Thinking in Stories

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

Tabish Khair in The Hindu

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.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When Plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools, and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver. Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only will he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some other such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

But a much easier marker: he doesn’t deadlift.