Narrative, Adaptation, and Change

This paper explores how individuals and communities orient themselves to the future by the way they story the past. There is a persistent tendency to think of such narratives as factual and therefore stable. The mutability of such narratives is actually a key adaptive characteristic, ranging from complete repression of individual traumas to public revisionism and debates about such events as the bombing of Hiroshima. Arguably, only those with a predictable future can afford a fixed version of the past, while those who are swept by unpredicted social change toward new learning and improvisation must also construct new narratives. This paper considers the social and individual value of multiple fluid narratives in the context of multiple belief systems of other kinds.