Chapter Eleven: Social/Power Structures
In all of this, there may be some interesting things going on with our background psychology. Some monkey scientists (as in scientists who study monkeys, not, you know, unusually inquiring and intellectual monkeys) have suggested that when monkeys groom each other, it’s not actually primarily about hygiene and keeping parasites/pests down after all: the act of grooming, they suggest, plays an important social role because there seem to be interesting ‘rules’ at play about who gets to groom whom and for how long—the more important you are, the more grooming you attract.
Basically, this act of grooming has been equated to a form of social monkey gossip—and about two-thirds of human communication is thought to be gossip, not necessarily in the negative, stigmatised sense, but in the sense of telling stories about what other people are doing.
Think about that for a second. Up to two-thirds of all human communication is us telling each other stories about what we and other people are doing. That’s a lot of stories being used every day as social glue, to keep us connected and informed about each other.
Of course, the other function of gossip, beyond conveying facts and linking us with those around us, is navigating power. Sometimes ‘gossip’, or stories about real people, can be used to challenge existing power structures or hierarchies, and sometimes it can be used to reinforce it. Likewise, stories in general have the same ability to either challenge or affirm existing power structures.
This is because, like it or not, storytelling seems to hold a position of power in human society.
To test this theory, researchers sought out populations in southeast Asia and assessed them both for the number of esteemed storytellers they contained, and also the degree of cooperation displayed by the population.
The camps that had a greater number of esteemed storytellers were indeed found to be more cooperative overall. Additionally, these storytellers weren’t lubricating the wheels of society without any benefit to themselves: storytellers were found throughout the various populations surveyed to be preferred social partners, and to be more likely to be the recipient of shared food.
As a flow-on benefit from this, they were found to have on average an additional 0.5 surviving children compared to non-storytellers.
Now, this is only one study, and the researchers themselves noted that further longitudinal studies would be needed to really affirm these findings, but it does at least strongly suggest that storytellers hold a position of power in society. This doesn’t just apply to hunter-gatherer societies, of course: check out any A-list of celebrities in the contemporary western world and you’ll find it chock full of people whose job it is to tell stories, whether that be through writing them, acting them, or telling them through other means (‘a day in the life of’ reality-style TV, anyone? That’s just another kind of gossip story!).
We’ve known throughout history how powerful stories can be; that’s why the printing press was such a disruptive piece of technology. Not only did it make stories in general accessible to the public, it made the special ones, the religious ones, things that could no longer be controlled by a small group of powerful people—and by making these stories public, it took away some of the power from the people who, previously, had been the storytellers.
If you’re still feeling skeptical about the power of stories, you just have to look at the history of storytelling technology, and how it was received by society at the time of its invention. It’s not just the printing press that was considered highly disruptive to polite society: literally every development in the way stories are told to the public was initially decried as a horrible, immoral, and corrupting.
The invention of the novel was derided as a lewd and inappropriate use of one’s time. Then, with the improvement of printing presses and cheap paper, as well as access to cheaper distribution, came serialisation: the release of stories one chapter at a time in magazine, periodicals, or even as cheap-quality paperbacks in their own right. The outcry over this was even more vocal, with detractors commenting that this was ‘not the right way’ to indulge in reading, as it wasn’t a ‘mere healthy recreation’ like cricket, conversation or backgammon.
Serial reading, people: Not A Healthy Recreation.
Then of course came movies and television, still today considered ‘lower’ forms of storytelling by much of society (if only because we haven’t perfected the next wave of storytelling technology yet).
Huxley made his opinions on these new ‘talkies’ clear, with John the Savage in Brave New World recoiling in disgust at the ‘feelies’ he is taken to see.
Bradbury was similarly scathing of the television, shown clearly in his novel Fahrenheit 451, where the installation of large, window-sized screens (which are essentially TVs showing soap operas) has stripped the population of its will to learn anything.
See also the various ‘banned books’ movements throughout history, which have sought to remove from public circulation reading material that they felt encouraged negative behaviour—in many cases, code for ‘challenged existing social narratives’.
Stories clearly have power, or we wouldn’t be afraid of them.
Introduction
Ch1 The Point Of A Text
Ch2.1 Thesis Statements
Ch2.2 Thesis Statements
Ch3 Quotes Are Usually Themes
Ch4.1 Theme In Fables
Ch4.2 Theme In Fables
Ch5.1 Finding Themes
Ch5.2 Finding Themes
Ch6 Subthemes
Ch7.1 Theme + You
Ch7.2 Theme + You
Ch8 Why Stories? Recognising Patterns
Ch9 Why Stories? Memory Aids
Ch10: Why Stories? Social Cooperation
Ch11: Why Stories? Power Structures
Ch12: Why Stories? Empathy
Conclusion