Jayati Ghosh, one of India’s leading economists, who has written about women’s extreme inequality in the labour market, spins a tale about a young woman, Chitrangada, who rejects the role assigned for her. In Knock Twice, the resulting collection, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate and geo-hazards, Bill McGuire, weaves a story of refugees from rising sea levels slipping through immigration controls. That’s why a group of leading scientists, economists and ecologists recently put facts momentarily to one side, and wrote modern folk tales for troubling times in an experiment to communicate issues of concern more compellingly. Progressive politics needs better stories as much as it needs facts and policies. If you want change to happen, you have to change deeply embedded cultural narratives.
In both you might also glimpse the village whipped up by the charismatic trickster who appears in its midst, into a fury of self-destructive suspicion and isolation. Progressives have learned the hard way in an age of Brexit and Trump that it is messages that resonate with mythologies – such as “making America great again” tapping the former frontier optimism of nation-builders, or “taking back control” for the brave, resilient island – are impervious to fact and rational argument. But that is partly because, in campaigning for change, the art of storytelling has been too often replaced with reliance on a deluge of facts and polices. So much accumulated wisdom in tales mocks our multiple current follies. Daedalus is the smart entrepreneur switching to wind and solar power.
Icarus strikes a Richard Branson-like figure, or the head of an oil company still exploring for oil we cannot afford to burn. In fact Canute was demonstrating the opposite to his courtiers, the ultimate limits of kingly power and humankind’s attempts to command nature.Īnd the story of killing the goose that lays the golden egg in order to extract its riches, and finding nothing, stands as a parable for how we over-exploit the environment everywhere from our seas, to our forests, farms, fossil fuel extraction and more.įolk tales and myths are especially strong on hubris, with the tale of Icarus and Daedalus sharply dividing Icarus, who fails to accept the limits of the material world, overreaches and crashes, from the wiser Daedalus, who still manages to fly, but not too near the sun. King Canute was the monarch who vainly tried to command the seas not to rise. Folk tales are a guide to the consequences of such short-sighted self-centredness. Seas are polluted with plastic and acidifying, the atmosphere loaded with more carbon dioxide than human civilisation has ever experienced, and a mass extinction event underway, visible recently in the large-scale die-off of insect life. One of our greatest contemporary threats is our wholesale abuse of the natural world. The kelpies of Scottish folklore carried children to watery graves, while the Inuit told tales of the Qallupilluit, who lived beneath the ice and would steal children through its melting cracks. Across cultures you will find stories designed to keep us away from danger, with many applicable to a warming world. This, of course, is one of the other functions of folk tales – they are cautionary and teach us to identify risks. Almost daily at the moment, another male impresario or figure with other power is revealed as the wolf that befriends with an ulterior motive the young and vulnerable, or perhaps the charming vampire seeking to satisfy its lust. And just as it may be the season of flamboyant, escapist horror, it can be frightening when we discover that places we thought, or trusted to be safe, turn out to be concealing predators.
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