The Meta-Narrator

How can you tell if you’ve accidentally signed up for a cult? One sign is that you’re so enthusiastically opposed to the U.S. presidential candidates besides the one you prefer that you’re no longer living up to the “reflective” ideal I described in my last post.

Of course, in a democracy, anyone is entitled to limit their point of view and ignore the rest the world has to offer. We can stay inside the “bubbles” or “echo chambers” our friends and media create for us, if we want – in the language of my earlier post, we can be “fully immersed.”

But it’s a slippery slope. It means we trust the authority figures in our “bubble” to do the right thing. And if they know they have that trust, and they’re not actually worthy of that trust, they can get away with murder. So no matter how much we love our candidate, we still need to think for ourselves. Right?

Here’s a quiz! Let’s think about three people who were candidates for president this year: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders.

Positives: Can you list some sincere good sides of each candidate? Here are some examples. Can you think of more?
“Trump hasn’t gotten us into any wars.”
“Biden is a very good listener.”
“Sanders has done the country a service by raising important issues that we need to address.”

Criticism: How do you feel about critiquing your preferred candidate? Is it important to critique them, or does it feel disloyal?

Perspectives: When you see media for another perspective, do you always brush it off in horror or disdain, or do you sometimes find yourself thinking, “They may have a point”? If so, would you admit to that in public?

Values: Do your own values stay the same no matter who’s in office? For example, if you believe family values are important and you’re otherwise a Trump fan, do you find yourself saying, “I admire Obama’s commitment to marriage and family, and it bothers me that Trump’s personal life has a poor track record in that regard”?

Loyalty: What do you think is more important, loyalty to your candidate or loyalty to values that would lead you to reject your candidate if they cross a line?

Methods: What do you think is more important, for your candidate to pursue their goals using whatever methods they think will be best or most effective, or for your candidate to respect the Constitution?

Anxiety: Do you see your candidate as someone who would save us from a terrible fate… other than whatever terrible fates might befall us as a result of electing one of the other candidates?

Variety: Do you think it would be better for the country to always have the same political party in power?

Term Limits: If your candidate were elected president, would you favor removing the term limits so they could stay in power longer than the Constitution currently allows?

Accountability: If your candidate were elected president, who should they be accountable to – the American people, or only their own conscience?

Respect: 
If you favor Biden or Sanders, list three positive things you sincerely admire about George W. Bush – things Republicans would generally agree with you about.
If you favor Trump, list three positive things you sincerely admire about Barack Obama – things Democrats would generally agree with you about.

The other side: When thinking about the Americans you disagree with, which would be better – to understand their needs so your own party can better meet them, or for them to just shut up or leave the country?

Excitement: Are you only willing to vote for president if a candidate who excites you is on the ballot?

Heroism: Have you ever described your favored candidate as a hero?

Higher powers: Have you ever described your favored candidate as divinely chosen or favored by God?

I’m not going to score your answers. For one thing, that would imply I’d spent months doing surveys and analyses to find out where each of these questions lies on the spectrum of “thinking for ourselves” versus “being in a cult.” That’s not the point here; this is not scientific research. My point is to encourage each one of us to do some soul searching.

What do you think? What would you add to my quiz?

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I’m writing a book, and I could use your help. An important part of the publishing process these days is for the author to be able to show the publishers that people are interested in their work. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it and share it on social media. If you’d like to read future posts, please “Follow” by entering your e-mail address at the top of the right-hand column. Both of those steps will help me show the publishing world that people are listening. Thank you!

Last week, I showed that giving people the facts not only won’t make them listen, it all too often makes them double-down and get even more entrenched in their beliefs. Understandably, this is frustrating! This week I’m going to share the heart of the book I’m writing – a new way to think about this situation that points to some options we might have for addressing it.

What I’m talking about is the relationship we have with a given story-about-us, especially the “master narratives” that everyone in our society generally accepts.

Let’s start with an analogy. According to retired University of Toronto psychology professor (and novelist) Keith Oatley, there are three ways to read a book. If it’s really exciting or compelling, we can find ourselves so deeply engrossed in the reading that we lose all awareness of the outside world – we don’t notice if we’re hungry, or what someone’s doing in the next room, or how time is passing. We’re “fully immersed” in the book. The same thing can happen when we’re watching an exciting movie or sporting event, or playing a fast-paced game. Alternatively, if we’re reading something more slowly, over a period of days, and thinking about it when we’re not reading, and making connections between what’s happening in the story and our own memories and the circumstances of our own lives, we’re more “reflectively immersed” in the book. Or maybe it’s a terribly boring book that we’re being forced to read as an assignment, and it doesn’t feel real to us at all, and we’re resisting it every step of the way, then we’re “cynically detached” from the book, holding it at a distance mentally.

Similarly, with “stories about us” (meta-narratives) we can be the same way – fully immersed, reflectively immersed, or cynically detached. It’s not a perfect analogy, because of course people deeply engrossed in one worldview can still be aware (at least on an intellectual level) that others exist. On the other hand, our background “immersion” in a story of our people can be even more powerful because it doesn’t just start with sitting down to read or watch a movie and end when you get up again. Instead, your worldview and its stories (the collective progress we’re making, or the impending collapse of civilization from climate change, or the need to restore America’s greatness, or whatever) are there in the background of your life all the time, ready to surface whenever someone mentions something related.

Let’s look at these three possible relationships to our collective stories more closely.

If you’re fully immersed in a story-of-us, you believe the way you see the world is true and that other ways of seeing the world are misguided or wrong. The social institutions you’re a part of and your media choices fully support it, which means you may live in a “bubble” or “echo chamber” that always reflects this worldview back to you. If you’re aware of other options, you feel loyalty to your own. You’ve probably even been taught to defer to the authorities behind this worldview – leaders, institutions, and sometimes holy texts.

If you’re reflectively immersed in a story-of-us, you believe the way you see the world is one of several valid stories, and that it’s your responsibility to evaluate these stories for accuracy and ethical impact and then choose one or more to live with. It’s a conscious choice. Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about how he had done just that. I’m not endorsing the position he ended up with; it’s his choice to make, and we can trust that he picked one that matches his temperament and values. It’s his process that matters here.

Note: Reflective does not mean liberal! There are many thoughtful conservatives out there who understand the appeal of liberal and progressive worldviews but prefer caution and stability. There are also many on the Left who can find other worldviews appealing for relatively superficial reasons, without necessarily reflecting on their consequences (and of course, there are liberals and progressives who don’t see other perspectives as valid).

On the other hand, if you’re cynically detached, you probably see yourself as powerless to participate meaningfully in any of the stories-of-us, or you don’t like the options available and would rather not even bother thinking about it any further. Maybe you’re even buying into a story about detachment, like the Deep State argument that there’s some great conspiracy pulling all the strings, leaving you no real options. Unfortunately, that’s just an illusion of power over your worldview that doesn’t compare with doing the harder work of finding a way to contribute; you’re still basically at the mercy of your people’s “master narrative.”

Sometimes, you really are powerless to make a difference. Ideally, if that’s the case, instead of identifying with the broader community that’s shutting you out, you’ll focus on a different one where you do have the ability to make a difference, and immerse yourself in that one instead. A good example is modern China – the government really doesn’t want its people to think critically about its policies, and if you try, you could end up in trouble, like the dissident poet Liu Xiaobo. But you’re welcome to immerse yourself in the story of your own family – sometimes there are huge family reunions for, say, all the descendants of Kong Fuzi (Confucius), and other extended families do that too.

Reunion of descendants of Confucius:

We have different relationships with different meta-narratives. Richard Dawkins, a famous British scientist who is also a well-known atheist, presumably is fully or reflectively “immersed” in a storyline of scientific progress and “detached” from any storyline promoting religion.

For our society’s master narratives, full immersion is probably the default – we grow up learning how the world works and having expectations based on that. We may also learn how to think critically and question that understanding, but that comes later, and it’s optional. Sometimes we stick with what we know until we find something better. Sometimes young people will try out a series of worldviews until they find one that fits, at which point they’re able to be reflective about them. Sometimes a worldview feels so right that we decide to fully immerse ourselves in it and think everyone else should do the same. (And sometimes our government decides that for us – compare today’s authoritarian China with China during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, where – like in Stalin’s Soviet Union or today’s North Korea – every citizen was expected to devote their lives to their people’s story. If you’re reading this, you have choices.)

However! The very foundation of democracy is that reflective stance. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the very first of the Federalist Papers, when he and others were trying to persuade the colonists to accept the newly drafted U.S. Constitution, democracy is about “reflection and choice.” Our Bill of Rights ensures that we have freedoms of speech, religion, and so on – in other words, that we can choose our worldviews and collective stories.

How do we make that choice? There are many sources of information that can give us what we need for informed decision-making about the stories we want to guide our lives together. Education and open-minded travel are obvious candidates. Responsible journalism is absolutely vital and, frankly, probably one of the noblest professions of our time. Learning about science is important, too, as the entire point of science is to challenge existing understandings and determine how confident we should be in what we think we know. And exercising our imagination is essential: An excellent way to learn about other worldviews is by reading fiction where you take the point of view of people unlike yourself.

As Americans, democracy is our birthright. No matter how much loyalty you may feel towards any leader or political party – and some of them do seem to be demanding loyalty these days – our highest obligation as citizens should always be to the reflective process that underlies democracy and the freedoms of self-expression that make it possible.

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I’m writing a book on this topic, and I could use your help. An important part of the publishing process these days is for the author to be able to show the publishers that people are interested in their work. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it and share it on social media. If you’d like to read future posts, please “Follow” by entering your e-mail address at the top of the right-hand column. Both of those steps will help me show the publishing world that people are listening. Thank you!

A childhood friend, who is now a retired journalist and journalism professor, posted this cartoon on Facebook recently:

(Original source)

A few hours earlier, another childhood friend had posted something to Facebook – something political – with so many factual errors that I was venting to my partner about it. He thought I should respond; I thought not.

At least a dozen of my Facebook friends are people I knew when I was a kid. My parents divorced when I was 12, and after my mom relocated us to another town, I thought I’d never get to know what happened to all the kids I’d been growing up with. I was thrilled when Facebook gave me the opportunity to reconnect. I love them! It’s fascinating to learn about the adults they’ve become.

It’s also, as I’ve found, an opportunity to see for myself what people outside my day-to-day life are thinking. The challenge is, whether and how to respond when their facts are… iffy.

The comic above illustrates what we social scientists call the “information deficit” model. The idea is, people are lacking in facts, so if you give them the facts, they’ll understand and behave “rationally.”

That model might work if we went around thinking that there are topics we don’t know anything about but should, and then we had the time and inclination to take in the information when it’s offered. But usually people don’t work like that. Either we figure we know enough about the topic to have an opinion, or we find someone who’s supposed to know about these things and then trust them to do their job.

It’s more realistic to go with a “motivated reasoning” model, like I described in my recent post on how stories-about-us work. We figure out how we feel or who we trust, and we use that information as a shortcut to decide what we think about things. Once we’ve made up our mind, we’ll go to more mental effort to defend our position, if need be.  We’ll use the evidence that supports our position, and ignore the evidence that doesn’t. Research by Dan Kahan and others has shown that this motivated reasoning is equally common for conservatives and liberals, and the more educated you are, the more likely you’ll use the facts to bolster what you already believe, rather than starting from scratch.

In the real world, this leads to some strange things. We saw it with the COVID virus, where a few individuals who had been vocal early on about the need for caution later changed their minds entirely. For some, this is surely “COVID fatigue,” feeling like it’s been “enough already.” They want or need the closure that comes from having it all behind us. For others, though, it seems that we can see the power of political party identities in action – when the virus was treated by both parties as a common threat, they strongly favored protective measures, but when Republican leaders decided to treat the virus as a partisan thing, they quickly fell in line and started saying the opposite of what they’d said two months before.

I’m also reminded of a story a family member told me about how firmly someone he knew was promoting some supposedly conservative policy position, but he had it backwards – the position he was espousing was actually the liberal position. Awkward!

Motivated reasoning includes selectively choosing facts to make one’s case, but what about “facts” that are outright wrong?

I’ll admit, I’ll sometimes chime in, when I know my experience has given me better access to the information than the person posting could be expected to have. Sometimes they’re actually interested in the information, which is cool, but if they aren’t, that’s fine too. It’s not about “fixing them.” Rather, it’s about me being responsible.

Most of the time, though, I think there’s a better way to look at it. It’s basically how we should think about other people’s religions. If you have religious beliefs, you may consider them literally true, but even if you don’t, you probably consider them metaphorically true, and the rest of us should consider them metaphorically true as well. What do I mean by that? It’s like the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter – regardless of whether Santa is physically there at the North Pole right now, supervising the elves building toys for delivery in four and a half months, there is also the living idea of Santa Claus that brings value and magic to children and their adults alike. Or, say, Robin Hood – whether or not some medieval Englishman actually forcibly redistributed the wealth in Nottingham, he’s a part of our cultural heritage who still inspires us today. So if your friends are Christian and you aren’t, you could get hung up on whether certain teachings in Christianity are literally true (the Virgin Birth, for example), or you could honor the feelings behind those teachings (respecting Jesus as an extraordinary person whose life could have important lessons for us). We can look beyond the literal words to see what deeper meaning is there.

So when we’re evaluating someone’s social media post, the important thing is not always whether the facts, suppositions, and suspicions are correct; it’s whether they feel right to the person saying them. The post may be expressing a deeper truth, and if so, that’s what we should respond to.

However! How we go about responding to these “deeper truths” is important! If we think, “They said X but they really mean Y,” that’s reductive and not respectful. They probably mean both X and Y, and they might mean Z instead of Y, who knows? If we say, “You said X, did you really mean Y?” that’s reductive, disrespectful, and patronizing, too.

On the other hand, if you want to start an actual dialogue, you could say, “When you said X, it also seems to me that you’re saying Y, am I understanding?” If they’re also up for dialogue, you might go on to say that you don’t share their X-thoughts, but Y makes sense to you. Common ground!

It’s hard to resist the immediate temptation to correct the facts. I can say from talking with many inveterate fact-correctors that they feel like they’re respecting the other person’s intellect. I don’t think it feels like that on the receiving end, though – it often feels like condescension.

We could even say that the left/right split in the United States is only one facet of our polarization. Another facet is the deep split between those who want us to be able to move past the toxic aspects of polarization and those who relish it. Ironically, and unfortunately, the very act of pointing out that someone has, however innocently, been manipulated by extreme partisans is an act that reinforces that toxic divide.

I think the answers involve respect and trust. And probably patience, though I’m not so good at patience myself. If someone acts like a decent human being in all the other spheres of life but seems to go off the deep end where politics are concerned, we should probably focus on the “decent human being” side and not on what can feel like the “unfortunately manipulated” side. The rest of it may take time.

Science fiction novelist Becky Chambers described my book topic very well, in her most recent Wayfarers novel, Record of a Spaceborn Few. The characters are humans, many generations after a greatly damaged Earth had been left behind. Here, an archivist of the great Exodus Fleet is explaining her life’s work to a young man:

“Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one. When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves – that’s still true, don’t forget that for a minute – but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things. Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.” (p.315)

That’s what I’m writing about – the psychology of these stories, which have a life of their own, and which can easily lose touch with reality. Thanks, #beckychambers!