Homo Narrans

Man as Mythmaker

It is in the nature of man to tell stories. We tell them to others; we tell them to our children; we tell them to ourselves. We tell stories about our past — personal and collective; we tell stories about our beliefs and our world; and we even tell stories about God (some of them inspired stories). We tell stories because we are made in the image of God, and He is the ultimate storyteller: The Universe, ultimately, is God’s magnum opus, which He spoke into existence. We call ourselves, perhaps somewhat misleadingly or even arrogantly, homo sapiens — ‘the wise man’ —, but, perhaps, we should call ourselves homo narrans — ‘the storytelling man’ — instead. Bees may ‘dance’ to communicate the location of food sources and some animals pass down a limited amount of information to future generations, but mankind alone tells stories. We tell of witches that consume children who venture too far into the woods away from home, of the foolishness of trusting that which has destructiveness as part of its nature, and of the danger of unbridled or sinful ambition. Some of our stories are literal — telling of the deeds of our forebears or our younger selves; some of our stories are allegorical — designed to convey truths that elude or excel the mere recitation of facts. In a very real sense, all of our stories are mythical — some fledgling, some fully formed. Myth exceeds retelling as prayer exceeds recitation.

If we were to stop telling stories, then we would cease to be truly and fully human; we would, in fact, degrade and fall into something less than what God intends us to be. Even among the most debased and degenerated members of the human species (e.g., the African bushman and the Australian aboriginal), stories are still told and even form a central part of (what passes for) their culture. The first story (myth) passed from one man to another was the Fall — passed from Adam to his sons and daughters —, and we have been passing our mythological history from one generation to the next ever since those early days of man upon the Earth. For our storytellers and mythmakers to fall silent would be to suffer a truly great evil — almost a second fall. And yet we are trending toward such a future of deafening silence, and we are doing so blithely, unthinkingly.

It seems to be an attribute in the nature of the soul to tell stories. That which is soulless can tell no stories, much as song falls silent among the wicked or the despondent. Shuffle five random words randomly and some small number of permutations will be intelligible statements, but this would not bestow upon such statements the status of story or even, in reality, mere coherence or meaning, for meaning and coherence are both products of the mind, and only a mind can imbue a statement with either. When one mind formulates a statement, such mind imbues such statement with meaning, and, then, when another mind receives such statement, that second mind also imbues the statement with meaning; if all goes well and the two minds share sufficient context, then the meaning received by the second mind will match the meaning intended by the first. If a statement is generated, but not by a mind, then it has no meaning until a mind receives it and imbues it with meaning; similarly, if a mind generates a statement and thereby imbues it with meaning and then some mindless system (e.g., a voice recorder) captures such statement, the only meaning with which the statement has been imbued is that imbued by the first mind, for the system has no mind by which meaning may be imbued. I am handwriting this article: Nothing on this (or any other) page has any inherent meaning — any meaning in itself; it has meaning because my mind has imbued it with meaning and your mind has (in transcribed form) also imbued it with (a hopefully matching, if not necessarily identical) meaning. A machine can never imbue meaning, for a machine cannot have a mind.

Beyond the ‘individualized’ meaning of the author–imbuer and the reader–(receiver–and–)imbuer, there is also the matter of the shared context. I did not create the English language (or any other language I use); similarly, I am almost certainly not the one who taught you English. The English language is part of our shared context, created and imbued with meaning by (many) other minds. Now, surely, at least at this level, it becomes obvious that the issue of meaning is actually, truly or ultimately, metaphysical, not mechanical. A sufficiently advanced machine could certainly construct a system that would appear to have meaning; for instance, an advanced AI (much more advanced than those we have today) could construct an artificial language and an entire constructed history of a civilization that never existed to accompany that language, and such language would certainly appear to have meaning, but it would, in truth, actually be meaningless until ‘processed’ by a mind and thereby imbued with meaning. (It may be worth noting, in passing, that the issue is not one of fact versus fiction, for fiction can certainly form a very important part of culture.) This may seem a fiddly or an even hypertechnical point, but it is the true heart of the matter: Only a personal agent can choose to act, and it is in the choosing that meaning is concealed and revealed. A rockslide that happens to create a geometric pattern bestows upon that pattern and those rocks no meaning, for it is a merely naturalistic, a mechanical process; a man who arranges rocks in a particular pattern thereby imbues such construct with meaning, for he is a personal agent who chose to act, whereas the rockslide is a process that simply occurs, it does not do.

This goes to the very core of what it means to be a human being. We have named ourselves homo sapiens — ‘human wise’ or ‘human knowing’ —, but, perhaps, even above and beyond this, we are also homo fiens — ‘human becoming’ — and homo faciens — ‘human doing’ —, but there is (perhaps ironically) no mere homo essens.