There’s been a few things that have appeared on my Tumblr dash that have me thinking about a concept that I’ve been poking around the edges of for some time.
I call it denarration: the state of being without a narrative, without history, and thus without a future to look forward to.
I haven’t looked at the notes for this yet, but I’m dead certain that at least one of them repeats the tired old lie of “dem moon landin’s r t3h FAEKS!!!1!”
(Reblogged 23 Dec 2011 Source: 1000scientists, via grottu)
What causes denarration – which I personally believe is not just one man’s fancy, but a very real state and a very real threat to humanity – may be manyfold. For example, a sufferer may simply not understand why he or she should care about what happened in ages past when there’s the present to react to, perhaps because the concept of history was irredeemably wedded to long boring lists of dates and data whose sole use was to pass a test.
"Dude, who cares about the past except stinky ol' Miss McGurkenshaw anyway?"
I should know. In school I didn’t understand what Social Studies was for at all, since it seemed to look at every other society except the one I was stuck in.
Apart from school damage, another is the simple fact that modern, First World, industrial-era lifestyles aren’t exactly… what’s that word… significant. Hence leading this blog post with a screen from the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.
There are, as everyone well knows, a lot of people convinced that the US government pulled a swifty on everyone and faked - along with hundreds of thousands of accomplices – the fruition of the Apollo space programme and the greatest feat of manned exploration in history. (Maybe because they can’t see any tyre tracks on the moon.) There are those who say much the same thing about the Buildings 1 and 2 of the World Trade Centre in 2001. And of course the millions whose desperate need for affirmation that their particular Christian god is real causes them to spit in the face of almost all science as they obsess over one of the creation myths in the Bible.
They seek importance in their lives, and they cannot find it in dry history and often incomprehensible science, let alone the mechanised tedium of day-to-day living. Instead, they find an exciting story that panders to their biases, puts them centre-stage as Brave Underdogs Against The Man, and live it to the hilt.
Actually, tinfoil hats let the government IN.
But there’s another problem. These days, we are more or less drowning in a torrent of stories, of varying levels of fact. Sure, a book on car repair is miles away from the latest big-name techno-thriller, but it also becomes disturbingly easy for people to get confused between a factual discussion and something more fanciful. (That for many subjects there are conflicting opinions probably doesn’t help, and so they go with whoever agrees with them.)
Information overload doesn’t enlighten; it just entrenches existing endarkenment.
But denarration isn’t just a severing from social or cultural or physical history. There’s also cultural denarration. As Big Media becomes ever more risk-averse and reliant on recycling fads of the past, the more bewildered generations become as they find themselves confronted by source material they are unable to comprehend.
Wait, what, there were bands BEFORE Glee?
Seriously, I’ve seen reposts of ‘reviews’ in which either truly naive or trolling reviewers panned the original because it didn’t resemble the adaptation or remake they were comfortable with. (E.g. #1, #2 which is more a counterexample.)
I agree with Hipster Kitty.
I am not tolerant of people who insist on flying in the face of facts, of history. Because if you don’t know how you got here, how can you tell where to go from here?
Mull that over a bit and you’ll understand my concern. If your preferred story doesn’t jibe with the facts, then any decisions you make are likely to be the wrong ones. No history means no knowledge base from which you can attempt to plot a course for the future. Or, even worse, you cannot conceive of the future, period.
I’m not just talking about garden-variety NIMBYism, but about a total incapacity to rationally discuss the inevitable seismic changes that will come in the future. And if we, as a race, are too busy either living day to day or defending some romantic self-aggrandising fantasy, those changes will most likely break us.
A shared narrative binds us together as a people, as a culture, as a society, as a race. Denarrated, or struggling to choose between competing narratives, we will most likely become a bitterly disputed history ourselves.
