All of our stories are fictions, and our meaningful fictions are true. I believe that meaningful stories unite universal understandings with the particularities of our personal and local experiences. Honoring the particular in the universal, and the universal in the particular, connects us both in our likeness and in our uniqueness.
My modern education, to the extent that a 48 year old in an exponentially changing world has had a modern education, was biased toward learning abstractions, and toward conflating the abstract with the universal. I was taught to revere the leverage of abstract laws and theories and to prefer them over particularity and uniqueness. With each learned law, I felt more god-like. Science taught me the patterns of everywhere, and the specific descriptions of nowhere.
The seduction, security, familiarity, and efficiency of patterns are so inviting that we are steadily sacrificing our intimacy with unique landscapes, and our sense of place, to their convenience. We impose familiar templates on unique landscapes in service to our techno-economic narratives. Our new windows to the world, our computers and phones, reinforce stories motivating our need to live among abstract patterns with which we can have no intimacy.
With our alarming rate of pattern conformity, I suggest that we are resigning ourselves to an unspoken and overwhelming fable. It says: “We are dependent on a techno-economic monster that grows as we feed it, a monster that will eventually eat us all, yet we must feed it now to stave off near-term disaster”.
I suspect there is some truth in this fable, and I suspect that this truth is amplified by our unspoken belief in it. I am confident that we need a new story, one that places the power of abstraction in service of our particular and local lives. I would like to suggest that any response to our modern fable, and its monster, needs to include a return to meaningful narratives, stories and education that honor the intimacy and compassion of the particular with the universal, and a return to science in service of our stories.
What do you think? Do you feel any truth in this fiction? Do you see a path to grounding our narratives in the particularity of our lives and our locations?