'That's right!' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'It wasn't the fight!'
'And it couldn't possibly have been the carousing, which was really quite moderate by our standards,' said the Dean.
'In fact we didn't get drunk at all!' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, brightly.
Unfortunately, Rincewind's memory was literally treacherous. It worked perfectly.
'So, then,' he said, wishing that he didn't have to, 'we didn't tell Will all that stuff?'
'What stuff?' said Ridcully.
'All about our magical library, for one thing. And you kept saying "Here's a good one, I bet you can use this" and you told him about those witches up in Lancre and how they got the new king on the throne, and that time the elves broke through, and how the Selachii and the Venturi families are always fighting—'
'We did?' said Ridcully.
'Yes. And about the countries we've visited. Lots of things.'
'Why didn't someone stop me?'
'The Dean did try. That's when you hit him with the Chair of Indefinite Studies, I think.'
The wizards sat in ale-smelling gloom.
'Should we have another try?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'What, and tell him to forget it all?' said Ridcully. 'Talk sense, man.'
'Perhaps we could go back in time and stop ourselves telling—'
'Don't say that! No more of that!' snapped the Archchancellor.
Rincewind pulled a copy of the play towards him. The wizards froze.
'Go on,' said Ridcully. 'Tell us the worst. What did he write?'
Rincewind opened the book and read a couple of lines at random:
'You spotted snakes, with double tongue; Thorny hedgehogs, be not—'
'No, no, no,' muttered the Dean, his head in his hands. 'Please tell me no one sang him the Hedgehog Song!'
Rincewind's lips moved as he read on. He turned over a few pages.
He flicked back to the beginning.
'It's all here,' he said. 'Same rather bad jokes, same unbelievable confusions, everything! Just as it was before! But it's going to happen here!'
The wizards looked at one another and dared to share a smug expression.
'Ah well, there we are then,' said Ridcully, sitting back. 'Job done.'
Rincewind turned some more pages. His recollections of the night were not coherent, but even a genius couldn't have made sense out of a bunch of drunken wizards all talking at once.
'Hex?' he said.
The crystal ball said: 'Yes?'
'Will this play be performed in this world?'
'That is the intention,' said the voice of Hex.
'And then what will happen?'
Hex told them, and added: 'That is one outcome.'
'Just a moment,' said Ponder Stibbons. 'There's more than one outcome?'
'Certainly. The play may not take place. Phase space contains a broadsheet account of a disruption of the first performance, followed by a fire in which a number of people died.
Subsequently the theatres were closed and the playwright died during a riot. He was struck by a pike.'
'You mean a halberd, of course,' said Ridcully.
'A pike,' Hex repeated. 'A fishmonger was involved.'
'What happened to civilisation?'
Hex was silent for a moment, and then said: 'Humanity failed by three years to leave the planet.'
30. LIES TO HUMANS
Please tell me no one sang him the Hedgehog Song ...
The Hedgehog Song, a Discworld ditty in the general tradition of Eskimo Nell, first made its appearance in Wyrd Sisters with its haunting refrain 'The hedgehog can never be buggered at all'.
The wizards have wielded the power of story with a vengeance. They have used it to prime their secret weapon, Shakespeare, and are convinced that he will prove more effective than a MIRVed ICBM. But before he's launched, they've very properly started to worry about collateral damage: possible cultural contamination by the Hedgehog Song.
It is a consequence only marginally less dire than eternal elf-infestation, but on the whole, preferable.
In the real Roundworld, the power of story is just as great as it is in the fictional counterpart.
Stories have power because we have minds, and we have minds because stories have power. It's a complicity, and all that remains is to unwrap it.
As we do so, bear in mind that Discworld and Roundworld are not so much different as complementary. Each, in its own estimation at least, gave birth to the other. On Roundworld, the Disc is seen as fantasy, the invention of an agile mind; Discworld is a series of stories
(amazingly successful) along with ceramic models, computer games and cassette tapes.
Discworld runs on magic, and on narrative imperative. Things happen on Discworld because people assume they will, and because some things have to happen to complete the story. From the standpoint of Roundworld, Discworld is a Roundworld invention.
The Discworld view is similar, but inverted. The wizards of Unseen University know that Roundworld is merely a Discworld creation, an unanticipated spin-off from an all-too-successful attempt to split the thaum and create the first self-sustaining magical chain reaction. They know this because they were there when it happened. Roundworld was deliberately created to keep magic out. Surprisingly, the magic-free vacuum acquired its own regulatory principle. Rules.
Things happen on Roundworld because they are consequences of the rules. However, it is astonishingly difficult to look at the rules and understand what their consequences will be. Those consequences are emergent. The wizards discovered this to their cost, as every attempt to do something straightforward in Roundworld - like creating life or jump-starting extelligence - went seriously awry.
These two worldviews are not mutually contradictory, for they are worldviews of two different worlds. Yet, thanks to the interconnectedness of L-space, each world illuminates the other.
The strange duality between Roundworld and Discworld parallels another: the duality between Mind and Matter. When Mind came to Roundworld, a very remarkable change occurred.
Narrative imperative appeared in Roundworld. Magic came into existence. And elves, and vampires, and myth, and gods. Characteristically, all of these things came into being in an indirect and offbeat way, like the relationship between rules and consequences. Things didn't exactly happen because of the power of story. Instead, the power of story made minds try to make the things in the story happen. The attempts were not always successful, but even when they failed, Roundworld was usually changed.
Narrative imperative arrived on Roundworld like a small god, and grew in stature according to human belief. When a million human beings all believe the same story, and all try to make it come true, their combined weight can compensate for their individual ineffectiveness.
There is no science in Discworld, only magic and narrativium. So the wizards put science into Discworld in the form of the Roundworld Project, as detailed in The Science of Discworld. With elegant symmetry, there was no magic or narrativium in Roundworld, so humans put them there, in the form of story.
Before narrative imperative can exist, there has to be narrative, and that's where Mind proved decisive. The imperative followed hard on the heels of the narrative, and the two complicitly coevolved, for as soon as there was a story, there was someone who wanted to make it come true.
Nonetheless, the story beat the compulsion by a nose.
What makes humans different from all other creatures on the planet is not language, or mathematics, or science. It is not religion, or art, or politics, either. All of those things are mere side effects of the invention of story. Now it might seem that without language there can be no stories, but that is an illusion, brought about by our current obsession with recording stories as words on paper. Before there was a word for 'elephant' it was possible to point at an elephant and make evocative gestures, to draw an elephant on the cave wall and add spears flying towards it, or to mould a model of an elep
hant from clay and act out a hunting scene. The story was as clear as day, and an elephant-hunt would follow hard on its heels.
We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes, and the bonobo chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain, three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
Even today, five million years since we and the other two species of chimpanzee went our separate evolutionary ways, we still use stories to run our lives. Every morning we buy a newspaper to find out, so we tell ourselves, what is happening in the world. But most things that are happening in the world, even rather important ones, never make it into the papers. Why not?
Because newspapers are written by journalists, and every journalist learned at their mother's knee that what grabs newspaper readers is a story. Events with zero significance for the planet, such as a movie star's broken marriage, are stories. Events that matter a great deal, such as the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol cans of shaving-cream, are not stories. Yes, they can become stories, and in this case do when we discover that those selfsame CFCs are destroying the ozone layer; we even have a title for the story, The Ozone Hole. But nobody knew or recognised there was a story when shops first started selling aerosol cans, even though that was the decisive event.
Religions have always recognised the power of a good story. Miracles run better at the box- office than mundane good actions. Helping an old lady across the road isn't much of a story, but raising the dead most certainly is. Science is riddled with stories. In fact, if you can't tell a convincing story about your research, nobody will let you publish it. And even if they did, nobody else would understand it. Newton's laws of motion are simple little stories about what happens to lumps of matter when they are given a push -stories only a little more precise than 'if you keep pushing, it will go faster and faster'. And 'Everything moves in circles', as Ponder would insist.
Why are we so wedded to stories? Our minds are too limited to grasp the universe for what it is.
We're very small creatures in a very big world, and there is no way that we could possibly represent that world in full, intricate detail inside our own heads. Instead, we operate with simplified representations of limited parts of the universe. We find simple models that correspond closely to reality extremely attractive. Their simplicity makes them easy to comprehend, but that's not much use unless they also work. When we reduce a complex universe to a simple principle, be it The Will of God or Schrodinger's Equation, we feel that we've really accomplished something. Our models are stories, and conversely, stories are models of a more complex reality. Our brains fill in the complexity automatically. The story says 'dog' and we immediately have a mental picture of the beast: a big, bumbling Labrador with a tail like a steam-hammer, tongue lolling, ears flopping[75]. Just as our visual system fills in the blind spot.
We learn to appreciate stories as children. The child's mind is quick and powerful, but uncontrolled and unsophisticated. Stories appeal to it, and adults rapidly discovered that a story can put an idea into a child's head like nothing else can. Stories are easy to remember, both for teller and listener. As that child grows to adulthood, the love of stories remains. An adult has to be able to tell stories to the next generation of children, or the culture does not propagate. And an adult needs to be able to tell stories to other adults, such as their boss or their mate, because stories have a clarity of structure that does not exist in the messiness of the real world. Stories always make sense: that's why Discworld is so much more convincing than Roundworld.
Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture's Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one's culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course. Stories map out the phase space of existence.
Some stories are just entertainment, but even those usually have a hidden message on a deeper, possibly more earthy, level -as with Rumpelstiltskin. Some stories are Worlds of If, a way for minds to try out hypothetical choices and imagine their consequences. Word-play in the Nest of the Mind. And some of those stories have such a compelling logic that narrative imperative takes over, and they transmute into plans. A plan is a story together with the intention of making it come true.
Inside Roundworld, as it sits in its glass globe within the confining walls of the library of Unseen University, our story is coming to its climax. Will Shakespeare has written a play (it is, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream), a play that the elves believe will consolidate their power over human minds. The narrative of this play has collided with Rincewind's mental model of what he wants to do, and the flying sparks have ignited a plot. How will it all end? That is one of the compulsive aspects of a story. You'll just have to wait and see.
We have seen how history unfolds an emergent dynamic, so that even though everything is following rigid rules, even history itself has to wait and see how it all turned out. Yes, everything is following the rules, but there is no short cut that will take you to the destination before the rules themselves get there. History is not a story that exists in a book, the fatalistic 'it is written'.
It is a story that makes itself up as it goes along, like a story that someone is reading and you are listening to. It is being written ...
Philosophically, there ought to be a big difference between a story that is already written, and one that is being created word by word as you read it. The one is a story whose every sentence is predetermined; not only can there be only one possible outcome, but the outcome is already
'known'. The other is a story whose next sentence does not yet exist, whose ending in unknown even to the storyteller. You are reading the first kind of story, but while we were writing it, it was the second kind of story. In fact, it started out as a totally different story, but we never wrote that one at all. The philosophers realised long ago that it is no easy matter to determine which kind of story fits our world. If we had the ability to run the world again, we might discover that it does different things on the second occasion, and if so, the history of the universe would be a story that unfolds as it goes, not one already committed to paper.
But this doesn't look like a feasible experiment.
Our fascination with stories lays us open to a variety of errors in our relationship with the outside world. The rapid spread of rumours, for instance, is a tribute to how our love of a juicy story overcomes our critical faculties. The mechanism is precisely the one that the scientific method tries very hard to protect us against: believing something because you want it to be true. Or, for some rumours, because you fear it could be true. A rumour is one example of a more general concept, introduced in 1976 by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. He came up with this notion in order to be able to discuss an evolutionary system that was different from the Darwinian evolution of organisms. It is the meme. The associated subject of 'memetics' is science's attempt to comprehend the power of story.
The word 'meme' was coined by deliberate analogy with 'gene', and 'memetics' with 'genetics'.
Genes are passed from one generation of organisms to the next; memes are passed from one human mind to another human mind. A meme is an idea that is so attractive to human minds that they want to pass it on to others. The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is a highly successful meme; so, for a long time, was Communism, though that was a complicated system of ideas, a memeplex. Ideas exist as some cryptic pattern of activity in brains, so brains, and their associated minds, provide an environment in which memes can exist and propagate. Indeed, replicate, for when you teach a child to sing 'Happy Birthday to You', you don't forge
t the song yourself. The Hedgehog Song is an equally successful Discworld meme.
As the home computer spread across the globe, and became inextricably wired into the Internet's extelligence, an environment was created that gave birth to an insidious silicon-based form of meme: the computer virus. All viruses so far seem to have been written deliberately by humans, although at least one turned out to be a far more successful replicator than its designer had intended, thanks to a programming error. 'Artificial life' simulations using evolving computer programs are often run inside a 'shell' that isolates them from the outside world, because of the unlikely but possible evolution of a really nasty computer virus. The world's computer network is certainly complex enough to evolve its own viruses, given enough time.
Memes are mind-viruses.
In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore says that 'Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral, or positively harmful to us.'
The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is mostly harmless, although it is just about possible to see it as an insidious piece of propaganda for global commerce if you're that way inclined. Advertising is a conscious attempt to unleash memes; a successful advertising campaign starts to build its own momentum as it spreads by word of mouth as well as overt TV or newspaper ads. Some advertising is beneficial (Oxfam, say) and some is manifestly harmful (tobacco). In fact, many memes are harmful, but still propagate very effectively: among them are the chain-letter and its financial analogue, pyramid selling. Just as DNA propagates without having any conscious intentions of its own, so memes replicate without having conscious objectives. The people who set the memes loose may have had overt intentions, but the memes themselves don't. Those that perform well, leading human minds to pass them on in quantity, thrive; those that do not, die out, or at best live on as small, isolated pockets of infection. The spread of a meme is much like the spread of a disease. And just as you can protect yourself against some diseases, by taking the right precautions, you can also protect yourself against becoming infected with a meme. The ability to think critically, and to question statements that rest on authority instead of evidence, are quite effective defences.
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