Pan, Hook and innocent cruelty

In this the panto season in Britain, a post involving a play that is often put on as part of a pantomime season offering may be apposite. I have a number of memories from early childhood  and quite a few from what I think of as mid-childhood (roughly primary school age). One of these was shaken loose by this article about Peter Pan in which early on we are told:

... the Boy Who Won’t Grow Up is—in actuality—a terrifying protagonist .Peter Pan’s “Greatest Pretend” is Heroism | Tor.com

It reminded my of my first reaction to the Peter Pan story when it was read at school in class (you know, that carpet time thing at the end of the day). I recall actually not liking Peter Pan very much. I remember thinking that he reminded me of school bullies: that sense of what I would now label 'entitlement', being full of himself and the carelessness for others. It all just seemed to me that the kind of characteristics I was, in most other parts of my life, being encouraged to emulate were spectacularly absent from this boy's character, not even in embryo were they there nor was this a story of a journey to wisdom on his part. And worse, this lionising of Pan seemed to be empowering to the attitudes of those who swaggered around the playground and the classroom assuming that if they could take it, it was theirs and if anyone objected, we were to be agressed into line.

Now I've got that flashback of my chest ...

The article linked to reminds us how never Neverland is some kind of virtual world (programmed by Tinkerbel who seems to be of a piece with Pan's negligent insouciance) with Pan at the centre.

Peter Pan is lord dictator of Neverland. His word is law. His adventures take precedence. His desires are paramount. Super fun as an avatar for any child, but what about everyone else who occupies space, who breathes Neverland’s air? What happens to the indians, the Lost Boys, the pirates? They are only relevant in terms of how they play into Peter’s story.

So in some way, fair enough: if it's his 'party' then he can be the centre of it. Note, though, there's an interesting Christological counterpoint we could explore on the back of this.

Not only, though, is he dictator; he is a kind of pagan god (I had to say it that way because I was intrigued as a child by his apparent naming for the Greek mythological god of woodlands).

Barrie states—in no uncertain rhetoric—that when the Lost Boys get too numerous, Peter Pan thins out the herd. ... . And we have to assume that he either deliberately leads them into danger, or that he does the deed himself.

Perhaps apt for a character who shares a name with a woodland god: a survival of some version of the fittest -fittest in this case to capture and hold Pan's interest. It really does feel like a version of a pagan sprite or deva has been narrated into this tale.

Again it is hard to avoid thinking of the this god's carelessness in contrast to another Centre of the/a world who self-empties and submits to death rather than condemning others to it and in order to bring life to those others.

So I found this piece somehow affirming of my 7 year-old self's distrust of Peter Pan. interestingly it was because, at that age, I was taking a view from the margins, from the point of view, more in a sense, of the lost boys who outlive their usefulness to Peter Pan and are 'thinned out' of the herd: I knew what it was like to be one of those.

So it is worrying to realise that this is still the world we live in. Emily Asher-Perrin, who wrote the article makes a good point (and I defer to her as she studies Barrie's Peter Pan as a life project, and I don't). I think it is right that what I was as a junior-school child reacting to was the heartlessness of Pan. Dimly aware that something was wrong about it. In this case, we are invited to consider ...

as Barrie states, Pan will always come back to steal our runaways and
lost boys, and will continue to do so as long as children are “Innocent
and heartless.” The genius of Pan’s tale, is that innocence does not automatically denote goodness. Instead, it makes a child’s lack of experience a very frightening thing after all.

it is that important point: innocence does not necessarily mean goodness. Not only children, but animals are innocent. However, the levels of what we would consider cruelty, exploitation and bullying in primate bands, for example, are horrific by our standards. 'Frightening' might be the right sort of term. indeed. But it is the discomfort of the fact that we are considering human children not chimpanzees.

But there's a further discomfort. In part we can see this played out in the film Hook (which I think is brilliant in many ways). Where we meet what turns out to be a grown-up Peter Pan who has been lured back into the grown up world by love. (In this context, this is an interesting reflection in itself: the way into goodness is through love). This Peter Panning (as he becomes) makes his living by mergers and acquisitions -as 'granny' Wendy says, he has become a pirate. But in this case, it is the grown-up who has become hardened against the simple delights of love and joyfulness who needs to discover the innocence of delight and, actually to rediscover the love of and for his own children. But the interest is in how the man mirrors the carelessness of the Pan though in this case by being lured into 'piracy' -a macho, game-playing, status-seeking heedlessness of human costs. So this discomfort, I'm saying, isn't about the cruel innocence of children but the fact that the selfish cruelty runs through into adulthood.


And there's a question as to how far it is right. I'm not convinced by this innocent lack of goodness. I think, theologically, I'm committed to the insight that goodness is basic and evil is dependent on, parasitic even, on goodness. There can be goodness without evil but no evil without goodness. Evil is always derived from, a twisting or negation of what is good. This is rooted, for me in the Genesis declaration, which the early church understood to rule out gnostic attitudes to the material world, that "It is good". So I'm suspicious of something that appears to see 'good' (and by implication 'evil') as human impositions on a 'neutral' cosmos.

But is that what the phrase 'innocent but cruel' implies? The word 'cruel' seems to be about a lack of kindness or love, well more than lack; in fact, will to harm or hurt. 'Innocent' however, seems to be about not having a will to wrong. So I'm wondering whether 'innocent cruelty' is not an oxymoron. But of course, the words attributed to Barrie are "innocent but heartless". So the question is about whether heartlessness is evil, in truth.  I've translated 'heartless' as careless and cruel, above. Is that fair?  Well, to me 'heartless' seems to mean something like 'lacking empathy' on the basis that 'having a heart' seems to mean being kind, understanding feelings or in some way having empathy. Not having a heart seems to involve being, to some degree, cruel. So I think that these are words sharing a huge amount of semantic overlap. However, I wonder whether cruelty has connotations of deliberate intention of harm whereas heartlessness has the same connotation: could it mean ignorant harmfulness?

All of which, to me, indicates that in Barrie's estimation, children lack empathy or fail to understand others' feeling and are unkind. But could that unkindness stem from simple inability to understand others' feelings and to have empathy. So, is their innocence, in fact, not having yet developed the capability to be empathic? But if so, then I'm not convinced: child development studies indicate children mirroring and matching emotions with those around them, particularly those with whom they share bonds. -Perhaps that is it: the heartlessness comes from not sharing bonds or not having developed them. If that is so, then the difficulty is one of failing to extend the circle of sympathy, perhaps of even refusing to. There may be a degree of willed carelessness arising from an inarticulate understanding that to do so would mean giving up the advantages that their 'lordship' can confer. Such power over others requires the cultivation of heartlessness, learning to suppress or evade sympathy. And perhaps this is what name-calling is about: a distancing mechanism; framing the other in a way that rules out empathy by emphasising distance and making difference a cause for repugnance.

So, it's not so much that children are innocent but cruel as that their (actually 'our') emergence from innocence involves distancing and suppression of empathy. Of course, this is why love of God and of neighbour is a cardinal virtue in many spiritual paths: it is not so much an attempt to restore innocence as to weigh against the creeping distancing and growing repugnance. Peter Pan is not testimony to innocent cruelty but to the loss of empathy and acquisition of the attitudes of objectifying others which allows us to instrumentalise them and even to justify cruelty.

I can't, however, leave it there. One of the other memories shaken loose by this article was that, having got over my dislike of the heartless Pan, I did manage to identify with one aspect of his character: the love of action-adventure. And it is here that I think that Pan's appeal to us really resides. When I watch my nephews playing rough and tumble, when I remember my own children doing the same and when I think about my own childhood, then I realise that it is the exuberance of physical movement and of pitting yourself against something that draws out your abilities particularly when it puts you in a story where you are winning the acclaim of others perhaps by rescuing them or winning a prize for them. (Of course the story may be one that justifies distancing, repugnance and cruelty). So where Pan scores for us as story is identifying with the sheer joy of physical expression and the excitement of deeds of daring-do, especially when these can be framed as the heroism of the smaller or weaker standing up to and defeating the mighty (Pan the child with a knife against the adult Hook wielding a sword). (Again, interesting to note a resonance with a gospel theme here). I guess this further illustrates, in fact, how evil is parasitic on the good.

There is something in this that resonates with the Biblical theme of growing in wisdom, perhaps.But that is an exploration for another post, perhaps.

This is someone's story: the BIAPT conference

Lovely to be in Edinburgh in the sun and at the fine Pollock Halls complex for the annual BIAPT conference. The theme this year is story and narrative. We have a real storyteller telling -so far- traditional stories. And I think that this is a good idea -not to just have academic conversations about story but to be exposed to it.

Interestingly, Mark Cartledge's keynote address on the first afternoon has given us the 'go to' story for the conference so far: "Shane's story". It's an Alpha distributed testimony which is a good example of its genre and people keep using it as a common point of reference. Clearly it has raised questions about selection of narrative threads, power, whose interests are being served by the editing and distribution and indeed commercialisation, coaching and priming.

One of the things that I've found myself commenting on several times so far is the connection between telling our stories and the ministry of spiritual direction. I think this is mostly about the fact that I keep noticing how in telling our story in spiritual direction, we are often integrating new experiences into our narrative or finding /noticing experiences hitherto unintegrated that now gain traction or saliency in the light of our development and so need to find a place in our story. I guess this is analogous to the idea of narrative repair.

Kirsteen Kim spoke about the story of Korean Christianity strating with the the 2007 incident of the kidnapping of a mission team from Korea by the Afghani Taliban and then going behind that story. This was helpful in seeing a story unfold of a nation and its relationship to Christian faith -but I wondered how far it was really helping us to consider story in practical theology and how far it was simply being appropriated as history. Certainly we could begin to unpack the story and identify where other stories and perhaps even counter-stories might lie but I felt we needed to have some more guidance into how to 'take' this as practical theology. None of this is to take away from the actual contribution which was well presented and interesting. I'm merely reflecting (perhaps my own ignorance) that it didn't help me to move forward in understanding story in practical theology.

 Alison Millbank gave a very thought provoking talk about virtue and story as they inform or might inform church and school life. The title was "Ethics of Elfand' -drawing on a GK Chesterton essay of that title but which wrestles with the immanence of transcendent virtues (if I've both understood aright and expressed it in a helpful way). It was a wide ranging talk with many interesting things in it relating to church communities and church (largely) primary schools in relation to a notion of the common good. There seemed to be a paradox in the talk: I thought I heard her to be saying, in effect, that the common good is well-enough understood in the kind of way that Chesterton exposes in his essay because it is something of (my terms) a participation common grace of understanding of good lives -and yet later we are considering how the ends (teloi) of things (needed to define virtues in Aristotelian thinking) can only be understood in traditioned ways. I suspect that the paradox is resolved by recognising that the details of living are affected by teloi even if we can recognise in a more general way what common good might be: our understandings from particular traditions of what human beings are 'for' may nuance or even partly contradict some general understandings. But I'll need to think about that more.

One of the things that I found myself considering has been how little we have heard 'from the front' about narratology and the insights it and related areas of study might have to bring us into how stories 'work'. So I have felt that there has been a bit of a sense of sharing of ignorance where our thinking about story and narrative has not deepened although, I would suspect, a number of people have been able to make further connections between stories and to view theology through story. The shame, though, is that for practical theologians, there has been perhaps too little examination of the way that story is both tool of reflection and object for it.  Interestingly perhaps, for me, the most helpful (in the sense of insightful) aspect of the conference in respect of understanding story has probably been the last session with the storyteller Angela Halvorsen Bogo where she explored the ways that text and story work because they are performance and not simply text and the way that biblical texts contain fossils (this is my way of expressing it not hers) of the fact that they began as storytelling performances.

The New Covenant by Robert Emery

 For a number of years I've experimented from time to time with narrative sermons. For me, usually, this has involved telling a Bible incident as a more extended story. Usually I've found this easier to tell as a first-person narrative and I've tended to either take the part of a central character (eg Simeon in Luke's birth and infancy story) or to pick or make up a bystanding character. What this has enabled me to do is to use what I have learnt about the circumstances, culture, habits, mores and economics of the time to add depth and colour to the telling. It also enables me to teach about such things obliquely as part of driving the story forward.



So I was intrigued by Robert Emery's book when it was offered for review. At this point I've not read it all; just the first part, but already I can see that Mr Emery has done essentially the same sort of thing that I have done in my narrative sermons. It's been good for me to see how this technique reads when it's not been me that has created the story, and I've enjoyed it. I have found that social and cultural details that have figured as part of the story have 'come alive' more than if they are simply stated in a more textbook fashion. It also gives a chance to reflect on the biblical characters and what were the personal drivers and perspectives and struggles they might have had. It has to be said that as a means of conveying such information, it has a lot to commend it and it is preferable in terms of memorability and engagement to simple textbook tellings.



of course their are downsides in the form of potential pitfalls. The reader (or in my case listener) is at the mercy of the knowledge of the narrator and the ability to make imaginative connections and to understand the implications of cultural artefacts, ways of living etc in terms of the effects on human actors. So the possibility of slipping in anachronisms is very real and sometimes a crucual issue.



The other main potential downside is maintaining the balance between story, character and background. And in the temple tour narrative I think Emery only just manages not to get totally lost in the background at the expense of story and character. This pitfall is that the first-person narrative can simply become a lecture where the character speaking becomes a mere proxy for the author and so the character can end up giving what is effectively a textbook lecture on something (eg the architecture and furnishings and rituals of the temple) without it actually being part of the story or helping us to gain sympathy or insight into the characters. As I say, I think Emery just about manages to stay on the right side of the line in these respects, but the fact that I noticed the danger was a bit distracting. What I don't know is whether i noticed because this approach is familiar to me or whether it was because for most readers, the amount of detail being conveyed by the characters in 'conversation' was quite heavy.



It is hard to properly weave lots of such detail into narrative form in an engaging way, and consistently over a whole story arc. I'm looking forward to learning more from Emery's book both about the way of life of the times as he has discovered it and also about the relaying of insight into the times, people and events through this approach to narrative.



The New Covenant, a book by Robert Emery  #SpeakeasyNewCovenant

Although I'm not in the USA, I'm happy to meet with the guidelines for such reviews required in the USA: I received a copy of this book from Speakeasy for review. I'm not required to write a positive review.

Genesis and the Rise of Civilization -a review

I have had to be careful how many books I pick up for review for Speakeasy -I've got a reading list to work through for various ongoing writing projects of my own. However, when I sow this being offered for review*, I knew I had to have a look at it. Genesis and the Rise of Civilization by J. Snodgrass:  The Goodreads review is short but captures what drew me in.

 Snodgrass Integrates Studies of World Mythologies, Ancient Near Eastern Tribes and Empires, Archaeology and Rabbinic Stories to Read Genesis as a Parable about the Agricultural Revolution, and God's Counter-Revolution.

You see I'm finding myself fascinated by all of those things, so having them in one book ... well, several birthdays came at once. And the Goodreads blurb is right. I've enjoyed the insights brought to bear on specific stories or sections of stories by archaeological anthropology: these have been very insightful. Not always will they be congenial to a certain kind of literalism that can't countenance history or even pre-history beyond 6,000 years ago, or those who can only conceive that truth can be told by straight-forward historiography and are suspicious of the truth that can be told by parable, legend and mythical storytelling. What Snodgrass does is enable us to appreciate the truths that these kinds of language can tell.

As I've read this, it has become more evident to me that I'm going to be returning to it when I'm reflecting on the early chapters of Genesis and due to preach about them.

one of the themes that emerges clearly from this reading based upon prehistory reconstructed from archaeology and anthropology, is the conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists in which the latter emerged the victors.  The interesting thing it makes clear is the way that, contrary to the myths and legends of most other civilisations of the shift from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture, the Bible we have tends to exhibit sympathy for the pastoralists and to sound out the warnings about the downsides of agriculturally based ways of life.

The bigger picture of cultural difference and change is interspersed with little titbits of information which made me stop and think more. For example, what if it is right that Abram's wife Sarai's name reflects a background in her being an intentionally childless (ex)-priestess of the Moon-goddess cult. Could she and Abram have been fleeing a situation -eloping together for religious convictions?

The author is a teacher in church settings, and occasionally that background shows through in the writing in asides, puns and witticisms. I enjoyed these but i expect some readers might find them less scholarly and others that there aren't enough of them to properly lighten a scholarly book.

It's not a short book -though half of it is index etc.  There's something of interest on every page so reading it is not a hard job.

*Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the  publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255 -even though I am British, residing in Britain.

Gingerism and its discontents

At school and watching films on telly as a primary-aged child, I got the impression that beautiful or handsome humans were either black haired or blonde women whereas people like me who were some variety of red-headed were not. I also got 'reverse' skin-colour racism: being picked on because I didn't tan and only had freckles. So I don't need convincing that there is something in 'gingerism'.  I'm not saying it's as bad or systematic as racism or sexism, but it does really exist and we shouldn't let it pass without challenge.
As the article says:

the whole gingerism thing is a stealth form of acceptable racism that goes on in boardrooms, in authors' minds.

But I don't entirely go with the choice of example up next:

Look at Harry Potter – the redheads are the poor, weak family, the buffoons. If Harry Potter had been ginger, that would have been a different story.

It's true that Rowling has rightly picked up the way that a ginger family would quite likely be the object of derisive and dismissive comments. But it's worth noting the heroic and sympathetic qualities of that family. Rowling has the underdogs turn out to be among the celebration-worthy: their compassion, self-sacrifice are key to the plot. They are heroes in the story. The main hero even ends up marrying one of them.

Would it have been a different story if HP had been ginger. Not sure it would: one more thing for him to be harassed for and a further reason for him to identify with his best friends the Weasleys. They may be buffoons in the eyes of the self-important muggle-haters, but in terms of authorial and readerly respect, quite the reverse. Harry Potter is no gingerist text. It witnesses to gingerism but it critiques it too.

Damian Lewis and the case of the missing redheads | Art and design | The Guardian:

Story Fields

I found this idea really fascinating. Not least because it seems to help locate 'story' more firmly in a cultural milieu.

Story Fields: A story field is a particularly powerful field of influence generated by a story or, more often, by a coherent battery of mutually-reinforcing stories -- myths, news, soap operas, lives, memories, games -- and story elements -- roles, plots, themes, metaphors, goals, images, events, archetypes -- that co-habit and resonate within our individual and/or collective psyches.A story field paints a particular picture of how life is or should be and directly shapes our lives and our world, often without our even being aware of its influence.

I like that this enables us not to feel we have to look for a 'metanarrative' but for plural narratives and the way that they might fit into a narratival ecosystem whose shared and mutually reinforcing themes would function as ideologies.

It's helpful to look at the further explanation of the metaphor:

The word "field," as used in the term story field, refers to a field of influence, a pattern of dynamic potential that permeates a physical, social and/or psychological space. I borrowed the word from physics, where the term gravitational (or magnetic) field refers to a zone of dynamic potential that shapes the behavior of the physical phenomena within its range. Gravity provides some interesting metaphors to help us understand story fields. There are many ways to look at gravity. We can view a gravitational field as not so much a separate phenomenon from the objects within it as it is an extension of them. We could also say, with equal validity, that objects are cores or nodes of the gravitational field. Or one could also say that both the field and the objects within it are facets of some larger whole system, as the dancers and choreography are elements of the dance. Yet another way to put it is that objects and their gravitational fields are dynamic dimensions of each other. A similar intimate, ambiguous, co-creative, co-evocative relationship exists between story fields and the people who occupy and create them.

I think that's spot on: it resonates with the kind of dynamic understanding of culture that I would favour in seeing stories as cultural artefacts in the ongoing dialogue and semantic negotiations that are culture. I can tell that this image /metaphor is going to stay with me and I'm wondering how it's going to pan out in my thinking...

Did my moral compass just become demagnetised?

 I've been watching Continuum and finding it fascinating. The brain-bending to do with whether the future can be changed, the sci-fi fun with tech. But the more I watch, the more it seems I gain sympathy with those who are being presented as the 'baddies' and feel that the character presented as the heroine (Keira) may not be a goody. One of the viewer comments says it well:

 Should the viewers really like Kiera and what she stands for ? Do you honestly have no problems with the future she comes from and which she uncompromisingly defends ? She reminds me of Gestapo officer. They also had families they loved, feelings like Kiera, friends/family members who got killed by rebels (Kiera mentioned this as a justification) but they stand for something utterly wrong like Kiera does. And until now I have not seen Kiera doubt that fascist dictatorship, she defends so much, one little bit. .... Liber8 stands for the right cause but they try to achieve their goals with the wrong means.Kiera and her background does not get m... - IMDb:

 From about episond two or three I've been thinking that the ideals of the group Liber8 seem more aligned with mine -apart from blowing people up: undermining and working against corporate interests that seem to be content, over the arc of the future we catch glimpses of, to trample on people's rights and to exploit people unmercifully. The more it goes on, the more it looks like Keira is simply defending her chance to get back to the life she once knew. We have been taken through the story in such a way as to be sympathetic to that. But what of those for whom the future seems to be one of brutality and tyranny where a corporate-led big-brother society dominates. Keira seems to have been 'fortunate' to have been able to be on the side of money which gives her a personal and family stake in the system as it is/will be but what I'm seeing suggests that perhaps there's a further development perhaps as we realise that the comment above likening Keira to a Gestapo officer may be on the mark. But we'll see.

We've just been seeing an episode where debt is used to enslave people who are set to work on production lines having had their minds removed in effect by the implantation of a sub-dermal chip. Somehow the 'baddies' don't look so bad and the 'goody' seems to be defending the real baddies.

The Curse of the Black Spot

I enjoyed last night's Dr Who, and I've found myself musing over a couple of aspects of it. Check out here (at least for the time being) for some further info or reminders: BBC - BBC One Programmes - Doctor Who, Series 6, The Curse of the Black Spot: "Beset by terror and cabin fever, the pirates have numerous superstitious explanations for the appearance of a mysterious Siren."
So, what I found intriguing having slept on it is the plot structure. A lot of popular viewing, and indeed literature, employs a plot line which is basically 'heroes and others are threatened by some malevolent force (whether a thing, a population or something more amorphous) and the goodies work together using their resources (usually cunningly) deployed to destroy, neutralise or rout the malevolents'.
Of course, that kind of plot arc is basically reinforcing, normally, the myth of redemptive violence (MoRV) which is arguably a key mythic pattern in our culture (I happen to concur with Walter Wink that it actually is). What I enjoyed about this plot is that it opened up the imagination to other ways of plotting the things we face.

In the classic MoRV take, the scenario that the episode opens with would be resolved by either leaving things with the discovery of how the Siren accessed their ship or hiding places and closing it off and getting away or, more usually, discovering something that enabled them to destroy or 'neutralise' the monster. What happened here was the discovery that the 'monster' isn't really but is actually an intelligent programme (an emergency medical hologram -borrowed from Star Trek Voyager?) whose mission is to save the injured and ill by taking them to a life-support unit and keeping them alive albeit comotose pending a visit by real medics. In this case, because the crew of the space vessel the Siren is from, have died from an earth virus (shades of War of the Worlds?), the medics are never going to come and, unlike Voyager, this holographic medic hasn't evolved beyond 'her' programming. So the EHM paramedic simply snatches anyone injured or ill and warehouses them. The resolution here is not from the MoRV script but by understanding the 'enemy', trusting their intelligence and working with their beneficent desires for an outcome of win-win. MoRV, of course is not about win-win but a zero sum 'game'.

I salute the win-win storyline. What this also tells me is that in the struggle for a more peaceful, safer and more just world a big part of it is to expand the moral imagination. Part of our problem as a global society is, I would contend, that our ability to think (collectively) about how to resolve conflict, differing aims and objectives etc is infested by MoRv in such a way that it disables possible win-win plotting. We need to big up stories of win-win plotting (and other kinds of non-MoRV) so that the resources that we have, collectively, to put ourselves into plot-lines-in-life that enable human flourishing for all. So let's have more of these win-win plots and let's celebrate them and encourage them to fill our hearts and minds and so drive from our real-life plotting the automatic recourse to win-lose and MoRV which, I think, made the mistakes of responding to the Twin Towers attack by going into Iraq.

The second thing I've been musing is much less cosmic but nevertheless still intrigues me.
The Siren (whom we discover is an emergency holographic paramedic) looks remarkably like the stowaway lad who we discover to be the captain's son. Maybe this was a co-incidence or merely a resemblance in my own mind, but maybe it has further significance. Within the information from within the story, it could be that the lad was the basis for the programme's choice of form to appear in (the alien skeletons were clearly not human and probably, in our eyes, properly monstrous -big teeth, bony crest on the skull). But then, if this was the case, how did it know (a) to put clothes on and (b) to put female garb on given that all the models it had on the ship were male?

How storytelling shaped humanity - opinion - 25 May 2009 - New Scientist

For all of us interested in hermeneutics, this could be the new kid on the block of theories. New Scientist reports here: Review: How storytelling shaped humanity - opinion - 25 May 2009 - New Scientist: "Art, Boyd says, is a form of play. It is an interesting idea. In recent years, biologists who study play have come to see it as an adaptation allowing intelligent animals to hone mental and physical skills in non-threatening environments. This fits perfectly with Boyd's assertion that fiction fosters cognition, cooperation and creativity. Where the idea falls short is in its failure to recognise that play is primarily interactive, whereas storytelling is more of a spectator sport."
Now, I'm not sure whose perspective that last sentence represents but I think I disagree with it. Not completely but enough to be very dubious: the thing is that lots of good storytelling is actually interactive and not just about spectating. And indeed, the social setting of much storytelling is interactive even if the story is 'spactated' for a time: the conversation in which the story is 'performed' is often a co-operative affair and stories are swapped and commented upon.

That said, the approach seems potentially useful: "the process of creating a story may be expensive in terms of time and energy but is intrinsically rewarding because it appeals to our brain's love affair with pattern. It also reshapes the mind, promotes a creative approach to problem solving and increases the storyteller's social status. The audience, meanwhile, pay a price in their time, but in return acquire a deeper insight into society and the minds of other individuals."
Now think about that in relation to the biblical narratives. Does it work? Well, the pattern thing does: part of the point is that the biblical narratives are helping to highlight patterns of God's relating to humans and this can have the effect of enabling us the hearers/readers to approach our lives (problems included) differently, with the creativity of God. The greater insight in the audience is also into the ways of God. So much so familiar. This seems to be pretty much noting particularly salient points which are not really about evolutionary perspective but things that are consonant with it; as such they do us the favour of helping us to pay attention to some fairly practical matters relating to basic drives and social conditions.

Oh, I missed out about the story-teller's status: celebrity culture; say no more. ... ?