What's The Big Idea?

Not long ago, I read a passage from Alexander Argyros’s A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos that has since interfered with my quiet times. Sometimes an idea is so "big" that I can't easily let it go.

In his discussion “Narrative and Chaos,” Argyros makes a number of startling statements:

I propose to claim that not only is narrative a stubbornly universal manifestation of human culture, but that it constitutes one of the most remarkable and desirable inventions of biological evolution.

Argyros’s claims are controversial:

I believe that a chaotic sociobiological view of human culture suggests that narrative is both a product of, and a selective pressure for, our evolution into Homo sapiens.

Argyros says that traditional narrative is “characterized by an overall causal frame, the general plot, which is itself composed of a frequently tangled hierarchy of nested plots and subplots”—a complex system. He says that humans require such a system, that “one way or another, any text will be made into narrative.” He says that the human concept of time has evolved in a manner that is “essentially futural.” He asks, “why else do our brains take up so much space for memory, if not to help us in the difficult work of choosing a future?”

So, we see that narrative is a dynamic system, operating in an aparently chaotic fashion, where input and output are continuously circulating and interacting. We see that humans appropriate vast arrays of information by encoding that data into narrative forms. We see humans operating in a temporal framework which is futural. With these presumptions in hand, Argyros looks further:

Our evolution into human beings undoubtedly entertained a feedback/feedforward relation to creation cosmologies and eschatologies. That is, the ability to imagine nonempirical first causes, infinite ends, and explanatory totalizing cosmologies—that is, grand narrative—requires an enormously intricate neocortex, whose gradual selection allows for even more complex cosmologies.

Those are some big ideas—definitely something to think about—and certainly the basis for a response the next time someone tells you, “Oh, I haven’t read a book since high school.”

Buy A Blessed Rage for Order: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472102214/qid=1148184426/sr=1-
2/ref=sr_1_2/104-8759922-8220731?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Technorati tags: Chaos Theory, Narrative, Systems Theory