Mrs. Brundtland's Disenchanted Cosmos

The whole world loves a storyteller. There is a magic to the act of storytelling, a warmth of waiting as someone begins, Once there was a ..." The storyteller unravels the struggle of good and evil, gods and demons, humans and animals. The beauty of a good story is that it can be told again and again. But in the modern world, storytelling is dying out. The batde between good and evil is no longer embodied in myths, fables, anecdotes, or parables. The struggles of humankind are now sought to be captured in the grids of social science, and the classic narrative of social science is the bureaucratic report. A report is the end of storytelling. It is not told; it is not authored. It is generally chaired by a person heading a committee. A report is too impersonal to have the warmth of a story, and yet the story of the world, its fate, is caught in reports the Brandt Report, the Brundtland Report, the Report of the Club of Rome. They are all stories of the world, but they do not belong to the world of storytelling. Dry as dust, they reduce even the hell of Dante and its horrific circles to sanitized departments, each headed by a bureaucrat. Yet these narratives unreadable and opaque as they are must be taken seriously. They represent new charters of conquest. They "speak" (if a report can speak at all) with forked tongues. Reports as narratives mimic modern violence. They are bloodless and antiseptic, but with one stroke in a file, a world can die; with one erasure, a man can cease to be a citizen. These reports capture the new styles of control and surveillance. The usual methods of modern control the factory, the school, the prison were all modes of vigilance. They are best embodied in the Ben-