We don't need a new story

Why I am weary of calls for narrative change.

I’m tired of people saying “We need a new story”.

We don’t. We are already up to our oxters in stories.

The old Tina Turner song “We don’t need another hero” comes to mind.

I want to keep the music and some of the lyrics but then tweak the chorus.

So it’s “Our of the ruins, out from the wreckage, can’t make the same mistake this time…dum be dum be dum…” Then please repeat the new chorus after me:

🎶 All the children say! WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER STORY 🎶

Sorry.

By all means squeeze another story into the back of the car before you set off on your social change adventure, but you’ll find there’s a narrative traffic jam on the road to anywhere you want to go.

And when your car stops and the rain starts, the water will fall as narrative too, in memories, scenes, lyrics, and anecdotes. It doesn’t stop, and it’s not meant to. Stories are the semiotic air we breathe, the meaning oxygen that prevents us from wilting.

What the ‘we need a new story tribe’ are angling at is that the story of modernity is ending, and it’s not that they are wrong as such. We appear to be in a new geological phase of time, with a new infosphere, and since capitalism appears to be running out of sane frontiers (they are already plundering the bowels of the earth and profiteering from your suggestible eyeballs…) it might be that the end is nigh. That story of science, reason and progress is running out, and perhaps individualism and consumerism and (bogey man alert!) patriarchy are on the way out. As more and more people lose confidence in that story, it is almost a self-fulfiling prophency that it will come to an end. So what’s the new story?

That’s roughly how the story about the need for new stories goes.

But there are so many distinctions to make here that it’s maddening. An epoch is not so much a story but a historiographical reference for an extended period of time with contested characeristics. A paradigm is not so much a story but a way of organising knowledge and practice and conferring legitimacy. An Imaginary is not so much a story but a background setting that operates as a kind of lens through which we are obliged to see the world. These conceptual reference points, and others, are all somewhat story-like, and no wonder! Stories permeate everything. It’s true that “We need a new story” is useful for getting beyond technocratic policy debates and inviting political imagination, but it doesn’t actually say much, and lacks explanatory bite.

The problem is not the stories. Everyone loves a good story. The problem is that the simplistic diagnosis in question - “we need a new story” betrays its own subject and fails to inform action.

We live by stories, for stories, and through stories. As a Chess Grandmaster and teacher I noticed that even apparently logical thinking is suffused with narrative structure, and in Chess for Zebras(2005) I have a chapter all about storytelling and another on the myths we play by. In my PhD thesis on the concept of Wisdom (2008) stories featuring wise actions are used as provocations to elicit insight into what makes action wise, as opposd to say shrewd, kind, creative, or merely intelligent. Looking back at the text now (still unpublished) I was glad to see a section called ‘Why stories’ that included the following gem:

The Master gave his teachings in parables and stories which his disciples listened to with pleasure-and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper. The master was unmoved. To all their objections he would say, ‘You have yet to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story’

(Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom)

So I take stories very seriously, but no less playfully as a result. (Here I’m thinking of frivolous as the opposite of serious, and earnest as the opposite of playful).

And yet!

While it’s true that we need to narrate our predicament and locate our agency in space and time, the suggestion that in order to do this today, “we need a new story” is obtuse, vague, lazy, and lame.

That’s a lot of catty words. Let’s see if they get the cream.

“We need a new story” is obtuse because while we can create stories for particular purposes stories are not instrumental by nature and any story created for a purpose risks seeming synthetic and brittle. And while you might pitch a new story and imagine everyone will came under the spell of your narrative enchantment, your main opponents might think and do the same thing. We are also created by other people’s stories. Remember: Take Back Control! And: Make America Great Again!

“Define or be defined” they say, and who are they? Exactly. I remember for instance being defined as a ‘radical leftist’ by several internet trolls when I dared to challenge Jordan Peterson back in the day but I never saw myself as such. My story was different, but who knew?

We tend to forget too that stories have realities and purposes of their own. Not everything is a story, but almost everything perceptible sits within overlapping stories.

There’s a famous line by the American poet Muriel Rukeyser: “The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms”. That’s poetry rather than proposition because surely it’s made of both, but the world is as much a story as an object. There is some Theology skulking around here if you have the heart for it. *In the beginning*, they say, was the word (Logos). From that perennial vista, the idea that we need a new story is obtuse. Our challenge is rather to recognise that we are already living within and through the oldest possible story, the one that will encompass and outlast us all.

“We need a new story” is vague because one story will never do it. You can have a story of stories in principle - a metanarrative, even a paradigm. Still, a story is subversive of these grandiose conceptual props, and our world is much too wayward and contested for any single story to hold sway. Stories are nimble and legion and cross-pollinating. They have an agency of their own. We can’t control stories or treat them as mere tools, so what do we expect a new story to be or do? How is it going to help?

“We need a new story” is lazy because (to mischievously paraphrase something Gandhi didn’t actually say) we must be the story we want to see in the world. Insofar as we need a new story, we have to not just create it but forge it, become it, and live it. We may fancy ourselves as the authors of our lives but we are also characters in an improvised historical drama. The kinds of stories we need today have not happened yet, and they only arise from our actions, as Joe Brewer puts it well in a relatively neglected three-minute Katie Teague video: Living into Being.

Finally, “We need a new story” is lame because while it sounds innovative and insightful to say we need a new story, it amounts to narrative bypassing (did I just make that up?) and entails no political commitment. In fact, “we need a new story” may even amount to social conformity of the ‘Jesus is coming, look busy’ variety. Everyone and their forgotten cousin thinks we need a new story today, which indicates that the idea has become part of our problem. The expression “we need a new story” is now totemic of our immunity to change and lack of imagination. It’s another way of saying: We don’t know what to do, so let’s continue pretending to be deep.

Stories are not objects. They do not sit on the shelf waiting to be purchased. And they are not things we can readily conjure on demand either. Stories come into our lives unbidden. Stories are latent and emergent as well as being endogenous and ubiquitous. They are already all over the place, within us, between us, for us and against us. Stories are going to surprise us no matter what we do.

I don’t care how big your whiteboard is. I don’t care how many coloured marker pens you have. I don’t care about the creative brainstorming room you set aside in your new office with those ostentatious bean bags you expect me to sink into without any care for how I get out of them with dignity; nor do I care how many yellow sticky notes you have assembled to stake out your conceptual territory. And your large thermos flask of weak coffee will not save us, not even with oat milk on the side. And don’t think I don’t know about all those shortbread biscuits you hide inside the napkins and stealthily place in your bag for your children at home, only to discover a week later that you forget, and now have crumbs interspersed with your keys.

OK, that last one is just me.

But none of this matters to the stories.

*

I have run out of time for today, but here is a better way of looking at it: The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote: ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’. The long answer is outlined in Perspectiva in ten premises (June 2023)

Those ten premises are a longform description of the metacrisis, which I first wrote about in Tasting the Pickle, but subsequently in Prefixing the World, and in Katie Teague’s film Living in the Metacrisis. These ten premises might be ‘as simple as possible but not simpler’ but maybe not. I’ve been thinking of how to distil Perspectiva’s rationale to make it even more readily accessible without adultering it. I noticed that 1-4 are all a kind of recognition of how things are, 5-7 are all a kind of reorientation and 8-10 are all a kind of reckoning with what follows for the nature of worthwhile action.

In November 2023, I decided that there are ultimately three major patterns of change that seem to be necessary and I wrote about The Flip, The Formation, and The Fun. The argument is that we need a new metaphysics, a new metaethics and a new metapolitics. That’s a whole conversation of course, and one that may take decades to play out. There are implications for social and contemplative practice, for institution building and for spiritual innovation. It’s the difficult work of the century we call home. The joyous struggle we are caught up in is to forge a new relationship to reality, champion a new societal purpose and build a new political economy. We need to do all those things and it won’t be easy.

What we don’t need is “a new story”.

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