The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down Hardcover – 31 May 2022
by Jonathan Gottschall (Author)
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Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it's the best method we've ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization's greatest ills-environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare-you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.
Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.
With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, "How we can change the world through stories?" and start asking, "How can we save the world from stories?"
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Review
"[a] thoughtful and entertaining investigation on a critical question: 'How can we save the world from stories?'... Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality."--Kirkus
"In this provocative and insightful book, Jonathan Gottschall shows us why dangerous stories spread so rapidly, and how they lead to division and distrust. But our storytelling instinct can also be harnessed for good, and Gottschall draws on a trove of research and compelling stories to show us how we can stop conspiracies, bigotry, and misinformation. The Story Paradox couldn't be more urgent."--Jonah Berger, Wharton Professor and bestselling author of Contagious
"Jonathan Gottschall has written a gripping and thoughtful book on a neglected but urgent topic: the dark side of stories. With crisp prose and an array of fascinating examples, he demonstrates how our innate ability to spin tales can lead to distortion, dissolution, and destruction. The Storytelling Paradox is a bracing call to action to become more empathetic and to deploy narrative as a force for good."
--Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When, Drive
"Jonathan Gottschall is not only the deepest thinker about the powerful role of stories in our lives, but a lively and witty writer. The Story Paradox offers much insight and many pleasures."
--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and Rationality.
"This fascinating book explores the dark power of stories, arguing that they are an essential poison--necessary for human life, but too often a force for irrationality and cruelty. The Storytelling Paradox is provocative and original and a delight to read--and ironically enough, Jonathan Gottschall is a hell of a story teller himself."--Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at University of Toronto, and author of How Pleasure Works, Against Empathy, and The Sweet Spot.
"We constantly modify one another's brains, and the surgical tool we use is storytelling. In this luminous and incisive page-turner, Jonathan Gottschall takes us deep into the world of stories: what we tell, how we receive, and why it matters so deeply for our world."
--David Eagleman, Stanford neuroscientist, author of Livewired
Book Description
Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it
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Product details
Publisher : Basic Books; 1st edition (31 May 2022)
Language : English
Hardcover : 272 pages
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Jonathan Gottschall
I am a Distinguished Fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. My research at the intersection of science and art has frequently been covered in outlets like The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, Science, and NPR. I'm the author or editor of seven books, including The Storytelling Animal, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice Selection and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. I live with my wife and two young daughters in Washington, Pennsylvania.
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Top reviews
Top review from Australia
Thomas Edmund
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth a ReadReviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 15 January 2023
So, the first few chapters of Story Paradox were 100% write up my alley - an exploration of what stories mean to us socially, neurologically, and for society as a whole.
The next few chapters focussed on kinda the usual suspects for this sort of non-fiction, Socrates and Plato, there were quite a few insights and I enjoyed the strange balance between stream of consciousness of in depth analysis. The effect was kind of a paragraph to a few pages of a topic in quite specific detail but then an almost non-sequitur leap to a new topic. Not in a terrible way just in a sometimes surprising or hard to grasp the overall picture way.
As the book continued I did feel this flighty approach start to wear, its felt less like a powerful thesis and more like a philosophical riff on the subject. Still fun to read and overall pretty fine, perhaps just less than my hopes as I started this book.
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Top reviews from other countries
Paris Wood
2.0 out of 5 stars Appreciated but deeply flawedReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 4 September 2022
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Gottschall is a phenomenal writer and he tells a great story. I read this book in two days in a borderline hypnotic haze and am a huge fan of his first book on story. I take his central premise on the dangers of storytelling for granted as just the truth. Most people don't take it seriously enough for the amount of sway it has in our lives. No matter what else I have to say, the man can paint a picture like no other, and his command of language allows him to turn some really creative phrases. That said, my overall judgement of the book is the following.
1.The author brings up historical material and philosophy that he is in no way prepared to handle thoroughly. Anyone pointing to the trans-atlantic slave trade as the sole reason race relations are like they are today is willfully ignoring the years of contentious history specific to America that includes legal precedent and policy that only ended in the 60's. The same can be said for anyone pointing out that African elites often participated in selling slaves like its some kind of gotcha. Gottschall presents the information like it's some bombshell, but it's both well documented and accepted by anyone who reads even the most milquetoast history on the subject. Which frankly says more about general historical education in the US than anything else. This book is so fixated on it, it gets its own half page notation assuring the reader that it’s both the truth and super relevant. This framing of the issue is not only redundant and uncontested- it misrepresents the problems surrounding conversations of American slavery. Case in point - did Africans write the laws that created the American racial slave/caste system? Did they write Jim Crow or enforce it? Did they pen exclusive housing covenants for our suburbs? No. They did not. African descendants in America fall under the broad banner of "Black". Even the mixed ones, and most of us are. Did that just happen naturally? Looking at the history of both law and culture, I can tell you it did not.
If I’m a bad person, but I’m in court to get justice for my murdered brother, is the subject of the trial the history of murder across the world or its commonality? Do I need to be an angel to get justice? The issue would be the specific event involving myself and the perpetrator. Not whether or not other people in my family have committed murder themselves. The entire section would have better been left out of the book entirely. It's not necessary for his broader explicitly stated project and does more harm via misrepresentation than any good. Also, and minor nit-pick at two of the implications. Most Black Americans have no idea where they're from absent a DNA test. America is the whole reason we identify as black rather than say, Yoruban. It's almost silly and cruel for Gottschall to say "who are you to judge when your ancestors might have been from the kingdom of Dahomey" in a "what about-ism" that hinges pretty heavily on that lack of knowledge. The comparison of a whole ass continent to a much more cohesive group of colonies turned states and an attempted broad indictment with the same logic is also mind-boggling. It's both thoughtless and irrelevant. Additionally, the Dahomey's victims were people "Of the time" and I certainly doubt they considered the date on the calendar a justification for their treatment. The same of American slavery. Where records are preserved, it is often not hard to find contemporaries in preserved primary sources who disagree with a practice that we look back and assume were just moral norms "of that time" - and victims thoughts are almost always lost to history.
Gottschall could easily have explored how powerful people have no incentive to listen to those they wield power over How we use narrative to project legitimacy despite any excesses that would be considered unacceptable among perceived equals across time. This phenomenon is fairly universal across cultures and time periods. Bonus bleak-pilled points to the implication in the book that for any group to progress out of a bad situation, a member of the ingroup needs to write a book first about the plight of the downtrodden. Couldn't just listen to the people affected. In any age, I'm sure they'd tell you if you asked, though it would be inconvenient for anyone invested in maintaining status at the top. That’s usually the problem.
2.Gottschall’s focus on atrocities and wrongdoings specifically in Africa has an aggregate affect of a "no angels" vibe almost explicitly walked up to in his attempt to calm things down with a "blood on all hands" conclusion mid way through. At one point, he mentions the Rwandan genocide and explores the way that after the bloodshed, narrative has been deliberately deployed to try and soothe tensions with some success. Here also however, he leaves out further context The event was heavily influenced by colonialism. He insists on bringing up this and events like it with a very strange bent to the framing. It's perfectly fine to bring up this kind of thing, necessary for the conversation in fact. To be clear, there are no angles on planet earth. I am not saying that atrocities committed by Africans should go un-examined. I just find his choices of cultures to focus on for these failures while leaving out critical context very strange, especially given the project of the book. Ostensibly, he's worried about the story sickness plaguing our species. So why the frequent return specifically to Africa? Then later on he basically says we should not overly rely on history anyway because it’s also a story that can cause a lot of harm. So my guy. Why did you bring up the specific events that you did with the framing that you presented them with?
He could have just as easily interrogated the way that Hollywood movies- with worldwide reach - also use depictions of interracial romance for the same sort of fence mending. The ways associations for different ethnic groups are built by media in our multicultural world for good and ill. I would love a book that actually looks at the ways story is deployed by our species to affect perceptions, mating preferences, etc across the world. Story and our perceptions of our roles are the ballast of the politics and the crazy crap in every person's day to day lives. Stories we tell ourselves in the US are not just at odds with each other across political lines, they are buck-wild in the ways they justify or de-legitimize systems of value. Very much worth a detached, (I'm not claiming objective) robust investigation. What does such a thing say about how our species in-group and out-group communicates and even finds ways to justify NOT talking to groups perceived as other? Gottschalls preoccupations of history without villains, blood on all hands (Even in Africa), the excesses of the right and the left, his very specific presentation of history and ultimate suggestion that we throw it out entirely (So why did you bring up so many pointed parts of it?) suggests a preoccupation not explicitly stated in the book We rarely know ourselves so well. I also think that Jon is dressing up a very specific brand of apologia in different clothing. Much of his focus in the book is irrelevant to the task of interrogating story sickness. You also don't have to try hard to convince people that there's violence on the African continent and among its people. You ever watch the 6 oclock news here?It might not seem that way if your life is on a college campus, but out here, you're selling sand in a desert bro. Don’t do me any favors.
Philosophy is lacking too. Gottschall is an atheist, meaning that he does not take a teleological view of the universe. It's not "for" something in this world-view. Ideas of "progress" or "moral arc" should become suspect. It should indicate that if we're "doing better" it's because of a specific set of circumstances that aren't just tied to the calendar. Since there's no linearity, "progress" can be lost. We can backslide. History is full of backslides, women's loss of social status in the switch to agrarianism being one major example he should be familiar with. There was a time in America's history when slavery itself was not thoroughly racialised. Doesn't make it better, but it signals a change in status that happened over time. A "Backslide" from better treatment to worse. So the idea that our descendants will be wagging a finger at us from a more informed moral ground assumes quite a lot about the "linear progress" of moral understanding. "The Golden Rule" is ancient. "Black" vs "White" are modern political classes, created only recently on the world stage. Even more ancient is the neural architecture that lets us intuit the frame of mind of others of our species regardless of color. Those realities do not keep those rights from shifting and never have. We're in a live fire exercise my friends, and its very easy to tell everyone else to shut up if you have no memory of being hit by a bullet.
3. No one has the same experiences in the world and I can't speak for anyone else. I won't pretend to, and there are good-faith actors who would disagree with many of my conclusions. I have argued with a lot of people who use the condition of the world to make judgments about the overall worthiness of "Black" people. That’s why I’m preoccupied with history and its presentation. Explaining this experience to anyone who doesn't know what I mean is as draining as dealing with the bigotry of low expectations day in and day out. It’s amazing to hear public appeals to individuality and convenient deployments of “content of character” and then not be extended the courtesy assumption of being an individual constantly. I’ve played xbox online with your kids. I grew up online. I know what people say under anonymity and in person under favorable circumstances. I’ve also travelled. We are not post racial. This is not a lecture on what that's like. I say that to say this: Understanding why something is the way it is might prevent you from judging it unfairly. If you look at crime statistics from a historically deprived group, you might land on the erroneous conclusion that that "kind" of person is just predisposed to violence. Side-bar, maybe there’s a cognitive consequence to having to defend your right to be in a space over an extended period of time and the ruminations the experience would come with. History is context, you can't just remove it without causing more problems than you're claiming to fix. You may also wind up having very unhelpful conversations like...
3. Sam Harris. The book takes the position that science is ultimately where we should focus to get out of our story induced madness. However, I have no reason to believe science is a better master in the world. Science itself is staffed by messy humans with our own motivations and it has itself been used to prop up pretty nasty stuff, like Phrenology and Eugenics. Just knowing that is why simply removing history as an important element of understanding the world is a terrible idea. For example, you might be a scientist like Sam Harris and step into an age old argument about the cognitive abilities of Black people. You might claim to be brave for having the argument and feel like a martyr, without fully recognizing that there is a wide swathe of people quite willing to hear exactly what you’re saying for all the wrong reasons. In some of the related discussions the man is preoccupied with protecting his reputation with absolutely no consideration that reputation might also apply to broad claims about entire groups of people. Like, Sam. Do you think someone is going to give me a DNA or IQ test before they make quick assessments of me? Our brains categorize things to save energy and it's part of the reason stereotypes exist. We kinda can't help it. The fact that he sees absolutely no danger in rushing to settle the science is one of the many reasons (including institutional incentive and funding) not to just accept that we should put all of our faith in the broad idea of science under which work many imperfect people.
The history and people like him in the now sure as hell give me pause. Science will inform policy and policy will always be political. I do not see that changing for our silly mushy species. So the solution proposed by Gottschall comes off as unrealistic. Naive even. Harris has also conflated "Dispassion" with reason in some of his interviews. A lot of people who laud "reason" uncritically do this. As someone who has gone though the process of challenging and losing some fundamental beliefs, I can say that's far from the truth. You ever lose your faith in god after being a committed catholic? How about as a Black catholic for whom the prospect of a deity making everything right in the end was like a warm fire in dark places? It's like burying a friend. Extremely painful and emotionally taxing. Anyone who understands that evolution did not craft us as animals with neatly ordered brains where "reason" and emotion are separated should intuit that reason hurts sometimes. If you come to a conclusion fully free of emotional reaction, it doesn't necessarily mean that you've reached that conclusion through reason alone or absent of bias. It might just mean you don't have a dog in the fight. Changing your mind, challenging important ideas, finding contradictions in your own thoughts takes an enormous amount of time and self reflection. We are often fighting the emotional reactions in ourselves this type of reflection will cause. Its not going to happen immediately on a public platform where you've put yourself in a position that throws up all of our built in social defensive mechanisms. It's not gonna happen via podcast. So all that said: forgive me for not trusting the high minded idealistic appeals professed by squishy humans that I suspect are too much like the rest of us to be trusted with a blank check that just reads “For science”. The only thing different about this movie is the title, and we’ve seen it all before.
Someone might mistake me here to mean that we shouldn't bother with science. Not at all my point. Science is amazing. I'm saying that we might want to approach ideas that have broad implications for policy with an overwhelming preponderance of caution that is aware of the context in which the information is being discussed. That type of caution would need to go far beyond the worries of one man focused mostly on the slights against his reputation (blind to that of others) and maybe shouldn't be teased as forbidden knowledge on internet radio. Reason is the result of an evolved cognitive heuristic. If it's not the key from god that gives us the golden secrets of the universe untainted by our own hardware biases. So I would hope for abundant tact and awareness from my public facing scientists.
4. The book treats inherited beliefs as static things and encourages a lack of judgement. Sure, admirable, but people change their beliefs. Book also takes for granted that the beliefs people claim to have in public are what they actually believe. However, belief in context affects social dynamics within social settings involving reward, punishment, acceptance, etc. At a certain point, someones actual held beliefs really don’t even matter compared to what they are incentivized to do for status and resources. We usually just do something and rationalize our actions to ourselves after the fact. Part of the problem is us taking for granted what an "individual" is, but you're nothing in a vacuum without relation to other people within a culture and systems of incentive. Normal people can be lead to do terrible things because of the context around them. Individuality is worth interrogating in the pursuit of understanding how story moves society.From my point of view, the concept as typically deployed is really just a social/political convenience. Tangent for another time. This is where his solution for news rooms and academic institutions falls apart. People believe things and claim to believe things in context and those outward postures are absolutely affected by whether or not they are monetarily incentivized to stand by those beliefs or represent a "team". We are status seeking creatures. The writer doesn't at all account for cynical actors or the human capacity for self delusion. He could just have easily suggested making school more affordable so students meet people from different walks of life. There were a million other ways to create exposure and community cohesion. Why the preoccupation with making sure college faculty represents both sides of a political argument no matter what the facts surrounding the arguments are?
I really REALLY wanted to like this book. I emailed Gottschall in 2020 because I was so excited by the idea of a sequel to The Storytelling Animal - a book I’ve read over five times. I was ecstatic for the sequel when I saw it. You could have sent a rocket to the moon with the force of my excitement, then brought it back to earth with the gravitational weight of disappointment. Story Paradox doesn't handle the stuff it brings up super well. Belief can just be a configuration of atoms in the brain along with the other configurations driving us to reproduce - if you’ve read the book you’ll know why I say that. The book’s solutions are very much lacking. Do you think it's a coincidence that a country of "others" that never really put in the genuine political work to become “US” is at this precipice 60 years after landmark civil rights legislation? Now gutted legislation by the way. If you want to solve the story poison that our country is showing at this point in time, you can't do it by just ignoring the past. We need to explicitly cultivate cultural practices around having hard conversations, listening to each other, and ensuring that the elites of our institutions are not atmospherically removed from the problems of those at the bottom. We are talking about power, and incentives and designing a world to balance them better. Incentive structures would have to change, as well as the values by which we assign status. Anyone dead set on the need for the status quo to remain precisely as it is will be blind to that. We have to explicitly plan against all of our awful, petty, human impulses and be extremely self skeptical. We need to listen to each other and then be encouraged to digest and act on what we’ve heard.
A good diagnosis is going to take medical history into account. A good treatment program will be based on that history. This book comes up short on the treatment suggested, and advocates throwing the history out of the window entirely. The primary issue with the book is that it appears to be status quo apologia focused mostly on a centrist appeal for two extremes to calm down. Not a book focused on story. The rise and fall of arguments appear to hinge on that goal, and their weaknesses break against the shortcomings that the position would create. Like the fallacious idea that "two sides" represent a theoretical horseshoe of equal danger. However, the legislator is way more dangerous than the screeching SJW and we’re seeing that clearly in 2022.
If you want a much better book that causes a deep sense of discomfort with just how flawed we are as an animal and how story reflects those flaws, I'd suggest "The Science Of Storytelling" by Will Storr. Much better book. More sober and less concerned with occupying a non-existent "rational and neutral" middle ground.
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9 people found this helpfulRepor
R.M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Timely and Highly Recommended Book on StorytellingReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 24 November 2021
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This is such an important and highly recommended book for the times we live in. It’s an accessible, well-researched, easy-to-read exploration of the power, and danger of stories, and one of my standout books of the year. It’s also one of the most important books I’ve read on storytelling.
I enjoyed Gottschall’s previous book, The Storytelling Animal, which is about the power of stories and how we’re wired for story (homo fictus). The Story Paradox follows on from that, asking us to think about the fact that if stories can be used to change the world for the better, could they not also change the world for the worse? “Story science reveals that everything good about storytelling is the same as everything bad. Everything that makes storytelling wholesome is precisely what makes it dangerous.”
It’s because of this that Gottschall says, “The most urgent question we can ask ourselves now isn’t the hackneyed one: “How can we change the world through stories?” It’s “How can we save the world from stories?””
Gottschall approaches the topic unflinchingly, diving into everything from religion, political polarisation, and social media to a certain former American president. Gottschall argues that we tell stories to sway and shape the world more towards the way we want it to be. But due to an information and media overload, the stories we’re consuming are making each of us less tolerant and more set in our own ways. “Story used to drag us all to the middle and make us more alike. Now we’re all in our own little storyverses, and instead of making us more alike, story makes us into more extreme versions of ourselves.”
Our isolated technological bubbles of story are becoming narrower, more-defined and less accepting. This matters, because truth and facts matter. But stories supersede facts. This is why, for example, conspiracy theories hold so much sway over us.
When it comes to pressing issues such as COVID-19 and the climate crisis, this can have detrimental effects. From vaccine hesitancy to climate denialism, stories can be damaging for humanity. Take the climate crisis. Public awareness largely began after Dr James Hansen’s Senate Testimony in 1988. Yet 33 years later, and 26 COP climate summits later, and we still haven’t meaningfully addressed the issue with the urgency it requires. “The problem with messaging climate change isn’t that it makes an inherently bad story so much as an inherently deactivating one… In contrast to the abstractions of science, conspiracy stories about climate change can be highly activating because the good guys and bad guys are sharply drawn, and the problem is so much smaller.”
Working out where to go from here is a challenge, especially for authors. We clearly have a responsibility when telling stories, and not only that, but we’re seemingly up against a tidal wave of disinformation which shows no sign of dissipating. Stories have unified humanity in the past and also torn it apart. Now stories are threatening our ability to address civilisation-threatening issues. Our collective task is to work out how to get out of this mess. Perhaps the first step on that road is reading this highly informative book and then looking at what we’re putting out there and how it might be affecting society.
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3 people found this helpfulReport
5.0 out of 5 stars Timely and Highly Recommended Book on StorytellingReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 24 November 2021
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This is such an important and highly recommended book for the times we live in. It’s an accessible, well-researched, easy-to-read exploration of the power, and danger of stories, and one of my standout books of the year. It’s also one of the most important books I’ve read on storytelling.
I enjoyed Gottschall’s previous book, The Storytelling Animal, which is about the power of stories and how we’re wired for story (homo fictus). The Story Paradox follows on from that, asking us to think about the fact that if stories can be used to change the world for the better, could they not also change the world for the worse? “Story science reveals that everything good about storytelling is the same as everything bad. Everything that makes storytelling wholesome is precisely what makes it dangerous.”
It’s because of this that Gottschall says, “The most urgent question we can ask ourselves now isn’t the hackneyed one: “How can we change the world through stories?” It’s “How can we save the world from stories?””
Gottschall approaches the topic unflinchingly, diving into everything from religion, political polarisation, and social media to a certain former American president. Gottschall argues that we tell stories to sway and shape the world more towards the way we want it to be. But due to an information and media overload, the stories we’re consuming are making each of us less tolerant and more set in our own ways. “Story used to drag us all to the middle and make us more alike. Now we’re all in our own little storyverses, and instead of making us more alike, story makes us into more extreme versions of ourselves.”
Our isolated technological bubbles of story are becoming narrower, more-defined and less accepting. This matters, because truth and facts matter. But stories supersede facts. This is why, for example, conspiracy theories hold so much sway over us.
When it comes to pressing issues such as COVID-19 and the climate crisis, this can have detrimental effects. From vaccine hesitancy to climate denialism, stories can be damaging for humanity. Take the climate crisis. Public awareness largely began after Dr James Hansen’s Senate Testimony in 1988. Yet 33 years later, and 26 COP climate summits later, and we still haven’t meaningfully addressed the issue with the urgency it requires. “The problem with messaging climate change isn’t that it makes an inherently bad story so much as an inherently deactivating one… In contrast to the abstractions of science, conspiracy stories about climate change can be highly activating because the good guys and bad guys are sharply drawn, and the problem is so much smaller.”
Working out where to go from here is a challenge, especially for authors. We clearly have a responsibility when telling stories, and not only that, but we’re seemingly up against a tidal wave of disinformation which shows no sign of dissipating. Stories have unified humanity in the past and also torn it apart. Now stories are threatening our ability to address civilisation-threatening issues. Our collective task is to work out how to get out of this mess. Perhaps the first step on that road is reading this highly informative book and then looking at what we’re putting out there and how it might be affecting society.
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3 people found this helpfulReport
Sorrowful investigator
3.0 out of 5 stars DisappointingReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 3 August 2022
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I ran into Gottschall’s work by chance and thought it looked promising. I am gradually getting through The Story Paradox, which I find quite interesting in parts and a little tedious and disappointing in others. I thought it would explain more in scientific terms but Gottschall’s English Literature academic identity keeps him over-anchored in the humanities. He tries to be politically even-handed but inevitably leans left, even as he notes the dangerously leftist bias in academia. An early reference to antisemitic narrative (The Elders, David Icke, et al.) and a nod to the culture wars reveals his true interests and identity. Gottschall acknowledges his Jewish ancestry but not the fact that all five of his book cover testimonial authors are Jewish. I think this is important because the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is deeply rooted in story-telling purporting to convey truth, and Jewish authors have a massive influence on Western civilisation: outsized, as Amy Wax has called it. Neither Marxism nor Freudian psychoanalysis (and their myriad derivatives) deserve more than a place among social ‘science’ and psychotherapeutic just-so stories, whereas Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays certainly ranks highly as an advertising propagandist for capitalism. Plato is used here as a sort of lodestar, if negatively at times regarding his anti-poetry stance, and logic and science are seriously played down, I think, as simply alternative narratives rather than a different and often superior form of ‘story’. Much more could have been said about history and revisionist history than Gottschall says here, and a fawning inclusion of James Baldwin on American history hardly digs into this topic. A little Julian Jaynes, David Bohm or Iain McGilchrist wouldn’t have gone amiss in a work purporting to explain the evolutionary arc of narrative. Ben Shapiro features briefly but Jordan Peterson does not make an appearance at all. If Gottschall is ‘the deepest thinker’ in this domain, as Stephen Pinker calls him, God help us, since this is absolutely not depth! Perhaps one can forgive the author for writing a tepid middlebrow, journalistic book instead of a cutting-edge scholarly treatise, but please, Dr Gottschall, spare us the language-corrupting ‘bored of’ virus (p.97)!
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2 people found this helpfulReport
Mark Arnest
5.0 out of 5 stars Eye-OpeningReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 14 September 2022
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In a June 2022 poll, one-third of Americans agreed with the statement that "members of Satanic cults abuse thousands of children every year." Gottschall's book will help you understand why such lunatic conspiracies
are on the rise. You may not like his conclusions - it's clear that he himself did not, and he seems a bit surprised by some of them - but the book is honest, plausible, and readable. Highly recommended.
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UncleChick Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars Why Story is at the Root of Destabilizing SocietyReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 23 January 2022
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Analyzes history of Story and how people use it for organizing disordered info about the world into meaning and order; how Story is morally neutral and can be used equally well for great good and great harm; how man is Homo Fictus and loves dark stories and that's not going to change; the sort of danger we're, post-truth, where no one can agree on one story of the reality all people share; how technology has accelerated the problem and made it exponentially worse; and how Communist China is effectively using this to the advantage of the Communist Party there, and why democracy has more trouble with this than authoritarian states do. He offers a little hope for fixing these enormous world-encompassing problems, by individuals fixing themselves, but not much.
4 people found this helpfulReport
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The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down
Jonathan Gottschall
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Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it
Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it’s the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization’s greatest ills—environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare—you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.
Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.
With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”
GenresNonfictionPsychologySciencePoliticsPhilosophyNeuroscienceEvolution
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272 pages, Hardcover
First published November 21, 2021
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Jonathan Gottschall14 books128 followers
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Jonathan Gottschall is an American literary scholar, the leading younger figure in literature and evolution. He teaches at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. He completed graduate work in English at State University of New York at Binghamton, where he worked under David Sloan Wilson.
His work The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer describes the Homeric epic poems Iliad and Odyssey in terms of evolutionary psychology, with the central violent conflicts in these works driven by the lack of young women to marry and the resulting evolutionary legacy, as opposed to the violent conflicts being driven by honor or wealth.
Literature, Science and a New Humanities advocates that the humanities, and literary studies in particular, need to avail themselves of quantitative and objective methods of inquiry as well as the traditional qualitative and subjective, if they are to produce cumulative, progressive knowledge, and provides a number of case studies that apply quantitative methods to fairy and folk tale around the world to answer questions about human universals and differences.
Gottschall was profiled by the New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work was featured in an article in Science describing literature and evolution.
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BlackOxford
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January 5, 2022
The Essential Poison
Sugar-coating hemlock doesn’t reduce its toxicity but I’ll bet it would be a real boost to sales. Perhaps this is the theory behind Jonathan Gottschall’s book about language. He makes his concern explicit. “I think of storytelling as humanity’s ‘essential poison,’” he says. By describing the poison in terms of stories and claiming we can tell the difference between better and worse stories, Gottschall implies that certain species-death is avoidable if we read the instructions on the label. Socrates, I’m sure, would object to the pitch on moral as well as health grounds.
Oddly, Gottschall doesn’t think scientists and mathematicians tell stories. This is because he dissociates stories from language, so that he can later claim a sort of priority for science in checking prose stories. But the specialised languages of formulas and equations are as much stories as The Story Paradox itself, including all the messy conclusions of self-referentiality. It’s part of his programme to make the medicine go down easier I suppose.
Gottschall also would like us to think that stories only became problematic with the internet and social media. This is, of course, ridiculous as the history of religion and its varied myths, all of which he cites, demonstrates so obviously. In fact Gottschall has got the chronology wrong. Stories created the internet. Language is the fundamental technology. Gossip is the killer app that allowed the species Homo Sapiens to survive in a world of stronger, faster, and more quick-witted predators. Language creates the collective human mind which is the most predatory instrument on the planet, perhaps in the cosmos. As Gottschall notes correctly:
“Behind all the factors driving civilization’s greatest ills—political polarization, environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare, and hatred—you’ll always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.’
Gottschall thinks we can escape what he calls the magic of stories by knowing that they’re stories. Such an escape however would require some sort of final story about stories, an ultimate story like say that of the Catholic Church in its doctrinal statements, or the Fundamentalist’s Bible or the much sought after Theory of Everything in Physics. But these ultimate stories are just more of the same, that is, hopeless attempts to evade the hideous necessity of language through yet more language. Nevertheless Gottschall wants us to have hope, to think that he and we can discern better from worse stories. According to him, the solution is at hand, “We need more reason in the world.”
Where is such reason to be found? Gottschall thinks he knows: “Above all, we need to double down on our commitment to science because science is for standing up to stories.” Has he never heard of epistemology, that centuries-old failed attempt to identify better and worse scientific stories? In other words, his buck-passing solution to what he calls “a pandemic of conspiratorial thinking” has no credibility whatsoever. There is no vaccine (or anti-venom) that can cure us. His book is just another catalogue of useless, largely pornographic, anecdotes about QAnon, Trump, Hitler, Stalin and the various other nutcases who have committed atrocities.
I take the publication of this book as helpful in only one respect - evidence that the the quality editorial staff at Basic Books has deteriorated markedly over recent years.
aesthetics american epistemology-language
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Jaidee
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October 1, 2022
2.5"glib, over-reaching, yet still worthwhile" stars !!
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Perseus books for an e-copy. This was released November 2021. I am providing my honest review.
I want to describe to you how this book went down for me. It is a wednesday evening and there is an alumni continuing ed lecture that you are sort of interested in attending but you already know how it will go down. The lecturer has accolades coming out of his ying yang and in the audience will be the semi intelligent left leaning liberals that are financially comfortable oooohing and aaaahing and nodding their heads in agreement while sipping their Chablis but only half listening as they are exhausted from their mid management careers and would rather be Skyping with their extramarital affair. The audience is multicultural and very very woke but they are envious of their former classmates' larger homes and are distressed by the possibility of a mens' shelter being built two streets down.....do you get my drift...that is the narrative that came up for me during this read....
This is not an academic book but a presentation of strongly held beliefs held about the intersectionality of our human need for narrative, increasing isolation and the increasing influence of social media in our lives tied together by an entertaining array of soft science research, anecdotes and humor that only ladies with three glasses of wine would giggle at....
I am not saying that this did not open up ideas for me or I did not enjoy to a degree but the authorial voice and lack of organization led to this being a rather ho hum evening.
With a lot of work this could have been much more impactful and helpful...which I believe is what the author intended....
This is my story and I'm sticking to it....
two-ana-half-stars-books
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Nelson Zagalo
9 books · 322 followers
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December 1, 2021
I cannot call a book something that is nothing but a jumble of ideas and phrases stuck together to manipulate whoever reads it. I can't even say that Jonathan Gottschall tells a story, because telling a story implies cohesion and discursive unity, and here we have anything but that. Gottschall grabs everything from everywhere - various scientific, technological and cultural areas - that can somehow support his premise, and sets up a house of cards to sell his ideas. He just forgot that rhetoric needs ethos to work, not just logic and emotion. It is almost painful to see Gottschall, someone who teaches in higher education, using research work by multiple colleagues, which are related to concrete issues, being cited distorted or summoning the results for what he is interested in, just to offer proof of authority to the discourse he constructs. This we call manipulative discourse, without any respect for the readers. If in his previous book, "The Storytelling Animal" (analysis VI), we already felt much of this, and which at the time I considered to be an "absolutist approach", in this new book, besides not adding anything, the approach slips into an attempt to inculcate fear and panic, hoping with this to attract the lights to sell more books.
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Não posso chamar livro a algo que não passa de um emaranhado de ideias e frases coladas juntas para manipular quem lê "The Story Paradox" (2021). Nem sequer posso dizer que Jonathan Gottschall conte uma história, porque contar uma história implica coesão e unidade discursiva, e aqui temos tudo menos isso. Gottschall agarra em tudo de todo o lado — diversas áreas científicas, tecnológicas e culturais — que possam de algum modo suportar as suas premissas, e monta um castelo de cartas para vender as sua ideias. Só esqueceu que a retórica para funcionar precisa de Ethos, não chega lógica e emoção. É quase doloroso ver Gottschall, alguém que ensina no ensino superior, usar trabalhos de múltiplos colegas, que estão relacionados com questões concretas, que ele cita distorcendo ou convocando os resultados para o que lhe interessa, apenas para oferecer prova de autoridade ao discurso que constrói. A isto chamamos discurso manipulativo, sem qualquer respeito pelos leitores. Se no seu livro anterior, "The Storytelling Animal" (análise VI), já se sentia muito disto, e que na altura considerei como "abordagem absolutista", neste novo livro além de não vir acrescentar nada, a abordagem resvala para a tentativa de inculcar o medo e o pânico esperando com isso atrair as luzes para a venda de mais livro.
Comentário completo em português no Virtual Illusion:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
human_engage narrative_study
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Rossdavidh
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March 18, 2022
When I was finishing my review of Jonathan Gottschall's last book ("The Storytelling Animal", see here), I lamented that, after having convinced the reader (well, this reader anyway) that storytelling is one of the most fundamental things about humanity, he didn't take on the topic of whether or not our storytelling impulse might be a source of trouble now, given the many changes in how we tell each other stories (media used, reach, etc.). In his newest book, Gottschall takes on the topic of the dangers of storytelling. I awaited the delivery of it with some excitement, and cracked the cover with a bit of mental preparation to have my mind blown.
Of course, I had overdone it. There is still, I think, too much we don't really know about how story works on the human mind, and Gottschall is forced to admit as much:
"Early in my research for this book, I spent a morning in the lounge of the college psychology department, eagerly perusing the tables of contents and indexes of about twenty recent textbooks from different subfields of psychology. I was scanning for references to any variant of the word 'story' or 'narrative'. I had my notebook out to scribble down ideas, concepts, and references to journal articles to run down. When I finished the notebook paper remained pristine. I got zero hits.
The science of story exists, and this book couldn't have been written without it. But it's still a very young science, where the known is dwarfed by the unknown. And far from moving toward its rightful place near the heart of the human sciences, story science hasn't even penetrated the textbooks...Excuse me while I whisper in the ears of ambitious young researchers: The tree of story science is heavy with toothsome, low-hanging fruit. Go feast yourself and grow fat in reputation."
So, while Gottschall does not have the fruits of that young science yet to present to us, he does have what I call the One Big Idea of his book, which is an idea about what 'story' is, and what it tells us about what language is. Language is not, primarily, used to communicate. Not really, not most of the time. We do, yes, occasionally say, "could you hand me the salt, please" or "turn left here", but the vast majority of our use of language is not for the purpose of communicating information. Instead, it's for the purposes of manipulating each other. We talk, to sway how other people think, rather than to merely convey some information. What is the term we use, to distinguish between something that merely conveys information, and something that instead (or in addition) sways our emotions, stirs our hearts, perhaps even calls us to action?
The term is "story". It's what's normally lacking in a textbook, and it's why they're mostly dull (and ironically as a result uninformative). It's what _is_ there in an excellent piece of popular science writing, and of course, fiction (which in most cases achieves the manipulation without even bothering with any information about anything real at all). Story is, therefore, both profoundly powerful and, as a result, profoundly dangerous. All the more so because it is so poorly understood.
There was a moment in the mid-20th century, when America (and perhaps other nations as well) had a bit of a legislative freak-out about the dangers of subliminal advertising. The fear was that our minds could be controlled by seeing or hearing advertisements too dim to be consciously perceived. It turns out that this is almost entirely bogus, but there is a similar problem in front of us, now and forever, so much more dangerous not only because it actually works, but also because we would greatly resent any effort to protect us from it. The difference is that, in nearly all cases now, the only covert message that the storyteller (movie director, script writer for a TV series, best-selling author, news journalist, politician) is actually trying to slip into our minds is:
"Pay attention to me".
Now, it is questionable whether the propaganda of previous ages, which certainly wanted people's attention but wanted it for some other purpose, was actually any less dangerous. Still there is most decidedly something chilling about comparing our own storytelling input to that of, say, a medieval peasant. They spent most of the day doing manual labor, mostly without saying anything, perhaps sometimes singing a work song but not ingesting story after story. For any century prior to the 20th, storytelling (and storylistening) had to wait until the end of the day, or the depths of the winter. In 2020, while Gottschall was writing his book, Americans (in part due to the pandemic) for the first time spent more time watching TV than working: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.... It ought to horrify us how much of our lives we spend watching fictional depictions of somebody else's life, instead of living our own.
Unfortunately, while Gottschall is able to tell a pretty decent story himself, he doesn't really have as much information in this book as I was hoping for, either. In some ways, this is not his fault; he's trying to convince us that storytelling is worth serious scientific study, not tell us what the discoveries and conclusions of such study might be. But I did find it a bit of a letdown.
But then there were moments like this, when he turns his attention to Facebook:
"[Facebook] hasn't thrived because it discovered a new way of capturing attention. In large part, its algorithm just independently discovered the oldest way of capturing attention - the universal grammar of storytelling - and figured out how to distribute it on a colossal scale. The intelligence behind the algorithm may be artificial, but the narrative psychology it exploits is entirely natural. To wish the negative externalities of Facebook away is a near thing to wishing away the universal grammar of storytelling. It's to fantasize that social media companies are creating demand for dark, divisive, and morally provocative material rather than responding to it. It's therefore to fantasize that a different algorithm serving as a router for narratives of truth, goodness, and positivity could perform almost as well. But no matter the business model (free, subscription, or whatever), social media platforms will naturally conform to the built-in regularities of narrative psychology, whereby the darker the narrative, the more it crackles with moralistic energy, the more likely it will win out in story wars."
That, is something you will not get by reading books from lesser minds. While I have little sympathy for Facebook, it is undoubtedly the case that much of our dissatisfaction with them, is much like our dissatisfaction with Congress being too partisan to get stuff done, or our dissatisfaction with fast food for not being nutritious: it is really our dissatisfaction with ourselves. It isn't ethical to cater to our darkest desires, but it is still a product primarily of our darkest desires, not Facebook's (or Congress', or fast food's). If we primarily paid attention to thoughtful, dispassionate, considerate, long essays, then the social media of our day would be serving them up to us. They don't want us to binge on anger and derision for others, any more than they want us to binge on pictures of cats. But they do want us to pay attention, as much as possible, and what works for that, is the nasty side of storytelling.
So, while Gottschall's book was not all that I hoped for, it was worth the reading, and if it is unable to illuminate a dark corner of the human mind, it is at least able to convey forcefully that it exists, and why we do desperately need it illuminated. I don't know if any of the "ambitious young researchers" that Gottschall refers to will read his book and accept the challenge, but I can only hope so.
red
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Andrea McDowell
569 reviews · 321 followers
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December 14, 2021
A short, effective book describing the upsides and downsides of the power of narrative on human beings and human society. As Gottschall points out: both the best and worst parts of our histories have been motivated by and founded on stories, whether good or bad, and we need to grapple with story's potential for harm as well as good. He also goes into how and why "bad" stories are often more compelling and shareable than "good" stories, given that there's no need for consistency with boring non-narrative facts and they can easily hijack very contagious elements like anger, outrage, and fear. Any number of covid conspiracy stories come to mind as examples.
2021 brain-stuff groundhog-day
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Ietrio
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November 24, 2021
There is no paradox here, only a weak story: the story of a entitled man who thumps his feet in a tantrum because the world doesn't heel to his ideal world whim.
junk
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Kressel Housman
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February 22, 2022
Sometimes, while reading a book, I think, “This is pretty good, but not fabulous. 4 stars.” Then I reach the ending, and it blows my mind. It casts everything that came before it in a brand new light. That’s how a book can earn a fifth star on the very last page.
This book was the opposite. All throughout, I was thinking, “Wow. This author is telling it like it is. 5 stars.” Then I reached the conclusion, and with a single word, the book lost me. That word was “hate.”
The author is a literature professor whose previous work has been on my to-read list for a while. It’s called The Storytelling Animal, and its thesis is that the human mind is constructed to process the world through stories. The current book revisits that thesis, but now that we’re living in a post-truth era where conspiracy theories abound, it’s clear why the author was motivated to explore the negative side of stories. Specifically, he pinpoints the need for a villain. Villainy is at the core of any conspiracy story. Psychologically, people need someone to scapegoat for the mess they find themselves in.
The thesis resonated with me for many reasons. First, as a Jew, I know all about being cast as the villain in someone else’s picture of the world. Early on in the book, the author recounts the events of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The perpetrator genuinely believed he was acting the role of the hero by ridding the world of some elderly Jews, as though we really are “the Elders of Zion” corrupting the world. It was similar for the young man who showed up at that DC pizza shop to liberate kids from pedophiles. He believed in a story he read online, and since nobody else was acting on it, he assumed the role of the hero vigilante. He went armed and prepared to kill the bad guys in his rescue of innocent kids. In his mind, it was a supremely moral act.
It’s easy to write these people off as gullible dupes, but consider how deeply stories affect you personally. I, for one, have a lifelong phobia based on some imagery I saw on TV at the age of four or five. Stories also inspired the games my sister and I used to play with our friends: Charlie’s Angels, Little House on the Prairie, Gilligan’s Island. I think that was the beginning of my hobby of writing fanfic, and I know I’m not the only one who “lives” in these stories. I’ve heard it said that Roger Stone is cosplaying the “wise guys” in mafia movies, and of course, a persona from reality TV made it all the way to the most powerful office in the world. Presumably, he bought his own act – perhaps not entirely, but enough to convince himself that he’s a patriot who’s been wronged. We’re all the heroes of our own stories. It’s our cognitive bias. We’re just wired that way.
So can we be heroes without having villains to fight? Professor Gottschall cites the movie “Babel” as an example of a villain-less story, but it’s the exception. People want happy endings, and above all, that means seeing that justice is served. It’s true even in love stories. Sure, we’re happy that Cinderella marries Prince Charming, but the ending is incomplete without the humiliation of the evil stepsisters. In the Grimms’ version, it’s pretty grisly. In order to fit into the glass slipper, one sister cuts off her toes and the other her heels. This kind of schadenfreude is baked into our sense of a good story.
As a writer, I’m having trouble with this myself. It’s probably one of the main reasons I took the book so much to heart. For over two years now, I’ve been working on a Beauty and the Beast (Rumbelle) fanfic. The basic Beauty and the Beast plot might be what Professor Gottschall would call “empathy for the devil.” My story includes a whole meta-narrative about it. One character is in a quarrel with the Brothers Grimm about villainy. (It’s seen most clearly in Chapter 20, if anyone’s curious.)
Workshopping the story has taught me a lot about people’s inner processes, and their reactions correlate with Professor Gottschall’s observations. The Beast is a hidden hero. He has to have a good side for Belle to be right about him. But when I make him too kind, people say I’m straying from the original. Then I give him an antagonist to punish, and readers hate him. . . except for the fans of the TV show. They love the Beast/Rumpelstiltskin no matter what. They want to see the antagonists suffer more. They’ve said it about Belle’s non-love interest Gaston, and they say it about the Grimms. One of the story’s intended messages is that revenge isn’t justice, but it doesn’t seem to be landing. I am caught in the story paradox.
It’s because this book addressed issues that I care so deeply about that reading the word “hate” in the conclusion was such a turn-off. Professor Gottschall states that while we shouldn’t hate storytellers, and that we must pity the people who fall for them, we should hate stories. I’m sorry, but I just can’t get on board with that. Yes, we should question and deconstruct stories, especially when they demonize someone else, but hate? If stories are so intrinsic to how our minds work, then story-hatred is no different than self-hatred. That’s not a recipe to rebuild a better society. It seems to me that in advocating story-hate, Professor Gottschall fell into the villainy trap. He, too, got caught in the story paradox.
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Tim
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March 2, 2022
'I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.'
- James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes
Suppose you have a cat that needs medication. Your cat will not take her medication. Your cat does not like her medication. Your cat is plotting to smother you in your sleep because you keep trying to get her to take this horrible medication. What can you do? You mix what she needs (her medication) with what she enjoys (her food). This is the traditional function of story as this book outlines it. It is trying to impart something to you in a way that power point purveyors simply cannot. A parable is an example of this concept. However, the author notes that story can also have a dark side. You have a vermin problem. For some unfathomable reason they are loathe to ingest poison. What can you do? You mix what they eschew (the poison) with what they will willingly receive (their food). Indeed, medicine and poison are in one sense the same thing: a foreign substance being introduced into your body. What differentiates them is their effect on you. One makes you better and the other makes you worse. Story can work like this by embedding ideas in your mind. It's basically the same idea as memes and memeplexes. While that terminology might be relatively new, the thought that it is conveying isn't. It has always been the case that the immaterial realm of ideas and information has required a physical medium to travel about in: squishy bundles of neurons, stone tablets, flash drives, interconnected computer networks. As the author describes it:
'It may help to think of the sway-making power of stories as the closest real-life equivalent to the force in Star Wars. Like the force, story is an all-pervasive field of dark and light energy that influences all of our actions. On the radio, on the news, on TV, on podcasts, on social media, in advertising, and in face-to-face yarning—we’re forever swimming through a turbulent sea of narratives, with rival stories churning against each other and buffeting us around.'
The contention of this book is that the original way of imparting ideas and information in order to change minds is still the best way because it does an end run around any barriers you might have in place to resist a particular idea or information cluster. Arguably the less overt they are, the more potent they are; people who recognize they are being manipulated usually respond by putting up a wall. The power of story isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is certainly more covert than overt in method. To use a word that is much in vogue in current online culture, stories are influencers.
Suppose you have some cause, crisis, or crusade you are amped up about and want to make people aware of. You might make a documentary that lists facts, figures, and have a voiceover by that one actor whose voice you recognize but can't put a name to. (You know the one I mean, right? Yeah, that guy.) The facts and figures approach is a more abstract approach. It might work or it might make people flick to the next channel. You could also pick a person integral to that cause, crisis, or crusade, craft the documentary around them and work all of the other stuff in along the way. Now people have a story. This is a more concrete approach. Another example. Suppose you wanted to demonstrate that people corrupt institutions and institutions corrupt people in a perpetual and seemingly never ending cycle, an overt way to do that would be to have a person stand at the front of a room and drone through a power point presentation filled with pie charts and bar graphs and historical records. A covert way would be to have them sit down and watch the HBO series The Wire from start to finish. Of the two, I know which would be more likely to make a lasting impression on me (Hint: It's not the power point presentation). To be fair, I will note a trade off here. The fictional narrative makes the point and underlines it. It gets your attention. However, the presentation (assuming no malevolent intent or ignorance of the facts on the part of the speaker) will be more accurate. It not only checks the veridicality of the narrative, it fills in all of the details. The advantages of story as summarized by the author:
'Storytellers enjoy a number of scientifically validated advantages over other types of messengers. First, and most basically, unlike some other forms of messaging, we love stories and the people who deliver them. Second, story is sticky (we process narrative much faster than other forms of communication and remember the information much better). Third, stories rivet attention like nothing else (think about how little your mind wanders during your favorite TV show or a novel you can’t put down). Fourth, good stories demand to be retold (think how hard it is not to spread that top-secret gossip or give away a spoiler), which means the messages in stories spread virally through social networks. And all of these advantages are driven by the fifth and most important advantage stories have over other forms of communication: they generate powerful emotion.'
Another point he makes is that everyone uses story to one degree or another to understand the world and themselves. That voice in our heads telling us about our past (where we have been), our present (where we are), and our future (where we are going) is much more than a clinical record of life events. We aren't cameras recording information to a hard drive. Your consciousness is providing a commentary track on all of this input. I don't think there are any exemptions to this narrative commentary, though perhaps there may be people not self-reflective enough to see they are not exemptions. In saying this, I am not saying that there is no such thing as truth, that no one can know anything about anything at all, that all knowledge is some kind of social construction, that any possible take on every possible issue is equally valid and worthy of consideration, or any of the other forms of applied postmodernism that are currently de rigueur . Are there any humans (myself included) that out of all humans have reached peak objectivity and are thus capable of placing themself outside of any possible framework that structures their existence and a set of moral values that is at least somewhat concomittant with it? It could be a fully articulated worldview or it might be some vague notions about – to co-opt Douglas Adams – Life, the Universe, and Everything but there isn't anybody that doesn't have a framework; there are just people that have a framework that is tacit and unarticulated and those that don't. Something being unexamined does not mean it isn't influencing your actions and behaviour, it just means the influence - like the framework itself - is invisible to you. It's kind of like culture. Culture is 'just the way things are.' Tacit frameworks are 'just the way I am.'
This book also tackles the hyperpoliticization of absolutely every facet of western culture and notes that while the problem may at times be a problem of facts, it is most definitely a problem of narratives:
Going from the pre-Guttenberg age in which formal storytelling was overwhelmingly consumed communally in smallish groups, to the mass audiences of the broadcast age, to the new age of story “narrowcasting” represents a sea change in human life. It amounts to a dangerous social experiment that seems to be going awry. Story has gone from being the great uniter, as James Poniewozik puts it, to the great divider. Story used to drag us all to the middle and make us more alike. Now we’re all in our own little storyverses, and instead of making us more alike, story makes us into more extreme versions of ourselves. It allows us to live in story worlds that reinforce our biases rather than challenge them. The end result is that everything consumed in our storylands just makes me more me, and you more you. It also makes “us” into more extreme versions of “us,” and “them” into more extreme versions of “them.” The sharp balkanization of American liberals and conservatives—with all the dire consequences for civic harmony and national cohesion—is largely a result of each side’s ability to live entirely inside the storyverses of the Left or the Right.
I am not sure if there is a solution to this problem. He talks about authoritarian nations imposing a top down approved narrative for the population. Gotta say – not a fan. In fact, I'm going to file that one away under solutions that are worse than the problems they are addressing. Diverging storyverses could be mitigated to some extent by using an aggregator. Social media and its daily dosage of outrage porn also discourages any sort of in-depth analysis. When our emotions are triggered at the expense of our reason it's kind of an uphill battle. Another part of the problem is whether one is inclined to approach narrative in terms of instrumentality or ontology. Should the best narrative win or should the truest narrative win? Should the end pummel the means into submission? Is the noble lie good because it is noble or bad because it is a lie?
All told, story is subversive, story is instructive, story is persuasive, and story is potentially divisive.
'To summarize, telling just gives us the meaning. Showing forces us to figure out the meaning for ourselves, and when we do this, we take ownership of that meaning. In this way, great storytellers play the psychological equivalent of the cuckoo bird’s trick: they make us feel that the notions they’ve laid like eggs in our minds are actually our own.'
While I don't think (most) people writing stories are actively deceptive as the bird in the analogy above is, he does have a point. Inasmuch as we are inclined to get anything more out of a story than escapism, I suppose we have to do the hard work ourselves: step back from the story, reflect on the story, and perhaps extract some general and abstract statements we feel it might be making from the story. And then, of course, decide if we agree. A quote attributed by some to Aristotle:
'It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without accepting an idea.'
Something our increasingly censorious culture could certainly take to heart.
2022 communication-logic-rhetoric culture
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Dora Okeyo
26 books · 172 followers
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June 27, 2021
Now more than ever, we find ourselves consuming and being bombarded by stories from ever angle-and reading this book reminded me of the power of narrative.
In social media today it's more about the power of a hashtag or trend- and once everyone is talking about it, it's difficult to take time to sieve through the truth from the lies. This book looks at the story, the oldest form of communication of human beings, takes us back to history and historical events to best understand how the one thing we love and are good at can ultimately destroy us.
As a Reader and Writer, this book is a great conversation to have. The author does not immediately say "watch what you say" or "sieve what you hear," he takes you through the journey of stories and story telling and misconceptions of them as well.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.
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The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down
Jonathan Gottschall
3.76
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Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it
Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it’s the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization’s greatest ills—environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare—you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.
Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.
With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”
GenresNonfictionPsychologySciencePoliticsPhilosophyNeuroscienceEvolution
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272 pages, Hardcover
First published November 21, 2021
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Jonathan Gottschall14 books128 followers
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Jonathan Gottschall is an American literary scholar, the leading younger figure in literature and evolution. He teaches at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. He completed graduate work in English at State University of New York at Binghamton, where he worked under David Sloan Wilson.
His work The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer describes the Homeric epic poems Iliad and Odyssey in terms of evolutionary psychology, with the central violent conflicts in these works driven by the lack of young women to marry and the resulting evolutionary legacy, as opposed to the violent conflicts being driven by honor or wealth.
Literature, Science and a New Humanities advocates that the humanities, and literary studies in particular, need to avail themselves of quantitative and objective methods of inquiry as well as the traditional qualitative and subjective, if they are to produce cumulative, progressive knowledge, and provides a number of case studies that apply quantitative methods to fairy and folk tale around the world to answer questions about human universals and differences.
Gottschall was profiled by the New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work was featured in an article in Science describing literature and evolution.
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BlackOxford
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January 5, 2022
The Essential Poison
Sugar-coating hemlock doesn’t reduce its toxicity but I’ll bet it would be a real boost to sales. Perhaps this is the theory behind Jonathan Gottschall’s book about language. He makes his concern explicit. “I think of storytelling as humanity’s ‘essential poison,’” he says. By describing the poison in terms of stories and claiming we can tell the difference between better and worse stories, Gottschall implies that certain species-death is avoidable if we read the instructions on the label. Socrates, I’m sure, would object to the pitch on moral as well as health grounds.
Oddly, Gottschall doesn’t think scientists and mathematicians tell stories. This is because he dissociates stories from language, so that he can later claim a sort of priority for science in checking prose stories. But the specialised languages of formulas and equations are as much stories as The Story Paradox itself, including all the messy conclusions of self-referentiality. It’s part of his programme to make the medicine go down easier I suppose.
Gottschall also would like us to think that stories only became problematic with the internet and social media. This is, of course, ridiculous as the history of religion and its varied myths, all of which he cites, demonstrates so obviously. In fact Gottschall has got the chronology wrong. Stories created the internet. Language is the fundamental technology. Gossip is the killer app that allowed the species Homo Sapiens to survive in a world of stronger, faster, and more quick-witted predators. Language creates the collective human mind which is the most predatory instrument on the planet, perhaps in the cosmos. As Gottschall notes correctly:
“Behind all the factors driving civilization’s greatest ills—political polarization, environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare, and hatred—you’ll always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.’
Gottschall thinks we can escape what he calls the magic of stories by knowing that they’re stories. Such an escape however would require some sort of final story about stories, an ultimate story like say that of the Catholic Church in its doctrinal statements, or the Fundamentalist’s Bible or the much sought after Theory of Everything in Physics. But these ultimate stories are just more of the same, that is, hopeless attempts to evade the hideous necessity of language through yet more language. Nevertheless Gottschall wants us to have hope, to think that he and we can discern better from worse stories. According to him, the solution is at hand, “We need more reason in the world.”
Where is such reason to be found? Gottschall thinks he knows: “Above all, we need to double down on our commitment to science because science is for standing up to stories.” Has he never heard of epistemology, that centuries-old failed attempt to identify better and worse scientific stories? In other words, his buck-passing solution to what he calls “a pandemic of conspiratorial thinking” has no credibility whatsoever. There is no vaccine (or anti-venom) that can cure us. His book is just another catalogue of useless, largely pornographic, anecdotes about QAnon, Trump, Hitler, Stalin and the various other nutcases who have committed atrocities.
I take the publication of this book as helpful in only one respect - evidence that the the quality editorial staff at Basic Books has deteriorated markedly over recent years.
aesthetics american epistemology-language
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Jaidee
590 reviews · 1,138 followers
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October 1, 2022
2.5"glib, over-reaching, yet still worthwhile" stars !!
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Perseus books for an e-copy. This was released November 2021. I am providing my honest review.
I want to describe to you how this book went down for me. It is a wednesday evening and there is an alumni continuing ed lecture that you are sort of interested in attending but you already know how it will go down. The lecturer has accolades coming out of his ying yang and in the audience will be the semi intelligent left leaning liberals that are financially comfortable oooohing and aaaahing and nodding their heads in agreement while sipping their Chablis but only half listening as they are exhausted from their mid management careers and would rather be Skyping with their extramarital affair. The audience is multicultural and very very woke but they are envious of their former classmates' larger homes and are distressed by the possibility of a mens' shelter being built two streets down.....do you get my drift...that is the narrative that came up for me during this read....
This is not an academic book but a presentation of strongly held beliefs held about the intersectionality of our human need for narrative, increasing isolation and the increasing influence of social media in our lives tied together by an entertaining array of soft science research, anecdotes and humor that only ladies with three glasses of wine would giggle at....
I am not saying that this did not open up ideas for me or I did not enjoy to a degree but the authorial voice and lack of organization led to this being a rather ho hum evening.
With a lot of work this could have been much more impactful and helpful...which I believe is what the author intended....
This is my story and I'm sticking to it....
two-ana-half-stars-books
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Nelson Zagalo
9 books · 322 followers
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December 1, 2021
I cannot call a book something that is nothing but a jumble of ideas and phrases stuck together to manipulate whoever reads it. I can't even say that Jonathan Gottschall tells a story, because telling a story implies cohesion and discursive unity, and here we have anything but that. Gottschall grabs everything from everywhere - various scientific, technological and cultural areas - that can somehow support his premise, and sets up a house of cards to sell his ideas. He just forgot that rhetoric needs ethos to work, not just logic and emotion. It is almost painful to see Gottschall, someone who teaches in higher education, using research work by multiple colleagues, which are related to concrete issues, being cited distorted or summoning the results for what he is interested in, just to offer proof of authority to the discourse he constructs. This we call manipulative discourse, without any respect for the readers. If in his previous book, "The Storytelling Animal" (analysis VI), we already felt much of this, and which at the time I considered to be an "absolutist approach", in this new book, besides not adding anything, the approach slips into an attempt to inculcate fear and panic, hoping with this to attract the lights to sell more books.
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Não posso chamar livro a algo que não passa de um emaranhado de ideias e frases coladas juntas para manipular quem lê "The Story Paradox" (2021). Nem sequer posso dizer que Jonathan Gottschall conte uma história, porque contar uma história implica coesão e unidade discursiva, e aqui temos tudo menos isso. Gottschall agarra em tudo de todo o lado — diversas áreas científicas, tecnológicas e culturais — que possam de algum modo suportar as suas premissas, e monta um castelo de cartas para vender as sua ideias. Só esqueceu que a retórica para funcionar precisa de Ethos, não chega lógica e emoção. É quase doloroso ver Gottschall, alguém que ensina no ensino superior, usar trabalhos de múltiplos colegas, que estão relacionados com questões concretas, que ele cita distorcendo ou convocando os resultados para o que lhe interessa, apenas para oferecer prova de autoridade ao discurso que constrói. A isto chamamos discurso manipulativo, sem qualquer respeito pelos leitores. Se no seu livro anterior, "The Storytelling Animal" (análise VI), já se sentia muito disto, e que na altura considerei como "abordagem absolutista", neste novo livro além de não vir acrescentar nada, a abordagem resvala para a tentativa de inculcar o medo e o pânico esperando com isso atrair as luzes para a venda de mais livro.
Comentário completo em português no Virtual Illusion:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
human_engage narrative_study
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Rossdavidh
512 reviews · 154 followers
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March 18, 2022
When I was finishing my review of Jonathan Gottschall's last book ("The Storytelling Animal", see here), I lamented that, after having convinced the reader (well, this reader anyway) that storytelling is one of the most fundamental things about humanity, he didn't take on the topic of whether or not our storytelling impulse might be a source of trouble now, given the many changes in how we tell each other stories (media used, reach, etc.). In his newest book, Gottschall takes on the topic of the dangers of storytelling. I awaited the delivery of it with some excitement, and cracked the cover with a bit of mental preparation to have my mind blown.
Of course, I had overdone it. There is still, I think, too much we don't really know about how story works on the human mind, and Gottschall is forced to admit as much:
"Early in my research for this book, I spent a morning in the lounge of the college psychology department, eagerly perusing the tables of contents and indexes of about twenty recent textbooks from different subfields of psychology. I was scanning for references to any variant of the word 'story' or 'narrative'. I had my notebook out to scribble down ideas, concepts, and references to journal articles to run down. When I finished the notebook paper remained pristine. I got zero hits.
The science of story exists, and this book couldn't have been written without it. But it's still a very young science, where the known is dwarfed by the unknown. And far from moving toward its rightful place near the heart of the human sciences, story science hasn't even penetrated the textbooks...Excuse me while I whisper in the ears of ambitious young researchers: The tree of story science is heavy with toothsome, low-hanging fruit. Go feast yourself and grow fat in reputation."
So, while Gottschall does not have the fruits of that young science yet to present to us, he does have what I call the One Big Idea of his book, which is an idea about what 'story' is, and what it tells us about what language is. Language is not, primarily, used to communicate. Not really, not most of the time. We do, yes, occasionally say, "could you hand me the salt, please" or "turn left here", but the vast majority of our use of language is not for the purpose of communicating information. Instead, it's for the purposes of manipulating each other. We talk, to sway how other people think, rather than to merely convey some information. What is the term we use, to distinguish between something that merely conveys information, and something that instead (or in addition) sways our emotions, stirs our hearts, perhaps even calls us to action?
The term is "story". It's what's normally lacking in a textbook, and it's why they're mostly dull (and ironically as a result uninformative). It's what _is_ there in an excellent piece of popular science writing, and of course, fiction (which in most cases achieves the manipulation without even bothering with any information about anything real at all). Story is, therefore, both profoundly powerful and, as a result, profoundly dangerous. All the more so because it is so poorly understood.
There was a moment in the mid-20th century, when America (and perhaps other nations as well) had a bit of a legislative freak-out about the dangers of subliminal advertising. The fear was that our minds could be controlled by seeing or hearing advertisements too dim to be consciously perceived. It turns out that this is almost entirely bogus, but there is a similar problem in front of us, now and forever, so much more dangerous not only because it actually works, but also because we would greatly resent any effort to protect us from it. The difference is that, in nearly all cases now, the only covert message that the storyteller (movie director, script writer for a TV series, best-selling author, news journalist, politician) is actually trying to slip into our minds is:
"Pay attention to me".
Now, it is questionable whether the propaganda of previous ages, which certainly wanted people's attention but wanted it for some other purpose, was actually any less dangerous. Still there is most decidedly something chilling about comparing our own storytelling input to that of, say, a medieval peasant. They spent most of the day doing manual labor, mostly without saying anything, perhaps sometimes singing a work song but not ingesting story after story. For any century prior to the 20th, storytelling (and storylistening) had to wait until the end of the day, or the depths of the winter. In 2020, while Gottschall was writing his book, Americans (in part due to the pandemic) for the first time spent more time watching TV than working: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.... It ought to horrify us how much of our lives we spend watching fictional depictions of somebody else's life, instead of living our own.
Unfortunately, while Gottschall is able to tell a pretty decent story himself, he doesn't really have as much information in this book as I was hoping for, either. In some ways, this is not his fault; he's trying to convince us that storytelling is worth serious scientific study, not tell us what the discoveries and conclusions of such study might be. But I did find it a bit of a letdown.
But then there were moments like this, when he turns his attention to Facebook:
"[Facebook] hasn't thrived because it discovered a new way of capturing attention. In large part, its algorithm just independently discovered the oldest way of capturing attention - the universal grammar of storytelling - and figured out how to distribute it on a colossal scale. The intelligence behind the algorithm may be artificial, but the narrative psychology it exploits is entirely natural. To wish the negative externalities of Facebook away is a near thing to wishing away the universal grammar of storytelling. It's to fantasize that social media companies are creating demand for dark, divisive, and morally provocative material rather than responding to it. It's therefore to fantasize that a different algorithm serving as a router for narratives of truth, goodness, and positivity could perform almost as well. But no matter the business model (free, subscription, or whatever), social media platforms will naturally conform to the built-in regularities of narrative psychology, whereby the darker the narrative, the more it crackles with moralistic energy, the more likely it will win out in story wars."
That, is something you will not get by reading books from lesser minds. While I have little sympathy for Facebook, it is undoubtedly the case that much of our dissatisfaction with them, is much like our dissatisfaction with Congress being too partisan to get stuff done, or our dissatisfaction with fast food for not being nutritious: it is really our dissatisfaction with ourselves. It isn't ethical to cater to our darkest desires, but it is still a product primarily of our darkest desires, not Facebook's (or Congress', or fast food's). If we primarily paid attention to thoughtful, dispassionate, considerate, long essays, then the social media of our day would be serving them up to us. They don't want us to binge on anger and derision for others, any more than they want us to binge on pictures of cats. But they do want us to pay attention, as much as possible, and what works for that, is the nasty side of storytelling.
So, while Gottschall's book was not all that I hoped for, it was worth the reading, and if it is unable to illuminate a dark corner of the human mind, it is at least able to convey forcefully that it exists, and why we do desperately need it illuminated. I don't know if any of the "ambitious young researchers" that Gottschall refers to will read his book and accept the challenge, but I can only hope so.
red
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Andrea McDowell
569 reviews · 321 followers
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December 14, 2021
A short, effective book describing the upsides and downsides of the power of narrative on human beings and human society. As Gottschall points out: both the best and worst parts of our histories have been motivated by and founded on stories, whether good or bad, and we need to grapple with story's potential for harm as well as good. He also goes into how and why "bad" stories are often more compelling and shareable than "good" stories, given that there's no need for consistency with boring non-narrative facts and they can easily hijack very contagious elements like anger, outrage, and fear. Any number of covid conspiracy stories come to mind as examples.
2021 brain-stuff groundhog-day
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Ietrio
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November 24, 2021
There is no paradox here, only a weak story: the story of a entitled man who thumps his feet in a tantrum because the world doesn't heel to his ideal world whim.
junk
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Kressel Housman
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February 22, 2022
Sometimes, while reading a book, I think, “This is pretty good, but not fabulous. 4 stars.” Then I reach the ending, and it blows my mind. It casts everything that came before it in a brand new light. That’s how a book can earn a fifth star on the very last page.
This book was the opposite. All throughout, I was thinking, “Wow. This author is telling it like it is. 5 stars.” Then I reached the conclusion, and with a single word, the book lost me. That word was “hate.”
The author is a literature professor whose previous work has been on my to-read list for a while. It’s called The Storytelling Animal, and its thesis is that the human mind is constructed to process the world through stories. The current book revisits that thesis, but now that we’re living in a post-truth era where conspiracy theories abound, it’s clear why the author was motivated to explore the negative side of stories. Specifically, he pinpoints the need for a villain. Villainy is at the core of any conspiracy story. Psychologically, people need someone to scapegoat for the mess they find themselves in.
The thesis resonated with me for many reasons. First, as a Jew, I know all about being cast as the villain in someone else’s picture of the world. Early on in the book, the author recounts the events of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The perpetrator genuinely believed he was acting the role of the hero by ridding the world of some elderly Jews, as though we really are “the Elders of Zion” corrupting the world. It was similar for the young man who showed up at that DC pizza shop to liberate kids from pedophiles. He believed in a story he read online, and since nobody else was acting on it, he assumed the role of the hero vigilante. He went armed and prepared to kill the bad guys in his rescue of innocent kids. In his mind, it was a supremely moral act.
It’s easy to write these people off as gullible dupes, but consider how deeply stories affect you personally. I, for one, have a lifelong phobia based on some imagery I saw on TV at the age of four or five. Stories also inspired the games my sister and I used to play with our friends: Charlie’s Angels, Little House on the Prairie, Gilligan’s Island. I think that was the beginning of my hobby of writing fanfic, and I know I’m not the only one who “lives” in these stories. I’ve heard it said that Roger Stone is cosplaying the “wise guys” in mafia movies, and of course, a persona from reality TV made it all the way to the most powerful office in the world. Presumably, he bought his own act – perhaps not entirely, but enough to convince himself that he’s a patriot who’s been wronged. We’re all the heroes of our own stories. It’s our cognitive bias. We’re just wired that way.
So can we be heroes without having villains to fight? Professor Gottschall cites the movie “Babel” as an example of a villain-less story, but it’s the exception. People want happy endings, and above all, that means seeing that justice is served. It’s true even in love stories. Sure, we’re happy that Cinderella marries Prince Charming, but the ending is incomplete without the humiliation of the evil stepsisters. In the Grimms’ version, it’s pretty grisly. In order to fit into the glass slipper, one sister cuts off her toes and the other her heels. This kind of schadenfreude is baked into our sense of a good story.
As a writer, I’m having trouble with this myself. It’s probably one of the main reasons I took the book so much to heart. For over two years now, I’ve been working on a Beauty and the Beast (Rumbelle) fanfic. The basic Beauty and the Beast plot might be what Professor Gottschall would call “empathy for the devil.” My story includes a whole meta-narrative about it. One character is in a quarrel with the Brothers Grimm about villainy. (It’s seen most clearly in Chapter 20, if anyone’s curious.)
Workshopping the story has taught me a lot about people’s inner processes, and their reactions correlate with Professor Gottschall’s observations. The Beast is a hidden hero. He has to have a good side for Belle to be right about him. But when I make him too kind, people say I’m straying from the original. Then I give him an antagonist to punish, and readers hate him. . . except for the fans of the TV show. They love the Beast/Rumpelstiltskin no matter what. They want to see the antagonists suffer more. They’ve said it about Belle’s non-love interest Gaston, and they say it about the Grimms. One of the story’s intended messages is that revenge isn’t justice, but it doesn’t seem to be landing. I am caught in the story paradox.
It’s because this book addressed issues that I care so deeply about that reading the word “hate” in the conclusion was such a turn-off. Professor Gottschall states that while we shouldn’t hate storytellers, and that we must pity the people who fall for them, we should hate stories. I’m sorry, but I just can’t get on board with that. Yes, we should question and deconstruct stories, especially when they demonize someone else, but hate? If stories are so intrinsic to how our minds work, then story-hatred is no different than self-hatred. That’s not a recipe to rebuild a better society. It seems to me that in advocating story-hate, Professor Gottschall fell into the villainy trap. He, too, got caught in the story paradox.
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Tim
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March 2, 2022
'I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.'
- James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes
Suppose you have a cat that needs medication. Your cat will not take her medication. Your cat does not like her medication. Your cat is plotting to smother you in your sleep because you keep trying to get her to take this horrible medication. What can you do? You mix what she needs (her medication) with what she enjoys (her food). This is the traditional function of story as this book outlines it. It is trying to impart something to you in a way that power point purveyors simply cannot. A parable is an example of this concept. However, the author notes that story can also have a dark side. You have a vermin problem. For some unfathomable reason they are loathe to ingest poison. What can you do? You mix what they eschew (the poison) with what they will willingly receive (their food). Indeed, medicine and poison are in one sense the same thing: a foreign substance being introduced into your body. What differentiates them is their effect on you. One makes you better and the other makes you worse. Story can work like this by embedding ideas in your mind. It's basically the same idea as memes and memeplexes. While that terminology might be relatively new, the thought that it is conveying isn't. It has always been the case that the immaterial realm of ideas and information has required a physical medium to travel about in: squishy bundles of neurons, stone tablets, flash drives, interconnected computer networks. As the author describes it:
'It may help to think of the sway-making power of stories as the closest real-life equivalent to the force in Star Wars. Like the force, story is an all-pervasive field of dark and light energy that influences all of our actions. On the radio, on the news, on TV, on podcasts, on social media, in advertising, and in face-to-face yarning—we’re forever swimming through a turbulent sea of narratives, with rival stories churning against each other and buffeting us around.'
The contention of this book is that the original way of imparting ideas and information in order to change minds is still the best way because it does an end run around any barriers you might have in place to resist a particular idea or information cluster. Arguably the less overt they are, the more potent they are; people who recognize they are being manipulated usually respond by putting up a wall. The power of story isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is certainly more covert than overt in method. To use a word that is much in vogue in current online culture, stories are influencers.
Suppose you have some cause, crisis, or crusade you are amped up about and want to make people aware of. You might make a documentary that lists facts, figures, and have a voiceover by that one actor whose voice you recognize but can't put a name to. (You know the one I mean, right? Yeah, that guy.) The facts and figures approach is a more abstract approach. It might work or it might make people flick to the next channel. You could also pick a person integral to that cause, crisis, or crusade, craft the documentary around them and work all of the other stuff in along the way. Now people have a story. This is a more concrete approach. Another example. Suppose you wanted to demonstrate that people corrupt institutions and institutions corrupt people in a perpetual and seemingly never ending cycle, an overt way to do that would be to have a person stand at the front of a room and drone through a power point presentation filled with pie charts and bar graphs and historical records. A covert way would be to have them sit down and watch the HBO series The Wire from start to finish. Of the two, I know which would be more likely to make a lasting impression on me (Hint: It's not the power point presentation). To be fair, I will note a trade off here. The fictional narrative makes the point and underlines it. It gets your attention. However, the presentation (assuming no malevolent intent or ignorance of the facts on the part of the speaker) will be more accurate. It not only checks the veridicality of the narrative, it fills in all of the details. The advantages of story as summarized by the author:
'Storytellers enjoy a number of scientifically validated advantages over other types of messengers. First, and most basically, unlike some other forms of messaging, we love stories and the people who deliver them. Second, story is sticky (we process narrative much faster than other forms of communication and remember the information much better). Third, stories rivet attention like nothing else (think about how little your mind wanders during your favorite TV show or a novel you can’t put down). Fourth, good stories demand to be retold (think how hard it is not to spread that top-secret gossip or give away a spoiler), which means the messages in stories spread virally through social networks. And all of these advantages are driven by the fifth and most important advantage stories have over other forms of communication: they generate powerful emotion.'
Another point he makes is that everyone uses story to one degree or another to understand the world and themselves. That voice in our heads telling us about our past (where we have been), our present (where we are), and our future (where we are going) is much more than a clinical record of life events. We aren't cameras recording information to a hard drive. Your consciousness is providing a commentary track on all of this input. I don't think there are any exemptions to this narrative commentary, though perhaps there may be people not self-reflective enough to see they are not exemptions. In saying this, I am not saying that there is no such thing as truth, that no one can know anything about anything at all, that all knowledge is some kind of social construction, that any possible take on every possible issue is equally valid and worthy of consideration, or any of the other forms of applied postmodernism that are currently de rigueur . Are there any humans (myself included) that out of all humans have reached peak objectivity and are thus capable of placing themself outside of any possible framework that structures their existence and a set of moral values that is at least somewhat concomittant with it? It could be a fully articulated worldview or it might be some vague notions about – to co-opt Douglas Adams – Life, the Universe, and Everything but there isn't anybody that doesn't have a framework; there are just people that have a framework that is tacit and unarticulated and those that don't. Something being unexamined does not mean it isn't influencing your actions and behaviour, it just means the influence - like the framework itself - is invisible to you. It's kind of like culture. Culture is 'just the way things are.' Tacit frameworks are 'just the way I am.'
This book also tackles the hyperpoliticization of absolutely every facet of western culture and notes that while the problem may at times be a problem of facts, it is most definitely a problem of narratives:
Going from the pre-Guttenberg age in which formal storytelling was overwhelmingly consumed communally in smallish groups, to the mass audiences of the broadcast age, to the new age of story “narrowcasting” represents a sea change in human life. It amounts to a dangerous social experiment that seems to be going awry. Story has gone from being the great uniter, as James Poniewozik puts it, to the great divider. Story used to drag us all to the middle and make us more alike. Now we’re all in our own little storyverses, and instead of making us more alike, story makes us into more extreme versions of ourselves. It allows us to live in story worlds that reinforce our biases rather than challenge them. The end result is that everything consumed in our storylands just makes me more me, and you more you. It also makes “us” into more extreme versions of “us,” and “them” into more extreme versions of “them.” The sharp balkanization of American liberals and conservatives—with all the dire consequences for civic harmony and national cohesion—is largely a result of each side’s ability to live entirely inside the storyverses of the Left or the Right.
I am not sure if there is a solution to this problem. He talks about authoritarian nations imposing a top down approved narrative for the population. Gotta say – not a fan. In fact, I'm going to file that one away under solutions that are worse than the problems they are addressing. Diverging storyverses could be mitigated to some extent by using an aggregator. Social media and its daily dosage of outrage porn also discourages any sort of in-depth analysis. When our emotions are triggered at the expense of our reason it's kind of an uphill battle. Another part of the problem is whether one is inclined to approach narrative in terms of instrumentality or ontology. Should the best narrative win or should the truest narrative win? Should the end pummel the means into submission? Is the noble lie good because it is noble or bad because it is a lie?
All told, story is subversive, story is instructive, story is persuasive, and story is potentially divisive.
'To summarize, telling just gives us the meaning. Showing forces us to figure out the meaning for ourselves, and when we do this, we take ownership of that meaning. In this way, great storytellers play the psychological equivalent of the cuckoo bird’s trick: they make us feel that the notions they’ve laid like eggs in our minds are actually our own.'
While I don't think (most) people writing stories are actively deceptive as the bird in the analogy above is, he does have a point. Inasmuch as we are inclined to get anything more out of a story than escapism, I suppose we have to do the hard work ourselves: step back from the story, reflect on the story, and perhaps extract some general and abstract statements we feel it might be making from the story. And then, of course, decide if we agree. A quote attributed by some to Aristotle:
'It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without accepting an idea.'
Something our increasingly censorious culture could certainly take to heart.
2022 communication-logic-rhetoric culture
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Dora Okeyo
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June 27, 2021
Now more than ever, we find ourselves consuming and being bombarded by stories from ever angle-and reading this book reminded me of the power of narrative.
In social media today it's more about the power of a hashtag or trend- and once everyone is talking about it, it's difficult to take time to sieve through the truth from the lies. This book looks at the story, the oldest form of communication of human beings, takes us back to history and historical events to best understand how the one thing we love and are good at can ultimately destroy us.
As a Reader and Writer, this book is a great conversation to have. The author does not immediately say "watch what you say" or "sieve what you hear," he takes you through the journey of stories and story telling and misconceptions of them as well.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.
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