I was recently an impartial observer in a bit of an old foofaraw that took place, as so many great foofaraii do, on the internet. I'm not going to give even the vaguest details of what went on or how it all went down, for a variety of reasons. Of primary importance is to protect the privacy of all involved, of course, but also because it's just not that relevant.
What was important, I noticed, was the need for everyone to tell their version of what happened. This need to control the narrative seems to be very important to humans for some reason. We have an overwhelming need to control the story. "History is written by the victors," it is said, usually by a card-carrying member of the winning team. We wrestle vigorously for control of the narrative. Abraham Lincoln did his sums on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, our childhood history states. Then, as we get older, a new story emerges: that story was made up by a writer in the 1920s to romanticize Lincoln's homely forest upbringing. I'm sure there's a third story emerging, that there's a grain of truth to the shovel story after all, but it wasn't sums, it was Latin. Sic semper fabula, as it were, and I'm sure there's a historian to tell me Lincoln would have appreciated that dark humor, and another to tell me he wouldn't have done.
There are even whole narratives about the narrative, in a wonderful meta that feeds on itself. Rashomon is a great movie in which the story is not so much about the events, but the different versions of the narrative that surround them. This has the wonderful effect of taking the narrative out of the realm of device and essentially making it one of the characters of the story. We grow more and more familiar with this new character in much the same way we do with other characters in a tale; by observing the way other characters interact with it. This makes the narrative in Rashomon a very real interface. It changes and is changed by those with whom it interacts.
Historians have a very personal relationship with this particular interface, and the very best ones treat it with the respect it deserves. Properly trained historians (and I know a few) tread carefully in the narrative of the past, observing it with scientific detachment. They treat history as though it's under investigation by the FBI. "These are events that we know to have happened," they say. They require multiple sources, like reputable journalists. They require verification with the assistance of other scientific disciplines. Proper historical research will use just about any scientific discipline you care to name in its quest. Pages from a manuscript are subject to chemical testing. Inks and dyes are recreated using manufacturing techniques known to have existed at the time. Metals are refined to see if they might have been commercially viable. Animal bones are exhumed and studied.
There are two stories about exploring the narrative that fascinate me a great deal. The first involves the famous case of Otzi, the 5300-year-old man found frozen in ice in the Tyrol Alps. If you haven't read about this guy, go and do so. Heck, the Wikipedia page is a great place to start. He was found in 1991, and research has been ongoing since then. I can't help but think that if we had found him even thirty years ago, we wouldn't know anything about him. But microscopic examination of this well-preserved corpse has advanced what we know of the narrative of human life five millennia ago beyond imagination. (Spoiler Alert: they really weren't all that much different from us.) Otzi is a great example of not destroying the narrative with conjecture, or with the desire to control the past.
My other favorite story involves a horrible tragedy. Apollo 1, originally called AS-204, was meant to be the first in a series of manned missions meant to meet President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon. On January 27, 1967, during a test on the launchpad, a fire in the spacecraft took the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
There were two investigations that almost immediately formed. The first was led by Washington DC administrators and a congressional committee, with Senator Walter Mondale on board. This committee effectively had as its focus a single question: "Who is to blame?"
There is a problem with questions like that, namely, the logical fallacy petitio principii, "begging the question." Asking, "who is to blame," creates an expectation for the outcome. Blame will be found, and assigned, and those guilty will be punished. The focus is thus no longer on the truth of the narrative and instead on the control of it. It does not admit of the possibility that there might be no blame to apply. There must be blame; otherwise our entire investigation is invalid. This is not because Congresspersons are inherently evil, necessarily. It more than likely has to do with the blindingly obvious fact that Congress deals in law, and many of its members are attorneys, who, again, it must be said, are not evil in and of themselves. But these are people who deal in blame and guilt, so naturally their investigations would expect them.
The second investigation was composed by top scientists from NASA and academia, and also by the astronauts themselves. Anyone who's read that Tom Wolfe book will come away with the idea that astronauts were a bunch of crazy risk-taking test pilots who chased women and drove Corvettes the wrong way up the interstate and what have you. This description has some merit. Both pilots and aviators could share stories of adventure and fun.
What everyone forgets about the astronauts, however, is that just about every single one of them had at least a bachelor's degree in some sort of engineering discipline, and a large percentage of them had advanced degrees in the field as well. When you think of a bunch of hard-drinking, hard-partying woo-hoo rednecks, you also need to see thirty crew-cut heads in short-sleeve shirts bent over desks while furiously working away at slide rules. These were not, by and large, men of great imagination, prone to works of poetry and a love of opera. These were men who had a serious vested God-damned interest in exactly how many foot-pounds of torque that alloy bolt would take before it sheared right off, taking your wing with it and leaving your wife and kids with a tiny pension to survive on.
These people had no interest whatsoever in controlling the narrative; they let the narrative speak to them.
"What the hell happened?" they asked, and got to work. They disassembled the entire AS-204 command module, down to the individual bolts, and photographed and examined each part. If there was a discoloration or something the engineers didn't understand, they refused conjecture; they handed that part of the investigation off to an expert who did understand. They ran tests on identical parts, and identical spacecraft. They took the entire ship apart, figured out what went wrong (the story is too complex to go into detail here, but the main culprit was an electrical short in a pure oxygen environment), and then used their data to completely redesign and rebuild a much safer and ultimately successful spacecraft.
Beware people who spend too much time looking for someone to blame, because they will inevitably find someone, and it won't be them. Instead, focus on the truth of the narrative. Ask yourself, and the world around you, these two questions:
"What the hell happened?" and
"What the hell is happening?"
Remove yourself from the need to control the narrative and instead allow yourself to simply understand it. Knowing what is happening is almost always more valuable, and is easier to navigate.
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