Now I want to bring in our philosophers. The first is an attractive figure: that master of 18th-century empiricism, our canny Scotsman, David Hume, one of the most important figures in the Western philosophical tradition. Hume was a man of wit and charm, popular in the salons of his day, and reasons for this may be evident in the generosity and inclusivity of his ideas around morality.
Not surprisingly, philosophy has generally considered itself the pinnacle of the intellectual tradition. Not so, says Hume. Virtue, he says, is not the result of either self-sacrifice or self-interest.
Hume argues that moral progress consists in including more people – and different kinds of people – in our sense of community, thus extending our moral concern to encompass increasingly large domains. He specifically argues this with regard to women and Native Americans. Women and Indigenous peoples were shabbily and unjustly treated; therefore, progress consists of entering imaginatively into what life is like for people who are not you, who are in fact unlike you.
In other words, Hume reverses the Western philosophical tradition since Plato, who had attempted to wrest moral authority from the poets. Hume gives it back, arguing that literature is vital for moral progress.
It is refreshing, after reading about thousands of years of abstract writing that treats theology and philosophy as the pinnacles of human wisdom, to hear Hume saying no, all this theorising is useless; it is literature we need to pay attention to. And this tradition has been continued by neo-pragmatist philosophers, notably Richard Rorty, who also rejected Plato.
Philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) argued for the importance of literature. “Rorty argues that philosophers have traditionally sought to escape from history by searching for truth,” notes Staloff. “He believes truth can never be found embedded in language. A ‘true’ statement is merely one that we approve of.”Even more crucially, Rorty argues that language is not merely descriptive, not a kind of analogous system indicating reality, but rather it is itself part of reality. It is causal, not representational.
Rorty reaches the same conclusion as Hume: cruelty is to be ameliorated through cultural edification. The moral education needed to sensitise us to the suffering of others, of those who have to put their suffering “no place anyone can see”, is most effectively absorbed through fiction.
The dangers of narrative
To be fair to Plato, in proposing to ban the poets from his republic, he was recognising the real danger that the power of narrative can be misused to tell lies, which he blamed for the execution of his beloved teacher Socrates. His reservations must be taken seriously, along with the scepticism of writers such as Didion. Like a very sharp knife, the power of story is neither good nor evil; it cuts both ways.
We see this dilemma enacted every day now. Is Joe Rogan “just” a storyteller and therefore free to spread conspiracy theories and lies about vaccines, resonant as they are, in theme and tone, with the medieval “blood libel” against the Jews? Or should he be expelled from the republic, denied his paid public platform to spread dangerous misinformation?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , antisemitic propaganda about supposed Jewish plans for world domination, was first published in Russia in 1903. It is considered an early example of a conspiracy theory. It was thoroughly debunked by The Times in 1921. But it is still spreading its poison around the world.
In that shapeshifting way of totalising lies (almost analogous to the way viruses mutate and adapt), it is now linked to conspiracy theories around the Covid 19 pandemic.
Plato (c.370 BC)
So on the one hand we have philosophers, such as Hume and Rorty, arguing for the critical role of literature, of story, in building empathy, expanding the realm of those whose suffering we are sensitised to. If one of the greatest injustices is that beings are forced to put their suffering “no place anyone can see”, then, according to Hume and Rorty (and many creative writers), the proper use and study of literature is one of the few ways we can illuminate such places.
On the other hand, there is the long tradition of Plato and many other philosophers who have argued for the importance of transcendent objective truth.
In our current emergencies over the acceptance of vaccines and the imperative for action on climate, we can see that the need to find a way to agree on what constitutes an objective truth is more urgent than ever.
Language as virtual reality
What underlying mechanisms or processes in human beings could underpin the critical role of story? What is the power of language that allows shared realities to be created by large numbers of people across space and time? It may be that neuroscience is starting to provide some fascinating clues.
It seems that language and storytelling operate as the original and very powerful forms of virtual reality. fMRI technology , which can show us mental processes in real time, is starting to illuminate the physical processes that drive this.
Our brains exist in silence and darkness, with sense data presented by electrical signals. The brain builds its picture of the world from these electrical signals. It is not surprising that the electrical signals triggered by reading are as real to the brain as any other kind of electrical signal.
A study by professor of psychology Jeff Zacks has shown that reading about an action triggers the same areas of the brain as actually performing that action.
“We’re used to thinking that virtual reality is something that involves fancy computers and helmets and gadgets,” notes Zacks. “But what these kind of data suggest is that language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality, that there’s an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptional processes that are happening in each other’s brains.”
Research has found that reading about an action triggers the same areas of the brain as actually performing the action.
These kinds of studies can now show us some of the variables that influence the effectiveness of the stories we tell and the influence they can have over the processes in each other’s brains.
As the science writer Annie Murphy Paul has noted, precise words can stimulate specific areas. Words such as “grasp” and “kick” light up not just the motor cortex, but the part of it responsible for those movements. Read a sentence such as “the baking cookies smelled sweet” and the language processing areas of your brain will work, but the part dealing with smells remains dark. When you read “the cookies smelled of cinnamon” that area lights up too.
Hearts beat as one
We now have a very recent finding on how deep this entrainment goes. The power of stories extends not just from controlling the brains of readers or listeners, but their hearts too.
Professor Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist who directs a research lab at the Stanford University School of Medicine that investigates, among other things, the neurology of anxiety and stress, cognition and performance.
He hosts a popular podcast , in which he draws from recent scientific literature to empower listeners to take practical steps to improve sleep, say, or diet. In a recent episode, he reported a remarkable finding in terms that for him were unusually dramatic.
“This is a paper that came out in the journal Cell Reports – very reputable scientific journal. The study involved having subjects listen to a story. The subjects are all listening to the same story but those subjects are not listening to it together. They are in separate rooms or even entirely separate locations on the planet, or they are brought into the laboratory on separate days – so these subjects are separated by time and space.
What this study found is that different subjects listening to the same story undergo the same variation in heart rate. In other words the gaps between their heartbeats start to resemble one another in response to the same story.
This is absolutely remarkable – just think about that for a minute – this is a coordination of the physiology of the body in response to a narrative, a story, in different people. And yet when they line up the heart rates of these different people listening to the story at different times and in different places, they find that those heart rates map onto one another almost identically.”
Huberman explains why this is so remarkable and notes that more broadly this means coordination between neural circuits in the brain and body, coordination with the lungs and other organs.
“I think these results are just beautiful,” Huberman says.”In the sense that they really show that our brain and body are highly coordinated because people are listening to the story and the heart rate is changing in response to the story, but that there is what we call a stereotyped response to a given story. In my mind there was no reason the results had to be this way. You know, two people listen to the same story, why should their heart rates be almost identical? Very very interesting and points to the power of narrative and story in coordinating our physiology.”
The causal quality of language
Rorty’s contention that language is causal, not just descriptive, seems to be borne out by current studies in neuroscience.
If Hume and Rorty are correct that story is the best technology we have for expanding empathy and solidarity (and the neuroscience seems increasingly to show that there are physiological mechanisms capable of driving such a process), then this clarifies why intolerant regimes and neoliberal governments so consistently attack, interfere with and defund the humanities and the arts.
Political systems that rely on division and intolerance try to dissolve or at least narrow solidarity, even as they attempt to intensify it within more tightly defined boundaries. Solidarity is the quality, according to Rorty, that holds postmodern bourgeois “liberal” society together.
But as we have seen, story itself can be used to drive division as much as to cement solidarity. Narratives can enlarge the scope of our concerns; they can illuminate the sufferings of others. But they can also reinforce fear and intolerance, and they do this through processes grounded in the deepest physiological fibres of our being.
Despite Didion’s warning, we will continue to tell stories, because they are one of the primary ways we have of understanding and then shaping the world. This makes storytelling inherently political, because politics is the practical expression of morality.
This also illuminates why politics (and indeed any politician) grounded in any grand master-narrative, such as religion or a doctrinaire version of a political theory, is so dangerous. Such master narratives, the very ones deconstructed by postmodernism, claim not to be stories at all, but transcendent truths, which therefore cannot be critiqued or changed.
The pluralism embraced by postmodernism and deconstruction actually brings us closer to the truth, because it allows us to understand things in comparative ways and is thus the very precondition of beginning to think meaningfully about them.
Writing on Rorty and postmodernism , Patricia Waugh notes, that “What makes Rorty “strong” in his postmodernism, despite his defence of consensus as the basis of democracy, is the textualist insistence that society can only be transformed without violence through an aesthetic version of genetic engineering where it is vocabularies and not genes which determine the kind of life we shall lead.”
This claim illuminates why the battle over issues such as pronouns is so important and why the right resists so fiercely the idea of calling trans people by their proper pronouns, all the while claiming such issues are trivial. But if we don’t agree to alter our reality with words then we are left with guns, and we can see how well that is working out just now.
Rebecca Solnit brings many of these questions and concerns together in her 2019 essay Whose Story Is This?
“Who gets to be the subject of the story is an immensely political question, and feminism has given us a host of books that shift the focus from the original protagonist — from Jane Eyre to Mr. Rochester’s Caribbean first wife, from Dorothy to the Wicked Witch, and so forth. But in the news and political life, we’re still struggling over whose story it is, who matters, and who our compassion and interest should be directed at.
The common denominator of so many of the strange and troubling cultural narratives coming our way is a set of assumptions about who matters, whose story it is, who deserves the pity and the treats and the presumptions of innocence, the kid gloves and the red carpet, and ultimately the kingdom, the power, and the glory. You already know who. It’s white people in general and white men in particular, and especially white Protestant men, some of whom are apparently dismayed to find out that there is going to be, as your mom might have put it, sharing.”
The sharing that Solnit alludes to here links to Rorty’s ideas about the importance of solidarity and consensus for democracy. Consensus can’t be imposed and solidarity should not be manufactured by indulging in fantasies of a homogenous, unified society (and narrative) that never really existed. The only way forward, as Solnit puts it, is “sharing”.
This brings us back to the unique power of story. It has one killer feature, an extra feature that not even real life has. As Annie Murphy Paul notes that:
“novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”
This killer feature is one aspect of the power that Plato, Didion and many others wisely fear, and Hume and Rorty rightly celebrate. It is not a power we can or will stop using, so one of the great battles of our time, as Solnit says, is “who the story is about, who matters and who decides”.
This article was published by The Conversation .