The impulse to tell a story is profoundly human. We may all be brute animals at the end of the day, struggling to survive. But we seem to be the only animals that tell stories about that struggle. It is our distinguishing feature, one that alternately enlightens, entertains and burdens us. We might learn almost everything about ourselves as humans by paying attention to what we do with stories.

Perhaps we notice a few things. To tell a story is to ask a listener to step up, to identify and, ultimately, to care. To listen to a story is to invite the feeling that you and the storyteller are one and the same person. You see, feel and imagine as they do. If only for a moment. 

If the storyteller succeeds, then, for that moment, we don’t just suspend our personal interests. We expand them. We grow our individual agenda to include the needs, ideas, and suffering of the person we are seeing and hearing. We become larger. 

But here is where the burden comes in. It is very difficult to care inertly. Instead, it compels us to act. Empathy creates a kind of moral accountability, an obligation to respond. And stories are at the center of this. 

We might notice that many communities of people are all built around some kind of a shared story that has generated empathy and moral consideration for one another. Some suggest that these ‘moral communities’ are like circles.[1] Those inside the circle, by virtue of their membership in the moral community, are entitled to a kind of empathy and consideration that grants them a status denied those outside. And those outside the circle are, well, just temporarily left out of that consideration.

Of course, it is the power of stories that keeps them out too. A study of history is often a study of the stories we have told each other, and those we tell ourselves to justify the withdrawal of our empathy, the exclusion of people from our moral community. We notice that wartime propaganda, political campaign rhetoric, or certain ideologies of economic growth show how easy and convenient it is to tell stories that exclude the enemy, the weak, the unskilled, the ‘other’ from a nation’s or a person’s moral community. And in earlier ages, this same storytelling made it possible to exclude the mentally ill, the poor, women, or slaves from our consideration. In fact, it has been a sad legacy of human history that these stories of exclusion are responsible for much of the suffering we have experienced together. At each other’s hands. 

But again, paradoxically, stories can also change this. By helping us know and care about different people, and different worlds, and build new communities. It could be that our evolution as individuals, and as societies, may actually be dependent upon our capacity to widen the circles of our moral consideration so that more people matter to more of us. And, as we grow in our capacities to feel empathy for one another, we expand the burden of our responsibilities. But we also ensure our survival.

Some who study the planet, the history of civilization, and the future of the species make profound suggestions about stories. [2] Today, they say, the real story for the human community is this: We empathize, develop resources for responding adequately, meet our moral responsibilities to one another, or we die. 

Stories matter. 
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[1] For example, David B. Morris, “About Suffering: Voice, Genre and Moral Community”, in Daedalus, 125:1, 1996, ‘Social Suffering’, pp. 25-46.

[2] See for example, Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, NY: Penguin Group, 2009. Or Kleinman, Arthur, What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

If you haven’t watched an Op-Doc piece on the online New York Times, you probably should. It’s not that I’ve been blown away by any one of those I’ve seen. But I really like the idea of them, and find myself going back to them because of it: a very short “doc” form that insists upon a point of view, or on an essayist’s voice, or on a degree of critical observation.

A narrator with an opinion, I suppose.

Take a recent piece called "The Unfair Game," for instance. The accompanying copy describes it as a short film that "explains a troubling situation in English football, where ticket prices have risen to levels so high that many of the fans can no longer afford them." 

What catches my eye about “The Unfair Game” piece is what catches my ear about it. And what catches my ear about it is in large part due to its visuals. The cleverly constructed image track, focusing solely on the tabletop, the cards and the hands of the card dealer (oh, and a half empty pint off to the side, along with the occasional pull down of the sweater, or jumper, over the card dealer’s midsection), cooks along nicely as a steady source of information, confirmation and consideration, but always in relation to the audio track’s voiceover narration.

Sometimes the imagery works in direct support of the voiceover narrator’s claims by providing visual references as examples: for instance, cards depicting specific, well-paid (and no doubt easily-recognized, among true fans) English football players.

And sometimes it provides, in effect, graphic support of statistical claims made by the voiceover narrator: piles of cards in varying heights being slid across the table top, in direct alignment with the narrator’s cues, while replacing by slyly referencing the fatigued, and fatiguing, bar graphs of everyday powerpointist storytelling.

But sometimes it diverges from the voiceover narration, still supporting what’s being cued and advancing what’s being claimed, but doing so in more of a conversationally parallel and self-conscious manner that is not entirely reliant on the soundtrack: houses of cards being built higher and higher, with almost alarming ease and ironic … yes … off-handedness. 

Cutaway and B-roll footage placed over voiceover narration so often serves to fill the void of what is otherwise mostly an audio experience. Placeholders for the eyes. This we know from personal experience, of course. Invoicing on a finished project often relies upon such narrational redundancy.

The trick, or the card trick in the case of “The Unfair Game,” is to construct the visual and aural tracks to work, or to speak, in concert, whether in univocal assertions or in moments of parallel voice/play, so that “narration” doesn’t simply refer to what’s happening on the soundtrack, but instead to how the overall piece is … speaking its mind. And possibly changing mine in the process.