To say that we live in an information age is an understatement. Data not
only defines our world but ourselves. We use information to build personality,
image, and worth. We are what we know. How we use and manipulate information
qualifies our intelligence, perceptiveness, and insight; and suggests our place
in society. Those who know or want to know little – the poorly-educated,
unmediated, or fundamentally religious – exist only on the margins of
dense, highly-patterned, and complex informational worlds.
It was not always this way. In earlier pre-information ages worth and status
were not products of compilation but legacy. Kings, courtiers, and aristocrats
would always be defined by family, fortune, and heritage. Peasants would always
labor, serve, and produce, but there was never any question of their origins,
social trajectory, promise, or opportunity.
Informational constructs are varied and personalized; regularly updated and
refreshed. The man without opinions – no particular choice of political party;
no conclusions about policy or programs – is considered a cipher. Character and
personality while the product of parental genes and upbringing may be innate,
are intangible without informational constructs. A sense of humor cannot exist
in and of itself, but only derived from experience – the acquisition and
processing of information.
Irony, for example, is a trait of intelligence because to see the joke behind
the posture takes insight into human behavior, an understanding of the context
in which an event occurs, and perhaps most importantly a sense of history. To
see the irony and humor in the inflexible convictions of true believers, for
example – environmentalists, pacifists, gender reform, and capitalist deniers –
one must have an appreciation of the endless and perpetual cycles of war,
pillage and acquisition, and the ineluctable, permanent, innate forces of human
nature.
Anyone acting with absolute conviction in defiance of historical, genetic,
and social realities, can only be amusing.
So the ironist and the activist are both creatures of information and fact.
They both build their image, character, and individuality based on those facts
carefully and especially chosen to give them and their opinions weight.
Those who have little interest in defining themselves on the basis of
political philosophy, history, or social commentary are equally determined by
information. There are people whose entire raison d’etre is
making common, practical sense out of a complex world. Economists and people
who think like them need to parse risk, cost, and benefit for everything –
the best, most efficient way to get from Point A to Point B in a congested
metropolitan area; never paying more than the lowest price for a given product
or service; dismissing irrational, emotional purchases; fixing instead of
buying; parsimony, thrift, and judicious action.
Of course these people are using facts and information in the same way as do
esoterics – to build a recognizable, familiar, comfortable, and proud image for
themselves and others. They may choose to ignore opportunity cost in favor of
monetary cost because it better reflects their New England or Western values.
They may choose to dismiss a scenic, familiar route despite its advantages of
predictability and pleasure because it is a waste of time, fuel, and purpose.
The IT revolution of the past few decades has demanded our attention and
engagement. Once hooked into the electronic world, there is no going back. The
more we surf, the more we discover what we don’t know. Going down the
cybernetic rabbit hole is indeed falling into a fantastic world; and it is very
hard to climb out indeed.
Much has been made this election cycle of ‘fact’, lies, and untruths; and
commentators have struggled to understand how so many millions of voters could
have chosen Donald Trump who never apologized for his exaggerations, hyperbole,
wild stories, and implausible reasoning. These pundits, however, come from an
intellectual establishment which prizes logic, objectivity, and mental
discipline above all else. There is no way that they can possibly understand
how anyone could value image, meme, and emotion more than truth and reality.
The answer is not hard to find. The easy explanation is that Trump appealed
to the resentments, frustrations, and marginalization of the American white
middle class. They felt so excluded from the socio-economic, cultural, and
political assumptions of the ruling coastal elites, that they deliberately and
knowingly eliminated fact from consideration. Nothing less that radical reform
would do, and facts were only distracting.
The more profound explanation is that Americans are beginning to fall out of
love with facts. Virtual reality is the best expression of early 21st
century zeitgeist. Who could possibly want to be anchored – chained –
to a miserable real world when the virtual one is so appealing? When the
mind-computer interface is finally complete and seamless, there will be no
reason to linger in facts. Personal fantasy will be the new reality.
More profound still is the sense that fiction is qualitatively better and
more rewarding than fact. Shakespeare’s Histories while based on
historical fact are stories, tales of ambition, greed, family, and power which
are dramatic depictions of human nature.
Shakespeare understood the cyclical, repetitive nature of history very well.
As the critic Jan Kott pointed out, if one read the Histories in
chronological order, the similarity among them would be striking. Everyone from
Henry II to Henry VIII pursued their powerful ambitions, fulfilled their
historical legacy, and acted like kings should. At the same time these
historical characters were all different in the way they followed their similar
destinies. Drama, fiction, story-telling offers more insight into human
behavior than any factual foundation,
All the great dramatists since Shakespeare’s time and before offered insights
into human behavior and the human condition. From Aeschylus and Sophocles to
Henry Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams, playwrights
wrote of human essentials. They were less interested in the factual context in
which their characters lived and interacted than the emotional, personal, and
psychological expressions of their individuality. Although Blanche, Alma, and
Laura, and Williams himself were conditioned by their upbringing and
surroundings, these characters had a sensibility, fragility, and courage that
was unique and compelling.
Blake, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Coleridge
all wrote of the personal, the philosophical, and the uniquely human. They may
have reacted to the disappointments of the real world (The Hollow Men)
but their observations were about human beings and their independence from it.
Novelists of the 19th and early 20th century were social realists but
romantics; and it is the romance that is most appealing and telling. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas
Hardy, DuMaurier, Trollope, the Brontes, George Eliot, Sinclair Lewis and others
were less interested in the facts of existence themselves, than their influence
on character; but in the end it was character itself which prevailed. Madame
Bovary was indeed a product of a patriarchal society, but she was not a nice
person; and her story is less one of female liberation than one of more
characteristically human greed and ambition.
The older one gets the more that fiction appeals. After decades of seeing,
learning about, and studying the facts, few people trust them anymore to provide
insights into the real truth – death, dying, and what comes after. Ivan Ilyich
in Tolstoy’s story of that name realizes too late that his life has been crowded
with facts, with unnecessary barriers, firewalls, and structures to keep order
and the nasty bits out.
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Imagination - Why Fiction And Not Fact Provides The Answers We Are Looking For
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