The story telling species.

The story telling species.
We are the only critters that tell stories. We can guess that people were telling stories the day they invented language, sometime in the last 100,000 years (the earliest art forms we know of --the earliest symbols-- go back about 70,000 years).

We tell all kinds of stories-- about where we came from, what’s possible for us to do, why there are differences among us, what it means to succeed or fail, what it means to live and then not live any more. We don't have just one story, though we are driven to act as if we do. Our stories are based on how we interpret our experience, and no one story can explain everything, and no two stories can be perfectly consistent.

In recent decades stories have been the focus of a field of study called narrative psychology. The idea is that we base our sense of self and actions in the world on the stories we have constructed. We make up stories about the world and ourselves to guide our decisions. Our stories explain how the world works, who we are and what to do. In an important sense, “We are the stories we tell” to ourselves and each other (Gerbner 7).

We know that stories are key to integrating our thinking and behavior, and our communities as well. We know that we see the world through the lenses of our stories; they can make some things easier to see and others much harder. Once established, they can be very hard to change.


• Political stories.
The reason I want to know more about stories is that they precede and in some way enable political action. Politicians and pollsters have known forever that we vote our stories, or the lies they can sell us. Democratic educators help people tell their personal stories, weave them together to form a stronger, truer whole, and use them to guide our political decisions.

As the cultural divide in this country deepens (or rather, as the authoritarian perspective loses its near-monopoly of political talk), the political-story model has gained currency among the professors, pundits and political consultants. Capek wrote of “The ‘environmental justice’ frame” back in 1993, while Ariana Huffington speaks of the “frames” that bound our political views. In 2005 Safire complained on "Meet the Press" that "we're in the grip of a narrative" of a failed presidency -- which could be corrected, of course, not by competent policy but by changing the narrative. And Halliburton's liar-in-chief Karl Rove was notorious for
his unshakeable faith in the power of a story. The story he's stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won't lose at the polls if there's no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won't tell their own. And they don't-- whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans'.
"What's needed, wrote Michael Tomasky in an influential American Prospect essay last fall, is a 'big-picture case based on core principles." . . . Instead the Democrats float bland Band-Aid nostrums and bumper-sticker marketing strategies like 'Together, America Can Do Better'" (Rich, NYT 6-18-06).

It's been decades since I been to school, I missed generations of professor-talk, so I'm not sure how the playazz come by their "narrative" narrative. But I do remember Kuhn's 1962 book about scientific paradigms, and how that informed a lot of insightful or silly cultural and political work. Politics-as-story is not just a crit/lit conceit, already passé, or a set of borrowed buzzwords. It's powerful because it helps explain how we think and act politically. Story-telling is a model of thinking that corresponds in some part to how our minds really work.

So what do I mean by story? I was not shocked to realize that the consultant types tend to talk of stories as a sort of commodity, that can be packaged and sold like SUVs, or as a panel of hot-buttons that they push to make us jerk in unison-- in other words, the same old product with a new name. Dawkins talks of “memes”, a foolish attempt to attribute gene-like stability and transmissibility to what the rest of us call “ideas”. At other times "narrative" seems to be used as a more discreet term for stupid prejudice-- Those People are stuck in a rut of ignorance.

I've heard democratic educators talk about stories mainly as the expression of people's experience; as in, I some from this kind of background, these have been my struggles, this is what I want for my future. But I think stories are more fundamental yet.

When I capitalize Story, I mean a unit of thought that brings together for one person or many a hundred different ideas and experiences. A Story is an explanation that does not simply express our experience but actively shapes it, just as Kuhn's "paradigms" shape scientific research, and determine the very questions that we ask. A Story in this sense is something like a paradigm-in-progress, a big idea under construction, a way to express and make sense of the world. We may draw on very diverse experiences to build our Stories, but they can become very solid, lasting and apparently unified frameworks that guide our political commitments.

Maybe it would help if I sketched a couple examples. My Government Story may have started this way:

--I value sharing. I grew up with a fair passel of siblings. My father's mediocre career did not inspire me with visions of great individual achievement. I was still pretty young when I touristed through Southeast Asia, very well treated by strangers who were often themselves on the brink of starvation. I fear being dependent on any single individual, so instead I depend on broad public access to education, housing, and health care.

--I hated school. I hated the rules, too, but followed them well enough to please the teachers. I have some of the skills that let me take advantage of large organizations, as employee or consumer.

--My image of arrogant, childish, and destructive capitalists is much more vivid than that of arrogant, meddling, sinister government bureaucrats, though I grew up with little personal experience of either. I was born during Truman’s presidency; New Deal hopefulness was still in the air.

--From there it was studying history and politics in school, and slowly edging my way into political work. My Government Story says: democratic government is good.

I'll have to imagine what the Anti-Government Story consists of:

--Daddy as the lone hero, put upon by his petty bosses. Daddy become Batman and Rambo, the lone-wolf avengers, or maybe the 113 clones of maverick TV detective, scorning bureaucrats and bad guys alike. The technical geniuses of Heinlein and a dozen other science fiction writers, thwarting the smothering hands of petty bureaucrats. Daddy Warbucks, with his faithful oriental servants, jetting from continent to continent to chastise commie union leaders.

--the direct experience of mean-spirited, judgmental, uncaring, incompetent, burned-out bureaucrats in court, at the Welfare Dept. or Motor Vehicles, the visit from Codes Enforcement, etc. (Plenty of private sector bureaucrats, too, but somehow they all add up to Big Gummint.)

--intrusiveness: Mountains of nearly unintelligible paper for tax returns or business loans. Zoning regulations. Boxes to check race on questionnaires. In a workshop one day we were talking about civil disobedience. Is it ever OK to disobey the law? Yes, a couple women piped up, like when the government won't let you beat your children. Then, too, it's the government that buses kids to integrate schools, and forces them to study science.

--promises and expectations. Private sector bosses can be both more forbidding and also much cozier than impersonal, rule-laden bureaucracies. Most of us spend far more time with the workplace boss. Government workers are supposed to take care of me, that's their job. What I really appreciate is the card my employer sent last Christmas-- so thoughtful!

--foreign territory: waiting rooms crowded with strangers, high counters like barriers, maybe black people behind the counters, sometimes signs in other languages, vast but mysteriously inaccessible records. Some offices don't display religious symbols.

--corruption: We know more about government crimes than private: terrorizing Native, Black and Chicano communities; sterilizing low-income women; the radiation, syphilis and LSD experiments; McCarthyism; Watergate; Waco; Viet Nam, El Salvador, Iraq . . . .

These experiences and trainings can all add up to a militant hatred for, not corrupt government, but government in general (except for the military).


When I compare these story elements, it becomes clearer to me that our attitudes towards taxes, war, abortion, affirmative action, sex, drugs and rock & roll are intertwined with a much larger set of ideas and experiences, and that no amount of new information will change my neighbors' minds (or my own) until we can untangle these threads and themes and fashion new stories.

Political work is all about stories, and that's nothing new. When the first priest-king climbed a pyramid to cut out the heart of a captive and hold it up for the crowd to see, he was telling a story to keep himself in power. But democrats have no pyramids or slaves. We have to unravel the slave stories even as we work to assemble our own big story from a million personal tales. At the same time as we tell our stories, we have to be listening to our neighbors’. A colleague said that when we share our stories, and stitch them together into a meaningful whole, we will have a truer understanding of the world and the foundation for a strategy of liberation.

What I want to do here is to consider how we make stories in the first place, how we share them, and how they guide our political work. I want to encourage more political conversation in our daily work, and more effective conversation, by getting at our deepest political hopes and fears.