Storythinking with Dan and Tracy (Ch. 7)
Improving Storythinking
Ch 1 (hosted by Dan) | Ch 2 (hosted by Tracy) | Ch 3 (Dan) | Ch 4 (Tracy) | Ch 5 (Dan) | Ch 6 (Tracy) | Ch 7 (this post, Dan)
Fletcher begins this chapter with a sketch involving a character he describes as "the wizard", who turns out to be Joseph Campbell. I was once a big fan of Campbell, between the time when I read Tolkien, around 1972, and when he made a name for himself as an apologist for Star Wars. At that point I lost a lot of respect for him, because I perceived his advocacy as pandering and coattail-riding. I had read his 4-volume set, The Masks of God, and imagined it might be interesting to become a comparative mythologist. I also read several volumes of C.G. Jung's Collected Works that covered topics adjacent to Campbell such as archetypes and the collective unconscious. As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, one of the things I thought Jung did very well was to remain cagey about whether he actually believed in the reality of things like a collective unconscious or synchronicity, or was speaking in metaphors.
Tracy’s comment. I came pretty late to Campbell (and I haven’t read any Jung directly, only a little bit about him). My interests at the time were purely practical, since I was considering writing creative non-fiction, and the idea that there are a limited number of basic story types intrigued me. I think this has evolutionary and historical implications. There are certain repeatable patterns in how humans struggle in life, and each is captured in a certain basic story type — complete with a typical or recommended way of getting through the struggle (happy ending) or a meditation of what happens if you don’t get through (tragedy).
I’m a little slow to identify repeating story patterns, though. Maybe I get caught up in the details of the setting. Like, somebody had to point out to me that the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? was a retelling of Odysseus. 🙃
I think it's helpful that Fletcher positions Campbell within a tradition that included not only Jung but George Frazer and Sigmund Freud (although I'm surprised he didn't mention Northrup Frye). Fletcher faults Campbell for "seek[ing] one eternal story", which he says "is to convert narrative into logic, like Aristotle did in Topics". He says this is a confusion of "ideal product instead of practical process", which I think is close to the objection I would make. I'd probably say it's about that question Jung was clever enough not to get tripped up by: whether the things we're talking about are happening within each of our individual minds and just happen to be similar to what others are experiencing because we share both a culture and a deep evolutionary history; or whether there actually is some kind of transhuman spiritual realm. I think it's encouraging to a lot of people to imagine Jung was a mystic, but I suspect the value of his ideas is that they might just be relevant in an entirely materialist world as well.
Tracy’s comment. Hmm, Frye, yes. There’s a whole lot more to literary studies than semiotics and Campbell (et al). There is classical rhetoric, too, which developed out of oral culture. How do literary genres play in? What’s the role of metaphor and figurative speech? Persuasion and rhetorical appeals? Audience?
Yeah, I’m not quite sure I understand product/process mapped on to Fletcher’s ongoing, starting to be ad nauseum battle between logic and narrative — and didn’t we decide last chapter that both are needed?
Fletcher's focus on distinguishing product from process is this chapter's version of the logic/narrative dichotomy. He reintroduces Darwinian selection and says storythinking helps us refine "evolution's two core processes, creation and selection", which are basically analogous to writing and editing. Fletcher's tips for becoming a better creator are, "Work backward from effects", "Hybridize causes", and "Maintain an inclusive library". He also has three tips for improving our selective skill, which are "Design tightly controlled experiments", "Reject optimization for good enough", and "Prioritize second-generation outcomes". Although lists of pithy advice like these don't typically excite me, this last item caught my attention, because I just heard some similar talk about trying to measure multi-generational "fitness" in a conversation between evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying recently. Interesting that Heather remarked a few weeks ago that she had recently read Storythinking.
Tracy’s comment. In the most abstract presentation (logical?) of natural selection, there are only two features: 1) heritable variation; and 2) differential advantage for survival/reproduction (inheritance). Something has to get tracked, so it can change over time, and it has to be variable for not everything to be the same; plus, some “force” needs to differentially improve the chances of one variant over others. That force can be anything, as Darwin showed by making his case for natural selection based on artificial selection (i.e. breeding animals for specific characteristics).
Fletcher psychologizes and reifies the two-fold biological evolutionary process into the two story factors necessary for “improved” storythinking: creation (more or better heritable variation) and selection (the force that prefers one variant over another). I, too, liked second generation outcomes as an important selective factor. I wonder if there are biological population genetics models that show how important a trait that favors second generation outcomes is, stacking up against first generation traits. I could see an analogy to the classic r/K-selection strategies.
On the creation dimension, I’m drawn to the hybrid and the inclusive library strategies. I’m innately fond of creative thinking through hybridization (mashing up and mixing and matching to see something new). Keeping an “idea bank” of possibilities should help in a rapidly changing environment. Some idea may not work today, but it may have worked very well in the past, and it might work again tomorrow. Long memories are intrinsically creative. Isn’t this why studying history is so valuable?
I started this comment by saying this formulation is abstract. No actual evolutionary event works in the abstract. Whatever traits are affected by heritable variation and differential advantage have to be actually implemented, i.e. embodied. I’m a big fan of embodied cognition as a field. For example, where newly emerging AI is concerned, it could be that its lack of embodiment could be the deciding factor to its (relative) lack of success. What improvements to storythinking might come from paying attention to how creativity and selectivity are actually implemented?
I had hoped that practical advice on how to develop our storythinking skills would be the heart of the book and would be, well, practical. Unfortunately, it didn't seem so to me. The section was way too brief and the advice wasn't supplemented by any examples or, ironically, any narrative that might have helped me understand what Fletcher was really talking about. How does this work when one is crafting actual stories (like writing a novel)? How would it work when planning a project or a business? How might it work when imagining a more positive future? Maybe I'm being thick? Help me out here, Tracy.
I’m hoping that is what’s coming up in the next three chapters. We’ll see!