We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes, and the bonobo chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain, three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
Even today, five million years since we and the other two species of chimpanzee went our separate evolutionary ways, we still use stories to run our lives. Every morning we buy a newspaper to find out, so we tell ourselves, what is happening in the world. But most things that are happening in the world, even rather important ones, never make it into the papers. Why not?
Because newspapers are written by journalists, and every journalist learned at their mother's knee that what grabs newspaper readers is a story. Events with zero significance for the planet, such as a movie star's broken marriage, are stories. Events that matter a great deal, such as the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol cans of shaving-cream, are not stories. Yes, they can become stories, and in this case do when we discover that those selfsame CFCs are destroying the ozone layer; we even have a title for the story, The Ozone Hole. But nobody knew or recognised there was a story when shops first started selling aerosol cans, even though that was the decisive event.
Religions have always recognised the power of a good story. Miracles run better at the box- office than mundane good actions. Helping an old lady across the road isn't much of a story, but raising the dead most certainly is. Science is riddled with stories. In fact, if you can't tell a convincing story about your research, nobody will let you publish it. And even if they did, nobody else would understand it. Newton's laws of motion are simple little stories about what happens to lumps of matter when they are given a push -stories only a little more precise than 'if you keep pushing, it will go faster and faster'. And 'Everything moves in circles', as Ponder would insist.
Why are we so wedded to stories? Our minds are too limited to grasp the universe for what it is.
We're very small creatures in a very big world, and there is no way that we could possibly represent that world in full, intricate detail inside our own heads. Instead, we operate with simplified representations of limited parts of the universe. We find simple models that correspond closely to reality extremely attractive. Their simplicity makes them easy to comprehend, but that's not much use unless they also work. When we reduce a complex universe to a simple principle, be it The Will of God or Schrodinger's Equation, we feel that we've really accomplished something. Our models are stories, and conversely, stories are models of a more complex reality. Our brains fill in the complexity automatically. The story says 'dog' and we immediately have a mental picture of the beast: a big, bumbling Labrador with a tail like a steam-hammer, tongue lolling, ears flopping.75 Just as our visual system fills in the blind spot.
We learn to appreciate stories as children. The child's mind is quick and powerful, but uncontrolled and unsophisticated. Stories appeal to it, and adults rapidly discovered that a story can put an idea into a child's head like nothing else can. Stories are easy to remember, both for teller and listener. As that child grows to adulthood, the love of stories remains. An adult has to be able to tell stories to the next generation of children, or the culture does not propagate. And an adult needs to be able to tell stories to other adults, such as their boss or their mate, because stories have a clarity of structure that does not exist in the messiness of the real world. Stories always make sense: that's why Discworld is so much more convincing than Roundworld.
Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture's Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one's culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course. Stories map out the phase space of existence.
Some stories are just entertainment, but even those usually have a hidden message on a deeper, possibly more earthy, level -as with Rumpelstiltskin. Some stories are Worlds of If, a way for minds to try out hypothetical choices and imagine their consequences. Word-play in the Nest of the Mind. And some of those stories have such a compelling logic that narrative imperative takes over, and they transmute into plans. A plan is a story together with the intention of making it come true.
Inside Roundworld, as it sits in its glass globe within the confining walls of the library of Unseen University, our story is coming to its climax. Will Shakespeare has written a play (it is, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream), a play that the elves believe will consolidate their power over human minds. The narrative of this play has collided with Rincewind's mental model of what he wants to do, and the flying sparks have ignited a plot. How will it all end? That is one of the compulsive aspects of a story. You'll just have to wait and see.
We have seen how history unfolds an emergent dynamic, so that even though everything is following rigid rules, even history itself has to wait and see how it all turned out. Yes, everything is following the rules, but there is no short cut that will take you to the destination before the rules themselves get there. History is not a story that exists in a book, the fatalistic 'it is written'.
It is a story that makes itself up as it goes along, like a story that someone is reading and you are listening to. It is being written ...
Philosophically, there ought to be a big difference between a story that is already written, and one that is being created word by word as you read it. The one is a story whose every sentence is predetermined; not only can there be only one possible outcome, but the outcome is already
'known'. The other is a story whose next sentence does not yet exist, whose ending in unknown even to the storyteller. You are reading the first kind of story, but while we were writing it, it was the second kind of story. In fact, it started out as a totally different story, but we never wrote that one at all. The philosophers realised long ago that it is no easy matter to determine which kind of story fits our world. If we had the ability to run the world again, we might discover that it does different things on the second occasion, and if so, the history of the universe would be a story that unfolds as it goes, not one already committed to paper.
But this doesn't look like a feasible experiment.
Our fascination with stories lays us open to a variety of errors in our relationship with the outside world. The rapid spread of rumours, for instance, is a tribute to how our love of a juicy story overcomes our critical faculties. The mechanism is precisely the one that the scientific method tries very hard to protect us against: believing something because you want it to be true. Or, for some rumours, because you fear it could be true. A rumour is one example of a more general concept, introduced in 1976 by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. He came up with this notion in order to be able to discuss an evolutionary system that was different from the Darwinian evolution of organisms. It is the meme. The associated subject of 'memetics' is science's attempt to comprehend the power of story.
The word 'meme' was coined by deliberate analogy with 'gene', and 'memetics' with 'genetics'.
Genes are passed from one generation of organisms to the next; memes are passed from one human mind to another human mind. A meme is an idea that is so attractive to human minds that they want to pass it on to others. The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is a highly successful meme; so, for a long time, was Communism, though that was a complicated system of ideas, a memeplex. Ideas exist as some cryptic pattern of activity in brains, so brains, and their associated minds, provide an environment in which memes can exist and propagate. Indeed, replicate, for when you teach a child to sing 'Happy Birthday to You', you don't forget the song yourself. The Hedgehog Song is an equally successful Discworld meme.