“The truth resists simplicity.” – John Green

The economist Tyler Cowen gave a TED talk earlier this year about the dangers of thinking in “Stories”. He makes some excellent points regarding the fact that, though stories are a deeply ingrained part of human nature, they almost always conceal as much as they reveal. The world isn’t carved up into stories by default and in doing the carving ourselves important details get lost, facts get twisted, and emphasis gets assigned where it doesn’t belong.

I think that you’ll find his talk worth the 17 minutes you spend on it. If you’re so inclined, you can do that now:

In talking about stories, Cowen touches one of the most dangerous memes of modern thought: the Narrative. Now narratives are wonderful things in novels or other fiction, but narrative technique is increasingly being applied the factual world around us as a way to shape or distort our understanding of it. In Aristotle’s time this would have been called Sophistry. Today it’s called “Social Sciences”.

But the point remains the same. Narratives are used to take the facts and make them fit a particular worldview rather than the other way around. They are a way to take a common stock of facts and, through omission, emphasis, and distortion, use them to tell a just-so story about the world we find ourselves in.

These stories, of course, tend to grow up mycologically around significant events. The recent global financial crisis has spawned a profusion of narratives, as have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as has the Arab Spring.

Of course no event of recent American history has spawned more narratives than 9/11. Some tell us that it was the first blow in a war of good versus evil. Some tell us that this was the evil empire getting its comeuppance. Some tell us this was our sack of Rome or, at the very least, our Lost Legions. But of course it wasn’t any of those things. It was far more complex and, to use Cowen’s word, messy. It was an event born from incomprehensible chain of choice and motivation. No story could possibly encompass the truth of what happened, and by trying to reduce thousands of lives into a simple narrative we delude ourselves about what really happened.

This is one of the reasons why Simon Schama’s piece for BBC News on 9/11 was so refreshing. The only stories he tells are memories. He uses them to highlight, powerfully, that this event matters and still ought to matter. But he does so without presuming to tell us a story about what it means. He demands that we pay attention, but doesn’t tell us where this is all going.

Human beings are story tellers by nature and so it’s probably no surprise that we try to understand the world in the form of narrative arcs. But while narrative arcs work well for the constrained world of fiction, they are inherently insufficient to help us navigate the real world. Even more troubling is the fact that narratives are inherently skewed. Not all are biased (though, per H. L. Mencken, Americans can’t resist a morality tale and so ours almost invariably are) but all of them make errors of emphasis or value. So at the best of times narratives are incomplete and at the worst of times they lead us actively astray.

And so I think Cowen’s call to resist the temptation towards stories and narratives is important, as is Schama’s call to attend to an event like 9/11 and to not write it off into the past so quickly. Stories may help us understand our myths, our culture, ourselves, or even our past, but they’re an extremely poor way to try and understand our present or to guide us as we build our future. Because the truth resists simplicity, and we do ourselves no favors by trying to force simplicity upon it.