The Real Oldest Profession
Did you know that before the the First World War, the phrase “the worlds oldest profession” was not universally understood to refer to prostitutes? Farmers, teachers, priests and others were also in the race.
But there is a human activity much older than even specialisations like this. A universal human trait found in all cultures at all times.
Stories
No matter where you look in ancient history, you find stories. Before writing was discovered, they were told, often in song like the famous greek epics. The oldest preserved communication of humans, cave paintings, are probably stories.
The two first activities that children universally engage in are play and storytelling. And storytelling is the one that stays with us until our last breath, in many cases literally.
What is the Power of Stories?
To understand the power of stories, we need to first understand what a story is. Not everything that we say is a story or part of a story.
There are two key elements to a story. A narration and a meaning.
A narration is the recounting or telling of a connected series of events. That is why
I went to the bookshop yesterday.
is not a story. And this seemingly simple definition brings a whole set into the definition. What is an event, and what is a connection?
An event is something happening, so the simple recounting of a fact is not a story. That means stories are action-driven. Something needs to happen in a story. This gives stories a dynamic, a change. A story cannot be static. Immediately, our interest rises because something that is moving, changing takes our attention much better than something static.
A connection can be in multiple forms. In the most simple cases, it can be temporal (something happening after something else) or causal (something happening because of something else). Typically, we instinctively search for both of these. If two things happen after each other, we assume the first thing caused the other in some way. In the short narration
I went to the bookshop yesterday and met John.
it is assumed that John and the bookshop are causally connected, i.e. John is at the bookshop. The sentence does not explicitly state this, but the way the two events are connected implies it. With 9 words there is already two events, a temporal ordering and an implied causal connection.
But there is one more element to stories. A story has a meaning. The short narration above feels incomplete, does it not? In our heads we ask “and then?” or “and what?” because to become a story the narration needs to carry a meaning. This makes stories such a beautiful construct, because the meaning is also self-referential. Not only does it transport some intention of the speaker, some message or lesson or information, through meaning the story also explains through itself why it is being told. A good story needs no explanation.
I went to the bookshop yesterday and met John. He invited me here, great party.
Now we have a story. This is the story of how the speaker came to be at the party, explaining his relation to the host, that he came on short notice and much more in just 15 words.
There is one more crucial part to a story: It activates and requires the imagination of the listener, reader or watcher. The medium, be it words or pictures or sounds, is not the story. The medium is the presentation of the story, the storytelling. The real story happens in the head of the listener. This makes storytelling interactive even if the audience is seemingly passive.
Forms of Storytelling
Far beyond the oral, the speaking of a story, we find stories in so many shapes and forms that Mystique, the shape-shifting character in the X-Men comics and movies, is easily put to shame.
The oldest forms of storytelling are speech and song, with paintings evolving quickly after. Look at the painting on this vase now found in the British Museum and tell me it is not telling a story:
But as soon as writing was invented, it was used to tell stories, or write down the ones being told. And every new medium invented since, like photography, movies or computer games, has been used to tell stories.
Politics as Storytelling
Religions thrive on stories, as one look at the Bible, the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita reveals. Buddhism is the life story of Buddha and ancient african, asian or european (pagan) religions are full of stories about gods, spirits or semi-god heroes.
Religion also intentionally uses stories to alter perception, to teach and to convert people into followers. From this it should come as no surprise that politics is deeply into storytelling as well. After all, both religion and politics are concerned with power over peoples minds.
There are two parts to politics. The first is the political actions, the boring part that nobody who is not in the sphere sees. Meetings and discussions, diplomacy and compromises, the writing of laws and the administration of state. The second is the public face of politics, the parliamentary debates, the television interviews, the election campaigns.
In public politics, storytelling is the god of all. Every politician tells stories. The entire purpose of public politics is to put your story out there and make it compelling for as many people as possible. One party or candidate may create a story about how foreigners are taking all the jobs while another might ride on a story about his past heroism or successes. The most compelling stories, however, are those that start in the present and create a path into a better future. By connecting current events to visions of future events and injecting your own party as the connection, the meaning of the story turns naturally into “we need to be in charge to make this happen”.
In politics, there are two types of storytelling. The one is the open one, as famously used by Winston Churchill:
Once upon a time all the animals in the zoo decided that they would disarm, and they arranged to have a conference to arrange the matter. So the rhinoceros said, when he opened the proceedings, that the use of teeth was barbarous and horrible and ought to be strictly prohibited by general consent. Horns, which were mainly defensive weapons, would, of course, have to be allowed.
But the other is older and more common. The telling of a story that is not immediately visible as a story, like the one that General Eisenhower told after D-Day:
Great battles lie ahead. I call upon all who love freedom to stand with us. Keep your faith staunch — our arms are resolute — together we shall achieve victory.
While on its face, this is not a story, it actually very much is. There are several events: Great battles, the standing together of those addressed, the keeping of faith and finally victory. They are connected, though sometimes losely. Those who love freedom stand together. If we keep our faith, victory will be achieved. And there is a meaning: Prepare for more suffering, but in the end we will win. The story masterfully projects the present into the future, and to a desired, better future.
Stories, Small and Big
Not just the big stories of salvation and gods, of heroes and wars, of future societies and todays politics matter. Stories are also intensely personal. We are all constantly telling and re-telling our life story. Biographies are bestsellers because personal stories are interesting to us, because we share them, because we find ourselves in them.
Stories are how we make sense of events in our life as much as in the larger world. We are looking for the connections between events and for the meaning behind them. When we are confronted with something unusual or strange, we build stories about it. Very often our means of processing difficult moments in our life is to speak about them — to tell the story of them —and we do this again and again. While we repeat it, the story slowly changes and adapts to our needs, until it is the story that we accept as part of ourselves. Once this process is complete we “are over it”, can integrate the story into our life story and go on with our lives.
This is what psychologists do to patients — they invite them to tell their story, and they ask the right questions to understand the life story of their patients and to guide the patient into changing the story of their traumatic events until it fits into the life story.
This is also what talking with your best friends does. By re-telling events in your life, you re-shape them to fit into the overal life story.
What Storytelling Means to Me
I am neither a politician nor a psychologist. But stories mean a lot to me because I am an analytical person. From early childhood I was taking apart toys, reading very early, always trying to understand how things work. If stories are how we make sense of the world, then stories reveal much about both the world and ourselves.
To study something, you try to isolate it from external influences. Bacteria are studied in petry dishes. Humans are studied in controlled settings. The laws of physics are studied in laboratories.
Stories, however, cannot be isolated from the environment, because they are about the environment. Both the events and the meanings cease to exist in isolation.
But stories can be fictional. While most fiction has a relation to the real world, he whole purpose of a fictional setting is to replace the complex and often intransparent environmental conditions of the real world with controlled, fully transparent (at least to the author) conditions. Fiction is abstraction.
This is where I create stories. I have written short stories, I am writing a book, but my preferred medium is the combination of the two instinctive human behaviours I mentioned earlier, play and storytelling. Storytelling games are my passion and I have created pen & paper roleplaying games as well as computer games. And looking back I see that most of my creations are empty spaces for other peoples stories. There are my two big online games BattleMaster and Might & Fealty, both of which create a world in which players act, creating storylines as they go. There is my roleplaying game [explorers] with its intentionally sketchy background setting, which is more about the personal story of characters. And right now there is my game Schwarzwald, which on the surface seems to be a strategy game but ultimately the interactions and diaries — and thus stories — of players amongst each other will contribute greatly to success or failure.
What Storytelling Means to You
Whether you realize it or not, stories are everywhere in all our lives. From the personal story of our life that we all tell to each other, to the stories of other people we meet, to the big stories of political and religious leaders.
We can remain ignorant to this most fundamental part of what it means to be a human, or we can embrace it and consciously see the stories. And through understanding the difference between reality and the stories we tell, see the difference between the complexity of a society and the stories we are told about it. We can subscribe to simple narratives, or understand them as the stories they are. If we approach stories as stories, the storyteller becomes visible and we naturally ask ourselves who is telling the story and why.