Richard Kearney notes in his book On Stories that when someone asks you who you are, you tell your story, and in doing so, you narrate your identity, “you give a sense of yourself as a narrative identity that perdures and coheres over a lifetime.” We take the fragmentary moments of our life and put them into a plot, desiring to make sense of life’s events as a unity. “Every life is in search of a narrative,” Kearney says.
The narratives we create and recreate may tell of individuals or families, nations or peoples, cultures or humanity as a whole. They may be small tales of the oppressed or grand legends of the great. They may be mythical or historical, religious or scientific. Each and every narrative offers a particular and different answer to the question of who we are.
The stories we tell make our lives memorable. Sometimes we tell stories so as not to forget an event or to defy a campaign aimed at destroying the past. We remind ourselves of terrors and tragedies and those whose lives and stories were violently cut short by famine, sword, and fire. It is also vital that we remember that our identities are fundamentally narrative in character. We invent and can therefore reinvent them. We construct and should therefore reconstruct them. Being narratives, they are not the last word, closed to revision, or closed off to what the other has to say.
Kearney remarks that “the solution to many national conflicts may well reside in the willingness of both disputants – for example Arab and Israeli, Nationalist and Unionist, Serb and Croat, Tutsi and Hutu – to exchange narrative memories. For such mutual translation of competing stories might eventually enable the adversaries to see each other through alternative eyes. If warring nations were able to acknowledge their own and the other’s narrative identities they might then be able to reimagine themselves in new ways. Blocked and fixated memories, trapped in compulsive repetition and resentment, could then find the freedom to remember the past differently, historical enemies recognising themselves as mirror-images.”
Kyle, You quoted the term “mirror-images” and this is the key to understanding identity formation and expectations. An article in Scientific American Mind in the April/May 2006 issue discussed new research into the function of “mirror neurons” which were initially discovered in primates around 1994. This discovery is now being equated to the discovery of quantum physics in the sense of how it may change our understanding of human interactions and the formation of systems.
All aspects of human relationships are recorded and imitated by these specialized cells. Even if we do not perform the actions ourselves the premotor cortex and inferior parietal areas would activate in response to the observed action and would alos anticipate intention for future behavior expected for the particular event.
They alos discovered mirror neurons in the posterior paiietal lobe, the wuperior temporal sulcus and the insula all of which play significant roles in comprehending feelings, intent and language. These areas of the instinctive brain are fully formed in the womb and as a consequence they will wire the brain for the chemical response to the mother’s experience in her environment.
Belief systems about self and others are then formed to resonate with the chemistry of these experiences. There is also a protein that insures the hardwiring and learning of this material. This protein then begins to greatly decrease beginning in our early 20′s and then appears to stop production by the mid 20′s. This is why it so difficult to change emotional learning and consequently, change our beliefs about self and others.
This is critical to understand when approaching anyone of seemingly opposing beliefs and also in being aware of the rigidity of our own belief system.
Another reason it is important to exchange narratives is because of the importance for us to scrutinize the narratives we tell or hold to concerning others. The “alternative eyes” to which you refer may be alternative to the narrative we impose on others to sustain or justify our beliefs about them.