From Folkore To Fakelore

Before I continue my mythtical binge-readings, I want to say a few words about folklore. 

One thing I wondered about while reading the Greek Myths, Penguin Dragons, and the Norse Myths (next post) was just how sincerely people ever believed in this stuff. The dragon-writers address this almost directly, sometimes very critical about the supposed nature of dragons if not ever questioning their actual existence very much. Less explicitly, Greco-Roman writers were inherently flexible in a way quite alien to later religious doctrine : compare the wonton misogyny of Hesiod with the pseudo-feminism of Plato, or the myriad versions of the same basic myths told by people living a few miles apart. 

And yet, like the Norse, the stories are often incredibly specific and detailed, which doesn't feel like they they were just casually making it up as they went along. They must have had some level of actual belief in what they were saying, surely, but in what sense exactly ? Did they believe it mainly as metaphor, or largely as literal truth ? Did they see Zeus swallowing Athena's mother as symbolic or something that actually happened ? Did they believe the operatic-level details of Baldur's post-death romance as real occurrences ?

Belief, here in the simple sense of a sincerely-held opinion, is of course a spectrum. We can believe things with varying degrees of confidence and hold things only to be more or less probable in relative terms, rather than having absolute certainty or truth about anything. We can also, of course, be certain about things which are absolutely mutually exclusive, such muddled creatures as we are.

One aspect of how we evaluate evidence, a really crucial and perhaps the most important part of all (at least according to Damon Centola), is the metadata : the data about the data, especially the powerful heuristic of who-believes-what. After all, it makes sense to trust a hitherto-reliable source more than a stranger if you can't assess the situation for yourself.

But we can take this up another level. We ourselves have beliefs about what other people believe. We generalise. We assume all of demographic X believes assertion Y, which is hardly ever fully true but is a useful way to simplify things. This sort of metabelief itself forms a spectrum : we ourselves directly believe things; we don't believe them ourselves but think that other people do; we believe nobody thinks this any more but used to in the past; or we actively claim that a thing is not true at all (we can apply this in reverse as well, thinking that nobody actually believes in things they profess to when in fact they're quite sincere).

A myth, says a recent topical SMBC, has to be something that people actually believe... as well as not making any sense and featuring weird sex. Well it's tough to argue with the latter, even for dragons. For "not making any sense", that seems not unreasonable either. Put more charitably, a myth or folklore in this quasi-religious sense has to be irrational, something that's inherently unscientific and unprovable*. But I won't go into the distinction between folklore in the more general sense of folk-wisdom versus superstition here though, as this isn't really my point. I'll only add that folklore perhaps requires a few doubters and unbelievers : a thing which everyone believes is true and actually is is just common knowledge, which is hardly what we usually mean by "folklore".

* This is not the same as being anti-scientific, which is actively opposed to rational inquiry and at odds with tested and testable procedures. That would be the realm of conspiracy theories, not myths in the old sense.

But accepting this as a vague, rough, but workable definition, still doesn't answer my main question. Is it really actually necessary for people to believe in a thing for it to count as folklore ? What if people only believe that other people believe in it instead – does that still count ?

Like the folk beliefs themselves, this is satisfyingly murky and probably can't be entirely pinned down. But it does at least perhaps elucidate the difference between what was understood to be fiction from the outset and what was supposed to be taken as myth. There need be absolutely no level of belief in fiction whatever. One can read Tolkien and either accept or reject whatever moral lessons one cares to draw, but the works are unarguably fictitious. But with myths and legends, perhaps there needs to be some level of belief, maybe even just this meta-belief, for it to count as in some way authentic. 

This is perhaps why the "original" stories feel different to modern retellings. There's nothing wrong with reshaping the old stories, of course, but nowadays there is absolutely no serious level of belief in them whatsoever. This wasn't the case at the time, when people would at the least think that somebody else believed them even if they themselves didn't. The modern versions can be enormously interesting, but don't tell us much about the mindsets of those who actually thought some aspects of the stories were really true : only the earliest versions can tell us anything about the world view of those lost eras.

While I don't think we can or should put down strict rules regarding authenticity, it might be safe enough to attempt a rough guideline. Perhaps folkore can be said to be that for which there is a community of active believers (it can't be just some lone nutter), and when this ceases but people believe other people still believe it, this becomes fakelore.

The extra complication is of course that this metabelief itself can engender credibility. Not always, but sometimes. Even if half the group don't really believe a thing but are just acting out of conformity, our brains doesn't register this : we only see the sheer size of the group apparently acting in good faith, and so we give them more credence than we should –  this is of course closely related to a false consensus. Folklore can be self-sustaining because everyone knows it's true and knows that everyone else knows as well, so nobody sees any need to question it. The tales grow in the telling.

But beliefs can also go there and back again. Fakelore can become folklore if the group size is taken as evidence in lieu of anything better; but if direct evidence becomes readily available than folklore shifts to fakelore and eventually dies altogether. The shift is complex, and surely important beyond the mystical realm of legends and relevant for beliefs more widely. Things which feel true, or at least resonate with some moral or ideological thing we believe, are often political kryptonite to rational inquiry.

So did the people of days of yore believe in the lore ? My guess it that whether myths and folklore were regarded as literally true would be, for the ancient peoples, missing the point. They were perhaps often a mixture of true folklore and fakelore, but it wouldn't have mattered. The point wasn't usually to establish what was actually happening; such a level of rationality often didn't exist. Rather the stories were usually things you could believe in, not believe directly. As long as the story gave some useful message to the audience, whether anyone seriously thought it actually happened or not was irrelevant. I would suppose that some people took it very literally indeed, others as metaphors, but the majority never stopped to think about it : they'd take the general characters of the gods and the necessary rituals as "true" but be utterly unfazed by contradictions in any specific details.

It's also interesting to note how "myth" can also refer to something that needs to be disproved. Like conspiracy theories, some claims have apparent explanatory power but don't stand up under rational scrutiny. The difference with the old myths is that these ideas are explicitly intended to be taken literally, with no symbolic value : the myth that vaccines cause cancer isn't a metaphor for science run amok, whereas Fenrir's turn to aggression due to the gods treating him with suspicion has value completely independent of the wolf's actual existence. You can't disprove Fenrir, but you can easily debunk anti-vax nonsense.

There is however a connection. In some ways the batshit insanity that is the Republican party would seem to argue that yes, actually, large numbers of people can be believe anything. It doesn't have to offer any symbolic value. It certainly doesn't have to be in any way beautiful. It can be an open, bald-faced liar with a more than passing resemblance to a bloated orange fish spewing incoherent word salad, and they'll still believe it.

At least the ancient peoples had the unprovable nature of their deities to fall back on. In contrast those duped by modern, very obvious liars have no such luxury. It's been suggested that people believe in Trump and Farage and the rest because of what they're against, not what they stand for, and similarly that there's a cult-like aspect in supporters following them, personally, rather than caring about their particular message. Both of these might be partly at work. The problem is that every time I hear them speak they just sound ever-more self-evidently ridiculous to me. And not at the level where it requires some specialist training to see through their charade, not because of being a self-identified lefty with a liberal agenda or some brand of elitist intellectualism, but at the bloody fucking obvious level of fire-is-hot inescapable reality.

This leave me with a paradox. I can accept value and beauty in the old, incomprehensible myths of wolves eating the sun, world trees and gods swallowing their own children our of spite, of demons turning the world to stone and monsters of the deep. All this is easier to understand, far easier(!) than modern right-wing Western politics. The ancients ? A mixture of folklore and fakelore, moralising and metaphors, crackpots and consideration. My contemporaries ? I'm beyond baffled.