Reprinted with permission. | CARL NELSON | MAR 24, 2024
“Those who tell the stories rule society.” - either Plato or a Native American attribution. My research has made it a coin toss.
We live in a very encumbered age. We are encumbered by our wealth, our technology, our leisure, regulations, laws, social strictures, by the Deep State for sure… but most of all, I would think, by narrative. What are rules and regulations but ripened narratives with consequences? And we certainly have enough of them. And there is certainly a price to be paid for breaching them. All of them are touted as solutions. But, unfortunately…
“The chief cause of problems is solutions.” - Sevaried’s Law
We are metaphorically bathed in cautionary tales from dawn to dusk and then far into the night. The morning news wakes us. The evening news and a myriad of TV shows put us to bed. In between, there’s all that you heard throughout the day, all pitched in the best story form manageable, often cloaked in fear - so that you would listen, attend. These are the American society’s equivalent to Mao portraits. Really, it’s easy to suspect that the only thing you might be valued for is your attention - as all these narratives require acquiescent participants.
“Desire generates narrative, causing narrative’s inherent prejudice.” - Bill Soames
Dr. Michael Nehls is a molecular geneticist, physician, and author, most recently of “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom”. In a recent interview he discussed how the general human hippocampus size has been shrinking versus its general expansion in past times. The hippocampus is the clearinghouse of learning. When our hippocampal index of new neurons is positive, we are able to incorporate new information with what we know of the past; we individuate. We particularize as individuals. And when we encounter new knowledge, we first vet it for red flags as regards our current measure of wisdom. When the hippocampal index is zero or negative, the newer knowledge no longer individuates but rather simply overwrites what is there. This is how indoctrination takes root and perpetuates itself.
Fear and inflammation will prevent hippocampal neuron growth as resources are shifted elsewhere. As Dr. Nehls describes, this is how indoctrination occurs: the fear of the message prohibits neural growth, so that the present propaganda overwrites our historical memory of the past. Without a strong mental immune system (hippocampal index) which can resist fearful propagandas by comparing it with our already acquired wisdom - we are slaves to the current message.
I think it is reality which forces Conservatives to swim against this increasingly relentless modernist current. And the reality is that the human essence is poetic and not narrative.
The current legacy media is conducting a continual 24/7 bombardment of the foundational ethos against a populace who are hunkered down within their shrinking mandates trying to live their lives in a natural harmony with the world around them - that is, ‘poetically’. All the while, harassing narratives seek to restrict their movements, restrict their use of energy, restrict their use of labor saving appliances, restrict their use of language and free expression, restrict the use of assembly, restrict their use of representation, restrict their use of their lawful rights, restrict, restrict, restrict… this is what narrative fear accomplishes. But it isn’t only fear which drives this, to my mind, but the confining nature of narrative itself, as the only thing narrative naturally allows is its control; like a superhighway narrative exists only to get you from here to THERE.
Currently, the poetry - the give and take, discussion, and the expansion of understanding - of our cultural life is barely surviving beneath a blitz of narrative attack: the CO2 creates global warming narrative, the 1619 Project narrative concerning the founding of the United States, the Covid-19 narrative and successive pandemic scare narratives, the Black Lives Matter narrative of systemic racism, the Feminist narrative of oppressive patriarchy, the LGBTQ narrative of sexual identity, … All of these insurgent narratives (and a host of others generated daily) are conducting strikes across what has become a wasteland of the American tradition and the poetry of the American dream.
Poetry feels impotent, but it’s an impotence with the singular clarity of awe. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Matthew 11:15. We’re all going to die, and our placements eventually be for naught. Within this framework, Conservatives hold that the ancestral parents of our traditions lived and found out things making their lives more bearable and easier, which are the treasures contained within our traditions.
Others do not think this, and furthermore think it deplorable to do so, because they worship the new. What is the ‘new’ in their minds, has superseded all that was the past in the long evolutionary struggle to be the fittest and survive. (Reminiscent of Dr. Nehls’, vulnerable hippocampus, in which the new has overwritten all.) They certainly espouse the most dire of tooth and claw tests for all received wisdom. And yet, they act as if their own, next, untested notions were Athenas sprung direct from the forehead of Zeus. They would rather sweep uncomfortable truths, such as the “human condition” and bits of painful reality - long encountered throughout history - right under the rug, or send it off to the gulag along with history itself. Doubt for them is a structural frailty, to which their newest, just upgraded narrative poses the solution - with an aphrodisiacal, whip cream plus cherry like topping of power and control.
The nature of narrative is certainty. One thing leads to the next. And then it runs into a counter narrative and dispute. And then the best strategy wins, supposedly. But wins what? It wins control. It says how things are. This is the winner which over-writes history.
Narrative is stasis, while appearing to be its opposite. If the frozen-in-aspic nature of our current national conversation playing in the legacy media hasn’t convinced you of this… well, I will, nevertheless, lay its future out: The underdog and upper dog will tag team as ‘round and ‘round they contend, the upper dog versus the controlled opposition. We are currently in an actual war between nothing ever happening ever again - which continually reappears with too much velocity to grasp - and the exercise of our free will and speech which currently present as an exhausting isometric exercise, resembling poetry.
Narrative thrives in novelty and hubris, while poetry grows with humility and repetition.
“A child kicks his leg rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding fatality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”/ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.” - G.K. Chesterton
All of this is illustrated by the famous Dunning-Kruger graph of subjective confidence versus the accumulation of objective experience.
Higher learning greatly fuels the initial start of the Dunning-Kruger effect graph, which is where the narrative confidence most peaks, while reality begins dissolving narrative confidence with a descending curve near soon as experience begins. And with experience, monotony begins to extinguish the blush of the new. So that even on the rebound -at the level of greatest expertise and most experience - narrative never achieves the confidence of its first blushing birth. Indeed, the Dunning-Kruger curve is a graphic representation of Yeat’s “Second Coming” wherein…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
But let’s hear about the spiritual problem posed by this from another perspective, in fact, from the Progressive’s demi-god, Charles Darwin:
“My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond, poetry of many kinds… gave me great pleasure… But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.” - Charles Darwin
Implicit and Explicit Memory
According to Jonathan Gottschall, “The Storytelling Animal”, “There are two kinds of memory: implicit and explicit.” In the simulation model, as we acquire implicit memory, our brains are re-wired, so that though we have no memory of the activity or event which caused us to develop an ability, the ability persists. So, for example, you may not remember the very subtle sequences of choices by which you determined how to ride your bike without training wheels or (more advanced) how to roll a derby hat across your back from one hand to the other - but the skill persists, nevertheless. We have acquired ‘implicit’ memory.
Explicit memory requires no such explanation but is the one most on display whenever we use whatever we can “bring to mind” to tell a story, craft an argument, or endeavor to either to win or to direct a discussion. Implict memory is what a poem resurrects. People dance, or perform, paint or sing… like a dream resurrects hidden feelings and knowledge. Implicit memory is the thing that raises those red flags when we hear what we think might be a wrong account, but we haven’t the facts yet to challenge it.
We do not remember much of our dreaming, and yet the implicit memory of it helps us in our waking hours of problem solving. How many creative people remark upon finding the answer to a very difficult problem following a night’s very fertile dream? Isn’t it common knowledge that a productive way of solving a seemingly intractable problem is to “sleep on it”?
Woody Allen once joked, showing off the handsome watch he’d acquired: “My uncle sold me this on his deathbed.”
Our implicit understanding that there were more pressing matters at that point in Woody’s Uncle’s life, but that his Uncle is still in the day-to-day world of explicit existence supplies this joke’s humor.
At one time in my life I was a medical student riding in the Medical Aid Ambulance as part of my training. One night we stopped at a home in an upscale neighborhood to pick up a very elderly woman from where she had been living with the daughter. The elderly woman was bleeding from both ends, and quite faint, but as we rushed her to the hospital she pulled at my sleeve with something urgent to say. It was quite noisy what with the sirens, motor noises, CB radios and such so I bent down close to hear, as I thought this very well might be her last words.
“I want a private room,” she said.
Implicit memory might declare to our hospital bound woman, that she had much more important matters to address then than whether or not she was to acquire a private room. But this would depend upon what sort of life she practiced. For to complicate matters even more, modern life, in which our experiences are more and more secondhand or even mimicked - has polluted the implicit memory we build from our experiences in the natural world. That is mimicking a social status had implicitly become more important to this woman than her very survival, or at least it was uppermost in her mind.
An endless flotsam and jetsam of media driven narrative, plus interactions from the fabulous fictional, political and social worlds distort our implicit memory, sometimes beyond all common sense. We walk about as simulacrums of ourselves, derived from media concentrates, something like how the orange juice flavored liquids now offered have replaced the orange. Perhaps only the pulp (flesh) of our real existence is left, as a crutch to authenticity.
(To go even further down this rabbit hole, I would recommend Aaron Ames essay, “Darwin, Bureucrtese, and the Decline of Poetry. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/01/darwin-bureaucratese-decline-poetry-aaron-ames.html?utm_source=The+Imaginative+Conservative+Newsletter&utm_campaign=7f3afd8e16-Weekly+Newsletter_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c8d563f42-7f3afd8e16-132552253&mc_cid=7f3afd8e16)
I have memories of the theatre world, sitting within our group of playwrights and listening as another (politically active) playwright’s work was given a reading. She was a sound playwright, but her characters were made of plywood, assembled from glued chips of correct thinking, but which, it seemed were the production of her implicit memories of a politically reconstituted, human character was. How does a person get this across to another person. I remember on one occasion, I chanced to suggest that “what this play needs is a Republican. You simply cannot reach the epiphany - nor a sound denouement - with the characters you have assembled”. I was already the group ‘alien’, so the remark got more laughs than the usual mystification my observations typically produced.
I was simply trying to suggest that any real solution to a problem cannot be reached without introducing reality. This should seem plain enough.
Nevertheless, it seems currently that this woman playwright’s problem has gotten much worse, and in fact metastasized to afflict our entire society, our culture and our institutions.. The party of this woman’s reality is not our reality; in fact, it is not even real.
[ED: this piece is an abridged version of a more ambitious essay, “The Underdog is Just a Dog” published in the March 2024 edition of the New English Review]
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By Carl Nelson · Launched around two months ago, maybe three. This a blog of the essayist/poet/publisher (of Magic Bean Books) Carl Nelson. More about Carl and his work may be found at magicbeanbooks.co.