While recently attending my eldest child's high school graduation (go Farmers!), I had occasion to reflect on how the Narrative mind works. I listened to a commencement address by a teacher whom the students had selected, and was moved to tears by his words about prioritizing purpose over money, taking time to connect with others, owning your mistakes, being humble enough to realize when you don't know something, and leading in a way that helps other people. It was all excellent advice. Then I remembered being 18 years old at my own high school graduation, more than a quarter of a century ago. And I thought about how, at that age, I heard similar advice ... and judged it to be a lot of empty platitudes! What did those words mean: love? perseverance? honor? vocation? My 18-year-old self thought that it was a lot of hot air. I wondered which reaction my daughter was having -- the cynical and jaded perspective that I brought to these messages in my own teen years, or something closer to the sentimental and profound sort of feeling that I had as a middle-aged father. Knowing her practicality, my guess is that it was probably more like the first of those, although she is likely too polite to say so.
I should mention that I was valedictorian of my own graduating class, back in the dark ages at Rush-Henrietta Senior High School, and that I therefore gave my own speech on the day that I graduated from high school. As I remember, it was meant to be a sort of anti-speech, telling the assembled crowd that graduation was just another day, that accomplishments meant nothing in the long run, and that the task of living was simply to live each day as best you could. (I could be a real Debbie Downer at age 18). But then, strangely enough, I remember adults telling me how wonderful my message had been. One friend's mother was in tears as she said it -- she saw in my words a sort of existential exhortation to live well, love fully, and seize the day. I meant to reject the whole idea of commencement speeches, and yet had managed to deliver a message that at least some people thought was profound. Talk about "failing forward"!
This trip down memory lane illustrates how a narrative -- something like "love well" or "carpe diem" (Horace, Odes) or "whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Ecclesiastes 9:10) -- can be simultaneously a deeply meaningful statement and an empty banality. In one sense, 18-year-old Paul had a point: These are vacuous words on their surface, which don't add a dollar to anyone's pocket or an ounce of joy to anyone's life. And yet, these words are also a form of narrative shorthand that can be deeply evocative, drawing out a listener's own life history and encapsulating it in a pithy phrase that somehow feels as important as life itself. My friend's mother was correct as well: I had stumbled onto a message in my valedictory address that drew out her own experiences of daily struggle, and triumph, and loss, and joy. The phrase "this is a day like any other," instead of weakening the impact of the great day, instead served to hallow for her the many other days of her life that arrived with no fanfare of their own.
I have previously argued that the products of the Narrative mind are "thinner" than they appear. At some level, they are just words -- think of a chair, for instance, and it will likely have no particular color until you actually ask yourself what color the chair is. The Narrative mind holds the concept "chair" with no specifics. And yet, if you do query this image, you can readily imagine the chair's height, size, color, level of support for your back, placement in a room, or other features. You can elaborate those aspects, and make them part of the meaning of the concept "chair," by drawing on your personal library of life experiences with chairs. But those characteristics aren’t there at the start, and as you add them the general idea of “chair” recedes, replaced by the picture of a particular chair instead.
Several prominent neuropsychologists explain the inherent "thinness" of narratives by referring to the chain of neural associations that underpin each mental concept. Paul Churchland says that whole networks of neurons that fire together receive a sort of mental tag based on the firing of a smaller subset of neurons, and that subset in turn links to perhaps a single neuron at the apex of the pyramid. In this way, a conceptual statement comes to represent a whole network of ideas. Douglas Hofstadter argues that our narratives gain power through self-reference, looping back and back on themselves and acquiring a greater sense of meaning with each repetition. Repetition enlarges sentiment.
As a faculty member I attend at least one commencement each year, and sometimes two if I need to hood a mentee at our December graduation. For eleven years, I listened to commencement addresses by CU President Bruce Benson, who gave the same speech word-for-word each time. His address had the merit of brevity, being simply a curated list of advice that he thought young people needed to hear. It grew on me. I actually came to look forward to hearing his list of aphorisms and platitudes, which somehow seemed more profound and important each time he said them. Through repetition, a message like "the world needs leaders" or "don't give up no matter what" can draw out a great wealth of experiences, feelings, or subsidiary meanings for a person who has had that thought at various times of life and in diverse situations -- perhaps especially if the thought came to them during a trying time that they then survived. The more I heard President Benson's sayings, the more likely they were to come back to me at odd moments. And the more that happened, the more they meant to me the following year when I heard the list again. I won't say that it was great oratory, but I came to like his yearly talk quite a bit. Listening to it was, at the very least, a tradition.
In defense of Young Paul, I think that like many teenagers I was looking for a sense of "authenticity," for words to feel meaningful and important, and I noticed that the things people say at graduations instead felt like empty buckets. For me at that age, they were empty buckets, because I didn't have an appropriate range of experiences to fill in the meaning beneath the words. My friend's mother did, and thus for her my own empty words held power. I would note that relatively few things did feel deeply meaningful at age 18, and that those that did would later turn out to be mere pop-culture references or trends that my friends and I happened to like at the time. All of that has faded in importance over the years; perhaps ironically, it is the then-boring “everyday” details that I now miss, simply because they are gone. Although I had a happy childhood the most consequential things in life hadn't happened to me yet at age 18, so people's advice about those things left me cold. By the time of my daughter's high school graduation, I too was able to draw on relevant life experiences, with those connected to fatherhood being particularly salient in my mind. And I projected those same narratives into an imagined future for my daughter, which made the speaker's words doubly meaningful.
I have previously argued that "reframing" events with a new narrative can be either completely ineffective or extremely helpful -- it depends on the narrative, and on what it means to you personally. Narratives in themselves are nothing, mere logical (or even illogical) statements that could just as easily be churned out by ChatGPT. (As an experiment I asked the AI interface to write its own commencement speech for a high school graduation, and it did a pretty good job: you can see the output here). But narratives also serve as placeholders or signposts that direct us to important life experiences, emotions, memories, and skills, and in that sense they are among the most important things to us as human beings. Even in the generic ChatGPT-generated speech, we can find important "hooks" on which to hang our own experiences. So 18-year-old Paul was wrong as well as right: Narratives are indeed meaningless on their own, but they also convey a depth that the younger me simply had not lived long enough to appreciate.
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