Chapter 1
From Moses to modems: demystifying the storytelling and taking control
We are living in a world of stories. We can't help but use narratives to understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces. Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we understand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God1, and countless other religious historians and philosophers from Maimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn't believe that the wind or rain were gods. They invented characters whose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. The characters and their stories served more as ways of remembering that it would be cold for four months before spring returns than as genuinely accepted explanations for nature's changes. The people were actively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces of nature.
As different people and groups competed for authority, narratives began to be used to gain advantage. Stories were no longer being used simply to predict the patterns of nature, but to describe and influence the courses of politics, economics and power. In such a world, stories compete solely on the basis of their ability to win believers; to be understood as real. When the Pharaoh or King is treated as if he were a god, his subjects are actively participating in the conceit. But he still needed to prove his potency in real ways, and at regular intervals, in order to ensure their continued participation. However, if the ruler could somehow get his followers to accept the story of his divine authority as historical fact, then he need prove nothing. The story justifies itself and is accepted as a reality.
In a sense, early civilisation was really just the process through which older, weaker people used stories to keep younger, stronger people from vying for their power. By the time the young were old enough to know what was going on, they were too invested in the system, or too physically weak themselves, to risk exposing the stories as myths. More positively, these stories provided enough societal continuity for some developments that spanned generations to take root.
The Old Testament, for example, is basically the repeated story of how younger sons attempt to outwit their fathers for an inherited birth right. Of course, this is simply allegory for the Israelites' supplanting of the first-born civilisation, Egypt. But even those who understood the story as metaphor rather than historical fact continued to pass it on for the ethical tradition it contained: one of a people attempting to enact social justice rather than simply receive it.
Storytelling: communication and media
Since Biblical times we have been living in a world where the stories we use to describe and predict our reality have been presented as truth and mistaken for fact. These narratives, and their tellers, compete for believers in two ways: through the content of the stories and through the medium or tools through which the stories are told. The content of a story might be considered the what, where the technology through which the story is transmitted can be considered the how. In moments when new technologies of storytelling develop, the competitive value of the medium can be more influential than the value of the message.
Exclusive access to the how of storytelling lets a storyteller monopolise the what. In ancient times, people were captivated by the epic storyteller as much for his ability to remember thousands of lines of text as for the actual content of the Iliad or Odyssey. Likewise, a television program or commercial holds us in its spell as much through the magic of broadcasting technology as its script. Whoever has power to get inside that magic box has the power to write the story we end up believing.
We don't call the stuff on television 'programming' for nothing. The people making television are not programming our TV sets or their evening schedules; they are programming us. We use the dial to select which program we are going to receive and then we submit to it. This is not so dangerous in itself; but the less understanding and control we have over exactly what is fed to us through the tube, the more vulnerable we are to the whims of our programmers.