On… Story #3
Can Stories Remind Us of Who We Really Are?
Once upon a time, an old man said to his grandson: ‘There is a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil- angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly.
The other is good- peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’
After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’
The Story of the Two Wolves is a famous Native American legend.
The old man smiles.
‘The one you feed.’
This is a famous Native American legend as retold by Rutger Bregman, the author of this week’s book recommendation which I’ll return to later in this post.
And this is the final post in the Story Miniseries and it’s about the power of story to feed the good wolf within us.
The Guilty Wolf
Last week’s post which shared stories from around the world included the autobiography of Malidoma Somé’s who was kidnapped from his Dakara tribe in Burkina Faso, raised in a Jesuit school, and who then returned to his tribe as an adult, before offering himself as a bridge between the two cultures.
One of the most striking elements of Somé’s perspective is the importance he places on respecting our ancestors, which forms an essential part of communal life of the Dakara tribe.
Rituals that honour the wishes of the ancestors are infused throughout every part of Dakara life, and to neglect these duties is believed to bring disaster.
Somé’s account of how colonisation disrupted his people’s natural way of relating to the events of life is a painful read. For Somé the influence of our ancestors means that those of us whose ancestors and/ or culture profited from colonisation have inherited an imbalance, or guilt, that he sees as largely responsible for many of that society’s ills.
He writes, ‘When a person from my culture looks at the descendants of Westerners who invaded their culture, they see a people who are ashamed of their ancestors because they were killers and marauders masquerading as artisans of progress. The fact that these people have a sick culture comes as no surprise to them.’
For those of us who are not accustomed to such perspectives this might be a hard pill to swallow, but science is catching up with what many indigenous cultures have known intuitively, and it is now well understood that trauma has a very substantial negative impact on at least three generations if left unresolved.
So our ‘ancestors’ might have far more impact on us than we realise.
(I’ll be returning to this in future blog posts, but in the meantime, I would recommend the book, ‘It Didn’t Start With You’ by Mark Wolynn for more on intergenerational trauma.)
I am interested in Somé’s perspective on guilt because, in terms of mental health (and many other sets of indicators such as levels of obesity, addiction, and social cohesion), it seems that the progress of industrialisation has come at a considerable cost.
The benefits of industrialisation has come at a considerable cost to us, both personally and collectively.
And I wonder if perhaps guilt does have a part to play in that.
It’s something so rarely talked about beyond what is deemed correct by the law, which is always a red flag. So let’s dive in.
Righting the Wrong
It is rare to think of any good story where there wasn’t some wrong, imbalance, or disconnection, that didn’t need righting.
And in terms of the larger story of declining planetary health, it is not difficult to see where that might be.
Industrialised cultures, especially those with a colonial history, carry a great deal of the responsibility for current and historical carbon emissions and are, for now, often the least affected.
So how could we talk about climate change, without talking about guilt?
And yet I find that reminders of how guilty and responsible I am do not motivate me in the context of climate change at all. If anything, they demotivate and immobilise me, and I have found this to be the case pretty with pretty much anyone I talk to about climate change.
Because it is a difficult thing to realise that you may have found yourself on the wrong side of history through a way of life that you did not create, but which was inherited.
To open ourselves to such a realisation is deeply uncomfortable, and it’s therefore not surprising that getting society to take climate change seriously has been a very hard sell. It involves acknowledging some unpleasant things about ourselves.
And, because the impacts of climate change are so far reaching and so final, to acknowledge the guilt would be to also open ourselves to something that can really can do us some quite serious emotional harm.
It would be to open ourselves to shame, which is the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with us.
I do not think it surprising that we would resist such a view of ourselves, and not just because it is so uncomfortable or painful.
Human-kind
Rutger Bregman is the author of Humankind, and he would argue that we resist this narrative because the idea that we are fundamentally bad is simply untrue, contrary to much of what we might see in the world.
The 463 pages of Bregman’s book are packed with the almost undeniable empirical evidence that most human beings are, at their core, pretty decent and when put in difficult circumstances this usually becomes even more so the case (such as the Blitz, during the aftermath of natural disasters or even during this pandemic).
Bregman also speaks candidly about the challenges of taking such a view. He writes, ‘To stand up for human goodness means weathering a storm of ridicule’ (p.19).
So how has ‘veneer theory’ (the idea that beneath our thin outward display of civilisation we’re really just motivated by our own selfish desires) come to be such a dominant way of viewing ourselves, if it’s so untrue?
The answer, according to Bregman, is human psychology, fuelled by the media.
Humans are evolutionarily designed to notice threat more than goodness (as I wrote about in my post on gratitude) because such a predisposition made our survival more likely.
For the same reason, we are also more likely to notice and remember novelty.
It’s also therefore what sells, because it’s what we are attracted to.
Research has shown that the more extraordinary and unlikely something is, the more we actually become fearful of it, and it is therefore more likely to receive media coverage, creating a vicious cycle.
Between 1991 and 2005, for example, media reporting of airplane accidents consistently grew despite a reduction in the number of accidents, and with it came a general increase in public fear of flying.
So Bregman argues that the media has given us a warped view of our true nature, and that we are actually far more altruistic than we would give ourselves credit for.
Self-Fulfilling Stories
What I find most powerful about Bregman’s perspective is not so much his belief that we are all innately good, because that is an argument that could continue to rage for some time, but that, because there is clearly goodness in all of us, we can surely agree that we all of value.
That we are all worthy of love and none of us are beyond redemption.
This is essential information if we are to be able to acknowledge the part we play in climate change.
Because it is so much easier to hold up our hands and acknowledge our part if we do not believe we will be defined by the ways we have fallen short of how we would like to live in the world.
It also means that we can resist become too hung up on climate narratives of guilt and shame, and instead put our energies into doing what we can to make amends, here and now.
Many of us did not know about climate change before, but we know now. For many of us, green options were not available before, but they are now. And deep change takes time, so we have to work with where we are now, there is no other option.
Such a view of ourselves is also essential because what we believe about ourselves has a great deal of power over us.
We know from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, for example, that breaking the cycle of negative beliefs about ourselves is an essential part of moving through the things that are stopping us from living fully.
The more we think, ‘I’m rubbish at that’, the more negative thoughts come rushing when we try, getting in the way and ultimately creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Treatment is not to cover up the story we have about ourselves with another lie, such as, ‘I’m the best in the world at that’, but instead to reframe the thought into something more constructive. We instead learn to say, ‘I’m still learning that,’ ‘I’ve made good progress with that,’ or ‘I have prioritised learning other things that I am proud of.’
The power of Bregman’s book is that he helps us to reframe the negative ways that humanity sees itself, not by creating a delusion that we are not flawed, sometimes deeply, but simply by reminding us of how we are also good, capable, resilient, generous and so much more.
He calls this countering the ‘nocebo’ effect (the opposite of placebo).
Humanity is suffering from the nocebo effect because it has come to believe the worst about itself, which then brings out the worst in us as we become less and less willing to cooperate and trust each other.
Alex Evans, the author of my book recommendation from On… Story #1, also writes about this in relation to concepts of scarcity.
Citing how Hitler used the idea of ‘Lebensraum’ (meaning ‘room to live’) to justify expanding across Europe and how the genocide in Rwanda was rooted not just in ethnic hatred but also in poor food supply, Evans concludes, ‘perceptions of scarcity have the power to induce panic like almost nothing else.’
Which is why it is important to move past the negative beliefs we have about ourselves, and into the fullness of what it means to be human. And it’s why we need stories that help us to believe we are capable of overcoming this challenge, so that we have a chance of doing so.
The Power of Christmas Cheer
But if reading Bregman’s rather sizable book on the history of humankind is a prospect that doesn’t fill you with joy this Christmas, there is another recommendation I’ll make.
Last year I watched the newly released Christmas film, Klaus, which reimagines how the story of Father Christmas came about.
Klaus is a film about a town bitterly divided by a feud so ancient that no one can remember its origins.
When ‘a selfish postman and reclusive toymaker’ form an unlikely friendship, they spark a small act of generosity that spreads across the entire town, restoring the community as its members are unwittingly reminded and can no longer forget the good in each other.
Klaus is a film that reimagines the story of Father Christmas.
At first, however, the town elders are dismayed and confusion erupts across the region of ‘Smeerensburg’.
This reminds me of what Bregman writes of leadership;
‘To stand up for goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership.’ (p.19)
But, in Klaus, Smeerensburg does manage to overcome, and the film culminates beautifully.
Klaus is the story of how even the most entrenched of communities can be restored to their natural, more harmonious state simply by being reminded of who they really are.
It’s basically the crux of Bregman’s philosophy condensed into a delightful Christmas film for the whole family, which I would highlight recommend!
A Note on Musical Stories
In this series I’ve shared examples of both written and visual stories, but what of musical stories?
This week I have been listening to The Lost Words: Spell Songs. The album describes itself as, ‘a performance rich in spoken voice, whispers, accents, dialects, native languages, proverbs, sayings, birdsong, river chatter and insect hum, alongside beguiling music, song and visual beauty.’
It is the work of eight artists who were commissioned to respond to the loss of nature words in everyday language, as well as to both celebrate nature and mourn its destruction.
It’s a beautiful album, and there is one song in particular that I have found myself especially drawn to. Heartwood, which is a story about deforestation, is sung from the perspective of a tree.
The lyrics from the bridge are;
I drink the rain
I eat the sun
I give the breath that fills your lungs
I hear the roaring engines thrum…
But I cannot run.
Heartwood is a song about deforestation.
When I read that a football pitch sized amount of the Amazon is destroyed every minute, I feel myself closing down emotionally. It is a fact so boggling, so shocking, that I find myself turning away.
This, you might say, is my ‘bad wolf’, who wants to turn away in self-protection, despite the protestations of my ‘good wolf’ who wants to engage and do something about it.
But when I listen to Heartwood, I experience something very different.
Music is able to bypass the wrestling of my mind and connect me on a deeper level.
Held together by the music, for example, I find that my two wolves can meet each other and hold each other.
The notions of a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wolf fall away. I can have compassion for myself in wanting to protect myself, and I can also acknowledge the intense grief I feel for what is happening to our beautiful planet.
The music guides this grieving process, and knowing that the song will come to a close, I know also that I will not feel overwhelmed by grief forever.
We can learn to embrace the different parts of ourselves as they respond differently to climate change.
Wrapping Up This Miniseries
There are so many ways in which story has incredible power, I feel as though I’ve just touched the surface over the past three weeks.
But I wanted to finish this series with a short set of questions I have begun asking myself both about the stories I hear and the stories I tell to help me in determining which kinds of stories to give my attention.
1. When you hear or tell a story, do you feel yourself opening up or closing down, both emotionally and physically? If you’re closing down, perhaps in fear or shame, then there’s a good chance that story needs looking at from some different perspectives.
2. When you hear or tell a story, what are the implications for others? Does it deny the reality of another? Does it make heroes and villains, and if so, are you well placed to make such an assessment? Does that story deny the humanity of another?
3. Do the stories you hear or tell fit within the rich traditions of those that have come before us? Do they follow similar threads? Because these are the stories that have stood the test of time.
Thanks for reading!
About Me I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.
Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.