Stories We Live By

 

David Brooks, writer, philosopher and journalist, said in a recent speech to the Aspen Ideas gathering that the current divisive, belligerent mood among the people of earth can’t be attributed to our real-life situations. We have space, food, water, shelter, healthcare enough for everyone, and more. We don’t fight because we need to, he said, but because we carry stories in our heads to which we respond.

It's clear that he doesn’t mean story in the same way I meant it when I published a collection of short stories, but there’s something to be gained in connecting the two, particularly when behaviour is guided by, for instance, The Holy Bible, or the Quran, each telling a story by which adherents understand life and by which their actions are governed. Scientists, as a rule, act according to a very different story of life, their exploration guided very much by the saga of evolving nature and the incontrovertible principles that govern all things.

Our stories—I think Brooks would agree—are formed by the environment in which we grow and mature. He’d also agree that an individual’s story is most often stable and highly resistant to change. In general, our stories take the shape of our home, school and community experiences, and which of those dominates at any give time and place is highly relevant.

That’s overly simplified; peer pressure, personality traits, even birth order in a family, etc., etc. make it possible for the child of a liberal Christian home, for instance, to end up in a motorcycle gang, a drug dealer with little regard for the people he’s disappointing.  

What story does a nation have to promote to get youth to enter the military? Surely it must include a chapter that says humanity is adversarial—not cooperative—by nature and that safety lies in more and better weapons than potential enemies. Wars are inevitable? Wearing a uniform, marching in step, perhaps flying a jet fighter are nobler than, say, working as a junior high teacher in the poorest part of town?

What story motivates a millionaire entrepreneur to spend long days working to expand his business? And what story energizes a person to undertake a climb of a very difficult mountain face?

More urgently, what story motivates people to publicly display huge F**K TRUDEAU placards?

What story is growing in a ten-year-old girl's mind as she sits alone in her room surfing social media?

I am a parent and have been a teacher. I wish my training for the latter would have included a class or two taught by David Brooks. As a cooperative shaper (with their parents) of good stories in students, I might have done my “job” with clearer purpose. I would have toned down the material eulogizing the merits of competitive individualism and the triumphalism that accompanies it. I would have organized my classes to include elements of pure democracy, and taught them the how of negotiation and compromise and the shape of community decision making that doesn’t divide … by modeling it, rehearsing it.  

Brooks founded the Aspen Institute and to find a collection of information by and about this prolific author and New York Times columnist, see Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times; Chair, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, The Aspen Institute | Aspen Ideas