On metanarratives – or, how we transform our cultural mythology
Stories shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. Changing culture’s big stories, or metanarratives, takes time and many smaller stories growing together. New myths can help us live better, but they must be told with care and respect for the past.
Robert Bringhurst called ‘the thin but sometimes lovely web of answers we keep spinning for ourselves’
I also fear above all a killing of the magic. Because that’s what this process is, of changing the story that a person or a group or an entire civilisation tells about itself. A curious mixture of magic and alchemy is required to create a story – with all its depths of symbols and its archetypal imagery – that buries its way into a person’s heart, and then the heart of a community, and then the heart of a whole culture. And magic and alchemy have to be learned. And given time to work. You can’t short-circuit the process. We’re too quick these days to want to fix things. But some things can’t be rushed. They have to grow. Slowly. And deeply.
often it’s assumed that creating a culture’s ‘myths to live by’ is really no different from sitting down at a desk and dreaming up a short story.
The kinds of stories we’re talking about are filled with archetypal images and motifs that have been growing for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. The idea that you can sit down in a workshop one day and write a new story that has that kind of transformative power just doesn’t make any sense.
The prefix meta- means ‘beyond’ (in the sense of ‘sitting above’), and narrative is of course a story constructed in a sequential fashion. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about stories, encompassing and explaining other ‘little stories’ within conceptual models that bring those stories together into a whole.
A web of myths and stories that, by being so deeply interrelated, will lead automatically and organically to that new metanarrative that everyone wants so badly, but that can never possibly derive from the top down, like some new unelected political regime.
Out of this lived experience, what we can do is begin to tell stories of reconnection with the natural world.
through the lived experience out of which these new individual stories emerge – little by little the metanarrative changes
That’s how a new story grows. Slowly. Assisted by events in the real world and by new ways of living which reinforce it.
And this is my point: we can’t change the metanarrative by sitting around trying to think up new stories. We do it by not only perceiving in new ways, but living in new ways. By being the subjects for those new stories. More than that – by being the stories.
The power of stories in wider social change is more complicated, but at the most basic level, it is clear that if you can change individuals, a few at a time, social shifts will occur.
The myth of more is a myth of progress. Behind it is a belief in the idea of the triumphant journey of an all-conquering mankind towards deathless perfection, as we leave our animal natures behind and launch ourselves on a one-way, linear trajectory towards a perceived mastery of the planet – if not, preferably, of the entire universe.
The truth is, we have no idea how much we’ve been conditioned. Our social, economic and political institutions – as well as our own daily lives – are so embedded in this story that it’s hard for us to imagine there is anything outside it.
Berry proposed that such a story should incorporate an ‘integral vision’ in which ‘[h]uman persons bear the universe in their being as the universe bears them in its being.’ In other words: one in which we see ourselves as an intrinsic part of the world around us, not as separate.
They show us that the greatest treasure of all is a kind heart; the most powerful magic always is made from an act of love; and no life-saving or world-changing goal can ever be achieved without the help of a community of others – human and non-human alike.
the consequences of the increasingly rapid disintegration of a morally degenerate guiding mythology.