The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
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Pathological confabulators hew to their stories with striking tenacity. A brain-damaged father insists that he is still a young man, while also correctly listing the ages of his middle-aged children. Amnesiacs with Korsakoff’s syndrome constantly forget who they are and constantly spin and re-spin new identities for themselves. As Oliver Sacks puts it, one patient with Korsakoff’s is a “confabulatory genius” who “must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment.” Patients with Cotard’s syndrome maintain a host of interesting explanations for why they appear to be alive when they are in fact stone dead. Confabulators who have lost an arm or a leg may adamantly deny it. When asked to move the missing limb, the amputee will invent a reason for not doing so, an explanation that involves arthritis or a rebellion against her doctor’s badgering. (Then there is the Black Knight from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After King Arthur cleaves away both of the knight’s arms, the confabulating knight insists, “It’s just a flesh wound.” Arthur points out, “You’ve got no arms left!” As arterial blood spurts from his stumps, the knight responds, “Yes, I have!”)
These examples of confabulation in damaged or diseased brains are not only fascinating in themselves; they are also fascinating for the way they illuminate the function of healthy minds. Psychologists are finding that ordinary, mentally healthy people are strikingly prone to confabulate in everyday situations. We’re just so skillful that it’s hard to catch us in the act. It takes clever lab work to show how often our storytelling minds run amok.
One of the first such studies was published by Norman Maier in 1931. Maier placed each of his research subjects in a room that was empty except for two ropes hanging from the ceiling and some objects lying about the room, such as an extension cord and a pair of pliers. The subject was given a job: tie the two ropes together. But the ropes were too far apart to be grasped at the same time, and in many cases the subject was stumped. At some point, the psychologist would enter the room to check the subject’s progress. The subject would then suddenly figure the problem out: tie the pliers to one of the ropes as a weight; get the weighted rope swinging; catch and tie.
When the psychologist asked the subjects how they hit upon the pliers method, they told great stories. One subject, who was himself a professor of psychology, responded, “I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees. This imagery appeared simultaneously with the solution. The idea appeared complete.” What the subjects failed to mention was the event that had actually inspired the solution. When the researcher entered the room, he “accidentally on purpose” nudged one of the ropes and set it swinging, an event that few of the subjects consciously registered.
In a more recent study, psychologists asked a group of shoppers to choose among seven pairs of identically priced socks. After inspecting the socks and making their choices, the shoppers were asked to give reasons for their choices. Typically, shoppers explained their choices on the basis of subtle differences in color, texture, and quality of stitching. In fact, all seven pairs of socks were identical. There actually was a pattern in the shoppers’ preferences, but no one was able to detect it: they tended to choose socks on the right side of the array. Instead of answering that they had no idea why they chose the socks they did, the shoppers told a story that made their decisions appear to be rational. But they weren’t. The stories were confabulations—lies, honestly told.
A CURSED RAGE FOR ORDER
These may seem like tame examples. Does it really matter whether the stories we tell ourselves all day long—about why a spouse closed the laptop as we entered the room or why a colleague has a guilty look on her face—have a basis in fact? Who cares whether we make up stories about socks? But there is a dark side to our tendency to impose stories where they do not exist, and nothing reveals it like a good conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy theories—feverishly creative, lovingly plotted—are in fact fictional stories that some people believe. Conspiracy theorists connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination—yes, perhaps even your imagination—not despite structural parallels with fiction, but in large part because of them. They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment. Consider novels such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, films such as JFK and The Manchurian Candidate, and television shows such as 24 and The X-Files.
Loud, angry, and charismatic, Alex Jones has built a commercial mini-empire by peddling stories of evil conspiracies. In his documentary Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, Jones—chubby and pushing forty—offers a river of innuendo and a dearth of actual evidence to suggest that a tiny cadre of “global elites” are executing a dastardly plan to take over the earth and enslave its inhabitants. Road signs have been specially marked so that invading UN troops will be able to navigate the American heartland. Mailboxes have been discreetly marked, too. If you find a discreet blue dot on yours, breathe a sigh of relief: you will only be sent to a FEMA concentration camp. If you find a red dot, say your prayers: the foreign invaders will execute you on the spot. According to Jones, the plotters, Lucifer worshipers to a man, will depopulate the world by 80 percent and then take advantage of advances in medical genetics that will allow them to live forever like gods.
Documentarians from the Independent Film Channel (IFC) recently followed Jones around the country as he roared against the New World Order, investigated the assassination of JFK, and fired up the crowds at 9/11 Truth rallies. In the IFC documentary and on his disturbingly popular radio program (it draws one million listeners per day), Jones comes off as a paranoid egomaniac. Wherever he goes, he is sure he is being followed. Driving down the highway, he and his colleagues are constantly swiveling their heads, alert for tails. When an ordinary sedan passes them, Jones snaps pictures of the car, saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s military intelligence.” Standing outside the White House, Jones is convinced that a shirtless mountain biker is an undercover Secret Service agent keeping tabs on him. When a fire alarm goes off in his hotel just as he is about to be interviewed on a live radio program, he spits and sputters and flaps his arms, roaring, “They’ve set us up! They’ve set us up!”
Alex Jones leading a 9/11 Truth rally in New York City.
It’s fair to ask what, if anything, separates the paranoid confabulations of Alex Jones from those of James Tilly Matthews—or from the influential conspiracy theorist David Icke, who appears not to be kidding when he argues that the world is ruled by vampiristic extraterrestrial lizard people in disguise. It seems that differences between the delusions of psychotics and the fantasies of conspiracy theorists are of degree, not kind. Matthews’s delusional psychosis appears to be a broken version of the same pattern hunger that gives us conspiracy theories in mentally healthy individuals. In conspiracy theories, we have the storytelling mind operating at its glorious worst.
Many conspiracy theories would be funny except for the fact that stories—no matter how fanciful—have consequences. For example, in Africa many believe that AIDS is a racist hoax designed to terrify black people into abstinence and condom use, and thus to perpetrate a bloodless genocide. Believing this gets a lot of Africans killed. Timothy McVeigh (pictured here), who has been described as “a walking compendium of antigovernment conspiracy theories,” blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City because he subscribed to a prime tenet of the militia movement: the U.S. government has sold out to the New World Order.
What’s really striking about conspiracy theories is not their strangeness but their ordinariness. Go to Google, type in “conspiracy,” and browse through some of the 37 million hits. You will find that there is a conspiracy theory for just about everything. There are the big
classics, invoking evil cabals of Illuminati, Masons, and Jews. There is a conspiracy theory for any major entertainment or political figure who dies young: Marilyn, Elvis, Biggie, and Tupac; Princess Di (murdered because she had an Arab baby in her womb); RFK, JFK, and MLK (all killed by the same Manchurian candidate). There are conspiracy theories about Hurricane Katrina (government operatives dynamited the levees to drown black neighborhoods), fluoridated drinking water (a means of mind control), aphrodisiac bubble gum (Israelis use it to turn Palestinian girls into tarts), jet plane vapor trails (they spew aggression-enhancing chemicals into minority neighborhoods), Paul McCartney (long dead), John Lennon (gunned down by Stephen King), the Holocaust (didn’t happen), Area 51 cover-ups (happened), moon landings (didn’t), and so on.
A truly stunning number of people actually believe these stories. For example, a July 2006 Scripps Howard poll showed that 36 percent of Americans thought the U.S. government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, with a majority of Democrats and young people (between the ages of eighteen and thirty) believing that government elements either actively pulled off the attacks or—in a rehash of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories—had foreknowledge of the attacks but did nothing to stop them. The left certainly hasn’t cornered the market on conspiracy. At the time of this writing, for example, large numbers of right-wing Americans are lost in fantasies about President Barack Obama. Obama is a stealth Muslim (one-third of conservative Republicans believed this as of August 2010, along with 20 to 25 percent of Americans generally). Obama was not born in the United States (45 percent of Republicans). Obama is a communist who is actively trying to destroy America. Obama wants to set up Nazi- style death panels to euthanize old people. Obama is the Antichrist (in a controversial Harris Poll, 24 percent of Republicans endorsed the statement that Obama “might” be the Antichrist).
It’s tempting to blame general backwardness or ignorance for this epidemic of conspiracy. Tempting, but wrong. As David Aaronovitch explains in his book Voodoo Histories,
Conspiracy theories originate and are largely circulated among the educated and middle class. The imagined model of an ignorant, priest-ridden peasantry or proletariat, replacing religious and superstitious belief with equally far-fetched notions of how society works, turns out to be completely wrong. It has typically been the professors, the university students, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants who have concocted and disseminated the conspiracies.
Conspiracy theories are not, then, the province of a googly- eyed lunatic fringe. Conspiratorial thinking is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience. Conspiracy theories offer ultimate answers to a great mystery of the human condition: why are things so bad in the world? They provide nothing less than a solution to the problem of evil. In the imaginative world of the conspiracy theorist, there is no accidental badness. To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens. History is not just one damned thing after another, and only dopes and sheeple believe in coincidences. For this reason, conspiracy theories—no matter how many devils they invoke—are always consoling in their simplicity. Bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story.
6. The Moral of the Story
We live or die by the artist’s vision, sane or cracked.
—JOHN GARDNER, On Moral Fiction
FLIP THROUGH THE holy books of the three great monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and you will be flipping through anthologies of stories: the Fall, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Isaac, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the Archangel Gabriel seizing Muhammad by the throat and revealing that Allah created man from a clot of blood. Take away the lists of begettings, the strings of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” (one writer puts the number of biblical commandments not at ten, but at more like seven hundred), the instructions on how to sacrifice animals and how to build an ark, and you have a collection of intense narratives about the biggest stuff in human life. The Middle Eastern holy books are catalogs of savage violence, of a cruel God wantonly smiting, of a merciful God blessing and forgiving, of people suffering on the move, of men and women joining in love and doing lots and lots of begetting.
And, of course, it is not just the planet’s monotheisms that are built on stories. This seems to be true of all religions, major and minor, throughout world history. Read through the folklore of traditional peoples, and the dominant story type will be myths explaining why things are the way they are. In traditional societies, truths about the spirit world were conveyed not through lists or essays—they were conveyed through story. The world’s priests and shamans knew what psychology would later confirm: if you want a message to burrow into a human mind, work it into a story.
Staunch believers in any of the three major monotheisms (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) may take offense when I refer to their holy scriptures as stories. But many of those same believers would be quick to say that narratives about Zeus or Thor or Shiva—the Hindu god of destruction (pictured here)—are just stories.
Guided by the holy myths, believers must imaginatively construct an alternate reality that stretches from the origins straight through to the end times. Believers must mentally simulate an entire shadow world that teems with evidence of divinity. They must be able to decode the cryptic messages in the stars, the whistle of the wind, the entrails of goats, and the riddles of the prophets.
Throughout the history of our species, sacred fiction has dominated human existence like nothing else. Religion is the ultimate expression of story’s dominion over our minds. The heroes of sacred fiction do not respect the barrier between the pretend and the real. They swarm through the real world, exerting massive influence. Based on what the sacred stories say, believers regulate the practices of their lives: how they eat, how they wash, how they dress, when they have sex, when they forgive, and when they wage total war in the name of everything holy.
Why?
Religion is a human universal, present—in one form or another—in all of the societies that anthropologists have visited and archaeologists have dug up. Even now, in this brave age of brain science and genomics, God is not dead, dying, or really even ailing. Nietzsche would be disappointed. Most of the world’s people don’t look up at the sky and find it—like the poet Hart Crane—“ungoded.” The world’s big religions are gaining more converts than they are losing. While Europe has become more secular over the past century, most of the rest of the world (including the United States) is getting more religious.
Since it is not plausible that religion just happened to develop independently in many thousands of different cultures, Homo sapiens must have already been a spiritual ape when our ancestors began streaming out of Africa. And since all religions share some of the same basic features—including belief in supernatural beings, belief in a transcendent soul, belief in the efficacy of magic (in the form of rituals and prayer)—the roots of spirituality must be sunk deep in human nature.
But why did we evolve to be religious? How did dogmatic faith in imaginary beings not diminish our ability to survive and reproduce? How could the frugal mechanisms of natural selection not have worked against religion, given the high price of religious sacrifices, rituals, prohibitions, taboos, and commandments? After all, burning a goat for Zeus meant one less goat for your family. And sawing off a perfectly good piece of your baby son’s penis because an ancient story suggests you should is not without risks. (Before the discovery of the germ theory of disease—in the days before antibiotics and surgical steel—circumcision was dangerous, and accidents still do happen.) Also, while it is pretty easy to refrain from violating biblical injunctions against wearing cloth with mixed fibers or boiling a baby goat in the milk of its mother, it’s more of a burden to be stoning p
eople all the time: adulterers, magicians, Sabbath breakers, incest enthusiasts, blasphemers, disobedient children, idolaters, wayward oxen.
Religious tendencies are either an evolutionary adaptation, an evolutionary side effect, or some combination of the two. The conventional secular explanation of religion is that humans invent gods to give order and meaning to existence. Humans are born curious, and they must have answers to the big, unanswerable questions: Why am I here? Who made me? Where does the sun go at night? Why does giving birth hurt? What happens to “me” after I die—not my raggedy old carcass, but me, that endlessly chattering presence inside my skull?
This is, in essence, a by-product explanation of religion, and it is the one that most current evolutionary thinkers embrace. We have religion because, by nature, we abhor explanatory vacuums. In sacred fiction, we find the master confabulations of the storytelling mind.
Some evolutionary thinkers, including leading lights such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, focus relentlessly on the black side of religious behavior: the pogroms, the bigotry, the suppression of real thought in favor of dumb faith. They think that religion is the result of a tragic evolutionary glitch. Dawkins and Dennett argue that the mind is vulnerable to religion in the same way that a computer is vulnerable to viruses. Both Dennett and Dawkins view religion as a mental parasite (as Dawkins memorably put it, religion is “a virus of the mind”), and a noxious one at that. For these thinkers, religion is not akin, say, to the friendly parasites that colonize our intestines and help us digest food. Religion is more like the loathsome pinworms that lay itchy eggs around the anus. According to Dawkins and Dennett, human life would be a lot better if the mental parasite of religion could simply be eradicated.