We're Living Through a Storytelling Revolution

(gentle music) Good morning, I'm Michael Covnatt, and this is the next Big Idea Daily. You're quick dose of the best new nonfiction from some of the smartest authors around. Make sure you're signed up for our free newsletter using the link in the episode notes so you can get these big ideas right in your inbox. Now these days, it can feel like we're drowning in content. There's never been more to watch, more to listen to, more to scroll. And yet somehow, the stories that really stick, the ones that change how you see the world, are pretty rare. Kevin Ashton is a technologist and writer who thinks a lot about why humans tell stories and how that habit has changed our species. His new book is The Story of Stories, the million-year history of a uniquely human art. And our curator, Daniel Pink, says it shows that stories aren't entertainment through the operating system of civilization. Kevin joins us with some of his big ideas in just a moment. And later Harvard Literary Scholar Martin Puckner traces how the arts have been at the center of human civilization in the very beginning. With big ideas from his 2023 book Culture, The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop. How stories built us right after this quick break. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, I'm Kevin Ashton. I coined the term "Internative Things." It's in the Oxford English Dictionary now. And I led research at MIT that helped create the system in your smartphone. But this book isn't about technology. It's about something much older and more fundamental. Stories. For 25 years, I've been researching how storytelling shaped humanity and how new storytelling tours cause revolutions. What I discovered changed how I see everything from ancient fires to modern smartphones. I'm going to share with you five key insights from my book The Story of Stories. Insight number one. Stories created language, not the other way around. Everyone assumes language gave us the ability to tell stories. But that's actually backwards. A million years ago, around night fires in East Africa, our ancestors needed to communicate about things that weren't immediately present. Memories, plans, warnings about distant dangers. During the day, they just pointed and hollered like other animals. But night time around the fire was different. There were no immediate practical matters to discuss. So they did something no creature had ever done before. They communicated about events remembered and imagined. This storytelling required more nuance than hunting and gathering signals. So over hundreds of thousands of years, human vocalization evolved. The grunts and yelps turned into complex sounds about subjects acting on objects. But we now call language. The proof is everywhere. We understand stories without words all the time. In mind, dance, photography, silent films, even when we watch strangers through a window, every one of our 7,000 languages has the same basic structure, subject, verb, object, which is simply describing someone doing something. That's an event, which is a piece of a story. Here's what this means. We're not just a species that tells stories. We're a species whose brains literally evolved to be story-shaped. Story-telling didn't just change human culture. It created the human mind. We're all born storytellers. None of us can spend a waking day without seeking and sharing stories. The first purpose of language is story. In site number two, every new storytelling tour causes a social revolution. There's a pattern throughout human history that's remarkably simple. Whenever a new technology allows more people to tell stories to larger audiences, revolution follows. It's predictable. It's inevitable. Fire brought tribes together for the first spoken stories, writing spread stories beyond their tellers. Printing caused the Protestant Reformation and multiple political revolutions. Radio and television transformed the 20th century. And now smartphones have put broadcast power into everyone's pocket. This isn't about the technology itself. It's about the mathematics of stories. When you increase the number of storytellers and size of their audience, you inevitably increase what I call the size "missity" of stories. Some people tell stories to speak truth to power. Others tell stories so they can lie to the impotent. The turmoil we're experiencing right now, polarization, misinformation, culture wars, isn't a bug. It's a feature. It's a predictable result of the greatest storytelling revolution in human history. For the first time ever, everyone can tell stories to everyone. For 99.9% of human history, the power to tell stories to more than just a few people belonged exclusively to kings, priests, tribal leaders and elites. That exclusivity ended about 15 years ago. Understanding this pattern helps us see that our current chaos isn't unprecedented. It's the conclusion of a long cycle. But there's good news. Throughout our history, more storytelling has always led to progress, even when it feels otherwise. This revolution is painful, but it follows a pattern we've seen before. The story of stories shows us that we've survived these transitions before, and we will again. Insight number three. We are the biggest revolution stories ever caused. Here's the most profound part. Storytelling didn't create human culture. It created the human species itself. Our ancestor species, Homo erectus, evolved around those night fires, into creatures adapted anatomically, behaviorally, intellectually, socially and psychologically to be storytellers. We became Homo sapiens, but we're also Homo narrator. The species of stories. Think about the evolutionary pressure. Individuals and groups made more cooperative by stories survived better than individuals in storyless groups. Good storytellers gained higher social status and attracted more mates. Storytelling built social bonds far more efficiently than primate grooming. You can tell stories to many people at once. You can share reputations about people who aren't present. You can instill common values through repetition of group history. This means storytelling is not cultural. It's biological. Every human being is born a storyteller. It's as essential to being human as having opposable thumbs or walking upright. Even now, in the age of smartphones, oral storytelling remains our primary form. We still tell most stories by speaking face to face. Our major oral forms include presentations, sales pitches, sermons, stand-up comedy and the most common of all conversation. Standard conversation is just collaborative storytelling. Two or more people taking turns narrating connected events, usually in chronological order. From the moment we wake up, we're narrating our lives to ourselves. We tell stories about what we'll do, interpret the world through a story, make sense of strangers through imagined narratives. We think in stories because our brains evolved that way. We are the species with story-shaped brains. And storytelling is as fundamental to human existence as breathing. Insight number four. The smartphone is the culmination of a hundred thousand year pattern. I helped invent the Internet of Things, which is a big part of the system in your smartphone. I can't take much credit for the smartphone itself. Tens of thousands of people invented it. But I can take some of the blame for its consequences. Let me explain that pattern I mentioned. Fire brought dozens together around a single storyteller, writing reached thousands. Printing reached millions. Radio reached tens of millions. Television. reached hundreds of millions. But the smartphone? It does more than reach billions. It reaches everyone. 7.5 billion people have smartphones now. That's 90% of the human race. After 40,000 generations of storytelling, we now have a technology that allows everyone to tell stories to everyone. Not just passively receive them, but actively broadcast them. Think about what this means. For a million years, storytelling power was concentrated. You needed to be a king, a priest, a publisher, a network executive. Now, a teenager in their bedroom can reach orders of magnitude more people than a medieval monarch could in their lifetime. This is both wonderful and terrifying. As someone who helped bring this technology into the world, I felt responsible for understanding not just how it works functionally, but how it works historically, sociologically, psychologically. What have we unleashed? That's what this book is. My attempt to understand the full context of what we've created. Because when you see smartphones as part of this millionaire pattern, rather than as an isolated invention, everything changes. The anxiety, the addiction, the misinformation, the polarization, these aren't accidents. They're the inevitable symptoms of a storytelling revolution as significant as the invention of writing or printing. We've reached the apex of a pattern that began when our ancestors first sat around fires. Everyone can now tell stories to everyone, and we're the first people living through the consequences. Insight number five. Critical literacy is our only defence, and no one is coming to save us. Here's the hard truth. We're about to enter an age where artificial intelligence can create perfect simulations of reality at the touch of a button. Moving three dimensional images on screens with higher resolutions than our eyes that don't just look and sound real, but will eventually smell, taste and feel real. When signals and stimuli become literally indistinguishable from reality, when there are no towels showing us what's actual versus artificial, the war of stories will become multi-dimensional. The obvious solution is critical literacy education. Teaching people from kindergarten through graduation how to evaluate sources, understand bias, recognize manipulation. But throughout history, powerful people have fought for less mass literacy, not more. By limiting education, by censoring ideas, by banning books. The oppression of stories and storytellers is not ancient history. We see it all around us today. So no one else is coming to save us. We must save ourselves. That means becoming more self-aware, engaging in more self-reflection, feeling more doubt and humility than ever before, and understanding the innate and fundamental influence stories have on shaping how we think and what we do. But here's the good news. Our uniqueness is our power. We must know that we think in stories and we always will. Once we understand that, once we accept that stories shape our perception of reality, we can finally think critically about the stories we're told and the ones we tell ourselves. This is a story of stories. It's not just about understanding our past, it's about surviving our future. We evolved to be storytellers. Now we must evolve to be critical consumers of stories too. Thank you, Kevin. Okay, we'll take a quick break. And when we come back, Martin Puckner will share big ideas from culture, the story of us from K-Vart to K-Pop. Hi, I'm Martin Puckner, author of Culture, the story of us from K-Vart to K-Pop. I teach at Harvard University and I offer free online courses at Harvard X. I'm also a global fellow at the University of London. This book grows out of a decade of travel and teaching all around the globe, from deep inside the Arctic Circle to Brazil and from China to Iraq. From these travels, visits to archaeological sites and thousands of conversations, a new story of culture emerged. A global story of engagement across barriers of time and place, of surprising connections and subterranean influences, a history of humans as a culture-producing species. Today, we hear the word culture most frequently in the context of cancel culture or culture wars. I think that's a pity because it sells culture short. With this book, I want to offer a deeper historical perspective about what culture is and why it matters. From my travels and my work as editor of the Northern Anthology of World Literature, which some of you may have used in high school or college, I offer five insights. The first insight is that culture is not natural. True, we humans have produced culture wherever we lived. But the stories, paintings and performances we produce don't last. Unlike in biological evolution, we don't pass them down automatically to the next generation through our genes. Therefore, we need storage devices to preserve culture for the future. The earliest such storage devices were prehistoric caves. In the Shabbay Cave in southern France, humans began to decorate the rough surfaces with dozens of paintings 37,000 years ago and continued this work for thousands of years across 200 generations. Humans never used the Shabbay Cave for shelter. They went there only to express how they saw their place in the universe through painting. I call this not know how the technical and scientific knowledge the humans accumulate, but know why the human quest for meaning. Fortunately, the Shabbay Cave not only gave rise to this work, but also preserved it for the future. A similar role, a storage device, was later played by temples, theaters, libraries and all the way to today's electronic media, including podcasts such as the Next Big Idea Podcast. They're all places where culture is made, preserved and passed down to the next generation. The lesson to take away here is that we need to invest in such places of art making and storage so that we can continue the work our predecessors have brought. Culture needs are constant and active engagement, otherwise it will disappear. The second insight is that we are all late-comers. We often focus on firsts, which culture first invented casting in metal, or who first came up with the idea of writing, or when printing with movable type was first invented. Being first is seen as a matter of pride and prestige, but often that focus on firsts is misplaced, especially in the arts, where there was always someone who was there before us and whose ideas and beliefs and artworks we must reckon with. Let's return one more time to the Shovey Cave. After humans had labored in them for thousands of years, a landslide sealed off the entrance and no one could enter anymore. But then a few thousand years later, another landslide opened the entrance for a short while before it was closed off again for the next 30,000 years until the late 20th century. Now imagine a second group of humans entering the cave during that short interval. By the light of their flickering torches, they would behold the stunning work that had been done thousands of years earlier. Most likely that second group had no connection to the original artists. After all, they were separated from them but by as much time as the Roman Empire is from us. And yet the second group tried to make sense of the strange paintings they encountered, remnants of an alien culture. They didn't just admire these works. They made them their own by continuing the work on the cave in their own distinct style. My point here is that we are all like the second group of artists. When Whenever we go to an archaeological site or visit a museum or read an older text, we are confronted with the artistic expressions of distant predecessors, trying desperately to understand what they mean. Inevitably, we relate these strange works to our own world and try to incorporate them into our own lives. Embracing our status as late-comers, I think, can instill in us a certain awe at the creativity and ingenuity of previous generations. But it can also give us the freedom to use and adapt what others have created for our own purposes. What matters in art is not who was first, but how we late-comers use what has come down to us in new ways. The third insight is that cultures thrive by boring. There's a view of culture that focuses on distinct traditions created by tightly-knit communities who defend their tradition against outside interference. But once you look more closely into any of these traditions, you realize that they are made of fragments borrowed from others. This is because cultures thrive by borrowing. Coming from the past and from other cultures gives artists new ideas, shows them new possibilities, and thus leads to richer forms of expression that are more likely to endure over time. My favorite example is Pompeii. When the volcano Vesuvius erupted in 79 of the common era, it burned the city under a thick layer of ash, essentially creating a time capsule, a snapshot of life in the Roman Empire. Among the items found in the city was a small statue from South Asia representing Agatus. Its very existence in Pompeii shows how much trade the Roman Empire did with the East. Romans imported not just art, but also silk and spices. They imported so much that they created a trade imbalance with the East. What did the new owners make of the statue? Most likely they must took her for a representation of the Roman goddess Venus. These kinds of misunderstandings are often the byproduct of borrowing. But the borrowing didn't stop there. The Roman goddess Venus was herself adapted from Aphrodite, whom Romans had decided to borrow from their one-time foe Greece. Today, he sometimes think of the progression from Greece to Rome as natural, as if the baton of culture was passed from one culture to the next. But the truth is much stranger. What happened between Rome and Greece was a cultural graft, with one culture, Rome, deciding to graft the art of another culture Greece onto its own tradition. It wasn't just Rome. All cultures are made from borrowed figures and gods and artworks. And that's not a bad thing. That's what makes cultures grow and evolve in new ways. Time capsules, such as Pompeii, can give us a snapshot of just how much of any given culture was imported from elsewhere. The fourth insight is that nobody owns culture. In our current debates about culture, we worry a lot about appropriation, about facile or disrespectful uses of other cultures. I sympathize with the goal of being respectful, but I worry about the assumption that any culture can be someone's exclusive property, that culture can be owned. My favorite example is the Caperna Gast, the scribal text of ancient Ethiopia and its protagonist, the Queen of Shiba. Now the Old Testament describes how she visited King Solomon in Jerusalem to see whether he really was as wise as his reputation suggested. According to the Caperna Gast, the Queen of Shiba not only visited King Solomon, but also became pregnant with her son before returning home. When the son comes of age, she sends him back to his father who accepts him as his heir. But before long, the son wants to return to Ethiopia. Now before he and his companions depart, they steal the Ten Commandments and take them to oxen, the capital of Ethiopia. In other words, the Caperna Gast uses the Queen of Shiba episode from the Old Testament for its own purposes to claim descent from the legendary King Solomon and adds to the story the outright theft of the Ten Commandments, which then become the cornerstone of Ethiopian Christianity. The theft of course is imaginary. There is no evidence that it ever happened, although it's true that the Ten Commandments disappeared from Jerusalem at some point. And I do think that precious objects that were stolen and are now housed in museums should be returned whenever possible as some museums are beginning to do. But the story of the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Shiba and of the Ten Commandments shows just how little sense it makes to think of culture as the property of just one group. No one owns culture. This by incorporating the achievements of others that we make them our own. The fifth insight is to be humble. The abshot of the preceding four insights that culture is not natural and requires constant care. That we are all late comers, forever confronted with the mysterious work of the past, that cultures thrived by borrowing and that no one can really own culture, all lead to an attitude of humility. The heroes of this book treat the ideas of distant places with respect and curiosity. Even when those ideas challenge their most deeply held values and convictions. Translators working in the House of Wisdom, in Medieval Baghdad, studied Greek philosophy, even though it might challenge Islam. Some Christian nuns and monks working away in medieval monasteries, such as the one founded by Hildegard of Bingan, kept alive pre-Christian writing even though it might challenge Christianity. We who are living in a very judgmental age can learn from these figures. They knew that their own values and beliefs would not last, and they trusted that the future would not judge them too harshly. Will our own convictions for a better? I doubt it. And this means that we should treat the past, even if we don't always approve of it, with as much humility as we hope that the future will treat us. Thank you, Martin. Alright, everyone. You can grab a copy of the books we talked about today using the links in the episode of Notes.