Why tell stories anyway?

It’s a simple enough question.

And while we’re at it, let’s throw in a couple more for good measure: why, throughout human history, have women and men insisted on ‘making sense’ of life by singing, painting, sculpting and writing poetry about it? And, why do these poems, songs and works of art so often speak the language of God and of stories bigger than what we ordinarily see or experience;

There’s a school of thought (Nietzsche et al) that argues that this aesthetic response to the world is simply a throwback to a time when that was all we had, before science and the evolution of rational thought had uncovered the convenient world of ‘fact’.  Stories and the language of ‘God’, they say, are nothing more than a fossil of a previous era, embedded in the childhood of rational speech. 

In his book, Real Presences, however, George Steiner argues the reverse.  We make sense of our world, he argues, only by exploring, postulating and enacting through song, verse and the visual impact of the canvas, the ‘necessary possibility’ of God – or, at the very least, a story that is bigger than we are.

The problem with science, according to people like Steiner, is that it too quickly assumed an all-important role and dismissed the art of telling stories, along with our creative imagination, to the childhood of humanity.

And so we became a people overwhelmed by information – with no sense of the ‘big picture’ or how to narrate the individual pieces of our lives into any meaningful whole.

The term for this story-less state of mind is post-modernity.  It was grown up.  It was cool.   But ultimately it destroyed our power to dream, create, innovate and believe.

Twenty years after the publication of Steiner’s book, the world has changed.

In fact, says Daniel Pink in his now almost seminal text, A Whole New Mind, we are currently seeing a radical sea-change of opinion: ‘a seismic – though as yet undetected – shift’ in the way we think.  To cut a long story short:

We are moving from an economy and a society built of the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.

So to whom does the future belong?  According to Pink, it is no less than the artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, and big picture thinkers who will be winners in this new society.  In fact, he concludes, stories will once again assume their rightful place.  After all, ‘stories… provide context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters.’

So where, ultimately, do you, do I, fit in?

According to Steiner, we need to go really big picture to answer this one.

Christian or not, he explains, all of us know of a Friday that speaks of injustice, of interminable suffering, of terrible waste, and of the absence of love.  We also know about a Sunday; a day that signifies the day of our liberation, justice, resolution and hope.

We know of these days and yet, for now at least, ‘ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday.  Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other.’

On the Saturday, this longest of days, we sing, tell stories, and imagine a better world.  Of course, looking back from where we have come, our words can hardly begin to capture the terror, pain, and sheer awfulness of the Friday; and, at the same time, we know that when we finally reach our Utopia, even our best stories, along with all that is aesthetic, will appear to have no logic or necessity. But without these stories, says Steiner, how could we be patient?

So perhaps the question wasn't quite so simple after all.