Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, July 23-24, 2022.
There is an Irish saying my friend, Phil Cousineau included in his book, The Oldest Story in the World: any journey one takes is not complete until one tells a story about their adventure. So, the story about the voyage is as crucial to its meaning as the adventure itself. In mythologist Joseph Campbell’s classic work of 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he illustrates three “moments” of a journey: 1. Departure from the normal and familiar; 2. Meeting with both adversaries as well as helping companions; 3. A return home with “the boon” or the story of what one has learned during their quest.
The boon or story surveys the knowledge and perhaps the wisdom that expands and deepens the storyteller’s vision of themselves and the world traversed. When shared with others, the story may deepen the level of their self-and-world knowledge; stories look both within one and outside to the world they inhabit. Many of you know that Twelve Step Recovery Programs are guided in large measure by stories, personal narratives told to and received by others. Some healing power emerges in narratives that one can experience imaginally, not necessarily literally.
We can connect with strangers and friends more deeply when we share our tales with them, which is to share our identity, our history, with others. Telling our narratives and listening to others’ plots satisfies a deep hunger in both speaker and listener. Our stories voiced is one of our most creative acts; sharing our stories can be a generous way of relating deeply to ourselves and with others on a level far more profound than those offered by statistics, surveys and other forms of facts that don’t reveal the contours of a coherent narrative on a deeper level.
When someone asks who we are, our response often takes the form of a story. Each story we tell or hear carries a mythic resonance. We remember that the word “mythos” means story.
When we identity deeply with our own story, we tap into closely-held beliefs, prejudices, shadows, values, assumptions and aspirations. In a sense, we language ourselves into our present being through the stories we tell. Narrating ourselves in the world seems to be essential to our nature as a species. This deep hunger reveals the impulse to present ourselves both as a story and in a story.
Storyteller Richard Kearney observes in his book, On Stories, that “each nation discovers it is at heart an ‘imaginal community,’ a narrative construction to be reoriented and reconstructed repeatedly.” Forgetting one’s narrative origins, he goes on, is dangerous, because it can lead to “self-oblivion” when the disease of a community takes itself for granted or becomes so narcissistic it believes it is the center of the world and therefore entitled to assert itself, to the detriment of others
In this light, Democracy is less a noun, more a verb; it is a story in motion. However imperfectly, an origin myth or story, embodies shared values and stabilizing meanings that promote the following in the collective imagination: 1. participation, 2. integration and 3. aspiration. It shapes our past into formed memories that guide us as a people.
I am therefore more concerned with the theft today of our origin story, our founding narrative, that largely defines who we are and wish to become as a people sharing a communal narrative that aspires to benefit all its citizens.
Such a theft--to be replaced by a groundless fiction that is self-serving and just next door to wishful thinking—is felonious. If we allow our founding narrative to be eclipsed by a story-as-scam, we lose something essential to our identity as a people. Such corrosion unmoors us from a shared history and more painfully, perhaps, from one another.