Having discovered the human project through the indirect means of poetry, stories, and opera, it would be sensible to present it through a well-reasoned exposition, as I attempted to do in an earlier blog (https://frameshifts.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/april-blog-the-human-project.jpg).Well-reasoned exposition is not my strength, however. I entangle myself in sources—there’s always one more!—and in side-issues which become poetry, stories, and opera. You see where this is going. To keep me on track, Mashkinonge, the magical fish from The Fisher of the James (https://frameshifts.com/2013/01/14/the-fisher-of-the-james/), and Frances Burns, the graduate student from Escape Plans (See last story in Death on His Heels in Richmond at https://www.amazon.com/author/richardrose) have provided an annotated bibliography of the relevant sources. When I’ve worked my way through them, I may be ready to write the definitive exposition, but for now, I offer the following fishy remarks.
BEING AND SOMETHING
What I have to work with, what I am, and the Shield of Experience.
First, a few claims about my situation. Although Being has notably been linked to Time, Nothingness, and various moral imperatives, my assertions will not be notable, surprising, or imperative. But in regard to how imperatives arise, I do favor gossip.
In his history, Persica, Ctesias[1] of Cnidus apparently made up a story about Sardanapalus, the decadent last ruler of the Assyrian Empire who insisted on orgies even to making a spectacle of his death by self-immolation on a pyre of gold, courtesans, royal attendants, and all his favorite things. Ignoring the lack of supporting evidence—including evidence that such a ruler existed—Diodorus Siculus passed the story on to Dante, Goethe, Byron, and others—over many reputable refutations. Such a choice piece of gossip simply can’t be disregarded. The message of comeuppance on a brutal, pleasure-loving aristocrat was too good not to be told: it had become an imperative story.
As a cognitive being, I receive, test, select, and interpret sensations to create the shield of experience that goes before me. To care for myself and others, my shield should be intact. A protection, filter, and guide when encountering challenges, the shield of experience is therefore an ongoing work of refinement, cooperation, and communication—and gossip. William James said that experience is what you pay attention to. And experience—what we know–is welded of facts, gossip, and imperative stories—stories too good not to be told. When a combatant population receives friendly fire from a rocket landing on a hospital, it is imperative to say that the enemy targeted the hospital. The story must be told to demonstrate passionate unity with the accepted cause of the battle. It is the story to tell because it should be true even if isn’t.
Stories are what we have to work with. We are storytellers because we are human events. As events like processions, we have beginnings, middles, and ends—whether we’re considered events of history, evolution, or metabolism. Professions, academic disciplines, and popular interests are special kinds of stories—often formulaic. We continue telling stories because we are stories[2]. Whatever else we do we proceed. Of course, unlike Holden Caulfield, Esther Greenwood, and Portnoy, we keep most gossip to ourselves. Always under revision, stories are how we work on ourselves. Although I cannot do much to alter my sensory or cognitive powers—aside from learning to avoid delusion—perhaps I can improve myself by improving storytelling. [3]
What we are is cognitive beings; what we have to work with are stories. It would be of great interest to refine the definitions of being, cognition, and storytelling, but in that, as in so much, I am incompetent. Such an analytical project was already attempted by philosophers of enlightenment, romanticism, phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism. My non-analytical presentation is what you would expect from a journeyman-poet: An Intuitive Mélange.
But in defense of intuition, cognitive science tells a story that the brain is a predictive engine drawing on both bottom-up sensory inputs and top-down control elements to correct errors on the fly and keep us on course to flee a tiger, make a sandwich, or write an essay. This story about thinking suggests that intuition rests on a kind of Bayesian inferential engine that tests predictions and repeatedly checks results to alter course. In Theatocracy, Peter Meineck argues that when theatre captures the audience’s imagination, it becomes an external cognitive-accessory, embodying alternative predictive tests and thereby even recruiting emotional support for changes of behavior. Unlike rational argument, the story portrayed on stage changes minds by encouraging identification with characters and their situations as the audience projects itself into the action. Because classical theatre was embedded in religious ritual, its persuasive force was stronger than that of a modern stage-play or movie, but any observed enactments of people in troubling situations are capable of eliciting empathy and changes of mind. Simply suspending disbelief to enter into the frame of the staged story can be enough to suggest that one’s routine behavior and accepted views are simply other frames of reference rather than The Way Things Are.
Within one’s usual frames of reference, one inhabits a Storyland of assumptions, fragmented routines, and bits of stories, called “strips” by Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis. Within the Storyland shared by a group—such as a religious community, military unit, faculty department, or political party—the common sense and intuition exhibited by adherents comes as a shock to outsiders. In an End-of-the-World cult, it may be assumed, for example, that the Apocalypse will occur next year on a Tuesday. For another example, consider that in some nomadic hunting groups, it is common sense for a mother of two babies to let the weaker one perish in the bush so that its sibling will have a better chance to survive as the hunting band hurries from site to site. And North American suburbanites who are outsiders to the Kalahari Storyland may assume that their hurried practices of elective Caesarian-sections and formula-feeding are obviously the only acceptable child-rearing practices.
Intuition and common sense arise from the Storylands you inhabit.
Religious Storylands provide an apparently divine framework for aspirations. As cognitive beings relying on framed stories to inform us about Something, we are at a disadvantage in comparison to the all-knowing Beings of our religious imaginations. Such powerful Beings presumably perceive any object simultaneously from all planes, perspectives, and depths without need of a frame of reference. Given the interrelationships of the physical world, such a god or angel also could not fail to perceive Something as part of a whole and a whole of parts. But this kind of knowledge, even if it seems to be the aim of enthusiasts for Big Data, seems to me not only unimaginable but immobile and useless to human beings.
In contrast to all-knowing Beings, humans may have fragmented understanding and easily fix on poor ideas and misdirected aims. But they are always actively working through the plots of their own stories—not at rest in complacent certainty atop a sacred mountain. And when humans deal with Something, they do so in relation to its story. There is no holy movement in mysterious ways—only continual assimilation and accommodation within specific contexts. A human being experiments with respect to a hypothesis, plans with respect to an aim, and makes a choice with respect to criteria. Aims, plans, experiments, and choices are understood with respect to the Storylands in which they occur. Humans have no use for an abstract Something without reference to any Storyland. What does matter to us is a Something that moves and engages us—a story that absorbs us.
In De La Mettrie’s Ghost, Chris Nunn refers to stories and other control elements as cognitive objects. They correspond to neural ensembles of powerfully attractive organizational strength. Just as Peter Meineck underscores the absorption of an audience in the plot of a stage-play, so Nunn describes the contagious power of attractive story-lines—particularly when set in such troubling times as epidemics and pogroms. Similarly, in Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes the sense of absorption felt by participants who are fully engaged in optimal experiences—transforming experiences in which we see Something as we have never seen it before.
Once I found a mouse swimming in the toilet. At first, I thought it was a turd. Then it sprang legs and swished about. In that short strip of behavior, I saw and saw again.
Unsettling, isn’t it?
The cognitive object I had applied to the phenomenon—my own Mouse Story—didn’t match the new experience. Going from one frame of reference to another was a shocking shift. My Mouse Story would, now and ever afterwards, include the unsettling possibility of a rodent swimming in a toilet bowl.
How much more unsettling the realization that one never leaves Storyland! Our creative writing teacher tells us to show, not tell; our phenomenologist, following Husserl, tells us simply to describe phenomena. So, in a mania of description, we follow their instructions and fill notebooks with minute observations. (At one point, I had a few hundred lineal feet of them.) But the sensory reality recorded, no matter how vivid, remains an interpretation in the uncertain medium of language, as does Dr. Williams’ red wheelbarrow, however well it has been instantiated. Whatever else the Something may be that cognitive beings have to work with, it is a cognitive object—a story or strip-fragment of a story in some Storyland of experience. One can shift frames between stories; one can create and embody different stories. But one never leaves Storyland. Rather unsettling, isn’t it? In the first of his Duino Elegies, Rilke comments,
Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world.
—From Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Mitchell, in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Like the characters in the Wachowskis’ Matrix , or the speaker in Ogden Nash’s poem—who knocks against the skull in which he’s trapped—one may feel desperate. Storyland becomes a nightmare. One might even imagine a powerful Being who has set this trap and a Hero who escapes from this powerful Being by comprehending and transcending the illusion. Of course, the Hero-Story is one of the oldest cognitive objects—an archetype, in fact. No one leaves Storyland.
Like gossip, conversation, and opposing thumbs, Storyland is a hugely adaptive factor in human survival. Harari, in Sapiens, A Brief History of Mankind, describes the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago as the time when humans began to track relationships—like the many links between members in a group of fifty individuals. Think of the gossip! Unlike earlier family-groups, such communities could share, trade, specialize, and work in teams. They did so, Harari says, by accepting fictional objects, like ideas about weather, differences in personalities, the idea of debt, the movement of stars, or the seasonal migration of prey. The journalist Maria Ressa has said that facts, trust, and truth are the basis for the shared reality required by a democracy; in fact, any community requires a Storyland of shared facts and accepted fictions. Without shared reality and empathy—like that aroused in live theatre–community dissolves. And no, you can’t prevent this by increasing your posts on asocial media.
The term cognitive dissonance was first used by Festinger to describe the frame-shift-shock felt by members of a religious community as they confronted the fact that, contrary to doctrine, the world had not ended on schedule. On the other hand, recent research in astronomy has also changed the origin-story of the universe by re-setting the estimated time for the initial Singularity, but this change in the cosmological plot does not create anguish among physicists. Their Storyland is a refined network of well-tracked relationships quite open to such changes. Probabilistic relationships are even part of the plot. The physicists’ incredible story of cosmogenesis seems more fictional and terrifying than Genesis, which at least gave humans a walk-on part.
While a story may not be a Something, but, instead, a fiction about Something, its interpretive and predictive power is sharpened through refinement of experience. Delusions do not refine experience; they substitute belief for experience. Delusional Storylands are typically elaborate, but like a rococo church made of sugar, the structure rests on participants’ sweet absorption into the shared story, and on their carefully ignoring the shaky foundation given for imperative beliefs—like assuming it will never rain and crumple the whole contraption. No one can leave Storyland, but stories can be improved by checking for delusions.
We are cognitive beings whose shield of experience is a protection, guide, and forecast in any situation. The shield is continually refined through conversation and collaboration with others, including those special collaborations called rehearsals, rituals, inventions, and improvisations. The shield of experience is a network of stories and story fragments which extends the reach of our individual neural ensembles to the larger community. In a way, the community’s extended shield of experience is like the great net of Indra—the fabled protective network of interdependencies. But the jewels in the community’s network are the cognitive contributions—the stories—of all its members.
What I’m up to—the Human Project
Unlike the brain’s intrinsic error-checkers, triggered by uncertainty, and guiding perceptions of up-and-down, edges and corners, faces and projectiles, the error-checking done within a community is neither immediate nor always reliable. Trust is not easily transferred to outsiders and the story of danger from outsiders is common to most groups. Additionally, the trustworthiness of sources is usually linked to their familiarity and status rather than to the quality of their understanding. Despite these shortcomings, all humans are devoted to the same project—caring for and about each other and keeping their conversations going: communion, in fact. Without the continual flow of facts, trust, and truth, the community’s shield of experience breaks down.
Although care may initially be given only to the immediate group, strangers are inevitably admitted to the circle of care once they can be trusted. As humans have grown to a cosmopolitan species, the circle of care has also grown, although it fails to include all members of the species. Guards at the borders of every Storyland vigilantly maintain their circles of care. Groups may accept the same stories, but these tend to limit or impair the expansion of the human project to the entire species. Such stories are familiar:
- colonialism, usually in service of a righteous cause
- zero-sum-politics and business practice,
- transforming the Earth and humans into data and resource-commodities to be exploited without restraint,
- extirpation of the Other—especially enemies—their cultures, languages, and stories
- explicit and implicit maintenance of class and caste-systems, with elites protected from legal regulations and from the direct consequences of their practices.
Other stories serve to distract humans from the impairment of their project and even from the fact that, as members of the human species, they are all engaged in such a project. Purveyed by self-interested parties, these stories may be exaggerations (political rhetoric), persuasive (advertising), inspiring (religious messages), amusing (entertainment and infotainment), and frightening (warnings about outsiders). Such stories are strengthened by references to group identity, sanctity, ideology, and the fear of outsiders and uncertainties.
In opposition to these stories are the studies of historians, other academics, and researchers, the reports of journalists and commentators, the plays, poems, art, and music of makers, and the work of legal and social reformers and politicians. With any stories, but especially with the ones that seem most agreeable, one does well to keep an eye out for delusions, ideological imperatives and loyalty tests, fixations of all kinds, fear-mongering, and appeals to mistaken authorities, but the deep story of the human project is simple—maybe simple-minded:
The human project is to care for and about the members of our species and to keep the human conversation going: to seek communion.
The human project story serves as a criterion for checking other stories. For example, consider the contrast between the British idea of property-with- a-home-of-your-own with the indigenous American idea of communal lands shared for towns, trade, hunting, game-management, and agriculture[4]. The conflict between these ideas culminated in the Dawes Act, a land-by-the-spear solution, as Hellenists would have called it. Dawes resolved the issue with the Indian Removal program: easier to remove the Other from my sight than to converse with him. Edward Carpenter[5], the anthropologist, once commented that:
people of different cultures sometimes differ to the point where, although we could probably understand them, we might not want to make the effort. Then all we can do is show some humility and simply greet them.
What if, instead of Indian Removal, the settlers could have understood their inability to understand, and simply greeted indigenous people and accommodated to them as fellow-members of the same vast and heterogeneous species? What kind of history would have followed? The accommodating approaches of some French trappers and of William Penn offer intriguing alternative story-lines, but the main story lived by European immigrants in the Americas was about taming the wilderness, pushing into the frontier, settling the land, and celebrating productivity and progress.
As for caring for and about the hundred million inhabitants in hundreds of civilizations, speaking thousands of languages, interconnected over a vast network of roads by trade and shared philosophy and religion, and already inhabiting and protecting the islands and continents of the Americas—
They were not part of the story.
Apparently, what I’ve been up to for six decades is trying to embody the Human Project in works of music, writing, and teaching. But have I fallen into a familiar biological misinterpretation of cultural anthropology? Is the Human Project simply another expression of genetic determinism—of a human essence, or a human nature? Such convictions about human oneness, like convictions about the feasibility of utopia[6], have often been associated with tyranny. An ideological imperative to compel oneness, however, would be a distortion of “caring for and about each other,” absent a sinister re-definition of “caring.” Another imperative is not what I have in mind.
Greeting and conversing with each other while respecting cultural differences does not require ideological conformity. And removing the impairments to the human project need not become a cultural crusade. As a criterion, caring for and about each other is based on the description of a consistent feature already present in human behavior. It may serve as a criterion to compare with other ideas, such as democracy, capitalism, monopoly, communism, caste, and colonialism. In making comparisons, one asks: Does this idea lead members of the species to care for and about each other and to communicate more freely?
Some favorable comparisons, in my opinion, include the politics of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, the legal philosophy of John Rawls, the economic analysis of Karl Polyani, and the cultural anthropology of the Boas school. As with Tolstoy’s description of happy and unhappy families, the favorable comparisons are favorable in the same way, but the unfavorable comparisons of the Storyland of the Human Project with familiar ideologies and philosophies of the East & West are disturbing in many complex ways. Here I let the topic rest.
As I look back over my work, I find that the Storyland of the Human Project underlies my writing, composition, and professional work for sixty years. Not that I knew it. For most of that time, I framed my work in religious terms, as mentioned in the Sermonettes of the previous blog. Now I offer you the idea in its disarming simplicity. If the Human Project does not yet seem sufficiently preposterous, you are encouraged to read the work of an enthusiast, Frances Burns, as given in Escape Plans and in The Last Announcements of Mashkinonge. As Frances was a fictional character in the opera Escape Plans, her presentation falls into the category of a back-story. Frannie can speak for herself—authors like to be upstaged by such characters. You may read about her in Death on his Heels in Richmond. Some day you may even hear from her, if the opera is ever staged. As for the netted fishy heap brought up in Mashkinonge’s Last Announcements, I’ll let you know when I’m disentangled.
[1] Citations generally follow this format: Author’s full name or last name, book title, and paraphrase, but not always. In fact, the format varies. The materials cited were collected in different places and situations over sixty years. This is not academic work. The citations are courtesies to the authors and conveniences for search engines. While this may seem fast and loose, please note that I do not intentionally steal. In academic documents (thesis, dissertation, and research paper for a biology journal), I proved that I could follow professional guidelines.
[2] Writers of auto-fiction upset narrative expectations, perhaps in creative response to data overload, information silos, and search-engine-driven thinking, as Tope Folarin argues (in “A Multitude of Selves,” The Nation, October 16, 2023, 34-36, a review of Tremor, by Teju Cole.) Although auto-fictional writers may seem to surpass story-telling—or even demonstrate its irrelevance–I suspect that they are simply creating new elements for Storyland. That is, given the existence of an Internal Narrator in the posterior cingulate cortex, as described by Judson Brewer (The Craving Mind, 2017) and Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind, 2018), auto-fiction will simply be used by the Narrator as another device to maintain personal control and identity in the midst of disturbing and dissociative experiences. In support of this claim, I offer earlier auto-fiction: Montaigne’s Essais , Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and Auden’s discursive poetry.
[3] This was my aim in writing the dialogues and sermonettes in Religious Hygiene for Wild Men, although the sermonettes wander from their aim. For sermons, of course, aimless messages that wander and fall short are a part of the pleading style and altar-call.
[4] David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) describes the reign of terror within the Wahzhazhe (Osage) community of Oklahoma as some whites, blocked from the usual legal routes to take property—particularly oil head-rights—resorted to deceit and violence.
[5] The quotation is from a review of Eskimo Realities in the National Observer, in 1973.
[6] As masterfully described by Marie Berneri, Journey through Utopia (republished in 2019). As of 2023, Prince Mohammad Ben Salman’s Vision 2030 plan for a futuristic city near the Red Sea has already involved the displacement of thousands of Bedouins. This utopia seems likely to follow the course of other monomaniacal efforts. Kristen Ghodsee cheerfully describes utopias more egalitarian and communitarian in Everyday Utopias (2023), as did Rob Hopkins , who started the Transition Towns movement. Hopeful anarchists sharing decentralized and libertarian communal lives may be onto something. .
frameshifts 
