Confessions of a Bipartite Being (part 3)

History vs Story

So a few days ago the fourth episode of the new season of The Rings of Power dropped on Amazon. And for the first time in video history Tom Bombadil made his screen debut. This has brought all kinds of Tolkien scholars, critics, historians and fanatics out of the woodwork, as well as religious commentators and experts of every stripe.

I have to confess that I'm very fond of J. R. R. Tolkien's works. I've read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit many times — including reading them out loud to my son. But I have never imagined them to be anything other than a carefully constructed work of art, and I don't think Professor Tolkien thought so, either.

So what is happening when an expert says Bombadil is really Eru Iluvatar (the top god of the legendarium) and quotes a tiny phrase to prove that it's true; and then other "experts" disagree and get into all kinds of  kerfuffles about it? It's none of it true guys! It's a story. It's made like any other story and went through innumerable drafts and revisions before you all got to see it. Moreover, Peter Jackson with his films, and the creative team at Amazon did a whole lot of reimagining, fitting the narrative to the dramatic strengths and weaknesses of the screen, and trying to attract the widest audience. There really is no canon. There is certainly no ultimate truth. What are people arguing about?

Or, to view this phenomenon from another angle, I once read some woman's critique of a vampire romance thing, saying that vampires do but don't do that: They can come out in the daylight; they can’t enter houses uninvited; they have a fondness for type A-negative blood. Whatever. I can imagine having a preference for portraying vampires one way or another. (Personally I find vampires uninteresting and their portrayal kind of gross.) But how can you reasonably expect to have a discussion about the natural history of an imaginary being?

All of this relates to my observations in part 1 about our bipartite natures: living as much in our heads as we do in the "real" (or, as Tolkien would have it, "primary") world. In particular, it relates to the difference between story and history: what we tell each other versus a hypothetical list of empirical, "real" events. It's very hard, maybe impossible, to untangle them. Both stories and histories are made of words. And words live in our minds. But they do afford different classes of inquiry. Was there a dwarf called "Happy" in The Hobbit. No. Did Thomas Jefferson pen the Declaration of Independence? Yes (partially). On the other hand, did George Washington chop down a cherry tree or did Isaac Newton come to understand gravity when an apple fell on his head? Probably not. Is there a deeper story to the dwarves' quest to Erebor than is told in The Hobbit? For sure.

So, since the description of some event, "real" or "imaginary", history or story, is made of words; and words rely on context, assumptions, prejudices, metaphors, analogies and all the wonderful stuff that goes into narrative, it's really hard to distinguish or even define a "fact".

But that's not really what interests me at the moment. Scores of philosophers, since the beginning of recorded history, have fussed over the nature of reality. What I'm interested in is why some people get so upset when someone disagrees with them. Why would a Tolkien aficionado argue about an imaginary history? Why would a supernatural romance fan get irritated about the physiology and customs of a literary construct?

I can think of two or three reasons.

One has to do with the old primate bugaboo of dominance. If I consider myself to be an expert on a subject, and some upstart disagrees with me, they're challenging my primacy; they're trespassing on my intellectual property. I think this is most observable in university settings, where theories and models are linked so closely to the respect of colleagues and one's reputation. Our vampire fancier is also doing something similar.

I don't mean to suggest that all these disagreements are serious. I doubt if the Bombadilists and anti-Bombadilists will be having pitched battles in the streets. Humans like to squabble. But there is at least one situation where this phenomenon gets really dangerous. When people invent imaginary [G]od[s] and extend the dominance hierarchy into a divine mandate — the direct orders of a Super Dominant Boss — all sorts of genocides and other abominations ensue. The monotheistic religions are the worst in this way. The interaction of story and history becomes really toxic. And being somewhat of a misanthrope and pessimist, I believe that most of the leaders of religious feuds are self-aware, deluding their followers with carefully contrived poisonous stories that they don’t believe themselves, filled with narcotic promises of life after death with lots of wine and sex and excellent streaming videos.

Another reason why people may get upset when their beliefs aren't agreed to by others may have to do with insecurity. If I believe that something bad will happen to me when I don't behave in a prescribed way, I might be very frightened if someone suggests those behaviors are unnecessary (or futile). I suppose many superstitions and charms work this way. Certainly, a number of parental admonitions ("Don't go outside without a jacket or you'll catch a cold!", "Don't go into the water right after you eat or you'll get a cramp and drown!") seem to be related. A parent has a lot of native anxiety about their children — especially young children (although teenage children generate a different sort of anxiety.) It's natural and adaptive. The whole evolution of parenting is deeply tied to protecting vulnerable young. When your parents teach you something you tend to absorb it without question; it becomes a foundation of your idea of security. If someone shakes that foundation by disbelieving it, that too might generate anxiety, and the anxiety might result in an angry response.

Closely related to this is the response to someone disobeying the rules, laws or mores that one insists on following oneself. If someone denies themselves candy (or sex, or liquor) they might get furious if they see someone else indulging in it. Especially if they really wanted it. I suspect this is the heart of violent responses to "sin". But it also applies to disciplines like spelling or Oxford commas, and activities like an enforced stint in the armed services — that one feels they've been forced into, perhaps suffered from, and may be envious or angry when others are not so coerced or obligated.

There is a more primal element to this, something that has little to do with mental models or stories. Once upon a time there was a feral cat in my neighborhood named Silver Bear. My wife at the time really wanted him to be altered and to get him inoculated. So it was my job to capture him. Silver Bear was really afraid of humans. And he was often very hungry. So the (really dumb) idea was to coax him into hands' reach with anchovy paste, catch him by the scruff of the neck, and dump him, kicking and screaming, into a cat carrier. Imagine the scene: here I am with a daub of smelly fish paste on my finger, my hand extended out to a starveling cat. The cat plainly is trapped between two intense emotions: fear and desire, cowering back and opening his mouth to breathe in the intoxicating scent of dead fish. And what happened? Just as you might expect, he swiped four big gashes on my hand and ran away. The two powerful elements of fear and desire alchemized into anger. And I was left with a bloody wrist.

I think about this often. I call this alchemy The Silver Bear Effect. And I think it's another basis for the anger we sometimes see in people who engage in self-denial when they observe someone who isn't doing so. They’re like a mouse-trap ready to snap.

So where is all this rambling going? I guess it's about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world. The emotional reactions aren't rational. They belong to our biological selves — dominance, security, envy, desire, love, fear, protectiveness, nurturing, territoriality. But the stories we tell ourselves about the causes for these emotions can get pretty far removed from anything rational. And if we consider the emotional response to be a problem (e.g. I consider genocide to be a problem; I consider gun violence to be a problem), analyzing the rationale contained in the stories will not provide a solution; analyzing the organic causes may bring us closer. We should pay more attention to histories than to stories.