Relativity and Narrative Identification 24.4.04

I caught a snippet of a Radio 4 programme, when someone was discussing Jewish art and film in relation to the holocaust. The Jewish speaker suggested that Jewish people need another kind of identity which is not tied to and circumscribed by the historic atrocity, that they can’t continue to base their lives and their culture on what happened over 50 years ago. That’s interesting: what does it mean exactly, and what wider implications does it have?

We all have our own personal history, our autobiography, which is the subject matter of all psychotherapy. The modern system of NLP is especially eloquent in recognising that its practitioners work with the narratives of their clients, which is not a permanent fixture. It can be changed with various hypnotic and semi-hypnotic methods, which essentially allow people to disidentify with their personal stories and discover alternative narratives by which to live their lives. According to academic so-called post-modern theory, traditional narrative structures have broken down. That is itself no more than an arbitrary narrative and on a larger scale, the importance of story is more important than ever. The world seems to be divided between people who think life should revolve around belief, and others who think we should be sceptical, critical and questioning. Islam has become increasingly embattled, eventually crystallising its religious terrorists who identify so ferociously with their koranic narratives that they are prepared to kill and die for them.

Narrative is how we make sense of life, at the individual and the collective levels. And yet it is arbitrary; if you took any religious person and transplanted them into a different culture, their narrative would not make sense. Imagine a Jewish or Islamic believer washed up on a desert island, forced to live twenty or thirty years with native people who did not even speak the same language. You are born into countries, cultures and faiths, and those different environments make you what you are as a human being. If a Moslem had been born into a Christian culture, they would have been Christian. If a Jew had been born into a Hindu culture, they would have been Hindu. All narratives are relative, not absolute, and the hostility of the Middle East towards the West is partly because the West does not accept their belief systems and the underlying psychology of identification. We tend to construct our own value systems and think for ourselves, and deconstruct historic and received systems. Nothing is sacrosanct, anything is fair game when it comes to criticism and scepticism. When this ‘offends’ traditional Islam as with Salman Rushdie’s novel, that simply means those people do not like it when other people question those narratives. As Rushdie said, the death sentence imposed on him was “an extreme form of literary criticism”.

In this Middle East versus the West clash, this Islam versus the non-Islamic world, something will have to give. The more vehement Islam is, the more it sows the seeds of its eventual demise because total life-and-death attachment to a prescribed narrative is a flawed philosophy. It’s a kind of unconsciousness, a denial of higher human capacity. We witnessed the same thing with the Christian inquisition and the crusades; Christianity eventually had to learn that it cannot impose its narrative on other people. If someone disagrees with it, that is their personal choice. We understand that in 2004 but not so long ago, it was regarded as heresy with a potential penalty of death.

Our ‘identity’ is literally what we identify with, and ‘what’ is arbitrary, relative, and contingent. The animal world operates at a much simpler and more instinctive level where ‘identity’ is mostly just eating, drinking, and reproducing. This varies according to the species of creature and its level of development i.e. consciousness, but essentially the identity of an animal ‘is’ tiger, ‘is’, cat, ‘is’ bear or rabbit. No part of its consciousness is free to be anything else, and in that respect it is an automatic and one dimensional life. A tiger can’t start behaving life a rabbit, or decide that he’s had enough of chasing antelope and wants an easier life eating plant food. I can eat meat, or not; many years ago I decided that killing and eating animals was an unnecessary cruelty, an economic problem when some people in the world starve, and an unhealthy option. Chemically and biologically a tiger probably could survive on plant food, but the equation tiger = eat meat is hardwired into its identity so intimately that unless it kills and consumes other animals, it could not stay alive.

As human beings we have an enormous capacity for choice, in almost any part of our lives. This has both positive and negative repercussions: it allows us to create hugely sophisticated cultural environments, but it also means we can experience suffering and internal psychological conflicts. A tiger just ‘is’ a tiger, and literally cannot worry about a bad hair day, or his declining population. Even if he lacks females to mate with, he might get frisky, aggressive and frustrated, but he won’t get neurotic, conflicted and depressed. As human beings much of the pleasure we take in the animal world is projecting our own capacities onto it, enjoying the moments when we sense a very small but recognisable aspect of consciousness; dolphins and monkeys are the best example. Although scientists might argue there is no ‘evidence’ to suggest they have thoughts or feelings, more sensible people will sense their existence. But it is still enormously rudimentary, and a dolphin or monkey has no choice to be other than a dolphin or monkey, based on a substantial environmental dependency.

“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty”, said Hamlet. But – he said – he can also be a “quintessence of dust”, i.e. his life is meaningless and completely shallow, which implies that he is a mere product of the environment. So which are we? If at one end we have noble reason and infinite faculty, I suggest at the other end of the spectrum we have not dust, which is Hamlet’s exaggeration, but animal. As human beings we can notice and enjoy the huge variety of animal life, because we are not part of it. A tiger cannot do this, it simply inhabits its own tiger-ness from birth to death, locked into an environmental relationship which defines its own capacities. I can watch that tiger and learn about his habits, I can play with a pet dog, I can enjoy seeing a little mouse scampering over rocks, I can look anywhere in the animal kingdom and recognise the multifarious parts because I am not sitting in any of them, i.e. living those kind of lives. I can observe, and this is also pleasurable because ultimately those millions of creatures actually reflect different parts of me, from the primitive and instinctive to the more sophisticated and evolved.

I can observe, and the capacity for observation is a great human achievement. I am no longer observing if I completely identify with a specific and arbitrary narrative. And sometimes, it is dangerously close to animal-like identification with a very small and particular story. Modern civilisation is an astonishingly sophisticated achievement compared to a few hundred or even just fifty years ago. If parts of the human world are adamantly stuck in more primitive relationships to the cultural and psychological environment, they will feel increasingly pressured when they realise the rest of the planet no longer respects traditional narrative-identification. The fact is, you could take any Islamic fundamentalist, transplant them to a liberal and modern society, and they could have a happy and fulfilled life. The fact that they believe they could not do this is exactly that – an arbitrary belief - which is entirely their right to adopt, but it is entirely my right to deconstruct these psychological dynamics and elucidate the role of 1) narrative and identification, and 2) the potential for transcending this contingent and outdated relationship to the cultural environment.

In Christopher Nolan’s accomplished film Memento, the importance of memory and habitual identity is examined. The protagonist is enormously disadvantaged, vulnerable to the manipulations and predatory behaviour of other people. In one scene in the film a woman knows she can say and do whatever she likes to him, sit outside in her car for a few minutes, enter the house again, and tell him a fictitious story because he will have forgotten what happened. She says she has been assaulted, hence the bruises on her face, thereby enlisting his sympathies. The film is a fascinating portrayal of what happens when we do not have a guiding narrative by which to live our lives. At a primordial and survival-instinct level, we ‘sense’ that without our stories, we are done for. We lose our identity, our direction in life, and our capacity to negotiate with complex society. When our survival depends on jobs, incomes, bank accounts and the ensuing ability to feed, house and clothe ourselves, identity lies at the most fundamental part of our existence. Lose that, lose everything. And yet….the protagonist of Memento is able to drive around, talk to people, feed and clothe himself, and understand the social situations he experiences, demonstrating that historic and long term narrative is not necessary for personal survival. The more interesting and profound questions of Memento are those that no film could ever explore, being extremely subtle, elusive and metaphysical: what kind of consciousness are we witnessing in the character who in many respects behaves like everyone else, yet has a short term memory of just a few minutes? It is a consciousness divorced from conventional narrative guidance. It looks plausible when we see it in the film: we could live and survive, without any psychological narrative. It would be a strange experience, as we see in the film, but it would not in itself be life-threatening.

In the Chinese martial arts people identify with animals to discover resources of power, speed and agility that are otherwise dormant. You have tiger style kung fu, leopard style, snake, crane, monkey, and eagle. Each of those creatures - and others – have their own unique physical and psychological prowess: speed, power, reflex-reaction, sensitivity, killer instinct etc. If you act as if you are one of those creatures, you can find formidable capacities in your own psycho-physical experience. In a primordial physical sense, human beings are quite weak. We lack sharp teeth, claws and beaks; we do not have protective armour, great speed, or (normally) instinctive kill-or-be-killed viciousness. The latter is where many street thugs have a great advantage because they usually grow up in violent environments which teach them the laws of the jungle, rather than the laws of civil society. For most people, defending themselves against unexpected violent assault is a great fear-inducing shock; for the perpetrator he is merely speaking the language he was taught from an early age. We call violent anti-social people ‘animals’, and not without reason. Fluency with violent confrontation is something relatively few people have and your average nurse, teacher or shop attendant has to learn in his/her weekly self defence class what Johnny Thug has been experiencing and practising for most of his life.

I refer to this subject in relation to narrative, traditional and critical/creative thinking and – in a literal way – animal identification, because it is a dramatic and strong example for my ideas. Bruce Lee called the traditional martial arts the ‘classical mess’ and compared them to religious cults, each believing their way is the most authentic and superior. He deconstructed this traditional situation, noting that all martial art styles have strengths and weaknesses, i.e. reinstating their relative status. A tiger is more powerful than a leopard, but on an open plain would probably be out-ran by the lighter cat. A leopard is more formidable than a crane but at close range the bird can peck out eyes with deadly accuracy, and if you can’t see you can’t fight. In effect, Bruce Lee was the Salman Rushdie of the martial arts world, and one mythical explanation for his young and medically strange death was the secret ‘death touch’, administered by the traditional schools he had criticised and angered. Violence is an animal encounter which most of us do not understand (and hopefully never experience), which is why the martial arts are fond of the natural kingdom. And yet, it is a myth that we should attempt to copy the animals when in actual combat, because we are not animals. Two kung fu styles illustrate this point, both of them of relatively recent origin, advocating the importance of strategy, observation and other kinds of the thinking intelligence we associate with being human. As a result, in fact, they are not so much martial art ‘styles’ as systems of principles which can, in theory, be expressed in different ways. The first of these is called Wing Chun, a strategy developed to counter the animal methods of traditional Shaolin training; the second is called Jeet Kune Do, the ‘style which is no style’ developed by Bruce Lee.

This Bruce Lee reference is a good example of evolution in thinking, clearing away partial and redundant schemas based on subservience and mere imitation. Lee’s books document the way he challenged tradition, and his example still shines out as a triumph of liberating creative intelligence. What he opposed was the cult-like thinking of old-school Chinese values, which is essentially identifying with historic stories and a blind belief in a group superiority: exactly how religions fight and disagree with each other. Lee reinstated the importance and value of the individual person, as opposed to obedience and deference to a tradition into which you (supposedly) have to fit.

It is not difficult to deconstruct blind adherence to personal or collective narrative, when you see it. The key concept is relativity, whereby what people think is absolute and ordained is profoundly relative and contingent. Two people in the same family will have utterly different experiences with the same parents; which are correct? A Hindu believes one thing, a Moslem something else, a Jew and Christian something else again. Kurosawa’s film Rashomon is based on this relativity of experience, where different people experience and recount the same situation in different ways. The final question is to consider if anything is not relative, a mere narrative, indicative of a particular relationship to the cultural environment and nothing more. That’s a question I cannot explore here because it goes into a different intellectual domain, which has to be approached differently.