Conjuring Sense

So the 9/11 conspiracy seekers have made it all the way to a disparaging documentary on BBC2, which officially places them in the cranks category of the media landscape. And this is good, for the country-sized gaps in their logic, evidence, and willingness to disregard facts that don't fit their narrative is very sad. It makes me think that some people really don't have anything better to do with their days than construct elaborate fantasies.

However, it makes me think about the need for narrative. It's no great revelation that our culture is rife with stories, but what is interesting is our seeming need to construct narratives for ourselves to try and "make sense" of that which is senseless. I see this a lot in my professional and private life.

I've seen friends revise their stories, journalists alter an article, work colleagues try to paint scenarios in different lights and a variety of other events that are essentially narrative building. A corporate CEO might just as easily convince himself that he was destined to run a company, choosing to ignore or re-interpret the fact that he got his MBA due to a lucky break from an academic tutor. Everything must be made to fit our sense of "sense".

So what is "sense"? Narratives are constructed of many parts, with heroes and villains, acts and so on. This structure, however implicit or hidden, creates closure. The hero gets the girl. The bad men are punished. Life always finds a way etc. Closure is the feeling that an issue or question in the mind is fully answered. It then does not bother us any more. We fully understand it.

History is littered with many examples of this instinct in action. As a schoolboy, I was taught a grand narrative of Irish history, which basically laid out a three-act drama of "The Normans invaded, they became the English and brutalised us for 800 years, we kicked them out 1916 ra ra". We were taught the idea of a cycle of revolution that eventually threw of the yoke of oppression, but in reality this narrative is nonsense.

The narrative around World Wars 1 and 2 are likewise turned into the stuff of epics and heroes, Nazis and Holocausts. Many of the events are absolutely true, but the "sense" of them, the closure that they provide, the narrative, is bunkum. In reality life was as complex back then as it appears to be today. We have collectively chosen to forget the parts that don't make sense.

It is therefore a natural response for us to try and create closure where none is apparent. The story of how some guys flew planes into some buildings because they were told to leaves many unanswered questions. It seems to have no great start nor finish, so we construct one. We do it officially, via such documentaries as "The Power of Nightmares", and we do it unofficially, via "Loose Change". TPON has the benefit of proper research, but it is creating the opening of a narrative (of how fundamentalists have come to rule the world), and that gets our emotions involved. LC is almost complete and utter fabrication and deliberate mis-reading, and likewise is trying to breed emotion.

And maybe emotion is what it is all about. Dry accounts of fact do not remain in our memory. Emotions leave great echoes in our minds, but information does not. Maybe our quest for sense, and for narrative, is a quest for a genuine emotion, a sense that the feelings we have are legitimate and right, and we are ourselves heroes after all.