Okay, so the forest of stories is made up of all sorts of trees
(which are cut down to make paper to write stories on...)
and in the forest are all sorts of storyeaters, each w/ different dietary needs and tastes....

So now I'm thinking about niche displacement: short antelopes eating the lower branches and tall antelopes eating the middle branches and giraffes eating the tallest branches...all these species living together yet not competing each other out of existence, because differences in diet allow them to coexist. Seems as though in the int'l design/evolution debate, there's a marked refusal to niche displace, and insistance, from both sides, on one diet fitting all.

You speak, Tim, of a potted utilitarianism, a narrative ecosystem healthiest when it is most diverse, when all the stories within it have limit conditions...they can only grow into mighty trees in the right soil, with the right light, with the right nutrients. When they grow, the conditions around them may make them tall, or short, gnarled or straight, healthy or weak.

But the trees around them--the other stories--are part of that environment, as are the foragers--the other storyeaters. Their growth may be stunted by the large tree, or facilitated by the growth of a certain bush nearby

So: maybe the problem w/ humility as a supreme value for the storyteller is its "humble" failure to acknowledge how pronounced an effect--as part of a complex eco-system--we actually do have on each other, how much our stories can stunt one another's stories, shut out one another's sun, eat up one another's nutrients....hm. Better quit. Starting to sound too much like the latent sociopathic quality of advanced neurobiological solipsism...