Thoughts on Tyler Cowen and his TED Talk on Story

I greatly appreciated Tyloer Cowen's talk on story. And I hardly disagree with him at all. Story is, in part, a sense-making device. And the fact people use story to structure their lives and their ambitions, and also to convince others that their story is worth joining can be both good and bad. I don't think of story as much more than a map or a shovel. As a map, story helps us understand where we are. False stories, then, are false maps. And as a tool, story can help us organize our work. But shovels can be used to hit people over the head.

My problem with Cowen's talk is that he positions himself as the good guy in a story, battling the bad guy, which is, confusingly, STORY ITSELF. If you listen to his talk, he's doing the exact thing he's warning us about. He's telling a story and he's made himself a character in that story. He's made himself the hero, rescuing us from bad thinking. That, my friends, is a story.

At about ten minutes in, Mr. Cowen confesses this, but it's too late. He's already positioned story as suspect, the way a culture might present shovels as suspect if they'd been used in too many murders. I'd rather have him show us how to use a shovel than scare us about how we are going to be killed by them. What we need, then, is people who tell great stories with their lives, based in truth. We need people to live better stories so those around us can learn to live better stories themselves.

A better method would not be to attack stories (who would win that fight? An earth without Middle Earth is boring) but rather to warn us about making our stories too simplistic, and warning us that stories can be used to manipulate.

As somebody who is routinely painted in real-life stories as either the hero or the villain, I can tell you that simple people who frame life into simple stories are annoying. I have encountered many people who demonize me as the villain, either because of my theology or because I've wronged them (as a human) in some way. These people always position themselves as the hero. In other words, the story they are living within is complete fiction. But it makes them feel good, and at my expense. So I love what Tyler is saying here, it's just that he throws the baby out with the bathwater. Meanwhile, he's actually swimming in the bathwater himself.

Here's the talk:

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Thoughts on Tyler Cowen and his TED Talk on Story is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog