Suspicious Stories

Tyler Cowen

I was asked recently by a journalist to comment on Tyler Cowen's TED talk on why we should be suspicious of stories. I hadn't heard of Tyler Cowen, but the journalist explained what he had said, and I did my best to say something for her article.

You can watch and listen to this talk (click here). Here's what Cowen says: The trouble with stories is that they simplify, they leave stuff out and, worse than that, they leave stuff in which is always the same stuff, because there's only a small number of stories, maybe only seven. Instead of the fullness of experience, we get a story. When you hear a story you should be suspicious. A very common story is in terms of good versus evil. Cowen says that simply by giving up that story you raise your IQ by ten points.

People want to turn their life into a story, says Cowen, a simple narrative, whereas really they should think of their life as messy, in a complicated irrational world. Stories impose order on a world, or on a life, when really it should be thought of as a mess.

Although Cowen says he's an economist, he's not without a sense of humour. And so he says, if you're asked what that guy Cowen said in his TED talk, you're likely to find yourself telling a story. Stories are inescapable, so (says Cowen) you might say: "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories." Or, it occurs to me that one might tell a story of how Tyler Cowen said that stories are evil and mess is good. In doing that he raised his IQ by ten points. (Did I get that the right way round?)

I can see what Tyler Cowen is saying and he's not altogether wrong. Stories do simplify. But as I said to the journalist, so do scientific theories. Mess is all right, I suppose, but its very nature is that you can't think about it: all you can say is: "It's, ahem, messy." To think one needs to simplify and one hopes that in the simplification one perceives something essential, some principles at work, rather than just a mess.

The real issue, as I said to the journalist, is that story narrative (as opposed to scientific theory) is, as Jerry Bruner said, a distinct mode of thinking, which has the specific subject matter of being about human intentions and the vicissitudes they meet. Scientific theories, by contrast, are about how things work. The reason we're interested in stories is that we are intensely social creatures: we want to know what others, and ourselves, are up to.

And the best stories, the ones we call literature, don't tell us what to think. They enable us to think in our own way. But that will be for another post.

Jerome Bruner (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.