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Chapter Ten: Social Cooperation
Which segues nicely into our third point: that stories foster social cooperation.
The act of telling a story implies an audience, someone to have the story told to, especially in the case of oral storytelling. And there’s a reason that parents are encouraged to read to their children: the act of storytelling is bonding, reinforcing the relationship first between both story tellers and story-consumers, and secondly between all the various story-consumers together (I mean, witness the fan-led forums online where people bond fiercely over their favourite books, movies and TV shows—a perfect example of storytelling creating bonds and group identity).
This is also where you see the power story has over groups with a shared story-background; not only do you get passionate fandoms, you get things which are conceptually similar but on a larger scale: patriotism, after all, is simply a shared story about how wonderful our own corner of the world is, and an invested belief in it being better than other corners of the world. Democracy, freedom, equality—these are not physical, absolute things, but rather values that arise out of a shared narrative. We tell each other stories about how things matter, how they make the world a better place, and if we tell these stories often enough, and the people in power tell them enough, the concepts they embody become a reality. A shared cultural narrative—a common set of stories you tell yourself about who you are like, and who you are not like—is one of the key traits of group belonging, whether that group is a Harry Potter fan club or the United States of America.
I can attest personally to the power of this kind of storytelling: my son is of an age where he is noticing that other people sometimes choose to do things that we encourage him not to do, or that we just happen to not do in our house.
An easy example: we’re vegetarian. A lot of our extended family is, but not all of them, and certainly most of his friends at school are not. And the simplest explanation for him is, some families choose to do things differently. Some families choose to eat meat, and that’s fine. It’s just that in our family, we choose not to.
You’d think this would be on par with ‘Because I said so’ as reasoning goes, but this is where we see the subtle, yet persuasive, power of stories: we are not saying ‘Do this things for no reason’. Instead, we are suggesting (and this was totally unintentional at the time!) that in order to belong, in order to be a part of our family, this is the story we tell: that we do not eat meat. And so, because there is the hint of a story attached, a story that describes the members of our family group, he seems to have not only accepted it unquestioningly, but (to my utter embarrassment) also to have become one of those militant vegetarians who proudly informs all his friends, Well, we don’t do that in our family!
I mean, it’s embarrassing as heck sometimes, but it shows clearly the power of a shared narrative in forming group identity and cooperation between group members, right?
(Pity about the conflict between non-group members…!)
On a broader scale, religion serves a similar purpose, particularly in post-agricultural societies: as well as linking back to that idea of providing patterns in chaos and thus meaning in our lives, religion also functions as a way of ensuring social harmony (again, as with the example of my son, at least within the group) by telling stories that convey a shared set of expectations for behaviour.
In hunter-gatherer societies, we can see clearly how stories perform this role of maintaining social harmony: in studies conducted into the cultural stories of hunter-gatherer societies across southeast Asia and Africa, anthropologists found that around 70% of stories specifically concern social behaviour, implicitly conveying the social rules around hunting, sharing food, marriage, and interactions with members of other groups.
Some anthropologists suggest that it’s important for groups to share stories like this not just because it lets us know how we should act, but also because it means we can rest assured knowing that other people know the same set of social rules as we do.
If we know that someone belongs to the same religion, or meet someone of our own nationality while overseas, or discover someone has a similar physical condition to us, we instantly know that they ‘get it’—that they understand some of the rules by which we operate and through which we frame the world. We can rest easier, knowing that a shared set of stories has done the heavy lifting for us in defining the way we should interact.