I Don’t Want to Be Crushed

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jonathan Gotschall’s book, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down, as we absorb the election results. The ending of the book is a call to action and adventure in the vein of the hero’s journey – we need to figure out how to tell stories that are more useful than divisive, and we need people to problem-solve around it urgently. We require solutions, not more us versus them narrative. Otherwise we risk crushing ourselves.

One of our nation’s leading thinkers about the power of stories – both the positive, life-saving, and life-affirming stories as well as the dark, sinister, and factually untrue stories, Gotschall warns that “When we villainize, we dehumanize and give ourselves a free pass to sink into our sanctimony, if not our hate. And in so doing we make villains of ourselves.”

I feel the villainy, and yet as a human being, I am trained to want a story with a strong, morally courageous character that overcomes the obstacles presented by the evil character. It’s how we as a species have told stories for hundreds of thousands of years. According to author Ursula Le Guin, “Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.” It’s satisfying when a story ends happily.

In fact, Gotschall writes, people who read fiction in particular, “have a greater confidence that they live in a ‘nice world’ rather than a ‘mean world.’ They’re more likely to think that the world is a good place where things turn out well in the end. Perhaps this means that fiction turns people into suckers. But just as plausibly it turns them into nicer people who believe that good people can overcome daunting obstacles to improve the world.”

I used The Story Paradox to prepare for a speech I gave last month to attendees at Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful’s summit. I wanted to share ways that we can expand who gets to be a leader; for too long we have had one kind of person in charge of our governments, environmental groups, and corporations, mostly white, mostly male. I also emphasized the positive power of stories in these challenging times; catastrophes are hitting us constantly, be it hurricanes Milton and Helene, the Park Fire this summer in Northern California, or flooding killing thousands across Asia and Europe. In short, we need everyone to be an environmental leader, not just folks who work at The Nature Conservancy or the Sierra Club or those who attend international climate change conferences.

Before I gave my talk, I toured downtown Scranton with nonprofits, city leaders, and volunteers who have turned toxic waste sites into parks and graffiti-covered downtown buildings into amazing murals. These are some of the nicest people I have ever met – master gardeners, high school and college students in charge of litter cleanups in their schools, elected officials turning around their struggling economies, and government workers running sustainability and environmental programs in their towns and cities. They are the doers, the Saturday morning volunteers, under the radar, low-ego community members improving the world. They collaborate with enthusiasm, drawing in as many perspectives as possible, such as involving local deaf and hard of hearing and vocational high school students to build book boxes alongside perennial flower boxes. One leader from Scranton Tomorrow called it “beautifying your neighborhood though books” and that “holding a life in your hand,” such as a plant, could heal you.

What I shared with the group is that each of us can do something now, right from where we are, and that is to observe, witness, and tell new kinds of stories to inspire and defeat environmental antipathy and depression. Unfortunately, CNN is not going to report on the partnerships in Scranton that have led to a walkable, enjoyable, flower-pot filled city. But that’s not CNN‘s fault. According to Gotschall, humans focus on conflict and drama, and seek a moral imperative in their stories.

We learn how to behave and how to function as a society from the stories we tell, which is the positive thing about storytelling. Typically we have told stories in groups, Gottschall writes – around a campfire, for example, or a radio or television set. Until now, where we mainly consume stories by ourselves on social media, on our own devices. I don’t know if the manner in which we consume stories is to blame for the polarized situation we are in, but it may explain a lot.

Is it possible then, as Gotschall asks, to “tell stories about ourselves that are less divisive, less tribalistic, and less addicted to defining the ‘us’ in contrast to a villainous ‘them’?”

I want to find out. Gotschall proposes the following steps to navigate the stories that divide us:

1) Hate and resist the story
2) But try hard not to hate the storyteller
3) And, for the sake of peace and your own soul, don’t despise the poor sap who literally couldn’t help falling for it.

It won’t be easy not to fall into othering those who promote stories that I personally do not believe. But I don’t want to be crushed, I want to be part of solving for healthier, more loving stories and approaches to care for this Earth and all who exist upon it.