Narrative, Humanity, and Liberal Modernity

“Humans appear to pay attention to related details in a movie for much longer than monkeys do, suggesting that humans integrate events over time in a fundamentally different way.” In other words, it seems that what makes people different is our ability to follow a narrative. ... People fixate on one actor and integrate complex events over time. ... “Monkeys were reacting moment-by-moment instead of assembling and testing a narrative explanation for the scene before them,” the researchers wrote. - Asif Ghazanfar, HT to Andrew Sullivan

With the development of narrative, we became the animal that knows that it will grow old and die, and thus the animal that has art and religion. ... With the development of narrative, we also become the animal that imagines laws and ethics. (Vide infra)

Brandon Watson has a helpful rundown of the most common theories.  I'd like to sketch another, which I might call narrative theory. The paradox of fiction, as Brandon explains it, is that we feel for things we know don't exist.  Narrative theory, as I define it, posits 1) that fictional characters do exist, not as literally existing beings, but as narrative entities and 2) that real people like you and me are also narrative entities. We lovers of fiction and fictional characters have something in common: we're narrative beings. - Kyle R. Cupp

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

A major factor in the development of the technological modern world we experience was the symbolic ordering of nature by science. (See earlier post The Liberal Founding.) What is seldom realized is that all of us are constantly ordering the world. We don't live in the world as it is, but in a narrative drama which we construct by "integrat[ing] events over time." In this gestalt formation we perceive connections between the past and the present, and to a certain extent become able to know about the future.

As Ghazanfar and the other researchers argue:

The bulk of the overlap was driven by the two species’ shared interest in complex scenes, particularly faces, body movements, and social interactions.

But the researchers also found two intriguing differences between the monkey and human gaze paths.

First, “humans appear to look at the focus of actor’s attention and intentions to a much greater extent than do monkeys,” Ghazanfar and Shepherd wrote in a fascinating review published in the film journal Projections. Second, “humans appear to pay attention to related details in a movie for much longer than monkeys do, suggesting that humans integrate events over time in a fundamentally different way.”

In other words, it seems that what makes people different is our ability to follow a narrative. Whereas monkeys look and react to scenes quickly, people fixate on one actor and integrate complex events over time. In a clip showing two monkeys, for example, people tended to look squarely on the monkey sitting quietly in the center of the screen. Monkeys, in contrast, looked at the more active second monkey, even thought it was jumping out of view of the camera. “Monkeys were reacting moment-by-moment instead of assembling and testing a narrative explanation for the scene before them,” the researchers wrote.

With the development of narrative, we became the animal that knows that it will grow old and die, and thus the animal that has art and religion.

Part of postmodernism's attack on liberal western civilization was the attempt to deconstruct "metanarrative." In the current Wikipedia, "A metanarrative is a grand narrative common to all. The term refers, in critical theory and particularly in postmodernism, to a comprehensive explanation, a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealised) master idea."

In this point of view, narrative at times goes beyond projecting the future as a continuation of a pattern emerging in the past, visualizing what ought to be. With the development of narrative, we also become the animal which imagines laws and ethics.

"As you read a log," blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote, "you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending." [Emphasis added]

Orwell argued that to write clearly is a political act: "To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers." The well-structured, coherent novel of "one increasing purpose" is the verbal art form of our time. Its antithesis is deconstruction's concept of the postmodern novel, fragmented, ironic and self-refuting.

A "truth" becomes true by its connection to other elements of knowledge—in effect, by its place in an ordered narrative. The concept of a free citizen of a liberal society, capable of self-government, comes from the acceptance of an ordered narrative describing a rational, informed, ethical being capable of acting in the name of the public good out of enlightened self-interest.

As Richard Wolin wrote in The Terms of Cultural Criticism, to deconstruct the narrative of the autonomous self is profoundly antiliberal:

In the New Republic, Tzvetan Todorov deplored the “dogmatic skepticism” he finds in the academy—the attitude that “there is no such thing as truth or objectivity.” Todorov dramatized the danger by recalling that in George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother crushes the idea that reality is “something objective, external, existing in its own right.” … Tzvetan Todorov writes that “it is not possible, without inconsistency, to defend human rights with one hand and deconstruct the idea of humanity with the other.” Deconstruct humanity—reduce the autonomous self to the status of a fiction—and you are left with an entity no more responsible for its actions than a puppet manipulated by an unseen master.

After the turning point in our history of September 11, 2001, people hoped for a return to what was fundamental. Some asked, "Is this the end of irony?" What ordered narratives do you credit?