understands. This is the primary reason that Nietzsche so dreaded the death of God. The Christian underpinning of the west cannot simply be removed by a cold objective science while societal norms remain the same. There is, without the christian foundation, absolutely no reason for me to wait patiently in line at a drug store rather than forcing my way to the front. We are a product of these stories. They are us.

The first binary distinction man likely made was the distinction between known and unknown. What is known? Well, for early man maybe the tree was known or maybe it was a fire around which his family or tribe gathered…what we would recognize as a proto town square. Now unknown was a little different, it came in many forms. You could think of the unknown in geographical terms — the unknown territory versus the known territory. Known territory is, of course, safer and more comfortable because it is known. However, because it is known it has already been mined for anything of value. The unknown territory, with all its dangers, was not a place of safety and comfort but had the potential of enriching those courageous enough to confront it. This is a big part of the idea of the dragon that hoards treasure.

Other aspects of the unknown come in the form of prey animals. Human’s coevolved with snakes and so much of our biological platform, repurposed now for our modern minds but still the active underpinning of our cognitive structure, is based on snake predation. But snakes were not the only predators on the plains. Humans were vulnerable to various other tree dwelling primates which jump down on us from trees (if you ever want to see how deeply embedded our immediate unthinking response to predation from tree dwelling primates is wait until the next time you walk unawares into a spiderweb and without thinking you will find yourself in a defensive posture against something jumping out of a tree at you) as well as various predatory cats. All predators are a form of unknown.

Humans use our predator detection systems on such a deep level that it accounts for the reason why we are able to immediately demonize foreigners in a war. We do not think of them as people, we think of them as predators and

our actions towards predators, whether they are other humans or poisonous snakes, is exactly the same and is rooted in the exact same part of the brain. And this makes sense as another form of the unknown is the neighboring tribe who may, if confronted successfully, add value to your community but, if not, there could be great trouble. Again, dragons hoarding treasure.

With all of the forms of unknown humans developed the category of the unknown as such. The unknown as such is basically the lowest resolution version of the unknown. There are no particulars. It might be a city you have never been to or a hungry tiger. The unknown as such covers all situations where there is an element of the unknown which could be either dangerous or profitable depending on how successful your encounter is with it.

And so we act in the unknown as such like animals — we act first. We don’t think or imagine or plan. We act. It is no different than walking into that spiderweb. Walking into a spider web is as close as we can get to how animals or photo-humans “think.” It is an embodied reaction which immediately, and without thinking, puts you into a position to defend against the types of animals that prey on humans.

But an interesting thing happened with humans. We eventually started representing how it was that we were acting as well as how the other people (who we watched like a hawk) were acting. This representation of action, which you can think of as a child’s mimicking, eventually lead to telling stories about the representations about the actions. It is here, at the stage of telling stories about representations about actions in response to the unknown as such, that humans start becoming something which resembles what we are now. This is the beginning of the organization of small tribes coming together to form civilizations (after the last ice age, some sixteen thousand years ago — in evolutionary terms basically yesterday).

Millions of years of acting in response to the unknown as such and then millions of years of representing those actions finally lead to telling stories about those representations. Those stories, in preliterate man, are the stories which would be refined and distilled over another vast period of time before showing up in the Enuma Elis.

And what is the story of the Enuma Elis? When you drain all extemporaneous details it is a very simple story. It is the story of what happens when the dark things in the world, when the unknown as such, when predators as such, when dragons and all things serpentine, when storms and when enemies are at the gate, when the flood comes what do you do? The answer in the Enuma Elis (which would greatly influence the oldest stories in Genesis and as such be a ground floor influence on civilization itself) is that you open your damn eyes, you pay attention, you do not run, rather you arm yourself and courageously face the threat. When you defeat the threat you create the world with its corpse and return with the treasure to your people and graciously share. That is the story at the heart of human civilization. That is who we are.

This is what these ancient people were up to. They were trying to figure things out and when they got an answer they kept that story first passed down orally and then in writing. It is truly remarkable story. That the answer is pay attention and be brave when catastrophe threatens and if you do so forthrightly you can destroy the danger, plunder its treasures and make the world out of them while saving yourself and your family from the threat. This….and I really need you to take this very seriously…this is what it means to be a human. It took god knows how long for this to be figured out and articulated. The world is made by the brave men who pay attention when danger comes and fight the dragon and return with the treasure. All of civilization, all of whatever it is humans are, is that story.

Our modern fixation on objective knowledge has blinded us to this and, in doing so, blinded us to the absolute genius level sophistication which is the biblical library. Remember, for most of the history of man — and definitely for the biblical authors — your experience is what matters. You can think of it like this. The earth is spinning on its

access and orbiting the sun. That is an objective fact. It can be measured and proven reliably and repeatedly. But that isn’t how you experience it. It doesn’t feel like you are on a spinning ball orbiting the sun. While that is objectively true objective truth is not the only truth and it is certainly not the truth that the authors of the biblical stories felt was important. After all, why would people who are concerned with how to live in the face of tragedy, limitation and mortality care about the truth as it is for an object? That isn’t what we are trying to figure out. We aren’t trying to figure out what the world is made of, we are trying to figure out what the point of it is and how we should conduct ourselves.

The sun goes up and the sun goes down. Nothing could be more obvious. Go outside at sunrise. What happens. The sun goes up. It’s not like we are spinning at a thousand miles an hour while orbiting the sun at sixty seven thousand miles per hour. That’s insane. It is clearly the case that the sun comes up and the sun goes down.

If you cannot understand how both of those can be true simultaneously on different levels of analysis then the biblical stories are over your head. There is nothing more for you on this site.

The biblical stories are stories about the lived experience of man, distilled over a mindbogglingly long period of time by people who believed that man’s lived experience was the most important frame of reference. These were not ignorant unsophisticated superstitious people. If you have any remnants of that idea left over from your secular education you would do well to disabuse yourself of them immediately. The difference between the people who wrote the biblical stories and modern man comes down to frame of reference and the modern frame of reference, while incredibly powerful, is unnatural and has been superimposed over the far more natural native understanding of the importance of human experience.

This will be the second to last post for this week as Monday I will finally begin with the first line of Genesis. There will be a quick disclaimer I post later this week and then we are off to the races as they say.

If you have been following, I appreciate you taking the time to read these posts. Monday will begin the real meat and potatoes, but I wanted to get these last ideas about stories and reference frames out first. There is simply no amount of prep work that can get anyone ready for the task of seriously contending with the Bible but I hope I have laid enough of a framework that you can start to see how these stories emerged, first from the biological platform then to representation and then to articulated story form.