This is similar to the idea that the ancients lacked theory of mind or something like that. I think it is flatly wrong. They simply inferred things in different ways from different data.
Genesis is full of people feeling dramatic emotions and acting under various complex motivations.
You said "The first stories probably only described objective events and actions, including words said. Then stories added descriptions of character feelings and thoughts. Especially evaluative feelings, such as re status and norm violations, which story elements are how interesting, and which story endings are how satisfying."
This describes an evolutionary view where the world becomes more sophisticated over time, except for when it entropies of course, except that everything we have now is the perfect Goldilocks scenario, except for Moloch.
Did you mean to present this as a hypothesis? How would you even decide what the first story was without the Schelling point of Genesis?
Genesis is hardly a generalized human Schelling point of “first story.” We have extant stories from thousands of years prior, and those are just the ones written down. The first stories were certainly told orally.
Genesis is definitely the Schelling point for first story. It's the only one with a continuous living tradition, and the other ones from the time are remarkably similar. As for oral stories, that's unfalsifiable.
1. Regarding how a continuous oral tradition has to do with a story being first, well, how else are you going to decide what a "first story" is except via time? Obviously the earlier a story is, the closer to first of the list of stories we know it gets. So you can have the earliest known written tradition, the earliest story found by archaeologists, presumably if you believe epigenetic/lamarckian evidence exists, that they're methylated on the DNA...
2. Robin is making an argument that is unfalsifiable, that before written stories there were oral stories. This is octogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Maybe the first stories were social interactions! Maybe the first story was the Big Bang! Maybe the first human story was "Don't go near mammoth!" Maybe we see first stories every day when our babies point at things!
It's fairly obvious that biblical stories include theory of the mind. See for example the story of Jacob acquiring paternal blessing in Genesis, or Achitofel advising Avshalom in II Samuel.
Robin's way of looking at stories is the naturalist, empiricist way of looking at stories as being ways of learning, in which stories pose questions, often dilemmas. The storyteller asks the reader to look closely at something that troubles him or her, without giving a definitive answer. This is the tradition of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Greek tragedy, picaresque, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Voltaire, middle Tolstoy, modernist fiction, much fantasy before Tolkien (eg Lindsay, Lovecraft, EC Comics, Gormenghast), Catch-22, science fiction before 1980, and Douglas Adams.
The opposing tradition is the idealistic, rationalist way of looking at stories as strictly for teaching. The author is a wise old man telling people all the absolute and eternal answers to life, the Universe, and everything, and has no interest in context or other subtleties. There is a simple answer to everything. This is the tradition of Plato's literary criticism, Ovid's literary theory ("delight and instruct"), medieval morality plays, allegory, King Lear, late Tolstoy, Marxist artistic theory ("all art is political"), Soviet realist fiction, Tolkien and all the juvenile adventure fantasy written in his footsteps, and Christian fiction of all time periods.
I don't know where to place entertainment, which seems to constitute most of the fiction people consume on a daily basis. It can fall in either category, but a lot of it seems to be just entertainment. Comedy especially seems to need special treatment. It's most peculiar that for thousands of years, no one in Western history (AFAIK) considered the possibility that the purpose of comedy was anything other than to hold people who are inferior in some way up to ridicule. But at the moment, I can't think of any comedy that did anything else before Don Quixote.
"Soviet realism", or more-correctly "Socialist realism", is the name for the style of art allowed by the Soviet Union from 1932, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned modernism, and defined socialist realism, in its resolution "On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_in_fine_arts_of_the_Soviet_Union ), until Stalin's death in 1953. It's indistinguishable from the kind of art used in Nazi Germany at the same time, as pointed out by Igor Golomstock on the first page of his book /Totalitarian Art/ (1990).
/The Quiet Don/ was published in 2013, and isn't Soviet, and isn't fiction.
Is this AI? Quiet Don was published in installments in the 1930s and was avidly read by Y.I.Stalin. At some point, anecdotally he actually asked the writer how it is going to progress? lol.
On the other hand, there has been discussion IF Sholochov actually wrote Quiet Don, or whether his authorship has been put forward so as not to ppopularize the real authors. Apparently the original title in English was "And Quietly Flows The Don".
By the way, Quiet Don is thus not the original historical title in English, even though it is the 1:1 translation of its original title in Russian.
Sorry! I googled "The quiet don", and found only a non-fiction book about a mafia don, published in 2013, and didn't notice that it isn't even Eastern European. Very embarrassing.
I'm no expert on Soviet fiction. I've only read one book covering Socialist Realism, /Russian Literature Since the Revolution/, by Edward Brown, which has summaries, extracts, & discussion. It has a section on /The Silent Don/ on p. 140-148. I remember reading that now; its descriptions of ultraviolence stuck with me.
Brown agrees with you about it not providing simple answers, and called it out as being remarkable for Soviet fiction on that account: "The story contained no inept digression on the iron will of the proletariat–in fact the village characters were… Cossacks. … One superb scene after another convinced the Soviet reader at last that no clear political thesis would emerge, that no commissar would appear to guide the "elemental forces", that no problems of Communist ethics would be raised and solved… Those who in 1928 read the first volume of the novel as it appeared in October were struck first of all by its freedom from the familiar idiom of proletarian art. … His hero, searching for the right path, does not find it in Communism. He finds no answer to his questions, and after his tortured journey returns precisely to that spot which he had left as the novel opened and which remained for him the only reality, his own home and family."
The party eventually ordered extensive revisions in 1953 to correct its politics, but then Stalin died, and they were restored shortly after.
Memory, which can store stories, is primarily selected for its efficiency in representing features of the environment relevant to the survival of the being. This alone wouldn't explain the drift. But there is a second-order effect that may: Social beings are incentivised to express features that are easily representable (which in adversarial settings they are incentivised to express hard-to-compress features, such as randomness). Human stories are easy to compress and capture elements that are (or at least were) relevant to us. Is drift a third-order effect?
"In reality, we typically know little about the motives of people around us, and often little of our own motives."
Status is an important factor here. None of us are supposed to acknowledge that we care about status or seek it (although we all do) and this creates a great deal of evasion and social desirability bias and disingenuousness. In my experience these factors are evidenced more frequently among the professional classes.
> Long ago stories only described objective events and actions, including words said.
Do you mean for that to be taken literally? Like, long ago, humans used to only be able to speak in facts? That seems ludicrous to me! I'm pretty sure that, as long as humans have been humans, that stories have been stories, full of feelings, thoughts, metaphor, humor, and everything else! But maybe I'm misunderstanding you?
Maybe there's a debate between what counts as "communication", "language", and "stories". Like, bees communicating the location of flowers to other bees probably doesn't use metaphors. But I'm pretty sure that the "singularity" that catapulted humans through language and into their superpower of culture pretty much WAS "stories", which probably started with rituals and myth, NOT objective events and actions.
This is similar to the idea that the ancients lacked theory of mind or something like that. I think it is flatly wrong. They simply inferred things in different ways from different data.
Genesis is full of people feeling dramatic emotions and acting under various complex motivations.
I make no such claim.
You said "The first stories probably only described objective events and actions, including words said. Then stories added descriptions of character feelings and thoughts. Especially evaluative feelings, such as re status and norm violations, which story elements are how interesting, and which story endings are how satisfying."
This describes an evolutionary view where the world becomes more sophisticated over time, except for when it entropies of course, except that everything we have now is the perfect Goldilocks scenario, except for Moloch.
Did you mean to present this as a hypothesis? How would you even decide what the first story was without the Schelling point of Genesis?
Genesis is hardly a generalized human Schelling point of “first story.” We have extant stories from thousands of years prior, and those are just the ones written down. The first stories were certainly told orally.
Genesis is definitely the Schelling point for first story. It's the only one with a continuous living tradition, and the other ones from the time are remarkably similar. As for oral stories, that's unfalsifiable.
What does continuous living tradition have to do with a story being first?
And what do you mean oral stories being extant before written is unfalsifiable?
Are you a young earth creationist and claiming that God made the earth and stories in seven days or so?
1. Regarding how a continuous oral tradition has to do with a story being first, well, how else are you going to decide what a "first story" is except via time? Obviously the earlier a story is, the closer to first of the list of stories we know it gets. So you can have the earliest known written tradition, the earliest story found by archaeologists, presumably if you believe epigenetic/lamarckian evidence exists, that they're methylated on the DNA...
2. Robin is making an argument that is unfalsifiable, that before written stories there were oral stories. This is octogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Maybe the first stories were social interactions! Maybe the first story was the Big Bang! Maybe the first human story was "Don't go near mammoth!" Maybe we see first stories every day when our babies point at things!
If the hypothesis is that the first stories developed in a particular way, later stories should have consistently developed in a particular way.
It's fairly obvious that biblical stories include theory of the mind. See for example the story of Jacob acquiring paternal blessing in Genesis, or Achitofel advising Avshalom in II Samuel.
I'm thinking in the other direction, and find mine more persuasive
Humans, language, primarily evolved in sexual / social selection environments. Language is people-first, object-second.
Mostly the thought that objects DON'T have feelings and opinions is weird and new -- because our core referent is other people, not non-human things.
Robin's way of looking at stories is the naturalist, empiricist way of looking at stories as being ways of learning, in which stories pose questions, often dilemmas. The storyteller asks the reader to look closely at something that troubles him or her, without giving a definitive answer. This is the tradition of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Greek tragedy, picaresque, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Voltaire, middle Tolstoy, modernist fiction, much fantasy before Tolkien (eg Lindsay, Lovecraft, EC Comics, Gormenghast), Catch-22, science fiction before 1980, and Douglas Adams.
The opposing tradition is the idealistic, rationalist way of looking at stories as strictly for teaching. The author is a wise old man telling people all the absolute and eternal answers to life, the Universe, and everything, and has no interest in context or other subtleties. There is a simple answer to everything. This is the tradition of Plato's literary criticism, Ovid's literary theory ("delight and instruct"), medieval morality plays, allegory, King Lear, late Tolstoy, Marxist artistic theory ("all art is political"), Soviet realist fiction, Tolkien and all the juvenile adventure fantasy written in his footsteps, and Christian fiction of all time periods.
I don't know where to place entertainment, which seems to constitute most of the fiction people consume on a daily basis. It can fall in either category, but a lot of it seems to be just entertainment. Comedy especially seems to need special treatment. It's most peculiar that for thousands of years, no one in Western history (AFAIK) considered the possibility that the purpose of comedy was anything other than to hold people who are inferior in some way up to ridicule. But at the moment, I can't think of any comedy that did anything else before Don Quixote.
Some stories only ask questions, while others answer them. Both fit my description I think.
You're right. I think I was projecting my own expectations.
The Quiet Don is a master piece of Soviet realism, but it's not like it has a simple answer to everything.
"Soviet realism", or more-correctly "Socialist realism", is the name for the style of art allowed by the Soviet Union from 1932, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned modernism, and defined socialist realism, in its resolution "On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_in_fine_arts_of_the_Soviet_Union ), until Stalin's death in 1953. It's indistinguishable from the kind of art used in Nazi Germany at the same time, as pointed out by Igor Golomstock on the first page of his book /Totalitarian Art/ (1990).
/The Quiet Don/ was published in 2013, and isn't Soviet, and isn't fiction.
Is this AI? Quiet Don was published in installments in the 1930s and was avidly read by Y.I.Stalin. At some point, anecdotally he actually asked the writer how it is going to progress? lol.
On the other hand, there has been discussion IF Sholochov actually wrote Quiet Don, or whether his authorship has been put forward so as not to ppopularize the real authors. Apparently the original title in English was "And Quietly Flows The Don".
By the way, Quiet Don is thus not the original historical title in English, even though it is the 1:1 translation of its original title in Russian.
Sorry! I googled "The quiet don", and found only a non-fiction book about a mafia don, published in 2013, and didn't notice that it isn't even Eastern European. Very embarrassing.
I'm no expert on Soviet fiction. I've only read one book covering Socialist Realism, /Russian Literature Since the Revolution/, by Edward Brown, which has summaries, extracts, & discussion. It has a section on /The Silent Don/ on p. 140-148. I remember reading that now; its descriptions of ultraviolence stuck with me.
Brown agrees with you about it not providing simple answers, and called it out as being remarkable for Soviet fiction on that account: "The story contained no inept digression on the iron will of the proletariat–in fact the village characters were… Cossacks. … One superb scene after another convinced the Soviet reader at last that no clear political thesis would emerge, that no commissar would appear to guide the "elemental forces", that no problems of Communist ethics would be raised and solved… Those who in 1928 read the first volume of the novel as it appeared in October were struck first of all by its freedom from the familiar idiom of proletarian art. … His hero, searching for the right path, does not find it in Communism. He finds no answer to his questions, and after his tortured journey returns precisely to that spot which he had left as the novel opened and which remained for him the only reality, his own home and family."
The party eventually ordered extensive revisions in 1953 to correct its politics, but then Stalin died, and they were restored shortly after.
Yep. It's not an overt pro-socialist book. Interestingly, now it's authorship is open to question, just as with Shakespeare, lol.
Memory, which can store stories, is primarily selected for its efficiency in representing features of the environment relevant to the survival of the being. This alone wouldn't explain the drift. But there is a second-order effect that may: Social beings are incentivised to express features that are easily representable (which in adversarial settings they are incentivised to express hard-to-compress features, such as randomness). Human stories are easy to compress and capture elements that are (or at least were) relevant to us. Is drift a third-order effect?
Interesting how human nature never changes!
"In reality, we typically know little about the motives of people around us, and often little of our own motives."
Status is an important factor here. None of us are supposed to acknowledge that we care about status or seek it (although we all do) and this creates a great deal of evasion and social desirability bias and disingenuousness. In my experience these factors are evidenced more frequently among the professional classes.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/its-not-real
I'm struggling to understand this line:
> Long ago stories only described objective events and actions, including words said.
Do you mean for that to be taken literally? Like, long ago, humans used to only be able to speak in facts? That seems ludicrous to me! I'm pretty sure that, as long as humans have been humans, that stories have been stories, full of feelings, thoughts, metaphor, humor, and everything else! But maybe I'm misunderstanding you?
All of those things didn't appear all at once together. Some of them must have appeared before others.
Maybe there's a debate between what counts as "communication", "language", and "stories". Like, bees communicating the location of flowers to other bees probably doesn't use metaphors. But I'm pretty sure that the "singularity" that catapulted humans through language and into their superpower of culture pretty much WAS "stories", which probably started with rituals and myth, NOT objective events and actions.
How do you have myths without characters doing actions?
Excellent story