About 30 years ago, as I started being an statistical consultant, I was expected to deliver the results of my analysis with clear cut numbers and results. It was all about making one fact, of perhaps two, extremely clear. But the time has passed, and it does looks like we have grown more and more postmodern, more and more aware of the relevance of the process instead of being subjugated by the end-product. To tell some facts, new or not, is not enough, not anymore. My audience today expects a context, prefers a rather vague prognosis than a hard fact; my clients are more interested in hearing me describing their proces than mentioning its product.
We have placed lots of names to that. Context, background. Story telling, narrative. An argument inside a broader discussion, a proposition that builds, that is a step ahead, that belongs to a broader context. That promises future.
Perhaps we are making a full round back to our start, to that remote moment in which we were weak and scared creatures huddling around a fire that we barely understood, but that scared other creatures more than it scared us. Perhaps we are back at that moment when the few facts that we knew were terrible. The certainty that we would not eat enough, that we wil be soon eaten by predator or parasite, that we were unlikely to survive to the next night and stare at the fire again. So then, perhaps to counteract that crushing reality, we started telling tales, we promised ourselves a line, a continuity, a flow! just by mentioning it. Perhaps we were Scherezades conjuring our own future by telling us that tomorrow we would tell another tale, perhaps the continuation of this one, by describing ourselves as a process that would continue, that had a possibility of improvement rather than the certainty of death.
So perhaps after the great and absurd arrogance of the postwar years, after the collapse of ideologies and ecosystems... perhaps now that we are seeing more and more uncertainties surrounding our unsustainable existence, is that we are reinventing a sense of possibility by asking ourselves to talk in narratives and tales, instead of talking in dry and naked facts, that anyway, are very unpromising. So we are back at telling ourselves tales in order to go and try to impose some order in a world that we seem to understand less, and not more, by the minute.
And perhaps is neither a coincidence that I have come to write about ourselves conjuring a better world the day of the worker. A day in which we remember those that died in Chicago if only to give many others a future. A day that signs a narrative of emancipation, of a better future.
Let’s add to this narrative then.