À lire ici également : How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing
Stories connect us to people in a way nothing else can. It’s the reason politicians regularly tell stories on the campaign trail. Years ago, Harvard social scientist Howard Gardner set out to discover what highly successful leaders have in common. After reviewing the lives of 11 luminaries, from Margaret Thatcher to Martin Luther King, Jr., he concluded that their success depended to a remarkable extent on their ability to communicate a compelling story or, as he put it, “narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed.” These stories, he found, “constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader’s literary arsenal.”
When people are reduced to numbers -- as were the civilian victims of air power during the Korean War and as are the civilians who become “collateral damage” in American air strikes in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere -- we don’t feel their pain, nor do we automatically put ourselves in their shoes, which is by definition what you do when you are feeling empathic. We have the bomber pilot’s syndrome. We don’t feel anything for the victims below.
This is one reason why antiwar movements matter. They tell stories about the victims of war. It was striking in the Vietnam years, for instance, how many Americans came to care for, say, a small naked Vietnamese girl napalmed near her village, or so many other Vietnamese civilians whosuffered under a rain of American bombs, rockets, napalm, and artillery shells. The stories that the massive antiwar movement regularly told here about the distant world being decimated by the U.S. war machine created a powerful sense of empathy among many, including active-duty American soldiers and veterans of the war, for the plight of the Vietnamese. (It helped that few Americans believed that North Vietnam posed an existential threat to the United States. Fear brings out the worst in us.)
Storytelling happens to be in every human’s toolkit. We are all born storytellers and attentive listeners. Biology may incline us to turn a cold eye on the suffering of people we can’t see and don’t know, but stories can liberate us. Ted Cruz may be able to build up his poll numbers by promising to carpet bomb foreigners in the Middle East of whom we are fearful, but at least we know that biology doesn’t have to dictate our response. Our brains don’t have to stay in the Stone Age. Stories can change us, if we start telling them.