Our common stories

Human beings are storytellers.  We have been since long before we even discovered that things could be written down.  If you look at prehistoric cave paintings, it's obvious that they're there to tell a story.  What story, we're not sure, but some sort of story.  Each society is held together partially by the stories it tells, its people bound together by a common narrative.  There's even a theory of history that holds that each great civilization has a singular epic work that defines it (most of those who say this say that ours is Huck Finn).

For a long time, our stories were formed around religion.  The stories helped explain the world, but they shifted and changed, and that was alright.  Religion and its stories were a part of life, and as life shifted and changed, so did the stories.  The Romans needed a link between themselves and Greek civilization?  Well, then Troy must have had a survivor that went on an epic journey of his own.  Looking at older manuscripts and newer ones it becomes clear that religious truth changed with discovery and the changing needs of life, but more importantly, it meant that the storytelling options were still out there.  That new stories could still be told, and be added to the canon, but keeping the familiar characters.

Even in the Christian era, the canon was theoretically open.  New stories of saints and sinners came about, and even the Biblical canon was thought to be potentially open until the Protestants and Catholics started squabbling over it, and, as a result, both of them declared the matter closed.  It was that, combined with an Enlightenment perspective that saw historicity in a very different viewpoint (another topic for another day) that changed everything.  Religion still had stories, but they were a set number, and they would always stay the same, now.  They were written down for all time, and the book was closed.

For most civilizations, this change wasn't a huge change.  After all, they had thousands of years of history to mine for identity and legend to tie their people together.  For America it was different, though.  We needed new stories, a new common language to bind ourselves together.  We needed shared characters that we could heap new stories upon, like Hercules had been for the Greeks and Romans, and Thor and Loki had been for the Vikings.

Enter the superhero.  America invented the modern superhero, but I wouldn't be the first to notice that they're really mythological heroes.  Superman is America's Hercules.  That's why we love the superhero more than any other nation.  Because it's a common character that parents can tell their children about, and pass down.  I'll be honest, if I ever have children, I'm almost as excited to tell them about a child that came to Earth from a dying world from Krypton as I am to tell them about a baby born in a manger.  A few weeks ago there was a huge controversy because Superman announced in comics that he was renouncing his American citizenship to become a citizen of the world.  There was an outcry because Superman is ours, he's a fundamental part of what it means to be American.  But perhaps instead of being upset, we should follow his example.  While we'll never stop being Americans, perhaps it's time to place that second, and be human beings first.  Just another idea brought on by a crazy story.