On social and historical issues, we are over-fictioned. Our love of narrative means the needle of truth gets buried in a haystack of stories.
Older people will see dramas on TV set in past decades, where the clothes and furniture are right, but not the language and attitudes; and the more we see, the harder it becomes to remember how things really were. Further back, only good historians can help us, and they are often swimming against the tide.
Take this 1948 Disney production for example, about the American John Chapman aka ‘Johnny Appleseed.’
Some details are right - the northwest migration of settlers after 1787, the planting of cider apple trees (and the list of ways the fruit was used), Chapman’s Christian faith (with a guardian angel guiding him like Pinocchio’s Jiminy Cricket), his solitary life. At the end we are left feeling that he had done fine altruistic service.
Yet other points left out of the animation cast a different and much more interesting light. Chapman was not mainstream Protestant but a sectarian, a follower of the Swedish theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg; his angelic adviser was not fictional, but he had two angels with whom he conversed regularly and who promised him a couple of spiritual wives in the afterlife if he remained celibate in this.
Perhaps these matters could be left out from a children’s entertainment, but another that is central is the motivation behind the scattering of apple seeds: sound business sense. Chapman didn’t just follow the covered wagons, he bought tracts of land ahead of them, planted orchards and flipped the thus partly-developed properties for profit:
Under the deal offered by the Ohio Company, any settler who planned to start a new farmstead was given 100 acres of land. There was an important condition — the newcomers had to prove they intended to establish a permanent settlement. To show their intent, they had to plant 50 apple trees and 30 peach trees within three years…
Including this in the animation would have been a useful lesson for young people in entrepreneurship. It’s one of Britain’s tragedies that we are highly inventive yet poor at turning ideas into businesses; if only we helped British children develop the nous of a Bezos, a Zuckerberg, or even a Bill Gates (who ‘didn’t invent anything’) …
Both in learning about the past, and in thinking about current affairs (notably Ukraine, at the moment) narrative is used to oversimplify, distort and mislead. The Age of Communication is fast and dangerously becoming the Age of Disinformation.
Some links:
The latest outrage, fully justified, is at the editing or Bowdlerising of Roald Dahl's children's stories to suit current prejudices. Terms that appeal to young people's ruthless, nasty natures will be taken out and sometimes modifying phrases and sentences will be added.
Netflix bought the rights to these tales from the owners, the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC), in September 2021. The 'streaming platform' will use the butchered material to produce anodyne drivel similar to Disney's modern animations.
There is a wider tendency to promote the idea that reality will conform to how you wish it to be, and part of that is to falsify the past to make it look as if it was always that way.
Human maturation involves finding out that things aren't always how you like, or think. Wokeism is a block to growing up and that is why its followers have a hysterical infantile reaction to facts, ideas, principles and people that confront them.
It also means the loss of irony and humour, which are ways of recognising that life has contradictions and surprises.
About ten years ago I was working with special needs children in a unit for primary age pupils who hade been excluded from mainstream school because of their extreme behaviour. A pair of trainee social workers came to work and observe for a while, and to one of them I told a joke about ADHD (a common problem with our kids):
Q: How many kids with ADHD does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Hey, let's go out and ride our bikes!
The girl's mouth twitched at the corners, and then she said, 'That shouldn't be funny.'
That's what our education system has done: instead of a knowledge-based curriculum there has been a long program of cultural indoctrination and turning young people into supersensitive over-reacters, mealy-mouthed prigs and lazy condemners.
We are becoming so detached from reality that we are ripe for conquest.
The fruit loaf called by the Welsh 'bara brith' means 'speckled bread' in their tongue.
This reminded me of the word 'Brythonic', a term coined for a group of southern Celtic languages by John Rhys, Oxford's first Professor of Celtic and a fellow of Jesus College.
Now I speculated (speckle-ated?) that the 'bryth-/brith' could be connected, since the ancient Britons painted themselves, and in an early twentieth century article I found this:
'... the name of Briton apparently comes from the word 'Brith,' painted, while Giraldus Cambrensis records that 'Glaswir,' 'blue men', was in his time the name for the Welsh clergy, probably a survival attached to the priestly caste from heathen times. It is probable that both Britons and Caledonians adopted the practice of painting from the earlier races among whom they found it observed.'
'The Pictish Race and Kingdom,' by James Ferguson, in The Celtic Review, Vol. 7, No. 25 (Feb., 1911) - page 30
https://zenodo.org/record/1570180/files/article.pdf?download=1
