TRUTH IN AN UNREAL WORLD

The poorly educated are still obsessing over the diff between fiction and nonfiction.  They are waaaay behind.  Now the question is whether there is any reality outside of what we assemble in our heads.  The evidence is on the side of NOT.  

And in fact, since one cannot step into the same river twice, and memory is a time-river, one cannot access the same memory twice.  Something will drop out, something will be added.  Experiments show how easy it is to plant ideas.  DNA shows how easy it is to send people to terrible fates because they were stigmatized enough that a jury wouldn’t believe them.  The fMRI machines supply evidence that a memory is not a self-contained function of the brain -- one separate memory at a time the way we think of them.  Instead, the sounds are in one part of the brain, the sights are in another, the emotional state of the person at the time emerging from the accumulation of summoned senses.

The unreliability of witnesses is not a question of literary categories, which have just been invented in the recent centuries and become customary over the years, handy references for teachers who are trying to explain how a story works.  “Creative nonfiction” is a recently invented category to explain the journalist who, like Norman Mailer, puts himself in the story or imagines what might have happened by dramatizing it. 

False memories are provable scientific principles based on factual evidence.  People who write memoirs or work with psychoanalysts will report vivid events that could not have happened.  They’re called “screen memories,” the brain’s way of summing up and justifying an attitude.  Sometimes an impressive movie will get woven into one’s own life.

In the early world of the novel, the “roman,” which was an adventure in other places or in a mysterious part of society, the tales were often bolstered by pretending they were accounts “found” in letters or an old journal.  At the time people who did not travel were just beginning to realize how exotic other places could be.  There were two reactions, one denying in order to feel secure, and the other intrigued to find out more.  A publisher benefitted from both.

This is not a question of religious metaphors -- not the Easter bunny, the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.  It means that the whole world shifts on its axis all the time and some people are not keeping up.  Religion in particular can become unbelievable and irrelevant if it is based on superstitious claims, if life changes enough that the advice is no longer effective.

Literary categories must be in the hundreds, each with its degrees of fact.  Different cultures, different languages, each have their own customs and indicators.  To insist on fiction v. fact is to show how provincial and narrowly bound to one male-lawyer- dominated context the concept is.  Usually the point of this sort of argument is either political or has some monetary gain at stake, which is why it becomes so vehement, so tied to emotion.  My mother-in-law used to accuse me of reading lies (novels) while she herself read about real things (movie stars).

Another factor is a kind of xenophobia tied to the original organization of the tribal nomad mind to recognize only one’s own band, usually about a hundred people.  People who have never been out into the larger world enough to know that there are different ways of being and thinking become barricaded in their own minds.  Anything that’s not part of THEIR experience has got to be made up.

I call it “high school rules” but in a church it’s called “the one-celled congregation.”  Everyone does the same thing the same way and the same people stay in their roles: queen of the prom, nerd, football hero, the guy who always makes coffee.  If circumstances require broader minds, they fall short and get upset.  When they travel they eat at American food chains.  One of my friends taught a philosophy of religion class in a state university and said he could just about predict how long it would take for the naive small town kids to realize that they were a minority even in their own tradition as the world expanded around them to include Buddhists and Hindus.  For most, it was somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving.

Thinking about the “meta” level of anything is not really possible until the brain has developed the structure and neurons to do it, which is usually in a person’s twenties.  Not everyone can think at the meta level, the abstractions that yield insight.  The capacity may be dependent on a evolved kind of cell that not everyone has, like mirror cells that reinforce empathy so that one person can participate in another person’s feelings.  Indeed, some people seem flat or hard, even at the level of a sociopath who cannot grasp that others besides him or her self is a living being.

Some seem to have had that ability destroyed by trauma, maybe physical excision of brain matter rather than some psych block.

“Theory of mind” is not quite the same as empathy.  The term was invented to describe the ability to predict what other beings will do, which was clearly evolved by hunting.  Those who could see what either prey or a predator was likely to do next would come home with supper instead of becoming supper.

In wartime this ability becomes valuable and so do the unbelievable tales of courage and strategy.  One response is the vaudeville shtick of telling in detail about a famous encounter, challenged by the other guy in the oleo act who asks,  “But wuz ya THERE, Chollie?”  

And then there is the hill-billy old-timer who tells his grandchildren about ‘rasslin’ an impossibly big bear.  He’s vague about who the winner was, so the saucer-eyed children ask,  “What happened then?”  Grandpa, who is tiring, lights his pipe and announces,  “Wal, then the b’ar et me.”

Denying reality is a strategy for dealing with the anguish and starvation of the needy.  Just pretend the homeless are not there, even while stepping over them.  Don’t notice that one’s children are falling into bad company.  Deny that HIV or chronic fatigue or brucellosis is real.  If efforts to get people to see and help deal with a problem are failing, it is often because they are overwhelmed with statistics, but a story strong enough to convince them -- sometimes a work of fiction -- can be effective in changing laws and attitudes.  This is what “Black Beauty” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did.  They were “meta” in an effective way.  So was “The Red Badge of Courage” -- Stephen Crane was never in battle.

People who have obsessive moral accusations about this tangle of what is real and what is not, must be struggling with their own lives, trying to make choices according to emotion instead of logic, hoping to align with powerful people who will support them, or maybe just wanting to make a buck and cynically using “reality” as a selling point.

I find that I have a not-quite-moral attitude that doesn’t require truth so much as the meta-level of meaning.  I value the courage of the journalist who leaves the hotel bar to see the actual place, but I also do not discount the wild tales of persecution I’ve heard old indigenous people tell.  I don’t take them as factual, since they are often provably not, but I recognize the emotion they hold.  And I know the old adversaries on the other side, even “my” side, are no more accurate.  People who are resentful and frightened defend themselves with a pen. 

Every piece of writing can be proven wrong.  EVERY.  ALL.  That doesn’t mean it’s not an accurate account of something felt deeply.  To discount or mock it can be a kind of abuse.  But to cling too hard to one’s own idea of truth can reveal the oppressor’s iron heart.  Sorting it all out is a lifelong task, not a publisher’s blurb.