Is People’s Storytelling Drive Dangerous?


In the best part of the book, Gottschall cites the work of Jaron Lanier to explain how social media algorithms amplify our worst tendencies. While Gottschall is about a “universal grammar” of stories, he’s absolutely right that social media promotes narratives in which we feel innocent and find others inhumane. However, since all words, from ancient Bible verses to digital metaverses, must be “story” in the same sense, it cannot come to the important conclusion that a story needs a human storyteller. He acknowledges that novels make us empathetic (an argument pioneered by historian Lynn Hunt). But it can’t say that reading “Alice in Wonderland” is better than falling down a rabbit hole on social media.

Gottschall prefers quantity to quality by making charts of novels surveys rather than reading them himself. He can’t quite see that what the internet has created is not a story but an endless psychological experiment. Gottschall blinds himself to this fundamental point about our contemporary reading experience, by allowing the tools of big data and psychology to guide him. He’s not wrong that social media algorithms have drawn us into thoughtless narcissism. What he overlooks is that it is precisely their allies, psychology and big data, that provide the digital commercial and political weapons that keep us trapped in stories where we have always been on the good side. Gottschall warns us of such stories, and rightly so. However, in his analysis of their proliferation and concentration, he confused the villain with the hero. While he confuses human storytelling with automatic manipulation, he went near the machines without realizing he was doing it.

Gottschall ignores the fundamental difference between believing a story and being a storyteller. We see the problem when he tries his hand at fiction. It gives us (at least to many readers) a brief scene to appear about a young woman trying to escape a menacing assailant. “I am the god of his little world,” Gottschall writes eerily, before assuring us, more eerily, that he is a benevolent god. The story will be different when it is not told from an omnipotent place, for example from the woman’s point of view. It will be different if it is told non-fiction.

Gottschall’s view of our nonfiction world is that “nearly everything is getting better and very little is getting worse”. Given his rejection of both history and journalism, it’s hard to see how he can judge the past versus the present. It relies on Steven Pinker’s “data” on violence, but nothing like it. Pinker quoted others; her whimsical choices are helpfully explored in “The Dark Angels of Our Nature.” In the fields I know, Pinker picks cherries with red-fingered enthusiasm; His best numbers for modern death tolls come from such an obviously ideological source that I was embarrassed to quote it in high school debates. Like Gottschall, Pinker is a friend of contradiction. He partially supported the story of progress by pointing to rising IQs at a time when IQs were actually on the decline. He began his book by noting that the modern welfare states were the most peaceful in history, and ended by adopting a libertarianism that would lead to their dissolution. Pinker was telling us a story; It’s a story Gottschall liked, and that’s why it’s glorified as “data”.

The most important development in American storytelling that Gottschall ignores is the collapse of local news. Much of our country is a news desert. It is very difficult for people who lack basic facts about their own lives to start telling their own stories. Unlike Gottschall, investigative journalism is not just part of an overall narrative about negativity. It provides people with a foundation for their civic existence. Millions of little stories stand up to one big story. But millions of little stories need foundations in corporations. Gottschall has nothing to say about what it takes for Americans to become agents and narrators of their own stories. No matter how silly our stories are, he wants us to listen to each other, but he has no idea how to make what we’re saying more logical.

Part of Gottschall’s story about himself is that his views will offend the powerful. Yet his own worldview does nothing to challenge the status quo. He treats the political conflict only as a culture war, a view too comfortable for those in power. He says his most feared enemies are his left-wing colleagues; depicts his thoughts as purely cultural. Reading it, I used to think that left and right had nothing to do with economic equality and inequality, something Gottschall ignored.



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