The Power of Narrative

SPOILER ALERT!  GAME OF THRONES!

Here's a conversation between two bureaucrats of within the fictional kingdom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH7sIOBJqLA

Start from 1:48 onwards.

Narrative is the most powerful motivation behind human action.  Without narrative, action has no relation of consequence and becomes chaotic.

American history has no utilitarian purpose.  One can't build roads and bridges with this knowledge, yet American history is taught for the good majority of public school education.  Americans roughly agree that all men are created equal and the individual can determine one's fate in life.

But why aren't we taught Norwegian history?  Are the past actions of Americans more important than the peoples of Norway?  Wouldn't that imply that one group of people are more important than another?

To a large extent, American history is public propaganda.  Instead of our education system providing critical thinking tools to analyze and contextualize history and culture that an individual may value, any other culture that doesn't relate of fit within the narrative is implicitly sub-par.

One could counter by noting that studying the movement of American history charts a path of progression and improvement.  Without understanding this evolution we do not see how the thoughts of the past are relevant to our core beliefs today.

Hogwash.  Sociology and philosophy provide enough reasons to justify compassion to our fellow man, but to assume knowing history is reason enough to justify present actions and conditions is a dangerous lie.  Blind attachment to narrative is a cheap and lazy way to justify our actions.

The American narrative believes that the Constitution and democracy is the source of its current advance.  Our moral narrative justifies capitalism and our right to profit.

The Chinese narrative believes its age and history gives it precedence to be "superior" to any other foreign culture.  The name Zhongguo literally means "center country."

Narrative is not absolute truth.  It's only a frame.

This is the lesson I learned from "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (紅樓夢)。

So far my blog has been a semi-random mish mash of little curios in Chinese literature.  At first I thought following Chinese literature anthologies like DeBary and Bloom or Stephen Owen could carry an interesting narrative framework, but a chronological framework is only useful for academia and reference.

From now on my blog will discuss Chinese culture from the standpoint of "The Red Chamber."  Hopefully the narrative frame will be interesting as it was 300 years ago.