Welcome.
This is the LiteralMayhem podcast. My name is Martin and I’ll be your host…
This first episode is gonna be a short one… just something to get us started. A little chat about what we’re doing and why. And if there’s one thing that we could say—this—podcast—is--about… is that it’s a story about stories.
In college, I majored in philosophy… a discipline that often leans heavily on stories, in the form of examples, illustrations, anecdotes, hypotheticals, to investigate all manner of questions, big and small, about reality, the world, and our place in it.
In my professional life, I spent several decades in public relations and communications, essentially as a paid storyteller… As I said to a boss of mine once, we were doing “hair and makeup for corporate America.”
I’d add to that now that our medium was storytelling. Yes we were doing professional “spin.” But at its heart, all communications disciplines are about telling a convincing enough story that your audience buys your version of reality… and most important acts accordingly.
Because, if you can’t get your audience to understand and feel DEEP inside how good your idea is for them, if you can’t get them to internalize the power of your story, then your audience will be lured away toward someone who can. But if you know how to tell an engaging story, and engage people and hold their attention, you can sell just about anyone on just about anything.
Later in life, I went to back to school and got a Master’s degree in creative writing, which brought me full circle… back to all those complicated questions about the intersection of real life and theories about real life… and how stories play an important role in our understanding of the world.
So here I’d like to make three quick points about the importance of story… take it as setting the stage, setting the table, putting a stake in the ground… pick your metaphor…
The first point is that there’s a branch of psychology that believes “virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences.” [ML1] And even while others in the field disagree about the supremacy of story, they still acknowledge that stories hold “a privileged status in the cognitive system.” [ML2]
Psychologist and researcher Dan McAdams puts it this way: “Human beings are storytellers by nature… The story is a natural package for organizing many different kinds of information. Storytelling appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves… and our world… to others.”
In that way, stories serve as our internal filter through which we experience the world… they’re a template into which we fit experiences as they happen, to give them meaning. Stories are a model for how we should act and respond to the world around us.
And here’s a second point about stories…
We don’t just live out our stories. Our stories are so embedded within us, so integral to our perceptions, decisions, and actions… so invisible… that as human beings, we are a walking, talking, living, breathing collection of stories.
Our stories are so immanent within us, that we don’t distinguish our stories from ourselves.
John Holmes, a psychology professor at Waterloo University, says that, “Storytelling isn’t just how we construct our identities. Stories are our identities.” [emphasis original]
Who am I? The answer is a complex tapestry of interwoven stories. Who are you? And who are you to me? Another set of stories interlocking with the first. Is something I did right or wrong? Well it all depends on the story you use to interpret what that means.
Someone speeds by and cuts you off in traffic.. What an A HOLE!!!... that’s the story you tell yourself… unless that person is rushing to the emergency room because a loved one was admitted to the hospital?… Does that additional information change the story? That additional information, maybe?
That brings us to the third and most important point about the power of stories…
Very often we’d rather cling to the stories we tell ourselves about the world, than see the world as it really is. When a deeply held story is contradicted by facts, it’s quite common for those facts to give way before the story does.
It’s a habit that explains people’s growing affection for, say, conspiracy theories.
Powerful stories are difficult to dislodge once they take root. A weakness that’s not unique to conspiracists. It’s a trait we all share to a certain degree.
According to Prof. Holmes: “For better or worse, stories are a very powerful source of self-persuasion, and they are highly internally consistent. Evidence that doesn’t fit the story is going to be left behind.” [ML3]
Once a story gets embedded into our identity there is an enormous psychological investment in that story, and an enormous psychological cost to giving it up. Giving up our core stories, especially stories that form our identity, is like “relinquishing all knowledge of who one is and what the world is like.”
To paraphrase the title of the novel by writer Chinua Achebe… Thinks Fall Apart.
So this now becomes our departure point for the LiteralMayhem podcast… We all face an enormous challenge in that world is changing faster than our stories about the world.
The world is changing so fast that our stories can’t keep up.
And all too often, when the world outruns our stories, we nevertheless cling to those stories and refuse to see the facts. As professor Holmes says, “Evidence that doesn’t fit gets left behind.”
Resulting in what is, quite often, and quite literally, mayhem.
I want to give you a few tangible examples of what I mean… so it’s less academic sounding, more concrete, and hopefully more meaningful.
Here’s a thought experiment: What would you think if told you that Nature no longer exists?
I’m not talking about natural forces… Surely hurricanes exist… floods… earthquakes… wild fires… acts of God all still exist. That’s not arguable. And surely there are still pockets of teeming, diverse wildlife on our planet. That’s also not arguable.
What I’m talking about is the capital-N “Nature” of our romantic imagination… the magical, untamable, irrepressible capital-N “Nature” ... the Nature as we idealize it in the colorful TV version of our imagination … the capital-N Nature of David Attenborough programs, and The Undersea World of Jaques Cousteau, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom…
THAT version of nature… with it’s kaleidoscopic, unstoppable, endless abundance…
We have this romantic ideal of Nature writ-large that’s not just eternal and impervious to man, but also enveloping. It’s a story we tell ourselves that Nature is always and forever will be BIGGER than us… a story that Nature holds within its grasp all of humanity, human civilization, and human striving.
THAT version of Nature no longer exists… it no longer survives on its own terms, but on ours.
It’s well-accepted now that live in the Anthropocene Age in which man, not Nature, is the defining force on this planet.
There is no place on this planet so remote that it hasn’t been impacted by the scale of human industry. Forever chemicals like PFAS and PCBs and micro plastics are found in the flesh of animals in supposedly pristine ecosystems from the arctic to the Amazon… In fact, micro plastics are accumulating in even our own brains…
Species extinction, depending on the species and the region, is happening at a rate 10 to 100 times faster the natural baseline. The loss of ice from global glaciers, driven by climate change, is no longer measured in millions of tons, or even billions of tons, but now TRILLIONS OF TONS.
We’re building dams and extracting groundwater at a scale large enough to affect the Earth’s axis and rotation.
The fact is… capital-N Nature is now captive to human civilization. It is now our property. It’s chaotic lavishness. It’s seemingly limitless abundance. It’s supposed unstoppability, imperviousness, and eternal grandeur. All of that is now contained by us… as a subset of our human world. Not the other way around.
And I’d argue that our inability to control our planet destroying ways is largely due to our inability to give up our old story that Nature is eternal, irrepressible and uncontainable, and that we are still somehow smaller than Nature.
The longer we hold fast to that idealized fable, that idealized myth, the longer we’ll feel free to conquer Nature, degrade it, and harvest it.
For such an eternal thing as Nature of course will endure. Won’t it? It always has. So, it always will. Right?
Except that it won’t, unless we give up the old story and create a new one that’s more truthful and recognizes that in this relationship between man and Nature, it’s Nature that’s now the junior partner not us.
Nature’s survival will depend entirely on our husbandry. Placed under our protection, as if under a cloche.
But as Prof Holmes has said, facts often give way before a story does.
We still reflexively want to hold onto a story that has governed our understanding of Nature for eons, since the time of neolithic cave paintings. The story of man struggling to tame the wildness of the world has for millennia driven exploration, literature, art, national identity, science, and human imagination.
It’s hard for us to completely reimagine that relationship… that us little ole’ humans could destroy something as big as an entire fucking planet.
That old story of limitless, irrepressible, all-enveloping Nature is over. It’s done. It’s not coming back. Ever. We won. Nature lost.
That old romantic version of Nature being bigger than us, enveloping everything and every one… that version of Nature, exists only in our imagination and whatever’s left of it in the real world will continue to exist only at our mercy.
And yet we desperately don’t want to lose that old romantic story of grand all-powerful Nature… so we continue clinging to it, even at our own peril.
Here’s another question: In a globalized world, what is the meaning of national identity and culture? Do they even have meaning anymore? We want to believe they do… but do they really?
A great deal of ink and political capital has been spilled trying to foment a backlash to the dilution of both. Nationalism and cultural pride are driving populist politics all over the world.
Put it this way… In his book, Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin had a lot to say about what culture is, and isn’t. He said, “culture is not a community basket weaving project, nor yet an act of God... something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they have been forced to deal.”
What he’s getting at is that the hallmarks of culture, like music and food and clothing, are all just expressions of how a specific people have historically coped with their specific circumstances and environment. But when stripped of that original context, those original specific circumstances and vicissitudes, all that music and food and clothing are just empty symbols that we consume in order to pretend we’re making an authentic connection to those places and those people who created those traditions.
Think about it this way. Culture is lived. Traditions are performed.
As a European cousin said to me once. “Sure Martin, we’re all Americans now.”
Her point was that while cultural practices persist, the “vicissitudes” we’re forced to deal with, to use Baldwin’s term, are looking more and more the same the world over. More and more homogenous, more and more deriving from commerce, consumption, class status, and technology.
Is it possible that the economic integration of the world—the globalization of commerce—has already outrun our deeply held identity stories of nationhood and culture, and that our new reality is just waiting us out, waiting however many decades or centuries it may take for our stories to catch up?
Populist politicians all over the world are betting that people will cling so fiercely to cultural stories of identity that they’ll be able to leverage that into lasting power for themselves.
But in this contest between global commerce and authentic national cultures, it’s an open question what happens to culture from here on out. We cling to our cultural identity stories, even though the unique circumstances that created those cultural practices have radically changed. Some of them have even disappeared.
So, what does it mean to have a unique culture when the vicissitudes we all face are much more alike than they are different? Does culture just become a series of parades and festivals, a book of old local recipes, and a bunch of dates on a calendar? Is the culture enterprise merely a series of trappings that we consume, and that we sell to each other, or that we portray in art as a freeze-frame of Baldwin’s lost vicissitudes?
At what point is it all just green beer on St. Patrick’s Day?
Here’s another thought experiment… we tell ourselves that technology is a tool for human advancement. And yet, in our increasingly digital world, it’s looking more like Henry David Thoreau was right in that we have become “tools of our tools.”
Thoreau’s warning mostly concerned materialism, that “Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
He worried that we were becoming slaves to commerce. Organizing our human lives purely to serve the furtherance of inhuman systems of economics and money. That those systems were controlling us, and not the other way around. An early warning that “we’re all Americans now.”
In the same way, perhaps even more pronounced, technology is increasingly governing our lives, creating an algorithmic life that dictates how we socialize, how we learn, how we govern. We let it surveil us and prompt us, and even when it prompts us to be dependent we willingly submit. How much are we adapting to the demands of technology, rather than the other way around? How much have we become tools of those tools?
The question is exceedingly important in an age of AI, where hype and corrupted storytelling aim to lure us into giving AI and its owners more and more power over our individual, political, artistic, cultural, and social affairs, even in some ways power over reality itself.
In our next podcast, we’ll take on the issue of hype, especially as it relates to technology and AI… and how hype storytelling takes advantage of our bias toward believing in the positive power of technology. And how hypsters and AI boosters activate that bias in a very self-interested way, to get the economic and political outcomes that are best for them, regardless of the impact on us.
The inherent dangers and destructive power of AI are well-defined and well-known. Those dangers are challenging our long-held faith in the positive power of technology and technological progress to improve our lives.
And yet, when faced with danger, we respond with a shrug that it’s inevitable, or unavoidable… or we buy into the hype and cling to our mythical story about technology’s boundless positive potential, regardless of what the facts are.
Either way we’re adapting our lives in service to the advancement of technology rather than the other way around… even at the potential degradation of a human-made world.
And finally, what is gender? We thought we knew. But that story—and all the social customs that come with it—have been challenged, in many, many ways.
The LGBTQ rights movement has challenged many long-held stories—many that based their own prejudice in talk of morality, sin, and God’s will. It has challenged traditional religious-based stories about what marriage is, and increasingly the trans rights movement has called on us all to rethink our most fundamental stories about gender.
And that one often feels like a very big ask, given that rethinking our story of gender, to make room for their gender, necessarily requires us to rethink our own… considering the possibility that all of us exist on a gender continuum and not in a socially constructed binary. And predictably, those calls to abandon our old stories about gender have resulted in furious backlash politics that has reached the highest rungs of power, in the most powerful countries in the world, and become the personal crusade of the richest man in the world.
So, what is gender? Do we know, or do we just think we know? Is the story we tell ourselves still relevant? Is it still true? Was it ever true?
Can a computer think? Does it have “intelligence”? What does it mean to be “better than humans”? If a computer can be better than humans, then what does it mean to be “human?” We really need to know. Do we?
If computer can digest all the art ever made by humans, and find patterns that a human brain cannot perceive, and then use it to make art… can we actually call it original? Can we call it art? Or, which is my own view, is it just algorithmic vomit?
And what kind of new story do we need to be telling ourselves about our relationship to Nature when we’re powerful enough to tilt the axis of the entire fucking planet?
Can authentic culture survive several more centuries of global economic homogenization? What happens to nations and national cultures when each one is merely a shop-front in a global online strip mall?
Novelist Nicole Krauss recently wrote a piece for the The Washington Post on reading, writing and literature as sources of freedom… and it’s worth quoting a long excerpt here:
It’s made me deeply aware of the long arc of history, which saw the rise and fall of almost everything: democracies and dictators, gods and humans, war and peace, that which was feared, and that which was loved and cherished. And though the countless crossroads people arrived at in history, arguing about which way to go, may have since faded into the indelible road chosen, I’m also acutely aware that we now stand at another.
That the direction we choose will determine not only our children’s future, but the future of what it will mean to be human — and the conditions under which human life will unfold. Whether the still relatively young values of liberalism will survive, whether reading and writing will continue to be the underpinnings of culture, whether the constructs and algorithms of AI will replace the freedoms of selfhood, whether we will dominate and destroy nature or salvage and protect it: We now stand before these questions. Stand and, I hope, pause.
Because without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.
I’d suggest that reading, and understanding the importance of story, does another very essential thing… it helps us read the world… it helps us read the living stories we’re writing with our real lives in the real world… and it helps us guide the writing of those stories.
The question is… in a world of dying stories, where people no longer know how to read, where do we go next?
With respect to so many cherished stories, we do stand at a crossroads that asks us to look dispassionately and objectively at the stories we tell ourselves about the world, asking whether those stories still hold, or whether we need to rewrite them for a new era, and a new age.
I toyed with the idea of calling this podcast, A Squishy Place… because we live in a very fraught time, when so many of our deeply held, traditional, stories about ourselves and the world are being challenged, all at the same time.
And it’s happening so fast – faster than our stories can keep up – that it can feel hard to keep a solid footing, as the narrative ground under our feet keeps shifting and buckling and giving way.
In response… often in a furious backlash… we refuse to adjust our stories to the changing facts of our world. To a world that we have changed by our own hand. And as professor Homes pointed out, facts get left behind and we stubbornly cling to outdated stories and try to subdue the facts, forcing the world to conform to stories that are no longer true.
When we insist on backlash as a substitute for change, the result is often mayhem.
And that’s where we going to leave off, for now. I hope you’ll join us as we continue this discussion, this journey, this story about stories. I’ll do my best to make it interesting, challenging, surprising, and hopefully enjoyable.
Next week, we’ll be joined by Andrue Belsunces Gonçalves, a researcher in technology studies, and we’ll have a wide ranging discussion of hype. Hype stories. Hype narratives. The role of hype. What is hype? With a special emphasis on technology and articifial intelligence.
Until next time… thanks for listening. This has been… Literal Mayhem.
[ML1]Schank & Abelson
[ML2]Graesser, Ottati
[ML3]“Our Stories Ourselves” – MONITOR magazine of the AM Psych Assoc – by Sadie Dingfelder Jan 2011 Vol42 No1 … page 42 of print version
