Storytelling makes us more skilled in social situations, speeding up our capacity to process information and allowing us to test out alternative scenarios. It allows us to think beyond the here and now, which brings evolutionary benefits in its wake. Narratives can consolidate and communicate social norms, providing us with models of co-operation. As a richly patterned form of cognitive play, art serves to stimulate a flexible mind, modifying key perceptual, cognitive and expressive systems in ways conducive to our evolutionary flourishing. It improves our attunement to one another, thus fostering sociability within the group, and develops habits of imaginative exploration which can have a pay-off in real life. It raises our confidence by allowing us to reshape the world on our own terms, as well as offering us general principles and social information which can guide our behaviour and improve our decision-making. Fiction increases our range of behavioural options, acquaints us with risks and opportunities, and supplies the emotional resources needed to cope with inevitable setbacks.
Narratives can encourage us to identify with altruists and dissociate ourselves from cheats. ‘We may never be shipwrecked on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe,’ Boyd consolingly informs us, ‘but we can learn from the example of his fortitude, resolution and ingenuity.’ Stories ‘may help us to make better decisions’. Complex fictions are reduced to simple-minded moral guidebooks; literature becomes a way of flexing one’s spiritual muscles. One begins to wonder whether a dumbed-down version of the case might not appear in bookshops as Darwin and Corporate Decision-Making,
Play, is a serious business.. If music, dance and story can educate our sensory skills, they can also permit those capacities pleasurably to freewheel, blessedly released from anything so dull as a direct function.
It is just the same with power and desire, which have definite objects in view but which always overshoot them, delighting exultantly in themselves.
Art may be doing things for the sheer abandon, just for the hell of it, sans purpose.
We dont want to end like the puritanical United States, even the most frivolous piece of play must finally be revealed to contain a didactic message.
I once lived opposite a caterwauling neighbour, who on returning home from his roistering
would call out from the street to |I presume his good woman,
"I am going to kill you" he would call out,
A voice would come back, "...for what reason?"
"No reason" he would bawl back, "No Reason."
Source Terry Eagleton
Narratives can encourage us to identify with altruists and dissociate ourselves from cheats. ‘We may never be shipwrecked on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe,’ Boyd consolingly informs us, ‘but we can learn from the example of his fortitude, resolution and ingenuity.’ Stories ‘may help us to make better decisions’. Complex fictions are reduced to simple-minded moral guidebooks; literature becomes a way of flexing one’s spiritual muscles. One begins to wonder whether a dumbed-down version of the case might not appear in bookshops as Darwin and Corporate Decision-Making,
Play, is a serious business.. If music, dance and story can educate our sensory skills, they can also permit those capacities pleasurably to freewheel, blessedly released from anything so dull as a direct function.
It is just the same with power and desire, which have definite objects in view but which always overshoot them, delighting exultantly in themselves.
Art may be doing things for the sheer abandon, just for the hell of it, sans purpose.
We dont want to end like the puritanical United States, even the most frivolous piece of play must finally be revealed to contain a didactic message.
I once lived opposite a caterwauling neighbour, who on returning home from his roistering
would call out from the street to |I presume his good woman,
"I am going to kill you" he would call out,
A voice would come back, "...for what reason?"
"No reason" he would bawl back, "No Reason."
Source Terry Eagleton
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