Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, on Columbus Day, Monday 10 October 1983, President Ronald Reagan watched a tape of a new TV movie, The Day After, showing the aftermath of a nuclear war with Russia in the town of Lawrence, Kansas. “It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed,” he wrote in his diary. “So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. Whether it will be of help to the ‘anti nukes’ or not, I cant [sic] say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.”

Of course, this wasn’t the only reason why Reagan became less hawkish about nuclear weapons, moving towards an agreement with the Soviet Union. “But one factor was watching The Day After and being enormously moved and depressed and upset by it,” says Dorian Lynskey (Downing 1992), podcaster, journalist and author of the upcoming Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World. “It was the most watched TV movie in American history. Countless articles were being written about nuclear war. But the film – the story – was the thing that reached people.”

Not all stories save the world. But it’s hard to imagine a world without them. Storytelling is intrinsic in what it means to be human, says Elias Garcia-Pelegrin (St Edmund’s 2019), assistant professor in comparative cognition and evolutionary psychology at the National University of Singapore. “We are the way we are because we tell stories to each other. That’s the uniqueness of humanity. I can make you understand what it is to be me, and you can make me understand what it is to be you.”

Appropriately, the origins of storytelling are lost in mystery. “Take everything I’m going to say with a pinch of salt!” says Garcia- Pelegrin. Trying to work out how our ancestors thought is far harder even than working out what they ate or wore, he points out. But we see communication in its most simple form in the animal world: birds use alarm calls to warn others about nearby predators. Perhaps humans were able to put those simple semantics into a coherent space: a narrative. That calls upon something which almost no other species does: mental time travel. “This is our ability to access our episodic memory and travel back and forth between time and space,” says Garcia-Pelegrin. “We could tell a story not about a predator that is threatening us now, but one which threatened us yesterday, or might threaten us in the future.”

We are not the only animals that do this: chimpanzees can do it, and, incredibly, some crows. “But, as far as we know, no animal does it better than us,” says Garcia-Pelegrin. “In my opinion, when we evolved this extreme cognitive complexity to navigate between the past, the present and the future – that’s when storytelling became intrinsic within humankind. And the fact that we can do it better than anything else gave us an evolutionary advantage. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have it.”

One might ask, for example, why on earth we love a story about the end of our own existence. Multiple reasons, says Lynskey. “Part of it is inhabiting your worst fears and turning them into entertainment. Largely, in most end of the world stories, the world doesn’t quite end, and people survive.”

It can be a way of appreciating real life: in Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, Lynskey points out, a functioning airport, “which is normally a boring, annoying place to be” is reinterpreted as a taken-for-granted miracle. “But there also more misanthropic, or even nihilistic, writers who like to say how awful things are and imagine how good it would be if that was all swept away, either in the classically apocalyptic sense of the Book of Revelation, in which the decadent old world is replaced by eternal Paradise, or with the opportunity for a bizarre new life that you make for yourself, which is a feature of JG Ballard novels.”

These tropes would have been all too familiar to Reagan himself: the power of a good narrative was central to his success – and the success of many of his peers. “Storytelling is absolutely central to what politics is,” says Dennis Grube, Professor of Politics and Public Policy. “Democratic politics, especially, is ultimately the art of persuasion – we need to bring people with us. The goal for politicians, I say, is to tell a story in a way that successfully persuades voters that the government is acting in their best interest, on their behalf, to tackle an issue in a way that works. That’s more than regaling people with a list of facts, because facts don’t speak for themselves. Facts need to be interpreted and placed in an order that makes sense.”

Today’s voters may well be more cynical than those who were exposed to Reagan’s folksy anecdotes, but we are still likely to respond to stories that connect with our broader worldview. Grube cites the image of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson driving a JCB digger with ‘GET BREXIT DONE’ emblazoned on the bucket through a polystyrene brick wall, festooned with the word ‘GRIDLOCK’. “On Thursday [election day], I think it is time for the whole country, symbolically, to get in the cab of a JCB – a custard colossus – and remove the current blockage that we have in our parliamentary system,” Johnson announced afterwards. The country duly obliged. “He’s telling a story there,” says Grube. “It’s honestly the simplest story you or I could conceive of. And for that moment, it does the job that it needs to do. It persuades voters that he is the person to drive through this metaphorical wall. It’s effective.”

And as stories are ever-present and hugely powerful, we should take them more seriously, says Sarah Dillon, Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities, and co-author with Claire Craig (St John’s 1979) of Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning. Rather than shutting down English and creative writing departments and pushing STEM subjects to the exclusion of all else, she argues, societies need a rigorous understanding of how stories work, and what effects they can have.

“There is often a desire to dismiss stories, because from a scientific perspective, they are perceived to lack rigour or be overly seductive or persuasive,” she says. “The suggestion is that they are dangerous, in a certain way, because you can’t control them and categorise them the way you can with other forms of evidence. But our argument is that you can’t get away from stories. We are, as narrative theorist Walter Fisher says, Homo narrans. We are human beings defined by the stories that we tell and consume.”

Dillon and Craig’s Storylistening Framework provides a way for policymakers to use stories to gain insight into today’s wicked problems, like climate change, or unknown quantities such as AI bias. How might it work? Dillon cites the work of Joseph Weizenbaum, who created the first natural language processing software at MIT in the 60s. He named it ELIZA, after Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

“He called it that because it could be taught,” says Dillon. “George Bernard Shaw was an advocate of feminism. Pygmalion is a very interesting feminist text. What was Weizenbaum thinking when he chose Eliza as the name? What did he not learn from the text that he took the name from? That might have been helpful in informing and developing his thought and his practice in perhaps more equitable and just ways.” (ELIZA is still very much alive, incidentally: last year she beat OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in a Turing test study.)

Using stories in this way, Dillon says, helps us understand those parts of the world that can’t only be understood by science. And stories themselves are a part of that world – like rocks or gravity. “Therefore, they deserve to be studied and understood, just like the physical parts of the world. They are a tool and a method for making sense of elements that we find difficult to make sense of in other ways – that involve complex interactions across multiple scales, that involve people and emotions, and all those things that social sciences find it hard to quantify.” Take the recent storm whipped up by the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which brought a vast and complex story of institutional failure – which had previously gone under most people’s radar – to the attention of a horrified nation. We have yet to see the full consequences of the fury this story unleashed. But they could be huge: for victims, for perpetrators, for governments.

And while, for most of us, stories will have personal not political ramifications, that makes them no less powerful. Yvonne Battle-Felton, Associate Teaching Professor and Academic Director of Creative Writing at Cambridge University Institute of Continuing Education, tells the story of her grandfather. “He longed to be a musician and dreamed of going on the road. His family needed a steady income so he took to teaching the piano. He never fulfilled his dream.” But Battle-Felton fulfilled hers. “From his story, I’m reminded of what it’s like to have a dream and never being able to pursue it – and the importance of following those dreams and making sure that my children get to see me do it.”

When Battle-Felton started a true story open mic night, encouraging people to come and tell a story about themselves, she was startled by those who thought they didn’t have a single story to tell. “Because they hadn’t climbed a mountain, or done something that other people thought was important, they didn’t think they had a right to tell their story. And that still saddens me. We need to be able to tell our own story and write our own story. It’s a powerful thing, being able to write where you see absence. If you don’t see yourself reflected, then it’s easy to tell yourself there are certain things you can’t do.”

Lose stories, she says, and we lose our future. “We can’t allow that. Those in power read, watch movies, go to theatres. But they don’t think other people deserve to. We need to write another ending into existence, where stories are valued. If we do that, more and more people will be able to imagine that ending, visualise it and achieve it.”