The Art of Story Telling Preceded Modern Communication

 

I'm reading a book about how information is passed along among humans. Part of the message stems from a Supreme Court Judge many decades ago who ruled in favor of free speech. The Judge declared, "More information is better than less information. Good and factual information crowds out false and misleading information." The author of the book I'm reading says it is naive to believe good information crowds out false or bad information. Often just the opposite has occurred. 

A couple of examples not mentioned in the book come to mind. One was called "The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" promoted by President Johnson. President Johnson used an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify diving into what became the Vietnam War. The Resolution said there was an attack on a U.S. ship and the President was given authority to take action against any country which attacked a U.S. vessel. No attack had taken place, all made up. We now know bad information prevailed for decades.

President W. Bush said we needed to attack Iraq because it held "Weapons of Mass Destruction." Later he admitted there were none. In both of these cases there was good information available. The bad prevailed.

Today millions of Christians believe there was an ancient flood that killed everyone on earth except Noah and his family. If there was such a flood the source of humans which repopulated the world would have come from the region where the Bible was written. Today's science of DNA would trace today's humans back to that area. It turns out, however, human DNA shows humans first lived in Africa two hundred thousand years before the Noah flood was supposed to have happened. There is an uninterrupted DNA history of people living in Africa up to today. There is no missing history of humans there. On top of that, there is no physical evidence of such a flood. This is another example of bad information crowding out good. The Noah story lives on in spite of it not being true.

Before there was any writing of any kind, there was story telling. Information crossed the globe through story telling by humans. Story telling remains an influential way information is received by humans. Today it is received through all the devices and technology we all know about. Yet, the art of telling stories has not changed much. There are still very bad and false stories told which prevail over sound and factual stories. Bad false stories still often prevail over good ones. One assumes this will always be the case and every human has a responsibility to locate and listen to the good stories.