Postscript to Larger than Life

For the past sixteen months, I have been posting, sequentially, the transcripts to the episodes of a radio documentary that I prepared for airing back in 2004, which I had titled Larger than Life.  It was a series that attempted to show how our collective beliefs about ourselves and our places in the universe actually shape the evolution and major events of our society.

The precipitating cause of this project was actually my visit to an Irish Pub in Chesterton, Indiana called Wingfield’s on its weekly “all-you-can-eat ribs” night.  That was back in 1995.  A friend and coworker had invited me to join him there, and it just so happened that this was also “poetry slam” night at the same establishment, where patrons were invited to step up to a microphone and share their inspired verbal compositions with everyone else.  After a suitable indulgence in ribs and beer, I was sufficiently inspired (and inebriated) to go to the stage myself, and recite a poem that my friend and I had scrawled on the back of my menu.  To the surprise of my friend, and probably myself as well, the poem got a large round of applause from the audience.  The manager was also suitably impressed, and after the event ended, she stopped by our table and invited me to return on some future poetry slam night with more compositions.  I protested, however, that I wasn’t really a poet, and that I was actually more of a history buff, and offered instead to step up to the microphone some night and give a talk on some historical subject.  Surprisingly, she agreed to this, and offered to devote an entire evening to my presentation.

The talk that I gave was called “Homer’s Greece”, and I spent most of it retelling Homer’s tales of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s voyage back to Ithaca.  The presentation was well received by the patrons, and the manager invited me back for an “encore” on a future night.  I intended to continue along the same vein, by talking about the history of ancient Greece in its Classical era, covering its battle with the Persians, and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.  On the scheduled night of my return, I was overjoyed to find that the pub area was packed with hundreds of patrons.  Extra tables had even been brought in to accommodate them.  “I’m a hit!” I thought to myself, exuberantly, and couldn’t understand why the manager looked so nervous upon my arrival.  And then one of her associates explained to me that the large crowd was actually a retirement party for a steelworker at a local mill.  The manager offered to reschedule me to another night.

But I was undaunted.  I got onto the stage and started my presentation, confident that the audience would soon be enthralled by my recounting of ancient Greek history.  As I began, the patrons actually did fall silent, and I could see the manager and her associates looking at each other with hopeful smiles.  But as I continued, a din began to arise, as conversations resumed among the patrons, and it finally became so loud that I couldn’t even hear myself speak.  I left the stage, and as I walked away from it, I saw that one of the retiree’s companions had leapt onto it and taken the microphone.  I heard him make a joke about my failed presentation, and heard him say that now it was time for some genuine entertainment. 

Fortunately, the manager was able to salvage the evening for me by moving my presentation into a side room and, much to my relief, I discovered that some people – about two dozen – had actually come that evening to hear it.  I was of course a little shaken by the whole experience, but managed to get through my entire talk, and sensed once again that it was well-received.

Thus began what would turn out to be a recurring speaking engagement, and for all of my future presentations, the manager made sure that there were no competing parties or events that would put me at risk of enduring the same humiliating spectacle as on that second night.  Those first two talks comprised a good part of what would eventually become Episode 4 (“Troy”) of the Larger than Life series.  Over the course of the next two years or so, I gave “live” performances which included material that would also find its way into that series, including “Arthurian Legends” (Episode 7), “Mass Hysteria” (“The Secret Doctrine”, Episode 8), “Machiavelli” (Episode 10),  “Washington and Napoleon” (Episode 11), and “Great Discoveries” (“The Lost World”, Episode 12).

That final presentation at Wingfield’s, “Great Discoveries”, was a very special one for me, because it was actually videotaped by a local cable channel, and was then showed several times on that station.  This had become an emerging ambition of mine, to somehow turn these talks into an actual series: a documentary not unlike those that are shown on public television stations or, these days, on the History Channel.  Sadly for me, however, this would not come to pass.  For a while, it seemed that whenever a new manager or producer got a job at that local station, and came across the single presentation of mine that had been recorded, they would contact me, and enthusiastically raise the prospect of doing just that.  But inevitably, they found that their limited resources meant that they had promised more than they could deliver.  My hopes were raised and then dashed more than once, until finally, mercifully, the enthusiastic calls stopped coming, and I resigned myself to the fact that nothing more would come of this avenue.

Just when I was about to abandon hope of doing anything more with this project, a new opportunity came from an unexpected quarter.  A friend and former boss of mine, Cathy Hodges, got involved with a group of people who were planning to start a new public radio station in Valparaiso, Indiana.  She had taken on the task of searching for programming ideas, and, having attended one of my presentations at Wingfield’s, solicited me for some proposals of my own.  Naturally, the idea of doing a documentary based on my presentations again came to mind.

But I needed a central theme to organize these around.  Had there been a common thread of ideas running through the various topics that I had chosen to speak on – something that had motivated me to choose them?  I sensed that there was.  As a very young man, I had developed an interest in philosophy, and in particular became fascinated with the ideas of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.  In his day, back in the eighteenth century, a debate had been raging between the schools of idealism and materialism: whether the ultimate basis of reality lay in the mind, with the apparent universe around us being merely a mental construct; or in matter, with consciousness being only a sort of accidental result of the chain of causes and effects between material things.  Kant’s insight was that both of these schools were right: there really is something “out there”, independent of the mind, but we can never know exactly what that is, because our minds play an active role in shaping what we perceive and conceive.  In that sense, we create our own reality.

As a simple analogy, consider your computer.  In the room surrounding it, there is a multitude of sights, sounds, and smells.  And yet, all that your computer is capable of “perceiving” is what is transmitted to it through your keyboard.  And then, all that can be done with the electrical impulses passed through to it this way is what the computer is programmed or “hard-wired” to do with them: it can only “comprehend” them in pre-determined ways, structured by the computer’s design and programming.  Similarly, even our own multi-faceted perceptions – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – can only take in a fraction of our surroundings, and what we do with these perceptions, including how we organize them and take them in to begin with, is governed by our own “programming” and “hard-wiring”.  Now it is true that, as living, organic beings, we are more than simple machines: we have found ways to expand the capabilities of our perception, with such things as microscopes and telescopes, and we have at least some ability to “modify” our internal programming, but in spite of this, our reality is still profoundly limited and arbitrarily structured by us.  It is, predominantly, a product of our own creation.

Around the same time that I had discovered Kant, I had also come across a book entitled The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, written in the 1960s, and which had clearly been inspired by Kant’s ideas.  In fact, it took these ideas to another level, arguing that not just individual beings but human societies create their own realities, by collectively developing ways of looking at the world and making sense of it.  People living in a certain society are conditioned to viewing and interpreting their surroundings in particular ways, and this conditioning is so fundamental that their entire reality is essentially a social construct.  It affects not just their way of looking at the world around them, but also the way that they perceive members within their community, people who are not part of their community, and even the way that they perceive themselves and their role in the universe.

This idea affected me profoundly, and as I thought about the subject matter of my history presentations, I realized that this book, along with Kant’s earlier ideas, had been a fundamental inspiration for them.  The topics of interest to me had been the lives of great persons – both real and legendary – and the momentous events of civilizations, but also how these interacted.  Because as a part of creating their own realities, people also create their own personal legends, and in the case of some people, these personal legends eventually affect, in profound ways, the lives of others in their society.  In the most extreme cases, they actually remold that entire society’s view of itself and its place in the universe.  And the process works both ways, because in the collective development of their myths and legends, societies create historical figures of great importance who are either entirely fictional, or, if they actually existed, have lives that are now remembered in embellished and exaggerated terms: that have become “larger than life”. 

Of course, generally the personal legend that each of us manufactures is “larger than life” as well, in that they include beliefs about oneself and about one’s destiny that are not entirely grounded in reality (and many if not most of which were molded in turn by the beliefs about reality that our society has imposed on us).  But it is precisely those people who have had a profound sense of personal destiny, and who have acted upon this, who have often made the most significant impacts on history, either in positive ways (George Washington), negative ways (Adolf Hitler), or with both positive and negative consequences (Christopher Columbus and Napoleon Bonaparte).  Even those who have merely contributed world-changing ideas or inventions, such as Darwin, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Marx, Freud, and Edison, were generally motivated by a personal sense of mission, and a faith in their own capacity to discover new truths and ideas.  Individually and collectively, then, we are authors of our own reality, and even if this reality is merely an illusion, it is an illusion that sustains us and impels us forward.

The first half of what became a sixteen-part series dealt with the role that mythology, religion, and occultism played in our early civilization.  The second half, which began with historical events surrounding the discovery of America, shifted to an analysis of the impacts of more contemporary beliefs – the “isms” that have arisen in modern times: Scientism, Darwinism, Capitalism, Marxism, Freudianism, and Nationalism, among others. 

When my proposal for the new series was accepted, I imagined that I would merely have to write the scripts, and narrate them, and all of the other things that needed to happen in order to make them “ready for prime time”, such as putting in background music and doing sound editing, would be taken care of by experts who had been enlisted by the radio station.  And in fact, this is what I was led to believe.  But as idea shifted to execution, I soon discovered, once again, that the promises made by others had exceeded their capability to deliver on them.  I came to the sobering realization that if this series was ever going to air, then I would have to somehow take charge of every aspect of production, from start to finish.  It seemed like an overwhelming prospect, and I nearly despaired of even attempting it.  After all, never, in my wildest imaginings, did I think that I might be capable of sound editing, let alone musical scoring.  This was what I have called, in a previous blog (March 2015), a “cold, dark well” experience.

But rescue came in the person of a consultant hired by Cathy Hodges to assist her in doing the initial programming for the radio station.  His name was Joel Cohen, and he was a former teacher at the Columbia College in Chicago, which specializes in arts and media.  Joel took a personal interest in my project, and he not only encouraged me to rise to the task of taking on the entire project from start to finish, but also gave me practical suggestions on how to do such things as providing background music scores for the narration.  Still, my initial steps into the project were faltering ones.  It took me more than a year to compose, record, and sound edit the first episode, and several months to complete each of the next three.  But by the fifth episode, I had systematized the process, and become adept at carrying out all of its phases – from writing, to narration, to recording, to sound editing, to musical scoring – so that I was able to complete each episode within one month’s time.  Episode 5 was completed in January of 2004, and all of the remaining ones, through Episode 16, were completed by the end of that year.  It was in 2004 and early 2005 that the series had its first and perhaps only run at the local public radio station.  Over the next year or so, I made some further attempts to find avenues for getting a video production made, but with no success.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share the series through yet another entirely different avenue.  Ironically, I only did so because I had come into a “dry spell” in my blog entries, having run out of original ideas to write about.  I think that the average size of the readership of the series worked out to about the same as that of the attendance to my live presentations.  On the blog, two of the episodes, “The Secret Doctrine” and “Machiavelli: The Prince of Darkness” were conspicuously more popular than all of the others, but I suspect that the titles for these played a role in the interest that they received.  (I do, however, think that these were two of the best episodes.)

I actually made very few changes to the original transcripts that were written a decade ago: generally only correcting factual errors that I had discovered after the series aired.  (At the end of “The American Dream”, for example, I recount the story of the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese, which was witnessed by her neighbors, who did nothing to help her.  In the original version, I stated that there were thirty-eight witnesses to the attack, as this was what was generally believed about the crime after it occurred.  It has since been determined that this was actually something of an urban legend in its own right, and that the real figure is probably closer to a dozen.  Still, this was high enough in my opinion to merit retaining the story, as an example of personal non-engagement.)  And I must say that it was eerie how some of these episodes, as I posted them, seemed to provide timely commentary on current events, shortly after I published each of them on the blog.

Were I to rewrite the series today, however, I can think of a number of significant additions and changes that I would make.  It is embarrassing, when reading through them again, to see how culture-centric they are: telling a history of the world where most of the major events of consequence happen in Europe, and with America presented as a sort of final culmination of the story.  In the years since the series originally aired, I have had the opportunity to listen to two series of lectures on China: the first covering its ancient history, and the second covering its history in modern times.  A “Larger than Life” story, just as compelling as the one I told, could easily be written about China, and about other cultures and countries as well, no doubt.  I must say, too, that when reading through these again I was more than a little embarrassed to see the proliferation of male gender nouns and pronouns (“man”, “mankind”, “his”) when talking about general trends or phenomena, and here, too, a personal bias was apparent, as nearly all of the biographies presented are about male historical figures.  I tried to correct some of the more egregious examples of bias in my general nouns and pronouns, but barely scratched the surface, I’m afraid.  And in a future writing I would endeavor to be more inclusive in describing the people – male and female – who have contributed to the story of civilization.

Even the critique of the behaviors of modern human beings – and of Americans in particular – which was done in the final two episodes of the series, was probably colored by an egocentric bias: what psychologists call “projection”.  This is a tendency for a person to more often see one’s own faults reflected in others than in oneself.  In other words, there is a real possibility that many of the shortcomings that I ascribed to our contemporaries might actually have been unconscious reflections of my own.  For example, a lack of neighborly behavior, affinity for fast food, fleeting attention span, and tendency towards spiritual dilettantism are all charges that could be laid at my own doorstep.  I can only hope that my failings are sufficiently representative of those of my peers so that these and the other criticisms are genuinely relevant . . . and enlightening.

I can think of at least a couple of episodes that could have been added to the series.  For example, I had not been aware of the role that occultism played in some of the significant trends and events of the past century or so, such as the rise of Nazism.  (I had discovered this recently when watching a show on the History Channel, which is not surprising, since Hitler and occultism seem to be two of the more popular subjects on that channel, along with extraterrestrials.)  A recurring theme in my series was how religious and magical thinking has persisted into modern times in an awkward side-by-side relationship with science and rationalism, and this undercurrent of occultism would have been a very tangible illustration of the phenomenon.

One of the biggest single gaps in the series is the absence of any discussion of modern mythology: science fiction.  This genre, which has grown, over the past one hundred years, beyond magazines and books to movies and television series that are popular on a global scale, has had a significant impact on both the ideals and actual scientific advances of our society.  Some scholars of ancient mythology such as the late Joseph Campbell have recognized this, and noted that science fiction has indeed taken over the role that ancient mythology once played.  (I must comment, however, that I disagree with Joseph Campbell’s choice of Star Wars as an iconic example of modern mythology expressed through science fiction.  I think that the original Star Wars series was merely successful escapist entertainment, and that the second trilogy of movies that were made several years after the first lacked even this quality because their producer, George Lucas, had felt overwhelmed by the great cultural importance attached to his movies by Campbell.)  At least one entire episode of my series could have been devoted to the evolution of this genre, its messages, and the tangible impact that these messages have had.  Clearly, much science fiction has tried to address the question of what our destiny should be, or should not be.  In this respect, it has even competed with religion in illustrating for us an end goal for our collective existence.

In the final episode, I tried to summarize the ideas that had inspired this retelling of human history and the additional insights that emerged from it after I had done so.  Probably the most significant such insight that came to me, by the time I had finished, was that science, while succeeding in better describing for us the “how” of the universe, and in doing so replacing many of the obvious distortions and misconceptions which had been provided by superstition and mythology, has singularly failed in providing a satisfactory “why” for our existence.  And an answer to that “why” is one thing that human beings continue to desperately need, both in their personal and collective lives.  It is a psychological source of sustenance every bit as important as the more material ones of food and shelter.  Science has not only failed in providing an answer to this question, but when attempts have been made to use it to do so, disastrous and tragic consequences have often resulted, either directly through the application of misguided philosophies, or indirectly when unscientific fanatics or demagogues have used the modern tools of science to destructive ends on a much larger scale than would have been possible before the modern age.  It is for this reason, I think, that religion continues to hold a great sway over our civilization, even when many of its practitioners doubt or even disbelieve some of its central tenets, because it provides a meaningful role for them.  I doubt that science, in spite of its impressive advances, will ever reach a stage where it can do so.  My hope is that religion will evolve (as the philosopher Henri Bergson thought it has, and it will) so that it can answer the “why” of existence without resorting to irrationalism or historical fictions.

And so I can return Larger than Life back to the shelf again, perhaps for the final time, after having found this new venue to share it.  As I find myself approaching the threshold to becoming (and I hate this term) a “senior citizen”, I doubt that even if an opportunity did arise to turn it into a television documentary now, I would present it myself (as, in my younger and vainer days, I imagined myself doing).  That chore would better be passed on to a younger and more photogenic presence.  My more practical, remaining hope is that some past or future reader of the series will be sufficiently inspired to attempt a similar project of their own, perhaps based upon the same underlying insights as this one, and do so in a much more eloquent, comprehensive, unbiased, and researched manner than I did.  If it becomes a success, then I will have been grateful to have played at least some small part in contributing to it, or, at the very least, in providing motivation for the accomplishment..