Science and Storytelling

In 1959 the British scientist C.P. Snow published The Two Cultures, in which he lamented the split of human intellectual activity into the two distinct spheres of the sciences and humanities. While the humanities have been the foundation of societies since antiquity, in recent years science has risen to the point where it disrupts entire societies. As technology advances, scientists must attempt to bridge this divide by learning to use the most fundamental tool of the humanist: telling a good story.

This conflict is as old as civilisation itself, and for the majority of history science was subordinate. Naively, one expects that since science and technology are the main driving force behind progress, scientists should have had major roles in dictating the direction of societies. Yet even a brief glance at the historical record shows that this is not true and that throughout history, scientists and engineers have remained in obscurity. For an example, consider Roman aqueducts or Egyptian pyramids. Although they long outlasted the civilisations that produced them, hardly anybody knows the name of any engineers who designed them to stand for millennia. But we do remember men of letters like Plato or Virgil.

This is because historically power has been held by the storytellers. In many cases, this manifested as a priestly caste with the ability to interpret scripture and frame its message for the masses. Think of the Catholic Church’s punishing Galileo in the 17th century for the “heretical” observation that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Similarly, the Hindu caste system placed the priestly Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy for thousands of years. Throughout various civilisations, we see the same pattern of a priestly class dominating the affairs of state, while scientists and engineers remained subordinate to their authority. In those societies where religion did not dominate, priests were substituted by philosophers like Confucius or Aristotle. In all such cases, it was the storytellers who charted the course of civilizations.

Why did storytellers gain such power if scientists and engineers are fundamental to the material progress of civilizations? This counterintuitive power dynamic rests on the incredible power of stories to organize people into complex societies.

In his fabulous book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that one of the most fundamental distinctions between Homo sapiens and other species in the animal kingdom is our ability to tell stories and create imagined realities. While other animals can only use language to convey factual information about their environment, humans have the unique ability to use language to tell fictional stories and create narratives. This allows us to create myths which give rise to institutions that enable cooperation on a vast scale.

Think of parliaments where strangers mingle in a sense of brotherhood over common belief in a nation which exists only in their collective imagination. There is nothing in the laws of nature which necessitates the existence of the US or any other country, yet there are legions of patriots who can hardly imagine a life without their Mother/Fatherland. Without the ability to conjure imagined realities like nations, money, and civilizations, Homo sapiens would remain mired in the brutal free for all of natural selection. Instead, not only have we escaped from Darwin’s clutches, but in the process we have formed societies that aspire to the stars.

For the vast majority of human existence, the scientific breakthroughs we achieved paled in comparison to the grand visions relayed by our storytellers. Zoroaster’s prophecy of a cosmic duel between the supreme deity Ahura Mazda and the forces of evil was far grander than the metallurgical advances of the late bronze age could ever be. Science had to begin with small and modest advances. The stories our storytellers told had no such constraint — from the start, the only limit was imagination. Thus for much of human history it was storytellers who held the dominant role in creating the myths that shaped civilisations.

After thousands of years, science has finally progressed to a point where its breakthroughs match the grandest fancies of our stories. In the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text written roughly 2000 years ago, the universal form of God is so magnificent that it was comparable to nothing less than if “a thousand suns were to blaze forth together in the sky”. Since those words were composed, nothing that humanity produced could remotely compare to that vision — until the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer was reminded of those very lines when faced with the terrible brilliance of a nuclear explosion. Science had finally caught up to the imagination of the storyteller.

In the years since, scientific progress has only accelerated and today’s breakthroughs exceed the limits of our imagination. Consider CRISPR technology, which gives a way to edit genes on a vast scale. Scarcely any priest or philosopher could have imagined a future with the ability to edit the very code of life like one edits pages of a book. If our stories gave us the power to break free of natural selection, gene editing could give us the power to bring it fully under our control. We can direct the evolution of an entire species or drive it to total extinction — an incredible yet terrifying possibility. What could be more awe inspiring than that?

The ascent of science and technology to the point where it exceeds the visions of our storytellers means that in the future, scientists and engineers will also chart the course of civilization. There are signs of this already. Of the ten richest billionaires, seven are from science and technology backgrounds. Slowly but surely, scientists are finding their way to political prominence as well.

However this doesn’t mean storytelling becomes useless. In fact, those building the future need to be good storytellers. Scientists and engineers hold power over the objective reality of the natural world, but the imagined realities of the human world are still necessary to organize the societies of the future. These societies will be built not on stories, but on a synthesis of story and technology.

The increasing number of scientists communicating their work directly to the public through books, blogs, and videos is a harbinger of this trend. This gives them the ability to shape the narratives around breakthroughs which can now fundamentally alter society, like CRISPR. Another example of the story-technology synthesis is Bitcoin. Although revolutionary and technically novel by itself, Bitcoin would have amounted to little more than an academic curiosity if it weren’t for the story behind it: the narrative of statist tyranny and the mystique of a supposedly virtuous anonymous founder who vanished before they could benefit from their own creation. The technicals are impressive, but this story is what sold Bitcoin to the world.

The future, unlike the past, will be shaped by both science and storytelling. Instead of captivating the masses with visions of cosmic duels, the storytellers of tomorrow have the opportunity to do so with the breakthroughs they create in their own labs. Now that science itself has the potential to weave incredible stories and myths, perhaps the time is ripe to bridge chasm between the Two Cultures.