February 2024
‘Not all who wonder are lost’:
telling the truth in a time of fake news
“What happened to them?”
Many are asking that question, about parents or siblings, co-workers or long-time friends, often in relationships so fractured that the various parties won’t even speak. What’s most disconcerting is when these divisions aren’t over different points-of-view on disputed matters as much as whether one shares the same reality at all. As one person said to me about such a family rupture the other day—“One of us is crazy. We are living in two different worlds. How do you argue with people when the response to every bit of evidence against some unhinged idea is, ‘Of course they would say that.”
Most of us know there’s a problem; we just don’t know what it is. Some people claim that there’s a story to blame.
Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties, suggests that the emphasis on “narrative” is behind much of the partisan polarization of a “post-truth” culture. It’s not that we argue too much in this contentious time, but that we don’t argue at all. To argue—necessary for the survival of an open society—depends on the possibility of an examination of a shared reality, one in which one might be persuaded or persuade others. That can’t happen when the “other side” is irredeemable in either their malice or their stupidity. In the flight from evidence and logic, Wieseltier argues, we retreat to story as a shelter from argument.[1]
Unlike reasoned argumentation, Wieseltier writes, storytelling is ‘designed to inculcate certain responses, certain mental stances, in the listener. They are passivity, credulity, and wonder. All of them are stances of surrender.’[2] That’s why, he concludes, stories are so easily utilized by dictators and demagogues, for whom the tactic is “mesmerism,” telling a story so appealing to the limbic system that no other argument is necessary. The more the evidence recedes, the more the story holds. Democracy can’t survive that, at least for long. And yet, those who blame “storytelling” altogether as subjective “surrender” are giving up one of the most important means of telling the truth. Frederick Buechner can help us here.
Without any other context, Buechner’s admonition for the reader to “listen to your life” can sound like the sort of horoscopy spirituality of personal experience unhitched from an objective, transcendent truth. A major emphasis of Buechner’s work—across essays, memoirs, novels, and sermons—is, in fact, the interrogation of his own “story.” Is he “wishful thinking” by imposing a pattern on coincidences that seem to be signs? Are we “whistling in the dark” of believing the stories that would help us put away fear in this world of beautiful and terrible things? In one instance, Buechner even invented the ghost of his dead grandmother to explain away his “narrative” framework with cold, hard logic and the marshalling of evidence.[3]
And yet.
‘Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots,’ Buechner wrote. ‘After a while, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot.’[4]
As a novelist, Buechner knew that a plot—at least a credible one—is not one obvious and inevitable happening after another, easily distilled into morals and meanings. A plot, after all, followed along in the pages of a written story is easier for the reader to grasp than the plot of one’s story. We can flip backward and forward in a book, in an attempt to trace out character arc, embedded metaphors, and so on. In a life in which one is the “character,” however, we are not able to stand outside of ourselves.
At best, we can listen. For instance, Buechner advises that we can pay attention to those moments we find in our eyes, especially unexpected tears. Maybe the tears are just the result of a malfunctioning thyroid gland or misfiring ducts; such is possible. But maybe, he suggested, such tears are a sign that ‘God is speaking to you through the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.’[5]
Of one’s life, Buechner wrote:
You get married, a child is born or not born, in the middle of the night there is knocking at the door, on the way home through the park you see a man feeding pigeons, all the tests come in negative and the doctor gives you your life back again: incident follows incident helter-skelter leading apparently nowhere, but then once in a while there is the suggestion of plot, the suggestion that, however clumsily, your life is trying to tell you something, to take you somewhere.[6]
This is hardly a natural theology built on one’s autobiography, much less the “mesmerism” of a guru. It’s more akin to T. S. Eliot’s explanation of the mystery of attempting to read meaning into mystery:
[…] These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.[7]
Buechner, of course, was making his case not only as a novelist, but as a reader of the Bible. The Ten Commandments are not abstractions or mere imperatives; they are given only after the words, ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt’ (Exod. 20:1). Jesus could have spoken abstractly about the command to love neighbor but intentionally embeds that command in a story, ‘A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves…’ (Lk. 10:30).
‘In stories the hiddenness and the utterance are both present and that is another reason why they are a good way of talking about God’s truth which is part hidden and part uttered too,’ Buechner wrote.[8] This is not less truth-engaging than logical assertions, but more so. As philosopher Paul Moser has argued, the hiddenness of God in tandem with his revelation—through a story embraced by faith—is essential to what it means to relate to God as truth.[9] We are not to have the relation to him that we do a point of knowledge we have mastered.
Stories can be awful weapons, wielded often in the history of the world—and at the present moment—by authoritarians and despots. ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,’ George Orwell wrote. ‘It was their final, most essential command.’[10] Orwell’s observation has proven itself true over and over across the past century—whether in the context of the show-trials of Stalinist Russia, the “struggle sessions” of the Maoist Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the blood-and-soil race-myths of countless ethno-nationalist demagogues. In the hungering dark of loneliness, the way one proves that one really belongs is by demonstrating the willingness to believe—and to repeat back—increasingly ridiculous falsehood as though they were truth. This is precisely because stories have the power to change a perspective in a way that abstractions simply do not.
As Hannah Arendt argued, what is necessary for any society to oppose propaganda with truth is a right sense of authority, which she defines not as the sum total of knowledge but as the foundation for pursuing it. Christopher Lasch maintained that “authority”—rightly defined—must be grounded not in fear or obligation but in loyalty and gratitude. And as sociologist Robert Nisbet pointed out, that kind of authority is based in allegiance not on power or coercion. Authoritarianism thrives when there is a lack of authority. Hawkers of bad stories offer them to cultures that have lost their good stories.
Frederick Buechner was perhaps even more exasperated than narrative-skeptics of today by what often passed under the name of “narrative,” and could discern quickly, especially in preaching, when the telling of the stories was a way to avoid the question of whether or not the stories are real. Quoting Karl Barth, Buechner said that every time a preacher stands at the pulpit, opening the Bible, “there is a moment of real attention when people are really listening, and they’re silent, because, in their heart of hearts, they think, ‘Maybe this time we will hear whether it’s true.”[11]
Buechner, though, anticipated what moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found about what it takes to actually move people from a hive-mind of group-think into genuine change—and that is, he writes, ‘awe.’[12]
‘It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle,’ Buechner wrote. ‘In the last analysis, you cannot pontificate but only point. A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, “I can’t prove a thing, but there’s something about his eyes and his voice. There’s something about the way he caries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross—the way he carries me.”’[13]
That’s not, as Buechner elsewhere wrote, the kind of abstract, logical truth claim that Pontius Pilate wanted. When the governor asked, “What is truth?” Jesus’s response was, basically, “I am.”
Buechner’s argument about how we pursue the ultimate truth of the universe he also applied, to a lesser extent, to the way we pursue the ultimate truth about the mystery of our individual lives. The end result of both is a stilling—if just for a moment—of the arguments: a kind of astonishment that asks, as in Capernaum of old, of one who speaks with authority, and not as the scribes (Mk. 1:21).
Novelist Eudora Welty once wrote, ‘A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument.’[14] Maybe the shrillness, combativeness, and cynicism of this moment is not because we have too few stories, but too few. Maybe the reason we have given up on persuading one another, on being persuaded ourselves, is not that we experience too much wonder and credulity but too little.
If so, perhaps Frederick Buchner would say it’s because we’ve lost the plot. It could be that he would counsel us to start to find our way back not with the words “Point One, Subheading A,” but with the words “Once Upon a Time.” He might even call that, over and against all the political propaganda and conspiracy-theorizing, something as simple as “Telling the Truth”.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading The Buechner Review. If you would like to receive future articles in your email inbox you can sign up here.
Works cited:
[1] Leon Wieseltier, ‘The Rise of Narrative and The Fall of Persuasion’, Liberties, 4.1, (Autumn, 2023).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart: a memoir of the lost and found (New York: HarperCollins, 1999)
[4] Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace (New York: Phoenix Press, 1970), p.62.
[5] Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: an ABC theologized (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p.105.
[6] Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, p.10.
[7] T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), p.30.
[8] Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: writings on faith and fiction (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p.131.
[9] See: Paul Moser, ‘Divine Hiddenness Does Not Justify Atheism’, Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2020).
[10] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p.84.
[11] Frederick Buechner, Karl Bart – Is it true?, online video recording, YouTube, 26 November 2012 < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIETb5UIZWA > [accessed 12 February 2024].
[12] Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion’, Cognitive Emotion, (March 2003), 17.2, pp.297-314
[13] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: a theological ABC (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p.31-2.
[14] Eudora Welty, ‘Must the Novelist Crusade?’, The Atlantic (October 1965).
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