23AR28-06

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AR 28:6 - "We've relied too heavily on storytelling conventions"

In this issue:

EDUCATION - and "the urge to belong"

NARRATIVE - "story" and postmodernism

Apologia Report 28:6 (1,603)
February 23, 2023

EDUCATION

"Does education 'cure' people of faith? The data say no" by Ryan Burge (Religion News Service, Nov 10 '22) -- "Despite a long-standing biased assumption among many that the uneducated cling to religion, studies show people with higher degrees are most likely to be religious. ...

   "It's been 30 years since The Washington Post published an article on Christian televangelists, describing their followers as 'largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.' The pushback <www.bit.ly/3kmpWcm> was immediate and overwhelming, as thousands flooded the Post's telephone switchboard and letters poured in to its editors after Pat Robertson - a Yale Law School alum himself - read the offending passage on his television show, 'The 700 Club.'

   "It was a watershed in journalism that woke many mainstream outlets to the reality of evangelicals' demographics and power. ...

   "The Cooperative Election Study, one of the largest publicly available <www.bit.ly/3wtfkfj> surveys in the United States, began in 2008. In all 14 years since, those Americans who attained no more than a high school diploma have been more likely to report no religious affiliation than college graduates. ...

   "This same finding holds true in larger and more granular data sets. ...

   "Being a none correlates most closely, at 32%, with those who have not completed high school. ...

   "The share of respondents who identify as Christians (Protestant + Catholic + Just Christians) continues to rise, from 61% for those with the lowest levels of education to 69% of those who have taken some graduate courses.

   "It's also noteworthy that the share of atheists and agnostics does not rise with educational levels, either."

   Turning to the General Social Survey, <www.bit.ly/3ZcpE6I> Burge reports that "Among people with no more than a high school degree, 56% indicated they were certain about their belief in God, while 7% said they didn't believe in God at all. Those who hold graduate degrees were certain about their belief in God at a much lower rate of 38%. The share who didn't believe in God at all was 10%.

   "Certainty about the existence of a higher power seems to wobble a bit, then, with higher educational attainment, despite an increased likelihood of being connected to a religious tradition. That finding was replicated in a recent study published in the American Sociological Review <www.bit.ly/3IYK8L7> that concluded that education does seem to move individuals away from moral absolutism to moral relativism. This effect is stronger among those who major in the humanities, the arts, the social sciences or related fields.

   "This evidence seems to say that educated Americans are drawn to the communal aspects that religion provides, but may be more ready to question what's coming from the pulpit. It's not a surprising result, perhaps, given that higher education encourages discussion and debate - and perhaps, too, the urge to belong." <www.bit.ly/3jOPcYu>

   Meanwhile, on February 15 Burge published a complementary RNS article, "How much do Americans know about the faiths around them?" <www.bit.ly/3xPNw4g>. He notes, somewhat unsurprisingly, that "More Educated Individuals Have Higher Levels of Religious Literacy." (See <www.bit.ly/3YYxT6B> for the full Pew Research Center survey results.)

 ---

NARRATIVE

Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, by literary theorist Peter Brooks <www.bit.ly/3Iih8NS> who would like to remind everyone that "stories are constructed through deliberate choices and omissions. ... In other words, we could all benefit from a lesson in close reading and a dose of skepticism." 

   In her review, "Beware the 'Storification' of the Internet" (Atlantic, Nov '22), Sophia Stewart does everyone a favor by explaining <www.bit.ly/3H3u4Fz> that "we've relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a 'narrative takeover of reality' that affects nearly every form of communication - including the way doctors interact with patients, how financial reports are written, and the branding that corporations use to present themselves to consumers. Meanwhile, other modes of expression, interpretation, and comprehension, such as analysis and argument, have fallen to the wayside." 

   She continues: "there's a powerful narrative force at work today that Brooks, 84, understandably fails to consider in Seduced by Story: the internet. In doing so, he doesn't just badly circumscribe his argument; he misses how the ability to read critically and recognize the way a narrative is constructed is even more important now than when the novel, the subject of most of his focus, reigned as one of the most prominent forms of media. His sole mentions of the internet - vague acknowledgments that 'Twitter and the meme dominate the presentation of reality' and that ours is an 'era of fake news and Facebook' - fail to grasp that on the internet especially, more attentive, analytical reading is essential."

   Stewart <sophiastewartwrites.com> calls attention to "filmmaker Bo Burnham, who grew up with and on the internet, [and] is one of the sharpest chroniclers of how digital media shape our interior lives. In an interview for his 2018 movie, Eighth Grade, <www.bit.ly/3kmBTia> about a 13-year-old girl coming of age online, Burnham said that when it comes to the internet, talking heads focus too much on social trends and political threats rather than on the 'subtler,' less perceptible changes it's causing within individuals. 'There's something interior, something that's actually changing our own view of ourselves,' he said. 'We really do spend so much time building narrative for ourselves, and I sense with people that there was a real pressure to view one's life as something like a movie.'"

   Ask any youngster with a cellphone where they get their news. Usually, just one answer is given. TikTok is described by Stewart as the one place where "storytelling has become a lingua franca." She reports that the act of "'telling one's story' - in a novel or a film, a Twitter thread or a TikTok video - has also become disproportionately valorized, often seen as a 'brave' way to generate empathy and political change."

   In general, "We're telling ourselves stories in order to live, yes, but we're also turning ourselves into stories in order to live. ... Making ourselves legible to others is, in essence, the mandate of social media. ...

   "What do we want more," Burnham asks in his 2016 comedy special, Make Happy, <www.bit.ly/41llMCc> 'than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member?'

   "Social media hinges on storytelling because telling stories is, in Brooks's words, 'a social act.' This isn't inherently bad, but it's vital to be aware of artifice and the spin we put on our lives in public. As narrators of our own lives, Brooks writes, 'we must recognize the inadequacy of our narratives to solve our own and [others'] problems.' Pulling from Freudian psychoanalysis, Brooks concludes that telling stories should be a tool we use to understand ourselves better rather than a goal in and of itself."

   Burnham "cites the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who argues that in our present postmodern era, the 'grand narratives' - progress, liberation, salvation, etc. - that once sustained entire societies have lost their power. 'We are left with many mini-narratives everywhere,' Brooks adds, 'individual or collective and, in many cases, dominantly narcissistic and self-serving.' The fragmentation of what we perceive as real and true is indeed a pressing concern. What would Brooks make, for instance, of Atlantic contributor Charlie Warzel's claim that 2017 was 'the year that the internet destroyed our shared reality,' setting the stage for alternative facts and conspiracy theories?" <www.bit.ly/3ZetHiX>

   "It's a shame that Brooks doesn't see how broadly applicable his argument is." Brooks "discusses what he calls the 'epistemology of narrative' - in other words, how do we know where a narrator's knowledge comes from, or what his or her potential agenda might be? The question, which he applies to works by Faulkner and Diderot, felt especially pertinent to me as I watched the back-to-back ads that extolled the virtues of story. The many narratives that reach us through our screens demand the sort of scrutiny Brooks advocates for. A more critically minded and media-literate populace is the only antidote for a culture in thrall to a good tale." <www.bit.ly/3H3u4Fz>

   The connection we've seen in past issues of AR between story and postmodernism includes: 

   * - Narrative is for these new believers "the song of the vibrating network, [because it] circumvents logic, speaking truth of the people.' What we wind up with is 'Story over substance. Pathos over logos.'" -- AR 26.26 <www.bit.ly/3Xzxwyx> 

   * - Our mention of a profile on postmodern author George Saunders, "hailed a genius and the most gifted living short-story writer in America" -- AR 18:4  <www.bit.ly/3wthhY7>

   However, a deeper connection between story and postmodernism is discussed by James Lindsay <www.bit.ly/3ZwDWAf> in his 2022 essential book, Race Marxism, which <www.bit.ly/3IoL7nu> has a section titled "Storytelling, Narrative Weaving and Counterstorytelling." In it we read: "Critical Race Theory favors storytelling, as one of the 'other ways of knowing' used by races that aren't white to challenge the existing social order, and it views their exclusion from legal and scientific reasoning, for example, as part of the vast conspiracy of whiteness against all other races. ... (p51)

   "Rather surprisingly for most people not familiar with Critical Race Theory, it openly advocates for storytelling as a (non-white, non-Euro-centric) means of knowing and transmitting 'knowledge'.... (52)

   "While Critical Race Theory proper is largely a paranoid conspiracy theory about white people, a subdivision of Critical Race Theory known as 'Critical Whiteness Studies' (or just 'Whiteness Studies' or 'Whiteness Education') cannot be said to be anything but anti-white. ...

   "Critical Whiteness Studies is blatantly connected to Critical Race Theory, but it is equally obviously a problem for Critical Race Theorists because it is so transparently gross, racist, and conspiratorial. Therefore, it is often portrayed by Critical Race Theorists - when defensive of their Theory - as unrelated or, at most, an intellectual tangent or backwater of the Theory" (77) - *even as it is given increasing attention by higher education.*

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