by Iain McGilchrist, UnHerd
One of the many disadvantages of growing old is that you have seen more but are often too late to do much about it. You see more, not of course because of any innately superior faculty, but for no better reason than that you have lived through many changes and remember how things can be different, for better or worse, in a way which is hard to understand unless you experienced it. In the absence of experience, we rely on theory. For this reason, there are always campus Leninists, but very few survive into old age. Experience is a wise teacher, so long as you listen.
Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The art of storytelling is coming to an end. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.”
The art of storytelling is vital to truth. To a certain cast of mind this sounds like nonsense: after all, in the schoolyard “telling stories” is a synonym for lying. But after the schoolyard comes life, and to understand what is happening in life one needs myths. “Myth”, too, has journeyed from being a word that denoted the deepest kind of truth to the ancient Greeks, to one that suggests falsehood to us. (I hold this to be a natural consequence of the limited way in which our brains now serve us.) Myths embody wisdom that cannot be conveyed in the vapid language of concepts. It is, for example, because we have forgotten the great myths that we are defenceless against artificial intelligence. Leaving aside whether the projected, almost infinite expansion of power offered by artificial intelligence were really possible, could such an expansion ever be wise? For that, we would already have to have achieved wisdom commensurate with the power that is being offered; and, as it turns out, any wisdom we once had seems to have left us at just the moment when it was most needed. But that is only to be expected, since if we had been wise we would not have aimed for Promethean power. We need to remember and understand the great and ancient myths — no amount of meaningless information will ever serve in their stead. The wise rarely aspire to be chained to a rock in perpetuity, while an eagle devours their liver. Other cultures, other times, have seen this only too clearly. Why are we so blind? We have forgotten the eloquent wisdom made real and palpable in the deepest myths.