OMAIR AHMAD - Stories of Meaning and the Meaning of Stories
Over dinner a few days
ago, I ended up telling a story about Janaka to a friend. Janaka is generally
known as the foster father of Sita (she is born of the earth as a boon to him
after prayers) in the Ramayana, but he is also mentioned separately in late
Vedic literature as a king of Videha, of great virtue and sagacity. The story
that I recalled was of how a young sage came to Janaka’s court and asked him,
bluntly, “O king, you are considered a great sage, a brahmjanani,
and yet you are a king, surrounded by gold and luxuries. How can you be a sage
in the midst of this?”
Janaka heard the young
man out in silence, and then said, “I will answer your question, but on one
condition. Here is a bowl, full to the brim with oil. If you can circle my
palace and bring it back to me without spilling a drop, I will give you the
answer.”
The young man was
taken aback, but agreed to the challenge and taking the bowl, spent the whole
day painstakingly circling the palace until he was once again at Janaka’s
presence.
“Here, o King of
Videha, is your bowl of oil,” said the young man in triumph, “not a drop has
been spilled. I have completed my task, now I ask my answer.”
Janaka nodded at the
young man and said, “Just one question, can you describe for me my palace, the
beauty of ladies-in-waiting, the glory of the architecture, the richness of the
tapestries, the fine work of carving, the smell of incense and the wealth on
display?”
“But how could I do
that?” asked the young man. “My whole concentration was fixed on the bowl, even
if my attention had wandered for a moment I would have spilled a drop. I
noticed nothing of anything save my task. That is what you demanded of me and
that I have delivered.”
“Indeed, young sage,”
replied Janaka, “and that is also your answer, for I, too, am concentrated
wholly on my duty. My concentration moves not a fraction of a moment from my
dharma. That is my whole world. And if tomorrow Videha is lost, nothing of mine
is lost, for my thought is not occupied by these things.”
Humbled, the young man
bowed to Janaka and left, having found his answer.
I like this story for
all sorts of reasons, not least because I read it first in an Amar
Chitra Katha comic when I was a child. And yet, its “truth” is a
complex one, and not something that can be understood by reaching for “facts”.
We have some textual ‘proof’ from the late Vedic texts that Videha might have
existed and at least one king named Janaka ruled it, beyond that – whether he
was a sage, or a good king, or ever had a conversation with a monk who
questioned his saintliness is beyond the ability of anybody to verify. As for
me, I read it in a comic book.
Does this mean that
the story has no quality, and that it should be dispensed with? That is exactly
what would be implied by somebody quoting the late Christopher Hitchens,
especially on stories from religious texts, when he said in his inimitable
style, “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without
evidence.”
If we are to dismiss
every story for which we have no verifiable evidence we would be left with a
world without meaning. In his enormously ambitious and hugely successful
science fiction novel, Embassytown, China Mieville posits a race
that can only speak about facts. If they have to talk about a rock that is
broken and joined up again, they have to break a rock and join it up again.
They have no access to similes, metaphors, or stories that are not based on
verifiable evidence. In their interaction with humanity as non-facts breach
their communication (and Mieville has an excellent, sly metaphor of the
breakdown of double-checking) their language drives them drunk, insane even,
laying waste to their civilisation.
But there is a deeper
question of what kind of civilisation would be built purely on “verifiable
evidence” in the first place. The great fact of the universe is that humans are
entirely inconsequential. Given the scale – in terms both of time and size –
the earth is less important to the observed universe as a grain of sand
brushing against the side of a whale. As it is, speaking of scale is itself
deceptive. What happens at our scale – that of humans on a solid world – is
really not where the action is. As the theoretical physicist Brian Greene
argues in his, The Fabric of the Cosmos, our senses have led us
astray. Because we are the size we are, we perceive a relative stable universe,
but this is not the reality at sub-atomic levels, or at the time and scales
which planets or other galactic bodies such as stars and comets inhabit. To
judge the universe from a human perspective is nonsense.
While many of the
scientific discoveries that allow us to understand some of this reality – and
our very marginal part in it – have been made in the last couple of centuries,
the first hominids that walked the African savannah hunting and gathering in
the wake of more powerful and better equipped animals would have understood the
feeling of irrelevance very well. The stories that humans use to make sense of
the universe are not derived from the facts of the universe, but conversely for
what they desire from it: aspects such as compassion, justice and fairness and a
special place for humans.
The late Terry
Pratchett, who had little use for religion in his own life, populated his
famous Discworld novels with religious fables, none more so
than Reaper Man and Small Gods, but possibly his
most full throated support of the power of belief is found in a conversation
between the character of Death (enunciated in capital letters) and Susan in the
novel Hogfather.
“All right,” said
Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life
bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS
SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE
WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies?
Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU
HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the
big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY.
DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same
at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN
TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH
THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY.
AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN
THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY
BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have
got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
While Pratchett
described the unprovable hypotheses that underpin stories as “lies” – big or
small – the late Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist,
famously referred to the truths of religion and truths of science as two “non-overlapping magisteria”, which were
focussed on seeking truths that did not overlap with each other. The current
Pope, Francis, a man who has been a scientist in his own life, has spoken in
favour of scientific theories such as evolution and that God is not somebody
with “a magic wand”. As such, he seems to
share Gould’s point of view, but given the Catholic Church’s long struggle to
accept such ideas, it seems too easy to say that this was – and will be –
always so. While the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has declared that beliefs
incompatible with science should be shunned, his own position is based on the
belief that he is the 14th in a line of reincarnations – not a belief that
can be verified by science.
As 2016 draws to an
end, we put behind a year marked by large global populations believing in ideas
that are not based on verifiable evidence – whether they be that killing fellow
men will guarantee a place for you in God’s grace or that an orange-faced
buffoon with a history of bankruptcy and dishonest dealings will make America
“great again”. We do not truly understand why people believe what it is that
they believe, but the stories that they tell themselves give meaning to their
lives, and they will not let them go lightly.
Fact-checking, or
expertise in a particular field, may not be enough to confront the force of
these ideas. Instead, if we are disheartened by the visions evoked by a host of
political actors that seem to have stormed on to the world stage, our challenge
will be to create stories of meaning, to define what a “good” life is, why some
purposes are more “noble” or of greater “worth” than others. This requires a
politics of meaning, not merely a politics of technocratic skill. The open
question is does the liberal world order have such stories, and if so, can it tell
them in a compelling enough manner to enchant, persuade and motivate people to
defend it, and build upon its achievements? This is the contest that now takes
centre-stage, and those with the best stories may, quite literally, be the ones
who will have the final words. Hopefully they will not be “The End”.
