“So much of the evil and hatred in this world could be countered by understanding that in every culture we name our storytellers.” (Alice Munroe in Brianna Labuskes’ The Boxcar Librarain)
Munroe, one of three central chracters in Labuskes’ historical fictional rendering of the true history of the Boxcar Library, finds herself in dialogue with a wandering stranger named Colette, ultimately bringing her on to be the boxcar librarian- an individual who is hired to deliver books to the male workers in the the isolated mining towns cut-off from the city centers.
Social, economic and political concerns lie behind this visionary act of both preservation and protest, but at its heart is a philsophical conviction: Stories, Munroe believes, matter when it comes to how we see the world.
In this particular conversation she pulls inspiration from the shanacie, ancient storytellers whom were keepers or preservationists, of Ireland’s story, Irelands operative mythology. A history I have long been fascinated with given my own Irish roots. So much of this echoes down into the way Traditional societies work, all the way into the ancient world of the earliest civilizations and peoples. As Colette notes in the story, this is comparative to a figurative intersection between a bard and a historian. Or, as Munroe puts it within Labuske’s story, the keeper of a culture. The ancient practice of truthtelling.
Narrative, for me, is the only true counter to propositional approaches, which is what undergirds the world I inhereted from western culture, the world I was born into. I’ve written in this space before about my allegiance to narrative philosophy/theology, I’ve been thinking more about this lately, especially where it concerns the idea of knowledge. How is it that we know what is true and what is not? Propositional approaches, which see truth as inherently rational, reduce knowledge to doctrine, be it secularized or theological forms. Hard facts. Known data. The accumulation of verifiable “information.”
I have long found this approach to be unpersuasive. There can be only one end to such an approach- gatekeeping, or presuppositionalism. Meaning, it is in a sense its own worst enemy when it comes to seeking actual knowledge, usually resulting in erected walls between the single, most imporant element of empiricism: available conversation with the truth. Conversation is precisely what narrative enables. It is built on the notion of a shared story. As the character of Munroe puts it, “We want to be told stories.” Why? Because it is “human nature.” We intuitively understand that truth cannot be known as propositions. We inherently need to understand this world not as a series of isolated data points, we need to be able to connect it. If science can demonstate anything regarding human funciton, it begins with this quality. Such a world, reduced to isolated data, is left incoherent and unknowable.
Padraig O Tauma, an Irish poet and theologian, cites scholar Jack Niles in his podcast series on the subject, whom once said that “we should have been called Homo narrans, the story-telling primate.” Stories, as Tauma states, “help us understand God and our relationship with the divine, while allowing space for us to encounter mystery.” As Munroe puts it in The Boxcar Librarians, “They (stories) offer explanation… of the world and of ourselves.”
That word “space” is key, as that space is the primary defense we have against the threat of individualism, the primary outcome of a rationalist society such as the west. Propositions are inherently about manipulation and control, be it of nature, of the self, or of the other. The kind of truth it affords us is a reductionist form of reality, which falsely coopts the notion of complexity by recasting it within the myth of progress, or narrative threads that are enslaved to this imposed trajectory that sees us going from knowledge of less facts to more facts, the very opposite of what narrative philosophy/theology is ultimately concerned with.
Which of course only gets us to agreater ability to manipulate and control the world, not to greater knowledge of what that world is. And not suprinsingly, such a world, a world that finds itself detached from a cohesive and coherent narrative. is a world that must remain logically disconnected from the whole.
Reductionism can only ever lead us to the individual. Ironically, this is precisely the place where the rationalist agenda comes crashing down for many of us, as to uphold the individual, a key componant of secular humanism (a propositional approach), requires appealing to an evolutionary narrative that sees humanity as the natural byproduct of progress: this line that leads from worse to better precisely on the basis of its inherent ability to know facts, which it can manipulate and control as part of the main human enterprise. And yet, in this view nature finds itself being necessarily reduced every step of the way, leaving this propositional human swimming in in an empty ocean of its own contradictions and incongruencies. Ultimately, even the human is reducible to the same individual properties upon which all such information is bound to.
To bring this back to the quote I started this with, here is what is most interesting to me. My shifting away from propositional forms of knowledge began with, ironically, challenging the western narrative and finding it wanting. Which just underscores that it betrays its own position from the get go- as the quote states, it needs its storytellers. What narrative philosophy/theology breathes into the mix is an ability to ask the necerssary question, what story makes the best sense of the world we observe and experience. At its heart is that necessary conversation, a conversation that opens us up to logic and reason (or logos). Rather than getting mired in prooftexts, it sees knowledge, or truth, as being sought between contrasting narratives. Which simply means this- if truth exists is must exist external to our knowledge of it. That’s the only way it can be, by its nature, Truth. Therefore, where our narratives bring us into dialogue, such an approach iassumes that such colisions of differing narratives push us towards that necessary meta-narrative. This is how we move towards knowledge of Truth.
Propositionalists are inherently allergic to that word- meta-narrative. Meta-narratives betray the true aim of rationalism, which is to ensure that reducing the world to facts allows complexity to remain a construct. For as long as it is a construct it can be manipulated and controlled for our own purposes. The real issue is, when we peel back the curtain of this magic trick, it turns out those same propositionalists are in fact anchoring their embrace of those constructs in narrative truth, simply in ways that leave true knowledge enslaved to its own reductionism.
Which is to say, it leaves us unable to say anything about our actual knowledge of this reality, this world, knowledge we intuitively know can only be expressed through narrative. Not least because this is how our brains are designed. Most of all because this is the only way to access Truth that exists external to us.
Most damning in this regard- narrative philosophy/theology undercuts our need for control and manipulation, the root of propositionalism and its main philsophical forms, one of the biggest being secular humanism. Lose that and the logic of the whole human enterprise comes crashing down on its head.
To be in conversation is to name our storytellers. This was the contention of Niebuhr, who once famously penned his work The Story of Lives. Since then it has only gained traction, following names like Hauerwas and Ricoeur and Frei, and continuing to play out in more recent works from scholars like Jeanine K. Brown, John Sailhamer, McGrath, Gorman, or N.T. Wright. Perhaps its most noted rise has been in the resurgence of interest in Eastern Orthodox approaches, a Tradition that places narrative front and center as the main way of engaging and knowing truth. Rowan Williams and Elizabeth Oldfield are strong proponants of this approach.
To name our storytellers is for that conversation these narratives evoke to be able to critique our stories in community, and more importantly to make aware the inhrent value and meaning-making beliefs, practices and systems that are shaping and driving our lives. It is this critique that allows us to wrestle together with that universal story to which we, and indeed Reality itself, all belong. If Truth exists, it must be knowable, but it also must be the case that we can only know imperfectly. Here the full power of narrative theology pushes to the surface. Propositionalism is immediately crippled and compromised by such a clarification. Which is precisely why it seeks to reduce knowledge to facts or data points. To acknowledge that we can only know imperfectly, a necessary precurser to the notion of “growing” in knowledge, leaves the propositionalist forced to concede that logically, then, we cannot actually know anything at all. Because we will always know imperfectly, lest we have grounds to say Truth will one day be fully revealed. After all, if knowledge is the “fact” of gravity, for example, the only thing we truly know is that we experience it. A theory of gravity is destined to change and keep changing for all of time. What we know today, in theory, will be overturned tomorrow. And one of the most striking concessions within this is the idea that even within this “state of fact” that underlays the propositional view, true knowledge is not required in order for one to control and manipulate a thing. And since that is the ends and the means of such a view of the world, the only knowledge that matters is the function.
Narrative Philsophy/Theology on the other hand, actually frees us to know truly even where and as we know imperfectly. Precisely because it shifts the anchor of knowledge. Its emphasis is on seeking to name that which we already know to be true “through experience.” As Tolkien once put it, story is the seeking of a true myth that can make sense of all the world’s stories. Why do we seek? Because we know, even if imperflectly, and this knowing, this knowledge, binds us to the whole.
The Stories of my Life 