We want to continue to emphasize the subtitle of our Good
Stories course: Teaching Narratives for Peace and Justice. When we
work with Good Stories, how are we advancing our prospects for moving further
in capacity for building a peaceful world, both inside ourselves and with
others? Several concepts developed in our textbook, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by
Brian Boyd, are especially important in relation to this.
Explanation of Four Themes
1. Let’s continue focusing on metarepresentation. This concept explains how we are able to move
across the levels as we translate from the story images to the local and
individual levels. For example, in Buried Treasure, we abstract an archetypal
image like the “tatema” that Luis is given. For another example of the treasure archetype, we imagine a
representation for the “water of life” in Golden Water.
As
we move from the detail in the story to the abstract idea, we are doing
meta-representation: the box with silver coins is recognized as “treasure”
which could also be seen as the coin Jack gets, as the puppy Epaminondas
receives, and as the golden water found by the youngest sister. This
amplification enriches our ability to see the treasure in a variety of forms or
representations. Each of us has access to treasures, but they are easily missed
unless we develop vision to see them in varied forms and to see potential the
way the Creator does with the speck of mud retrieved by Little Coot in Beginnings.
When we have the abstract image (in
other words, when we “meta-represent”), we are then prepared to translate the
quality across into the other levels. For example, look at how we are finding
the “treasure” in our selection of a college major. If we make the fitting
choice, this field of study provides riches for ourselves and for others. One
treasure comes in the joy of learning (Individual Level: Inner), another is the
ability to earn a living (Individual Level: Outer), and a third could be the
benefits that the knowledge and skills provide for others through the
applications in the world (Local Level). If a person makes the right choice on
engineering, he or she should love learning about it and the projects he or she
develops could provide valuable structures for others.
Working
with stories exercises our capacity for metarepresentation, and we can use that
developed capacity throughout life in ways that support peace and justice.
2. The theme of cooperation
is perhaps the most important component needed at our time in history in order for
the advance of peace and justice. Working with stories contributes by showing
us examples and by developing our ability for empathy. The story about Kanu and
the Strangers is a prime example. We see the chief of the village model the
ability to anticipate strangeness as virtue, and when we identify with one of
the strangers we befriend aspects of ourselves that have been isolated and
devalued (cf, Daniel Deardorff, The Other
Within). This modeling and inner development enables us to participate in
social change that reduces hostility and enhances equal opportunity.
Boyd
emphasizes this theme throughout his book because fiction (story) gives us practice
with taking on the role of others who model character traits we need to build.
For example, we may better appreciate patience by empathizing with Psyche; we
may build capacity for courage and the judgment needed to meet with dangers by
joining Kanu’s team as they accepted and enacted the challenge of bringing back
the daughter of the village. This quest can be seen as bringing back the
emergent feminine qualities such as cooperation that are essential for
sustaining collaborative life.
Boyd
elaborates on the theme of collaboration:
We need to infer others' predispositions
and their likely intentions and actions, which may in turn be based
in part on their attempts to guess ours. If this hypothesis is correct, higher
intelligence emerged primarily as social intelligence, through a cognitive arms
race to understand conspecifics and to reveal to or conceal from others our own
beliefs, desires, and intentions. Because theory of mind was first opened as a
field to explore within primatology, the social intelligence hypothesis was
first called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. Chimpanzees seek to
understand one another especially in order to compete, sometimes by deception,
for food, sex, or status. But researchers have begun to realize that we have probably reached our unique human level of theory of
mind through pressures to cooperate more closely against other groups: we
understand one another so much better because unlike chimpanzees we have crossed a cooperation divide and from infancy have a greater motivation
to social engagement and shared attention than any other species.[note 68
Wilson, Evolution for Everyone; ] (p. 141-2; Kindle Locations
1597-1603).
During their fifth
year, children grow into a distinctively human theory of mind, capable of metarepresentation--of understanding the process of representation--and
involving beliefs as well as desires, goals, and intentions, a state that no other animal appears to
reach. At this higher,
exclusively human level, theory of mind becomes not only an intuitive
psychology but an intuitive epistemology.
No wonder it is hard to attain, even though as adults we employ it
effortlessly. (bold
emphasis, mine; p. 145; Kindle Locations 1640-1647).
3. The empathy we
develop through feeling with a character in a story can expand our
understanding of the attitudes, values, and behaviors needed to cooperate, to
accept differences (like Kanu does), and to expand our value system in ways
that extend justice. Boyd elaborates on empathy: Empathy arises from recognizing others' goals and desires, a capacity
necessary in an individualized social species. (p. 138; Kindle
Location 1561).
A third aspect of the theory
of bonds is social exchange. In the human case this extends far further than in
any other individualized society and has led to the evolution of a complex
suite of moral emotions to solve problems of trust and commitment.[note 55] We
can observe the basis for human moral emotions in other animals, especially primates: empathy, which as Darwin noted makes
individuals much more able to live in groups; [note 56] a sense of fairness and self-righteous indignation,
recently found experimentally even in capuchin monkeys,[note 57] and demonstrated cross-culturally in
humans;[note 58] forgiveness and
reconciliation, needed to repair relations, observed over the last twenty years
in many species;[note 59] emotions
like generosity and gratitude; and a capacity for detecting cheating in
social relations . . . Nature has endowed us with a moral capacity
"much like a gyroscope at rest," and culture's role is "to spin
it and establish its orientation."[note 64] (p. 140-141; Kindle
Locations 1584-1591).
4. Stories are true but they are true at a level of
abstraction that has to be translated into “real-life” situations if we are to
manifest these truths into our individual and social worlds. In order to
translate the archetypal images that resonate within us, we need the resources
of imagination, play, and creativity.
Boyd emphasizes how these elements have been vital in the movement of culture
and civilization.
They
[Darwin machines] cannot find the right answer beforehand: there is no single
right form of life, no single right antibody, no single right synaptic link, no
single right move.(note 32) But they can generate possibilities that the
environment tests. Survivors generate new variations and face new rounds of
tests, so that even without preplanning, success accumulates. (p. 120; Kindle,
1387-1389).
In
art understood as a Darwin machine, works are not somehow created to fit the
cultural environment. Instead they are generated, unpredictably, in the minds
or actions of artists, and selected first by them in accordance with their
intuitions about their social world, and then by this world itself. (note 40)(p. 123; Kindle, 1414,)
Art
develops in us habits of imaginative exploration, so that we take the world as
not closed and given, but open and to be shaped on our own terms. In and
through art, we readily turn the actual around within the much larger space of
the possible, the conditional, and the impossible. Art opens up new dimensions
of possibility space and populates it with imaginative particulars.
Art
builds our confidence, at the individual and the group levels, in shaping our
own destinies. (p. 124; Kindle,1427-1429, 1435)
The
connections among the four themes from cooperation to creativity are shown in
these excerpts from Boyd:
But
a system of unconscious emotional contagion [that works before language and
below conscious awareness and has evolved along with sociality] allows us
to coordinate genuinely cooperative intentions. Mirror neurons, [whose
function was discovered only in the early 1990s,] fire when we see others act
or express emotion as if we were making the same action, and allow us through a
kind of automatic inner imitation to understand their intentions and attune
ourselves to their feelings.
Quoting Goleman:
When
people are in rapport, they can be more creative together and more efficient in
making decisions ... Shared attention is the first essential ingredient
Animals
learn best to attune themselves to one another through the pleasures of play,
taking turns, checking to see that their partners still seek the
"high" of intense mutual engagement.(note 19) Humans, more flexible
in behavior and dependent for much longer in childhood, broaden and lengthen
social play, not only in childhood but right throughout adult life. And they
extend it, crucially, into the cognitive play of art. (p. 103-4; Kindle,
1186-1195)
And
through pretend play and fiction we learn to try out the positions of others,
we attune ourselves spontaneously to the shifting emotions of an unfolding
story, and we encounter story after story that embodies prosocial values in
memorable, emotionally compelling images, actions, and outcomes (p. 106; Kindle,
1214-1215).
Application of the themes
As we move into planning our second digital media project,
these themes are the stepping stones:
1. Through resonance, we each identify the metarepresentations that are worthy of
development because they connect with the unique talent and gift given to each
person. In other words, the authentic “hits” made in the experience of Good
Stories, of teaching-narratives, offer the source of the archetypal images
capable of advancing peace and justice.
2. Just as we are doing in the journal assignments, Digital
Media Project 2 translates across the levels so that the point of
resonance (such as Psyche opening the treasure chest or Chameleon looking like
Ruler-Above) gets applied in our individual character and at the social level.
For example, DMP2 could include a comic with an inner dialog where a self-doubt
is challenged by the way a divine ruler would see the situation. Another part
of DMP2 could show a photo of an experience though UMCP's alternative breaks program where a home is being made for persons living in sub-standard
conditions. The voice track could tell how this is like anteater’s work in the
Kanu Story and how it expands the chances for peace and justice.
3. In order to extend the understanding and the texture of
the key archetypal image and the related quality, DMP2 amplifies by showing drawings and photos connected with several stories. For
example, let’s assume that my points of resonance tended to relate to the
points where someone received guidance: the youngest brother stopping for the
small voice, the young sister listening to the old woman and to the talking
bird, Psyche getting help from the reed and from the tower. Through
metarepresentation I connect these points of resonance with the archetypal
figure of the Guide. My project amplifies with images representing the stories
just named and then translates the Guide across levels so that I creatively
play forward my developing understanding of Guide/Guidance.
The
empathy needed to recognize the
guides we might otherwise miss out on can be developed by amplification of this
theme. In the Grimms’ Water of Life, the guide was a voice that was perceived
by the older brothers as too small to be worthy of their attention. In Golden
Water, this is shown as a person who could be missed as just looking like a
haystack. Psyche needs to listen to the reed alongside the river if she is to
recover the golden wool. When we amplify the archetypal them of “guide” with
these stories, we develop empathy needed to value small voices and to look into
the hidden places.
Also,
the Golden Water story shows a progression of the guide archetype as it suggest
development of an inner voice (some call this “gnosis”). The youngest sister is
in search of the “treasures” (figured as golden water, singing branch, &
talking bird) that would make her home complete. This could represent the
development of her complete being, personality, or wholeness. She gets guidance for this from the
figure that was initially hidden in the mass of hair, like a haystack and then
later from the talking bird. As the guide changes from human to the bird, we
might understand this as developing more independence from outside mentoring
and more reliance on an inner voice. In addition to gnosis, this kind of
knowing has been elaborated as “felt sense” by Eugene Gendlin, as “feeling” in
natural horsemanship, and as a sense of destiny. http://dochorsetales.blogspot.com/2014/10/destiny-directions.html
4. As just illustrated, the making of this second digital
media project invites us to nurture and practice our capacity for imagination, play, and creativity. A sense of humor is often
the best tonic to get through difficult experiences. Lazy Jack’s bumbling
attempts in his slowly developing ability for adaptation in moving day to day
resulted in the laughter that connected with the beloved.
Imagination
also allows us to connect with resources such as the ones given for Psyche’s
tasks. When Psyche loses contact with Eros, the stage is set for bouts with
Depression because Eros represents the source of creativity and vitality. Our well-being depends on our nurturing our relationship
with play, and play deserves to be taken seriously along the lines of the way
that Vivian Paley portrays it in her accounts such as A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play and You Can’t Say You Can’t Play
Questions to think about:
1. After viewing “Beginnings,” name
and illustrate your point of resonance.
2. Explain how the Beginnings story, preferably the place in
the story that you just named, connects with Boyd’s explanation of the
importance of creativity. See excerpts from Boyd in part 4 above.
3. Use your creativity to make a visual that you could use
in DMP2. The image should show a photo of you in a place where you are getting
creative ideas. Put in a thought bubble that tells about an insight or a
wondering you are making based on the Beginnings story. For example, it might
say, “Like Little Coot this idea I have about [fill in your idea] looks like just a useless speck
of mud, but…”
