Stories Are Our Shields Against Life’s Absurdity

And how the dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction is a fiction

What do we depend on most in life?

To fulfill our social roles in our families, jobs, and nations, we depend on numerous tools and procedures. We rely on the accumulation of knowledge and on the trials and errors of history that inform our laws, which we aim to live by.

And in keeping the peace in our large societies that bring together many strangers, we wear a façade of ourselves, as it were, a persona that obliges us to swear fealty to certain prosocial principles even if they’re not as innocent or as self-evident as we’d expect. We may act as though this or that dogma, mantra, or creed redeems our life, quiets our doubts, and makes everything alright.

But perhaps nothing’s as common in human affairs as hypocrisy. We say we’ll do one thing, but we do another, or we perform certain routines even as we know secretly that they’re not fulfilling. Happiness is fleeting, and when events don’t proceed as planned and we’re faced with the world’s inhuman indifference, what’s left to comfort us, if anything?

Reason is supposed to be king in modernity, and we progress socially by figuring out how to get what we want with technological ingenuity. Yet consumers are among the most deluded of all human masses, matching even ancient theists in our cluelessness. We progress at nature’s expense and therefore at ours. So, the modern endeavour is self-defeating. And we ignore that fact, distracting ourselves with inane entertainments, and with the minutiae of our jobs that often trap us into wasting our time rather than making the most of our skills and interests.

Society progresses, we say, but that’s an abstraction. Only the top twenty percent of developed humanity (at the very most) live like blissfully free and empowered gods, receiving the lion’s share of the wealth generated by modern industry. The rest sacrifice themselves in some capacity to sustain the abstraction of a progressive society. In other words, the Pareto principle holds regardless of our egalitarian pretensions.

Of course, without scientific and technological advances, most of us would be living worse lives in certain respects. We’d die younger, malnourished, and with fewer middle-class trappings. But the peasants who made up most of medieval Europe are much more like the working class who make up most of modern developed societies than any of their lives compares to that of a medieval aristocrat or of a twenty-first century hedge fund manager.

The wealthy few depend on their power, riches, and array of possessions, but none of those things comforts these elites when they’re dying — and it’s one of the greatest ironies that the gods die right alongside the lowliest peasants and pariahs.

When you’re dying, your family, job, and material comforts count for nothing, no matter who you are. What do you depend on then in the ultimate test of your identity?

Most people rely on their religious faith or tradition to comfort them in their times of greatest need when they’re deflated or faced with catastrophe. When all else fails, they can rely on their cherished thoughts and habits.

With modern, post-scientific insights at hand, it’s easy to sneer at religions that seem archaic and preposterous. Their absurdity is a feature, not a bug, because the wrongheadedness of the creeds and rituals tests the practitioner’s loyalty to the group, and it’s the tribal advantages of belonging to a group that sustain religious folks.

But not in death.

Religious dogmas are just stories, of course. And is it possible to say or to think something that’s not at least halfway fictive? Is there some theory that’s not ultimately just a story we tell because that’s what we imaginative mammals do?

We distinguish between science and religion on precisely those grounds. Science is true because it works. Science maps out natural processes, enabling us to predict what will happen and thus to understand what’s going on. And indeed, no one can argue with the fact that science is more empowering than, say, ancient superstitions.

Yet raw power can be plenty absurd. Everything that happens in unknowing nature is as potent as can be, as events that arrived by countless twists and turns from the almighty Big Bang. Who can argue with a hurricane, a volcano, or a black hole? Yet each is perfectly absurd in being what it is for no redeeming reason whatsoever. Nature runs on “laws” that were chartered by no one. The universe is a machine with no designer or angelic engineer servicing its parts and optimizing its performance. That’s absurd!

So, the scientific empowerment of humanity won’t redeem us, especially if that power proves counterproductive, as even most scientists suspect it might be (since they’re sensitive to the warnings of climatologists).

What, though, of the scientific understanding of nature? Even if our power over nature counts as little as water’s power over the rocks it sculpts, or as the wind’s power over the branches it knocks down, aren’t scientific theories objectively true and therefore cosmically sound?

Objectivity is just a hubristic stance we take when we mean to enslave something. We objectify nature, carving it into levels and cycles, in our minds, so we can conquer the world by dividing it into parts. But as miraculous as our self-serving, artificial wonderlands may be in replacing the mindless wilderness, we’ll hardly have the last laugh in our conflict with all that’s inhuman. Even our most rational theories are squiggles and pretenses that mean much to us and nothing to the universe at large. In that existential context, then, scientific knowledge is mere storytelling.

In the final analysis, Einstein’s theory of spacetime, for instance, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing since we’re all whistling past the graveyard.

These theories are true, as best as we can determine, but our determinations themselves are irrelevant in the cosmic scheme. Temporarily, our most rigorous theories enable us to exploit some natural loopholes, but the very brains that relish that utility or semantic adequacy are accidental by-products that come and go. The history of our entire species, too, will be ephemeral and insignificant in that cosmic context. Scientific knowledge itself, therefore, makes a mockery of our hubris just as technological advances may result in the implosion of civilization.

(And if you’re wondering whether this talk of the “cosmic context” is supposed to be more purely objective and thus an exception to the rule of our storytelling, I’ve discussed this paradox of antirealism elsewhere.)

Our rational capacities are tools we rely on to survive, but they’re not what we rely on the most. What we cherish are our stories because our personal identity and the memories and models of our friends and family members we love amount to mere stories we tell together. Biologically, we’re our bodies and especially our brain and nervous system. But although we don’t often disgust ourselves, we’d be repulsed by a photograph of our squishy interior. Unless we’re medically trained, we faint at the sight of blood, yet nothing’s more comforting than the familiar narrative or thought pattern that runs through our “mind.”

That mind understands its environment with concepts that necessarily simplify what they’re about. We think in idealizations, stereotypes, and shorthand notions, all of which are fictive compared to the cold facts we can’t even fathom without fictionalizing and thus humanizing them.

We are the narratives we tell ourselves, and it’s those narratives alone that accompany us in our final moments when we’re dying — because those narratives are at our essence. Only our stories, the products of our imagination stand between our Quixotic quest for life’s meaning and the monstrous, godless, wild places of the universe.