Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe by Richard Holloway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Silly Like Us

Richard Holloway is an Anglican priest and bishop. This is important to know. He epitomises a tradition of religious tolerance that extends not just to the various High and Low factions of the Episcopal Church, but also to all other religions, including militant atheism.

Some find his stance, like that of his fellow Anglican Don Cupitt or historically the similarly-minded Baruch Spinoza, to be pantheistic at best and probably merely atheism hidden in a veil of religious language. But neither he nor I could care less about the label. He is, for me, a modern mystic who does what mystics have always done, namely to call out the linguistic idolatry of true believers.

Holloway knows that everything we can say or write, the only thing we can say or write, is part of a story. Some people, like him, are interested in the ‘big story’ of which other ‘smaller’ stories may be a part. The big story may either be religious or scientific. But these two categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They shade onto and inspire one another.

Holloway doesn’t want to evaluate the relative merits of any of these big stories. His issue is personal and ethical: “The difficulty is in identifying the story we are actually living by.” His method for accomplishing this is to make clear to himself as well as his reader that we are all stuck in a web of linguistic interpretation. That is, all our stories are fictions. They are the product of stories and they all produce more stories. “All our stories [are fictions], particularly the ones we think aren’t stories, aren’t fictions.”

So Holloway tells some stories about himself, some fictions he might take for granted and mistake for something other than fiction. He follows Hegel in sympathetically articulating contradictory stories about ‘big things’ like God, the Cosmos, Salvation, War... and, well, Scotland. He finds himself comprehending and reacting positive to stories on both sides of every issue, while being unwilling to commit fully to either side.

This is more or less standard philosophical dialectic. The expectation is that Holloway then would search for a resolution of the conflicting stories, a synthesis, or ‘bigger story.’ But he doesn’t. Rather than tell the bigger story, he searches in his own background for the much smaller stories which have contributed to his instinctive preferences. It is our unconscious memories of events, coincidences, and accidents that shape these little stories, not any rational choice.

What Holloway is trying to undermine is not religion but faith, that pernicious state praised as a virtue ever since St. Paul defined it as such. “Our problem is that, as well as possessing a capacity for reason and reflection, we are also a highly suggestible species, prone to crazes, panics, conspiracy theories and other psychological spasms: in short, beliefs. Beliefs, like communicable diseases, are highly infectious.”

And beliefs, as the ‘substance’ of faith, are impervious to experience, either personal or factual. As Holloway says, “... faith systems are usually authoritarian in their practice and self-definition and, with one or two exceptions, they tend to believe that their own version is the perfect and final word on the subject. Most of them were formed to promote a fixed belief in an ultimate reality whose existence, though uncertain, they are never permitted to doubt.”

“Where does it come from, this notion that a form of words held in our heads can either save us or kill us? Or that a thought or theory can damn or redeem us?,” Holloway asks. I think it obviously comes from a worship of words, a confusion of literature with reality to which we all are prone. This is our Original Sin. None of us can escape it fully. But we do need desperately to substitute the virtue of humility for that of faith in order to be slightly less silly.

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