The Hunger for a Single Story

Around fifteen years ago, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered her famous TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” It was hugely popular and influential. It’s among the more popular TED Talks of all time, approaching nearly 40 million views at the time of this writing. In it, she talks about discussed the problem of reducing human beings and cultures to a single narrative. We are all more complicated than the “single story,” whether that story is what it means to be black or African (in her case) or any of the other identities that we associate with or are defined by. Human beings are complex. Human cultures are complex. A single story rarely tells the whole story.

I liked Adichie’s TED Talk. I wrote about it in 2017 here on this blog. I do not require a great deal of convincing that the stories we tell about ourselves and about our world are often far too simplistic. I’m all about nuance and complexity and the grey areas that elude our preferences for black and white. And yet, as I sit here on the doorstep of 2025, I can’t help but think that Adichie’s talk sounds and feels different fifteen years later. The world has changed. We have changed. How we tell stories and what we demand of them has certainly changed. I wonder if at this particular moment, at least in the post-Christian West, we somewhat confusedly and incoherently find ourselves longing for a single story.

The thought occurred to me while I was reading an article from Robyn Urback in today’s Globe and Mail. Here in Canada, we’ve lost our national identity, she says. We have no idea who we are or what we stand for. We don’t know what our collective values might be or if any remain. We certainly don’t know what might justify them or how we might defend them. We have spent decades eroding any sense of pride in ourselves as Canadians, preferring to (mostly appropriately) elevate untold and undervalued stories while recasting dominant narratives as stories of unqualified oppression (e.g., our PM describing Canada as a “genocidal state”). We congratulate ourselves on our diversity and inclusivity in welcoming people from around the world (an odd thing for a “genocidal state” to do) and yet struggle enormously with what Urback calls “considerable problems of integration.” Turns out it’s not easy to integrate people into a story that doesn’t know how to tell itself.

And so, Canada—like many post-Christian cultures—finds itself in a weird and complicated space. Having largely cast off the single story of Christianity yet retaining an attenuated form of its ethic to care for the least, the lost, the lowly, to welcome the stranger, to lift up the downtrodden, etc., we end up with a political and cultural reality that feels fraught, tense, unstable. A bunch of very different people groups and histories and ideologies and religions and ethnicities all existing in the same space with no shared story or set of values turns out to be enormously complicated. Throw in the inherently polarizing and antagonistic nature of the digital world and, well, you get the world we live in in at the doorstep of 2025.

Is there a danger in the single story? Without question. Totalizing inflexible narratives have done and continue to do great damage in our world. None of us want to be reduced to a single story. But there is also a danger in the absence of a single story—at least a coherent broad narrative within which to locate the impulse to critique and to make space for other stories. To stay just with the matter of welcoming people from around the world, whether as refugees fleeing war or economic migrants or whatever, the flow is almost exclusively to countries and cultures shaped by Christianity (the historian Tom Holland makes this point well in a recent interview with Bari Weiss). It seems that there is a single story, however that story has been neglected, misused, or forgotten, that creates space—intellectual space, moral space, spiritual space, even geographic space—for this.

There is a danger in the single story, certainly. There is also a deep hunger for the single story. At the end of her article, Urback sort of limply urges Canadians to “actively promote a civic identity” to combat this lack of shared identity or pride and to guard against the fragmentation and conflict that seem inevitable. But where will civic identity come from without something approximating a single story? A story that tells us what we should value and why. A story that creates space for actual difference (unlike the cosmetic differences that our politicians extol) without violence. A story that scandalously commands the boundaries of love to extend even to the enemy. A story that holds out the hope of forgiveness and redemption. A story that says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

A story that binds our hearts in one and bids our sad divisions cease.