Author advocates empathy yet for Trump he can find none, somewhat denting his argument about the power of stories and how to avoid being manipulated by them
- American academic Jonathan Gottschall wrote a book about how stories ‘make us human’. Nine years on, he’s warning about their dangerous power to sway us
- We can fight that with empathy, he says, yet he has none for Donald Trump, treating him like dark Harry Potter wizard Voldemort. Who’s being manipulated now?
The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down by Jonathan Gottschall pub. Basic Books
Once upon a time – which is to say, in 2012 – there was an American academic who wrote a book called The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. In it, he described how stories have evolved to help us survive and how they can change the world for the better.
Years passed. This month, another book by the same academic, Jonathan Gottschall, has appeared. It’s called The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. It does not end happily ever after. What’s the story in between?
On a video call from Pennsylvania, where he’s a distinguished fellow in the English department at Washington & Jefferson College, Gottschall sighs. It won’t be for the last time; the overriding tone of this interview will be rueful. “Over the past decade, I’ve had this sense that, instead of doing this ancient work of making people believe in the same mythologies and values, and having this bonding function anthropologists have always attributed to stories, it felt like things were running amok and this weaving force in human life had become a cleaving force.”
“Cleaving” is one of those strange English words that can mean one thing and, simultaneously, its exact opposite. That’s the paradox: in Gottschall’s first book, stories stuck people together. In his new one, stories are splitting societies apart.
