Episode 55: Ed Finn
Ed Finn is the Director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. The Center was conceived as a place where people from radically different intellectual backgrounds come together to dream about the future—to “reignite humanity’s grand ambitions for innovation and discovery,” in their words. To this end, they sponsor everything from collaborative science fiction projects to big conferences about the future. We learned about the Center through this article and, if you want to dig a little deeper into their history, it’s a good place to start.
My conversation with Ed focuses on two interrelated subjects: dreams and narratives. Are we, as a society, adequately dreaming about the future or have we outsourced our dreams to distant experts? Do we have adequate time for dreaming? Has increasing specialization made it difficult for the kind of interdisciplinary thinking needed for the creation of radical new ideas? Ed advocates “thoughtful optimism” as he segues from dreams into narratives, suggesting that our more ambitious hopes can be realized through the right collective narrative. You will hear echoes of David Korten and Mark Mykleby, but I think one of the most interesting moments of the conversation comes when we talk about Lawrence Torcello and ask whether ambiguous narratives can get us further than a reasonable conversation.
Neil and I conclude the episode by discussing Douglas Rushkoff, Ethan Zuckerman, and whether a fragmented media landscape makes it harder (or impossible) to develop a unifying narrative. We also explore the idea of an ambiguous narrative in more detail, asking if a vague narrative is more or less likely to bring people together than an Enlightenment-style conversation about the Good.
I’m all for talking about narrative, but what I’m most curious is the *way* in which it is talked about. I’ve noticed that certain authors or writers talk about narrative in slightly different methods. While all seem to acknowledge that narrative is reality in a certain sense, I’ve continually read an unnoticed disagreement regarding what exactly to do about that.
It’s hard to describe exactly, if only because it can be so abstract to imagine… It’s almost as if there is suddenly a separation between the methods of telling stories and the purposes which stories traditionally served as a craft of dramaturgy. One train of thought I agree with the most is that a story should always ask questions, but never provide answers. A story about a topic should inquire it and elucidate it to the point where should an answer exist, it can only be implied by the definition of the problem itself. However, a story that provides answers as directly is no longer literature, but simply dogma. Literature inspires answers, but dogma merely imposes them.
For example, I know as anyone who has attempted to write before, that an essential force to employ in the telling of captivating stories is the use of conflict. Conflict, when used in a craftful fashion, leads into tension and suspense, the wonderful feeling of wanting to know what will happen next. This playful state where disbelief is suspended is where our best means of persuasion are most effective; yet, there is a world of difference between the persuasion of “After much toil and suffering, the forces of good triumphed over the legions of evil! Glory be!” and “… that was how it happened, but *why* did it occur in the first place? Was that suffering… even necessary?”
I feel that this talk about “crafting narratives”, while very worthwhile, leans more towards the dogmatic than the inspirational. I am uncomfortable with that. It is so familiar to me, yet I feel it is too dangerous to mess with.