tossyturny

Story telling as a human tradition

In the book Sapiens by critically acclaimed author Yuval Noah Harari, one of the key ideas that he brought up is the following.

We as human beings are able to advance and dominate all other species on earth because of our ability to communicate and believe in the same idea. Through storytelling and tradition, we are able to organise communities and our own lives consistent to a standard. The ability to tell stories to align our beliefs meant that our habits were no longer pegged to our biological tendencies, but rather the ongoing narratives in our lives. While all other living things on earth moved and behaved in accordance to their genetic instructions, we as humans departed from that process and behaved according to our beliefs.

And the rate of change of an idea or a story is much faster than the rate of evolution through the generations. Our lives could be drastically different from our parents and our forefathers, simply because we believe in a system that is more efficient. This is in stark contrast with most animals and living things on earth, that have to adapt slowly and pass on that information to their offspring through breeding.

How far do stories go?

Storytelling is fantastic for progress, because we are no longer tied down by our biological instincts, but similarly it presents challenges. How far can we take our narratives, before they become divorced from reality? How much of reality is up to interpretation, and how much of it is objective? And if there is some fundamental unchanging characteristic of our existence, if God and the absolute exists, where do we draw the line and say that certain narratives violates the principles of the absolute?

Recently, I discovered that a friend of mine is looking to transition and change genders. I’ve always dismissed these ideas as irrelevant to society. I come from a relatively conservative Asian family and culture, and I had not expected to encounter these ideas so close to home. Seeing someone I know personally have these thoughts was interesting because then I felt that I could no longer simply dismiss these ideas and was compelled to take them seriously.

Comparison between traditional and modern narratives

In earlier civilisations, the fables that our ancestors came up with, and the mythologies that were written, were based on observations on the tendencies of human beings as well as nature. Those stories taught us something about ourselves and our environment, and therefore contained wisdom that is still relevant now. With the sacred scriptures of all religions as examples, even if the elements within the stories are too fantastic to be taken at face value, they tell us something about human nature and human’s fundamental motivations.

Today, the narratives driven by the LGBTQ are figments of our imagination and tell us nothing about who we are as a species, but are rather based on the whims of whatever emotions one is feeling at the moment. One can feel a certain way one day and identify as a they or zee or whichever “appropriate” pronoun for the day, and change it just as easily the next day. This story has nothing to do with how humans see and understand themselves, it only mimics that function. In reality this narratives is only influenced by how one is feeling in the moment.

The danger with this modern philosophy is that, when you believe that you can be anything you want to be, you become nothing, and then you no longer know who you truly are. When one’s whimsical emotions is the ultimate authority on one’s behaviour, it’s impossible to reason that perhaps sometimes our feelings do not serve us.

Opinion: To give power to our feelings is to take away power from reason

Much of traditional narratives were written as guides on how to manage our animal instincts. When traditional values are forgotten, we lose our ability to manage them. Much of religion and culture teaches us how we can manage greed, lust, betrayal, and replace those instincts with our similarly strong ability show compassion for the fellow man. When we replace these historical guides with ideology that essentially says that any kind of behaviour is valid and one can be anything they want, we lose our ability to manage our vices that the traditional values help with. Even if we believe that we can be whatever we want to be, our animal instincts remain within us, and hold influence over our behaviour. I believe that our traditions and our history should not be discarded in favour of the modern rhetoric. To say that our feelings in the moment overrules the of standards that we have set for ourselves in order to live a good life, is to set ourselves up for failure.

No matter how much we want to believe that we can, there are some fundamental aspects of humanity that we cannot change. Call it our nature, call it God’s design, call it DNA, call it whatever you want, but I believed that we came into this world built by a blueprint that does not change, simply because we believe it did. And to leave us to our own devices without sufficient guidance and wisdom from our traditions, is to leave us to learn through the only medium left, which is the suffering of the consequences of our actions.

Opinion: Say it long enough and you will start to believe it

People will believe in anything, given enough exposure to ideology. Nazi’s in world war 2 manage to convince the inmates in concentration camps to turn against their own people by appointing leadership positions to a chosen few. They also managed to convince almost an entire generation to be illogically prejudiced against one group of people. None of us are exempt from this. Given enough exposure, opportunity and confirmation, even mild and reasonable individuals can fall for a rhetoric that is dangerous and harmful.

In a slightly more local example, girls who attended girls only schools have a much higher rate of turning out to be lesbians. I’m sure there is nothing in our educational curriculum that encourages same sex intimacy. But given an environment to explore, the opportunity to execute, and the influence of ideology, many girls schools in Singapore ended up developing a certain reputation for such behaviour. It is especially dangerous when individuals are still young and impressionable, to be exposed to such ideas, but even adults who buy into this modern narrative can start to believe in imagined identities.

LGBTQ in the past?

Certainly in the past there were people who enjoyed same sex companionship and intimacy. Certainly there were individuals who expressed themselves in a manner more consistent with the other sex. The difference is that, those behaviours were simply that, just behaviours that were enjoyed upon. No sane individual in the past identified themselves and something that they are not. There was no tension and conflict of identity. If a man enjoyed the company of men, he is simply that, and therefore he was seen as a man who simply indulged in pleasures that most do not find pleasurable. Today, that man would have a bunch of artificially created labels that he has to choose from to understand his own identity, when in reality, those behaviours were simply behaviours and nothing more.

In the future: Imagination made reality?

Science and technology is the bridge between who we are and who we could be. We are a species that is doomed to die the moment we are born. We are assigned a gender and masculine and feminine traits based on our genetic markers. In the present, when a man puts on a wig, chops his member off surgically, and takes hormones in order to become more feminine, he is simply that, a man trying his best to pretend to be a woman. But what if one day technology reaches a point where genetically we are able to alter a man into a woman such that he is indistinguishable from a normal woman? What if we are able to truly change the sex of an individual on a whim? What if technology advances enough to reach the realm of the divine, and likewise to how God plucked a rib from Adam to make Eve, we are able to induce metamorphosis in an individual to change to the other sex completely? Would transgenderism still be valid in that case? I do not have a good answer for that.

Today by going through surgery and taking a cocktail of drugs one can play pretend to be the other sex, and the outcome is not very convincing, it’s almost delusional. However, what if one day the option to change sexes actually exists? Do we have the moral authority to use such a power if it exists? The act of creation, destruction and mutation of our own species lies in the domain exclusive to God today. When the time comes where we overcome our own natural limitations, perhaps the narratives that guide us would have to evolve as well.