Guest post: THIS is the culture war
Originally a comment by latsot on “Mass formation psychosis”.
Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.
That’s partly because to many, many people ‘narrative’ is the same thing as ‘evidence’. I mean this in the most literal sense; I come across many people, especially on social media, who seem to sincerely believe that being able to tell a story about something – even if that story doesn’t really seem to explain the facts – is the same as providing huge great chunks of evidence of something being true.
In fact, they feel it gives them license to dismiss evidence, because to them, that evidence belongs to a different story so just isn’t valid. They’re happy to cite ‘evidence’ when it appears superficially to support their story but they’re unable or unwilling to distinguish between what is evidence and what is not.
So they get to tell their lovely story and cite any willy-nilly thing as evidence because the story is always so meandering and vague. And they also get to dismiss our evidence because they believe it belongs in another, nastier story they want nothing to do with.
Meanwhile, we are explaining what our evidence says and why it says what it says (and doesn’t say) and it’s being entirely ignored.
This is the culture war.
Absolutely – narrative is to reality the way validity is to soundness in a logical argument.
We live in a country that was built upon rhetoric and argument. It’s all about argument – it’s all about the narrative. Rarely does it seem to be about the truth. It’s why I never listen to debates. Anything of substance should be able to stand on the merits of the associated evidence.
With a little training a person can get pretty good at constructing valid arguments (ie, the conclusion follows necessarily from the claims), but as a country we are shit about asking whether valid arguments and compelling narratives have any basis in reality. It’s all about sound bites not whether the bites are sound.
That said, I still recognize the value of a coherent explanatory narrative over and absent or implausible one when two sides agree on the phenomenon.
Both the radical feminists and the trans-inclusive feminists believe in, and want to fight against, systemic Patriarchy. The rad fems base it in sex, with the stronger, more aggressive sex exploiting and controlling the resources of the weaker one: reproduction, copulation, labor. Therefore we find the same basic dominant/subordinate relationship repeating and enforced across time and location.
The other side? I asked a (transwoman?) liberal feminist and was told that pattern was the result of some sort of ancient fluke unknown to historians which spread from one or maybe a few points. Otherwise, it would have been inevitable and that sure doesn’t seem right. It’s like saying women really are inferior.
As a defense of the existence of the Patriarchy against a skeptic, neither story is sufficient without more evidence. But, just based on story-telling alone, that second one is worse. It doesn’t explain. It’s like the Theory of Evolution compared to “God went poof somehow, we don’t know.” Even without fossils and anatomy, there still more work with one than the other. The liberal feminist’s explanation’s best feature is the non sequitur at the end.
Latsot, you’ve really nailed it here. It’s all about narratives now. People want a tidy story to explain things, not the complicated, underivative truth. A tidy and familiar and comforting story. This is dangerous because sometimes the truth doesn’t have a precedent to model itself on; we can’t just rely on pattern recognition and narrative familiarity to figure out what’s real and true versus what’s illusory and untrue. It’s pattern recognition and narrative familiarity that has led everyone to treat gender identity ideology like it’s just as simple as Gay Rights 2.0. It’s also what’s behind the cringeworthy line “my truth” that I hear all the time among certain people. What they’re saying is, I’ve made sense of something complex by making it comfortable and familiar and digestible to me, and that’s what truth means to me: comfort and safety. It’s probably also behind the fact that the entertainment industry only wants to reboot and repackage old familiar “media properties” these days: they treat entertainment consumers (a creepy way to describe what are otherwise known as people) like they don’t have the energy to invest in entirely new stories — new ideas — anymore. If we take it a step back and speculate about why this is happening now, I guess the primary culprit has to be information overload due to social media and the internet? We have access to everything and everyone all the time now, and social media algorithms have eroded our attention spans to the point that it feels too exhausting to sort the truth out, so we just seek comfort instead. It’s quite depressing. More and more I feel like civilization can’t survive the Internet age unless we start formally teaching everyone how to manage our lives in the digital age. Maybe the Three Rs of elementary school should become four: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Reason(able thinking in the digital age).
OB:
True enough. But it’s also a favourite of historians. Be likewise cautious around any historian claiming to be ‘impartial.’ All histories are some historian’s ‘narrative.’
Artymorty, I think you are on paydirt there.
Across the history of what used to be called Christendom, critical thinking was neither taught to the youth nor encouraged generally. Doctrinal disputes were managed by the established clerical hierarchy, and usually took place in conjunction with ecclesiastical councils, held periodically to get ‘the line’ straight and to deal with any heresies that tended to arise from time to time under the leadership of charismatic preachers. Similar processes have taken place in other religions and cultures, notably Islam, with its Sunni/Shia divide.
Clerics of competing religions and competing gods tend to sabotage one anothers’ efforts, which helps explain the glory days of polytheist Classical Greece before the rise of monotheism.
According to Plato, Socrates was condemned by the established Athenian clerics for “corrupting the youth”: specifically, for showing by example the superiority of reason over religious doctrine. (Irony 101: ask any Christian why he/she is not a Muslim, and you will most likely get a reasoned ‘narrative’. The religious find it often handy; nay essential, to park themselves at the Temple of Reason when it suits them to do so.)
That also helps explain the difference between modern India and Pakistan, set up on the south of the Eurasian landmass like some controlled experiment on a people of a given ethnicity. Polytheist India is an economic powerhouse, while Pakistan to either side of it is a basket case. Critical thought is not taught in Pakistan’s Islamic schools, presumably lest it be turned on the national religion. That shows up in the parlous state of Pakistani science and technology.
New religious start-ups are happening all the time. (The ‘New Age’ movement was rife with it: possibly still is.) All you need is a bloke who has had a vision from some angel. A crackpot in a cave will do nicely, or perhaps a mother whose devotion goes a tad over the top, and who convinces her son or (less often daughter) that he/she is foretold in serious prophecy.
But then a process akin to Darwinian selection sorts out the sheep from the goats: many are called, but few are chosen, so to speak.
Omar do you know of any historians who claim to be impartial? The first thing you learn about history as a discipline if you specialize in it is that it’s never impartial.
Whereas with science they save that tidbit for the master’s degree.
When I first studied at my old Alma Mater of Sydney University in the late 1950s, its conservative history academics encouraged that as an ideal, and in their own eyes, embodied it themselves. But critics of the idea in more modern times (beginning in my experience with E.H. Carr, and his What is History?’ started its slide from favour, and then the postmodernism pandemic probably reduced it further. Maybe it survives today in monasteries on the bleak seacoast of Iona, but I grant you, it has copped a thrashing in more recent times.
But as iknklast points out at #6, there may be no shortage of proponents still encouraging it at the undergraduate level. Maybe when they finally sort out the PoMo shambles, it will revive, like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. (Aside: Must see if I can get that on DVD.)
[…] a comment by Artymorty on THIS is the culture […]