Today’s virtual reality (VR) restricts the screenwriter with its technological shortcomings, and there is little agreement on how stories should be told in the new format. While its immersivity heightens the audience’s sense of presence, and perhaps accentuates empathy, it draws attention away from plot and information, favouring mood and emotion. While the narrative VR of the mid-2010s favoured first-person point-of-view (POV) protagonists, what we must consider is how, as technological advances grant audiences ever-greater agency, traditional storytelling collapses when said audiences can take autonomous action and affect the plot. A disembodied third-person POV, as in regular cinema, is also unlikely to satisfy audiences. This paper argues that second-person POV, where the viewer is the protagonist’s sidekick, is the device that will allow future VR audiences to fully immerse and interact without giving up our perennial pleasures of plot, character arc and leaning back while others do the work. In the 2020s, narrative VR’s economies of production are also likely, through an uberization of filmmaking, to dramatically change the industry and the role of the screenwriter.
Nordic high-trust societies are underpinned by prosociality, a term denoting cooperation and working for the good of others. State-funded voluntarism provides opportunities for altruism that appears to contribute to the Nordics’ exceptional level of well-being. Altruists are rewarded by a warm, lasting affect that enhances personal well-being, thus motivating further prosociality. Humanity’s evolutionary past coded into us a desire to strengthen our community by helping those in need—a biocultural drive that is corrupted when authoritarian regimes enforce unselfish behavior on disempowered populations. Such coercive altruism has a line of adverse long-term consequences for communal functionality and individual flourishing. Our study examines how sociocultural context influences people’s prosocial strategies, and how sharing insights and practices from democratic and authoritarian traditions can lead to new, revitalized forms of altruism. Our in-depth interviews (n = 32) of Nordic and Slavonic helpers of Ukrainian refugees in Norway (1) illuminate the impact of culture and memory on altruistic practices, (2) define points of tension between systemic and anti-systemic modes of prosociality, and (3) identify cross-cultural interactions that generate trust, well-being, and social innovation. The post-communist experience of the Slavonic informants motivated anti-systemic altruism, which highlights spontaneity, improvisation, and occasional rule breaking. Norwegian systemic altruism is based on trust, efficacy, and rule-following. Our evolutionary approach to cultural psychology substantiates how important it is for development and immigration policies to align our knowledge of human nature with insights into the workings of cultural legacies. A better understanding of the biocultural mainsprings of altruism could be of crucial importance in our era of reemerging authoritarianism and increasing migration.
Scandinavian social democracy is increasingly upheld as an alternative that could reform capitalism. The Nordic Model produces income equality, low-conflict politics, and happy people. When half of young Americans express that they would prefer “socialism,” they generally mean to live in a society that provides for its citizens as the Nordics do. Such aspirations are complicated by how social democracy can be viewed as a secularized form of Lutheranism, the Protestant creed that the Nordic region embraced in the 16th century. Lutheran norms and values carried into the modern era and made possible social democracy's two distinguishing features: fascist corporatism and socialist redistribution. A strong state facilitates statist individualism, which empowers individuals vis-à-vis employers, parents, and spouses. The outcome could be cross-culturally salient, as it brings people closer to our species' fission-fusion baseline. Yet in the modern environment, only Nordics seem to have a cultural imaginary that makes compelling the politics that drive such high levels of both productivity and egalitarianism. The region's storytelling reflects this Lutheran past and is used to negotiate modern adaptations. A better understanding of social democracy could help prevent that demands for “socialism” motivate a turn to actual socialism.
Today’s political despondency is informed by how Western populations no longer believe in the cosmopolitan stories that underpinned the modern world. Before Kantian universalism became hegemonic, the eighteenth century offered a variety of perspectives, like those of outpost philosophers Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder. The scholarly and dramatic works of another thinker from the European periphery, Ludvig Holberg, have recently received new attention for their historicist themes. The ornery Norwegian polymath is praised for having anticipated the transnational cosmopolitanism that has reemerged in the past decades. Holberg was Scandinavia’s preeminent Enlightenment figure and is still beloved for his stage comedies. His only European success, Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741), argues for a cosmopolitanism situated in history, geography, and local culture. This article analyzes how the novel subverts its conte philosophique form to criticize common Enlightenment views on reason, universalism, and colonialism. Holberg’s philosophical “agonism of difference,” inferred from Niels Klim’s themes, is then used to evaluate four contemporary cosmopolitanisms: Appiah’s “universality plus difference” (2006), Tully’s “agonistic dialogue” (2008), and Habermas’s “legal order” (1997) and “postmetaphysical reason” (2019). What emerges suggests that Holberg anticipated a cultural collapse similar to what we experience today.
The Tristan legend is the quintessential love story of the Middle Ages. From the formative period of its courtly branch, the only extant complete version is Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (1226). King Hákon of Norway commissioned this and other romances to convince his aristocratic warriors to give up the kinship society ethos of heroic love that directed them to rape their enemies’ women. Courtly love sacralized female consent, yet critics have struggled to make sense of which purposes courtliness served. This evolutionary reading of Tristrams saga reveals how courtly love not only functioned as an ideological bridge between mating regimes, but also embodied proto-WEIRD psychology, the impersonal prosociality of the new mobile, educated, and transculturally inclusive European individual-as described by Henrich (2020). This ethos would evolve to become the morality of modernity. How it was disseminated exemplifies how fiction can help communities find provisional solutions to problems that cannot be solved definitely.
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