The power of story

As I watch aspects of the modern world crumbling before our eyes (financial system, bombs in Pakistan and yet more famine in the Horn of Africa, for example), I wonder why it is that the most noble of statements of modern history, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, carries so little real power in the minds of the millions and billions of citizens whom it was designed to protect.

Most probably, the real reason is that these are the very earliest days of building the myth-making narrative power that it needs to have to become internalised. When a powerful story is internalised, we use it unconsciously and collectively. The most powerful stories and myths have colourful and heroic characters, costumes and rituals, adventure, victories and defeats, deaths and resurrections, grand spiritual themes and overtones, righteous certainties, identifiable enemies, great injustices, sacrificial love.

Of the last of these, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi (name your hero here) would doubtless qualify as warriors fighting injustice. But before humanity's knee-jerk responses become healthy and sustaining, there needs to be a whole library of art forms to supply the concrete metaphoric structure that switches on people's story circuits and makes them see, provides them an epiphany moment after which consciousness shifts irrevocably.

So come on writers, poets, artists, musicians, creatives of all persuasions, cultures and ages. Our sovereign ideas need a much more glorious wardrobe.