For many years, I had a narrative about what makes a good relationship, and I had a lot of relationships that ended in exactly the same kind of car crash. I decided, each time, not that my narrative about relationships was wrong, but that I was wrong to think this guy was the protagonist in that narrative. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t wrong about the narrative; I was just wrong about the guy.
In fact, I was wrong about the narrative. When I changed the narrative, I found the guy.
We all have narratives, we have explanations as to how things happen, how to get what you want, how political figures operate, how dogs make decisions. And, as it was with me, it’s really easy to operate within a narrative without question, perhaps without even knowing that we have a narrative. I didn’t see my narrative about relationships as one of several possible ones, but as The True Narrative.
Relationship counselors often talk about how narratives constrain problem solving. Some people believe that people come to a relationship with stable identities—you get into a box (the marriage), and perhaps it works and perhaps it doesn’t. Some people have a narrative of a relationship being at its height when you marry, and it goes downhill from there. Some people believe that a relationship is a series of concessions you make with each other. Some people think that marriages are an authoritarian system in which the patriarch needs to control the family. Some people see a relationship as an invitation to go on a journey that neither of you can predict but during which each of will try to honor one another. There are others; there are lots of others. But I think it’s clear that people in each of those narratives would handle conflict in wildly different ways. People with the “people in a box” narrative would believe that you either put up with the other person, or you leave. People with the “concessions” narrative would believe that you try to negotiate conditions, like lawyers writing a contract. Patriarchs would believe that the solution is more control. Our narratives limit what we imagine to be our possible responses to problems.
If you ask people committed to any of those narratives if those narratives are true, they’ll say yes, and they’ll provide lots of evidence that the narrative is true. That evidence might be cultural (how it plays out in movies and TV), it might be arguments from authority (advice counselors, pundits, movie and TV plots). Or they might, as I would have, simply insist I was right by reasoning deductively from various premises—all relationships have a lot of conflict, for instance. That this relationship has a lot of conflict is not, therefore, a problem—in fact, it’s a good thing! (Think about the number of movies, plays, or novels that are the story of a couple with a lot of conflict who “really” belong together, from Oklahoma to When Harry Met Sally.)
If I thought of myself as someone who had relationships that ended badly because I got involved with the wrong person, I didn’t have to face the really difficult work of rethinking my narrative. And I was kind of free of blame, or only to blame for things that aren’t really flaws—being naïve, trusting, loyal. I could blame them for misleading me, or take high road, and say that we were mismatched.
If, however, I looked back and saw that I kept getting involved with someone with whom it could not possibly work because I kept trying to make an impossible narrative work, then the blame is on me. And it was. And it is.
I don’t really want to say what my personal narrative was, although I’ll admit that Jane Eyre might have been involved, but it was the moment that I stopped reasoning from within the world of that narrative and started to question the narrative itself that I was able to move to a better place. I had to question the narrative—otherwise I was going to keep getting “duped.” (That is, I would keep making only slightly varied iterations of the same mistakes which I would blame on having been misled by a person I thought would save me.)
Our current cultural narrative about politics is just as vexed as my Jane Eyre based narrative about relationships. We are in a world in which, paradoxically, far too many people all over the political spectrum share the same—destructive—narrative about what’s wrong with our current political situation. That narrative is that there is an obviously correct set of policies (or actions), and it is not being enacted because there are too many people who are beholden to special interests (or dupes of those special interests). If we just cut the bullshit, and enacted those obviously right policies, everything would be fine. Therefore, we need to elect people who will refuse to compromise, who will cut through the bullshit, and who will simply get shit done.
This way of thinking about politics—there is a clear course of action, and people who want to enact it are hampered by stupid rules and regulations–is thoroughly supported in cultural narratives (most action movies, especially any that involve the government setting rules; every episode of Law and Order; political commentary all over the political spectrum; comment threads; Twitter). It’s also supported deductively (if you close your eyes to the fallacies): This policy is obviously good to me; I have good judgment; therefore, this policy is obviously good.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. Staying within our narrative doesn’t look like it’s limiting options. It feels rational. The narrative gives us premises about behavior–if you think someone is a good man, then you can make a relationship work; the way to stop people from violating norms is to punish them; high taxes make people not really want to succeed–and we can reason deductively from those premises to a policy. If the narrative is false, or even inaccurately narrow, then we’ll deliberate badly about our policy options.
But what if that narrative—there is a correct course of action, and it’s obvious to good people—is wrong?
And it is. It obviously is. There is no group on any place on the political spectrum that has always been right. Democrats supported segregation; Republicans fought the notion that employers should be responsible if people died on the job because the working conditions were so unsafe. Libertarians don’t like to acknowledge that libertarianism would never have ended slavery, and there is that whole massive famine in Ireland thing. Theocrats have trouble pointing to reliable sources saying that theocracy has ever resulted in anything other than religicide and the suppression of science (Stalinists have the same problem). The narrative that there is a single right choice in regard to our political situation, and every reasonable person can see it is a really comfortable narrative, but it’s either false (there never has been a perfect policy, let alone a perfect group) or non-falsifiable (through no true Scotsman reasoning).
This narrative—the correct course of action is obvious to all good people—is, as I said, comfortable, at least in part because it means that we don’t have to listen to anyone who disagrees. In fact, we can create a kind of informational circle: because our point of view is obviously right, we can dismiss as “biased” anyone who disagrees with us, and, we thereby never hear or read anything that might point out to us that we’re wrong.
If we’re in that informational circle, we’re in a world in which “everyone” agrees on some point, and we can find lots of evidence to support our claims. We can then say, and many people I know who live in such self-constructed bubbles do say, “I’m right because no one disagrees with me because I’ve never seen anyone who disagrees with me.” And they really haven’t—because they refused to look. When we’re in that informational circle, we’re in a world of in-group reasoning. We don’t think we are; we think we’re reasoning from the position of truth.
But, since we’re only listening to information that confirms our sense that we’re right, we’re in an in-group enclave.
It’s become conventional in some circles to say that we’re in an epistemic crisis, and we are. But, it’s often represented as we’re in an epistemic crisis because they refuse to listen to reason—meaning they refuse to agree with us. We aren’t in an epistemic crisis because they are ignoring data. We are in an epistemic crisis because people—all over the political spectrum– reason from in-group loyalty, and no one is teaching them to do otherwise. We live in different informational worlds, and taking some time to inhabit some other worlds would be useful.
More useful is the simple set of questions:
• What evidence would cause me to change my mind?
• Are my arguments internally consistent?
• Am I holding myself and out-groups to the same standards?
Our epistemic crisis is not caused by how they reason, but how we do.