The Yarn Spinners
Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 6:03 am
What kind of world do we live in, when well-intentioned lunatics have more influence over how we think, feel, and act, than anyone else?
Joseph Smith was a wonderful storyteller - clearly, so wonderful that even in 2007 many people are so enchanted with his stories, that the fact that they could not possibly be true means nothing to them. Their belief in his stories, to them, gives their lives meaning; so why should they ever part with them? Meaning is enough. What difference then can it make that, contrary to Joseph Smith's assertions, the human family pre-dates two Missourians who lived only five millenia ago? Or that there wasn't a global flood 4000 years ago as Joseph Smith claimed? Or that the Native Americans aren't the blood descendants of Lehi at all, as Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon claim? Or a hundred other things? Clearly, none at all. These false teachings, which even many members know are false, to borrow a phrase, are simply instantly relegated to "not essential to our salvation" (though of course Joseph Smith said just the opposite). In the (not necessarily conscious) opinion of the believers, what is essential to the salvation of our psyches, our self-images, senses of safety, perhaps our marriages, etc., is to continue believing in Smith's silly, self-aggrandizing stories, and the authority claims of his successors.
Mormons may enjoy remembering that it is not only they who have found great meaning in wonderful (untrue) stories. Decades after almost all of his most important theories have been identified as either untrue or inherently untestable yarns, Sigmund Freud continues to inform the worldviews of millions of people. Humans don't actually wish to have incestuous relationships with their parents, and in fact possess an overwhelmingly powerful innate instinct against it? No problem. No evidence that our minds erase all memory of traumatic episodes? No problem. Therapists in the 80's, taking their cues from Freud, actually "creating" false traumatic memories in trying to "recover" these non-existent "repressed memories", and in so doing, tearing families apart, ruining the very lives they're supposed to be helping? No problem. Nothing seems to be a problem to those who like Dr. Freud's stories. After all - the stories give their lives meaning: incest, penis-envy, patricidal fantasies, fictitious anal fixations and all. In truth, it is nonsense, just like Mormonism - but not to the believers. For them, it has become crucial to life itself.
And what of Marx? It is no exaggeration to say that virtually all of Marx's "scientific" predictions about capitalism failed. No problem for his adherents; just like any other ideologues, his followers simply invented post hoc rationalizations to make it okay. To this day, a look at any university department faculty in the humanities or social sciences will reveal professors examining this or that "through the prism of Marxism" - after 80 years of TOTAL MARXIST FAILURE. After all the failed predictions, after MILLIONS DEAD because of the premise that human nature is infinitely malleable (a premise shared also by Mormon theology, hence its own experiments in Utopian collectives), and the desire of "knowers" to realize heaven on earth. It just doesn't matter. All that matters is that Marxism has given them meaning in their lives. Untruth has become "my truth" for the Marxist, "the end".
What about Betty Friedan and other founding mothers of modern feminism? Crucial to most modern feminism "thought" has been that "sex" does not exist; only "gender" does. ("Gender", the word, itself is a claim that all differences observed between males and females are a result of environment, rather than biology.) Now, 44 years after "The Feminine Mystique" came out, many dozens of studies confirm the fact (which, suspiciously, never seems to have been doubted prior to 1963) that the survival of our species has depended on the evolution of certain important differences in male and female human brains, just as is the case in other mammal species, has been overwhelmingly supported by many dozens of studies. (As it happens, quite a bit of the most important research in this area has been conducted by women themselves [and why not, since women have as much to gain from understanding humanity as men do?] See, e.g., the work of Doreen Kimura, or Louise Brizendine's new "The Female Brain") . Yet, there are still millions of people running around claiming that any observed differences between men and women are the result of social conditioning, and that "gender is a social construct". (No, dear - sex is real, and "gender" is largely a figment of your imagination.) The studies, the proof, the terrible effect on societies and personal relationships of positing identically hard-wired brains...none of it matters to the ideologues. Nothing can matter, by definition, to the ideologue, but his or her ideology. It's the story, stupid. Not the truth.
Translation-facilitating rocks, entirely fanciful "interpretations of dreams" (Freud's magnum lunatic opus), the superiority of central economic planning to free markets, innately identical boys and girls...all are nonsense, and demonstrable nonsense at that. Yet it seems to make hardly any difference to millions. It seems sometimes that we live in a world shaped not so much by what we know, but what we would most like to believe, damn the truth, "whatever 'truth' might mean anyway, as Nietszche taught us...".
Thank God the Bacons, Galileos, Newtons, Humes, Voltaires, Einsteins of the world have cared less about stories, even wonderful stories, and focused more on the business of trying to gain real knowledge about the world. After all, the story of Adam and Eve, which includes women through Eve being cursed by God with pain in childbirth, might be life-giving and appealing to some women - but probably far more life-giving and appealing are safe, emergency C sections and epidural blocks. (And to think there are still some feminists out there who claim that science is inherently patriarchally oppressive...what unspeakable ignorance.)
I like stories as stories, too - but I'm not sure they ought to be favoured over reality itself.
Just my two cents.
Tal
Joseph Smith was a wonderful storyteller - clearly, so wonderful that even in 2007 many people are so enchanted with his stories, that the fact that they could not possibly be true means nothing to them. Their belief in his stories, to them, gives their lives meaning; so why should they ever part with them? Meaning is enough. What difference then can it make that, contrary to Joseph Smith's assertions, the human family pre-dates two Missourians who lived only five millenia ago? Or that there wasn't a global flood 4000 years ago as Joseph Smith claimed? Or that the Native Americans aren't the blood descendants of Lehi at all, as Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon claim? Or a hundred other things? Clearly, none at all. These false teachings, which even many members know are false, to borrow a phrase, are simply instantly relegated to "not essential to our salvation" (though of course Joseph Smith said just the opposite). In the (not necessarily conscious) opinion of the believers, what is essential to the salvation of our psyches, our self-images, senses of safety, perhaps our marriages, etc., is to continue believing in Smith's silly, self-aggrandizing stories, and the authority claims of his successors.
Mormons may enjoy remembering that it is not only they who have found great meaning in wonderful (untrue) stories. Decades after almost all of his most important theories have been identified as either untrue or inherently untestable yarns, Sigmund Freud continues to inform the worldviews of millions of people. Humans don't actually wish to have incestuous relationships with their parents, and in fact possess an overwhelmingly powerful innate instinct against it? No problem. No evidence that our minds erase all memory of traumatic episodes? No problem. Therapists in the 80's, taking their cues from Freud, actually "creating" false traumatic memories in trying to "recover" these non-existent "repressed memories", and in so doing, tearing families apart, ruining the very lives they're supposed to be helping? No problem. Nothing seems to be a problem to those who like Dr. Freud's stories. After all - the stories give their lives meaning: incest, penis-envy, patricidal fantasies, fictitious anal fixations and all. In truth, it is nonsense, just like Mormonism - but not to the believers. For them, it has become crucial to life itself.
And what of Marx? It is no exaggeration to say that virtually all of Marx's "scientific" predictions about capitalism failed. No problem for his adherents; just like any other ideologues, his followers simply invented post hoc rationalizations to make it okay. To this day, a look at any university department faculty in the humanities or social sciences will reveal professors examining this or that "through the prism of Marxism" - after 80 years of TOTAL MARXIST FAILURE. After all the failed predictions, after MILLIONS DEAD because of the premise that human nature is infinitely malleable (a premise shared also by Mormon theology, hence its own experiments in Utopian collectives), and the desire of "knowers" to realize heaven on earth. It just doesn't matter. All that matters is that Marxism has given them meaning in their lives. Untruth has become "my truth" for the Marxist, "the end".
What about Betty Friedan and other founding mothers of modern feminism? Crucial to most modern feminism "thought" has been that "sex" does not exist; only "gender" does. ("Gender", the word, itself is a claim that all differences observed between males and females are a result of environment, rather than biology.) Now, 44 years after "The Feminine Mystique" came out, many dozens of studies confirm the fact (which, suspiciously, never seems to have been doubted prior to 1963) that the survival of our species has depended on the evolution of certain important differences in male and female human brains, just as is the case in other mammal species, has been overwhelmingly supported by many dozens of studies. (As it happens, quite a bit of the most important research in this area has been conducted by women themselves [and why not, since women have as much to gain from understanding humanity as men do?] See, e.g., the work of Doreen Kimura, or Louise Brizendine's new "The Female Brain") . Yet, there are still millions of people running around claiming that any observed differences between men and women are the result of social conditioning, and that "gender is a social construct". (No, dear - sex is real, and "gender" is largely a figment of your imagination.) The studies, the proof, the terrible effect on societies and personal relationships of positing identically hard-wired brains...none of it matters to the ideologues. Nothing can matter, by definition, to the ideologue, but his or her ideology. It's the story, stupid. Not the truth.
Translation-facilitating rocks, entirely fanciful "interpretations of dreams" (Freud's magnum lunatic opus), the superiority of central economic planning to free markets, innately identical boys and girls...all are nonsense, and demonstrable nonsense at that. Yet it seems to make hardly any difference to millions. It seems sometimes that we live in a world shaped not so much by what we know, but what we would most like to believe, damn the truth, "whatever 'truth' might mean anyway, as Nietszche taught us...".
Thank God the Bacons, Galileos, Newtons, Humes, Voltaires, Einsteins of the world have cared less about stories, even wonderful stories, and focused more on the business of trying to gain real knowledge about the world. After all, the story of Adam and Eve, which includes women through Eve being cursed by God with pain in childbirth, might be life-giving and appealing to some women - but probably far more life-giving and appealing are safe, emergency C sections and epidural blocks. (And to think there are still some feminists out there who claim that science is inherently patriarchally oppressive...what unspeakable ignorance.)
I like stories as stories, too - but I'm not sure they ought to be favoured over reality itself.
Just my two cents.
Tal