Alignment ⑧ scale
telling stories as a form of lossy compression is an evolutionary success story as far as it goes
Intakes
Over the long ages of the palaeolithic, people lived among others who they knew or knew of, or could place among those who knew of them. These few others comprised the world beyond the narrowest locality of kin. We work closely with a dozen others. It is more extensive in number and in range than most social animals. These rumours of connection, in song and dance, made up the entire world.
Thus it is that our social skills work best at this scale of humanity; a few hundred people are known, a few hundred are perhaps known about, in gossip, trade, and reputation.
Those stories of others when re-told, especially about those others we have never met, the elders who go before us, will conflate and confuse those individuals we have never met, with those we think we know, and that loss of information contained in what we think we know (align) informs all legendary creation. The type of creation where credit and blame are yet to be invented.
through takes
So it is that much hero based or centered fiction, in romance or adventure, relates the actions of a few key people on which the entirety of the cosmos depends, for good and for ill. I.E. the monomyth compresses reality into a story that is easy to follow, perhaps even down to just a moral. It is more a late refined mechanic than an archetype of narratology.
When the known world was only a few thousand people at most, such a figure of movement, made good local sense.
At some point however this appropriate scaling in which stories worked well was lost as population increase in denser populations, or greater motility. There was a take-off into a cultural singularity that mere evolution could not quite keep up with. Some, like Brian Garvey argue the singularity of cultural evolution among the Homo species is directly related to the lack of hardwiring of 'moral' factors, and all that was selected for was an urge to be moral, or as I say, it is the urge to should the world into place… as we self our worlds —among others— that is selected for. The details will then be varied over a deeper stratum of evolutionary pressure. Including a more socially hierarchical primate past.
Stories are one way, one medium, that older past has been undone in Homo species. As distillation, as outreach, as tradition, as change.
So an outcome of worlding we call 'morality' or 'morals' can be now regarded as a type of compression, and what we call cultural 'evolution' sees that 'compression' as 'selection', but it is not natural. Compression is not selection, even when it is highly lossy.
And not just because that appropriate scale of dozen and hundreds of people in the known world has been lost or perhaps even escaped. Especially if these stories are not part of a multi-tool tool-set, see post on woomera.
Story-telling is a type of lossy compression, the monomyth is a formulaic or conventionally familiar form, refined but over-rated if regarded monotheistically.
[Dangers lie where a narcissist talking about themselves compresses the world even further, legends in their own lunchtimes they collapse the world into their self.]
by-take
A more accurate fiction, if less well known, less celebrated, less labelled, unnamed but I christen it, is Predicament Fiction (e.g. Thumbelina) where it is one damn predicament after another falling down up on the innocent protagonist.
A fiction much more like real life than the adventure beyond the routine. Such that it may seem as not a story at all.
Both monomyth and predicament fiction use compression, but they use different compression algorithms as they have different frames of reference, they look at the ratios in the recursive proportions
[ world/self ] : [ figure/ground ]differently.
In predicament fiction the world is shrunk, in order to form or to figure the predicament as a binding agent on the innocent. As babes we all begin our stories in a predicament. A baby’s world is a dyad. A minimum reality in bad times. The survival of a lost orphaned baby is zero for most of human history. A hero is never born alone.
In comparison, in hero-based action, the few characters in a story bloom and balloon out to fill all possible pathways throughout the cosmos. The figures become giants and gods after they form the landscapes of their birth [but that is later, and probably a retrospective gloss of a hero-focussed culture]. Those giants and demi-gods arises out of the predicaments of being an infant who walk into history, or try to. This is why gods and pantheons of gods, and their monotheistic potholes come later, as we align our alignments of preference. (Some call that god's revelation of the great chain of being, which Sister Luke taught me about at the St Thomas Aquinas Primary school in Springwood, New South Wales.)
back takes
Now, I would argue that the world, as exampled by these two narrative phenomenologies, is immune to scale, or, at least an illusion suffices that scale and its possible complexity is near as nothing as may be.
I.E. all that possibility in all its complexities is too much effort, especially if one is considerate of one’s general readership in the audience, the age range in small groups of humans in evolutionary history is quite wide for starters. This compression is the result of an accident (a predicament perhaps) that we then lived among so few kith and kin, so that today our stories remain fit for the old stone age we no long live as a shared experience. Because we shared our way out of it.
These limits remain because they are foundational. We compose the world with these limits, so we cannot see the world outside of our stories, outside of our frames, they are always universal because they locate us… here. We suspect there is more going on, but still we locate ourselves in that universalist suspicion on our own patch. The universalist approach of science has inherited its very method from the limits and constraints we choose, and thus live, and from which, and through, we compress our experience into stories.
These limits become harsh when considering the scale of any alignment. Here scale is akin to framework, it is close as can be to perspective. Scale is a point-of-view dependent 'variable'. The visual metaphors for failure recognize those limits by way of the phrases and descriptions like short-sight, long-sighted, blinkered, and don't look up.
So, of course the sins of novelists, movie-makers and mythkeepers, are simply the outcome of the limits of being a human animal among others of their kind. [My notes for this essay began with this line.]
out takes
Stories and drama limit and commit our world to some pathways and not others, they are both a compression and a resolve, and these constraints found a shared reality and in turn, we self our worlds.
When all this can be perceived as a failing we can seek the credit/blame game and find badness in the individual pathology in one scale, or as conspiracies of structure or forces when we lose our tiny minds comprehension. These two 'errors' of perception are the same mistake, the difference between them is scale. They are errors of wanting to align everything, when the real error is a foundational and so a confounding bias that is born in our ongoing survival.
Scale is a frame, a disposition to pose oneself and all selves within the purview of one's concern, the point of view is a selection, the frame of reference is always within us all each and everyone of us… —that recursive fractal splintering weaves us together, and in failure scapegoats the most obvious thing nearest to hand, the compressive selection of our limited scope.
The hand is an eye. It blames the hand. Someone's hand.
Scapegoating is easier, both in terms of effort, than revising the frame of reference itself. That we see with, but cannot see. That recursive insight requires more bandwidth than imposing the frame of reference as a point of reference, glaring at you.
Even if you are somewhere else.
Perhaps we should look into the role our point-of-view has in limiting our frame more.
Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com
This is part of a series on Alignment as part of the [taphonomy of worlding] which is one of my Topics & Projects.
Interesting idea.
Having read Jaynes, I 💯 agree with your article. Thank you for sharing ❤️
I also have a personal question I wanted to ask, I left it inbox, when you have time please check it out.