Wired in our Bones

 In Britain, the Labour Party is currently tearing itself apart over anti-Semitism within the Party. The British Council of Jews has recommended that none of its members vote Labour. Meanwhile in Italy, the government has announced that it wants to make a census of the Roma in the country - a first step, often, towards persecution.

 It doesn't take much to reawaken hate, does it? A few years of hardship, a bit of struggle, and people start looking for someone to blame. And it's always the outsider they pick on. Jews, Roma, the Huguenots, whoever's convenient. Right now the EU is beginning to fragment and Britain is leaving it, which has brought controversy and pressure to them both. The reaction, among a shameful few, is racist.

 My wife had to tell me that Meghan Markle is mixed race. She also told me that one main character in the children's series "Go Jetters" is black. I honestly didn't notice. Probably this means I'm just not bothered enough about other people to pay attention (my wife's words again, hehe). It certainly means I'm not bothered enough about colour to notice. And how can you tell, by looking, if someone is Jewish? Or Muslim? Or Catholic?

 A few hundred years ago, people almost never left their home villages. The town twenty miles away might as well be on the Moon. Then, people distrusted anyone they didn't know, anyone from Away. They were racist towards folk just like themselves. Sometimes it seems that hate is wired in our bones. Wherever we are, in any society, we'll find someone to look down on, sneer at, belittle and besmirch.

 I try to portray a measure of reality in my worlds. I'll have a character scarred by polio, or someone stunted by a childhood with too little food. I'll even have racism. But I don't think I can plumb the depths of hate I see around me. Anti-Semitism, expel the Roma, Trump's dangerous demeaning of the Latino population. And yet I have to try, because that's a writer's job. I have to show enough of this horror to be realistic, and honest, but not enough to repel the reader.

 So I've found something about writing I don't like. Apologies for the bleakness of this post. Sometimes we need to face up to the ugliness though, because otherwise the ugliness wins.

 Take care.

The Punchline

 What is myth? Where does it come from?

 I don't mean stories like the fables of the Brothers Grimm, which are just warnings. Don't go into the woods alone, little girl; or don't be so strange that ordinary people get nervous. They're code for  'Do what society expects', and not much more. I mean the real myths,the ones that have come down from so far back in time that they were old beyond imagining when they were first written down.

 They're code too, of course. In pre-literate societies they were how knowledge was passed on. Embed it in a story, then spread the story so widely that the whole culture remembers it. People always change a story, though, even when it travels from village to village. We add a tweak here or there, change an oak into a willow because we happen to live near a stream where willows grow. Have you ever told a joke that wasn't quite the way you first heard it? Every repeat sees the story change.

 But I bet the punchline of that joke was still the same.

 Myths are encoded information. Our problem today is that we live in an empirical society, where we believe what we can touch and hold and not much else. We live in a world of science and objectivity, and the writers of those fables didn't. There's evidence that their brains were built differently, with a larger corpus callosum that meant greater exchange between the left and right halves of the brain. That meant the lines between reality and fantasy became blurred. They thought differently, in short. It means we have to understand what their myths meant to them, while not understanding how their minds worked.

 This is quite tricky.

 It's a little easier to work out where the myths came from. You find identical motifs, similar tales with the same numbers used in the same places, all over the world. I talked about this a little in my last blog, Memory and Myth. Because the stories are spread so widely, it means they must have originated in one place and then travelled with peoples as they migrated. So the creators of the stories must have lived during the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago or more. Sea levels were 400 feet lower then and humans might have flourished in the tropics, places like the Persian Gulf and Yellow Sea, and sailed east and west along shores which no longer exist. When the water rose the cultures were drowned, but the stories they'd sowed survived, in outposts on higher ground, or maybe among more savage peoples who began to look for better lands in the changing world.

 I think I could write at least three or four stories set in a world like that, without even trying. And there's one more interesting thing.

 Our world might be about to change just as radically, now mightn't it?