Why narrative inquiry?

The other day somebody asked me for the "top ten" reasons narrative inquiry is preferable to direct questioning. It was an interesting challenge, and this is the result. I've grouped the ten reasons into three groups.

Human-social aspects of narrative inquiry

Social function. People act differently and expect different things when they tell and listen to stories than when they talk normally. This gives the sharing of stories both a unique function in society and a unique advantage when one wants to understand feelings and beliefs. When a person tells a story in a group, that person is given both the floor and the attention (and silence) of the party. Asking people to tell you stories sends them the message that you have given them the floor and your attention. It sets up the situation "I am listening" rather than the situation "I am interrogating" and thus triggers a different social response.

Emotional safety. The separation between narrative events (storytellings) and narrated events (what takes place in stories) provides an emotional distance that creates the safety people need to disclose deeply held feelings and beliefs. As a result, people often reveal things about their feelings or opinions on a subject while they are telling a story that they wouldn't have been willing or able to reveal when talking about the topic directly. A story is a socially accepted package in which people have learned from a young age to wrap up their feelings, beliefs and opinions. People know that they can metaphorically place a story on a table and invite others to view and internalize it without exposing themselves to the same degree as they would if they stated those feelings, beliefs and opinions directly.

Providing a voice. Most people are very used to being asked for their opinions in standard surveys, and they get out their well-practiced poker faces for that game. Asking people to tell stories gives them a sign of respect by legitimizing their experiences as valuable communications. Respect is also communicated by giving people the freedom to choose what story they will tell and how the story will take form. The mere fact of saying "we really do want to know what has happened to you" is something many people have rarely experienced. Many respondents in previous narrative surveys have expressed gratitude for the chance to tell their story.

Cognitive aspects of narrative inquiry

Engagement. A story has a natural situation-tension-resolution shape, and people usually find it difficult to "leave" the story before the resolution has occurred, whether they are telling it or listening to it. The story pulls them in and engages them until it has completed its course. In the context of inquiry, this reduces the frequency of respondents answering questions without giving them much thought. Even if people had meant to ignore the inquiry, they are sometimes captivated by the storytelling aspect and stay longer (and say more) than they would have otherwise.

Articulation. When people tell stories, they sometimes reveal feelings and beliefs of which they themselves are not aware. When the answer to a direct question is "I don't know," asking for a story may provide the contextual triggers that bring out the tacit knowledge and relevant experience required. After the story has been told, the storyteller may still not know the answer to the direct question. However, if you collect hundreds of narrative answers, a coherent response will usually take shape.

Interpretation. When you ask people to tell stories, and then ask them questions about their stories, you are asking them to interpret rather than opine. This displacement gives people both the freedom to say forbidden things -- it's about the story, it's not about myself -- and the safety to admit fault or place blame. Also, people tend to have stronger reactions to hearing stories, in terms of the emotions they show, than they have to hearing factual information. For example, listeners tend to fidget less and lean in more when a story is being told than when someone is giving opinions or relating information. This makes asking people to interpret their own stories a useful means of surfacing their feelings about important issues.

Authenticity. When the goal of the project is communicative, whether this means communicating a message to customers or communicating the needs of customers to producers, stories convey complex emotions with more ground truth than any other means of communication. Direct questioning may generate more precise measurements, but story elicitation ensures greater depths of insight and understanding into complex topics and complex people. The act of listening to a story told by another person creates a suspension of disbelief and displacement of perspective that helps people see through new eyes into a different world of truth.

Imagination. When a topic is complex and many-layered, the best course is to increase diversity, generate many ideas, think out of the box, and prepare for surprise. Asking a diverse range of people to tell you what they have done and seen enlists their imagination along with your own. This both broadens the net of exploration by opening the inquiry to the varieties of human experience and increases its flexibility by capturing multidimensional context which can be plumbed again and again as needs emerge. In contrast, direct questioning, though precise, is narrowly focused and produces unidimensional content that can provide only one answer.

Information-gathering aspects of narrative inquiry

Contextual richness. When you ask direct questions, it is easy to guess wrongly about what sorts of answers people might have and even about what sorts of questions might lead to useful answers. This is often a problem when exploring complex topics. Asking people to talk about their experiences can sometimes lead to useful answers even if the wrong questions were asked, because the contextual richness of stories provides information in excess of what was directly sought. In fact, being surprised by the questions posed (and
answered) by collected stories is a standard outcome of narrative inquiry.

Redirection of non-responses. A well-constructed story elicitation results in fewer non-response behaviors (answering without considering, manipulating the survey to promote an agenda, trying too hard to do what seems to be expected, and so on) than direct questioning. These behaviors don't go away when people tell stories, but they are both reduced and more obvious when they do occur. Because telling a story pulls in both teller and listener, the reluctant pay more attention, those with agendas reveal their true thoughts (even while promoting their agendas), and performers have a harder time guessing what they are supposed to say (and switch to telling the best story they can). Also, non-responses are easier to spot in narrative results, because the texts of the stories themselves provide clues to why people gave the answers they did.

Gems: Studying Those Who Study Us

Here I begin another series of blog posts, this time on resources I've found (mainly books) that have been so useful to my understanding of organizational and community narrative as to call them "gems." As usual it's far too long, and again I beg your tolerance.

Cases and stories

When people start exploring what has been said and done in the area of stories and organizations, the field of case-based reasoning usually comes up. Case-based reasoning, or CBR, is an offshoot of cognitive science and artificial intelligence having to do with making decisions using cases, or stories about previous events. CBR is similar to organizational narrative in that bodies of stories are used to help people make decisions and share knowledge. However, CBR databases are very different from what I will call "story collections" in these ways:

1. CBR databases, as expert systems, are compiled only from interviews with experts in an area, whereas story collections include storytellers with a wide range of expertise and experience, and even deliberately juxtapose different and sometimes competing perspectives.
2. CBR databases are compiled from interviews in which only the most knowledgeable experts are asked to talk specifically and directly about knowledge, with the view of passing on how things are done. By contrast, story collections ask people to tell stories about their work (or any topic) as a whole. Story collections treat as valuable the most personal, emotional, and idiosyncratic aspects of the story -- pride, disappointment, pain, joy, confusion -- whatever resonates deeply with the storytellers. Questions are aimed obliquely and ambiguously in order to reveal not only how things are done but also how things may not be done, what things are like, how they got to be that way, and what it all means.
3. CBR databases are indexed by cognitive elements such as topic, task, goal, plan, lesson learned, and so on. Indexing is typically done by experts in the CBR field. Story collections are not indexed but interpreted for meaning and emotional content by the storytellers themselves.
4. CBR databases are used by indexing critical elements of the situation at hand, zeroing in on the relevant cases, and offering up solutions to fit needs. Story collections are sometimes used to find solutions to problems, but they are more often used when people don't know what they need to know - when they need to uncover biases, reveal trends, hear voices, discover paradoxes, improve self-awareness, and ask new questions.

Case-based reasoning works by what I call the "noun way" of getting an answer: the answer you get is the answer you need. Zeroing in, closing down and narrowing the field of possible answers are required for this process. In contrast, sory collections work by the "verb way" of getting an answer: the answer you get is not the answer you need, it is what triggers what goes on in your mind to get you closer to the answer you need. For this purpose, broadening things out and shaking things up are what is required.

The point I want to make in this essay, and the point of the "gem" I want to tell you about, is that CBR and other systems of knowlege representation are excellent tools for collecting and organizing how-to manuals for simple and complicated situations, such as repairing engines or designing load-bearing structures. But story collections are the tool of choice when your aims and issues are complex. And surprisingly little of human knowledge is not complex, even if it seems simple.

What is common sense?

To illustrate the differences in ways of looking at knowledge among the different fields concerned with it, let us consider the concept of common sense. Reading about common sense has always confused me, because people in different academic traditions use it in different ways (and with great confidence in their local meanings). As far as I can make it out, the term can mean any of six different things.

First, as it was used in antiquity, common sense referred to a fusion of the inputs coming from the five senses. To say "use your common sense" meant "use all of your powers of observation." That use has been pretty much abandoned, so I will also set it aside.

Later, the "common" in "common sense" changed to refer to what is common among a group of people instead of within one person. After that it splintered into five possible meanings. I list them here moving from least to most complex.

1. Common sense is what a system moving and working in 3D space needs to know. In this sense, the phrase refers to the body of knowledge limited to statements like "things that are let go of in space fall towards the earth" and "objects that are piled up sometimes fall down again." Those who speak of common sense in this way tend to be designing autonomous robots that need to move around and manipulate objects.
2. Common sense is what the common people believe to be true. This meaning is similar to "naïve physics" or "folk knowledge." It refers to what people know about something when they have no specialized knowledge about it -- what a banker knows about making shoes, what a shoemaker knows about banking. This sense of the term is more exclusive than inclusive, since it defines people more by what they don't belong to (the ranks of those with specialized knowlege, which is often synonymous with the ranks of power and prestige) than by what they belong to. This use of the term is similar to the use of "common" to mean "commoner," or not of noble birth. People who use this sense of the term tend to be writing about psychology and studying how people think and reason.
3. Common sense is what every human being believes to be true. This sense of the term is used primarily by people who work in the area of knowledge representation and build common-sense knowledge bases.  Major projects in this area include Cyc, the Open Mind Common Sense project (OMCS) and MindPixel. These projects claim to represent the knowledge every human being uses in daily life. The Wikipedia page on the OMCS project gives example statements that include "A coat is used for keeping warm," "The sun is very hot" and "The last thing you do when you cook dinner is wash your dishes."
4. Common sense is what a society believes to be true. This is the sense in which most anthropologists and sociologists use the term. In the anthropologist R.M. Keesing's famous statement, culture is "...not all of what an individual knows and think and feels about his world. It is his theory of what his fellows know, believe and mean, his theory of the code being followed, the game being played, in the society into which he was born." In this sense common sense is contextual, situated, idiosyncratic, and subject to change over time. Dictionaries and thesauri, though they do build knowledge bases, tend to see knowlege as more culturally situated and subject to change than do projects more closely aligned with the artificial intelligence field.
5. Common sense is what our society should believe to be true. This is the sense politicians and activists use when they talk about "common sense" as a call to political (or literal) arms. The message of such uses is "if you are with us, you will believe this." Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense is a famous example of this use. Says Paine: "Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom." Paine later asks of his reader "that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day." Note the terms used here: fashionable, favor, habit, appearance, outcry, custom, and the most obvious nod to identity politics, "true character of a man."

If you look at who uses each sense of the term "common sense," a pattern emerges: builders of simple "mindless" robots at the simplest level, then cognitive scientists interested in artificial intelligence, followed by anthropologists, and at the apex of complexity, politicians and activists. Also notice that as complexity increases, breadth of coverage decreases: from anything capable of moving about, to the uninformed, to people in general, to those in one society's culture, to those in one political party. (Why do I place "the uninformed" as more broad than "people in general?" Because from what I've seen, and as I'll explain, the view of "people in general" embedded in most "universal" knowledge bases is far from universal.)

Definitions of common sense 

These meanings of the term are not easily separated. Dictionary definitions often lump two or more meanings together without distinction. WordNet (which has mixed aspirations as both a knowledge base and a dictionary/thesaurus) defines common sense simply as "sound practical judgment" (my sense three above). Dictionary.com calls it "sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence" (my senses two and three above). The Merriam-Webster online dictionary says it is "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts" (senses two and three). Microsoft's Encarta dictionary calls it "sound practical judgment derived from experience rather than study" (more two than three). 

The definition on allwords.com is the most interesting of all:

Common sense. Ordinary good consciousness, awareness or understanding of something, arrived at though taking in account recent events and thoughts of others involved, used for the greater good of all involved.

This combines senses two (ordinary), three (good), four (others) and five (greater good). Add in gravity and you have the whole mix.

Wikipedia does the best job of giving a nuanced definition of the mixed meanings in the term (my additions show the senses referred to):

Common sense (or, when used attributively as an adjective, commonsense, common-sense, or commonsensical), based on a strict construction of the term, consists of what people in common would agree on: that which they "sense" as their common [three, four] natural [three] understanding. Some people (such as the authors of Merriam-Webster Online) use the phrase to refer to beliefs or propositions that — in their opinion — most people would consider prudent and of sound judgment [three], without reliance on esoteric knowledge or study or research [two], but based upon what they see as knowledge held by people "in common" [four]. Thus "common sense" (in this view) equates to the knowledge and experience which most people allegedly [four] have, or which the person using the term believes [four] that they do or should [five] have.

Some "definitions" of common sense clearly reference particular meanings, often the fifth, aspirational meaning alone. From a blog post with a list of postmodern definitions as "a useful gauge to see how academics construct their sentences" (which may or may not be satirical):

COMMON SENSE: In postmodernism in general, common sense is considered a fiction created by those in power to convince the oppressed that ideology is simply the way things really are. See ideological effect, myth.

Here is a hilarious (and again, possibly satirical and possibly straight-faced) definition of common sense from jurisdictionary.com, a site that sells legal advice:

Common Sense. The presence of mind and general caution and concern that the law imputes to all persons, i.e., sense everyone should have. Everyone owes a duty to use common sense. The breach of this duty may give rise to a cause of action.

And one from a religious web site:

The term refers to that KNOWING which is within all of us, as a characteristic of the mature human mind, which does have access to any and all KNOWING of the dimensions of consciousness beyond the self. Although anyone can certainly have an instance or episode of such common sense, such KNOWING, unfortunately if one is "lost" to the negativity of Satan's influences upon humanity, even then, that person's maturity of mind is being blocked by the Veil of Unknowing and their consequently immature mind (of whatever age) does not have this attribute of common sense.

One pattern I've noticed is that the attempts to build universal human common-sense databases (such as Cyc, WordNet, and so on) tend to speak only of senses one, two and three (the least complex and cultural). It is surprising that WordNet, for example, lists only one sense for the term "common sense" even though it lists no fewer than nine senses for the adjective "common" (and they cover all five meanings listed here). Could this be a blind spot in such knowledge bases, something they prefer not to admit about their own definitions of what they are doing and what they represent?

The gem

With that preparation, the gem to which I would like to introduce you is Diana Forsythe's 2001 book Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Tragically, publication of this work was posthumous, as this groundbreaking researcher died in 1997 in a rafting accident. This audacious work, in which Forsythe reports on observations made during years of participant observation with working cognitive scientists, is a fascinating journey through the minds of people who think they know what we know. The researchers Forsythe studied are the "knowledge engineers" who create common-sense knowledge bases and talk about common sense in the all-human-beings-know-this sense (third in the list above).

According to Forsythe's field work, knowledge engineers operate on the basis of three essential assumptions that influence their work. She contrasts these assumptions with those made by social scientists, who primarily use the cultural definition of common sense (fourth in the list above).

1. Knowledge engineers believe that knowledge is a structured, static thing that can be extracted, acquired, cloned, and stored. It is something that experts have and novices don’t. These engineers call the elicitation of knowledge a bottleneck, express frustration that it is inefficient, and hope that someday it can be automated. Experts who are offended at the idea that their knowledge can be so easily transmitted are termed "prima donnas" and "cantankerous" and are avoided. In this view knowledge is also seen as individually held, having no social dimension. In contrast, social scientists see the extraction of knowledge as impossible, since it is a dynamic and contextually situated phenomenon of shared construction. They also believe that the expert-novice distinction is relative, not absolute: every human being is an expert in some things and a novice in others, depending on the context.
2. Knowledge engineers see knowledge as entirely conscious. Thus they believe that experts can fully articulate their knowledge and that there are no differences between what people say they do and what they do. They see no reason to visit an expert in their workplace or to observe the expert doing normal work tasks; they believe that asking the expert what they know, straight out, is sufficient. Social scientists, on the other hand, believe that a large portion of knowledge is tacit and not easily surfaced, and that the relation between self-representation and observed action is tenuous.
3. Knowledge engineers see knowledge as universal and absolute. Thus they "prefer if possible to use themselves as experts," since anyone can capture "the world’s knowledge" simply by introspection. (Says Forsythe: "I have come to think of this style of thought as 'I am the world' reasoning.") Social scientists believe that knowledge is inherently contextual and relative, and cannot be transplanted from one brain to another. Forsythe noted, for example, that nearly every AI researcher she studied was a white Western male, and that they were perfectly comfortable assuming that whatever they knew was what every human being needed to know. 

Again according to Forsythe, these beliefs create three characteristics of knowledge bases created by knowledge engineers.

1. Knowledge bases depend on a non-representative sample of experts or even introspection as their sole source of information, and thus are narrow in scope. No evidence of conflict or diversity of thought is permitted, and the knowledge codified within them contains no negotiated, contextual, or organizational elements. Also, because of the belief that knowledge can be extracted, experts tend to be interviewed out of the context of their expertise, so the knowledge they are able to articulate is only a portion of mature thought in the field. For example, Forsythe recalls how an expert system built to support worldwide geological exploration failed when it went into production because the expert interviewed had only local knowledge of one geographical area.
2. Because the organization of knowledge bases is set in advance, they are brittle and cannot easily adapt to new uses. Expert system builders claim that indexing mechanisms should be based on first principles about how people think about narrative and experience. However, because of the belief that knowledge is universal, most of the indexing mechanisms used have been based on introspection, not on empirical evidence – thus they correlate more with the way researchers believe they themselves think than with the way people actually think. Also, because of the belief that knowledge has no social dimension, indexing is thought of entirely within one mind. The idea that there might be socially relevant indexes does not appear. 
3. Because knowledge bases are set up to store knowledge as a thing, they are static. They are like vaults in which information is locked up, never again to enjoy a life of discourse with the world. Such systems quickly become out of date or even nonsensical as the world around them changes.

 Forsythe ultimately warns that:

Those whose ways of knowing and doing are classified as "knowledge" and "expertise" by the builders of expert systems will find their view of the world reinforced and empowered by this powerful emerging technology. Those whose perspectives and practice are not so classified are likely to find their voices muted still further as the world increasingly relies upon intelligent machines.

Obviously I wouldn't be suggesting this book as a "gem" if I didn't agree with Forsythe's conclusions. Reading Forsythe's book (alongside cognitive science books and papers) had a large influence on my research on building story collections. That doesn't mean I think case-based reasoning is not useful. For some domains it is undeniably useful and appropriate. Narrow, brittle and static knowledge bases are just the thing when you need to look up engineering specifications and automate factory production. What concerns me is when I see case-based reasoning applied to complex areas such as education, medical diagnosis and decision support. That's where the gem shows its real value.

Why is an umbrella?

There's a little game I play when looking at books and papers about knowledge representation. I find an example about how computers need to be told things about "everyday" life and "universal human" knowledge, and then peel away the layers of assumptions about culture and context inherent in the statement.

One of the canonical examples that often comes up in the knowledge representation and CBR literature is this one:

"If it is raining, carry an umbrella."

The first time I encountered this statement -- which is rendered in so many places and with such confidence that it sounds like "the night is dark" in its universality -- I was taken aback. I'm not much of an umbrella user myself. If I'm caught in the rain I run or walk. On a very rainy day I might put on a raincoat, but as often as not I don't mind getting wet. Besides, umbrellas are awkward and sharp when you are walking with a small child (you might put somebody's eye out!). One thing I've learned living in the forest is that during that wonderful/awful time of the year when everything is blooming and growing, and the blood-sucking blackflies are out in full force, rain is your best friend. Blackflies hide in the rain, so we take full advantage of every rainy day and soak ourselves in it. (In mosquito season the rules reverse and rain requires a retreat to safety.)

There have been times in my life when umbrellas were important, but it was never because of anything as simple as rain. When I used to go to New York city all the time, I carried an umbrella for protection. After I hurt my back, I supported myself for a while with a long, cane-like umbrella because it didn't look as much like a cane as a cane would. Long ago when I went through an all-black-clothing period (don't ask) I used an ancient umbrella to heighten the sense of mystery and interesting alienation.

Once I was in New York city on my way to a workshop, and the sky opened up and simply dumped rain on the streets. I had no umbrella, or raincoat either, so I ran between awnings. Sometimes I tried to sneak under the huge, elaborate, expensive umbrellas some well-dressed people were carrying. The looks I got made it clear that walking in that part of town without an umbrella was a clear sign that I was of a different category of people, a category unfit to share an umbrella with a holder of a huge, elaborate, expensive umbrella.

I've always found that canonical statement about umbrellas to be strangely sterile and foreign to the world I live in. I seem to have been born to attest to the reality of alternative perspectives, being a "few out of the few" in several dimensions (to choose one: left-handed and ambidextrous). I take this as a message from [insert your belief system here] to act as a social gadfly and say "that's not the only way to see it" whenever possible. Which explains some of my attraction to story listening.

So lately I've been reading about umbrellas and their history and uses, just to see if I could find more inside the canonical umbrella statement to peel away. (There are many other such statements in the knowledge representation literature, but the umbrella one is used so often that it simply begs to be challenged.)

A brief history of the not-so-humble umbrella 

It is unclear whether the Chinese or the Egyptians first came up with the idea of the umbrella, and whether protection from sun or rain was the purpose. But umbrellas were never only about protection, at least not of the physical kind. As with many human solutions, the history of umbrellas is soaked with references to status, power and class. The earliest umbrellas were so large and heavy that they were owned only by the wealthy (or gods) and carried only by slaves or servants. Says the Wikipedia page on umbrellas:

In Persia the parasol is repeatedly found in the carved work of Persepolis, and Sir John Malcolm has an article on the subject in his 1815 "History of Persia." In some sculptures, the figure of a king appears attended by a servant, who carries over his head an umbrella, with stretchers and runner complete. In other sculptures on the rock at Takht-i-Bostan, supposed to be not less than twelve centuries old, a deer-hunt is represented, at which a king looks on, seated on a horse, and having an umbrella borne over his head by an attendant.

Umbrellas were used as signals to broadcast authority and to maintain control in uncertain social situations. This history of umbrellas at the "big site of amazing facts" says:

In the fifteenth century, Portuguese seamen bound for the East Indies brought along umbrellas as fit gifts for native royalty. Upon landing on a strange island, the seamen immediately opened an umbrella over their captain’s head, to demonstrate his authority.

Did indigenous people use umbrellas? Do they now? It seems that people do use leaves, whether singly if they are large or woven into mats, to shield their heads from both sun and rain, and have for many years. But when I find umbrellas mentioned with respect to indigenous tribes the uses are symbolic and social. This article on umbrellas made from Pandanus (poro) leaves in the Solomon Islands says that "Pandanus leaves are woven into hoods by women, who wear them when a taboo relative is present or during special occasions." The "Asante umbrella" is, again, used for symbolic meaning: according to this article, an early explorer who met with the Asante said that the "umbrella is the outward and visible sign of the dignity and importance of its possessor" and that "the glory and social prestige imparted by an umbrella varies with its size." (This is also true in certain parts of New York city.)

Umbrellas have at times been taboo. In the Middle Ages, Europeans considered umbrella use heretical, possibly because their use was confined to ceremonial religious processions. Later, only women used them; a man using an umbrella was considered effeminate. According to William Sangster's fascinating Umbrellas and Their History (ca. 1871), Jonas Hanway was the first Englishman "who ventured to dare public reproach and ridicule by carrying an Umbrella." (He was excused, to some extent, on account of having picked up bad habits in his travels to Persia and because of his ill health.) After Hanway's death in 1786, after he had carried an umbrella in public for some thirty years, men began to carry what they called "Hanways" and the umbrella grew in popularity among British men as well as women.

Umbrellas today 

Enough history; let's consider umbrella use today. First, let's look at some advertisements, which offer no end of amusement. Here's a little quiz for you. Is this advertisement intended to entice you to buy (a) a man's umbrella, (b) a woman's, or (c) a child's?

There’s nothing like a prop to bring out [your] inner diva. Whether vamping it up with a feather boa or flirting coyly with a painted fan, a [person] becomes positively magnetic with the addition of just the right accessory. Though a bouquet is a [person’s] traditional best friend, daring [people] are reaching for parasols and umbrellas to best set off their ... charms.

How about this one?

Rugged design features titanium reinforced ribs that provide strength and durability while still being lightweight and portable. Automatic Open and Close mechanism opens and closes the umbrella at the push of a button. Measures 11 in. collapsed and opens to a full 40 in. diameter umbrella canopy.

 Or this?

This cute ... umbrella features a see through water-proof cover for extra rain protection, pinch-proof runner and covered safety tips, fun tinted bubble style with matching color handle. Because the canopy is see through, [the owners] will be able to see where they are going and see traffic while using this umbrella, which is a great safety feature.

Are you laughing? Do I even need to tell you the answers to this quiz? And do umbrellas still seem perfectly utilitarian after reading these?

Now, how would you say the targeted buyers of this umbrella see themselves?

Humor and surprise are two of [a designer's] hallmarks, as witnessed by this [design]. [This] witty umbrella ... is known and enjoyed throughout the world. Designed by [a company] for [a museum] with [a] design by [an artist], the collapsible umbrella has an automatic open-close mechanism. Made for [the museum] with nylon exterior and lining. Size: 38" span. Proceeds from the sale of these products are used to support [the museum's] programs.

Or this one?

How can [a company] offer such decadent and sexy fabrics for their umbrellas? Well, we choose only sumptuous fabrics, and unsual prints for our umbrellas. Then, we have the fabric commercially treated for water repellency. We are also importing small quantities of truly unique umbrella fabrics from Milan. That's why a [brand name] makes a statement. Dare to be different! We're not for everyone! Are we for you?

How about this?

Whacks just as strong as a steel pipe but it weighs only 1 lb. and 11 oz. (775 g).... Our Unbreakable Umbrella has no unusual parts, no more metal than an average umbrella, it does not arouse suspicion, can be carried legally everywhere where any weapons are prohibited, unlike a walking stick it does not cause strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person, and it does protect from rain. Anyone who can use a stick for defense can use this umbrella.

So, are umbrellas for keeping off the rain? It's becoming increasingly complex, isn't it?

Umbrellas and social norms

How do people feel about umbrellas today? Is using an umbrella more commonsensical than other approaches to dealing with rain? What do people tell each other about umbrellas and rain? To look at this question it is easy: just type in "If it is raining, carry an umbrella" into Google. Evidently this is an issue about which people have questions, because there are "should I use an umbrella" and "do you use an umbrella" questions all over the web.

For example:

When it rains, do you use an umbrella? Or, like me, do you just get wet because it's too much hassle? I just get wet but is not because of the hassle. It is because I love rain and the way it feels when raindrops crash on your skin. The sensation is just amazing, beyond words.

Do you use an umbrella when it rains? There are times, when I do use an umbrella. But there are times, when I don't, for whatever reason. I think that it just depends on the mood that I am in, on that specific day, and such.

Reading through these comments, there is an unmistakable scent of authority and social norming to umbrella carrying. Clearly some people avoid umbrellas to challenge authority, to assert their individuality, and to thumb their nose at the way things are supposed to be done. Here's a quote from a randomly accessed blog:

I have a disdain for umbrellas... You see, I have my own unique way of dealing with what Mother Nature threw at me.

Not carrying an umbrella is associated not only with uniqueness, but with freedom, with the carefree life of childhood. From another blog:

At one point in our lives, we all wanted to play in the rain again. Getting wet, run and splatter each other with those colds drops of water is truly an enjoyable experience. It makes us forget all our problems; all our worries in life; and every inch of the negative emotions inside us are miraculously washed away – even just for a mere period of time.

And another blog post called "Utopia is being able to act like a kid":

All of a sudden, the rain poured and I ran to avoid it. Soon, I stopped, realizing I haven’t been in the rain in a long, long time. Being an adult doesn't mean I need to avoid being wet with a rainfall. I decided to get drenched. A few of my friends and I decided to play soccer in the rain. Although hard-hit by the icy cold rain, I happened to have, for the first time in a long time, one of those times when you feel simply wonderful. Getting lost in a 'mature' world we don’t realize that we are missing the best days of our lives.

At an online poll called "Do you always carry an umbrella?" the results (I get to see them because I voted) are roughly equally distributed between "Yes", "Sometimes," and "No, I always forget." (Note that the "no" vote has a bit of social obligation clinging to it.)

Some people carry umbrellas in a bid to succeed, to do things the right way, to conform, to prove they are "one of us." Their statements, often given as advice, usually include references to authority, conformity and the "proper" way of doing things. The best way to find conforming umbrella statements is to search not for "do you use an umbrella" but "should you use an umbrella" and "how to use an umbrella." When you do that, you find statements like this, from How to Choose An Umbrella at eHow.com:

Everyone needs an umbrella! Whether you're searching for a basic, collapsible rain umbrella or an umbrella with artistic flair, read on to make an educated purchase.

One difficulty is that many of the sites offering authoritative advice on umbrella use sell umbrellas (reference my earlier post on "I am the answer").

Other useful search terms to combine with "umbrella" are "idiot" and "stupid" and "clueless." There's a funny and widely traded picture of former US President George Bush being outsmarted by an umbrella in windy weather that is really cruel in its unfairness. Or, in a random personal blog you find:

I join two fellow ... travelers beneath a tree. The difference between them and me is an umbrella; they've each got one and I don't. I stupidly attempt to shield myself from the rain beneath the tree as the wind shakes more dew upon me than necessary. Really, tree? ... And the bus must be chugging slowly slowly slowly because it's past its prime functioning hours. But it arrives. I probably look like a wet umbrella-less idiot, standing there beneath the tree. My co-travelers must be judging me. I would, even if the situation is comical. 

There are even regional differences in cultural patterns of umbrella use. This article goes into great detail on the myth that people who live in Seattle don't use umbrellas in order to look "in the know." A blog post called "Should guys carry an umbrella" goes into detail on umbrella-related social norms in five cities. (This also points out that the effeminate charge has not disappeared.)

It also turns out there is a lot to know about how to use an umbrella. Believe it or not, "umbrella etiquette" is a term in use. This advanced etiquette web site has a full page on how to use an umbrella in public. Evidently umbrella owners must "learn the dance of the umbrella" -- meaning, don't poke people in the head with your umbrella or drip water onto them. This is evidently very important for short people who are more likely to have problems with umbrella heights and head heights. This funny blog post on "that famous Vancouver rain" says it well:

[L]earn how to use your freaking umbrella. I’ve got news for you…it’s wider than your head, dumbass. Don’t swing the shit around and don’t force people to dodge the stines. And to all you little 4 foot 10 ladies… most everyone on the street is taller than you! Your stupid umbrella is eye level people, and when you swing and bob it around you run the risk of poking some poor sap in the eyeball. Not me, cuz I wear glasses, but someone else. Have a thought for the people around you, please.

If you are not completely sick of umbrellas by now, here and here are two more blog posts that link to new ideas in umbrella design, including: an inflatable model with cloud-shaped bubbles; a hands-free model (not for the claustrophobe); an umbrella that covers sixteen people ("receptions were varied"); one that incorporates a squirt gun for fun or defense; one that lights up and says "don't forget" when you put it on a table; one that locks onto a pole so you can't lose it ("Do not lose your key."); one that incorporates a paintbrush for whimsical mud paintings; one painted like a GPS location dot ("...as if it is saying: 'Hey, I’m right here!'"); the "unbrella," which converts any sheet of flat material, such as a newspaper, to an umbrella-like object; and finally, one that exists only of a sheet of forced air that propels raindrops away from the head (and onto other heads?). Clearly the gargantuan imaginative force of our collective social genius is readily apparent in the world of rain and umbrellas.

Why is rain?  

Now, let's peel off the final layer. What is rain anyway, and what does rain mean, and what does getting wet mean? Does every human being consider keeping dry in the rain a high priority? Is keeping dry in the rain "common sense"? Is it a universal human trait? Does it enter into every village in every corner of every place on earth? This article, on how different cultures view rain, says:

For many in the Western World, rain is viewed as a negative thing. Children's rhymes like Rain Rain Go Away present the depressing rain as a stark contrast to the bright, happy, warming sun. But this way of thinking is not [the] norm for the Eastern World, such as Africa and the Middle East. Due to the agricultural nature of their society, rain is viewed as a soothing, joyful, sometimes beautiful gift. In fact, in drought-ridden Botswana, the word for rain, "pula" is also the name of the currency, which helps to solidify the position of importance rain holds in this agricultural region. 

Judeo-Christians look to the story of Noah to base their beliefs of the negativity of rain. In the story of Noah, God was angry and brought his anger down in the form of forty days and nights of unceasing rain, choosing only to spare the favored family of Noah. The tradition was picked up in Shakespearean literature. For example, the rainstorm in King Lear marked the high point of Lear's madness. Throughout the whole of The Tempest, rain is seen as a negative thing, a sign of trouble. Even in modern weather reports, the negative connotations of rain holds firm. When a storm is on the way, weather reporters sound almost apologetic when bringing this news to us. To be "in the eye of the storm" is to put oneself in great danger. To experience "the calm before the storm" is to know that danger is coming.

Native American culture, again a largely agricultural society, views rain differently. To the Anasazi tribe, rain is a sacred gift from the Rain God. Artwork from the tribe shows the Rain God as a benevolent figure who lovingly bestows rain on his loyal followers.

And so on. One cultural change is that as fewer and fewer people are involved in agriculture, societies view rain as a more negative thing than previously. While the term "rainmaker" retains its positive meaning, it has shifted to refer not to physical rain but to currency (as has "as right as rain"). I've noticed this negativity surrounding rain myself and found it disconcerting. In everyday conversation, people talk about rain as though it is some kind of scourge. But I view rain as a blessing, both because my soil is sandy and drains quickly and because I live in a forest, where the greatest danger is drought and the spectre of forest fire.

All right, all right, I'm done with rain and umbrellas. But as you can see, it's a fascinating exercise to compare these contemporary social negotiations about rain and umbrellas with the audacity of Jonas Hanway "who ventured to dare public reproach and ridicule." What was sensible is now heretical and what was heretical is now sensible. Common sense and heresy have changed places, as they have always done and will continue to do as long as there are people. Will there be umbrellas on the moon? Who knows?

The official story on umbrellas 

Now, here is our final test. After all of that messy, vibrant, funny, very human exploration, here is the entry for "umbrella" in the OpenCyc "common sense" knowledge base:

A mechanical device used for protection against certain elements of nature.

And here are the top three most populous statements in the Open Mind Common Sense database about umbrellas:

1. an umbrella is for protection from the rain
2. an umbrella is for keeping the sun off you
3. an umbrella is a device to protect something 

In comparison to what we've been pondering -- and I'm sure we've only scratched the surface of the place where people and rain and umbrellas come together -- these statements seem like nothing but crude caricatures, jokes, even insults to the immense complexity of human common sense. Well, a joke is one thing, and an insult can be ignored, but I'm afraid things have gone further than that. A mother I know told me that her child "failed" an assessment test for placement in some kind of official educational setting. Can you guess at one of the most critical questions on the test that determined this child's inadequacy? You can see it coming, right? The question was what do you do in the rain. The child's answer? Run. Wrong. Fail. Out of the group.

What I worry about is that Diana Forsythe's warning that "those whose perspectives and practice are not so classified are likely to find their voices muted" is already happening. Attempts to capture human knowledge as a static, narrow, brittle thing are already having an impact on social norms. The saddest thing about that placement test story is that the child did show common sense. Many people do run when it rains. The child's mother does. I do. (I asked my son the same question, out of the blue one day just to see, and his answer was the same.) But the child's response did not match the narrow, brittle, static caricature of common sense that the test makers had entered into the acceptable responses to the question. That's scary.

One of my favorites of Dave Snowden's many metaphors for the complicated-complex distinction is that of a mechanic walking up to an airplane with a toolbox. The complicated airplane doesn't react to the toolbox, no matter how large or authoritative it is. But people do. By the time the mechanic has arrived the human airplane is a whole different machine. It's like we are conducting a giant Heisenberg experiment with human knowledge, and the electrons aren't where they were before. One of the places where this shift in authority is most dangerous is in the area of storytelling. When the official stories become the only stories, our capacity to innovate, our collective imagination, our resilience in the face of change, is reduced. That's what worries me.

In practice

When I write I always imagine a canonical reader who has been collecting or listening to stories and using them to help an organization or community. This reader is not only friendly and approachable (otherwise I couldn't write) but also amazingly tolerant of abundant detail (otherwise I couldn't write). When I say "bear with me" they always respond "No, no -- go on! I'm fascinated!" But my canonical reader does insist on relevance. They want to know how what I am showing them can help them in their pursuit of effective story listening, and they do not tolerate off-topic diversions that never come round to anything in the end. They say things like "What do I care if you are left-handed?" and so on. This section is for you, dear on-topic reader.

Why should you care about case-based reasoning, and knowledge representation, and the aims of people who build robots? For two reasons. First, be aware that formal knowledge representation systems are creeping into all aspects of our lives, with effects both good and ill.

Second, when you collect stories, be aware that you are guaranteed to be attracted to the sweet fruits of simplicity, and that simplistic knowledge representations are among those fruits. Beware of strangers selling simple narrative solutions that reduce stories to lists of goal statements and facts. Reducing stories to one perspective, throwing away messiness and artificially resolving conflicts and paradoxes leads you down the scale of meanings of "common sense" into "I am the world" thinking. A while back I wrote about ways people sabotage their own narrative projects in order to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths. This is one of the ways in which they do it. Sliding down the complexity scale can be as simple as paying more attention to the factual elements of stories, such as location and official roles and subject matter, and less to things like emotion and conflict and confusion. It's also easy to slide down into "just the facts" without meaning to, which is why having an outside eye look over your questions can be helpful.

As I've said above, bridge engineers should be dealing with simplicity and order. But most people who collect stories do so because they need to grapple with complex, messy, social, cultural, emotional and sometimes painful issues. That's what people use stories for. It's where they belong. Moving down the scale of cultural complexity is calm, safe, controlled. It's like using an umbrella in the rain. But if you need to know anything about human beings, you can't find out what you need to know if you aren't willing to get wet.

Spam, spam, verbs and spam

Honestly, I don't know how people do this blogging thing. My thoughts are not blog thoughts. They are not many and short, they are few and long. Every time I try to write a short snappy post it turns into an extended essay. I wonder if blogging can work for all types of thinkers. While some people are moving into microblogging, there should be a place for those of us with slower-moving gears. Maybe if regular blogging (a few paragraphs) is mesoblogging, long and less frequent essay-blogging could be called macroblogging. Or sloth blogging, or elephant blogging, or owl blogging, or something.

Anyway, I'm working on what will probably be a cool blog post (but may equally well end up in the trash) and of course it's long. So here are just two tidbits from last week's post (on narrative divination for sensemaking) that I forgot to say then.

First, I forgot to say that spam is another untapped divination tool. (No, wait, come back!) Of course I agree that spammers deserve a special level of hell where they are forced to eat nothing but their own spam forever. But you have to admit, these spam people certainly have their finger on some kind of pulse. It's amazing how the spam I get tracks my current concerns so well. When I'm worried about money I get more spams about inheritances and lotteries. When I'm worried about my business I get more spams about business offers. When I'm feeling lonely I get spams that say "You haven't called me in a while." When I'm writing software I get spams about software promotion. When I was using, then leaving, Facebook I started getting spams with titles like "You didn't comment on my post." It's uncanny.

So here's a fun thing to do. If you happen to have a spam folder, before you clear it out you can use it for divination. I just tried it. I looked across the room and into the bathroom and remembered that I would someday like to put in a shower instead of that irritatingly useless double sink. (Why in the world do people need two places to wash their hands? Do they use one on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?) I used the ancient look-away-scroll-click divination method and landed on a spam about getting an advanced degree online. Immediately I begin thinking that if I did things to improve my business acumen, I might be able someday to afford that wonderful upstairs shower. And, that if I were to learn more about plumbing, maybe I could reduce the cost. And so on.

If you think about it, spam makes a great narrative database. It's little stories about what somebody thinks you will click on. I'm going to make you rich, I can save your sex life, I'll teach you new things, I need your help disposing of my money. If you mix all those stories together you have something that can trigger sensemaking. The banality of it actually helps with the serendipitous associations. I use the books on my living room shelves in the same way. I think of a vexing situation, then run my eyes over the titles and see what thoughts spring up. It works with lots of collections, as long as they are diverse and thought-provoking. (And yes, I'm aware that book titles are not stories; but the need to be careful about whether things are fully-formed stories or just references to or fragments of stories varies with the context of use.)

This leads into the second point I forgot to make before. There are two ways to get an answer to a question: the noun way and the verb way.

The noun way of getting an answer is, well, being given an answer. A noun. A measurement, a fact, a pixel of information. The length of the Amazon river is 4,132 miles. The noun way is the best approach when dealing with the known and knowable (or simple and complicated) side of things.

Usually. Mostly. From the Wikipedia page on the world's longest rivers:

The length of a river is very hard to calculate. It depends on the identification of the source, the identification of the mouth, and the scale of measurement of the river length between source and mouth. As a result, the length measurements of many rivers are only approximations. In particular, there has long been disagreement as to whether the Amazon or the Nile is the world's longest river.

The verb way of getting an answer is not getting an answer, but going through a process that nudges your thoughts into new patterns that would not have been possible otherwise. Narrative divination, and most sensemaking, is a verb way of getting an answer. It's the harder way, but when the things you want to think about are complex, the verb way is the most valuable. The verb way relies on analogy, indirection, diversity, assumption breaking, perspective shift, serendipity, and yes, even a bit of spam-like absurdity.

The noun and verb ways are not mutually exclusive: you can do both at once. Sometimes one will lead into the other, as my grab-a-topic-at-random search for the length of the Amazon river did. (Who knew river length was a political topic?) It's probably best to maintain an open mind and try both options in all situations rather than decide on either a priori. When you are seeking an answer, try mixing up your nouns and verbs.

That's a bite-sized post, I hope.

From the Island of Misfit Story Ideas: Narrative divination for sensemaking

I'm working on that promised post about preserving natural storytelling (note to self: never again end a post with "the next post will be about..."). It's stewing.

In the interim here is another visitor from the island of misfit story ideas. As before this is something I've been playing with in my mind for a decade but have not done anything with, mainly because this one is hard to explain.

Ancient connections

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient divination system and book of wisdom which forms one of the cornerstones of Taoism. The basic idea of the I Ching is that all of the complexity of the universe - encompassing all of the "ten thousand things" of multiplicative reality (ten thousand being the ancient way of saying "billions and billions") - can be represented by 64 six-bit combinations of no/yes, yin/yang, receptive/creative conditions. This includes all scales of reality, from the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the earth, and human society, down to your life, your relationships, your personality, and your needs at any moment of your life. When you throw the coins or cast the yarrow stalks, that action enters into the totality of the situation of the moment, and that in-the-universe-right-now connection - what Jung termed "synchronicity" - leads you to the pattern, or hexagram (six bit settings), that best describes the totality of the moment. Since the totality of the moment includes the situation on your mind when you threw the coins or sticks, the hexagram is relevant to that situation. In a sense the I Ching is a cosmic database query engine.

Why in the world am I explaining this? Because there are two things about the I Ching (and Tarot and Ifá and many, though not all, other forms of divination) that make them worth bringing up here. The first is their utility for sensemaking, and the second is their narrative nature.

A few examples ... sort of

Now here is a funny story. In order to illustrate the use of the I Ching for sensemaking, I thought I'd take you through a simple divination session. First I tried taking as my situation the fact that I was writing this blog post about this topic. The texts I found ... brought out my mixed feelings about writing on this topic. Brought them out a little too well. Of course I'm aware that some might see this topic as weird or irrelevant (what, are crystals next?), and let's just say the word "guile" came up. I wrote about it, I rewrote it, I deleted it.

So I tried again. I thought, better to choose a situation that is unimportant, silly, fun. I fixed on the treehouse my son and I keep talking about building. An innocent topic, I thought, but again the result was too good to talk about in public. Essentially, the I Ching (I always find myself thinking of it like a person) reminded me that there is no end to the ways a parent can fail a child.

Finally, casting about for some way to illustrate my point without exposing my deepest fears, I started looking around the room at objects of no importance. I looked out of the window at the snow falling onto tree branches, and decided to consult the I Ching on nothing but that simple image. But a third time, the answer cut too deeply into my feelings - about who I am, where I live, and why I live there - to talk about in public. 

Ironically, my little divination exercise proved exactly the point I wanted to prove, but not in the way I had imagined proving it. So all I can say is, it works well enough that I can't show you how well it works.

What works and what matters

Do I really mean "it works?" Are the results of divination systems such as the I Ching actually appropriate? Does it actually mean anything that the first words I found, after looking out the window at snow on branches, were "Wood is below, water above"? Probably not (though all good scientists retain a sense of possibility, if not probability). But when our purpose is sensemaking, the question of whether divination "works" in the narrow sense is beside the point. The practical fact is that ancient divination systems were and are excellent (and, lately, untapped) tools for contemporary sensemaking. If we throw out the baby of utility with the bathwater of belief, it's our loss.

Webster's dictionary says divination is:

1 : the art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers

2 : unusual insight : intuitive perception

The first meaning let us leave aside (though discovering hidden knowledge is fair game); the second, let us explore.

How does divination help with sensemaking? Well, look at how I described my use of the I Ching above. I said it brought out my feelings, reminded me, and cut deeply into my feelings. All of the imagery in those words is about bringing previously hidden things to the forefront. This is an essential element of most sensemaking, to start talking to the elephants who are (and have always been) standing in the room with us. It also links to seeing ourselves anew from the other side of the mirror and to exploring what makes us tick.

It's full of stories

The second amazing thing about many divination systems is that they are made out of stories. If you read any of the "judgments" or "images" in the I Ching, they are essentially tiny stories. For example, from the hexagram I got when I thought about writing this blog post, and taking some liberties with concatenation, we get this lovely piece of narrative poetry:

In the abyss one falls into a pit.
Misfortune.
The abyss is dangerous.
One should strive to attain small things only.

Forward and backward, abyss on abyss.
In danger like this, pause at first and wait,
Otherwise you will fall into a pit in the abyss.

A jug of wine, a bowl of rice with it;
Earthen vessels
Simply handed in through the Window.
There is certainly no blame in this.

Bound with cords and ropes,
Shut in between thorn-hedged prison walls:
For three years one does not find the way.
Misfortune.

Water flows on uninterruptedly and reaches its goal.
Thus the superior man walks in lasting virtue
And carries on the business of teaching.

I'm not going to interpret this - surely you can understand its messages well enough - but a story is being told here. In each of the texts of the I Ching - some encouraging, some warning - stories are being told. Some sections are not full stories, but when they are not, they allude to elements which can be combined to make stories. The image of "crossing the great water," for example, comes up often in the I Ching, as does the "superior man." These are archetypal images which in combination produce narratives, supporting pattern-matching at the level of collective sensemaking throughout society and throughout the ages.

Ifá divination is practiced in some parts of West Africa, usually by experienced diviners. Ifá is similar to the I Ching in the sense of involving indexes into a book of wisdom stories, many of which are condensed folk tales. I have a handy copy of the Ifá texts right here on my bookshelf (at least the version packaged for foreigners). I have no idea how to look up the situation I am facing, so I'll just choose a page at random (which may or may not come to the same thing):

Ifá says that a visitor is coming; we should take good care of him lest his kindness and goodness pass us by, because the visitor brings something that can benefit us.

Again, a story with a message. (Actually, that is part of a much longer story, but it's too long to type in here.) The Ifá texts in the book I have are much more obviously drawn from folk tales than the I Ching, but that may be an artifact of the way the book was collected and written down. Also, when stories survive for several millenia, details fall away.

I don't know much about Tarot, but I gather that the cards are essentially story elements - characters, situations, dilemmas. Again, this is a tool for narrative sensemaking. Not all divination systems (and there are hundreds) involve stories, but I'd venture a guess that the longest-lasting and most widespread do. Even such things as divination by weather patterns or bird flights involve stories - it was rainy and then it turned sunny; the flock veered and then dispersed. Divination through dreams is also a narrative method.

Your own book of wisdom

Now, how does this all relate to organizational and community narrative? You might guess where I am going. Let us compare:

Divination systems make use of a collection of stories and story elements derived from collective experience. A diviner extracts combinations from this collection and applies them to current situations about which someone needs to discover hidden knowledge, improve intuitive perception, and derive unusual insight.

~

When you collect stories about a topic or situation, or from a group of people, and when you do sensemaking exercises that produce constructs of collective meaning, you create a collection of stories and story elements derived from collective experience. You can extract combinations from this collection and apply them to current situations about which you need to discover hidden knowledge, improve intuitive perception, and derive unusual insight.

Just for fun, I tried a little experiment and pulled up some random stories from the project I last worked on, thinking again about the situation of this post I am writing. Almost immediately I happened upon a story about people being overrun with conflicting demands. Uncannily, this happened at almost precisely the same moment as my husband opened my office door, and as I simultaneously realized I had promised to finish this post and come back to Mommying a half hour ago. Again, the divination system revealed hidden knowledge about the situation of writing a blog as the mother of a small child.

(As Ursula K. le Guin wrote in Tehanu, in one of my favorite there-I-am moments:

And she went on, pondering the indifference of a man towards the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one's freedom meant another's unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking.)

Upping the wisdom

You might argue that a simple set of stories collected from real people today can't compete for sensemaking quality with the concentrated wisdom of the I Ching or Ifá or Tarot. I agree. Using raw stories for divination is going to result in more misfires, in the sense of stories being irrelevant to the situation at hand or just not very eye-opening. But there are ways to improve the divination-worthiness of a story collection. Here are a few ideas to wisdom-up your collection, in no particular order.

Add some purpose to your randomness. Use answers to questions about stories to extract those relevant to the situation at hand. This ensures relevance, but it is also a risky technique because it can be easily manipulated, sometimes without knowing it, to confirm assumptions and circumvent effective sensemaking. Still, there are ways to increase relevance while still allowing some serendipity. For example, if I want to read stories about passion, I might select those rated high on a passion scale, but I usually sample two or three times as many as I need and rearrange the selection randomly.

Screen out the no-shows. In any collection of stories collected from real people there are what I call no-shows, meaning the respondents didn't respond. They just got through the exercise so they could tick the box or get their candy bar or whatever. There are ways to remove those and to pull out only the stories most likely to be useful for divination. For example, only using stories with a text length of 500 characters (or an audio length of two minutes) removes all the too-short non-stories (although this could also remove some gems - sample to find out). You can also look for words of emotion, like "to my surprise" and "I discovered" and "stormed" and "screamed" and things like that. In general, the idea is that by doing some careful screening, you can use only the parts of your collection that show the most promise of being useful for divination. (Self-delusion warning: this also can be used to screen out challenges to current belief.)

Mix in disruptors. One of my favorite things to do, if a story collection is to be used for group sensemaking, is to mix in some stories that didn't come from the group of interest. To give an example, when preparing a story collection for a project on leadership, we added to the mix (of stories told by employees) some stories from old newspapers and historical accounts about famous leaders in a range of industries and ages. These were indexed by the same questions as the contemporary stories and appeared intermixed with them. When people encountered stories about themselves with stories about Lincoln and Napoleon and Keller, it got their minds moving in new directions.

Mix in abstractions. If you have collected some stories and derived abstractions from them - emergent constructs, usually - you can create some new, more abstract stories and mix those in. For example, it is useful after deriving some personifications to have people tell stories from their points of view. How did the "Independent free-thinker" see the recent company takeover? How did the "Money-is-power-monger" see it? Sometimes it is useful to set up stories where personifications confront emergent situations or values or themes. The "Pencil-pushing bureaucrat" might find herself in the "Blasted landscape," or the "Passionate perfectionist" might find himself talking to people who believe that "Life is a funny game." The stories that come out of those exercises are about the same things as the "raw" stories are, but they operate at a higher level of abstraction. Mixing those in with the raw stories creates a stronger divination base.

Add commentaries. One of the most useful aspects of the I Ching is its commentaries, a palimpsest of annotations added over the ages to each text. These bounce your ideas around some more after you encounter the basic "judgments" and "images" of the main text. In your story collection, answers to questions about stories serve as commentaries. If stories can be interpreted by multiple people, perhaps from different perspectives, it adds to the sensemaking utility.

Add transitions. The I Ching is called the Book of Changes because it is all about change. In addition to looking up the situation of the moment, you also look up what that situation might change to. This transition creates an expansion on the original sensemaking by helping people think about ways in which the situation might transform over time or as the result of actions. You can support such simulated transformations by incorporating transition links into your story collection. For example, something as simple as looking at other stories told by the same respondent, or by other people who answered questions in the same way, can give you additional insights. Your story collection might even contain answers to follow-up questions in which respondents were asked to describe the situation at a year's remove, say, or after some problem was resolved. Juxtaposing then-and-now stories can provide this element of transition and increase the potential for insight creation.

Poeticize. One of the reasons the I Ching works so well for sensemaking is that its essential texts are sparse and ambiguous. Poetic abstraction allows the stories and metaphors to pivot round to address many different purposes and needs. By poeticizing stories - that is, by removing detail and adding ambiguity - you can make your story collection work in the same way. There are two methods for poeticizing. First, you can simply ask your storytellers, in a question about their story, to render it as a short poem, a haiku perhaps, with oblique, ambiguous references and metaphorical displacement. If that is too difficult a task for your storytellers or you think they will refuse, you can do the poeticizing in a second step. Distribute the stories to people, ideally in the group of interest but at least strongly related to them, and have each person write short poetic versions of each. It is best if each story is rendered poetic by at least two people to increase diversity. Then the main texts of your narrative divination become the poems, and the stories with their details become commentaries. This is likely to increase the utility of your book of wisdom to aid sensemaking in a variety of situations.

Using your wisdom

How should you use narrative divination for sensemaking? Just the same way you might use the I Ching or any other divination method. In a group or alone, set yourself a situation to think about. Then select a story, either randomly or partially so. After reading the story, open things up and brainstorm freely about the associations the story brings up. Then distill the sensemaking to concentrated insights. Think of transitions. If they aren't already in the story collection, come up with some during the exercise. What might happen? What would happen in the best of all possible worlds? In the worst? What issues have come up? What feelings have been invoked? What conflicts are apparent? Have any elephants spoken up? Then think of another situation and go round again. Gather what you have learned, and see what you can make of it.

This kind of sensemaking has been taking place from huts to palaces for at least five thousand years. It's still as useful as it ever was. We have just forgotten how to do it.

It's not a puzzle; it's a piece of a puzzle

Those who have been reading this blog will know that I have long been puzzling over the relationship between the naturally occurring little-s story and the packaged, purposeful big-S Story in contemporary society. In particular, I keep coming back to this essential question: Why do people almost universally assume that recounting their own personal experiences does not constitute telling a story?

So I've been going on a little journey of discovery in the past few months, following my nose through the literature and the internet in the service of this question. I've come to a new realization about the question and I think you might want to hear about it.

We are all unqualified

Let me explain the progression of my thoughts on this. I started by thinking about what I had said to Kathy Hansen last year about this issue:

I don't think people have lost the ability to tell stories as much as they have lost the expectation that it is their place to tell stories. I don’t know how many times I've heard people balk at being asked to tell stories because they don't think their stories are good enough to be "real stories."

At that time I put the italics on expectation, but lately I've thinking more and more about the word place. I've seen many people respond with something akin to fear when I've asked them to tell stories. It was as though I was asking them to cut out a tumor or build a skyscraper. They seem to react as if they were unqualified to tell stories. I've been puzzled by this reaction every time.

The division of labor

So then I started thinking about what it means to feel that one has a "place" or doesn't, and what leads one to be qualified or not, and this led to thinking about specialization. So I started looking up narrative and specialization to see if anyone was putting those terms together. Then, through the magic of imperfect search results, I fell into some articles about the division of labor.

This was an unexpected connection. The term "division of labor," for me, conjures up the booming-voice 60s education guy saying something like, "As man learned to divide his labor, the weaving to the weaver, the pottery to the potter, his quality of life increased and progress was achieved," and so on, yada yada. So I went on a little journey through what has been said about the division of labor.

I'll just throw out a few tidbits to give you some context. Plato was one of the first division-of-labor fans:

[A]ll things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.

Adam Smith had these nice words to say about specialization:

It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labor, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.

Hume chimed in:

By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability encreases: And by mutual succour we are less expos'd to fortune and accidents. 'Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous.

The dark side

On the other hand, Rousseau pointed out the tendency of specialization to lead to unfairness:

[A]s long as they [people] applied themselves to tasks that took no more than one person to perform them ... their lives were free, healthy, happy and good for as long as their nature would allow.... But the moment one man needed the help of another; when someone perceived it was useful to have the tools of two men; then equality disappeared. Property was introduced, work became necessary, and the vast forests were changed into glowing fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, where one could soon see slavery and misery germinating and ripening along with the crops.

He also said (I cannot find a direct link for this quote, but it is quoted in this interesting paper):

Thus [as division of labor becomes established] does natural inequality imperceptibly manifest itself along with contrived inequality; and thus do the differences among men, developed by those of circumstances, become more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and begin to have a proportionate influence over the fate of individuals.

I like the phrase contrived inequality. It reminds me of how people think their stories are unequal to "real" stories, but the difference is contrived, artificial.

Even Adam Smith had reservations about the division of labor:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. ... But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in a civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people.

Invention is kept alive. That phrase more than any other made me think of what I've been seeing related to storytelling. It brings back that moment sitting with my mouth open staring at the advertisement (wish I could find it again) I saw in the doctor's waiting room. It was in a magazine called Parents or Parenting (or Your Kid or some such thing), and it said something like "We have all faced the problem of having our child ask for a story and coming up blank." And then it went on to try and sell you "story cards" that took that horrid task away from you. First, what's the point of being a parent if you can't make up stories for your kids? And second, can people really not make up silly stories for their kids? The requirements are minimal, and by the time the requirements increase kids start making up their own stories.

By the way, Smith's answer to the problem of dehumanization, which he elsewhere says amounts to "mental mutilation," is to force the "inferior ranks of people" into constant military-style education. (He doesn't seem to consider that the costs of carrying out and enforcing this solution might wipe out the "civilized" gains in productivity created by the division of labor.)

Then we get to Marshall Sahlins, who churned up the soil by suggesting that primitive, non-specialized, hunter-gatherer tribes were and are the original affluent society. In his seminal paper on this topic, he quotes the anthropologist Lorna Marshall (the parenthesized comment is, I think, Sahlins'):

Except for food and water (important exceptions!) of which the Nyae Nyae Kung have a sufficiency - but barely so, judging from the fact that all are thin though not emaciated - they all had what they needed or could make what they needed, for every man can and does make the things that men make and every woman the things that women make... They lived in a kind of material plenty because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay in abundance around them and which were free for anyone to take (wood, reeds, bone for weapons and implements, fibres for cordage, grass for shelters). or to materials which were at least sufficient for the needs of the population.

(He then goes on to say that even of food and water most hunter-gatherer tribes have enough most of the time, which is probably better than too much all of the time - visit any American mall if you question that.)

There is also the idea that garden-of-eden stories, which are widespread in many cultures, refer to the original affluence of hunting and gathering, before agriculture and the division of labor took hold. This is an idea popularized by the novel Ishmael, which is on my "really should have read years ago" list. This is the part in Genesis about "by the sweat of your brow" and "you shall eat the plants of the field." Scientific evidence confirms that

Contrary to what we would intuitively expect, fossil evidence confirms the conjecture that human health went into a serious decline with the advent of agriculture.

What it comes down to is that there are two competing stories being told. One is that we were saved by the division of labor; the other is that we were condemned by it. Both have been told for a very long time, so probably both are true. I love reading folk tales, and as I've read through compilations of them I've come across both versions of the story. In a Dutch folktale I encountered the magical wild boars who showed the people how to till the soil and plant seeds, from which saving agriculture was born. However, in other stories there have been unmistakeable references to the plenty of foraging and the hardships of agriculture. One thing I've noticed is that the saving-agriculture stories seem to appear more often in places that have winter, and the condemning-agriculture stories seem to appear more often in places that don't. That's just a hunch, but it makes sense.

The division of ... life itself

So, what does all this division-of-labor stuff have to do with people telling stories? Stay with me. While exploring the division of labor, I started to find mentions of the division of labor spreading outside of labor into what was previously not known as labor but as simply being alive. It turns out a lot has been written and said about this division-creep, which is variously called the commodification, commercialization, monetization, privatization, or specialization of everyday life. And here is where things start to connect to storytelling. The main authors in this area are Marx, Lefebre, Boudrillard and de Bord. (And before anyone says I'm a blundering amateur as far as political philosophy goes, I'll cut you off by saying: yep, I know it.) From de Bord:

Through its industrial production this society has emptied the gestures of work of all meaning. And no model of human behaviour has retained any real relevance in everyday life. This society tends to atomize people into isolated consumers and to prohibit communication.

According to de Bord, we know that our everyday lives have been impoverished by too much specialization, but we put that painful thought away from us:

Awareness of the profound richness and energy abandoned in everyday life is inseparable from awareness of the poverty of the dominant organization of this life. The awareness of this untapped richness leads to the contrasting definition of everyday life as poverty and as prison; which in turn leads to the repression of the whole problem.

These are precisely the terms in which I have been talking about natural storytelling - that the richness of everyday storytelling has been leaching away. A quote in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre by Goonewardena et al. caught my eye:

Marx describes the worker's feeling of "indifference" toward a specific type of work, which cannot provide him or her with personal identity any more.

That reminds me of how people have reacted when I ask them to tell me a story - with indifference, as though telling stories is "not their thing." Something other, alien, different. Something that does not provide us with our personal identities - any more.

Okay, so let's move on. As I was reading through all this, things started to click in my mind about everyday life and specialization. I like reading old novels, as I've said before, and it's simply amazing all the things people assumed everyone knew how to do back then. I was listening to Robinson Crusoe Written Anew For Children from Librivox with my son, and I came across an amazing juxtaposition. Crusoe says this:

So I set to work. I had never handled a tool in my life. But I had a saw, an ax, and several hatchets; and I soon learned to use them all.

He has set himself up as ignorant in the land of tools. But here's the thing. In the chapter before that statement, he said this:

One morning I saw an old goat feeding in the valley with a kid by her side. I crept along among the rocks in such a way that she did not see me. When I was close enough, I raised my gun and fired. [gruesome details] The flesh of these two goats lasted me a long time; for I did not eat much meat, and I still had many of the biscuits that I had saved from the ship.

About a month later I shot at a young goat and lamed it. I caught it and carried it home, dressed its wounded leg, and fed it. Its leg was soon as well and as strong as ever. The little animal became quite tame and followed me everywhere I went. I thought how fine it would be if I could have a whole flock of such creatures. Then I would be sure of food when my powder and shot were gone.

So being able to prepare and load a musket, creep up on a goat, kill it with a single shot, skin it, dry the hide (he mentions that elsewhere, in passing), cook the meat, tend a wound, tame a kid goat, feed it, and contemplate taking care of a whole herd of such creatures qualifies as - never having handled a tool in his life? And being able to do these things is so commonplace as to be not worth mentioning? To children? How many adults today could do any of this? How did he even know what to feed the goat? Was there Goat Chow there?

I've come across many other examples like this. People talk about making butter and cheese and soap and cloth the way we talk about making lasagna. We might make the dishes, but people back then made the ingredients. People assumed that many, many things we have no idea how to do today were so commonplace, so ordinary, so everyday, that they need not be mentioned. Another similar experience was when I was reading something in Gogol and I came across a passage - I can't find it again - in which he mentioned a mountain ash tree, in the same way you or I would say "Google," as though everyone would instantly understand why he mentioned it in that context. I only discovered such a tree exists last summer when I found some in my yard and figured out what they were. The point is, people used to know different things than we know now. And one of them was how to tell stories.

Buying cooking, buying grief

Still with me? Okay, just a few more threads to pull together here. After I read all this stuff about everyday life and division-creep, I started looking for other references to the division of labor and everyday life, or the privatization or commodification of everyday life. And of course, mentions started popping up all over, the same way every single house has a new roof when you need one. I'll confine myself to only two examples (see, I'm trying).

Recently, Michael Pollan published an article on how people have stopped cooking and are just watching people cook on television. I had to laugh as I realized that his questing after the reason people are turning cooking into a spectator sport paralleled my own explorations so perfectly. For example:

The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit. It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances....

And:

Maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on TV is that there are things about cooking we miss. We might not feel we have the time or the energy to do it ourselves every day, yet we’re not prepared to see it disappear from our lives entirely. Why? Perhaps because cooking — unlike sewing or darning socks — is an activity that strikes a deep emotional chord in us, one that might even go to the heart of our identity as human beings.

Sound familiar? Might telling each other stories go to the heart of our identity as human beings? Homo narrans and all that?

In The Careless Society: Community And Its Counterfeits, John McKnight examines the takeover of public bereavement and other traditional community functions by well-meaning service professionals. To do this he makes a wonderful extended soil-science-based metaphor (a man after my own heart). According to McKnight, the Wisconsin prairie had "provided maize, beans, and squash for the [native] Sauk people for generations reaching back into unrecorded time." When the European settlers came, their iron plows could not till the prairie soil, until John Deere invented a steel "sodbuster" plow that could slice through prairie grasses. The sodbuster opened up the prairie, but the Europeans didn't know how to take care of the soil and quickly depleted it.

It took the Europeans and their new technology just one generation to make their homeland into a desert. The Sauk Indians, who knew how to sustain themselves on the Sauk Prairie, were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation. And even they forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them on the prairie for generations. And that is how it was that three deserts were created - Wisconsin, the reservation, and the memories of a people.

McKnight then likens that story to the invasion of a new sodbuster, the professional service of bereavement counseling.

It is a tool forged at the great state university, an innovative technique to meet the needs of those experiencing the death of a loved one, a tool that can "process" the grief of the people who now live on the Prairie of the Sauk.

In the traditional ways,

The bereaved are joined by neighbors and kin. They meet grief together in lamentation, prayer, and song. They call upon the words of the clergy and surround themselves with community. It is in these ways that they grieve and then go on with life. Through their mourning they are assured of the bonds between them and renewed in the knowledge that this death is a part of the past and the future of the people on the Prairie of the Sauk. Their grief is common property, an anguish from which the community draws strength and which gives it the courage to move ahead.

The sodbuster of counseling starts quietly, assuring people that it has come to help. But as the authority of service becomes more and more dominant, it displaces the natural process of communal grieving:

Finally, one day the aged father of a local woman will die. And the next-door neighbor will not drop by because he doesn't want to interrupt the bereavement counselor. The woman's kin will stay home because they will have learned that only the bereavement counselor knows how to process grief in the proper way. The local clergy will seek technical assistance from the bereavement counselor to learn the correct form of service to deal with guilt and grief. And the grieving daughter will know that it is the bereavement counselor who really cares for her, because only the bereavement counselor appears when death visits this family on the Prairie of the Sauk.

Doesn't want to interrupt. Only the professional knows how. The proper way. Technical assistance. The correct form. Who really cares. This sounds exactly like how people react when I ask them to tell me stories.

The result is devastating:

It will be only one generation between the time the bereavement counselor arrives and the disappearance of the community of mourners. The counselor's new tool will cut through the social fabric, throwing aside kinship, care, neighborly obligations, and community ways of coming together and going on. Like John Deere's plow, the tools of bereavement counseling will create a desert where a community once flourished.

The protector is unprotected

Now here is the saddest irony of all. McKnight counts stories as one of the things that supports genuine rather than "counterfeit" community (along with collective effort, capacity, informality, celebration and tragedy):

In universities, people know through studies. In businesses and bureaucracies, people know by reports. In communities, people know by stories. These community stories allow people to reach back into their common history and their individual experience of knowledge about truth and direction for the future.

Professionals and institutions often threaten the stories of community by urging community people to count up things rather than communicate. Successful community associations resist efforts to impose the foreign language of studies and reports because it is a tongue that ignores their own capacities and insights. Whenever communities come to believe that their common knowledge is illegitimate, they lose their power and professionals and systems rapidly invade their social place.

Here I am connecting these threads of specialization to the decline of community storytelling... and it turns out that countering increasing specialization relies on community storytelling! Is that not tragic? Is that not alarming? In the ecosystem of community survival, storytelling is not just a cute koala. It's the keystone species that holds the whole system together. And it's in danger.

This fascinating audio program put together by George King and Associates explores the issue of the decline of community storytelling. There isn't a transcript, so I just typed in a bit of it as I heard it (note that two or three voices are mixed here):

Is there a family storyteller anymore? Well. We are told stories by professionals. Instead of having, as there was in the old old days, ordinary people singing and dancing and writing for themselves, we have slipped into a world in which everything is done by experts and by stars and by so-called spokespeople. They don't speak for me most of the time, and I do not think I am alone in this. I think I am one of the alienated multitudes.

Note the phrase "slipped into." We did not plan this state of affairs, and few would choose it. But we have it now. At the very least we should begin to be more aware of it.

Poverty and wealth

So there you go. People not telling each other stories, and people thinking they have no stories to tell, is no longer a puzzle to me. It's a piece of a bigger puzzle. It's not just that we aren't telling each other stories. We aren't doing anything we used to do anymore. We are outsourcing our lives.

Now, I'll wrap up this journey with two stories about my own stupidity (always a font of abundance) and one about the way I think community storytelling was once and should be again. I tell these stories about my stupidity because I think they actually have very little do with me and a lot to do with our society.

The first story started innocuously enough. I was washing my hair, and I used the last dregs of a bottle of shampoo. As I put the shampoo bottle down, a thought jumped into my head, unbidden. The thought was:

There. That's taken care of. That's done.

And then the rest of my brain said: What? What did you just say? I had just represented consuming something, using something up, to myself, as an accomplishment. I've pondered over that consumption-as-accomplishment incident for a while now. Shouldn't the accomplishment be making the shampoo stretch as long as possible? Shouldn't using up a bottle of shampoo be a failure, or at least an unpleasant fact of life, instead of an accomplishment? Have you ever caught yourself congratulating yourself on using something up? Isn't that creepy?

The next stupidity story is about the door mouse. As an older parent I was more susceptible than most to the you-are-a-bad-parent magazines and catalogs that flood the mailboxes and consciences of new parents. So I bought everything I thought I should have, and covered the house with plastic barriers and locks and safeguards of every sort. One of the things I bought was a "door mouse," a little plastic-foam thing you put on a door so that if it happens to get slammed it will not crush tiny fingers. Thinking, ooooooh, must protect those tiny fingers, I bought two of these idiotic things and placed them on the doors between rooms.

The door mice were beyond useless. They got in the way so much that they caused more danger than a simple slamming of doors could have. In fact, as I realized (too late), it's actually important for little kids to find out that doors slam. They need to know that about the world, and parents need to show them that.

So then the next wave of the catalog invasion comes, and I'm looking at it and trying to be dutiful, and suddenly a wave of understanding washes over me. This is not the things you need when you are a new parent. This is the things people think they can get you to buy when you are a new parent.

Now, I am not a stupid person generally. I read things, I converse with data, I consider myself a scientist. Why in the world did I think what was in a catalog was what I needed? Here is yet one more quote from McKnight's Careless Society book, describing the first assumption of the professional takeover of the personal (his italics):

As you are the problem, the assumption is that I, the professional servicer, am the answer. You are not the answer. Your peers are not the answer. The political, social, and economic environment is not the answer. Nor is it possible that there is no answer. I, the professional, am the answer.

I, the catalog, am the answer.

After the door-mouse incident, my attitude toward this assumption was fundamentally altered. I began to see catalogs and advertisements not as helpers and information sources, but as supplicants, petitioners - beggars, even. The information and support they provide is counterfeit. In fact, they need us more than we need them. When you look at it that way, when you start to see the producers of the things you buy as hangers-on to your life, the whole dynamic changes and you start to notice things you hadn't seen before.

For example, I started inventing things, discovering things. Here's one. Guess what you need to keep your house clean? Vinegar, baking soda, soap, and lemons. Amazingly, it all works pretty well. I've also realized that most things you buy for your house are interchangeable. You can use dog shampoo on people and people shampoo on dogs. You can use bubble bath on your hair and shampoo in your bath. Dog shampoo makes pretty good sink cleaner. Dish soap makes great hand soap. And it goes on and on.

One of my greatest discoveries was my new absolute, hands-down, best cleaner for an old grungy real-linoleum floor. Ready? Bubbles. Kids' bubbles. We were blowing bubbles in the kitchen and making a mess, and then when I went to clean it up, lo and behold, the floor there was cleaner than it had been in a year. I took out all of the tried-and-failed experiments I'd used to prolong the life of the ugly old floor - you know, all the neon-colored liquids in bottles with pictures of patronizing, condescending experts, or glowing examples of what you yourself might be like if you use their product - and gave them a square of linoleum each to work their magic. The bubbles won by a mile. So now when I want the kitchen floor extra clean, I get out the bubbles. (And you can make your own bubbles, too, and a lot cheaper than "real" bubbles.)

Now look at this quote from Adam Smith again:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

It was only when I stopped performing the "few simple operations" I was told to do by the specialized world that I started finding occasion to exert my understanding and exercise my invention. And I'd say not being able to clean your house or take care of your child without a commercial entity telling you what to do is... as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (I can say that because it's me I'm talking about. But it's not just me I'm talking about, it's us.)

Now for the counterpoint, and the last bit of this very long essay (no point calling it a "post" at this point).

I was poking around the web reading about "uncontacted peoples" (no reason) and I came across this fascinating story. The anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya knew the Ongee people, who live on Little Andaman island near India, and worried about them during the 2004 tsunami. A year later he finally talked to an Ongee elder, who told him, as he relates in this article:

Why do you get so concerned? Earth tremors are frequent, you should know, you have lived with us long enough in the forest to know that... it is just a thing that happens again and again, its just that on the day when giyangejebey (tsunami) came, the water went away from the land very quickly and like the breathing-in-and-out-of-the-body the sea water had to come back very rapidly and in a big way! We saw the water and knew that more land would soon become covered with sea and angry spirits would descend down to hunt us away.

Note how he says "frequent." He doesn't mean frequent in his lifetime, he means frequent in the lifetime of the Ongee. Would anyone in our contemporary societies say that? Could we?

The article goes on to describe how the Ongee had an elaborate ritual in place, presumably for centuries, by which they dealt with periodic disasters. In other words, they have a real, working collective memory. Says Pandya:

So unlike the settlers the Ongee did not wait to wonder at the earth quake, which to them is a normal order of nature, but they did take their cue from the daily observation of water levels. According to most of the non-tribal residents of Little Andamans, the earth quake was experienced around 8 in the morning but the 6 to 9 meter high waves in two spurts came nearly 30 minutes after the tremor. Many lives were lost because they were looking at the damage done by the tremor, oblivious of the killer waves coming behind. The Ongees say that "if the water goes away quickly it will rush back even more and with greater speed as the good spirits want to provide the order to the sea and forest on which their descendent Ongees depend". What we rely on is installed 'scientific' instruments to record the abnormal tremor but Ongees maintain a record of the normal water level to signal the start of abnormal phenomena - a different way to organize the knowledge and systematize observations.

Now, please place those two stories next to each other in your mind: my door mouse realization and the Ongee reaction to the tsunami. I've been doing it, and it's painful. It's more than painful, it's frightening. If the Ongee are feasting at a narrative banquet, we are subsisting on gruel. (Or maybe "edible foodlike substances.") And we are supposed to be the ones who know things.

My dad always says "You pays your money and you takes your choice." We've paid our money, and we've taken our choice. But is this really what we want? When I explained to my six-year-old son what I was writing about, he said, "Well, of course we need to put it back the way it was."

The next post will be about things I think will help to put things back, and hopeful signs.