Class 12 - Stories as Persuasion

Welcome back

Today we’re going to be talking about storytelling as a means of persuasion. A lot of what we do to persuade is tell stories. As the scholar Wendy Doniger writes, “stories are not designed as arguments, nor should they be taken as arguments. Rather […] stories provide us with metaphors that make the arguments real to us.” (Other People’s Myths p.2)

You could say that storytelling is a part of rhetoric — the arts of persuasion. In the next couple of sessions, we’ll explore how stories work to persuade us, to make arguments real to us.

But first, let’s check in, and in particular see if there are any questions about the essay.

Here are some questions for checking in:

• How’s it going?
• How is the essay going?
• Do you have any problems or difficulties?
• Do you need class time to help you work on the essay?

The Power of Words

The first part of this session is about the power of words to bring about change. Writing changes the world. There are lots of example of this. The Bible, the Koran and the Pali canon are written texts. So is the Communist Manifesto. So is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And all these things have shaped the lives and thoughts of countless people.

Sometimes these changes take place very quickly. But sometimes they take place slowly. You could call this slow change ‘the glacier principle.’ This is an idea borrowed from the writer and activist Tiffany Lee, who is based at the University of Wisconsin. According to Lee, it is easy to underestimate how writing brings about change, because it often works slowly, almost imperceptibly. But, Lee writes, ‘like a glacier, writing can eventually reshape the world.’

The physical landscape of which we are a part, with its hills and the valleys, was carved out over millennia by the slow movement of glaciers. The same is true of our mental landscapes, the concepts that shape our lives and our worlds. They have been fashioned over time by the things that others have thought and written and handed down. We haven’t chosen these landscapes, but they have given shape to us, and they help shape the possibilities that are open to us. And much of this writing is not just reasons and arguments and conclusions, but also stories!

So in this session, we’re going to be exploring our own experience of how stories work to make arguments real, and to bring about change. Here’s the great James Baldwin:

“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimetre, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.” — James Baldwin, “Writing and Talking”, New York Times, sept 23, 1979.

Exercise 1:

The first exercise is about the power of stories. It is about exploring your own past to see how the stories of others have affected you.

In this exercise, you will be reflecting on stories from your own life that show how stories can bring about change. We’ll start by thinking about the following five questions:

• When have you heard a story that has helped to persuade you of something, or to change your perspective or your life?
• Who told this story?
• What was the story?
• What change or changes did it lead to?
• How long did these changes take (were they quick, or were they glacier-like)?

Make notes by free-writing for five minutes, and then we’ll split into breakout groups and feed back afterwards.

BREAK

Exercise 2:

Now we’re going to start to tell stories of our own about the power of stories to bring about change. Think about just one occasion when you were changed by an encounter with other people’s stories. You may have had more ideas when in the breakout group.

After the breakout groups we’ll write the story of this change. You have twenty minutes to do this.

Silent Spring

Next time, we’re going to look at a famous example of how stories and storytelling have brought about change. In the early summer of 1962, an article appeared in the New Yorker magazine. It was written by the biologist Rachel Carson, and at first glance, readers might have been forgiven for thinking that they were reading a work of fiction. This is how the article began (you will read the whole piece for your homework).

“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of colour that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines…

It is a beautiful opening. But soon it becomes clear that not all is well in this sleepy little town. One spring, Carson wrote, ‘a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change.’ Livestock sickened and died. People fell ill. And the budding spring trees that were usually so full of birdsong were uncannily silent. It was, Carson wrote, ‘a spring without voices.”

As Carson’s storytelling went on, she revealed that this town didn’t exist. But in countless towns across America and across the world, things like these had happened. And the culprit was human-created chemical compounds poisoning the land, among them DDT, or Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Carson’s two articles in the New Yorker, and her book — also called Silent Spring — later that year wove together science and storytelling in a powerful call-to-action. Carson’s book ignited a new awareness of the environmental impact of pesticides. It took ten years of legal and scientific wrangling, but in 1972 the US government eventually agreed to phase out the use of DDT.

How stories change the world

Carson was a scientist. And if she had just sat down to write a scientific paper about the harms of DDT, her work would probably never have had the impact that it had. The thing that made Carson’s Silent Spring so extraordinary was the way that she connected her deep scientific knowledge with an ability to tell stories that tapped into people’s deepest concerns. The reason that stories are so powerful is that they are all about the art of connecting. They bridge our personal worlds and our broader political and social vision. They can show us how political, social, and environmental changes impact our everyday lives. And conversely, they can show us how our everyday choices and actions can lead to big changes out there in the world. Our ideas of how the world is and how it can be are fashioned out of stories. Stories make arguments real to us!

For your homework, read Silent Spring. The link is here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/06/16/silent-spring-part-1