Storytelling is a quintessential human activity. When people ask me my reading preferences, I must confess that they tend towards nonfiction. Yet storytelling is everywhere, and is inherent in all we do, including reading and writing nonfiction. Including even the "scientific method" itself. For what is an hypothesis we pronounce and then aim to prove, but a story of a certain kind?
Lately, we hear a lot about "fake news". The notion of "fake news" is itself authoritarian, even if we believe that objective truth is available for us to know. Because "fake news" presupposes that there is an obvious, objective truth, which we can arrive at by snapping our fingers or, more usually, listening to some authority figures, usually on the TV or in the "official" press, snapping theirs, usually accompanied by "experts" they chose. No wonder people are sceptical about it, when they discover there are many "stories" to choose from, and they can just as well choose the one that pleases their own personal fancy, as any other. That much, for good or ill, has been a gift of the Internet age.
We are constantly telling stories, and that can be a very salutary thing. To pretend that there is some kind of impenetrable firewall between stories and truth is a basic misunderstanding of the scientific method. Scientific truths are no more handed down by God from on high than any particular story, fictional or otherwise, necessarily is. And yet, any story automatically has a kernel of truth in it by the very nature of its effects on our thinking and our lives.
Stories always form the horizons and limits of our understanding of the world and its possibilities. In the book, "Many Headed Hydra", historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Reddiker refer repeatedly to semi-mythological stories, like that of Hercules and the Hydra from Greek mythology, and the Jubilee from the Bible, that in times past were foundational to many of our ancestors' ways of thinking about the world.
The stories of Hercules and the Hydra, contrasted with those of the Biblical Jubilee, represent almost opposite poles in the mythological underpinnings of the modern world. Hercules represented the metahistorical "Great Man", whose mighty individual strength puts down and defeats the disorderly and rebellious masses of commonfolk, represented by the Hydra. The commoners are embodied by the monstrous Hydra, an inhuman and ominous threat to all of civilization, which must be tamed, if not outright exterminated, to save the latter. The Great Man, Hercules, is the hero whose efforts attain this feat.
By contrast, the story of the Bibilical Jubilee, when all prisoners were set free, all debts forgiven, and the property of the great and powerful redistributed to the commoners, represented a great hope for moral and physical redemption, right here in this world and this life, for the downtrodden and struggling masses.
Whether a Jubilee ever actually occurred exactly as people understood it from reading the Bible was hardly crucial to the inspiration they drew from it. Likewise, whether a superman like Hercules ever really lived was hardly important to the social elites who drew inspiration from his myth.
Likewise, in our own times, the ignorance of stories like those of the Jubilee (or, for that matter, the origins and significance of the Herculean myth) represent a profound handicap for the moral imaginations of ordinary people. The particular facts of history are far less relevant than the impact they have (or the limitations they place) on the imaginations of those who do (or do not) learn them.
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