Order makes me happy. I can spend a day organising papers. I organise drawers, too, and my calendar and the nuggets of wisdom from books I read. Order is my peace of mind. Order soothes me with the promise that the world makes sense. At least, once you think hard enough.
Order makes you happy, too. Hence this craze for material design and meditation and minimalism. And white space. Because without order there is chaos. And confusion and, worse of all, chance. All scary stuff. If I may grow lyrical for a moment, if you squint, life in all its forms is one long struggle for order, against a melancholy universe of noise and entropy and chance. We are sense-seeking machines. We seek to build a world of order, where things are clear, coherent, predictable - and therefore fair and safe. Order is safe.
Hence why I read. Intelligent thought is an organising principle. Comprehension turns this disheveled reality into a well-structured story inside of which the world makes sense. Smart people are like focusing lenses. They can take the bewilderment of Brexit, with its multitudes of strangers thinking things stranger still, and turn it into the neat thesis of the "left behind". So panic over. Here, we feel certain, confident and calm. Out there, anguish.
This is not to say, with postmodernism, that everything is a deception. Some of these stories are objectively truer than others. This is to say that intelligent thought makes me happy. Even in small doses. Here are just 313 words of dim unease sublimated into a block of rhythmic prose that you can share on Facebook. A good story makes the world intelligible. And bearable.
Hence why I read, even the news.
The news is annoying because it is essentially a slot machine. It even looks like a slot machine, all flashing headlines and that. It's a gamble. You hit refresh and maybe win a bit of better understanding. Or something funny about a cat. Mostly, you win nothing, he-said she-said blather from pundits and analysts who sound more and more like they might fail a Turing test.
To be fair to the news, its job got harder. Here is some history. News used to be about concrete if weird things happening to people nearby. Stuff you could understand. These days, concrete events have been replaced by patterns, analysis, underlying issues, explanation, charts and everything else needed to make sense of a complex world. The time of stories has expanded to include past (context), change over time (trend) and future (forecasting). Individuals have been replaced by representatives, experts, commentators and spokespeople. In the 1890s, you might have read a story about Miss Emilia Taylor from 224 Evelyn Gardens. Now, she will just be an English teacher in London (i.e. nationality, profession, region). Also, back then, the farther it was from where you lived, the less it was news. Now, you have to keep up with everything everywhere. Well, you don't. People who buy and sell stock across continents have to. It was for these people that news agencies like Reuters were set up, rather than the likes of you, with your boring individual existence and lack of a portfolio. All that came later, when someone invented rubrics, meaning a way of sorting readers into consumer groups. Still, self-ascribed members of the elite have always liked to have opinions about everything. I am thinking of Stepan Arkadyevitch from Anna Karenina: "for him, living in a certain society - owing to the need.. for some mental activity - to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat".
But having views is indispensable not just because I move in a "certain society". Views are indispensable because they keep me sane. A good story is an ordered interpretation of reality. It is desk tidy for the brain. I would run out of room to breathe, for all the facts and data, without stories to assemble them into stable, comprehensive wholes. Great stories turn a pile of information into a single thought. One you can remember and hold in working memory and reason about without feeling faint. The thesis of the "left behind". Nationalism vs Globalism. The gig economy. And the better the story, the bigger the bucket. Good stories, like good explanations, have reach.
There is science to back this up. Cognitive science calls this assembling of information into coherent wholes chunking. To handle large quantities of information, we pack them into higher-order abstractions. Turning the key to start the engine, checking incoming traffic, putting the car into drive, steering and changing gear becomes "driving". Millions of people, with their sense of selves and habits and love affairs and daily struggle to make it to 50 without shooting themselves, become "Germans" or "generation X" or "digital natives" or whatever. Chunking is the hallmark of expertise. Chess grandmasters have chunked individual chess pieces into valid configurations, the way we all chunk letters into words (the chess "vocabulary" is much bigger). So we need chunking. We need these stories to make sense of the world.
The trick, of course, is finding the good ones. This is why I like brands. Daniel Kahneman says this: the basic test of skill is persistent achievement. What a brand does is advertise skill. And because its achievement is persistent, a brand helps you find important repositories of skill reliably. Great brands are great. I love The Economist, Book of Life and Steven Pinker. People can be brands, too, and great writers always are. It is hard to brand the news, because news is essentially random, but you can brand the quality of reporting and the skill of the people who do it. That is why I read The Economist. You can't brand a local grocery shop either, but Tesco and Waitrose have managed to brand the experience around one. I have a Twitter list called "great". Here I collect outstanding brands, the way a photographer might collect lenses. There is also "British politics", with a set of lenses, and "psychology and cognitive science", with its own.
Hunting for these brands, these people, these lenses, is like foraging. Except you are after good explanations rather than mushrooms. In theory, you have a choice between exploration (going from fertile patch to fertile patch) and exploitation (selecting a patch and sticking with it until it is no longer fertile). Darwin, for example, seemed to prefer serial exploitation, that is mastering one topic at a time (or, at least, this was the pattern he displayed in the 665 books in the diary he began when he was 28, they think he might have explored more in earlier years). In practice, it is all a bit random. Then again, collecting stuff always is. You just have to keep at it.
Which stories you collect is important. "No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant", says William Clifford in The Ethics of Beliefs; "it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resemble it before and weakens others". You can't get tricked by a piece of fake news by accident. Most people are rational. Rational just means that your views are consistent with each other. But you can be rational and wrong. Years of consistent deception will make you believe anything. A guy in a white coat will make you do most things. Again, quoting Daniel Kahneman: "For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs". So the brands you follow matter.
Luckily, truth has a nagging habit of turning up evidence. After a while and with sufficient intellectual rigour, you learn to tell the good story from the bad. As someone said recently, there is no post-truth way to fly an airplane (I think it was Brian Cox, but I could not find the quote). A foundation of good stories will keep you safe from lies, like a good immune system. The lies will try to fit in with them and fail.
That said, some lies masquerade as truth quite successfully. This is because, given a choice, our brains will choose coherence over truth. The list of cognitive illusions is staggering. Here are just two from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, fast and slow. If I say that Alain is "intelligent - industrious - impulsive - critical - stubborn - envious" and that Ben is "envious - stubborn - critical - impulsive - industrious - intelligent", you will like Alain better than Ben. Because order of information matters. Because we prefer to feel either one way or another about a person and ambivalence is hard. And if I repeat the phrase "the body temperature of a chicken" enough times and then ask you to rate true or false the statement "the body temperature of a chicken is 144°", you will rate it true more often than random. Because familiarity matters. As Dr Kahneman concludes: "The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen... Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance".
Still, I remain hopeful. We need stories, because we need order, because we need to feel safe. Our stories are like houses, they protect us from a reality that is far weirder, more random and more uncanny than we like to think. The trick is not to get rid of stories, but to continue to hunt for better ones.
