Narrative Awareness
One obvious vast distinction of Homo Sapiens from other species of mammals is the size and power of our brain and the outcomes that emerge from how we use it. From an initial mastery of fire we’ve arrived at rocketry, and space travel. Our ability to create and use tools has given us mastery over all the earth’s resources extending down to the subatomic level, and has taken us from cave painting through the printing press to the internet.
If we observed any other animal with the capability to do what we can do with resources in our environment, it would be unbelievable (and likely terrifying). Our abilities are unique among every other species on earth, and all because of our brains’ capacity for reasoning, problem solving and complex communication.
At the core of these three abilities sits what is perhaps the most fundamentally unique aspect of human brains: abstract conceptualization. Our ability to see “A+B=C” and immediately replace letters with numbers or even concepts to make this meaningful is a simple example of what is a complex mental capability. Each of us can come up with a different meaningful replacement for that simple equation, and most of us would immediately understand each other’s reasoning if it was shared.
What Does It Mean?
“What does it mean?” — in any language — is the impulsive abstract question that has driven all of humanity’s progress. Meaning, in this use, should first be taken in its broadest definition as “ importance or value” — the use that gives us the expressions “the means to an end” or “it is meaningful to her.” We are inclined, as are most animals, to pursue what has importance or value to us. For most animals, this begins with the means for survival (finding food and defending from becoming food), and can then extend into comfort (a warm, dry den) and connection (the safety of the pack or herd).
For humans, this impulse to find the importance or value or meaning of what happens around us — combined with our capability for abstraction — has given us mythology and religion, and also mathematics and science. With our ability for reasoning, problem solving and communication, we don’t just opportunistically pursue circumstances that provide what is important or valuable; we cultivate them. Our earliest ancestors did not accept that fire could only be created or controlled by powers beyond human control. Through trial and error in experimentation over time, they established an understanding of cause and effect around generating and extinguishing fires. They saw an innate value in rocks that allowed their conversion into hammers (and bludgeons), then flints, arrowheads and knives. Their ability to ask “what else could this do?” turned trees and stones into buildings and fences that kept certain animals in, and other animals out. It realized the significant difference between rounded and angular, and used water to turn wheels and move things otherwise too heavy to carry. And this was just our big brains getting started.
In our impulsive exploration of how to convert what we encounter in our immediate circumstances into a higher state of importance or value, we arrived at the more abstract concept of “meaning” as “the finer representation or expression of something more abstract”. This is the use that gives us expressions like “the meaning of life” or “there are two meanings for the word ‘meaning’”.
Our brains cannot be content with uncovering one level of cause and effect and leaving it at that. Mastering what was “important or valuable” in controlling fire and thus achieving the means to provide light and warmth in our shelters and to cook food did not fully satisfy our relationship with fire. We knew how we could create it and what we could use it for, but we still looked at fire and wondered how it existed, what it was made of.
We stared at fire for thousands of years while telling ourselves stories of the work of the gods (or increasingly in time just “god”) that for some were not meaningful enough, that did not fully seem to describe the true origin or nature of fire. To provide explanation, we conceptualized fire, along with water, earth and sky, as fundamental elements created by these gods. New generations devised new tools and thinking processes for better observation and measurement of what happened in their world. In the mid 17th century, experimenters like Robert Hooke observed that flames interacted with air. Roughly 100 years later, ongoing exploration of this observation along with a newly recognized ability for matter to take the form of “gas” led to the understanding that the air that interacted with combustion was actually an “elemental” gas that received the name “oxygen”. Further convergence of new abstract concepts such as “elements” and “molecules” and “energy” over following decades finally led to an understanding of the chemistry and physics of combustion that would lead to all of our present technology.
We as a species seem to impulsively believe there is always more below the surface of our immediate perception. To put our minds at ease, we need explanations into not just the “what”, “where”, “when” and “how much” of our circumstances which satisfy other animals’ needs, but also the “how” and “why”. These questions impulsively permeate our need to understand even our own place in our circumstances, leading to a need for definitions of “who” that feels “elemental” at an individual, personal concept of self, then is expanded to concepts of “us” and “them”. And these efforts to develop and maintain answers that ease our nagging persistent impulse to understand “how”, “why” and “who” occur as stories we tell ourselves to explain our world.
Our Path
Which brings us to the beginning of our path to Narrative Awareness; to understand the forces that mediate our sense of self, to recognize that our actions as a ‘self’ or a central character “I” take place in social and cultural terrain, and to use these recognitions to develop personal and collective narratives that determine society’s path into the future.
The Narrative of Self
We are conditioned to think of our self as something fundamental, core and largely stable. We have history, a personality, an identity. Yet we’re never the same person we were 5 years ago. What is the frame of time in which our self is constant. What is the frame of time over which it changes?
What of those times when we think — or say — “that’s not like me” or “I was not acting like myself”? Could the self you were in those moments truly not be you? Did they somehow involve your physical self but not your mental self? Or are they also a part of your self, just not a part that fits the way you see yourself?
They are, of course, the latter, and these stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are the first critical narrative structure warranting awareness. This narrative of self is more commonly called the Ego.
Our Ego is a psychological mechanism than establishes our self as the center of all stories. ‘Egotistical’ and ‘self-centered’ are synonymous in this sense, and being too caught in a self-centered narrative about the world is seen as a character fault. In a sociological sense, this is because the egotist will ignore the interest of others to pursue their self-interest.
But while egotism and self-centeredness are criticisms lobbed at others when they blatantly value their interests over ours, American culture is built around concern for oneself: self-interest, self-determination, self-identity. Democracy is premised on the notion that votes are made in one’s self-interest or around self-identity, and that representation should be changeable if those interests are not met. And capitalism is the economic model that most supports self-interest as a result of self-determination above all others. (Socialism becomes a model that supports the self-interest of people who cannot amass sufficient capital to meet their needs, and believe they never will.)
This leads to the second focus area of narrative awareness. Knowing that our ego strives to select thoughts embedded within an interpreting self aligned to a consistent (though not always constructive) self-interest, what forces are at play to establish the basis for what we have to think about?
Mediated Consciousness
Consciousness means simply that we recognize that we’re thinking, and what we’re thinking about. That recognition of thought does not come because a consistent “observer” sits in the mind separate from thought watching what comes past, but is instead the recurring temporary product of a set of mental impulses triggering our language and other sensory centers enough to warrant a “response” that positions these impulses in a narrative of past, present & future, or cause & effect, which then indicates how we should react to them.
There are two questions inherent in this definition: 1) what forms these mental impulses, and 2) what forms the narrative of past, present & future or cause & effect that we use to evaluate these impulses?
“Culture” is the answer to both questions. From birth, the culture that surrounds us gives us our language and vocabulary, which in turn gives us the tools to order sensory impulses into concepts with meaning (good, bad, happy, sad, etc…), and thus to progress from utter helplessness in our environment and dependence on others for survival, to an ability to see, conceptualize and leverage the structures of cause and effect relationships that help us avoid harm and accrue benefit. Over time, the mind releases impulses even without direct sensory stimuli, with memories of what’s been experienced and concepts on what led to those experiences becoming abstracted into new immediate impulses without direct external cause.
What each of us manifests in terms of such abstract thought (i.e. thinking not in direct response to immediate stimuli) is a unique result of the combination of what we received as language tools, and the circumstances/environment in which we used them; or in other words, the culture in which we were raised.
All cultures contain the potential to produce the ability for abstract thought — though not all circumstances allow their application to the same challenges or opportunities. A child raised in poverty is as capable of developing brilliant thinking skills as is a child raised in wealth. The opportunities to apply their brilliance is far more limited for a child raised in poverty than in wealth, as they begin with less access to the resources that must always be spent to fuel a change in personal or social conditions.
In its first manifestation in our lives, culture is conveyed at the level of the family. What is enacted as culture in the family is often linked to the cultural norms of a close community, sometimes built around shared interests, sometimes forced by circumstances. Those community cultures are in turn shaped by larger cultural narratives (there’s that word again) imparted through mediating structures.
Mediating structures are not the same as the common conception of Media, though what we think of as Media (with that capital ‘M’) is indeed one very important mediating structure.
As articulated by Marshall McLuhan, mediating structures are those that serve as a conduit for thoughts that have resided beyond us to come to reside within us. Speech is the purest form of media in this sense, imparting meaning & concepts that let us make (cause & effect) sense of the world.
From narratives mediated through early utterances and cave painting evolved new mediating structures including storytelling and drama, numeric systems and alphabets, laws, religions and governments, painting, sculpture, architecture and engineering, schools, publishing, radio, film, television, chemistry, physics, information science and digital media (among others).
Conclusion (For Now)
To close this brief introduction to Narrative Awareness as it relates to consciousness and culture; our conscious thoughts exist — in a physiological sense — simply to maintain a narrative that allows us to make sense of and respond to conditions in our environment. Thoughts give us the advantage of “looking back” and “thinking ahead” in the cause/effect chain that we perceive to shape the world around us.
Our ego exists as a mediator of what narratives around cause and effect best support our self-interest. It filters thoughts based on the way in which the self continually takes shape around those thoughts. The ego’s physiological goal is to seek advantage for self-preservation, but it often naturally extends that self-interest into pursuit of self-advancement.
From our earliest childhood, our ego is trained on how to select thoughts for self-interest through mediating structures of language and behavior within the home, within community beyond the home, and from cultural institutions like schools and religious bodies. And of course, a huge array of cultural perspectives are strongly conveyed through Media (& the inevitable associated Advertising) — be it conveyed through mass media of print, television and film, through the algorithmically filtered and curated streams of social channels, or in very narrow-cast digital outskirts of the internet.
All of these mediating structures inform the narrative that constitutes our consciousness by 1) implanting the seed for further thought in our own mind, and 2) portraying notions of identity and selfhood, and setting examples of self-interest that we may chose to emulate.
Narrative awareness allows us to unpack and assess the stories we are being told through mediating forces, and filters through which we process those stories.
