Ideas - Seduced by Story: The Dangers of Narrative

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Humans are storytelling creatures. But literary scholar Peter Brooks argues that stories have become far too dominant as the way we understand ourselves and the world. IDEAS examines the dangers of seeing everything as a story. *This episode originally aired on March 7, 2023.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story.

And so ended the Game of Thrones story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it. And so begins this episode of Ideas about the power of stories, for good and for ill. I'm Nala Ayyad. We begin our lives in the thrall of stories. Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moo cow coming down along the road.

And this moo cow that was coming down along the road met a nice little boy named Baby Tuku. We're captivated by them as adults. It was the best of times. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. Were hooked by a single cryptic utterance.

Rosebud. And were strung along even by stories that aren't in any hurry to get anywhere. Way out west there was this fellow, fellow I want to tell you about, a fellow by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him. I'm Peter Brooks. I teach at Yale University in the Department of Comparative Literature and occasionally in the law school as well. In 1984, Peter Brooks published perhaps his best-known book,

Reading for the Plot, which saw stories as core to literature and our humanity. Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-conscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.

Stories are inevitable. We're storytelling, story-making, story-interpreting animals. But there are so many bad stories out there. We have stories that say some people are inferior to others because of their race or gender. Stories that justify brutality, cruelty, inequality, etc. And then we have beautiful, liberatory, magical stories, but stories come in all varieties and species, so they're everything, good and bad and in between. And we're inundated with stories.

Everything today seems to be a story or explained by a story. Boring presentations all lack one magic ingredient. You guessed it, stories. It doesn't matter what you're working on. You can tell it like a story, not just a list of facts and opinions. It was as if a fledgling I had nourished had become a predator devouring reality in the name of story. had become a predator devouring reality in the name of story. Peter Brooks came to think that stories have overpopulated our minds and drowned out everything else.

We never envisioned nor hoped for the kind of narrative takeover of reality we appear to be witnessing in the early 21st century, where even public civic discourse, supposedly dedicated to reasoned analysis, seems to have been taken hostage. Peter Brooks' latest book aims to defang the story monster. It's called Seduced by Story, The Use and Abuse of Narrative. He recalls the moment when it hit him that the storification of reality, as he calls it, had gone too far.

historification of reality, as he calls it, had gone too far. I think for me, it was with George W. Bush. When he introduced his cabinet, for instance, he said, each person has got their own story that is so unique and tells you what America is all about. And then introducing a secretary of state, Colin Powell, a great American story, introducing a secretary of transportation. I just. A Great American Story, Introducing a Secretary of Transportation. I just love his story. You have the feeling that Bush fought only in story form. Then the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be taking over, not only in politics, but in all of reality.

And of course, our recent experience in America has been terrifying, right? Where fake stories distorting reality, distorting what happened in our most recent presidential election. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. Led to a violent invasion of the seat of government. So all the more reason that we need to be analytic about the place of stories in the world. And what about, I mean, you mentioned George Bush, but what's the origin story of how stories overtook politics? I think that Ronald Reagan, for instance, was maybe the first president to govern by anecdote.

That is a short story. One of my favorite stories about runaway bureaucracy was a fellow, this is for true, a fellow who sat there in one of our large departments and his job was when the papers came there, he was to look... Everything had to be engaged with the narrative of individual lives for him. That seemed to be the only way he could rhetorically demonstrate and perhaps understand the world around him. And Gary Willis's book on Reagan suggests that sometimes he confused stories from reality with films that he had acted in. He gave fictional anecdotes instead of real ones. But obviously, it goes back earlier than Reagan.

But there's been a decline in an old tradition of public rhetoric, something that used to be taught in American schools, for instance, and isn't anymore public speaking oratory. Oratory got a very bad name at some point. And it all seems to have been supplanted by narrative. It's unfortunate, I would say. But what about in the marketplace? I mean, how did stories start to become kind of the language of marketing in the corporate world?

That again, it's hard to pinpoint the origin, but you pick anything off the shelf of the supermarket and on the back, it will tell you our story. Or if you go to the corporate websites, it will have our story. Behind every product is a story. A story of pride. A story of people. Every morning... Certainly in publicity, which is so closely tied to corporate America, story form took over at some point. And it had to do with television, certainly, and television storytelling. But if you go back to my childhood, advertising was largely pictorial and lyric. I mean, the singing commercial, and I can still remember many of them from my childhood.

Me too, yeah. still remember many of them from my childhood. Me too, yeah. Mr. Clean will clean your whole house and everything that's in it. But that all disappeared in favor of telling stories about products. I've asked you a lot of how. I'm curious

sort of on the bottom line why you think stories have become so dominant. Well, I think they're very persuasive. They're very usable. Everyone can tell a story. Everyone wants to tell a story about his own life. When you meet someone new, who are you? I'm going to tell you my story. The trouble with that is that it becomes assumed that telling a story is automatically a good thing and presents you in a positive light. Why do we assume that storytelling is necessarily positive?

We have so many examples to the negative, right, of stories that are toxic and mislead us. I think stories are seductive and intended to be, but it's not always wonderful. I mean, look at the examples in history where democratic regimes collapsed under a powerful story. I mean, Germany in the 1930s being the most obvious example where simplistic and toxic stories just took over the country, right? And explained everything, made people feel better about themselves, and led right into war and Holocaust. And I think that we didn't come that close, but there were certainly moments during the Trump presidency where I was reminded of Germany in the 1930s, where reality seemed to be dissolving, collapsing, under the weight of lying stories that convinced people that they were true.

And then the lie of a stolen election was the final example of that in that presidency. So I think we have to have stories. We need stories. We would die without them, but we have to be more analytic about them and how they're working on us. I'm Mira Sukharov. I'm professor of political science at Carleton University. I specialize in the politics of Israel-Palestine and their narratives, the stories that each side tells about themselves and the world around them is particularly pertinent and really helps us understand how each group and members within the group put together the facts of history to make sense of the world. When we think about the events around 1948 for Palestinians, the focus is on the Nakba, which is the Arabic word for catastrophe. And it's the description of the fleeing and expulsions of Palestinians, 750,000 in all from 1947 to 1949. Israelis, for their part, tend to focus more on the Arab-Israeli war, meaning the war in which 1%

of Israelis were killed as they were fighting against the combined armies of the surrounding Arab states. For them, the Palestinian experience is much less relevant. And if anything, it's less I find a disagreement over facts and more disagreement over meaning, and to put it in more everyday language, a disagreement over blame and responsibility. So you start to think about narratives, you start to think about, well, what does each side really care about? What is each side really looking at? And in some ways, that helps change what might seem like a Solomonic division of a single entity into two non-entities. It can help us move away from that dilemma into thinking about how can everyone gain

dignity, safety, freedom, and equality in that land. Most, I venture to say, of the examples that you're talking about are what you call in the book, in your book, mini-narratives, not grand narratives. So can we talk about some examples of grand narratives and what their function is and how they sort of act compared to other stories or mini-narratives? Yes. The notion of grand narrative came to my attention in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who wrote this book called The Postmodern Condition, where he says there's been a decline in the grand narratives. And by the grand narratives, he means such overarching stories as progress, which certainly was the great American narrative,

right? Or emancipation, emergence from relative bondage in terms of your social position into a much greater freedom, much greater social mobility. And I think that those grand narratives are still around, but they don't command the unquestioned belief that they once did. And so we have to find other narratives to take their place. One conflict of that, if you've seen recently in this country, is between the 1619 project started in the New York Times. That is, what would it be like to recount the story of the United States, starting from the arrival of the first enslaved people in Virginia. The very first enslaved Africans were brought here over 400 years ago. Since then, no part of America's story has been untouched by the legacy of slavery.

And a counter to that, you had this official nonsense that came out of the Trump White House called the 1776 Project, which totally sugarcoats American history. We will be donating and campaigning on behalf of school board candidates who oppose critical race theory being taught in schools and will be able to use their position to buy textbooks that are patriotic and that tell a reasonable and realistic history. And at the moment, we very much in this country have a standoff

between those two narratives of the country. It really matters who tells the story because the story looks very different from different perspectives. The journalist, essayist, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Whose Story Is This?, published in 2019. One of the things I see with the white supremacists in the U.S. is telling the story of refugees and immigrants solely as the perspective looks from people who've been here from a long time without empathy or compassion for them and with a refusal to recognize the climate change, the global politics, the complicity of the U.S., for example, and why people become refugees in Central America.

And, you know, the police shootings that are so common often let us see with the video that the police are telling a story that is nothing more or less than a bald-faced lie because the video tells a very different story. The person wasn't violent, wasn't armed, wasn't resisting. The person was running away, not running towards them, etc. So it's so important who we decide to listen to. It's so important who we decide to listen to. And one of the ways we can think of the last several decades is potentially sometimes tentatively shifting who we decide is a legitimate and valuable storyteller, whether it's aroundumerable situations in which one person benefits more than another. And exposing cruelty, injustice, inequality requires listening to the stories of those who are the victims of those things. Mira Sukharov. So particularly for marginalized groups who are often not included in the hegemonic primary state-based stories of the countries or world that they fundamental humanity of people who haven't always been at the center of history as it's told by dominant powers.

And it's not that those people were silent before, which is often how we talk about it. They had plenty to say. They just didn't have arenas in which people were willing to listen to them, or they did, but it was with other Indigenous people, other queer people, other women. The corridors of power didn't let those stories in. How do stories become grand narratives or myths? It's a wonderful question to think about. I mean, if you go back to the grand narratives that Leo Tao is talking about, you can see, for instance, how they're released during the Enlightenment, when, as Kant said, we emerged from childhood into adulthood, partly because we emerged from a sacred history into a secular one. And many of them are released at the time of the French Revolution, right? and patriotism and democracy and literacy and all those goods that sustained us at least up to the time of the First World War,

which may have been the first big disillusioning in the notion of progress and democracy. Do you see any myths today or grand narratives that are dangerous that are operating today? Well, the extraordinary thing to me today is the return of fundamentalist religious narratives that claim to explain everything. You know, when I was young, I thought by the time I become an adult, religion will be something in the past, you know, it'll be an archaeological curiosity. Not at all. I mean, that sweeping return of religion throughout the world has been a phenomenon

that is remarkable and I think dangerous. And because fundamentalist religion claims total explanatory force of everything in our lives. And so I think that's something we have to watch out for. And in this country, our current Supreme Court seems to have bought into that, that the claim of religious belief trumps everything, right, and takes precedence over other rights. It's quite amazing. What about things like, you know, nationalist myths or anti-Semitism? Yeah, well, nationalist myths are still very powerful, and particularly

in emerging nations. You know, at one point, we thought we might get a kind of trans-nationalist myth going in something like the United Nations and attention to world disasters such as climate change that need to be addressed on a global scale. But so far, that's, well, I won't say it's a failed project, but it's not a project that's shown much in the way of success. What comes to mind is, you know, even the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where Putin is peddling a specific version of what the history of that region was like. And we're looking at Ukraine as the hero nation, these two sort of competing narratives.

And it shows you just the power of myths to mobilize political regimes and whole populations, right? That buy into it and will go and fight and die for a completely bogus myth. Peter Brooks is the author of Reading for the Plot and Seduced by Story, the Use and abuse of narrative. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National,

and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. We're a broadcast and a podcast. Find us and hundreds of our past episodes on the CBC Listen app, on our website, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it

sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. We know the world through stories. Stories that explain how the world came to be and where we came from. Long, long ago, Kichimanitu, the Great Spirit, had a vision. He dreamt of sky, stars, sun and moon, and an earth filled with vegetation and animal beings. Stories that impart moral lessons. But a Samaritan who was traveling on that road came across the man.

And when he saw him, his heart was filled with pity. He went over to the man, poured oil and wine on his wounds and bandaged him. And stories that teach practical wisdom. I hope you've learned a lesson, said the tortoise to the hare. Slow and steady wins the race. We're so attuned to narrative that if we're not aware that a well-told story is fiction, we're apt to mistake it for reality. This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen.

Out of character to assure you that the war of the world has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo. Peter Brooks teaches comparative literature at Yale University and has made a career of analyzing narrative and celebrating the power of stories. But he also sees the power of narrative as dangerous in a world that's swimming in stories, especially if we don't read them as just that, stories. The seeming obliteration in the public sphere of other forms of expression by narrative

suggests that something in our culture has gone astray. Do we really want all our understandings to be expressed in narrative terms? Isn't there a risk of making story an excuse from other kinds of understanding? What about logical argument, for instance, once considered the dominant form of civic discourse? And the logical endpoint of Peter Brooks's

arguments in Seduced by Story is what I wanted to pursue with him in our conversation. So living our lives, as you said, is one thing, and the telling of the story of our lives is a very different thing. But we're only able to know our lives and make sense of them through narrative. So far, so good? So far, so good, yes. Okay. But you write that psychoanalysis is founded on stories, on people coming to self-knowledge by narrating their own lives. Tell me about that.

Yes, well, I think Freud says that, you know, the patient comes to the analyst with an incomplete story, a story that has blockages and gaps in it. And the role of psychoanalysis is to complete that story and is created between the patient and the analyst is not historically verifiable, but it can work anyway. I mean, he wouldn't go so far as to say that a completely fictional story would work. He takes the position, if it works, it must be true, right? Right. the position, if it works, it must be true, right? Right.

That if it seems to the patient to make sense of his or her life, that in some deep sense, it must be the truth. And so I think psychoanalysis is a deeply narrative discipline or science, whatever you want to call it. But the complicated bit is that if we only know ourselves through stories and we know that the stories aren't necessarily reality, that they may not be actually accurate, can we ever truly know ourselves then? We can only approach self-knowledge.

Total self-knowledge is probably a very elusive thing. Freud said late in his life that the psychoanalyst himself had to go back into analysis periodically, right? Because that's the only way to sort of not entirely know yourself, but know your blind spots and know your repressions and blockages. So what you can know is the limits of your own knowledge, which is what Montaigne said many centuries ago. But can people become kind of trapped by the stories that they tell or believe about themselves? Oh, I think absolutely they can become trapped. They come to believe in a certain mythic version of themselves that is not helpful, right?

And that remains a kind of blind alley for their life. So you have to keep revising that story as you go along. About a decade ago, I published a book called The Far Away Nearby about my relationship to my mother, among other things. And I had a pretty terrible relationship with my mother, among other things. And I had a pretty terrible relationship with my mother, in part because she was so deeply saturated with stories about what a woman should be, what a mother should be, what a daughter should be. And so she was very deeply preoccupied with beauty in which one of us was prettier, not a great game to play with

someone 33 years younger than you, with fairness, with also the expectation that women were caregivers and I should be her caregiver and some magical boundless healing impossible way, particularly given her immense animosity whenever I got close to her. And so when she developed Alzheimer's, it was a fascinating, complicated thing for me because most people talk about this disease and losing your stories as this terrible thing where you lose the core of your being. But some of our stories are poisonous, toxic, terrible, imprisoning, damaging. And she just dropped so many of these stories of competition, of resentment, of anxiety, of, you know, about what a daughter should be. And she was liberated herself. She had the most joyous years I ever saw in her,

really enjoyed things and treated me very differently. Her resentment didn't sort of stand up on its hind legs and start taking swipes at me. The minute I walked into the room, she just forgot all that stuff and could enjoy what was there to be enjoyed and recognized me as a person who was actually taking care of her. So it was fascinating to see her losing stories that had really been a trap for both of us, a trap I was trying to escape and I don't think she could see. Now, a different kind of story is the novel. You know, it's fiction, and you suggest that it's the best way, novels are the best way that we have to understand ourselves and what it is to be human and the meaning of our own lives. What is it that gives novels that power, even though we know those stories aren't true? A novel is a remarkably capacious form. And I think one thing that novelists discover is just the power of the fictional character.

And just think of the amount of time and the amount of emotion we invest into people we know are not real, right? But who teach us about the world. but who teach us about the world. Proust is one of the most interesting novelists about this, because he says that the first novelist, which is, of course, a mythic figure, understood that it's much better to replace real people with fictional people, because real people are always partly opaque to us, whereas fictional people can be completely transparent. We can live in their minds. We can live in their minds. We can see the world through their eyes. And I think that's something that fiction does do for us. It enables us to get out of the narrowness of our own perspective and espouse

others. If we can really put ourselves in other people's places, it expands our ethical horizons. I mean, the intellectual historian Lynn Hunt has a book where she claims that the 18th century novel, 18th century interest in empathy, what they called sympathy at that time, really was at the base of the human rights movement, that that's how we understand that other people, not us, also have rights. So that's the value of stories in literature or drama or film. But where do things kind of cross over into the dangerous dominance of narrative today and the spread of misinformation and disinformation and the distrust and the polarization that they engender? and the distrust and the polarization that they engender.

One distinction I want to urge in my book is that between fiction and myth. It seems to be that fictions, as in novels, but other kinds of fictions as well, are always aware that they are make-believe, right? That there is an element of play involved, as in children's play. And I do talk a little bit about children's play. Children are capable of playing at make-believe and being totally absorbed in it, but at the same time, stepping out of it and realizing that it is make-believe, right? But when make-believe and fiction turn into myth, then it becomes something that's all explanatory and dominant, and there's no room for criticism in it. And that's what it seems to me so dangerous and which we see so much of in the world today, particularly in the political sphere, people who impose their fiction in the form of myth.

So I know we talked about some of this earlier, but can you give us the top of mind, a couple of examples? Well, take Orban in Hungary, who really has instituted the death of democracy. I am an old-fashioned freedom fighter. I am an old-fashioned freedom fighter. I am also the only anti-migration political leader on our continent. In slow steps, right?

I mean, he didn't do it through a coup or anything like that, but just gradually strangled the institutions of a democracy, including the independent judiciary and independent press and NGOs and so on. And certainly if Trump had another four years as the president of the U.S., you'd see some of that too. I mean, strangling of organs that promote truth. It's going on in Israel at this moment. Netanyahu is trying to strangle the independent judiciary. I mean, my fear is that we've reached a point where democracies are old and tired and ready to slip into a kind of post-democracy where things have the appearance of democracy. There are elections still and so on, but they aren't truly democratic.

Interesting you choose Orban. I've been to Hungary and I covered the migrant crisis over there and the narrative around that. I'm curious, often we hear about the problem with social media and the stories told on social media is that anger is operationalized as a catalyst for persuasion or for people's interest. Do you see that too, just in the bigger picture here, that there's a specific kind of story that is becoming more prevalent, maybe that is underlain by anger? I think anger, and I would add to that resentment, that people who feel they have not profited from progress, who've been left out in post-industrial society. And I mean, a great deal has been talked about in this country about the Rust Belt and de-industrialization. And people, particularly men, have been talked about

recently who don't seem to have anything left to live for. And I think that is a terrible crisis in Western democracies, right? People who feel there's nothing left to live for. And that spirit of nationalism that came out of the French Revolution and swept through a great deal of the world and really sustained people as part of a nation and a culture, that's been thrown into question by so many things, including, I mean, I spent a lot of time in France. I'm a student of French literature. Immigration, right?

Immigration, which has just so much taken apart the national myth and the national unity and belief. And it's a very difficult thing to deal with. I mean, I certainly very much on the left, and I think that immigrants should be welcomed and absorbed as much as possible. But I'm also sympathetic to those French who feel that their culture has just been destroyed, and they have nothing left to believe in. What is it that you think that makes the false narratives, either in the political sphere or elsewhere, so seductive or more convincing or persuasive than the facts of science

or what a government might say or what recorded history might say? It simplifies and totalizes. These are explanations that sweep away nuance and complication. And look at the recent COVID pandemic and those who thought that masking, social distancing, and these things that you try to do to keep more or less healthy, which were never going to keep you totally healthy, were just nonsense because, you totally healthy, were just

nonsense because they weren't 100%. And if you could come up with a simplified explanation of what worked or didn't work, it was much better. I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the internet of people who've had these shots and now they're magnetized and put a key on their forehead, it sticks. There's been people who've long suspected that there was some sort of an interface between what's being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers. My name is Timothy Caulfield. I'm a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta. And I explore how science is represented in the public sphere. You know, there's so many powerful examples of stories, of testimonials, of anecdotes overwhelming the scientific evidence.

You know, we've seen it with dramatic examples of alleged adverse events from vaccines, the professional football player collapsing on the field. That dramatic event will overwhelm hundreds of millions of carefully collected data points on safety and efficacy because it's a dramatic story. We see it with unproven therapies, miracle cures, people claiming that they had this fantastic result from a product despite what good clinical trials will say about efficacy. You know, one of the best, you know, historic examples of, I think, the power of a story

is Jenny McCarthy on Larry King talking about her kids. Well, it differs for a lot of people, but, or opinions. But I believe that it's an infection and or toxins and or funguses on top of vaccines that push children into this neurological downside, which we call autism. And she goes on, Larry King, and she tells this story about her child getting autism after receiving a vaccine. No evidence to support this. The experts on the show say there's no evidence to support this. But despite that, this heartfelt story from a parent is the takeaway.

And you can see it in Larry King's eyes. And she's held up as a hero for telling this story. And you can see the in Larry King's eyes. And she's held up as a hero for telling this story. And you can see the frustration from the experts. But we remember, yes, it's because she's a celebrity. Yes, it's on Larry King. But the big power of that moment is the story coming from a parent. And that had a dramatic impact.

And it plays to our cognitive biases, right? It plays to our negativity bias. It's a scary story. We're going to remember it. In fact, there has been empirical studies that have shown that a powerful anecdote, a powerful story will overwhelm our ability to think scientifically. So is the world so awash in stories that we've simply taken them as a natural part of the landscape of everyday life. And we've forgotten that they're actually constructed. I think that's true. We've forgotten they're constructed and that they can be subject to analysis.

They just seem natural, something that comes to us. And they do. I mean, children learn the rules of storytelling very early, somewhere between age two and three. And if you tell them a story that doesn't have an ending, they don't like it. They'll tell you, how did it end? So I think that our capacity for storytelling means that we tend to lose the kind of analytic perspective on it. So what do you mean when you've written or when you wrote that storytelling isn't innocent? Because stories have designs on them.

They want to seduce you. And there's a great deal of literature about storytelling as seduction, right? And that's something that I think the great writers have always known. For most of us, when we watch a movie or read a novel, we buy in to the fact that this is a story that we're being told. It's a fictional world. But that's not necessarily the case with narratives in the real world. People often keep their disbelief suspended,

even if the story is demonstrably untrue. Why is that? Well, again, I think it's the power of storytelling. Facts, you know, the law says just the facts, ma'am. We want the facts on the ground. But facts don't mean anything to us unless they're organized in story form, that someone did something with such and such a result. And I think we are always susceptible to seeing the world in more orderly form than perhaps the world really is. And that's, again, the seduction of stories and the need for stories. I mean, these two things are separated only by a fine line. I mean, if there were no

stories, a jury could never convict anyone because it's on the basis of story that they reach conviction in both senses. Conviction that this is true and conviction in the sense of sending someone for punishment. But that's why you always have to be very analytic about it. I think that the kind of work that we do in literature departments and teaching people the analysis of story should be more widely available than it is. You know, I mean, that's an argument for my own domain, but I think it is important. It's fair enough. But are you saying basically the narrative actually kind of acts as a suppressant to critical thinking? I think it can sort of flood our critical facilities and knock them out of order, because a great narrative is very absorbing, and it's great entertainment, and we need to be entertained. And it gives us always the sense of

a more orderly universe where things have beginnings, middles, and ends, which whereas our lives seem to be more or less barely controlled chaos a lot of the time. You write that the interaction between the storyteller and the audience is central to stories and that as readers, we want the narrator of a novel or short story to make us believe them. But we expect them to tell the story in good faith and play by the rules. That's what you say. Right. But there are a number of examples, of course, from real life of storytellers who haven't played by the rules, like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

Elizabeth Holmes was riding high, the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire. Now she's facing the prospect of decades in prison for fraud. A truly remarkable story at the height. Her company was worth nearly $10 billion and her blood testing technology was inside of Walgreens. Enron. Guilty verdicts in the biggest case of corporate fraud in history. 38 counts of fraud and conspiracy. In the eyes of the public, Enron was making billions. But in reality, the company had cooked all its profits. Can you talk about them and how they managed to dupe journalists and regulators and investigators, people who are supposed to be critical thinkers?

It's amazing. I mean, Fair enough. people who are supposed to be critical thinkers. It's amazing. I mean, Theranos is such a remarkable example of a kind of will to believe, right? People wanted to believe in Theranos and in Elizabeth Holmes. I mean, she was a slick operator in selling the notion. And if the notion had worked out, it would have been so great.

But there is a kind of will to believe. And Enron is another extraordinary example because that was a vast, I mean, Theranos was sort of two people, whereas Enron was hundreds of people and they had no money in the bank and they were just selling an idea of future riches. You know, it was going to be total electric supply and so on. So why do even investors buy into these stories? I mean, we are all quite gullible, you know, and we have no reason not to be in some cases. We want the thing to work.

We want the good guys to win. So how are we supposed to know the truth? I don't know that there's any way to know the truth except to know the untruth, right? To say, no, that's not possible. And to be critical about it. The best thing you can do for people, and I think this has been proven

over and over again, is inculcate a spirit of critical attention and reading. I mean, look how much the political divides are now becoming educational divides. It's scary. I mean, obviously, I'm an educator, a teacher, but if you could teach everyone, the world would be a much better place. When you see a story being used in the context of health, for example, is the anecdote being held up as proof, as the kernel of evidence, or is the story being provided to give context to the data? Let's use the vaccines as an example. Is an adverse event, an alleged adverse event being held up as the evidence that the vaccines aren't safe? Or in the context of, say, a public health agency, is the story being used to give

context to the numbers? Because the numbers can be overwhelming. So a heartfelt story about, say, a COVID death can have a real impact versus hearing that millions of people, see, just seeing that number, millions of people have died from COVID. So stories matter. And I'm not anti-story, kind of on the contrary. But we have to be careful that the story isn't being held up as proof of a generalizable conclusion. So always ask yourself that. How is this story being used? Is it being used as the proof, or is it being used to give meaningful context? meaningful context. Storytelling risk degradation bias promiscuous overuse in public life.

The media proclaims story everywhere as if that were the only form of understanding left in our civilization. This saturation of our culture by the mindless promotion of story argues the need for Benjamin's rich and acid analysis of culture by way of its literary exemplars, themselves largely dissenters from cultural consensus. Critical attention to the way stories are told and the way they work on us, their listeners, is ever more crucial in politics, in law, in narratives of who we are as a nation as well as individuals. Failure to understand the rhetoric of narrative and its persuasive effects has consequences for the polity itself. The kind of conundrum that I was sort of contemplating is that the only way we know and understand the world reality and ourselves is through stories, but stories are inherently fabricated and they can be false. Do we need to better understand how narratives are constructed and how they work on us? Is that the solution? I think that's part of the solution. And I'm not going to say the whole world is storified. I mean, there is science

and scientific truth. And it's interesting that one of the effects of some of the mythic storifiers at the moment is to throw out science, right? That there's no such thing as objective science. And I don't believe that. But yeah, I think you can take any group and educate them a little bit in analyzing narratives and how they're working on them. I mean, I'm co-teaching a course at Yale Law School at the moment. And I think one thing that law students need to know is how much story is involved in their discipline and rhetoric. And they're taught to think like lawyers in law schools, but they ought to be taught to think like literary critics as well. You reference novelists like Henry James and Honoré de Balzac, as you said, quite often

in your book. And how do they and other writers of literary fiction both immerse the reader in a story and make the reader think about how stories are written and how they play on our minds? I think by the use of different perspectives. I mean, Balzac was very much interested in frame tales, where you have an inner story being told to a narrator who's dramatized in the text, and then who reflects upon it, or perhaps responds in some way. And Henry James, of course, was the great theoretician of point of view. As he says, it's always more interesting to have a story told from the perspective of someone who learns the story. So you have a sort of double story of what happened and then the story of the reaction to the story.

And he says at one point that late in his career that he decided anything was better than the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible authorship. A great phrase. It's always more honest to be perspectival in your narrative. And I think that's something that many great writers have understood. So it seems like there's a bit of a paradox here, though, that the upshot of all this is that, again, as we were saying earlier, that literary fiction is often more truthful or more honest than stories in the real world. I think that's right, because it takes its own fictionality seriously and gets you to engage with that fact, whereas stories in the real world too often don't ask about their own status, you know?

You write that the weight of the unanalyzed stories, those that are propagated and accepted as true and necessary myths, may kill us yet. Do you see the passive consumption of stories as we live it now as an existential threat to humanity? I think so, partly because the media that are willing to diffuse untrue stories without any analytic attention to them have increased so that there are more and more people who've come to believe in what seems to be an alternate reality to the real reality that we

live in, if I can speak that way. And I think that that's very dangerous. I mean, I think if people vote themselves into a false parallel reality, because it simplifies and explains and makes them feel better, we're done for. Story is powerful, and for that reason it demands a powerful critical response. We need to dismantle and contest its claims to totalistic explanatory force. We live at a time when knowledge generated by the humanities in general, and literary study in particular, is often publicly devalued or even derided. I would argue that we need more than ever the reflective knowledge that the humanities can provide, very much including

analysis of the dominant stories of our economies, our ethics, our politics. The role of the literary humanities in public life may be this, to provide public tools of resistance to bogus and totalizing world explanations, to broadcast the means to dismantle the noxious myths of our time. Can you envision a university elective called narratology and critical thinking or narratology of everyday life or something along those lines? Yeah, I don't think it should be an elective. It should be part of your freshman course in university and in professional schools as well. Something like narrative, rhetoric, and belief, you know. And it should underlie everything else, just as Aristotle thought that rhetoric sort of underlay everything else.

as Aristotle thought that rhetoric sort of underlay everything else. Could we talk just about the necessity or the merit of having that kind of education in everyone's life, given what's happening in this day and age where narrative is concerned? Yeah, I mean, I think it should actually take place in secondary education and not wait till university level education. But there's so many forces against that, so many forces that want curricular uniformity. And in history, for instance, teaching in American history that whites out all the bad spots, you know, and look at what's happening in Florida, all the bad spots, you know, and look at what's happening in Florida, where the governor doesn't want AP courses in African American studies, for instance. So getting such critical thinking into the curriculum is not easy. I mean, I think that's what education ought to be about more than anything else is the capacity to think critically about

the world around you. And so I would continue to push for that as an ideal, though I know it'll be a long time coming, if ever. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us. Great pleasure. Thank you, Melody. Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His latest book is Seduced by Story, The Use and Abuse of Narrative. This episode was produced by Chris Wadzkow. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.