Ideas53:59Seduced by story: the dangers of narrative
We're immersed in stories from our earliest childhood. Narratives are how we come to know and understand the world and our place in it.
Stories are absolutely ubiquitous in contemporary life. Politicians try to reach voters through anecdotes. Governments try to control the narrative. Marketing and branding herald a company's story to endear it to consumers. Geopolitical tensions smoulder and combust over nationalist narratives.
Yale University comparative literature professor Peter Brooks thought stories weren't being taken seriously enough, either in literary circles or culture more broadly, when he published his influential book, Reading For The Plot, in 1984.
We've forgotten they're constructed and that they can be subject to analysis. Stories have designs on you. They want to seduce you.- Peter Brooks
Almost 40 years later, he's alarmed by the dominance of stories in contemporary life. He argues that media of all kinds celebrate and disseminate countless stories every day to the point where narrative has eclipsed every other form of discourse. Verifiable fact and reasoned argument stand little chance against a barrage of compelling stories.
"Why do we assume that storytelling is necessarily positive?" Brooks said in an interview with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed. "We have so many examples of stories that are toxic and mislead us.
"I think stories are seductive — and intended to be…. I mean, look at the examples in history where democratic regimes collapsed under a powerful story, Germany in the 1930s being the most obvious example where simplistic and toxic stories just took over the country, right. [Stories] explained everything and made people feel better about themselves and led right into war and Holocaust.
"And I think that we didn't come that close, but there were certainly moments during the Trump presidency where I was reminded of Germany in the 1930s, where reality seemed to be dissolving, collapsing under the weight of lying stories that convinced people that they were true. And then the lie of a stolen election was the final example of that in that presidency."
Stories need a critical lens
"We need stories. We would die without them, but we have to be more analytic about them and how they're working on us most," Brooks said.
Part of the danger of stories is that the world is so awash in them that we tend to take them as a natural part of the landscape of everyday life. They might seem innocuous or genuinely compelling, but Brooks argues that stories are anything but innocent.
"We've forgotten they're constructed and that they can be subject to analysis. Stories have designs on you. They want to seduce you."
In fact, Brooks considers the proliferation and passive consumption of stories to be an existential threat to humanity.
"[Narrative] can sort of flood our critical facilities and knock them out of order, because a great narrative is very absorbing.
"The media that are willing to diffuse untrue stories without any analytic attention to them have increased so that there are more and more people who've come to believe in what seems to be an alternate reality. And I think that that's very dangerous. I mean, if people vote themselves into a false parallel reality because it simplifies and makes them feel better, we're done for."
Brooks says there is an antidote, though — something that's been derided for decades as being of little practical value: the study of literature. Inculcating people with an understanding of how narratives work and how they can manipulate us would better equip us to think critically about the stories of everyday life.
"It should be part of your freshman [first year] course in university and in professional schools. It should underlie everything else, just as Aristotle thought that rhetoric sort of underlies everything else."
Guests in this episode:
Peter Brooks is a Sterling professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale University and author of Reading for the Plot and Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.
Mira Sucharov is a professor of political science at Carleton University and author Borders and Belonging: A Memoir.
Rebecca Solnit is a journalist, essayist, activist and author of more than 25 books, including The Faraway Nearby and Whose Story Is This?
Timothy Caulfield is a Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at University of Alberta and author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash.
*This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.
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