Today’s Story That Matter is a classic, or even the classic survival tale, “To Build a Fire” by Jack London.
Most of us know the story, either from reading it in high school or just absorbing it through culture. It’s about a man who embarks upon a long walk in very cold weather in Alaska. He makes some mistakes, starting with being there in the first place, and freezes to death. The climactic mistake is to built a fire under a snow laden pine tree. He gets the fire going, but then the tree dumps its snow on him and the fire, and from there on he’s doomed.
The survival information is simple, right? If you’re going to go traipsing around the frozen tundra, you’d better take that outdoor survival class first. But ignorance, carelessness, and incompetence aren’t really the man’s problem. He’s actually observant, fairly well provisioned, and basically prepared for cold weather. London does not hide his message. The narrator sums up the man’s problem on page two of my version:
The trouble with him was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick and ready in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their meanings. Fifty degrees below zero meant 80 degrees of frost. Such facts told him that it was cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to consider his weaknesses as a creature affected by temperature. Nor did he think about man’s general weakness, able to live only within narrow limits of heat and cold. From there, it did not lead him to thoughts of heaven and the meaning of a man’s life. 50 degrees below zero meant a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear coverings, warm moccasins, and thick socks. 50 degrees below zero was to him nothing more than 50 degrees below zero. That it should be more important than that was a thought that never entered his head.
The survival tool this man lacks is imagination. Of course, a professional story teller will value imagination, but how is it crucial to our species’ survival? Well, we don’t have much else. No fur. We’re slow, soft, weak. Our teeth are blunt, our fingernails useless as weapons. And yet we rule the world. As I and others have said before, fiction is what society is built upon, and fiction is a product of imagination. I’ll define imagination here as the ability or tendency to build in our minds situations, stories, characters, settings, and play these situations out as simulations. This allows us to learn about ourselves and the world without having to directly experience everything. Direct experience is certainly a good teaching tool, but the problem is when the experience kills us, and which point, the lesson is over, and so is the game.
Stories That Matter are part of our collective imagination, passed down generation to generation, in the way that instincts are passed down to less imaginative animals, like London’s dog, who is able to survive its owner’s ineptitude by following its ancient intuitions. Human’s, however, meet too many variable problems to rely on instinct, so we have imagination.
The hardest thing to imagine is our own frailty. The default mode is to assume we are alive, we are doing fine, and so we will continue to be alive, continue to be fine. Twenty years ago I would have laughed if somehow had suggested we in the United States were in danger of losing our democracy, that a deranged autocrat might take over the government and systematically disassemble our democratic norms and institutions, all while robbing the public coffers in plain sight. The would-be dictator would turn the Department of Justice into his own personal legal attack dog to go after his domestic critics; he’d co-opt a branch of law enforcement to use as his own secret, masked police force. I would have laughed if somehow had told me just twenty years algo that what happened in Nazi Germany or Stalinist USSR or Maoist China could certainly happen here. And yet, here we are, well on our way. To fail to predict and defend against this possibility represents a failure of collective imagination.
I once heard a story on a history podcast about Hitler and his generals receiving various reports on its enemies’ industrial capacities. When the report on the USA came in, the numbers were stunning. The bean counters weren’t telling a story. They were just providing the data. It was at this point that a smart Germany would have reconsidered their game plan, drawn back their ambitions, and did whatever they could to make sure the US never entered the war. But Hitler was unable to imagine anything beyond his own vanity. He began to laugh, and his sycophantic generals also laughed. A couple of years later, Hitler shot himself in a bunker rather than be taken alive, where he would surely have been tried, convicted, and hung. We refuse to imagine our failure at our great peril.
Back to our man in the Yukon. He first was unable to imagine how cold it could really get, despite an old man he’d previously met’s warning. And even his doused fire was a failure of imagination. Had he pictured the fire under the pine tree, gamed it out in his head, he’d have caught the mistake before it cost him his life. At the very end of the story and end of his life, he finally imagines himself not as himself but as one of “the boys” at the camp finding his dead body later. He pictures the situation clearly, almost as a fiction writer would write the scene. He’s learned his lesson too late.
The Samurai code Bushido trains the warrior to imagine his own death, in vivid detail, before engaging in battle. That way he will be prepared for it. I’m not sure we need to go that far, but we should certainly be open to exploring futures where things awry and proceed accordingly. Anyone can daydream about how everything will work out exactly like we want, but it takes effort and practice to tell ourselves the opposite story, but that story just might save our lives someday.
