From fireside myths to modern fiction, stories helped us survive by teaching empathy, choices, consequences and how to live as a group.
Thinking about stories – or rather story (the concept of) – I was struck by the phrase “empathy technology.”
So true.
This nano-machine – cunning as a virus – that bypasses all cynical filters and goes straight to the gut or heart to do its damage.
How much have I learnt not travelling a mile in another man’s shoes – that’s just a recipe for blisters – but spending 300 pages in their heads?
Stories are not just entertainment; they’re devices for feeling what others feel.
That’s what they’ve always been. More than that, that’s what they’re for.
The purpose of story
Morality, of whatever hue, isn’t a later addition to storytelling, like sprinkling meaning on after the fun has happened – the medicine following the spoonful of sugar. Morality is the foundation on which story was built. Without it, a story becomes airy and weightless, pleasant perhaps, but without resonance.
I’m not talking fire and brimstone morality, the booming voice of enforced goodness laying down rules from a pulpit. I mean something quieter and far more fundamental, best described as purpose.
In fiction, morality is simply the sense that choices have weight, that actions shape outcomes, that people matter. It’s the belief that what characters do changes their world in ways that feel meaningful. A story becomes “moral” not because it tells us how to behave, but because it treats human experience as significant. Even the lightest tale carries this thread.
An evolutionary necessity
From the earliest myths told around fires, storytelling existed to help people imagine choices and consequences. A tale about a careless hunter or a loyal companion wasn’t simply a diversion; it was a lesson in how to behave, manufactured using empathy technology so the lesson would stick.
And this wasn’t cultural decoration – it was evolutionary. We survived and prospered because we were social creatures who depended on one another. Understanding trust, cooperation and conflict kept groups alive.
Storytelling began as a shared rehearsal of ethics, a way for communities to practise understanding each other and to pass on wisdom in a vivid, memorable way.
And who could stomach the elders telling you how you should behave if it weren’t for its druggie environs, the heady trickster that is story.
Spoonful of sugar
Fast forward.
You can still feel this ancient purpose in writers who foreground empathy through imagination. Charles Dickens didn’t preach reform; he dramatised it. By inviting us to care for David Copperfield or fear for Nancy in Oliver Twist, he let us rehearse compassion. Dickens knew that moral insight lands hardest when experienced emotionally rather than delivered as instruction.
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Even stories that seem far removed from moral instruction operate on the same principle. We don’t even need humans to fall for a story’s charms. Watership Down, for instance, asks us to empathise with rabbits – creatures with their own hierarchies, fears and loyalties.
By treating them as fully realised characters, author Richard Adams leads readers to feel responsibility and courage across species.
How to use this insight
Science fiction takes this even further. Think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, where an entire world is constructed to challenge our assumptions about gender, loyalty and trust. The strangeness isn’t a gimmick. It’s a tool that forces readers to step outside their habits and imagine new ethical possibilities.
For writers, this isn’t just an interesting observation – it’s an opportunity. Understanding story as a moral rehearsal doesn’t mean writing fables or lecturing readers. It means recognising that every narrative, however playful, carries an emotional and ethical charge.
If you build characters who make meaningful and authentic choices, readers will test themselves against those choices. If you create imaginative worlds that stretch empathy, readers will grow into the stretch.
The Splintered City by Giles Broadbent is out now.