Andrew Swensen: Faith in one another should be our 2021 story - TribLIVE

solokol.blogspot.com

We are hardwired for story.

It is our nature to weave the experiences of life into narrative, both as individuals and societies, and this storytelling nature is as intrinsic to our species as purring is to cats and singing to birds. Here we wrestle with the deepest questions of humanity, chart origins and intentions, and build identity.

I have devoted much of my life to stories, delving into their inner clockwork and meditations on humanity. Fictional narratives are built on a paradox: They create something that we know not to be true in order to explore truth. Individuals and societies explore our most anxiety-producing questions and experiences in tales of life, death, love and loss. These fictions follow the same psychology by which we narrate our actual lives, ordering events, telling ourselves that life moves in some direction, and perceiving potential meaning that we need to discern.

Unfortunately, while we are accustomed to looking for truths in our fictions, we are far less aware of how we make fictions of our truths.

Because our storytelling nature governs how we view our day-to-day lives, our emotional experiences of insecurity and resulting anger prompt us to assign responsibility for inner discomfort to someone or something outside of ourselves. If someone doesn’t answer the phone, we build a story that they are “ignoring me,” when they are more likely binging “Queen’s Gambit” or “Bridgerton” on Netflix. If another driver offends us, we cast aspersions worthy of a human rights violation.

In both cases, we assign motivation in the absence of fact, and our narrator-self stands as the narcissistic judge of “right and wrong” but neglects the narcissism of our storytelling.

The researcher Brené Brown has a simple tool to cultivate self-awareness in this moment: begin your description of events with the phrase “The story that I am telling myself is … .” What Brown is teaching us is that all stories, including our own inner narrative, have a narrator, and self-awareness grows when we become conscious of our narrative agenda and its frequently unreliable storytelling.

I can’t help but look at the national story of 2020 through the eyes of a narrative theorist, and two essential things have become the victims of dysfunctional storytelling.

The first is factual truth.

Societies define themselves through origin myths, hero epics and legends. The historical accuracy can be less important than the shared identity engendered by the tale. Ask yourself who rode to Lexington and Concord to warn of British troops approaching in 1775, and you will likely answer Paul Revere. Historically, you would be wrong, but culturally, we adopt that myth thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” 85 years later. In fact, Paul Revere and his compatriot Samuel Dawes were captured, and Samuel Prescott warned the Concord militia. Perhaps Longfellow found “Prescott” too hard to rhyme.

Yet the truth of the story matters little for our collective mythology that likes a good tale of heroic patriots getting the leg up on the dreaded British oppressors, who play the villain of 1775 (but will become part of a buddy tale by the 20th century). Indeed it matters little whether Paul Revere reached Concord, if George Washington cut down a cherry tree (unclear) or if Abe Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope (almost surely not).

Yet we like these tales because we envision ourselves as a scrappy, resourceful people without the pomp and frippery of monarchies, and we like heroes who tell the truth or write brilliant oratory on a scrap of paper lingering in their pockets.

However, truth often does matter, even when it does not comport with the story that we wish to tell. The medical realities of epidemiology matter. A virus is a tiny bundle of protein and DNA, arguably not alive, and it does what its genetics tell it to do: reproduce prolifically inside the cells of a host. It does not have a political agenda, and it kills you without thinking about your civil rights. Immunization is also a matter of science. Thank your lucky stars, and immunization, that you don’t have smallpox; it isn’t pretty.

Yet rather than taking the pedestrian view that immunization leads to immunity, we are told that Bill Gates created covid-19 in order to have us injected with microchips that will control us through recently installed 5G networks.

The second casualty after truth is decency. Death threats and assassination plots have arisen on toxic fictions run amok over a “stolen” election despite Republicans and Democrats watching every polling place, Republican state officials confirming Trump’s loss and Republican-appointed judges rejecting every lawsuit due to a lack of evidence.

Moreover, a president who incites a mob that storms the Capitol deserves to be publicly shamed, now and in the history books of the future.

Yet the truth here is not that 81 million Joe Biden voters have conspired some monolithic plot to “steal” anything from anyone. On a walk down the streets of Chicago or San Francisco, which vote heavily Democratic, you will find no cabal of left-wing zealots plotting against you. No, instead you will see a lot of good people going to their jobs every day and trying to make ends meet — but still ready to give you directions if you look lost, happy to help you find the best pizza in town, and perhaps eager talk about when the Bears or 49ers are going to have another Super Bowl contender.

Lest the political left become too smug to face into its own story, rest assured that this story is undermining the future of our recovery as well. Yes, Biden won, and yes, we all know that the Electoral College is an absurdity. Yet the echo chambers of the American left cast Trump voters as 74 million villains in the costume of every nefarious vice.

The next time that you get in a car accident in Wyoming, someone among the trauma team that saves your life is a Trump voter. And when they give you a transfusion, you may owe your life to a Trump voter who sat with a needle poked in their arm for 30 minutes and got nothing for their trouble except a couple of cookies and sticker.

I do not want to fall into the trap of false equivalence in order to write a “balanced” story. Insurrection and election deceit supersede arrogant sanctimony as threats to the common weal. My point is that each of us is either a part of the problem or the solution: Character assaults are lethal to our nation, but decency and respect are essential.

Our narrative problem has exploded to such an extent that if something does not support our worldview, then we level moral condemnation worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy at people who are neither as morally corrupt nor as simple as we make them out to be. We enter the cybersphere not to seek truth but to find narrators to confirm our own unreliable fictions, and to spit venom at our perceived villains.

Sadly, in the maelstrom of mythmaking taking over our country, we sacrifice the best of our mythologies and replace them with something insidious. We make myths that bring each another down through cruelties, instead of lifting up a narrative to give life and soul to unifying American virtues.

In his farewell address, George Washington prophetically warned that divisiveness “kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” We have kindled far too much animosity against one another, from shouting matches at the neighborhood Target to insults traded on Twitter, and we are all the poorer for it.

A republic hinges on the collective faith in its institutions, but as Lincoln wrote, though not on the back of an envelope: We are a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

The ultimate faith that this nation requires is faith in one another. That should be the story that we tell ourselves in 2021.

Andrew Swensen is a faculty member in the Conservatory of Performing Arts at Point Park University.

Categories: Featured Commentary | Opinion