Is Our Awakening the End of Our Storytelling?

Narrative is our main way of making sense of life, but that’s only one way to relate.

Photo by Liana Mikah on Unsplash

The most memorable class I took in college was called “Narrative and Human Rights.” It was a literature class, technically, focused on analyzing the way we talk about human rights across time and space, and how that changes what we understand human rights to be. I remember that class because it was the first time anyone taught me about the more meta-level of consciousness: looking not at the meanings of things, but at the process by which we make meaning.

There are all kinds of ways we make meaning. The topic of meaning-making can get esoteric to the point of uselessness, but the process by which we make meaning has very important real-world impacts.

Take gender, for example. Gender is a way humans in various cultures have made meaning out of biological sex. We observe a certain fact — a baby’s genitalia at birth— and use it to assign a set of meanings about the baby’s future character, qualities and role. In assigning that meaning, we shape the baby’s future. While our collective culture is starting to understand that biology and the complex assigned meanings of gender are not the same thing, society at large still makes gender meaningful beyond biological sex, and requires…