The case against narrative

The recent experience of a global pandemic offered a massive opportunity for humans to rethink their existences with reference to systemic occurrences, events at the level of populations rather than the level of the individual, outcomes on the basis of statistical probability rather than short-term local or individual heuristics and planning based on proper assessment of the mass of foreseeable contingencies instead of bids for popularity. Nevertheless, the demotic reliance on narrative comprehension still seems to remain a dominant impulse among humans presented with evidence that contradicts narrative interpretations. This paper discusses that condition with reference to Kahneman’s (2011) Systems 1 and 2, Clarke’s (2008, 2022) distinction of the systemic contingencies of communication and intelligence, Kahneman et al’s (2021) discussion of noise, plus recent discussions of narrative and complexity. It concludes that the proliferation of narrative and the decline in its larger progressive social functions, has provoked a crisis of the real, developed a tendency to disembodiment, lost its ambition to communicate while purporting to do, and increasingly carries an individual rather than a social rationale.

This is an author's accepted manuscript version of an article published by Imprint Academic in the journal 'Cybernetics and Human Knowing'.