We Need New Stories - Part 1

There are dragons, but where are the dragon-slayers?

When the moon landings were on we got a colour TV specially, and a neighbour built a 6ft high model of Saturn 5, and we all went to see it. As a lad I could imagine the wonders that would be ours by 2020. 2020, that totemic and glorious year of the future: I tallied up the years to check I’d still be alive to see it. The flying cars, space travel, the ‘white heat of technology’ ushering in an age of abundance and leisure.

We need new stories.

Stories bring into the open the hopes and fears enjoyed or endured by people and by societies. Even when they tell of the past, our stories shine a light on the present and into the future.

Humanity’s stories have always included a hefty helping of fear and disaster. But these have generally been balanced by stories of hope. The flood came and wiped away almost everything, but Noah floated and the rainbow came. Adam and Eve ate the apple, but thousands of years later came the Christ to redeem all sins. The ‘gospel’ was literally the good news.

The good news stories have been taking a hammering, whilst the bad news stories have been getting blacker and blacker. And suddenly, it seems like we are out of good stories. Can 2121 possibly be as grim as we expect?

Until recently we’ve always found new good stories as quickly as history has snuffed out the old ones. Darwin disposed of traditional Christianity, but that was OK, because Marx and Freud became the Good News. That didn’t end well, but it was OK, because we had Modernity. And when fascism made that Not OK, it was OK because we got American Freedom & Democracy. That meant the arrival of acronyms like the EEC and UN and NASA, and those were really exciting stories, sometimes about global governors doing good for the world. Vietnam was a check, but it was OK because we still had the Moon Landings. Space proved a dead end, but that was OK because we had the end of Communism, Democracy triumphant and the End of History. Iraq banished those illusions, but still, it was almost OK, because we had Globalization and Emerging Markets, which was almost as good. And we had Technology, but then we discovered that What Technology Wants isn’t necessarily what we need. And then we discovered that anyway our financial systems couldn’t cope with that, and anyway maybe Globalization wasn’t really all that OK.

And now what is the good story we tell ourselves to comfort the present and illuminate the future?

My wife’s book club group regularly chooses American books of unrelenting misery, brokenness and - I have to say it - soulless and alienated narcissism. It makes you wonder how they ever got published, let alone reviewed as ‘compelling,’ as they usually are.

Sometimes I wonder whether seemingly gushing acclaim by an English reviewer isn’t sending a coded warning. Consider this: “Tender yet devastating, [Lorem Ipsum] is a masterful novel that brilliantly illuminates the tensions between desire and safety; the legacy of tragedy, and the crimes and misdemeanours of families.” Let’s face it, if you can decode English doublespeak, you’ve been warned fairly comprehensively.

The market for appalling, abominable future dystopias is fed with a fury. The world is heading for environmental apocalypse and there’s nothing we can do about it. But Artificial Intelligence will probably get us before the climate does - and we can see this arriving already through Chat GPT and its successors. The ‘eerie silence’ from advanced alien civilizations is evidence there is a ‘great filter’ that ushers them (and by extension, us) to self-destruction. And look, the authoritarians are winning and war-hungry and are armed with nukes and killer-bugs, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The British government is testing a national alarm system via hour phone (doesn’t work too well).

If any novelist out there has dreams of future abundance, a future of expanded freedoms and widening opportunities, they are keeping them quiet.

Relentless and aggressive misanthropy, with all its carefully curated sub-divisions (racism, sexism, ageism, classism) and garnished with violence and soulless sex will get you published fast and on to the best-seller lists.

What they lack is hope, intimacy, and depth of soul.

We need new stories. Stories in which humanity’s intelligence and curiosity can overcome the problems inevitably coming our way. Because, let’s face it, humanity has always faced devastating problems and has always - always - beaten them. And always will, provided we allow ourselves to continue thinking. Ask David Deutsch.

But a life without stories of hope is a life impoverished. A society without stories of hope, is a society losing the will to endure. A society without stories of hope is a society which is teaching itself its own helplessness, and its own worthlessness. And that, I’m sorry, is the worst news of all.

So we need new stories, and we need them badly.

Part 2 will shift the focus to the way the lack of Story has deformed British politics, and what we can do about it.