Learning ethics through stories

I have not written for ages, as we have been moving house. And it nearly didn’t happen. We have been utterly lost in a world where the tempting possibility of more and more money turns ordinary people into greedy ogres. There are no laws in this world to prevent people from behaving like ogres, being greedy at any cost is completely legal. And the government is encouraging it! We nearly lost our faith in human goodness and felt as if we had been actually punched. Except there was one miraculous estate agent who did not behave like the rest, and say: “Plan B – ask for more money.” She held onto some ethical principals, and with this magic wand, managed to turn the situation round.

Now over that bridge, another forest of problems! No cooker, dodgy electrics, and I feel lost, disorientated. One of the reasons I tell stories is because I had a nomadic childhood, moving house every couple of years. Stories became a way of carrying a thread from place to place. I loved making dens, putting up tents, and played with dolls houses for hours. I started to tell stories to my sister and cousins, to write little books and plays. Stories were my way of making sense of things.

The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim believed that fairytales helped children integrate fears and anxieties. He writes in The Uses of Enchantment how relationships and emotions are manifested in fairytale narratives. The act of sharing stories allows the listener to enact situations in their imagination – face ogres, find the way out of the forest, transform the world. Listening to fairytales develops courage, determination, hope, a sense of moral goodness, and ethics. If only the government would listen to  a few fairytales.