Why Fallacies Are False -- 21, oral "grammar"

So I’m talking about Axel Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research because it describes the structure for information that transmits well in a non-literate culture. I said that it starts from an analog of the first rule in SWLT. His work is the basis for my Rule 4, the divide between orally transmitted material and what originates in writing. And I said that the “grammar” rule in SWLT has an analog in Olrik’s work. These are Olrik’s “Epic Laws”.

You probably never heard of the Epic Laws. They are a collection of 20 features common to oral narratives; they can appear in any narrative while it transmits orally within its culture.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2018/07/fact-checking-torah-olriks-epic-laws.html

While written material may have some of these features, it does not rely on them the way oral narratives do. But if you discover them, dig into the history of the written work; its roots may go back to a time when the culture transmitted its history by word of mouth. I think this is true for the Chinese Romance of Three Kingdoms, particularly the opening with several versions of Olrik’s Law of Three.

The Epic Laws show up in the African Mwindo Epic; in Sumerian and Greek myth; in the Mayan Popol Vuh; in the Mahabharata. And they are all over Torah. Every single narrative in Torah has examples of the Epic Laws, and some of the narratives are related to each other according to other principles identified by Olrik, a sort of syntax.

Olrik died in 1921, decades before we knew that humans originated in Africa. Olrik’s principles reflect something that developed with the rise of speech among humans in Africa, and spread with humanity as it migrated around the world. For as much as 500,000 years, writing did not exist. People had to teach their children about their culture orally. And the “grammar” they used in their teaching has not varied. What’s more, that grammar persisted after writing developed.

That sounds like a pretty rash statement, right? But in 2013, when I translated the transcript of the Mendel Beilis trial of 1913, I found that one of the titillating details discussed at trial used Olrik’s Law of Three. It was not an oral narrative in Olrik’s sense; it was gossip that developed in the two years between the murder and the trial. I know that, because it was not just your generic gossip about who was sleeping with whom, it precisely related to the murder case that was being tried, and it existed only among people in the part of Kiev where the murder occurred.

Do you remember back to when I said that the Beilis prosecutors had trouble with their witnesses because the witnesses could not testify to actual dates and times? Most of the witnesses called by the prosecution were either completely illiterate or preferred to get information by word of mouth. They had better things to do with their money than buy newspapers. This is a breeding ground for transmission of oral narratives, as gossip, and for information to morph in transmission, taking on the features of Olrik’s Epic Laws, which eventually showed up in trial testimony.

Showing that gossip, being orally transmitted, will have similar features to ancient oral traditions.

Showing that the Epic Laws are all but hard-wired into the human brain.

If your kids memorized some of the books you read to them, analyze them with the Epic Laws and let me know what you find. Then run a testing program. Have your kid tell the story to some other kid. The more examples of the Epic Laws you found in the book, the more accurately your child should relay the story. After multiple retellings to the second child, have that child repeat it to a third. Record all the retellings: you’ll find increasing divergence from the original text. If the Epic Laws really are hard-wired into the human brain, they should emerge more strongly as your test proceeds.

Go through the films you liked best. One of the reasons films are usually different from the book, is that film uses the Epic Laws. Unconsciously, of course, since nobody in Hollywood could read Olrik’s book until 1992. But scriptwriters have usually been voluminous readers, and would have copied the features of the books they liked best. I know that Burt Lancaster who, as I said, read thousands of books in his life, had a knack for picking scripts that had examples of Olrik’s principles, case in point being Lawman. I wrote up an appreciation of his work in which I talk about this.

Until about 1800 CE, the vast majority of the world’s population did not read, even if their culture had a system of writing. Every culture has a subset of population that doesn’t read or prefers to get their information by word of mouth. In those subsets, information morphs according to Olrik’s laws, especially the part about transmission BECAUSE of exciting or titillating content. That’s how you get eyeballs and eardrums. That’s why MSM is morphing into infotainment.

And Fox got there first. The fact that MAGA lives and breathes Fox, shows you that its style suits their preference for oral transmission. They prefer exciting oral communications to boring written facts. And as part of a cultural subset, they reject external narratives. You can’t change their minds without one-on-one discussions that get them out of their subculture – at least while you’re talking to them. This resistance to change is a fact of human nature, and results in cult deprogramming reversing itself – meaning that when a MAGA exits a discussion with you and goes back to their comfort zone, they’ll forget everything about which you convinced them to agree with you.

Now I will make an even more outrageous statement. Political change happens because even if the government tries to put across a true message, there is a mass among the body politic who do not get the message because it doesn’t have the features of the oral transmissions in their subset of the culture. The information content differs, or the format does not use the Epic Laws. String together enough of these subsets who prefer oral to written transmissions, and you lose elections or have a revolution. If there’s chaos going on in the world right now, it’s because people resist information that doesn’t match their preferences for content and format.

And so one Danish professor, about whose work hardly anybody knows, can diagnose and explain some of the biggest events in history.