Human cultures are neural environments extended throughout time and space. Cultures reach out to the ancestors. They explain the origins of everything. Thunders, earthquakes, life, death. They connect the most remote past with the future. And in the process, they provide meaning. Cultures make sense of all that happens. In the skies up above, on earth down below. Within us, between us, among us. Our similarities, our differences, our emotions, our thoughts. Everything is culture, and culture is everything.
Cultures are networks of brains cooperating and competing to provide meaning and explanations. Human beings are the master storytellers behind these networks, storytelling animals addicted to meaningful patterns. They snuff meanings out like dogs looking for truffles. Human beings are always on the prowl for meaning. When they don’t find it, they create it. Their chants, their dances, their rituals, their epic stories of good versus evil. Everything is full of meaning. Stories imbued with meanings explain nature, support societies, and give us purpose.
But not all meanings are created equal. Some can be a fata morgana. Some may turn out to be lies. And some of them are just toxic, as divisive and deadly and infectious as epidemics. And yet, cultures also enmesh and intermingle and prosper and unite. Culture is as fragile as it is beautiful at the margins, at the crossroads, right where civilizations meet and learn and tell each other stories.
In this endless quest for meaning, at one point we discovered that there is no ultimate meaning. We understood how our brains were the product of an agentless mechanistic process. That our brains are biased. That our logic can be fallacious. That the Earth, our home, is just a tiny speck in a centreless cosmos. That the stars high above are so distant that the light they emit, the light that sailors used at night to navigate the seven seas, is but a fossil of their once luminous existence. That we are literally made from the star stuff that once shone so bright.
No dragons, no demons, no ghosts.
For some, it was a liberation. For many, it was too much to bear. It was not a peaceful transition. We had to come up with new stories to rebuild our inner worlds. Create new meanings. New epics. New cultures.
This is where we stand now. It’s hard, and we keep on trying. But this is what we do. We have always explained the cosmos with the help of myths and rituals and stories. We have always come up with ingenious, stunning analogies to explain the way of the heavens. We developed sagas and theologies to justify the way things came about down here. Cosmogonies. Creation stories. Origin stories.
Now, we have a new origin story. We may have lost our dragons, but we do have dinosaurs. We have new characters for new generations. New audiences. And new storytellers for a grand new evolutionary epic. Stories aren’t going anywhere. We still need them to thrive. We need stories just like the air we breathe, like compasses to guide us. And we will need them forever. It’s our story to tell. The story of Homo sapiens, the storytelling animal who danced with the gods. The scientist who dug the bones of the mighty beasts of yore. The poet who wondered about the laws of the heavens. The researcher who pondered the chemical structure of human emotions. Through a microscope or in the hexameters on papyrus, in the atomic structures or on the silver screen, the universe is full of wondrous stories that define who we are.
We are Homo narrator, mendax, sciens, sapiens. And we are made of stories.