This blog was born in August of 2012 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since then its following has remained a sparse few folks who either Googled their way here by mistake or already knew me and for one reason or another kept coming back. Thanks! I appreciate their dropping in. It keeps me working on vocabulary and knowing when to be concise (brief but comprehensive) which is not easy by the way; and when it’s alright to just throw words at the page from a meandering stream of consciousness.
I like to identify with Andy Rooney, a writer featured on the CBS program, 60 Minutes. He passed away over a decade ago at 92 but when I feel writer’s block and ideas stay stuck down in a neural wrinkle I still default to, ‘What would Andy Rooney say.’ He took ideas from the Common Sense pool and turned them upside down which, sooner or later offended nearly everyone. In his own, self-assuming style he insulted or provoked people of every color and ethnicity, every LGBT, every belief. The network pulled him off the air but their audience switched to another channel until they reinstated Andy, which they always did. In hindsight, what separated Andy from Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher was that the pundits spoke from their own self appointed authority, “Believe me, I know!” but Andy kept asking, “How does this work?” Andy wasn’t selling a canned belief system or an unholy scheme, he was sharing his search for possibility and meaning. When his readers swamped him with complaints he responded with; “When so many of your friends disagree with you so strongly it must be time to rethink your own position.” His disclaimers and apologies were pointed and contrite. When he redefined his thinking and apologized it was convincing, not the (Maher/O’Reilly) double talk that changed the subject without addressing the issue.
Andy Rooney surfaced at the peak of white male privilege and that explains a lot. It was a cultural constant, like the air we breathe and our mother’s embrace. I came along twenty years later and to some extent we stumbled over that same self serving prejudice and we both asked similar questions like, “What is wrong here?” Finding fault within one’s own peer group is difficult and challenging it in public is asking for a rebuke. If for no other reason, I liked Andy. On his best day he reasoned that he could be wrong, that he was often wrong and that occupying a credible balance was preferable to the comfort of partisan privilege.
My reading list now includes scholars like Yuval Harari (Sapiens) and Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind). I never needed convincing but human’s evolutionary history and behavior patterns fix us well within the animal kingdom. We are animals, no less than pelicans, whales and monkeys. What makes us really, really special are the tools in our tool box and a creative imagination. We can leapfrog straight away from raw instinct to creatures with language and story. With Story, humans can self identify in time and space, reflect on the past and ponder what comes next. Humans have been begging the same insightful questions all along; where did we come from, how did we get here and why?
Paleolithic humans were smart as can be but they didn’t know their own backstory (evolution) and their most scientific tool was the naked eye. So they made up Stories that they could understand. It had to make sense of a complicated, dangerous world. We call those primitive stories, ‘Myth’. In that complicated, dangerous world the most important knowledge and skill set dictated how to survive, replicate and reproduce; how not to go extinct. From mountains to seashore, culture to culture, different groups of people did survive and reproduce sufficiently. We are the flesh & blood evidence. What Harari points out is: People don’t all share the same myth, they never have. But if their Story works (perpetuating the generation to generation survival of the species) it doesn’t matter.
Harari has opened Pandora’s box. Take every mythical belief and the behaviors they provoke, put it together with how those groups conform and consider what they think it means. That would be their collective Story. All of it: what you experience, how it affects individuals, the clan or tribe over the short term and/or the long haul, how people connect Cause and Effect relationships, what they reject and what they believe, it is their Story. Remember that one tribe’s Story could be very different than another tribe’s Story. Environmental features and conditions affect everything in the human saga. Climate, availability of food and water, dangerous predators, competing with other tribes, etc. Altogether in a well framed Story that has taken, (who knows how many) generations to formalize into myth, your Story (history, beliefs & behavior) doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work (replicate, reproduce, carve its own niche in the environment and sustain the species.) Your Story doesn't have to be true, it just has to work.
Speaking for myself, Harari’s ‘It Only Has To Work’ observation is a profound revelation. I am not selling his book or professing my discipleship but the door has opened and the tide has turned in my thinking. E.O.Wilson (R.I.P.) condensed the idea down into a simple sentence: “The trouble with Homo sapiens is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” So said, I want to follow up on that idea as I move on into 2023. I can refer to this January 7, 2023 post and move on with the premiss, It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.
I like to identify with Andy Rooney, a writer featured on the CBS program, 60 Minutes. He passed away over a decade ago at 92 but when I feel writer’s block and ideas stay stuck down in a neural wrinkle I still default to, ‘What would Andy Rooney say.’ He took ideas from the Common Sense pool and turned them upside down which, sooner or later offended nearly everyone. In his own, self-assuming style he insulted or provoked people of every color and ethnicity, every LGBT, every belief. The network pulled him off the air but their audience switched to another channel until they reinstated Andy, which they always did. In hindsight, what separated Andy from Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher was that the pundits spoke from their own self appointed authority, “Believe me, I know!” but Andy kept asking, “How does this work?” Andy wasn’t selling a canned belief system or an unholy scheme, he was sharing his search for possibility and meaning. When his readers swamped him with complaints he responded with; “When so many of your friends disagree with you so strongly it must be time to rethink your own position.” His disclaimers and apologies were pointed and contrite. When he redefined his thinking and apologized it was convincing, not the (Maher/O’Reilly) double talk that changed the subject without addressing the issue.
Andy Rooney surfaced at the peak of white male privilege and that explains a lot. It was a cultural constant, like the air we breathe and our mother’s embrace. I came along twenty years later and to some extent we stumbled over that same self serving prejudice and we both asked similar questions like, “What is wrong here?” Finding fault within one’s own peer group is difficult and challenging it in public is asking for a rebuke. If for no other reason, I liked Andy. On his best day he reasoned that he could be wrong, that he was often wrong and that occupying a credible balance was preferable to the comfort of partisan privilege.
My reading list now includes scholars like Yuval Harari (Sapiens) and Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind). I never needed convincing but human’s evolutionary history and behavior patterns fix us well within the animal kingdom. We are animals, no less than pelicans, whales and monkeys. What makes us really, really special are the tools in our tool box and a creative imagination. We can leapfrog straight away from raw instinct to creatures with language and story. With Story, humans can self identify in time and space, reflect on the past and ponder what comes next. Humans have been begging the same insightful questions all along; where did we come from, how did we get here and why?
Paleolithic humans were smart as can be but they didn’t know their own backstory (evolution) and their most scientific tool was the naked eye. So they made up Stories that they could understand. It had to make sense of a complicated, dangerous world. We call those primitive stories, ‘Myth’. In that complicated, dangerous world the most important knowledge and skill set dictated how to survive, replicate and reproduce; how not to go extinct. From mountains to seashore, culture to culture, different groups of people did survive and reproduce sufficiently. We are the flesh & blood evidence. What Harari points out is: People don’t all share the same myth, they never have. But if their Story works (perpetuating the generation to generation survival of the species) it doesn’t matter.
Harari has opened Pandora’s box. Take every mythical belief and the behaviors they provoke, put it together with how those groups conform and consider what they think it means. That would be their collective Story. All of it: what you experience, how it affects individuals, the clan or tribe over the short term and/or the long haul, how people connect Cause and Effect relationships, what they reject and what they believe, it is their Story. Remember that one tribe’s Story could be very different than another tribe’s Story. Environmental features and conditions affect everything in the human saga. Climate, availability of food and water, dangerous predators, competing with other tribes, etc. Altogether in a well framed Story that has taken, (who knows how many) generations to formalize into myth, your Story (history, beliefs & behavior) doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work (replicate, reproduce, carve its own niche in the environment and sustain the species.) Your Story doesn't have to be true, it just has to work.
Speaking for myself, Harari’s ‘It Only Has To Work’ observation is a profound revelation. I am not selling his book or professing my discipleship but the door has opened and the tide has turned in my thinking. E.O.Wilson (R.I.P.) condensed the idea down into a simple sentence: “The trouble with Homo sapiens is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” So said, I want to follow up on that idea as I move on into 2023. I can refer to this January 7, 2023 post and move on with the premiss, It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.
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