This reminded me of a fun and amusing sci-fi short story called "The Tryouts," by Barry Longyear, about an alien culture oriented around storytelling by firelight, which was their means of spreading news and information. The news had to be cast as a good story to be culturally acceptable and paid attention. Recommended if you can get your hands on it (I read it in an Asimov's anthology that I borrowed from a friend).
My business partner and I have a weekly brainstorm on Tuesday night (not quite by campfire) that's focused on us coming up with wacky and crazy creative ideas. We often do it over wine, we let our imaginations run wild, we try to come up with extreme concoctions that might just be able to work, and we have a space to be creative and no idea is bad during that time. Surprisingly, we've found that this really helps our creativity for the other 99.9% of the work-week: sometimes, our crazy ideas come back to us (in more reasonable forms, less extreme) that we then implement and make happen!
In other words: we realized, too much of our day-to-day work is concerned with tactical issues, so we've created a space around a virtual fire to unleash our creativity, which then helps us in the day-to-day.
Maybe this work due to evolutionary forces on humans since these paleolithic days!
This should be common sense to anyone who's ever sat around a campfire.
I mean, all the work is done for the day, you've likely eaten (or are eating), the dark sky and the fire sets the mood, stories are told. We still do it to this day (although not as often). It's why people go camping...
I like to think that we're genetically predisposed to enjoy sitting around campfires. The reason being that all of our ancestors that didn't enjoy it, and were instead walking around the forest at night, didn't survive long enough to pass on their genes. Makes for a good campfire story at least.
In the old stories and myths, Fire was the inspiration. The spark. The kindling. It's flames lighting up the dark naturally attracts people to gather in, to look inward instead of outward into the shadows. Fire can't travel far from it's source of fuel, it must be carried like a torch. One of the first things you learn about Fire is that fire is meant to be shared.
Some of the older cultures have a fire tending tradition. For some, the "fire starter" was a sacred, and respected skill. In others, a boy or a girl was initiated into the tradition by given a fire to tend when they come of age (around 10 - 12). They tend to it all their lives, merge the fires when they get married. When their children becomes of age, they start a fire for the children from their own fire. When they die, that fire they have tended all their lives cremates their body for the final time.
Modern-day Fire rituals are not confined to the candle or the flame or turning on the TV. Running a torch around the world is an example.
These days, we're out of touch with Fire. We typically control it in the form of gas fuel lines or electricity (lightning, in the old stories are considered a different form of fire). Your mom probably told you not to touch the stove, because it is hot and it will hurt. We have fire-safety drills. We have fireman who comes in to wipe out the fire, lauded as heroes. The typical story we have around Fire these days involve explosions, anger, and destruction. Lots of mad cackling.
The old stories of Fire, on the other hand, speak about inspiration, will and drive. Fire worked with the other elements: Earth to contain it and is itself the fuel and raw materials; Water to circulate and transport heat; Wind to stoke it up. Fire is to be respected, both the fire in the campfire and the fire within your belly.
When you lead people in your quest to make it big, change the world, or to get rich, is your inner fire that of anger, rage, suffering, and destruction? Is your "disruption" story another fancy way of saying attack and ill will? Is it another way of saying you're going to take over the world and control it with power?
Or is your inner fire inspirational? Is it the clear, cleansing fire that burns the darkness you carry within? Is it the kind of fire that you'd share with friends? Is your inner fire the warmth of your love and the light of your vision?
> For some, the "fire starter" was a sacred, and respected skill ... These days, we're out of touch with Fire.
Which is why everyone should go camping, and be forced to start their own fire with only matches (no fire-starter). I'd say with a couple sticks, but then they'd never go camping again.
Starting a fire, tending it, cooking over it, and sitting around it and telling stories/playing games is one of the best experiences one can have, it's fun, frustrating, satisfying, and enlightening all at the same time (just put the phones away though).
Yep, that's the difference between book learning and experiential learning. Or rites of initiation. I don't know about the extreme of making everyone start their own fire, although the experience of starting a fire with a good guide / storyteller to walk someone through it is a powerful experience.
The next startup I am joining, I'm going to try convincing the whoever it is to do this kind of a thing. "Team bonding" is not a very good substitute.
> I don't know about the extreme of making everyone start their own fire
It's fun though! We do it nearly every weekend in the summer. It's also fun cooking on a wood fire - you set the heat by moving the pot around, stoking the fire, spreading the coals, etc...
Yet we control fire to the point of not even seeing it. I'm thinking of an internal combustion engine, or the fires inside of a coal-fired power plant.
“I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”
I'm pretty sure most cultures through the modern period had this shift from fire the creator to fire the destructor. When urban cities were getting crowded and a fire could ravage almost all of London, people were often more terrified of waking up to a fire consuming their very combustible homes than of being robbed in the middle of the night. Breweries and bakeries often set whole neighborhoods alight and arson or even the threat of arson caused citizens to become a furious lynching mob very fast. Though we don't have such big risks anymore since electricity and safer building materials, we inherited some of their fear.[1]
I agree. However, I think the use of fire in conquest started before that, in pre-modern civilizations. I mean, there's a whole chapter on the use of fire in Sun Tzu's Art of War.
A bit melodramatic, wouldn't you say? We're out of touch with fire? Are you saying that had negative effects on our culture or something? And you seem to be saying that fire used to be thought of as good and sacred and now is thought of as destructive. That is completely baseless. Fire, like every other force known to man, has always been seen as two-sided.
I'm also demonstrating the difference between merely observing storytelling and experiencing it.
I didn't say it was good or bad. You did. I said people became out of touch with fire and the stories and experiences around fire. We've more or less lost touch with fire as an inspirational experience, and it seems to me, your words more or less is a great example of it.
Ah, yes. Those lost, noble days when we all walked around gasping in religious ecstasy whenever our eyes fell on someone's cooking fire or someone burning his trash in the street.
whereas daytime talk was focused almost entirely on economic issues, land rights, and complaints about other people, 81% of the firelight conversation was devoted to telling stories
Correlation is not causation. Maybe people found that stories are best suited to being told by firelight, but without fire they would have found time for them at other times.
In other news, Ancient wells may have aided the rise of water drinking.
I guess if "I hacked my life by taking cold showers" is worthy of hn attention, then "I hacked my culture by telling fireside stories" should be too...
Tweaked the title a bit because it's drawing a hyperbolic conclusion from the paper it cites (which is nonetheless interesting): http://www.pnas.org/content/111/39/14027
