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Stories engage listeners because a person — a hero — is at their center. We identify with the heroes of stories because each of us is the hero of our own story, trying to overcome the external and internal obstacles that stand between us and our goals. They also engage because they leave room for interpretation and reimagining. The point or moral of a story is not equal to the story itself. In fact, explaining a story can kill it, reducing story to statement. This is not to say that a story means whatever a listener chooses. If that were true, stories would have no power to pass on the values, thoughts, and feelings of cultures and organizaitons; they would not communicate. Academics who favor deconstructionism argue that thi is exactly the case, but the experienc of cultures and individuals over many thousands of years proves them wrong. Good stories are flexible and suggestive, they provide opportunities for interpretation and response, but only within a range of meaning the story establishes. The fact that they do not have one simple point does not imply that they can mean anything at all. An employee who interprets a story about the boss firing someone who questions his judgment to mean that the boss welcomes criticism will soon discover that deconstruction works better in theory than practice.
[Cohen & Prusak, 2001. In Good Company. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Pp. 117-118.
I've always believed, like Sokol, that the ideas of the postmoderns made sense if taken more subtlely than postmoderns want. Audiences do indeed co-create an experience, the meaning, a story with the storyteller. Lit Crit folks are known as those who can't tell stories. Or at least don't. Maybe that's why they need to deconstruct them.
Mara Beller, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote an interesting article on the Sokal Hoax that describes how the weird, wacko theories of several quantum physicists sound at least as bad as some of the excesses of the post-modern litcrits. Scientists think that because they have a great deal of knowledge and skill in a particularly difficult domain that they have similar levels of knowledge in skill in humanistic domains. Doctors and lawyers have the same problem, so perhaps it stems from the insularity of the professions. The article is a decent discussion of the general problem, focusing on the Sokal Hoax as a starting point.
Seligman, whose book I've been reading for the last 24 hours, has some strong things to say about how our childhood affects our adult lives: it doesn't. Really. That's what he says. Which totally contradicts current wisdom.
He argues that genetics matter more than what happens to you. Although in an earlier chapter, he says rather conclusively that parents arguing in front of their child has detrimental affects. In fact, any unresolved adult argument seems to set kids on edge. It actually seems to make good sense to hold your arguments with your spouse "not in front of the children". He even argues that children do not know that their parents are at odds: they normally assume that everything is going great with their caretakers.
To get the full post-modern political experience, I started my day listening to Alex Jones talk about the the evils of the neo-conservatives, and how he, as a true conservative, abhors the current Iraqi civilian casualites. (His site has some terrible pictures from Aljazeera television of dead children, reportedly from US bombings.) His take is that the US armed forces are playing "bad cop" so that when the Internationalist UN troops come in as "good cops" they'll be accepted.
I followed that by listening to Air American Radio, the new liberal answer to conservative talk radio, which broadcasts in Chicago on AM950. I started off with Al Franken (ex SNL commentator and author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), who has a new talk radio show. They, of course, lambasted Condoleezza Rice for her testimony before the 9/11 Commission and the rest of the Bush White House for casting aside almost every issue that the Clinton Administration followed.
What I really liked was that you could pretty much produce a coherent worldview by combining these two sources. Both were incredibly critical of Bush Jr. and his staff. For different reasons, of course. I doubt that Air America Radio would agree with Alex Jones that Bush is an Internationalist / Socialist / puppet. Still, it was a very funny ride into Chicago from both shows. Air America's later show, The Majority Report, hosted by Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder, was funny but because it was so bad. The only entertaining part of it was Mike Papantonio coming on and outshining the much more famous hosts.
Beat listening to Viacom radio again.
I was reading this article by Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian, The Church on the Other Side and generally regarded as a guru of the post-modern church. [An aside: can there be such a thing as a post-modernism guru?] It was interesting that he compared the post-modern philosophies with the reformation movement (I don't think it holds up to scrutiny) but I found his omission of the global perspective disturbing. As we've seen in the Anglican schism that's happening, taking a national perspective on church issues can lead to serious repercussions for Christians elsewhere in the world.
Recently, due to an inexplicable need to continue making my life miserable, I have returned to the chaos theory / complexity theory studies I for the most part gave up when I left college in 1990. Oh, the days of analogue computing and finding out that things were silly!
One of the things that has me wondering is the concept of emergence. There's something circular in the biological arguments. It's not that I have some big chip on my shoulder against evolutionary biology -- branches of it have explained some big mysteries fairly well, like why I still have an appendix even though it serves no purpose other than to kill me when it becomes infected -- or that I think that the idea of basic iterative fundamentals is somehow odd. Still, I have to admit being a bit skeptical.
I've just finished reading a piece by a guy named Clifton on Orthodox vs. Emerging Church and then ead Jamie's reply to his points on bechurch.net. One of the points that Clifton makes is that he is uncomfortable with the identifcation with "post-modern" as it seems to mean that the modern era is over. Jamie agrees, saying that he feels we are currently inside the transition between modern and post-modern.
It is an interesting idea.
One of the things that struck me about John Horgan's article in COMPUTER this month ("The End of Science Revisited") is how similar today's science seems to be to the science of the previous fin de siécle. People such as Horgan are claiming that science has gotten to a stopping point, a place where we cannot really know much more. The complexity of what we are studying will stymie us. In the late 1800s, pundits proclaimed the completion of knowledge in the reverse, that we knew how everything moved and soon it would all be down to measurement to predict all things. It didn't work out that way: what became known as quantum physics got in the way. And one of the bloodiest conflicts on record.