Second, don’t you think the “We need a new story” crowd are gesturing (however vaguely) at the same conclusion you point to? To me, your conclusion sounds like a new story.
“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.”
"So, in some way, I believe that many of the stories that we need right now in our culture arrived perfectly on time about five thousand years ago." Martin Shaw
I sense your urgency in this piece, Jonathan, and I resonate with it. The challenge with stories, as I see it, lies in their tendency to focus primarily on the 'what' and 'why.' A truly impactful story incorporates a poetic 'how' that can only be understood with an open heart. Unfortunately, many of us remain trapped in dualistic thinking, which limits our ability to recognize this crucial and transformative aspect. While I don't align myself with any specific narrative 'tribe,' I continue to long for a new overarching story that is expansive enough to include all of existence and profound enough to motivate us to protect it from what threatens it. Until then, I remain focused on the little I do have control over, that is, my daily tasks of life, attempting to remain grounded in my actions. And am grateful, ever so grateful, that there are people, like many of us here, who are attempting to do the same.
Huh. That struck me as the most reified relationship to story(ing) I think I’ve heard in a very long time. If that’s all the author imagines that “story” can and does meaningfully placehold, the worlding it enacts is indeed an impoverishment to be rightly rejected. If, on the other hand, “story” is allowed the space to evoke, say, a more Baradian, Deleuzian, or even Piercean sensibility (which I can confidently say that it does, for many), this piece begins to feel more like a case of uncharitable ax-grinding and failure of imagination and less like a sophisticated philosophical defense or ethical advocacy. Yes, of course, “story” can be legitimately understood in the reductively pathologizing way the author seems to hold it (and I can support and celebrate all the concerns that arise from such an act), but why reify this word from the beginning only to de-mean those for whom the idea is deeply meaningful and foreclose the question into which it might otherwise invite us?
Agree. I’ve been thinking about this for years. Some complementary questions:
1. What even is a “story,” which can literally mean “lie”? (Leaving aside myth, where important truths rest upon falsifiable facts. And are journalism “stories” inverted myth, where false narratives rest upon provable facts?)
2. Why new stories if the old ones made no difference? (1984 for example. Did that massively popular story do anything to stop our march towards a technocrat surveillance dystopia?)
3. What if the stories we need are displeasing or unpalatable, or incompatible with capitalism and the attention economy?
4. Is our need for a new story unevenly distributed? Is a story that pierces the heart of the president of Standard Oil more valuable than one that makes eight billion powerless hearts beat happily?
5. What if the idea that words are primary (in The Beginning) is a persistent error? What if the snake wrote that part, inserting a poisonous, self-referential worm into the human buffet of wisdom and mythology? What is the Tree of Knowledge after all, but a tree both made of words and whose fruit are more words?
Is the notion of “story” as slippery as that of “we?”
I enjoyed the playfulness of this, Jonathan. Thank you.
Back in Apr 2019 myself and 67 others followed my friend Daisy Campbell (who has been instrumental in the creation of CoB). We travelled in a big bus from The Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset to CERNE in Geneva (or Hardon2Hadron as we preferred to say) with the express magical purpose of bringing about the end of story (as we know it). The (as we know it) was tagged on 'cos we were a little worried about the original idea of ending story completely. We also 'reset time'. I've yet to see conclusive evidence that we were unsuccessful.
Of course, me being all about money... (which Joe Brewer referred to in that vague way as 'economic systems' which I don't think helps us)... I would like to offer this wisdom from my buddy Noam Yuran. "Money is the mute object of discourse". Money is written into story by default. So new discourse about 'economic systems' is always on dodgy ground imo. If we want redemption (get it?) then it will come through action. We must act ourselves into a new way of thinking - as you put it a few weeks back - and once that's done we can sit around the fire and make up those new stories.
I agree with the criticisms of the 'story' - however, there is also more. At the root of the issue, I think, is that we indeed "need a new metaphysics, a new metaethics and a new metapolitics" - and, the 'new story' is a shorthand for that, in many peoples' minds. What is the story of any given epoch? It's hard to pin down and might seem ephemeral, yet is nevertheless embedded in the various socio-cultural artifacts in formative ways - which then informs our subjective and 'objective' experiences, and creates conditions for the emergence of social institutions, policies, and de-facto 'solid' experiential realities, that effectively become embodied. This 'embeddedness' is pervasive, systemic, and therefore difficult to perceive - and so we translate it as 'stories', because we cognitively attempt to create wrappers around things, so that we can cognicize them. As an illustration - and if Weber was right - then the stories of the early Protestants had a very formative effect. There is also arguably something 'underneath' stories. We might not yet know what that is - since we are in the midst of emerging a new set of 'sciences' that, as McGilchrist might suggest, are going to be based on a better balance between the various modes of perceiving the world. So stories in that sense are far from 'innocent' - they are formative and present conditions for emergence, since they effectively collapse some interpretative possibilities offered by the 'consensus reality', while allowing others. If we believe in the stories of exclusive competition, externalities and 'winner takes all' scenarios, why would we then listen to Joe Brewer, and attempt to create a regenerative world? And if we subscribe to the indigenous stories, we are getting more than a story - it's an entire worldview, that comes with responsibility for the stewardship, deep respect of, and love for the mother Earth. So, while finding the 'new story' might not be an end in itself - in as much the Enlightenment was not purely based on stories - the emergence of a new age, I think, aught to consider the generative power of stories as a minimal 'nugget', a sort of a Planck scale, of wisdom (see Boje and Jørgensen, 2008); and create ones that we find most promising towards enabling the 'creation of conditions that fulfill their own possibility'. Let us become the Protestants of our own age. What stories would we need to move beyond the instrumental - and what emergent structures might they imply?
This piece really didn't do it for me, Jonathan. But maybe it's because I've been pondering all of this stuff very deeply for ... decades, and have been sinking ever deeper into the layers of grief which await anyone who perceives what's happening in our world -- to us, to nature, to culture, to everything.
No, of course we don't need another story. What we need is another direction to walk in. One which makes sense now, which didn't seem to make sense to many twenty and thirty years ago. That is, it's not so much about story as about living the implications of what is real now. Living it. Its essential feature (this time in our lives and in history) is moving in the world, which is why I said walking and evoked direction. I will offer no story about any of that. I'll point to the heart of us all and ask us to then move.
You've won me over on the inadequacy of the word 'story', but I think the sentiment many people are trying to get at with 'we need a new story' is a good one, that's more precisely expressed as 'we need a new plan, that's both visionary and practical'. To my mind, and to use the 'time between worlds' framing, it's saying that we (people who want a better future) need to design and build the new world, not just wait until it happens, and to do so we need a 'story' to guide us.
IMO, the idea that we need to design and build the new world is an important one, because if we do just let the future happen, it's going to be awful. I really like the way you (personally and through Perspectiva) have developed the related 'time between worlds' idea. My impression (but please excuse and correct me if I am wrong) is that it's a kind of preparation for envisioning and building the new world, because it gets minds & hearts out of the old one and ready for the new one.
There are of course many people trying to envision what the new world should look like and how we can build it... I am one of them! The quick description of what I'm envisioning is 'a planetary pluriverse with a systemic basis of bioregional cosmolocalism'. I would be delighted (and maybe you would too...) if you were to read my recent essay developing my thinking on this: https://paddyleflufy.substack.com/p/the-meta-solution-is-a-new-civilisation
"It's always been the same old story"~Cat Stevens. The human mind creates stories ad infinitum. The glibness of "we need a new story" is what urks. It seems like a wistful hope or hopium designed to placate or manipulate.
The fact that we evolve is relevant here. It's what you advocate in this essay. Personally & Socially we evolve. We wake up over & over to new stories. Until we don't. Sometimes we regress. Sometimes societies regress into fearful reaction instead of moving forward in the direction of positive change for all of us. For some, change happens too fast & they react. Thats what we see in the authoritarian shift happening around the world.
Time will tell which part of our psyche's will prevail. The lizard brain or the evolving soul. There is a story that says that evolution will always win, its just a matter of time. There is also a story that says civilizations die. It's happened to homo sapiens more than 80 times in our long history.
We must all do the work to transcend our lizard brains & to help others.
Could it be that what we deny, is exactly what we need to navigate in the ruins without creating new ruins?
I am going to use a big C word, Complexity, the ever-growing monster we keep trying to sweep under the carpet. Is this monster a metaphor for creating an ever-increasing heap of stories failing to deliver in a world steeped in Complexity?
Perhaps we need an anti-story to redress the problem of navigating the ruins for the benefit of everyone, ethically, returning to our roots of the ancient eternal story of man's true identity, embedded in the mind of our creator. St Paul said we have the mind of Christ. This was the reality before Man separated from God. Do we actually live in a Simulation, we deny at the cost of failing targets for avoiding the world of ruins.
Better packaging can't make garbage ideas that don't make sense to people any less so. If you find failure after failure, what needs to change is the thing itself, the people and organizations pushing it.
First, I’m here for Tina.
Second, don’t you think the “We need a new story” crowd are gesturing (however vaguely) at the same conclusion you point to? To me, your conclusion sounds like a new story.
“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.”
"So, in some way, I believe that many of the stories that we need right now in our culture arrived perfectly on time about five thousand years ago." Martin Shaw
https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/mud-and-antler-bone/
I sense your urgency in this piece, Jonathan, and I resonate with it. The challenge with stories, as I see it, lies in their tendency to focus primarily on the 'what' and 'why.' A truly impactful story incorporates a poetic 'how' that can only be understood with an open heart. Unfortunately, many of us remain trapped in dualistic thinking, which limits our ability to recognize this crucial and transformative aspect. While I don't align myself with any specific narrative 'tribe,' I continue to long for a new overarching story that is expansive enough to include all of existence and profound enough to motivate us to protect it from what threatens it. Until then, I remain focused on the little I do have control over, that is, my daily tasks of life, attempting to remain grounded in my actions. And am grateful, ever so grateful, that there are people, like many of us here, who are attempting to do the same.
Huh. That struck me as the most reified relationship to story(ing) I think I’ve heard in a very long time. If that’s all the author imagines that “story” can and does meaningfully placehold, the worlding it enacts is indeed an impoverishment to be rightly rejected. If, on the other hand, “story” is allowed the space to evoke, say, a more Baradian, Deleuzian, or even Piercean sensibility (which I can confidently say that it does, for many), this piece begins to feel more like a case of uncharitable ax-grinding and failure of imagination and less like a sophisticated philosophical defense or ethical advocacy. Yes, of course, “story” can be legitimately understood in the reductively pathologizing way the author seems to hold it (and I can support and celebrate all the concerns that arise from such an act), but why reify this word from the beginning only to de-mean those for whom the idea is deeply meaningful and foreclose the question into which it might otherwise invite us?
What if "we need a new story" is a simpler way of saying "we need a new metaphysics, a new metaethics and a new metapolitics"?
Agree. I’ve been thinking about this for years. Some complementary questions:
1. What even is a “story,” which can literally mean “lie”? (Leaving aside myth, where important truths rest upon falsifiable facts. And are journalism “stories” inverted myth, where false narratives rest upon provable facts?)
2. Why new stories if the old ones made no difference? (1984 for example. Did that massively popular story do anything to stop our march towards a technocrat surveillance dystopia?)
3. What if the stories we need are displeasing or unpalatable, or incompatible with capitalism and the attention economy?
4. Is our need for a new story unevenly distributed? Is a story that pierces the heart of the president of Standard Oil more valuable than one that makes eight billion powerless hearts beat happily?
5. What if the idea that words are primary (in The Beginning) is a persistent error? What if the snake wrote that part, inserting a poisonous, self-referential worm into the human buffet of wisdom and mythology? What is the Tree of Knowledge after all, but a tree both made of words and whose fruit are more words?
Is the notion of “story” as slippery as that of “we?”
I enjoyed the playfulness of this, Jonathan. Thank you.
Back in Apr 2019 myself and 67 others followed my friend Daisy Campbell (who has been instrumental in the creation of CoB). We travelled in a big bus from The Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset to CERNE in Geneva (or Hardon2Hadron as we preferred to say) with the express magical purpose of bringing about the end of story (as we know it). The (as we know it) was tagged on 'cos we were a little worried about the original idea of ending story completely. We also 'reset time'. I've yet to see conclusive evidence that we were unsuccessful.
Of course, me being all about money... (which Joe Brewer referred to in that vague way as 'economic systems' which I don't think helps us)... I would like to offer this wisdom from my buddy Noam Yuran. "Money is the mute object of discourse". Money is written into story by default. So new discourse about 'economic systems' is always on dodgy ground imo. If we want redemption (get it?) then it will come through action. We must act ourselves into a new way of thinking - as you put it a few weeks back - and once that's done we can sit around the fire and make up those new stories.
I agree with the criticisms of the 'story' - however, there is also more. At the root of the issue, I think, is that we indeed "need a new metaphysics, a new metaethics and a new metapolitics" - and, the 'new story' is a shorthand for that, in many peoples' minds. What is the story of any given epoch? It's hard to pin down and might seem ephemeral, yet is nevertheless embedded in the various socio-cultural artifacts in formative ways - which then informs our subjective and 'objective' experiences, and creates conditions for the emergence of social institutions, policies, and de-facto 'solid' experiential realities, that effectively become embodied. This 'embeddedness' is pervasive, systemic, and therefore difficult to perceive - and so we translate it as 'stories', because we cognitively attempt to create wrappers around things, so that we can cognicize them. As an illustration - and if Weber was right - then the stories of the early Protestants had a very formative effect. There is also arguably something 'underneath' stories. We might not yet know what that is - since we are in the midst of emerging a new set of 'sciences' that, as McGilchrist might suggest, are going to be based on a better balance between the various modes of perceiving the world. So stories in that sense are far from 'innocent' - they are formative and present conditions for emergence, since they effectively collapse some interpretative possibilities offered by the 'consensus reality', while allowing others. If we believe in the stories of exclusive competition, externalities and 'winner takes all' scenarios, why would we then listen to Joe Brewer, and attempt to create a regenerative world? And if we subscribe to the indigenous stories, we are getting more than a story - it's an entire worldview, that comes with responsibility for the stewardship, deep respect of, and love for the mother Earth. So, while finding the 'new story' might not be an end in itself - in as much the Enlightenment was not purely based on stories - the emergence of a new age, I think, aught to consider the generative power of stories as a minimal 'nugget', a sort of a Planck scale, of wisdom (see Boje and Jørgensen, 2008); and create ones that we find most promising towards enabling the 'creation of conditions that fulfill their own possibility'. Let us become the Protestants of our own age. What stories would we need to move beyond the instrumental - and what emergent structures might they imply?
Thanks for the video with Joe Brewer. Wonderful !
long live stories, myths and grand narratives
https://johnstokdijk538.substack.com/p/we-dont-need-a-new-story
TLDR - I’ll read it later. But yes, the story is eternal and that’s what needs to be revived. God bless you.
This piece really didn't do it for me, Jonathan. But maybe it's because I've been pondering all of this stuff very deeply for ... decades, and have been sinking ever deeper into the layers of grief which await anyone who perceives what's happening in our world -- to us, to nature, to culture, to everything.
No, of course we don't need another story. What we need is another direction to walk in. One which makes sense now, which didn't seem to make sense to many twenty and thirty years ago. That is, it's not so much about story as about living the implications of what is real now. Living it. Its essential feature (this time in our lives and in history) is moving in the world, which is why I said walking and evoked direction. I will offer no story about any of that. I'll point to the heart of us all and ask us to then move.
You've won me over on the inadequacy of the word 'story', but I think the sentiment many people are trying to get at with 'we need a new story' is a good one, that's more precisely expressed as 'we need a new plan, that's both visionary and practical'. To my mind, and to use the 'time between worlds' framing, it's saying that we (people who want a better future) need to design and build the new world, not just wait until it happens, and to do so we need a 'story' to guide us.
IMO, the idea that we need to design and build the new world is an important one, because if we do just let the future happen, it's going to be awful. I really like the way you (personally and through Perspectiva) have developed the related 'time between worlds' idea. My impression (but please excuse and correct me if I am wrong) is that it's a kind of preparation for envisioning and building the new world, because it gets minds & hearts out of the old one and ready for the new one.
There are of course many people trying to envision what the new world should look like and how we can build it... I am one of them! The quick description of what I'm envisioning is 'a planetary pluriverse with a systemic basis of bioregional cosmolocalism'. I would be delighted (and maybe you would too...) if you were to read my recent essay developing my thinking on this: https://paddyleflufy.substack.com/p/the-meta-solution-is-a-new-civilisation
"It's always been the same old story"~Cat Stevens. The human mind creates stories ad infinitum. The glibness of "we need a new story" is what urks. It seems like a wistful hope or hopium designed to placate or manipulate.
The fact that we evolve is relevant here. It's what you advocate in this essay. Personally & Socially we evolve. We wake up over & over to new stories. Until we don't. Sometimes we regress. Sometimes societies regress into fearful reaction instead of moving forward in the direction of positive change for all of us. For some, change happens too fast & they react. Thats what we see in the authoritarian shift happening around the world.
Time will tell which part of our psyche's will prevail. The lizard brain or the evolving soul. There is a story that says that evolution will always win, its just a matter of time. There is also a story that says civilizations die. It's happened to homo sapiens more than 80 times in our long history.
We must all do the work to transcend our lizard brains & to help others.
Could it be that what we deny, is exactly what we need to navigate in the ruins without creating new ruins?
I am going to use a big C word, Complexity, the ever-growing monster we keep trying to sweep under the carpet. Is this monster a metaphor for creating an ever-increasing heap of stories failing to deliver in a world steeped in Complexity?
Perhaps we need an anti-story to redress the problem of navigating the ruins for the benefit of everyone, ethically, returning to our roots of the ancient eternal story of man's true identity, embedded in the mind of our creator. St Paul said we have the mind of Christ. This was the reality before Man separated from God. Do we actually live in a Simulation, we deny at the cost of failing targets for avoiding the world of ruins.
Better packaging can't make garbage ideas that don't make sense to people any less so. If you find failure after failure, what needs to change is the thing itself, the people and organizations pushing it.