Human History X: The Forgetful Storyteller

Because where men remember, they often do not learn. Men haul their rancor down generations, bequeathed father to daughter, mother to son, until—the causes beyond recollection—a grudge becomes a nationality, and a quarrel becomes a war. - Elizabeth Bear

Individuals can remember the past; societies do not. Hence we are condemned to repeat it no matter what we do. Tragedy followed by farce - some guy on Twitter whose name really doesn't matter right now

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Why are people always so surprised when they read a book from 50 or 100 years ago and find that, barring technology, the arguments and debates and politics and even the personalities are pretty much the same? By the same token, why does it shock or excite us when fiction like Black Mirror eerily predicts the technologies of the day after tomorrow and the consequences for the day after that? Humans gonna human gonna human, people! We are what we are and what we are is what we've always been. I present to you a quote from the book of Ezekiel Chapter 23 Verse 20-21:

There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses

Now granted, that was just a very colourful metaphor for Israel the country abandoning Jehovah to follow other gods but isn't the word choice fascinating? The notion of huge cocks (and thus the larger universal male pre-occupation with having a big dick) and enormous equine-scale spurts of hot steaming seed, straight out of the most lurid hentai anime of the present day.

Yes, I have watched anime porn. Many times. It was awesome. Deal with it and move on.

NOPICTURES
please don't go looking up hentai if you don't already know what that is. it won't end well

The point is, our appetites and urges are the same as those of our grandfathers and their grandmothers. We know this in our bones even if we forget it in our heads. Every generation thinks they invented sex till they have kids, then they pretend they never heard of such a thing and these dastardly kids are up to no good — not like YOUR day.

NOPICTURES

Oh, but it gets worse. By the time the young grow wise enough to have useful advice, they are too old to be listened to and nobody gives a fuck what they say. The wheel turns, the rust falls off, the cycle repeats. Well, back when there was no TV, we kind of had to listen to our grandmothers and grandfathers, they were the only game in town for late-night entertainment. Tales by Moonlight, anyone?

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We are humans. We are the storytelling animal; it is what we do and who we are. Religion, history, technology, mythology; all stories, all ways we string past into future, chaining the forgotten to the unknown every step of the way. The earliest works of art in the world, even before the cave paintings of Lascaux and Bantimurung and Las Geet, were dolmens and henges and megaliths - structures that reshaped the very ground to tell the future that we were here.

Some of them were more practical of course; some pointed at the sky and tracked the stars and sun, stories above and below. Astrology begat astronomy; cycles and patterns and memory. Astronomy became navigation, the stars our compass. Consider the humble GPS. The journey that started with our ancestors navigating by looking up at the stars has now reached a point where we look down at the electrified silicon mirror in our hands as it receives directions from our satellite emissaries to those same stars. Science is a story too.

The internet itself is a perfect testament to the rear-guard battle between memory and entropy. We forget, we remember, we reconstruct. Pages fall off but with enough redundancy and repetition, the things we value get carried down the river of time. This is where the stories come from, the need to hold on to what's important, to remember.

This seems to be my long-winded attempt at pretending not to have fallen off the Steemit saddle for the past two months. Again. At least last time, I had a genuinely valid excuse. Now? Just laziness and the inverse of sunk-cost fallacy. Oh well, back on the wagon we go.

Thanks for reading! More of my posts can be found by clicking the name below. If you enjoyed this one, then by all means

@edumurphy