Stories for the Ages
The stories humans tell ourselves
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there lived a group of land dwelling organisms. All manner of organisms had long since learned to sense their environments, to seek prey and to avoid becoming prey. They could sense light bouncing off objects in their immediate vicinity. They could sense vibrations of a certain range travelling through the air. They could sample the air and detect chemicals that told of prey, predators, food and mates. They could chemically sample food to see whether it would be help or poison.
These were just a tiny sample of all the possible information they could glean from their environment, but it was enough to allow them to find food and mates and avoid predators. At least most of the time. And most of the time was good enough.
But these organisms had a special trick; instead of processing and reacting to the information brought by the light as an entirely separate system from the one processing and reacting to vibrations, and another system processing and reacting to chemical information, these organisms were able to integrate that information, stitch together the incomplete information provided by each system and come up with a better, more complete picture of their environment.
The picture was still woefully incomplete, of course. There was still a nearly infinite amount of information present in the environment that the organism was entirely unaware of. But the more complete picture brought by the integration of the information allowed these organisms to survive better than others who weren’t able to integrate so well.
It made some things more complicated, but it also made things better, and better was good enough.
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there was a group of hominids. These hominids had gotten a little better at integrating information, and they had also learned to make noises at each other that conveyed important information, such as the approach of a predator.
But then it occurred to the hominids that the other beings in their troop thought and felt just like they did. By thinking about their own thoughts and feelings, they could understand and predict those of others. The hominids had been living in troops for some time now; it meant they didn’t have to go looking for mates, and it helped ensure the survival of one’s young when they were too weak to defend or run away well enough. It provided some measure of protection for the mature members, too, as even at the height of physical prowess, it was still possible to be caught in a vulnerable moment by a predator.
With this new idea, though, there were more reasons to communicate with each other. Communication made the idea stronger, and with the idea and the communication, the hominids were able to do things together that they could never do before, like have one hunter chase prey onto the spear of another.
It made some things more complicated, but it also made things better, and better was good enough.
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there lived a group of humans. They didn’t live in any one set place, but settled for a little while, hunted the local game, foraged the local plants, and when both started getting scarce, they moved on to the next place, where game and edible plants were more abundant.
Sometimes, hunting and foraging got scarce, and when they moved on, it was just as scarce in the next place. Sometimes it was even more scarce in the next place, and people died from not enough food. Sometimes people felt bad, got hot, laid down and died. Sometimes it was many people of the group, sometimes it was just the young and the old. Sometimes people got hurt, got hot, laid down and died.
But life was not all bad for these humans. There was love and friendship, sex and play and songs and stories. Lots of songs and stories. Their lives were full of dangers and opportunities, situations where knowledge could make the difference between life and death. The elders needed to pass that knowledge on to the young, so they told stories of their lives, of their parents lives, and their grandparents lives. They also told stories of the spirits of the land, the water, the air and the trees, the ones that brought the seasons and the ones that brought sickness and death, the ones that took the young before they saw their first cycle of seasons.
The People watched what was around them intently — they had to, their lives depended on it, just as their lives depended on them seeing the patterns, knowing what they meant, and anticipating the possibility of food, or needing to fight or run away. And just like the patterns made by the People on their clothes and tools, these patterns must have been created by the spirits around them. There was no other explanation that made sense.
The spirits, like the people around them, had moods, feelings, needs and desires, and like the People around them, if you paid close attention to the signs, you could understand and anticipate them, and if you were lucky, these spirits who were more powerful than humans would help and bless instead of destroy. But only if you were lucky.
The trick of integrating information was still fairly new, and is quite complex. Like all complex things, sometimes things go wrong with the integration, or at least different from normal, and cause experiences of things that no one else could see. Often these experiences were very intense and profound, and the humans who experienced them felt a strong need to explain these experiences, and make sense and meaning from them. They found meaning in the stories about the spirits, and took this as proof that the stories were true. They honoured those who had the experiences, and were sure that such people had a connection to the spirits, and a better understanding of what the spirits wanted, and how the People might live more in harmony with them.
But then some of those gathering seeds were clumsy and spilled a whole lot of small seeds on soft ground where they couldn’t really be gathered up again. When the tribe came back some time later, there was a large area of seed plants growing there, waiting to be gathered.
This started an idea. Instead of gathering seeds, they could put them in a place that was good for the seeds to grow and convenient for the humans to gather. That way, there was more food, more predictably. It also meant that the tribe couldn’t travel like it used to, because they needed to stay and defend their patch of seeds; they had sacrificed some of their food now, they needed to make sure they got the results later.
That made somethings more complicated, but mostly it made things better. And better was good enough.
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there lived a group of farmers. They worked hard and for long hours, longer and harder than their tribal ancestors had done. Sometimes the rains didn’t come, sometimes there was too much rain or at the wrong time, the crops failed and people died because there wasn’t enough food. Sometimes people got hurt, got hot and died. Sometimes people got sick, got hot, got spots or boils, and died. Sometimes whole farming communities died out that way.
But life wasn’t all bad. There was love and friendship and sex. And lots of songs and stories. The people weren’t nearly so dependent on their knowledge of their environment, so there wasn’t nearly so large and amount of knowledge necessary to pass on, but people still loved songs and stories, and there was still things the young ones needed to learn.
They didn’t tell stories about the spirits. Life had changed, what was important to the humans had changed. They still saw patterns, but instead of spirits they told stories of gods who would make the rains come, or not. Gods who could bring sickness, or radiant health. Many gods with many powers, who could make life easier for the humans, or bring death and destruction.
Because the gods were so powerful, the humans wanted to stay on their good side, so that the gods would bring them blessing rather than destruction. So the humans prayed to the gods, abased themselves and pleaded for the blessings, and burned grains, animals and sometimes other humans to please the gods.
The integration of the senses still went a little different for some people. It was still sometimes an intense and profound experience, and still needed and explanation and meaning. Those who had those experiences again interpreted them from the stories they told which gave all the rest of their lives meaning, and again, it made everyone believe even more deeply that the stories were true.
Also as before, those who had the experiences were honoured for them, and believed to have a special relationship to the gods. The gods were capricious and sometimes cruel, so these people were important for letting the rest know what the gods wanted, and what should be done to appease them.
The idea that everyone was responsible for keeping the gods happy meant that everyone behaved according to the same set of rules and knew what to expect from everyone else. It also meant that there was a very good reason to be harsh with those who broke the rules, to bring them back in line. This cooperation to keep the gods happy meant that it was also easier to cooperate for other things, like building bigger buildings or working together to defend the community from other people. Or to work together to seize territory from other groups who didn’t work together quite as well.
That made things more complicated, but also better. And better was good enough.
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there was a town. It was ruled jointly by the head of the military and the head of the priests. Farmers were now productive enough that not everyone needed to farm; there were craftsmen and merchants, soldiers and priests, who could buy food from the farmers.
Crops still failed sometimes, though, and people died because there wasn’t enough food. People also got sick or got hurt, and died. Life wasn’t especially good, but there was still love and friendship and sex, and still some songs and stories.
The priests had taken over most of the stories, though. The priests had started to insist that there was only one god who ruled everyone and everything, because when there was a lot of gods, the priest of one god wouldn’t be listened to by the followers of a different one. If there was only one god who ruled all, then his priest would be able to command everyone. The priests had also started insisting that with the proper worship and sacrifice to the god, the rewards would come in the life after this one, because if worship and sacrifice were all about rewards in this life, when the devout got no reward and the unfaithful prospered, it caused too much doubt that what the priest said was true, and there was less worship and sacrifice.
The military heads supported the priests, because if the military wanted to attack or defend, they could convince or bribe the priests to say that it was god’s will that it should happen. If it was the god’s will, the soldiers were willing to die, and the common people were willing to be conscripted or pay taxes to support the war. If everyone believed the same thing and followed the same rules, they were more predictable, and could be manipulated more easily into doing what the rulers wanted.
The integration of sense still went strange sometimes, and it still sometimes resulted in intense experiences, which the people interpreted in terms of the stories the priests told, because those were the stories that gave meaning to all the rest of their lives. Those who had these experiences were not always honoured, though; if they told stories of their experiences that the priests liked, they were brought into the priesthood, but if they told stories of their experiences that the priests didn’t like, they were tried and executed.
Sometimes, though, there were people who, with or without the intense experiences, saw through the priest’s use of the god for their own power, called them out, and called on the common people to find their own path, and create their own relationship with the god. These people were often tried and executed, but sometimes the priests couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to try and execute them, and sometimes they were tried and executed, but had too many followers who couldn’t be executed. This resulted in splinter groups that for a time were finding their own paths and creating their own relationships with the god, but over time, these splinters, too, were taken over by priests who decided for the people what the god wanted, how people should behave and what rules they should follow.
The military and the priests working together used the resources of their towns to seize both more resources and more converts. These resources and converts were used to seize even more resources and even more converts. Empires were formed, united by stories of the greatness of the god, the greatness of the military leaders, and the inevitability of their victory.
This made things more complicated. It wasn’t better for most people, but it was definitely better for the people in charge, and as far as they were concerned, better was good enough.
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there was a city. In this city were some people who had started to realize how limited the senses were that they had always relied on. They started gathering some of the huge amount of information that was generated by the environment, but not picked up by human senses. As they started gathering this information about the environment, they started telling some different stories, ones that no one had told before.
The priests didn’t like these stories or the people who told them. These new stories were contradicting the stories the priests told, and there were more and more people who started believing the new stories instead of the priests, and the priests started losing the power that they once had.
People still occasionally had moments when the integration of the senses went strange, and had intense, profound experiences. Now, though, they had a choice of what stories to use to explain and create meaning from their experience; sometimes people interpreted them by the old stories that the priests told, and were usually welcomed by the priests as one of their own. Sometimes, however, they interpreted the experiences based on some of the new stories, and told people about alien abduction and alien visitors who were trying to learn about humans.
The military was happier about the new stories than the priests; as long as everyone believed more or less the same thing, they could be predicted and controlled, it didn’t matter whether it was the old stories or the new stories that everyone believed. The new stories also resulted in much better weapons of war that over time could kill more and more people, requiring less skill and fewer people to wield them. This gave the military a great deal of power, and often caused a great deal of destruction.
Fortunately for most people, the new stories didn’t just result in weapons, but also many things that made food far more bountiful and available, so that people didn’t have to die from not enough food, and mostly didn’t. It also conquered most of the sicknesses that killed people, and even when people got badly hurt, they were much less likely to die from it.
Life was much more complicated, but it was also much better. And that was good.
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there was a network of cities. The new stories had allowed people to be able to talk to each other far more widely and deeply than they ever had before. Some of the people talked to each other and realized through talking, that both the old stories and the new stories still made many assumptions about people that were making the people less than they could be. They also noticed that both the old stories and the new stories treated things that were imaginary as if they were real, and these things that they treated as if they were real, were also making people less than they could be. The people saw these truths and called out those telling both the old and the new stories, but the people who called them out didn’t have a newer, better set of stories to replace the old ones or the new ones. The new stories changed somewhat because of these people, but were not replaced, because there wasn’t anything to replace them with.
Questioning the new stories made life more complicated, and many people didn’t like this.
When the nights were long and the days were deep, there was a girl. Her family loved her very much, so they taught her the old stories, because they were sure those stories were true and right and would give her the right path for this life and the next. The girl loved her family, too, and so believed them that the stories were true and right, and she believed them with all of herself.
But the girl got older, as children do, and being a curious child, started asking questions that her family and teachers and elders couldn’t answer very well. She didn’t really like the answers, but her love for them was such that she accepted the poor answers, and kept her silence.
She got older still, and was sent on for further education with teachers who believed the new stories rather than the old ones. From these teachers, she got much, much better answers to her questions, and she started believing the old stories less and less, until she could no longer pretend even to her family that she still believed them.
The girl, now a woman, went on to even more teachers, ones who were calling out the new stories, and their words held a ring of truth to them, and she came to see the flaws in the new stories, as well.
Like all humans, the woman didn’t just want stories that explained her experiences and made meaning of them, she needed them. But what stories should she believe and use as guidance?
This story doesn’t have a satisfactory ending. It doesn’t have any ending, really. The woman is looking for some combination of old stories, new stories, and even newer stories to create something coherent and meaningful. She hasn’t found it yet, so the quest goes on, as it does for many people.
Sign up for my weekly Musings at anethum.ca/wp
