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?

The Two Realms

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“We shall even find, in Parmenides and in Plato, the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

“Everything,” said Thomas [Aquinas], “that is in the intellect has been in the senses.” - Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe - Thomas Cahill

Words can be relied upon only so long as one is sure that their function is to reveal and not to conceal. - Hannah Arendt

Schools of philosophy, and schools of politics belong to one of two realms: An outlook most famously expressed by Plato, or an outlook represented in modern times by the Enlightenment and its characteristically empirical approach. Popper, above, paraphrases Plato’s philosophical idealism, while Aquinas in the second selection rejects Plato’s teaching that the senses belong to the realm of “appearances,” concerning which there can be only opinion, not knowledge.

To summarize, Plato taught that the table we think is real is an effect—in the parable of the cave a “shadow”—of a pre-existing immaterial template of the table. The template is usually referred to as a form (idea in Greek, producing the term philosophical idealism).

Cahill: In the Platonist model of knowledge, the real physical thing which you can see or touch is only an “appearance” generated by a hidden Form.

 Of philosophical idealism Aristotle said:

This form, which exists in the carpenter’s mind, is the formal cause of the table—but it can have no existence except in the carpenter’s mind and at length in his work. To speak otherwise—to say that there is an absolute Tableness floating somewhere that gives form to all particular tables—is “to speak abstractly and idly.” - Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter

There is an ancient quarrel, as Plato might have said, between the empirical view of the world, whose adherents Plato called “lovers of sights and sounds,” and the theoretical, a priori doctrines grounded in undetectable, immaterial “forms.” The difference is as fundamental as it could possibly be: each concept of what the world is really like has an ontology (concept of the nature of reality) and an epistemology (concept of how human beings can know reality) which can’t be reconciled with the other, and which results in a radically different politics. The empirical view, as argued in The Liberal Founding, is associated with liberal democracies. The regime produced by an outlook based on the eternal, perfect, immutable forms is a stark contrast:

In the Republic and the Laws, [Plato] paints a detailed picture of the ideal Greek polis, a state without a whiff of democracy, solidly built on enlightened Socratic-Platonic principles. Most people ... need to be governed by guardians, philosopher-kings who have been strictly educated to know always what is right and just for themselves and for others. ... The great mass of humanity will remain ... hopeless “lovers of sights and sounds,” mistaking the paltry pleasures of evanescent physical phenomena for truth. Because of such inherent human weakness, Plato reluctantly banished all poetry, art, and music from his ideal state; these things only lead people into trouble. ... Besides the guardians, Plato's society has two lesser classes . . . - Cahill, ibid.

This politics is a ramification of Plato’s ontology—the forms, which alone are real, are intangible—and his derived epistemology: the philosopher, unlike those who know only the illusory world of the senses, is able to apprehend the forms directly. As I.F. Stone recounts in The Trial of Socrates, Socrates said the polis should be ruled not by the few nor the many but by as he put it in Xenophon's Memorabilia “the one who knows.” By Plato’s theory of knowledge, only the philosopher-king can be qualified to rule* the polis.

[Plato's disapproval of political democracy was explicit. Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”]

One of the consequences of the Platonic view of the world is top-down thinking and organization. There is a foregone conclusion that the many do not know and are not qualified to participate in political decisions.
Another consequence of the primacy of the forms may not be evident at first sight. The problem is suggested by the following lecture note:

Socrates begins his argument in both dialogues [Theaetetus & Phaedrus] with the truism that you cannot make shoes without knowing what a shoe is, nor can you be a trader in horses without knowing what a horse is. But to know what a shoe or a horse IS, for the purpose of shoemaking or horse-trading, is it necessary to meet the impossible standards of Socratic logic by coming up with an absolute and perfect definition of either shoes or horses?

www.wbenjamin.org/nc/nov30.html

In other words, the horse trader thinks that his expertise is the sweating, whickering horses he sells, but the real issue is something else which is hidden to him: the Form of the horse. The political philosophies of the Platonist realm (I’m finally getting back to the Two Realms) are about something else:

And that brings us to the Marxist/Freudian axis. In a Marxist model of knowledge, the superstructure—the tangible products of culture—camouflages and reinforces the hidden reality of class warfare. In a Freudian model, the manifest content of a dream is a cover or disguise for its latent meanings. ... [In the model of knowledge presented by deconstruction or postmodernism], in contrast to the Marxist or Freudian schemes, there is no ultimate meaning to which one can penetrate. There is only the constant deferral of meaning. - Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism

If you think you’re talking about a horse, in Plato’s context you’re talking about the Form of the horse. If you think you’re talking about the Bill of Rights, to a Marxist you’re talking about false assurances which are an instrument of class warfare. If you think you’re talking about how your boss pushes you around, to a Freudian you’re talking about your neuroses. If you think the proposition that light travels faster than sound is a fact, a Nietzschean will say, “There are not facts, but only interpretations,” and adherents of deconstruction or postmodernism will point out that language cannot refer to anything outside itself. (As an exasperated observer remarked, they inhabit a conceptual world where “nothing is anything and everything is everything else.”) Welcome to the realm of the hidden, shifting topic. Welcome to Plato’s Realm.

(*)  Modern states do not have rulers. The British are quite clear that the Queen reigns but does not rule. Can you name the ruler of France? Germany? Likewise, no one in our society is called a ruler. And properly speaking, the people do not rule: they govern.
However, when university courses discuss “Who should rule?” the one answer which is seldom seen is: “nobody.”