Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

The stories that all human cultures use to mould the expectations and behaviour of the growing child use iconic figures: always some animals, and then status-figures of the culture (princesses, wizards, giants, mermaids). These stories sit in all our minds, contributing to our acting, our acting-out, our thinking, our predicting what will happen next, as caveman or cameraman. We learn to expect outcomes of particular kinds, frequently expressed in ritual words ('And they all lived happily ever after' or 'So it all ended in tears') [47] As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, fairy tales are certainly not, as modern detractors of the fantasy genre believe, set in a world 'where anything can happen'. They existed in a world with rules ('don't stray from the path', 'don't open the blue door', 'you must be home before midnight', and so on). In a world where anything could happen, you couldn't have stories at all. . The stories that have been used in England over the centuries have changed in complicity with the changing culture -making the culture change, and responding to those changes, like a river changing its path across a wide flood-plain that it has itself built. The Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen were but the last of a long series, with Charles Perrault accumulating the Mother Goose tales around 1690; there were many collections before that, especially some interesting Italian groupings and retellings for adults.

The great advantage we all get from this programming is very clear. It trains us to do 'What if ...?' experiments in our minds, using the rules that we've picked up from the stories, just as we picked up syntax by hearing our parents talking. These stories-of-the-future enable us to set ourselves in an extended imagined present, just as our vision is an extended picture reaching much further out in all directions than the tiny central part to which we're paying attention. These abilities enable each of us to see ourselves as being set in a nexus of space and time; our 'here'

and 'now' form only the starting place for our seeing ourselves in other places at other times. This ability has been called 'time-binding', and has been seen as miraculous, but it seems to us that it is the culmination (for now) of an entirely natural progression that starts from interpreting and enlarging vision or hearing, and from 'making sense' in general. The extelligence uses this faculty, and hones and improves it for each of us, so that we can use metaphor to navigate our thoughts. Pooh Bear getting stuck, and unable to exit with dignity because he ate too much honey, is precisely the kind of parable that we carry with us to guide our actions, as metaphor, from day to day. So are Biblical stories, with all their lessons for life.

Holy books like the Bible and the Koran take this ability one giant step further. The Biblical prophets do, wholesale, what each of us has been programmed to do retail for our own life and those of our own nearest and dearest. The prophets predicted what would happen to everybody in the tribe if they continued their current behaviour, and thereby changed that behaviour. This was a step on the way to those modern prophets who predict The End Of The World some time soon.

They seem to feel that they have perceived a trend, a constraint in the universe, that the rest of us have not understood, and whose properties are directing the universe along some undesirable or calamitous path. Though they don't usually mean 'universe', they mean 'my world and nearer ones'. So far they haven't been right. But we would not be here to write these words if they had been, which is another anthropic issue, but not a very important one because they have been wrong rather often. They predict what will happen If This Goes On; but, increasingly it seems, This doesn't Go On for very long because it's unexpectedly replaced by a new This.

We all think that we can become better prophets with practice. We all think we have a clever way to build 'the road not taken' into our experience. Then we invent time travel, at least in our imaginations. We all want to go back to the beginning of that argument with the boss, and do it right this time. We want to unravel the chain of causality that led to boring edge people. We want to avoid the bad effects of elves but retain the good ones. We want to play pick-and-mix with universes.

However, despite their emphasis on prophecy, monotheist faiths have real trouble with multiple futures. Having simplified their theology down to one God, they also tend to believe that there can be only one 'right way to heaven'. The priests tell the people what they must do, and at least while the religion is fresh the priests are fine examples. This is what gets you to heaven, they say: no adultery, no murder, no failure to give a tithe to the Church, and no undercutting the other clergy for indulgences. Then the gateway to heaven becomes 'strait', narrower and narrower, until only the blessed and the saints can get in without spending time in some purgatory or other.

Other religions, notably extreme versions of Islam, promise heaven as the reward for a martyr's death. These ideas are more closely associated with barbarian views of the future than tribal ones: paradise, like Valhalla for the Norse heroes, will be full of the hero's rewards, from perpetually renewed women to ample food and drink and hero's games. But they are also associated, as they were not in the more purely barbarian Norse legends, with a belief in fate, in the will of a god that nothing can avoid or deny. This is the other way for authority to force obedience: the promise of ultimate reward is a very persuasive story.

Barbarians, for whom honour, glory, power, and love, dignity, bravely are the meaningful concepts, get plus points for denying authority and shaping events to their own desires. They have, among their gods and heroes, the mischievous unpredictable ones like Lemminkainen and Puck.

Barbarian nursery stories, like their sagas, laud the hero. They show how luck is associated with particular attitudes, especially a pure heart that does not seek immediate or ultimate reward.

There is frequently a test of this purity, from helping a poor blind cripple, who turns out to be a god in disguise, to curing or feeding a desperate animal, who comes to your aid later.

The agents in many of these stories are supernatural -out of the order of things, magical and causeless -'people', such as fairies (including fairy queens and fairy godmothers), avatars of the gods, demons, and djinni. People, especially heroes or aspiring heroes (such as Siegfried, but also Aladdin), attain control over these supernatural beings with the assistance of magic rings, named swords, spells, or merely by their own inner nobility. This changes their fortunes, and luck comes to be on their side; they win battles and bouts against long odds, they climb tall mountains, they kill immortal dragons and monsters. No tribal thinker would even dream of stories like these. For them, fortune favours the well-prepared.

Man is forever inventive, and we have stories that counter even the most heroic tales: the Sidh, the seven-foot-tall elves of Lords and ladies and old Irish folklore, the Devil who buys your soul and has you at his mercy even if you repent, the Grand Vizier, James Bond's opponents.

What is interesting in our discussion of stories here is the characters of these anti-heroes. They don't have any. Elves are the High Folk, but they don't have lives of their own; they are simply portrayed as being antithetic to what people, especially heroes, want to do. We don't care about the human aspects of James Bond's iconic enemies: they are always portrayed as being mindlessly cruel, or avid for power without responsibility and without having to overcome obstacles. They are ciphers, they don't have creative personalities, and they don't learn. If they did, one of them would have shot James Bond dead with a simple gun many years ago, after learning what happens to those who put their trust in laser beams and circular saws. They'd remove his watch first, too.