Rumors

Where do you get your information?  Is it fact, hearsay, rumor, blasphemy, primary sources, secondary sources, apparitions from biblical burning shrubbery, and do you even really know the difference?  Dismount!   Thank you I'll take that, here's your tag.  That was all of us getting off our high horses, and checking our assumptions at the door to really think about this.  Don't worry you can ride off into the sunset with any manner of ideological superiority complex you want once we're done.  Now onwards and upwards. 

Living in a small African village with hardly any regular primary sources of information has taught me the power of rumors in a pretty profound way.  Information often passes through many mouths before it reaches Dassilame Serere and as such its pretty hard to determine fact from personal opinion.  As in any other society in the world though this is no hindrance whatsoever to my village's ability to be absolutely certain of what it knows... and this can lead to problems...  For example my host brother Omar recently tried to convince me that Osama Bin Ladin is in fact not dead and is a great learned person... let's digest this a little bit.  On first hearing this I was pretty shocked and more than a little uncharacteristically nationalistic.  We argued back and forth for a while and I ended up getting somewhat frustrated so I stopped the conversation.  Surprisingly what was frustrating wasn't my brothers views.  It was his certainty.   All his arguments were wrong but it essentially boiled down to the fact that someone he trusted told him this so it was true.  In the history of human story telling this is perfectly normal and understandable, but in our modern context of complex world politics its down right scary.  The final straw that ended the conversation was when I asked my brother if he wants Americans to die, because Bin Ladin killed Americans.  He flipped this right back at me though and asked if I want Muslims to die, because George Bush killed lots of Muslims.  Touche Omar, Touche...

As much as I want to say Omar is dumb and I'm smart he's got a point, and maybe here is a positive aspect of rumors;  while they can perpetuate a lot of untruths, they also help to boil down a lot of complex information into a sort of average truth.  Omar's information about Osama Bin Ladin is factually wrong, but its part of a complex social narrative that gets at a lot of the truth of American/ Muslim political and social interactions.  It shows the mistrust many Muslims have for western governments, and their bitterness at what can often seem like a hatred on our part for their faith.  Think of rumors as a kind of social barometer for international/ interfaith/ inter-anything relations.  Listen to the rumors and you can probably tease out the nature of the relationship.  So what do we do about this?  I said earlier that this kind of a rumor is scary and it is.  It shows the true importance of our image as a nation and illustrates just how much of the moral high ground we've lost in this "War on Terror".   Now more than ever we need that moral high ground if we ever hope to rid the world of ignorance and hate.  Those little compromises we make, sacrificing human rights for strategic reasons, or not being as generous as a nation in our situation should be, aren't really little at all; they add to the ongoing narrative that the world creates about us and that narrative is far more pervasive then any "facts" we try to spread .  It's in my little village so there probably aren't many places it isn't. 

This is why Peace Corps is so successful.  I wish I could say that our greatest gift is the work we do, but it isn't.  Our gift to the American people (notice not the countries we serve) is a positive image of the caring, hard-working America that whether true or not is part of our national narrative that we value and want to perpetuate.  I say true or not because once you start thinking in  these terms its really hard to tell where to draw the line.  As a species we tell stories, we speak in metaphor and simile, and regardless of our actual knowledge level we create a certain certainty of the world around us.  It's just not in human nature to humbly step aside and say we don't know; when we don't know we make it up.  Yes how we see the world is story, not fact, and I argue that it probably isn't any more truthful then the stories told in my village.  

Whoooaaahh there buddy, no jumping back up on that high horse yet.   I know this is pretty cynical but its a much healthier view then claiming absolute certainty of the righteousness and moral superiority of our actions.  We simply can't afford to be that nation.  We need to be better than that.  Of course everything in the real world falls in between and things are far too complex to be speaking in these terms. On the other hand look at the political discourse in America and tell me if its more based on fact or narrative.  Most of the time the overall political landscape is far too complex for the average person to take the time to digest and understand, so our news networks tell stories.  They paint the characters as hero's or villains, and create conflicts, climaxes and catharses enough to keep us watching when the true arc of the story is much larger and harder to understand.  The world is complex.  I guess that is the moral of the story.   Many of my blog posts come to that conclusion so it must be true.  We need to be skeptical of the views we hold and the things we call "facts" because in the end most everything is just a rumor to a greater or lesser degree.   But don't take my word for it.  Remember too that I'm telling you a story.  We started out with my brother perpetuating something untrue and I extrapolated that we don't necessarily know any more then him.  Tell a different story and my conclusions could sound like total BS.  Just food for thought.  

Cheers,
Garrison

P.S. Did you guys here that Obama is planning on mining for gold on the moon to solve the economic crisis and the Republicans are against it because it will attract the martian labor unions and their socialist influence!  Just saying :-)