Once More: Storytelling Animals

This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in the annual conference of the Oklahoma Writers' Federation, Inc. Our keynote speaker was the hugely talented Patrick Rothfuss--who, in addition to writing engrossingly brilliant fantasy novels, also founded Worldbuilders, a geek-powered charity that raises money for Heifer International (an organization I have a fair bit of fondness for myself).

During his keynote, in addition to showing off his enviable beard and reading his not-for-toddlers picture book The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle, Rothfuss made the case that what distinguishes human beings most meaningfully from other animals may be our irresistible desire to tell stories--to see the world through the lens of storytelling, to make sense of it all in narrative forms.

Hence, I thought this might be a good occasion to revisit my own exploration of this idea--from a post last year. The entire post is reprinted below. What do people think? Is "storytelling animals" a better definition of humanity than the classic "rational animals"?



STORYTELLING ANIMALS

The traditional philosophical definition of 'human' is "rational animal," and while I think this definition works, it seems to me a case could made for defining us as storytelling animals. That's what is suggested in a recent article by Maria Popova, and also in the book Popova discusses in that article, namely The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall.

There may actually be a close connection between rationality and storytelling. Perhaps defining us as storytelling animals, as opposed to merely rational ones, focuses in on a certain kind of rational thinking that is especially distinctive of who and what we are.

Reason makes connections. Some of those connections are logical ones--and certainly part of what human characteristically do is recognizing logical implications. But the most important connections people make have to do with the question "Why?" And as soon as we start saying why this or that is the case--as soon as we start making causal connections, teleological ones (roughly, connections based on purposes and aims), or what I'll call emergent ones (accounts of how some higher level property arises out of the interaction of simpler elements)--we've started to tell a story.

Scientists, in their way, are in the business of telling stories. They aim not just to be collectors of facts and observers of patterns. They want to make sense of those facts and those patterns, weave them together into a coherent picture. This is the essence of narrative, what distinguishes a timeline from a story: Fitting the pieces together in a way that makes sense. The theoretic level of science might be construed as a distinctive refinement of the storyteller's art.

Arguably, the most influential scientists are those who have a knack for how to tell their story well, in a way that resonates with and makes sense to others. Darwin, in The Origin of Species, famously told the story of evolution in a way that connected with the common experience of people of the day--by, among other things, invoking the metaphor of animal husbandry to explain the process of natural selection.

Philosophy, too, can be seen as involving a specialized kind of storytelling. Philosophy has both a negative/critical side and a constructive/speculative one. The constructive side attempts to fit disparate elements of our experience together into a coherent way of seeing the whole--and the critical side is really in the service of the constructive one, assessing attempts at speculative construction to evaluate their internal coherence and their fit with our lived experience and the facts available. Philosophy in this sense becomes a kind of storytelling and vetting of stories in an attempt to piece together our human experience into a compelling account of what it all means.

Even those who resist speculation beyond "what science tells us" have a hard time resisting their own version of such holistic storytelling, which is why "scientism" so often emerges among those who are doggedly committed not to believe in anything beyond what science tells us. Scientism is what happens, we might say, when those who consciously refuse to tell a holistic story end up telling one subconsciously: They weave together a narrative picture of the whole premised on the idea that there is nothing beyond what science gives to us, and hence postulating that the picture of "the whole" cannot include any postulates beyond the very delimited ones that arise in the scientist's specialized form of storytelling.

Naturalism, in contrast with scientism, might be seen as the conscious attempt to build a narrative worldview around such a postulate--and hence as the effort to tell this story in a self-reflective and thoughtful way, as opposed to merely falling into a muddled story by accident.

Note: The above distinction might convey the impression that agnosticism is paired with scientism rather than naturalism, but that is a mistake. Agnostics might be very deliberate, thoughtful storytellers who are simply hesitant to give too much credence to their own stories. Telling a story isn't the same as believing it.

But this point raises some interesting questions which I think I'll take up in my next post. For now, however, let me ask it of my readers: What, exactly, are the different ways in which storytelling can be (or generally is) related to belief?