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The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down Hardcover – November 23, 2021

by Jonathan Gottschall (Author)

4.5 79 ratings

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Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it

Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.

In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it’s the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization’s greatest ills—environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare—you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.

Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.

With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”

Print length

272 pages
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English
Publisher

Basic Books
Publication date

November 23, 2021
Dimensions

6.3 x 1.25 x 9.55 inches
ISBN-10

1541645960
ISBN-13

978-1541645967
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[a] thoughtful and entertaining investigation on a critical question: 'How can we save the world from stories?'... Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality."―Kirkus

"Jonathan Gottschall is not only the deepest thinker about the powerful role of stories in our lives, but a lively and witty writer. The Story Paradox offers much insight and many pleasures."
―Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and Rationality.

"Jonathan Gottschall has written a gripping and thoughtful book on a neglected but urgent topic: the dark side of stories. With crisp prose and an array of fascinating examples, he demonstrates how our innate ability to spin tales can lead to distortion, dissolution, and destruction. The Storytelling Paradox is a bracing call to action to become more empathetic and to deploy narrative as a force for good."
―Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When, Drive

"In this provocative and insightful book, Jonathan Gottschall shows us why dangerous stories spread so rapidly, and how they lead to division and distrust. But our storytelling instinct can also be harnessed for good, and Gottschall draws on a trove of research and compelling stories to show us how we can stop conspiracies, bigotry, and misinformation. The Story Paradox couldn't be more urgent."―Jonah Berger, Wharton Professor and bestselling author of Contagious

"This fascinating book explores the dark power of stories, arguing that they are an essential poison—necessary for human life, but too often a force for irrationality and cruelty. The Storytelling Paradox is provocative and original and a delight to read—and ironically enough, Jonathan Gottschall is a hell of a story teller himself."―Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at University of Toronto, and author of How Pleasure Works, Against Empathy, and The Sweet Spot.

"We constantly modify one another's brains, and the surgical tool we use is storytelling. In this luminous and incisive page-turner, Jonathan Gottschall takes us deep into the world of stories: what we tell, how we receive, and why it matters so deeply for our world."
―David Eagleman, Stanford neuroscientist, author of Livewired

"A really fascinating breakdown of the way we process stories and fiction, and how it may be impacting the dangerous evaporation of our shared sense of reality. Check it out, you'll enjoy it." --Seth MacFarlane, Creator of The Family Guy, American Dad, and The Orville.

About the Author

Jonathan Gottschall is a distinguished research fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the author of The Storytelling Animal, a New York Times Editor's Choice and finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and The Professor in the Cage, one of the Boston Globe's Best Books of the year. He has written for or been covered in the New York Times, Scientific American, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Millions. Gottschall has also appeared on popular podcasts like Star Talk, The Joe Rogan Experience, and Radiolab. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (November 23, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1541645960
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1541645967
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.25 x 9.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #154,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #57 in Evolutionary Psychology (Books)
- #167 in Rhetoric (Books)
- #313 in History of Civilization & Culture

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4.5 79 ratings

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Jonathan Gottschall

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I am a Distinguished Fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. My research at the intersection of science and art has frequently been covered in outlets like The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, Science, and NPR. I'm the author or editor of seven books, including The Storytelling Animal, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice Selection and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. I live with my wife and two young daughters in Washington, Pennsylvania.

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UncleChick Smith

Why Story is at the Root of Destabilizing Society

Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2022

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Analyzes history of Story and how people use it for organizing disordered info about the world into meaning and order; how Story is morally neutral and can be used equally well for great good and great harm; how man is Homo Fictus and loves dark stories and that's not going to change; the sort of danger we're, post-truth, where no one can agree on one story of the reality all people share; how technology has accelerated the problem and made it exponentially worse; and how Communist China is effectively using this to the advantage of the Communist Party there, and why democracy has more trouble with this than authoritarian states do. He offers a little hope for fixing these enormous world-encompassing problems, by individuals fixing themselves, but not much.

5 people found this helpful

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Mark Arnest

Eye-Opening

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2022

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In a June 2022 poll, one-third of Americans agreed with the statement that "members of Satanic cults abuse thousands of children every year." Gottschall's book will help you understand why such lunatic conspiracies are on the rise. You may not like his conclusions - it's clear that he himself did not, and he seems a bit surprised by some of them - but the book is honest, plausible, and readable. Highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

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The Story Paradox, paradox.

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2022

So, the first few chapters of Story Paradox were 100% write up my alley - an exploration of what stories mean to us socially, neurologically, and for society as a whole.

The next few chapters focussed on kinda the usual suspects for this sort of non-fiction, Socrates and Plato, there were quite a few insights and I enjoyed the strange balance between stream of consciousness of in depth analysis. The effect was kind of a paragraph to a few pages of a topic in quite specific detail but then an almost non-sequitur leap to a new topic. Not in a terrible way just in a sometimes surprising or hard to grasp the overall picture way.

As the book continued I did feel this flighty approach start to wear, its felt less like a powerful thesis and more like a philosophical riff on the subject. Still fun to read and overall pretty fine, perhaps just less than my hopes as I started this book.

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Tom Dolack

Brisk introduction to power and pitfalls of narrative

Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2022

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This is an interesting view on not just the power of story, but of it's dangers. It should be read in conjunction with his The Storytelling Animal, which gives the other side of the coin. Gottschall is very readable writer and his style stands in stark contrast to most academic writing. The briskness of the prose at times comes at the expense of depth, but that would have turned the book into something more scholarly and less readable. The reader can fill in gaps on their own - including with some of Gottschall's other work.

8 people found this helpful

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Sandra J. Newell

A valuable companion to The Storytelling Animal

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2022

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An entertaining book grounded in the primary literature of psychology of stories. The Paradox from the title is clearly explained in the Introduction, most simply with the metaphor of the Force in Star Wars. I won’t include a spoiler and explain that metaphor. Gottschall’s thesis is that “The storyteller rules the world.” Sometimes that can be bad for the people caught up in the story.

2 people found this helpful

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Abdullah

Wonderful!

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2022

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Quite the eye opener and a very interesting read! Didn't think a book about the power of story could be this good!

2 people found this helpful

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William M. Downs

Excellent Book

Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2022

I beg you not to give any weight to Timothy Snyder’s inane review in the New York Times. “The Story Paradox” is an excellent book with a powerful message about how storytellers help and hurt our society. The ‘story’ Mr. Snyder tells in his review says more about himself than it does this book. I’ve read Mr. Snyder’s “On Tyranny” - he could learn a thing or two from “The Story Paradox.”

6 people found this helpful

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Paris Wood

Appreciated but deeply flawed

Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2022

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Gottschall is a phenomenal writer and he tells a great story. I read this book in two days in a borderline hypnotic haze and am a huge fan of his first book on story. I take his central premise on the dangers of storytelling for granted as just the truth. Most people don't take it seriously enough for the amount of sway it has in our lives. No matter what else I have to say, the man can paint a picture like no other, and his command of language allows him to turn some really creative phrases. That said, my overall judgement of the book is the following.

1.The author brings up historical material and philosophy that he is in no way prepared to handle thoroughly. Anyone pointing to the trans-atlantic slave trade as the sole reason race relations are like they are today is willfully ignoring the years of contentious history specific to America that includes legal precedent and policy that only ended in the 60's. The same can be said for anyone pointing out that African elites often participated in selling slaves like its some kind of gotcha. Gottschall presents the information like it's some bombshell, but it's both well documented and accepted by anyone who reads even the most milquetoast history on the subject. Which frankly says more about general historical education in the US than anything else. This book is so fixated on it, it gets its own half page notation assuring the reader that it’s both the truth and super relevant. This framing of the issue is not only redundant and uncontested- it misrepresents the problems surrounding conversations of American slavery. Case in point - did Africans write the laws that created the American racial slave/caste system? Did they write Jim Crow or enforce it? Did they pen exclusive housing covenants for our suburbs? No. They did not. African descendants in America fall under the broad banner of "Black". Even the mixed ones, and most of us are. Did that just happen naturally? Looking at the history of both law and culture, I can tell you it did not.
If I’m a bad person, but I’m in court to get justice for my murdered brother, is the subject of the trial the history of murder across the world or its commonality? Do I need to be an angel to get justice? The issue would be the specific event involving myself and the perpetrator. Not whether or not other people in my family have committed murder themselves. The entire section would have better been left out of the book entirely. It's not necessary for his broader explicitly stated project and does more harm via misrepresentation than any good. Also, and minor nit-pick at two of the implications. Most Black Americans have no idea where they're from absent a DNA test. America is the whole reason we identify as black rather than say, Yoruban. It's almost silly and cruel for Gottschall to say "who are you to judge when your ancestors might have been from the kingdom of Dahomey" in a "what about-ism" that hinges pretty heavily on that lack of knowledge. The comparison of a whole ass continent to a much more cohesive group of colonies turned states and an attempted broad indictment with the same logic is also mind-boggling. It's both thoughtless and irrelevant. Additionally, the Dahomey's victims were people "Of the time" and I certainly doubt they considered the date on the calendar a justification for their treatment. The same of American slavery. Where records are preserved, it is often not hard to find contemporaries in preserved primary sources who disagree with a practice that we look back and assume were just moral norms "of that time" - and victims thoughts are almost always lost to history.

Gottschall could easily have explored how powerful people have no incentive to listen to those they wield power over How we use narrative to project legitimacy despite any excesses that would be considered unacceptable among perceived equals across time. This phenomenon is fairly universal across cultures and time periods. Bonus bleak-pilled points to the implication in the book that for any group to progress out of a bad situation, a member of the ingroup needs to write a book first about the plight of the downtrodden. Couldn't just listen to the people affected. In any age, I'm sure they'd tell you if you asked, though it would be inconvenient for anyone invested in maintaining status at the top. That’s usually the problem.

2.Gottschall’s focus on atrocities and wrongdoings specifically in Africa has an aggregate affect of a "no angels" vibe almost explicitly walked up to in his attempt to calm things down with a "blood on all hands" conclusion mid way through. At one point, he mentions the Rwandan genocide and explores the way that after the bloodshed, narrative has been deliberately deployed to try and soothe tensions with some success. Here also however, he leaves out further context The event was heavily influenced by colonialism. He insists on bringing up this and events like it with a very strange bent to the framing. It's perfectly fine to bring up this kind of thing, necessary for the conversation in fact. To be clear, there are no angles on planet earth. I am not saying that atrocities committed by Africans should go un-examined. I just find his choices of cultures to focus on for these failures while leaving out critical context very strange, especially given the project of the book. Ostensibly, he's worried about the story sickness plaguing our species. So why the frequent return specifically to Africa? Then later on he basically says we should not overly rely on history anyway because it’s also a story that can cause a lot of harm. So my guy. Why did you bring up the specific events that you did with the framing that you presented them with?
He could have just as easily interrogated the way that Hollywood movies- with worldwide reach - also use depictions of interracial romance for the same sort of fence mending. The ways associations for different ethnic groups are built by media in our multicultural world for good and ill. I would love a book that actually looks at the ways story is deployed by our species to affect perceptions, mating preferences, etc across the world. Story and our perceptions of our roles are the ballast of the politics and the crazy crap in every person's day to day lives. Stories we tell ourselves in the US are not just at odds with each other across political lines, they are buck-wild in the ways they justify or de-legitimize systems of value. Very much worth a detached, (I'm not claiming objective) robust investigation. What does such a thing say about how our species in-group and out-group communicates and even finds ways to justify NOT talking to groups perceived as other? Gottschalls preoccupations of history without villains, blood on all hands (Even in Africa), the excesses of the right and the left, his very specific presentation of history and ultimate suggestion that we throw it out entirely (So why did you bring up so many pointed parts of it?) suggests a preoccupation not explicitly stated in the book We rarely know ourselves so well. I also think that Jon is dressing up a very specific brand of apologia in different clothing. Much of his focus in the book is irrelevant to the task of interrogating story sickness. You also don't have to try hard to convince people that there's violence on the African continent and among its people. You ever watch the 6 oclock news here?It might not seem that way if your life is on a college campus, but out here, you're selling sand in a desert bro. Don’t do me any favors.

Philosophy is lacking too. Gottschall is an atheist, meaning that he does not take a teleological view of the universe. It's not "for" something in this world-view. Ideas of "progress" or "moral arc" should become suspect. It should indicate that if we're "doing better" it's because of a specific set of circumstances that aren't just tied to the calendar. Since there's no linearity, "progress" can be lost. We can backslide. History is full of backslides, women's loss of social status in the switch to agrarianism being one major example he should be familiar with. There was a time in America's history when slavery itself was not thoroughly racialised. Doesn't make it better, but it signals a change in status that happened over time. A "Backslide" from better treatment to worse. So the idea that our descendants will be wagging a finger at us from a more informed moral ground assumes quite a lot about the "linear progress" of moral understanding. "The Golden Rule" is ancient. "Black" vs "White" are modern political classes, created only recently on the world stage. Even more ancient is the neural architecture that lets us intuit the frame of mind of others of our species regardless of color. Those realities do not keep those rights from shifting and never have. We're in a live fire exercise my friends, and its very easy to tell everyone else to shut up if you have no memory of being hit by a bullet.

3. No one has the same experiences in the world and I can't speak for anyone else. I won't pretend to, and there are good-faith actors who would disagree with many of my conclusions. I have argued with a lot of people who use the condition of the world to make judgments about the overall worthiness of "Black" people. That’s why I’m preoccupied with history and its presentation. Explaining this experience to anyone who doesn't know what I mean is as draining as dealing with the bigotry of low expectations day in and day out. It’s amazing to hear public appeals to individuality and convenient deployments of “content of character” and then not be extended the courtesy assumption of being an individual constantly. I’ve played xbox online with your kids. I grew up online. I know what people say under anonymity and in person under favorable circumstances. I’ve also travelled. We are not post racial. This is not a lecture on what that's like. I say that to say this: Understanding why something is the way it is might prevent you from judging it unfairly. If you look at crime statistics from a historically deprived group, you might land on the erroneous conclusion that that "kind" of person is just predisposed to violence. Side-bar, maybe there’s a cognitive consequence to having to defend your right to be in a space over an extended period of time and the ruminations the experience would come with. History is context, you can't just remove it without causing more problems than you're claiming to fix. You may also wind up having very unhelpful conversations like...

3. Sam Harris. The book takes the position that science is ultimately where we should focus to get out of our story induced madness. However, I have no reason to believe science is a better master in the world. Science itself is staffed by messy humans with our own motivations and it has itself been used to prop up pretty nasty stuff, like Phrenology and Eugenics. Just knowing that is why simply removing history as an important element of understanding the world is a terrible idea. For example, you might be a scientist like Sam Harris and step into an age old argument about the cognitive abilities of Black people. You might claim to be brave for having the argument and feel like a martyr, without fully recognizing that there is a wide swathe of people quite willing to hear exactly what you’re saying for all the wrong reasons. In some of the related discussions the man is preoccupied with protecting his reputation with absolutely no consideration that reputation might also apply to broad claims about entire groups of people. Like, Sam. Do you think someone is going to give me a DNA or IQ test before they make quick assessments of me? Our brains categorize things to save energy and it's part of the reason stereotypes exist. We kinda can't help it. The fact that he sees absolutely no danger in rushing to settle the science is one of the many reasons (including institutional incentive and funding) not to just accept that we should put all of our faith in the broad idea of science under which work many imperfect people.

The history and people like him in the now sure as hell give me pause. Science will inform policy and policy will always be political. I do not see that changing for our silly mushy species. So the solution proposed by Gottschall comes off as unrealistic. Naive even. Harris has also conflated "Dispassion" with reason in some of his interviews. A lot of people who laud "reason" uncritically do this. As someone who has gone though the process of challenging and losing some fundamental beliefs, I can say that's far from the truth. You ever lose your faith in god after being a committed catholic? How about as a Black catholic for whom the prospect of a deity making everything right in the end was like a warm fire in dark places? It's like burying a friend. Extremely painful and emotionally taxing. Anyone who understands that evolution did not craft us as animals with neatly ordered brains where "reason" and emotion are separated should intuit that reason hurts sometimes. If you come to a conclusion fully free of emotional reaction, it doesn't necessarily mean that you've reached that conclusion through reason alone or absent of bias. It might just mean you don't have a dog in the fight. Changing your mind, challenging important ideas, finding contradictions in your own thoughts takes an enormous amount of time and self reflection. We are often fighting the emotional reactions in ourselves this type of reflection will cause. Its not going to happen immediately on a public platform where you've put yourself in a position that throws up all of our built in social defensive mechanisms. It's not gonna happen via podcast. So all that said: forgive me for not trusting the high minded idealistic appeals professed by squishy humans that I suspect are too much like the rest of us to be trusted with a blank check that just reads “For science”. The only thing different about this movie is the title, and we’ve seen it all before.

Someone might mistake me here to mean that we shouldn't bother with science. Not at all my point. Science is amazing. I'm saying that we might want to approach ideas that have broad implications for policy with an overwhelming preponderance of caution that is aware of the context in which the information is being discussed. That type of caution would need to go far beyond the worries of one man focused mostly on the slights against his reputation (blind to that of others) and maybe shouldn't be teased as forbidden knowledge on internet radio. Reason is the result of an evolved cognitive heuristic. If it's not the key from god that gives us the golden secrets of the universe untainted by our own hardware biases. So I would hope for abundant tact and awareness from my public facing scientists.

4. The book treats inherited beliefs as static things and encourages a lack of judgement. Sure, admirable, but people change their beliefs. Book also takes for granted that the beliefs people claim to have in public are what they actually believe. However, belief in context affects social dynamics within social settings involving reward, punishment, acceptance, etc. At a certain point, someones actual held beliefs really don’t even matter compared to what they are incentivized to do for status and resources. We usually just do something and rationalize our actions to ourselves after the fact. Part of the problem is us taking for granted what an "individual" is, but you're nothing in a vacuum without relation to other people within a culture and systems of incentive. Normal people can be lead to do terrible things because of the context around them. Individuality is worth interrogating in the pursuit of understanding how story moves society.From my point of view, the concept as typically deployed is really just a social/political convenience. Tangent for another time. This is where his solution for news rooms and academic institutions falls apart. People believe things and claim to believe things in context and those outward postures are absolutely affected by whether or not they are monetarily incentivized to stand by those beliefs or represent a "team". We are status seeking creatures. The writer doesn't at all account for cynical actors or the human capacity for self delusion. He could just have easily suggested making school more affordable so students meet people from different walks of life. There were a million other ways to create exposure and community cohesion. Why the preoccupation with making sure college faculty represents both sides of a political argument no matter what the facts surrounding the arguments are?

I really REALLY wanted to like this book. I emailed Gottschall in 2020 because I was so excited by the idea of a sequel to The Storytelling Animal - a book I’ve read over five times. I was ecstatic for the sequel when I saw it. You could have sent a rocket to the moon with the force of my excitement, then brought it back to earth with the gravitational weight of disappointment. Story Paradox doesn't handle the stuff it brings up super well. Belief can just be a configuration of atoms in the brain along with the other configurations driving us to reproduce - if you’ve read the book you’ll know why I say that. The book’s solutions are very much lacking. Do you think it's a coincidence that a country of "others" that never really put in the genuine political work to become “US” is at this precipice 60 years after landmark civil rights legislation? Now gutted legislation by the way. If you want to solve the story poison that our country is showing at this point in time, you can't do it by just ignoring the past. We need to explicitly cultivate cultural practices around having hard conversations, listening to each other, and ensuring that the elites of our institutions are not atmospherically removed from the problems of those at the bottom. We are talking about power, and incentives and designing a world to balance them better. Incentive structures would have to change, as well as the values by which we assign status. Anyone dead set on the need for the status quo to remain precisely as it is will be blind to that. We have to explicitly plan against all of our awful, petty, human impulses and be extremely self skeptical. We need to listen to each other and then be encouraged to digest and act on what we’ve heard.

A good diagnosis is going to take medical history into account. A good treatment program will be based on that history. This book comes up short on the treatment suggested, and advocates throwing the history out of the window entirely. The primary issue with the book is that it appears to be status quo apologia focused mostly on a centrist appeal for two extremes to calm down. Not a book focused on story. The rise and fall of arguments appear to hinge on that goal, and their weaknesses break against the shortcomings that the position would create. Like the fallacious idea that "two sides" represent a theoretical horseshoe of equal danger. However, the legislator is way more dangerous than the screeching SJW and we’re seeing that clearly in 2022.

If you want a much better book that causes a deep sense of discomfort with just how flawed we are as an animal and how story reflects those flaws, I'd suggest "The Science Of Storytelling" by Will Storr. Much better book. More sober and less concerned with occupying a non-existent "rational and neutral" middle ground.

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Top reviews from other countries

R.M.

Timely and Highly Recommended Book on Storytelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 24, 2021

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This is such an important and highly recommended book for the times we live in. It’s an accessible, well-researched, easy-to-read exploration of the power, and danger of stories, and one of my standout books of the year. It’s also one of the most important books I’ve read on storytelling.

I enjoyed Gottschall’s previous book, The Storytelling Animal, which is about the power of stories and how we’re wired for story (homo fictus). The Story Paradox follows on from that, asking us to think about the fact that if stories can be used to change the world for the better, could they not also change the world for the worse? “Story science reveals that everything good about storytelling is the same as everything bad. Everything that makes storytelling wholesome is precisely what makes it dangerous.”

It’s because of this that Gottschall says, “The most urgent question we can ask ourselves now isn’t the hackneyed one: “How can we change the world through stories?” It’s “How can we save the world from stories?””

Gottschall approaches the topic unflinchingly, diving into everything from religion, political polarisation, and social media to a certain former American president. Gottschall argues that we tell stories to sway and shape the world more towards the way we want it to be. But due to an information and media overload, the stories we’re consuming are making each of us less tolerant and more set in our own ways. “Story used to drag us all to the middle and make us more alike. Now we’re all in our own little storyverses, and instead of making us more alike, story makes us into more extreme versions of ourselves.”

Our isolated technological bubbles of story are becoming narrower, more-defined and less accepting. This matters, because truth and facts matter. But stories supersede facts. This is why, for example, conspiracy theories hold so much sway over us.

When it comes to pressing issues such as COVID-19 and the climate crisis, this can have detrimental effects. From vaccine hesitancy to climate denialism, stories can be damaging for humanity. Take the climate crisis. Public awareness largely began after Dr James Hansen’s Senate Testimony in 1988. Yet 33 years later, and 26 COP climate summits later, and we still haven’t meaningfully addressed the issue with the urgency it requires. “The problem with messaging climate change isn’t that it makes an inherently bad story so much as an inherently deactivating one… In contrast to the abstractions of science, conspiracy stories about climate change can be highly activating because the good guys and bad guys are sharply drawn, and the problem is so much smaller.”

Working out where to go from here is a challenge, especially for authors. We clearly have a responsibility when telling stories, and not only that, but we’re seemingly up against a tidal wave of disinformation which shows no sign of dissipating. Stories have unified humanity in the past and also torn it apart. Now stories are threatening our ability to address civilisation-threatening issues. Our collective task is to work out how to get out of this mess. Perhaps the first step on that road is reading this highly informative book and then looking at what we’re putting out there and how it might be affecting society.

3 people found this helpful

observer100

A truly important book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2022

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We are story-consuming and storytelling animals. Both the consuming and the telling feel good. Storytelling is a brilliant teaching method.
But what if we’re given different stories from childhood, stories which become foundational to identity and cast the other as enemy, by nature evil in contrast to our own goodness? What if marshalling what we believe to be facts into the form of a story necessarily requires selection and falsification?
We are all consumers and tellers of stories whether we realise it or not.
We need to read this book.

Sorrowful investigator

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 3, 2022

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I ran into Gottschall’s work by chance and thought it looked promising. I am gradually getting through The Story Paradox, which I find quite interesting in parts and a little tedious and disappointing in others. I thought it would explain more in scientific terms but Gottschall’s English Literature academic identity keeps him over-anchored in the humanities. He tries to be politically even-handed but inevitably leans left, even as he notes the dangerously leftist bias in academia. An early reference to antisemitic narrative (The Elders, David Icke, et al.) and a nod to the culture wars reveals his true interests and identity. Gottschall acknowledges his Jewish ancestry but not the fact that all five of his book cover testimonial authors are Jewish. I think this is important because the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is deeply rooted in story-telling purporting to convey truth, and Jewish authors have a massive influence on Western civilisation: outsized, as Amy Wax has called it. Neither Marxism nor Freudian psychoanalysis (and their myriad derivatives) deserve more than a place among social ‘science’ and psychotherapeutic just-so stories, whereas Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays certainly ranks highly as an advertising propagandist for capitalism. Plato is used here as a sort of lodestar, if negatively at times regarding his anti-poetry stance, and logic and science are seriously played down, I think, as simply alternative narratives rather than a different and often superior form of ‘story’. Much more could have been said about history and revisionist history than Gottschall says here, and a fawning inclusion of James Baldwin on American history hardly digs into this topic. A little Julian Jaynes, David Bohm or Iain McGilchrist wouldn’t have gone amiss in a work purporting to explain the evolutionary arc of narrative. Ben Shapiro features briefly but Jordan Peterson does not make an appearance at all. If Gottschall is ‘the deepest thinker’ in this domain, as Stephen Pinker calls him, God help us, since this is absolutely not depth! Perhaps one can forgive the author for writing a tepid middlebrow, journalistic book instead of a cutting-edge scholarly treatise, but please, Dr Gottschall, spare us the language-corrupting ‘bored of’ virus (p.97)!

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