Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

(sarah fishburn)

The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.