TELLING TALES
By David Gardiner
Have you ever wondered why human beings tell stories? Has there ever been a human culture that didn’t?
There is something compulsive about this “narrative drive” in human beings. We can no more resist it than we can suppress the impulse to breathe or to walk on two legs. We are story-telling animals in the same way that wolves are pack animals. Not only are we story-telling animals, it is our story-telling skills that have (to paraphrase Reginald Perrin’s boss CJ) got us where we are today.
Suppose for a moment that we did not tell a*********s - that we constructed no narrative to accompany our experience. What would we see when we looked out into the world? All that we would “see” (or more accurately, experience) would be raw data. A meaningless flux of
