Rebecca Solnit, interviewed by The New York Times over the weekend, said what I’ve been muttering for 15 or 20 years of hearing otherwise sensible communication teachers portray storytelling—or “story,” as they preciously call it—as somehow more moral than other forms of communication:
It’s always important to recognize that stories can be destructive, imprisoning. They can obscure the truth as well as reveal the truth. There’s this period a while back when people were flouncing around with this, Aren’t stories wonderful? And there are stories to justify white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction. The right has its stories, which the fact that this regime has to lie constantly says a lot about who they are. But yeah, stories can be destructive. A lot of stories can oversimplify. I do often see the stories people on the left tell, and the left, I think, is a lot of different things, not a monolith, as very driven by their own version of sectarianism criticism, grievance, often stories of oversimplification. Everyone in that category was like this, and everyone in this category is like that. … So, yeah, I think the idea that stories are these magical devices that will do all our work for us is itself a bad story.
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