The so-called
post-truth society is not primarily the result of our inability to focus on
facts; it is due to our failure to read stories deeply.
“All major political movements have depended on the power of stories.”
Say the word
‘thinking’, and the image evoked is that of abstract ideas, facts, numbers and
data. But what if I say that this is our first and most common error about the
nature of thinking? As religions have always known, human thinking is conducted
primarily in stories, not facts or numbers.
Human beings
might be the only living animals that can think in stories. Facts and
information of some sort exist for a deer and a wolf too, but fiction, and
thinking in fiction?
Now, stories are
celebrated for many things: as repositories of folk knowledge or accumulated
wisdom, as relief from the human condition, as entertainment, as enabling some
cognitivist processes, even as the best way to get yourself and your children
to fall asleep! But all this misses the main point about stories: they are the
most common, most pervasive, and probably the oldest way for humans to think.
Problem of a
fundamentalist reading
Having missed
this point, we then proceed to reduce stories — and their most complex
enunciation, literature — to much less than what they are or should be. For
instance, a good story is not just a narrative. It does not simply take us from
point A to point Z, with perhaps an easy moral appended. Religious
fundamentalists who see stories only in those terms end up destroying the
essence of their religions.
Let us take one
example: the Book of Job. The fundamentalist reading of the Book of Job
stresses Job’s faith. In this version, the story is simple: Job is a
prosperous, God-fearing man, and God is very proud of him. Satan, however,
argues that Job is such a good man only because God has been kind to him. Give
him adversity and you will see his faith waver, says Satan. God allows Satan to
test Job, by depriving him of prosperity, family, health. But Job’s faith does
not waver, and finally all is restored to him. The fundamentalist reading —
which reduces the story to a narrative — is simple: this is a parable about
true faith.
To leave the Book
of Job there is to stop thinking about it. Because the narrative of Job is
secondary to its problematic. One can even argue that the narrative is
misleading: in the restoration of Job’s children, health and wealth, we have a
resolution that fails in our terms. We do not expect such miracles in real
life. Hence, it is not the narrative of Job that is significant.
What is
significant and useful are the problems of the story. For instance, when the
righteous, believing Job is afflicted with death and suffering, such questions
are raised (in the story and by Job’s friends): Who is to be blamed? Is God
unjust or uncaring? Has Job sinned in hiding (or ignorance) and is therefore
being punished? Does it all make any sense?
Job adopts a
difficult position throughout the story: among other things, he neither blames
God, nor does he blame himself, but he demands an answer. When one thinks of
this, one comes to the kernel of the thought of this story: how does one live
best in a world where undeserved suffering sometimes befalls the good? It is
not the unbelievable narrative which makes this a significant story; it is the
way Job’s reactions, his friends’ prescriptions and the problematic of the
entire story make us think. Moreover, as God’s incomplete ‘answers’ to Job
indicate, stories can make us think in very complex ways.
Religions have
always known that human beings think best and most easily in stories. That is
why religions consciously think through stories: the ‘facts’ and ‘details’ of
these stories change with changing human circumstances, but what does not
change is the bid and ability to make us contemplate, imagine, reason, induce,
examine — in other words, think.
Strangely,
politicians have also known this. All major political movements have depended
on the power of stories. In the decades when the Left was on the ascendency, it
had a powerful story to tell — of human exploitation, human resistance and
eventually human achievement in the shape of a ‘classless’ society. In recent
years, the Right has managed to tell us stories that, for various reasons, seem
more convincing to many: inevitable state-aided neo-liberalism, for instance.
Narendra Modi’s victory in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s in Turkey, and Donald
Trump’s in the U.S. — all three are driven by powerful narratives that explain
the ‘past’ and promise a ‘future.’
Failure of
academics
Unfortunately,
the one area where thinking in stories was taken seriously — and not just
reduced to mechanistic explanations — has lost confidence in itself. The
Humanities have been too busy trying to justify stories in all possible terms —
entertainment, discourse, narratology, cognitivist structures, reader response,
etc. — instead of working on how to best think in stories. The total failure of
academics, publishers and editors to talk of literature as literature — not just
what sells, or a set of ‘reader responses’, or a soporific, or passing
politics, or ageless ‘Darwinism,’ etc. — is an index of this failure.
The so-called
post-truth society is not primarily the result of our inability to focus on
facts; it is due to our failure to read stories deeply. Just as there are ways
in which facts can be used positively or negatively, there are ways in which
stories can be read — to make us think or to prevent us from thinking.
Literature — even in the days when it was written with a capital ‘L’ — was the
one area of the Humanities where this was a serious endeavour. This has changed
at great cost to human civilisation.
Humans still
think primarily in stories. But the failure of standards in education and
literary criticism has combined with the rise of fundamentalism (which is not
piety or religious thought), scientism (which is not science) and numerical
neo-liberalism (which is not even capitalism) to deprive more and more people
of the ability to think critically, deeply and sensitively in stories. This
explains many of our current political and economic woes.
Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist and academic who
teaches in Denmark.
Excerpted from today's The Hindu, pg.13 'Perspective'
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