Before I leave the book The Last Unknowns, edited by John Brockman, I must comment on what, to me, seems like the oddest question posed in this book of questions:
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| Jonathan Gottschall |
How could stories be bad for us? And how could someone who teaches stories for a living suggest such a thing? I would be interested in hearing Gottschall's argument. I'll bet there's a story there.
Everyone tells stories. Some are true. Some are embellished. Some are entirely fiction. Yet we all tell stories. And we all listen to them or read them or even dream them, usually with pleasure, which is itself a good.
When you experience a funny incident or perhaps have a near-collision on the highway or an unexpected surgery, one of your first impulses is the tell your story to someone. Somehow you don't feel fulfilled until you can tell your story. The better the story, the more often you will tell it.
We learn from stories. That is why literature is taught at Washington & Jefferson and most other colleges. Stories teach us how other people live and how other people think. They teach us about good decisions and bad ones. They help us practice empathy. They excite our imaginations.
History, at its best, is a series of stories. And so we learn history through stories. In fact, a good many disciplines, from art to zoology, are taught, in part, through stories.
Our entertainment, whether we read novels, watch movies or listen to popular songs, is often story-based. Even a TV reality show usually takes the form of a story. A baseball game tells a story. We stick around to the ninth inning to see how it turns out.
Religions are also usually story-based. The Bible is a collection of stories.
The articles we read in magazines and newspapers are often called stories.
There are bad stories, certainly, but stories are vital and basic to human existence. How can that be bad?
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