narratives in society, psychology & religion

[disrupter]

this is just some initial thoughts i had on the subject, feel free to chime in with your insights, ideas & counter arguments.

The narrative is a powerful device & shows up regularly in our lives.

Theism is essentially narrative in nature.
I think a soothing narrative allows one to rest one's mind.
It creates a kind of frictile [given to friction] surface where our minds can be [temporarily] lodged or rested.

I suspect this has a lot to do with telling bedtime stories to children.
The story gives them a structured narrative that engages/ties-up their minds instead of all the dangling questions & uncertainties, chewing, nagging, dogging the mind.

Oddly science does some narrative stuff. presumably based on evidence, but it describes sequences of events that culminate in some particular outcome or other. although i think it emphasizes the open-endedness & subject to change of it.

narration is a device, a descriptive device. Seemingly a useful device [certainly for entertaining, calming, engaging children]. Biographies also act as narratives. a time structured chain of events about some seemingly significant person's life. I think they may allow us to 'project' [imagine about, play with] the narrative.

mostly i have referred to positive, soothing narratives,
but conversely there can be disturbing, upsetting narratives as well.
'Step on a crack break your father's back, Step on a line, break your mother's spine' [a short partial narrative]. But you can imagine all sorts of nightmare narratives, horror stories & movies. I suppose actually being a badly treated slave is sort of a nightmare narrative.
My dark imagination can imagine possibly even worse scenarios/narratives.

analytically i guess one needs to examine what a narrative is.
story would be our simplest definition.
a descriptive text that tells a sequence of related events, often with central, often human, characters. Often designed with some kind of overarching dynamic or philosophical vantage. Sometimes they actively promote some idea which makes them to at least some degree propaganda. Sometimes they may be some raw exploration of life situations with possibly ambiguous endings.

i think what it does is provide 'coherence'. i would crudely define coherence as something that is self-connected, all-of-a-piece. and the coherence of it allows for reflection off/from it.

We live in many chaotic mediums. overtly air & water, perhaps even dirt comes to mind. Also our economics, social & psychological environments can [are likely to] be chaotic.
A narrative sort of [can] gives us a kind of coathanger to provide some guiding paradigm. It can certainly be soothing.
It provides perhaps a wrapper of coherence to our minds, imaginations, thinking.

Perhaps initially if the structure is available to re-adaptation it doesn't matter so much where we start. we build a raw structure. we see if it inherently interacts with our environment. we play with it to see how it acts. we build a copy of it or perhaps a different structure. eventually we can put several structures together, & later do it with intended design characteristics.
The narrative might be described as some elaborated coherent mental/imaginary structure, almost without exception, relating to events through a passage of time.

poetry would not stipulate coherence.
tableaus would not have a passage through time.

i think time is a stipulation in a narrative
& at least some sketchy coherent relationships between described scenarios/events.

It suggests to me that the universe has a gradient of stuctured, unstructured & void domains. Without innate structure already pre-existing in the universe, we would probably be at a loss. without void this structure could not be animate. chaos, unstructured material, is sort of a state between. with approximate granularity of smaller size(s).

i suspect narration is heavily dependent on 'empathic' relating of events.
ie. I relate to someone describing 'driving a car' because i have driven a car.

is 'description' inherently coherent? focus on a single thing from possibly variant points of view & various characteristic traits?

a lot of it is about linkage, the way logic is about linkage.
perhaps progress is a more open term.

[Linkster]

Which is why religion has always done so well at allowing people to channel their fears over to fiction - without going in to the long history of it - it seems that this has always been the attraction of it to the human species.

The ability of those narratives to then be channelled in to a political, crowd controlling or even warring stance by humans shows the power of the spoken and written word - and usually without a lot of thought put into the content by the receiving end - although it is a pretty simple task to see it on the delivery end

[disrupter]

I was thinking it [presumably] provides enough/sufficient detail to satisfy/calm/quiet the listener's mind.

sort of like i don't have to provide even the most crucial detail(s), like how some fiction technology works, as long as the author provides enough for a sense of its 'realness'. how it looks, feels, what it does, how it was used, while ignoring the elephant, 'how exactly did it do that?'

Of course think of how many people drive cars, and a lot of them have very little detail on how exactly it works. I assume they still teach the very crude abstract about internal combustion, pistons & camshafts, but beyond that they are fairly clueless.

We start switching light switches probably before we have any clue where the electricity comes from.

almost like if i provide x number of identifiable details, even ignoring some of the most fundamental the mind's capacity for details gets 'occupied' & is satisfied.

one gets bounced along the surface of the narrative, not getting hung up on depth. Which in many ways is not so different from the way many of us live our lives. ie. we need to know the details to get necessary tasks done, but beyond that it is up to whatever curiosity we have to take over. Without curiosity you can skim your entire life.

Perhaps it is as though we save our open endedness for the overall theme or direction of something & anything tangent to perpendicular is sort of discounted as extraneous.

the narrative utilizes our capacity for abstraction, without going into the potentially infinite depth of ancillary details. In a sense saving/preserving our minds as an abstraction device. If we went into infinite detail we could not progress through the surface parallel path. Without it we would probably go mad.

It makes me wonder if in some respects that might be the physics relationship with reality that allows us to experience 'time'. Instead of understanding every [perceivable] detail in the universe of every instant, we necessarily gloss over the ones that are not relevant to [quasi-]vector through time.
Which would make our actual lives a kind of narrative about our space-time experience. Understanding everything would probably make us essentially mentally non-functional.

In a sense a narrative may serve to re-align us [to parallel] with the way we must of necessity interface with the spacial-physics universe in order to progress through [experience] time. It may improve our ability to skim, through distracting us from points of our lives that are bogging us down.

Maybe quantum physics has more to do with our relationship to space-physics than is actually inherent in it.

Have you ever tried to focus on detail in a dream or semi-lucent dream or daydream? I wonder if it might be something like that. Mostly we don't, only with very intentional focus do we begin to discern the fine detail of the World around us.

i was thinking perhaps we might be more scupulous about which details we require to satisfy our minds. sort of preferring or demanding the technologically crucial details [perhaps without complete depth]. Perhaps this is the science oriented mind in action. honing in on the crucial, unexplained details. Of course if one is consumed with any given [tangent/perpendicular] avenue/vector of inquiry we may lose our way along our previous surface path.

Although oddly once you have science & technology it may curve the whole surface a society runs on. ie. because one person pursues a tangent/perpendicular vector it draws others in & as technologies develop that the wider population interfaces with the entire narrative of people's lives & society at large begins to get turned in that direction.

Fishing is not a totally unept analogy. going out on a foreign [non-dryland] medium in a craft & throwing in a line to see what one can snag & bring to the surface.
Science i suppose is more often like scuba diving at depth trying to get an entire landscape/ecology in grasp.

But in a surreal way maybe since this is not a cogent/real landscape with a necessarily uniform ocean we speak of perhaps the boat analogy can be applied. Our minds can float into altered states & we snag odd notions which may be anything. sometimes immediately apparent for some particular use, often not immediately apparent, but perhaps potentially useful. Also it might act as a depth sounding & where the richest sources of odd things is.

[this is all pretty vague]

[Bill]

I'm not sure you've presented your thesis as clearly as you could, and arguably should.

But I think I agree with your thesis as I understand it so far.

I have a cluster of similar theories about how the brain is influenced by "stories" and "storylines", often at an unconscious and preconscious level.

And that much of human thought is a kind of memorization and mixing and repitition of story elements and storylines.

I think we can see this fairly easily in popular creative media like movies and television - a limited set of mythic stories, or themes from mythic stories, used over and over again.

Pop media that moves outside the commen set of storylines is rarely successful - but popular media that tells one of the familiar stories will succeed financially, even if it's in most other ways a piece of crap.

And politics can be seen as conflicts of storys and storylines.

[disrupter]

im not really presenting a thesis or proposition, i am more just wandering through the subject, exploring it. This is not exactly something for a report or english paper.
I hope that is ok.
brainstorming sort of? seeking perhaps predominant core paradigms of the subject if there are any. [i suspect there are, as it is such a recurrent thing.]

this is raw thinking as opposed to finished product.
not exactly ready for presentation. :)

[disrupter]

A narrative brings a clarity to a string or sequence of potentially ambiguous events. It illustrates them.
It sort of strings them together. It turns proximity into [assigns] causes & effects.
It gives a specific point of view. [arguably inherently biased, even intentionally biased]
With that specific point of view it gives a kind of 'up' & 'down' to everything.
Uncipherable events are given [a cast of] meaning & form.

A narrative gives a descriptive order to a life, our lives.

It often creates a kind of iconography* [my definition], a bit of a morality play.
A common structure is main character encounters difficulties then overcomes them.
We like to see/interpret that some character trait allowed/made-possible the overcoming of ill happenings. Or conversely a lack of good trait(s) didn't allow a character to prosper when opportunity was there.
An illustration to some point or purpose.

A narrative gives clarity, but we have to ask does it give [is it] accuracy?

Science notes how we internally describe events in such a way as to cast ourselves in the best available light.
In chaos are things so ambiguious that [almost?] any description will do?

Also i find people assign cause & effect attributes rather arbitrarily. Even in supposed science without always scrupulously verifying this. Without considering the converse or it's simply association or perhaps both elements are attributes [effects] of some unseen or unrevealed originating causal element.

Narration can be used to paper over some 'questionable' behaviors.
The religious story/narrative is: i acknowledge that i have done bad things but God's acceptance turns [almost anything] into a 'happy', forgiven ending.
I find that a bit troubling, especially as an atheist.
It certainly doesn't make a good accounting system with at least temporal finite resources.

Weirdly science may be somewhat narrative in nature.
Maybe even math.

They both seek [to establish] clarity. Grabbing the [apparently] certain & tossing all else aside.

Religion is obviously very narrative. It establishes an entire cast of characters.
It makes human existence explicitly a morality play.

weirdly that is kind of what i am doing. Trying to clarify [organize?] my conceptualization of my [our?] existence. Trying to etch little clarifying lines amid the noise & chaos.
Like quantum ambiguity, am i creating something that didn't actually exist before, or amplifying it to some unseen degree? In illustrating we change things?

*a cartoon type icon, a generalized form that contains the crucial attributes of that iconic idea. ie. table; flat surface perpendicular to gravity field, useful for organizing objects in an equal gravity gradient [not the necessarily religious 'iconography' definition of iconography]

[disrupter]

Just a general comment on religion:

I think heavy proselytizing religions are much more about psychology than spirituality.

They usually start by whacking down everyone psychologically who is not indoctrinated. Sort of like the military does with new recruits.
Which just butchers any pre-existing spirituality you [may] already have.
Chop down people's morale to [almost] nothing & then completely reconfigure them along the system dogma's paradigm.
Then they set themselves up as some monopoly of psychology.
the spirituality is almost non-existent.

Spirituality is rich, sensual & very often delicate.
I think it is sort of an interface thing, bordering the transcendent.
i don't mind superstition as long as it is personal & non-offensive.

The sheer banality of these proselytizing religions is just nauseating. Bland, monotonous, impersonal, generic.
They attempt to industrialize spirituality which is about as un-spiritual as you could get.
The dynamic can never be completely objectified.

they take the transcendent & turn it into the mundane which inherently makes it NOT transcendent.

They give you the PROMISE of the transcendent & yet they rob you of the transcendent.
It just seems inherently fraudulent,
like a ponzi, pyramid scheme.

sigh, oh well that is my take on it.

[disrupter]

Isn't religion essentially a romantic notion?

That attempts to either make our existence psychologically more palatable or at least substitute some narrative for the actual [often chaotic] abyss of reality?

is physics the [thusfar defined] limit of possibilities? An attempt to define the real bony bottom line of existence?

Meditation can be done to sooth & calm us as a manipulation of our nervous systems.
it could be done purely for its own sake, because one likes that state of psychology/mind.
it could be done with the idea that we contend with our varied existences better that way, but if that is not based on scrupulously retained experience it could possibly be a romantic notion.
So we distinguish between romantic & experiential [slightly grey area], but without initial at least small romantic notions we would in many cases never gain the experience.

To experiment we must have at the very least some small romantic/hopeful notion that doing something will either be rewarding/informative.
Although I suppose it could be purely compulsive, reflexive.

I suppose that comes down to whether we see ourselves as essentially idle & therefore we must go beyond that to act,
or alternatively if we are already kinetically engaged which merely makes it a changing of our activities or their characteristics.

In a sense [believed] romance can cause our actions to be led by our imaginations. I suppose the alternative to that is either inaction or action via reflex(es).

We are such creatures of [willful?] imagination that everything we do is 'romantic'. & i suppose technologically it is shaving/skimming the romantic, imagination as close to the surface of the limits of physics for maximum advantage. So in a weird way we are somehow maximizing [increasing?] the potential of physics.
Although at some point we may be able to go beyond the Universe where there may be meta-physics or simply no definition & no limits.

The creative, technological mind, deep mines the imagination due to fixation upon some fantasized notion. Always an iffy yet potentially very rewarding thing. I suppose if we were brilliant we would simply conceive of an idea & then pull/manipulate the scientific known parameters to effect/fulfill it.
makes it sound almost both beautiful & blaze'.
We project an idea in our imaginations & then think as to how it is realistically, efficiently possibly effectable or not.

Warning! Warning! : approaching the deep soup
Mostly chattering to myself at this point [if not always :D]

Limits & definitions are inseparable. Definitions are essentially sculptured limits aren't they?
If you have no limits you have no definition? Can you have a limit without a definition?
A discontinuous function can have a limit to [one of] its discontinuity, but its limit itself is a non-existent thing. So there is a limit, but the limit itself doesn't exist? Pi & sqrt2 are defined as limits [i think] of 'finder' functions? Unlimited slope is undefined [as a value of slope]. So the limit is a [result of an infinite?] function? Aren't they in fact theoretical notions? We can define them between a pair of caging values, but there is no end to it.
(probably just rehashing the definition of [reason for] calculus)
It is a supposition isn't it? Or at least if you think there is some exact value.
It is a notion, but it seems to be a workable notion.

Science is about a workable supposition isn't it?
It isn't like we really understand the 'why' of things, we simply record what the universe does & then attempt to create a workable theory that is as close an approximation of actual experience as we can get.
When the theory becomes predictive then it gains our confidence.

Maybe it is all about the level/depth of romance.
Religion is deep, unapologetic [reckless?] romance whereas science attempts to come closer & closer to actual [pre]existence using a feedback loop.
Science needs at least a touch of romance for motivation, but its accuracy is about stripping away all the incorrect bits.

Romance is a kind of psychological embeddedness isn't it?

Where does passion fall in all of this?
belief? abandon? commitment?
What about desperation?

Heavy romance is sort of resource demanding,
whereas science attempt to find the minimal requisites of existence.
I think Science is inherently elegant. it seeks the well defined 'bones' of reality.
Deep Romance is inherently baroque? Often corpulent, potentially excessive.

I think the blind abandon/commitment to the presumptive & romantic notions of religion [or anything that had those characteristics] helped us, as individuals [or groups] to contend with the [massive chaotic] wilderness of the natural biosphere.
In a sense it is the efficiency of pathology.

But now that our realm is known to be finite in physical scope we will have to put the brakes sharply on that kind of [formerly necessary] overly romantic thinking & the pathological actions they enable.

We need to become cool aloof calculators,
very formalistic,
we have to commit ourselves to embedded formal structures the way bones give us much more articulation in our animations/actions.

if we don't we will go the way of bacteria & other more compulsive, uncoordinated cell sets.

We either work collectively, with some foresight or our myopic, inarticulate individualized sensibilities will almost certainly be our downfall, our extinction.

United we stand, divided we fall,
but not as a notion of romance but a dispassionate, clinical fact.

our selfish interests demand it,
they have become necessarily collective in nature.