My daughter’s debate with her friends, about what separates humans from other animals, spilled into our family chat. My initial contribution of “opposable thumbs” (meaning tool usage) was met with derision by my elder daughter who looks for counter-arguments to anything I ever say (come to think of it, she would have learned that from me). Here is a belated addition to that debate - what separates us from other animals is our ability to tell stories. Homo narrans goes back to the 1960s; variously attributed to Kurt Ranke or Walter R. Fisher. The argument is that storytelling, over language or reasoning, is the defining characteristic of our species.

Our ability to build on what our ancestors learned is what separates us, and those lessons came to us through stories. For, as Seneca the Younger says in “On The Shortness of Life”:

So, while our life is fleeting, engaging with the thoughts of the philosophers, scientists and artists who came before us effectively adds their years to our own.

Many animals have sophisticated communication systems (I have written about the waggle dance of bees before), but these are signaling systems and do not lead to the large scale education and cultural transformation brought about by storytelling. Whether it is The Greatest Story Ever Told, the Odyssey, or the Bhagavad Gita, through stories humans can simulate what it is like to be someone else, to experience the thoughts and emotions of events we ourselves have not experienced directly. As the current Odyssey movie mania amply demonstrates, storytelling is a foundational element for morality and empathy. It allows us to not just understand “what is”, but “what ought to be” and “what if”.

In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins argues that organisms are merely survival vehicles for their genes. He also introduces the notion of memes (yes, memes goes back to the 1970s you young uns) replicating from mind to mind via language and imitation. Individual ideas are vulnerable on their own; stories are meme-complexes, interlocking networks of memes that reinforce one another to ensure long term survival of those core principles and ideas. By connecting core ideas in a memorable story they span centuries and speak to us thousands of years later. Potent memes (teachings of Socrates, parables of the Buddha, Aesops fables or the structure of the scientific method) can replicate across millennia without dilution. A person’s individual genome is halved every generation and within a few centuries their unique contribution to the population pool is negligible. While other organisms must wait thousands of generations for beneficial genetic adaptations to manifest, human societies adapt in real time by transmitting and imbibing beneficial ideas (through well told stories).

To connect this to the pace layering of civilizations: at the art and fashion layers, fast replications test new ideas against the current environment, while slow replicators codified in myths, religious texts and philosophical traditions - provide the foundation and stability, preserving wisdom over generations and millennia.

The stories we tell shape the mental models of our listeners including ourselves. Sci-Fi stories can act as R&D for our collective imagination, but if all of them are dystopian, we are driving in the wrong direction. Sensationalized story telling (I wrote about risk perception, here) hijack human mental shortcuts leading to biased and warped decision making. Frivolous stories contract our vision of what is needed and possible trapping us in what Seneca calls the “engrossed” life (preoccupied with trivial distractions) where we arrive at the end of the journey unprepared.

A culture that tells the wrong stories either gets paralyzed or runs really fast in the wrong direction.

Go out there and tell the right stories.