Harvey Cox on Stories

In any case, confronted with the discomfort of my students about stories, and at a university whose motto is "Veritas," I had to ponder again the stubborn dilemma of why, in our era, factualness has become synonymous with truth. Is it because "bits" and "information" are crowding out narrative as the preferred mode of communication? If that is so, it is bad news indeed. It will eventually lead to a severe impoverishment of both the mind and the spirit. We need facts, if only to protect us from frauds, but we also need stories, to enable us to make sense of the facts.

Jerome Bruner is one of the greatest twentieth-century scholars of how human beings learn. After years of research he came to the conclusion that narrative - along with science and logic - is essential to us for organizing our experience. Without narratives we would not be able to cope with the fragments of segmented information that constantly surge around us. Narratives provide a framework that enables us to know our world. Without a narrative thread, the fabric of the world is no more than rags and tatters. It would make just as much sense, maybe more, to say, "Well, that's just a fact" rather than "that's just a story."

When bad stories crowd out good ones, soon narrative itself begins to putrefy, but without narrative, moral reasoning becomes impossible. To be able to discern what kind of person you want to be or what you should do in a given situation, as I discovered with my students, you have to have some idea of "where you are coming from." The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested that the only way to answer the question, "What am I to do?" is to ask, "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" Maybe our obsession with fact is a symptom of something deeper that has gone wrong. It may stem from the increasingly manic pace of modern life and the overload of messages and signals that assail us from every side [including this blog!], day and night, and undermine our capacity to organize the important aspects of our lives. No wonder people have turned in such large numbers to meditation, and are seeking out retreat centers where they can slow down and allow their thoughts and experiences to catch up with each other. [...]

The British theologian Don Cupit has written, "Stories are interpretive resources, models and scenarios through which we make sense of what is happening to us and frame our action. Unlike the forms and concepts of philosophy, stories are stretched out in time...They shape the process of life. It is through stories that our social selves, which are our real selves, are actually produced."

-When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today by Harvey Cox, pgs. 37-39