The Story Paradox by Jonathan Gottschall

A Review

A few years ago, I stopped (for the most part) writing about political issues.I decided, instead, to focus on my writing, on my poetry and fiction — that is, on storytelling. I got tired of discussing politics and economics because I realized that I couldn’t make any headway with anyone. Everyone had their story, and they were sticking to it. No facts could seem to penetrate their minds — and if that was the case, why bother? Why not go back to doing what I had in fact gone to school to do: write stories.

Of course, the fact is that I was choosing to exchange one kind of story for another. I had what I considered a fact-based story of politics and economics, and I was attempting to use that story to persuade others to abandon their own stories (which they equally considered to be fact-based) in favor of mine. But, as Jonathan Gottschall points out in his provocative (but no less true for being provokative) book, The Story Paradox, that the most certain things in the world is that people read the world through the lens of story, and that people do not give up their stories without a fight.

Gottschall, who takes an evolutionary perspective on literature, has written several books, including The Storytelling Animal, which takes a much more optimistic view of human storytelling. In The Story Paradox, though, he considers the fact that there is a flip side to the unity stories bring, which is that they can and often are divisive. Like the brain chemical oxytocin, they not only make us feel love, but also hate for those who are not those we love.

A story must have several things. One, it must have a protagonist; two, it must have an antagonist; three, it must have a problem to be solved. Typically, the protagonist is the “good guy” (anti-heroes notwithstanding), and the antagonist is the “bad guy.” Of course, antagonists and protagonists are typically more complex than this — they may even switch places — particularly in novels. We could, for example, have a protagonist who is a good-hearted man who is driven to stealing for his family (like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables) and an antagonist (in this case, Inspector Javert) who, based on the information he has, thinks he’s after a robber and thus that he’s doing his duty as a an enforcer of the law. Indeed, Javert is such a good man that, when he learns how good Jean Valjean is, he cannot take the disconnect between what drove him to chase this man for many years and who he turned out be, he commits suicide. Les Miserables, then, does have a protagonist and an antagonist, but no villians.

Novels, plays, and poetry — and, at their best, TV shows and movies — typically provide us with complex characters where, even with the protagonists, we understand where they’re coming from (even if we don’t agree with them). I think we have a hard time not liking Macbeth, even though there’s little question he’s the villain of the story (along with his wife). However, not all stories are this way. Especially the stories that dominate our lives outside of literature. Most of those stories (and most of the most popular films — think of all the most recent superhero films) have clear good guys and bad guys. And this is especially clear in the political stories we believe.

The most successful politicians are good storytellers. Trump was a great storyteller, even if there were those who saw through his storytelling. He was such a great storyteller, that many of his followers cannot be told anything negative about him, and they believe the most outrageous lies he told. I have had devout Christians insist he was a good Christian man. How they bought into that story, despite the overwhelming evidence against it, is beyond me. Well, it’s not, actually, beyond me. The point of this review is to point out that Gottschall demonstrates that storytelling is powerful force, and a great storyteller will get you to believe almost anything.

Almost anything? Yes. We have stories about the earth being flat, about aliens building things like the great pyramids, and Jews controlling the world. We have the absurd beliefs of Q-Anon, and we have the conspiracy theories of too many feminists who believe there is a conspiracy among men to oppress women. The facts of global warming are obscured by the political stories about how to solve the problem: typically through socialism at the most extreme, but at least through more regulations, higher taxes, and concentrating political power in the hands of the storytellers themselves. This has resulted in counter-stories where global warming is denied outright.

The problem, then, is that when we have these kinds of stories, we end up creating social divisions. The communists had the story of the certain triumph of communism. The Nazis had the story that the Jews were the cause of all the world’s problems (and anything associated with the Jews, including “Jewish science” and capitalism). The most radical feminists have the story that men are consciously, actively oppressing women. Different racial and ethnic groups have stories that place other racial and ethnic groups in direct competition or even outright antagonism against them. History is replete with religious groups fighting against each other over which of their stories about deity is true. Republicans and Democrats increasingly simply see each other as evil. And more often than not, the only thing that repairs these divisions is to have a common enemy emerge. The U.S. became strongly cohesive after 9–11. We are faced with a common enemy, and that united us. At least, for a while. It didn’t take but a few years for the storytellers to divide us once again.

This isn’t to say, of course, that storytelling is all bad. That isn’t what either I or Gottschall are saying. It’s simply a warning that stories can have this kind of effect. And, historically, have typically had this effect. Group unity has almost always required an Other we can be against. That being said, though, stories have often created improvements in human life as well.

The economist Deirdre McCloskey has argued in many of her works that it was a change in storytelling that resulted in what she calls “the great enrichment” we saw taking place starting with the Renaissance. The story changed from businesspeople being villains to at least a neutral view of them. Moneymaking — including making money through interest on loans — was no longer seen as a barrier to getting into Heaven (remember Jesus saying that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven). With this changing attitude, more and more people went into business, more and more inventions were, as a result, created, and wealth increased throughout Europe. As this story has changed, so that now businessmen are villains who exploit us, who have to be regulated lest they poison us, and who need to pay “their fair share” in taxes, economic growth has slowly started to flatten off. This, at least, is McCloskey’s story.

We can tell other stories about this same time period. There are those who argue that economic growth came with scientific discovery, which in turn was made possible with the weakening of the Catholic church. Others argue it was technological advances that drove both science and economic growth (I’m more prone to believing some combination of this story and McCloskey’s). Others see colonialism and slavery as driving economic growth in the West.

One could go on and on. The point is that when it comes to history, we tell it as story. Facts are chosen according to whatever story we want to tell ourselves about the world. And the stories we want to tell are based upon whatever group we belong to. And the groups we belong to are made coherent through shared stories. Typically, we don’t choose the stories we interpret the world through, but rather inherit them from our families and even friends. It can take a great many facts to overwhelm those stories, and even those facts are always told in a story.

All of this is a much-needed warning about the situation we find ourselves experiencing in the world at the present time. We seem to find ourselves surrounded by a proliferation of stories whose purpose seems to be to divide us more and more. But it does not have to be that way. The TV series Will and Grace actually brought Americans increasingly together in opposition to homophobia and support for gay marriage. That story improved social attitudes for a particular out-group, making them an in-group. It has had major repercussions for both American society and for gay culture — most, I would argue, positive.

This implies, then, that we need to start actively creating stories that bring us together. It’s not impossible to create stories with complex characters — too complex to be heroes or villains, even if they are protagonists or antagonists. In my own novel manuscripts (and one published novel), I don’t have heroes or villains (even if in my latest work one of my protagonists is a rather unsavory character). They are complex novelistic characters, with a combination of traits — a feature found in practically every other human being on earth. It is stories like these, with complex characters, that we need to try to tell more and more. We need more unifying stories and fewer divisive stories. We need, for example, a story of America as a complex unity — complex as a complex organism, while still unified by a common DNA of sorts. We need to figure out what that common DNA could be to ensure our social body remain coherent and cohesive. That means having protagonists who aren’t evil, but are simply factually wrong (and acknowledging the fact that it may be we who are wrong about some of the facts). Epistemological humility needs to be the foundation for these kinds of stories.

In the end, I became disgusted with politics because the stories were becoming simpler and simpler — and as they became so, people stopped listening and thinking. Thus, I went back home to literature, where I honestly should have remained.

Overall, I certainly have to recommend Gottschall’s book. The Story Paradox makes a case that stories can be used for good and for ill — and they are used for both precisely because they have emotional power and the power to bring us together (against a Them). It is a warning that stories can create such deep divisions that they can actually destroy entire socieites. Indeed, when the stories holding together Medieval Catholic Christiandom were successfully challenged by other religious stories and by new science-based stories, we saw the collapse of an entire society — and the building up of a new one. And that is the good news. Storytelling tears down and it builds up. It is part of the natural creative destruction we find in economies, polities, cultures, and societies. The stories that created Modernism were replaced by the stories that created Postmodernism — one world view, one social structure was torn down and replaced by another. Postmodernism has reached its end. We’re looking at the collapse of the stories of postmodernism. We have entered its decadent period — a period that will end with divisiveness and perhaps even war (or, perhaps more accurately, is ending that way). A metamodern culture and society will emerge when metamodern stories replace the postmodern ones.

What stories can we tell that will build a new global society that will embrace the strengths of the stories that came before, that will embrace all the facts as we know them, and will provide people with the emotional connections we need to each other and to those stories? That is our task, our challenge, our hope.