The Uselessness of Narratives

Human beings are born storytellers. It's in our nature.

We tell stories to make sense of our experience. We tell stories to find reasons. We tell stories to explain. We tell stories to find meaning. We tell stories to connect with each other. We tell stories to amuse and entertain.

The popular writer Noah Yuval Harari describes storytelling as our superpower. It's this ability that fundamentally differentiates homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's allowed us to rise to the top of the survival heap. 

While animals only cooperate with their biological kin or in small packs, our species learned to cooperate with total strangers by telling stories. 

Telling stories has allowed us to collaborate on a mass scale. Pooling our various talents and skills we were able to learn from one another, share with one another, trade with one another and dominate as a species. 

Through stories we created social systems, societies, institutions and civilizations. We created mass market economies, countries, and international organizations.    

I was a storyteller once. Even published short stories and two novels. I wrote book reviews for the newspaper, and gave reviews as public lectures. 

And then it just stopped.

Not only did I lose my desire to write and publish stories. I lost my desire to read them. Up to that point I read about a novel a month. And fiction was all that I read. Then one day - it seemed like it happened overnight - I felt that I never wanted to read another novel again.

I couldn't explain why.   

It happened about ten years ago, so part of me thinks it had to do with donald trump, and his omnipresent brand of post-truth politics. Here for the first time was a politician who somehow defied narrative. 

His political ascendency was both a product of the imagination and made possible by a failure of the imagination. He was a creation of television, more fictional character than real, for years the target of  mockery and scorn, who was somehow becoming a reality to contend with. Many of us could hardly believe it was possible. 

Sometimes that happens. When something so outrageous impinges on normalcy, we fail to acknowledge it, and before we can, it's too late. 

With trump, the reality we were living became stranger than anything fiction could muster. A satire and absurdity worthy of a Simpson's episode. 

No work of fiction could compete with reality anymore. The lie of fiction - noble lies told in the service of art, beauty and truth - became eclipsed by the hollow, ill-intentioned lies and outlandish conspiracies we were hearing every day emanating from the Oval Office.  

What was the point of reading or writing fiction? It had lost the battle. 

I started reading only non-fiction to try to make sense of the world in which we were living. I read books on philosophy, politics, psychology and even physics. As reality became indistinguishable from fiction, I wanted to feel grounded again.

Those books, however, maintain a certain element of narrative, using cause and effect and chronology to analyze and explain the world. 

In recent years, I've gone a step further. 

I've been reading books on Eastern religion and spirituality. You might call these books anti-narratives. They explore the deepest most universal truths of existence by going beyond narrative. They are written with very little narrative structure, usually question and answer format, a guru responding to disciples. 

At root, the message is that narrative obscures truth. The fundamental purpose of narrative, like memory, is the construction of a particular "self", an identity in which one is a protagonist inside one's own story. According to Eastern wisdom this particular self is artificial and therefore false. It must be transcended in order to live fully and truthfully in the present.

Our emotions are not to be denied or avoided, they are not even to be understood or explained, as we do with the narratives we construct. They are simply to be experienced, accepted, and allowed to come and go, without attaching any meaning to them. 

Easier said than done for most of us. In the West we are conditioned to think of ourselves as the central actors in our stories. 

The realization and acknowledgement that each of us has an infinitesimally small part in a grand and complex eternal reality, can itself, be a source of meaning and liberation. And being fully present, in the moment, constitutes the way to live in reality as it truly is.