Tag Archives: Culture Wars

Who is shooting who in the Culture War?

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Charlie Jane Anders sent out a fabulous piece yesterday called Maybe endless stories about escalating wars weren’t a great idea after all on her mailing list (which I highly recommend, btw). The piece is about story structure and its effects in the real world. Her main point is that one of the standard story structures you see in fiction (called a rising action) can be seen being mirrored in the world around us.

In a rising action, the hero faces a seemingly endless escalation of conflict. Then right at the last possible moment, they save the day, usually against all odds. You see this story structure not only in most novels, but in most movies and tv shows. Marvel movies all do this, as do pretty much every popcorn movie. You see it in every thing from Rocky, to Top Gun to even Star Wars. Even much of the more highbrow stories in movies and tv follow this pattern.

I’m not going to disagree with Charlie Jane. I think her point is spot on. My only quibble is I think she is aiming too low.

I’ve long thought that this kind of dramatic story structure is found not just in our media, but in our day-to-day lives. Ever since I first stumbled upon the short and densely packed Three Uses of a Knife by David Mamet, with its opening chapter on wind chill, I realized that humans don’t just consume dramatic stories in our media, we generate them. Once you know where to look you see stories everywhere. Even something prosaic as buying coffee, can be made into a story.

No one just buys a coffee. They have to park their car, then wait in line, someone needs to take their order, then they have to wait for their name to be called. Finally they need to check if their order is correct. Each of this steps offers a chance for drama. Either this name is misspelled, or someone cuts in line, or the barista gets the coffee wrong, or their name. Something is almost guaranteed to happen, and when it does we will immediately recognize it as drama. Someone is doing something against our friend. We know this instinctively. We know they will buy a coffee, we will see them with the coffee in their hand. We already know how the story is going to end, and yet if told right, and if enough events occur, a good teller can make the story last three minutes or more, and have everyone around them laughing of crying.

But even the simplest of stories do this. It’s really hard to tell someone about your day without it automatically being converted to story structure.

My inexpert name for this phenomena is the Narration.* That is, we take simple occurrences in our lives, and convert them into a story. Usually this story has rising conflict and comes to a conclusion. Most importantly the story has a hero, or a protagonist. Usually the hero is ourselves. All stories we tell are reflective of this, even the stories we tell about others say as much about ourselves. But for a story to work the hero needs a villain, or an antagonist. Sometimes there isn’t a definable antagonist, but more like what they call in fiction writing “forces of antagonism.” For instance, if someone tells you the wind knocked them over, we generally don’t think of the wind was actually trying to kill them, we understand it was making things more difficult for them. The wind isn’t necessarily a villain, but it is playing the role (for the sake of the story) as one.

btw, you can also find forces of protagonism in stories. If you’ve ever watched a leaf boat make its way down the gutter on a rainy day, (some of the best drama you will ever experience with a toddler) then you know what it is like to see a leaf become a hero. Certainly no one thinks the leaf is directing its actions, and yet that is exactly what we tell ourselves.

So a story needs at least four things: A rising action, a conclusion, a hero, and a villain. And like I said above, once you start to look for these things, you find them everywhere.

My main point to all this, and why I mentioned Charlie Jane’s piece at the top, is that I believe humans natively think in Narration. It is our default setting, so to speak. That is, we inherently think in story structure.

If this is true, then it’s not that Hollywood, or big publishing is leading us into ever more drama, it’s that we are naturally doing it ourselves. Narrative is internal and essential to the human experience. Why else would we sit through a two hour popcorn movie and find it entertaining if it wasn’t speaking to our inner language? Why else sit for hours with a good book, or binge all night a TV series?

We not only think in Narration, we demand it back from the world. Things that are not natively in Narrative form we don’t understand. It is foreign to us. Don’t believe me, trying explaining quantum mechanics, climate change, or the holy trinity to someone you don’t know. At some point it will become difficult because there are some things that naturally resist the Narrative format. Sure, things are happening, you might even have some data, but that date doesn’t lend itself well to a story, and thus it’s hard to comprehend.

As to culture wars, you can see here my idea on those. To me, culture wars have existed forever. They are intrinsic to the human experience, just like Narration. As soon as you have a bunch of people think of themselves as a “group,” then they automatically become the heroes or their story. Once that happens then Narration will insist that someone else play the role of the antagonist. You need an opposing team, be they Democrats or the Chicago Bulls. At that point, all it takes is the least bit of provocation, and suddenly a story bursts forth. Both sides will be neatly lined up, and the result will be deeply satisfying to everyone.

Once you understand this, then politics makes a lot more sense. Sports too. Why else to we prefer to see two teams compete against each other, or two individuals athletes. It’s because one plays the role of the hero, and the other the villain.

Anyway, I challenge you to pay attention to this idea in your day-to-day communications. See if you don’t find the Narrative everywhere.




*I’m sure someone had a better term for it, I just don’t know it.




Culture, an Analogy

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“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently…” – David Graeber 

Many years ago I had a sort of epiphany about what culture is, and how it works. At the time I chose to not write it down, in part due to my own laziness, and in part to see if it was a genuinely good idea. I often have ideas that fail to make it the full light of day before imploding. Such is the nature of creativity. The impulse is kind, but its offspring are not always lasting or well-thought. 

Over the years my little analogy grew to reflect changes in the outside world. I saw arguments in politics over the culture wars (which, far from being a recent phenomena, dates back to the beginnings of recorded history), I saw massive changes in the media that artists use (from vinyl to CDs, from DVDs to streaming, and from AOL to the targeted social media we have today), and I saw every day recommendations (over books or screen time, or the value of letting a child play outdoors), and they all struck me as somehow being connected.

The question remained: How? How are these seemingly disparate elements connected? My answer is the stone.

The evidence for my analogy comes mostly in the form of observation. I have no formal education into the nature of culture, and in fact have barely scratched the surface in terms of research. All of what you read comes from a simple yet central idea. What if all the things that humanity argues about were just variations on the same thing? What if this thing was something that grew over time, evolved as it were. Ideas battling it out with other ideas until eventually one was the victor. After all, we no longer argue over the divine right of kings, or assume that mental illness comes about from demon possession. Why is that? What made those changes happen? It was cultural, sure, but how? How does culture work? How does it evolve? 

It was in attempting to answer those questions that this analogy came into being.

…

The Stone

Imagine if you will, a massive wheel of stone that is hundreds of miles wide and perhaps equally as large in diameter. The stone travels slowly over a large flat plain, completing a single revolution once per year, so that the part which is currently at the very top will be on the top again in precisely 365 days. The weight of this stone is crushing, destroying everything in its path. Behind it is a transformed landscape marking its passage that goes back for millennia. The stone is almost inconceivably large, and is unstoppable in its rotation. 

Upon the face of this stone are people. We will call them sculptors, though they go by many different names: Artists, writers, painters, dancers, singers, songwriters, chefs, architects, musicians, scientists, etc. They are of all shape, sizes, color, nationality, and religion. Each day these sculptors work upon the surface of the stone, battering and hammering into the hard face with their tools. Their goal is to affect the stone in such a way that when it reaches soil below it will use its massive weight to stamp an impression into the dirt that will last year after year beyond its passage. Some sculptors work singularly, some work in large groups. The work is hot, heavy, and dangerous. The very top is the safest place to work, and that is where you’ll find most of the sculptors, but the stone remains underneath that area for only a short time. Those that wish to influence a particular section beyond that short moment, must invent ropes and pulleys and other contraptions to hold themselves to the ever rotating surface while they work. If you start too early you’ll discover that the stone, fresh from compacting the soil, is embedded in a thick layer of dirt. If you stay too late upon the other side you risk the very real chance of being crushed by your own work. Every year the stone in its undying rotation creates hundreds if not thousands of casualties. The price for inattention is high.

All of humanity is deeply interested in what the sculptors do, but the vast majority do not live upon the stone. Either they find the work disinteresting, too dangerous, or perhaps they have some other reason. Instead, most people live in the impressions left behind by the passage of the stone, for as the stone moves it leaves behind vast buildings made of compressed soil, some so large they become massive unending cities. Also left behind are sculptures, and trees, comfortably shaded benches to sit upon, toys for children and adults, pools, and roads, auditoriums, and churches, and cathedrals, cars and trains, musical instruments of every style, and vast platforms that twist and swirl for dancers to perform upon.  All that is needed is a little bit of scrubbing, and a little bit of digging, and the impressions from the stone can be made livable. Don’t like the house you’re in? Wait a year and try the next version. Hopefully, the architect up on the stone will listen to your requests. Of course, you can always pay them, for many of the sculptors are paid by the people below to create things for their use. Not all sculptors are paid. Some work for the joy, or desire. Some for the notoriety. It is said that one sculptor, by the name of Jesus, hit a crack in the face at just the right moment that it caused a massive avalanche of stone to fall. You can still see the impression of his work today. Some claim this Jesus was buried in the rubble of his own creation, and popped up, alive and healthy, three days later on the other side. His own work sheltering him from the weight of the stone. Alas, no one can travel back that far in the stone’s wake and check. 

This, then, is our culture. The stone. It is both something that concerns us all, and yet is something we can also contribute to. It is the most democratic of mediums, although some groups do in fact limit who among them can work its surface. Some people by hammering away find great success, but the vast majority of sculptors do not. Most know of the stone only by the impression it leaves behind. Some live so far from the stone that they have never seen its motion. By now, the entire surface of the stone has been marked by humanity, much of it for thousands of rotations. That doesn’t mean one cannot go in and try to reshape any area they desire, but the stone is hard, and the work is difficult, and there might be just as many sculptors wishing to carve the stone in the entirely opposite direction. The battle is the work, and the work is the battle, and all of us, all of humanity, are affected by the outcome.