The Value of Stories

The Human Fire 2.15 - September 15, 2024

The library of our lives.

I spent Friday in downtown Boston with my wife, son, and a group of homeschoolers exploring the famed "Freedom Trail" and debating the tea tax that provoked the "Boston Tea Party" before revolution broke out in the colonies.

One interesting dimension of the tea tax debate lies in the fact that the British tea, even with the tax, was the cheaper option available to the colonists. Here's a direct refutation of the classical economic story that humans are rational, self-interest-maximizing beings! Turns out some things are more valuable than cost.

We immerse ourselves in stories, but we often fail to grasp how much they shape us. Our narratives - personal and collective - go a long way in determining how we see the world and how we see ourselves. That's why it's good to have more than one at hand, in case your main narrative experiences a revolt.

Oxygen

“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night

Neither my life nor yours, nor ours together, is reducible to any single story. I find that encouraging, since it allows for the various strands to connect wherever they might, or stand apart on their own. In that sense, while we are story-telling creatures, our actual experience is more like a library. How much richer is my life with many stories, rather than just one?

Fuel

Standing outside Faneuil Hall in Boston, you can see a statue of founding father and former governor of Massachusetts, Samuel Adams. The inscription on the statue states, "He organized the Revolution, and signed the Declaration of Independence." These are true, and yet his life was so much more.

Adams was himself a masterful story-teller, so much so that in his day and after it was claimed he was a "master manipulator of the mob." Determined to uphold the rights he believed were guaranteed by the English constitution, Adams consistently pushed his contemporaries to make a choice: the freedom and liberty to govern oneself, or the tyranny of rule by others. His "committees of correspondence" - the original social media - spread the stories of what was happening on the ground in the colonies. It's a good illustration of how all stories operate from a particular vantage - a point of view, perspective, or prejudice.

When relations between the United States and England grew closer in the 19th-century, Adams came to be viewed with much discomfort. He was seen less through his own actions and words, or those of his contemporaries, and more through the need of Victorian society for a respectable past.

But not all perspectives are equally illuminating when it comes to storytelling. There are reliable and unreliable narrators. Adams himself may yet continue to be a reliable narrator in the story of liberty. As he wrote, "A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader."

Not long ago I did some genealogical research on my family heritage. My maternal grandmother had years ago told me that, on her father's side, our people traced their heritage back to the Huguenots of sixteenth-century France. The Huguenots were among the first groups to articulate the right of people to resist unjust rulers. This intrigued me, because before I even knew about my heritage, much of my graduate work took place in the world of French Protestantism. There clearly was a draw there for me intellectually, but apparently genealogically as well.

It turns out that my grandmother's line includes religious refugees who fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had held a tenuous peace between Catholics and Protestants for about a century. They settled in the Protestant-friendly Netherlands before eventually crossing the Atlantic for Pennsylvania.

But going back further in that line, I was able to trace my heritage all the way back to the Guise family - ultra-Catholic French nobility who were instrumental in instigating the violence of the French Wars of Religion.

In the same family line were Protestants and Catholics who wanted to kill each other, and here I was nearly 300 years later trying to sort that history out.

Our stories, it turns out, are often in need of re-telling.

Heat

Dhananjay Jagannathan, a philosopher at Columbia University, advises us on the power that stories have to make sense of things, especially as we retell those stories. He writes, "Narratives offer modes of self-disclosure, ways of connecting our experiences to those of others that aspire to truth. In that aspiration, they stand up to challenges, if not often outright refutation. The aspiration is and always remains open-ended." How can you remain more open-ended in your own storytelling? What stories do you tell are in need of refuting or retelling?

We all possess an interlocking series of stories that we belong to, and belong in. That library of tales may include family stories, cultural stories, individual stories, even cosmic stories. From those, what is your favorite story, either based in historical reality or authorial imagination? What are the stories you tell about yourself when you're getting to know someone?

Next week I'll conclude this series on value by exploring the value of the systems and structures we create to manage and improve our lives. Hit reply and let me know any stories you have about those systems.

Until next week, I'll see you down the path.

Chad

HumanWealth Partners

P.O. Box 1486, Newburyport MA 01950
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