Science and storytelling
Science and storytelling
Spontaneous sophistry; supposedly stimulating?
Taking a quick break from my series about Swedish society to fire off a quick note about some things I’ve been thinking about for a while; about the power of storytelling and how it fits into politics and climate science.
A tale of a Tardis
There’s an old joke that the coastline of Great Britain is literally infinite. Measure it, but then zoom in further and you find even more curves and inlets to measure. And so on, until you’re tracing the lines of every pebble, then grain of sand, until it all collapses into sub-atomic particles, I suppose.
This is an example of something that has a sort of fractal nature. That the closer you look at it, the more of it there is, and as you zoom in you see each branch expand to be actually as complex as the whole, as are the branches’ own smaller branches.
I mention this, because I think this is the kind of power that stories have. They are infinitely complex, and the closer you analyse them, the more you find. Including things the storyteller themselves never thought of.
The practise of science, on the other hand, is very different. It’s about saying exactly what you mean, no more, no less; and making sure that exactly what you mean can be understood in its full/limited sense by any other practitioner of the field. Art, literature and storytelling have in a way opposite aims to this. If science is a clean-cut lego brick designed to fit easily with any other brick, stories are ragged mossy rocks that tell you far more than the author could possibly convey, because they are themselves tiny models of reality and grow out of a billion older cultural references.
Embodying a story
I’ll wrap up with an observation about how this affects political leadership and also climate communication.
Here’s a tweet about how the British Labour Party leader is struggling.
What I take away from this is that Starmer lacks a narrative, which is to sya that he doesn’t tell a story with his politics. Effective political leaders need to be storytellers, or be acting as part of a broader story. Labour’s Starmer can't do this, and Boris of the Conservatives can — which is why Boris keeps winning, despite all his seeming mistakes. Every u-turn that Boris makes is cushioned because the overall story he’s telling and he’s operating inside is still strong.
'The story' is the form that humans have always used to express complex ideas. It’s a form of encoding information that allows it to slip out of my brain and into yours. When done right a story has an impact far bigger than the individual words you use to tell it. When done right a story has a fractal quality that makes it get bigger the more you get into it. And of course you yourself add and enrich it when you re-tell it.
Mossy legos?
One of the problems we face with communication of climate change is that scientists are taught to produce lego, while the general public are best able to grasp musty mossy rocks. There are, of course, many scientists who are able to tell stories effectively, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and this is maybe as it should be, or as it inevitably shall be, since as I said before, science and art have different goals, and so their practitioners have different incentives pulling them in different ways.
To end on a personal note, this is where science-interested storytellers like myself come in, to bridge the gap, and this is why journalism, for all its flaws, is still needed. And this is why this newsletter is called True Stories, because I think what we need these days are stories (to reach and convince people) but also truth (so we can respond to the very scientifically real climate crisis).
Now I really should get back to taking notes.
All the best!
Loukas Christodoulou