I just watched an interesting video. It was not at all about family history and yet it was one of those times when the parallels jumped out at me. The speaker was a philosopher that discussed a story known as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the idea of metacognition, that is, thinking about thinking. Whether one agrees with him or not, the points were worth thinking about.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is, perhaps the world’s oldest surviving work of literature. It dates from roughly 4,500 years ago. Its survival, in an of itself, is pretty awe inspiring and that is something I want to get back to. He also mentioned how literature that has stood the test of time tends to be full of thinking about thinking. That might sound overly cerebral, but even fiction with a great deal of violence contains a great deal of thinking about strategy—what is my opponent thinking? If I do this, how will my opponent respond?
Stories that captivate people let us see what is going on in the characters’ minds even when that is not the point of the story. We need to understand how they think and what they think about what other characters are thinking. That is the way people work and if characters never show any signs of thinking about thinking they seem flat and uninteresting. The philosopher in the video found few if any signs of thinking about thinking in the Epic of Gilgamesh, making it an odd literary classic.
Genealogy and Thinking about Thinking
So what does this have to do with genealogy and family history? I suspect one of the reasons that The Epic of Gilgamesh is relatively popular is that it is extremely old for what it is. Being the oldest work of literature that we have gives it some automatic power of attraction. We are interested in extremes. Though things happen in it that are recognizable today, it also has the powerful feel of the alien to it. The odd and unusual will at least briefly hold our attention. Sometimes in genealogy when we go back to distant times, what we find becomes generally interesting simply because it is from so long ago. When we stretch time to its breaking point, whether it is with an ancient epic or research that stretches back for centuries, people find it interesting. When we encounter that mix of familiar and alien that we often find when looking at people from long ago, we find that fascinating. Some things are so recognizable and yet others are so strange. That dissonance that we encounter in the distant past interests us.
Getting back to the philosopher’s point, Gilgamesh has action. Things happen. Yet, the characters don’t do much of any thinking about thinking. The characters are flat. Often that is what we get if we stop our research once we have the names and dates. We may not produce great works of literature about our ancestors, but when enough information survives, we can at least start to bring them to life. We may never be able to know what sort of thinking about thinking some did. Other ancestors left behind enough to start to get into their heads. When we have enough to start our own thinking about their thinking, they start to become people once again. I think when we can, it is our duty to do that.