Luke Ford

What are some great articles or books that decode why one narrative triumphs over all others? For example, the poets gave us the narrative of WWI to which all other narratives must bow. Why did that happen? Was it due to the poets vibrating at a higher level than everyone else (Michael Beckwith)?

According to Larry McEnerney, the former Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, “There are conversations moving through time and there’s a bunch of people and they get to say what knowledge is.” I assume that the same type of people who decide knowledge also decide narrative.

That’s the supply side view. There’s also a demand for narrative. How well a narrative meets the demand will affect its success. For example, most people under duress respond positively to narratives that blame out-groups for their problems.

Groups with the most power must enjoy disproportionate success at shaping narratives that don’t clash with the vital interests of people hearing the narratives. I don’t believe people evolved to be gullible. Smart powerful people can’t get you to believe something that is against your best interests. But what if you don’t care much? For example, many Jewish leaders since WWII have determined that the survival of the Jewish state depends upon American patronage, and hence the Israel Lobby has strong incentives to build influential narratives because its leaders feel that the survival of Jews depends upon its efforts and they understand that most Americans don’t care much about countries outside of America.

I can’t think of many pundits employed by the mainstream media in the past 70 years who were anti-Israel: Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan. Perhaps there were a few others?

When I think about major news stories, I’m often struck by the uniform narratives we receive from the elite media. Think about these stories and how the media coalesced around one dominant narrative: the rise of Barack Obama (messianic black guy whose election redeems America from racism), Donald Trump (unruly outsider who threatens our democracy), Supreme Court (taking away our rights), Ukraine war (caused by Putin’s megalomania in the Western view, caused by NATO expansion in the Russian, China and realist view), Russiagate (Russia is messing with our domestic affairs), threats to our democracy (threats to the institutions that the ruling elite dominate), Putin (threat to democracy), China (for years its rise threatened democracy and now its decline threatens democracy), and the rise of Christian nationalism (scary).

International humanitarian law and human rights law have become increasingly popular over the past 25 years and one result of this increased supply of experts is intense jockeying among experts for status and this creates incentives for attention-grabbing pronouncements on Israel v Gaza. One reason that Israel’s fight in Gaza is often called genocide is that as the number of genocide scholars increase, the number of “genocides” must increase to meet the demand, and the newer the “genocide”, the better. Immediacy has cash value. Genocide scholars need jobs too, and to increase demand for their services, they need hot new “genocides.”

Much of the talk about a new cold war with China comes from International Relations scholars who need jobs. They must manufacture demand for their services, just like psychiatrists are incentivized to widen definitions of mental illness so that they have more income, power and prestige. The more mental health professionals you have, the more effectively they promote awareness of the need for their skills — the diagnosing and treatment of mental illness. This leads to more people getting diagnosed as mentally ill even when they only suffer from normal adaptive amounts of sadness.

Professions just like individuals are primarily out for themselves.

The more professional moralists your society produces, the keener they will be to promote a sense of sin among the people so that their services receive more demand, income, power and prestige.

After survival, the number one human drive is for status.

A Ph.D. friend says: “Seems simple but it really cracks the code on…maybe everything. I became a …. expert and then suddenly I see it everywhere. Sometimes it’s about being able to spot things more easily. But perhaps more often it’s about manufacturing what I need to imagine myself relevant. Good thing I left academia!”

When I look at a garden, the first thing I look at is its drainage due to my three years working in landscaping from 1985-1988.

When something big is happening, people want to jump on the bandwagon explains statistics professor Andrew Gelman:

…a big part of the appeal of the Nudge phenomenon is not just the lab studies of cognitive biases, not just the real-world studies of big effects (ok, some of these were p-hacked and others were flat-out faked, but people didn’t know that at the time), not just “nudge” as a cool unifying slogan that connected academic research to policy, not just potential dollars that flow toward a business- and government-friendly idea, but also the idea of Nudge as an academic success. The idea is that we should be rooting for Thaler and Sunstein because they’re local boys made good. The success is part of the story, in the same way that in the 1990s, Michael Jordan’s success was part of his story: people were rooting for Michael to break more records because it was all so exciting, the same way people liked to talk about how world-historically rich Bill Gates was, or about the incredible Tiger Woods phenomenon.

Sometimes when something gets big enough, its success becomes part of the story, and I think that’s what happened with Nudge and related intellectual products among much of social-science academia. One of their own had made it big.

Another example comes up in political campaigns and social movements. Brexit, Black Lives Matter, Barack Obama, Donald Trump: sometimes the story becomes the story. Part of the appeal of these movements is the story, that something big is happening.

A scholar replies: “Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory is the classic account of the war narrative. Janet Watson’s Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain might be closer to what you want – I think she argues about how one narrative emerged to triumph, and she attributes part of that to Fussell.”

A friend says: “Paul Roth. Lots of reviews and discussion of this book – The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation.”

Another friend says: “Hayden White was a “historiographer” of the 1980s. He was influential, wrote a dozen books or so. He popularized the idea/term “metahistory,” and in general he leads his readers to a skeptical position.”

Senior Lecturer in Law, Amanda Alexander, writes in 2021:

Although White may, at first, appear to give the historian choices in how to employ and, therefore, give meaning to, the events of history, White attributes these choices of plot to precognitive ways of seeing the world — ways which are often shaped by the historian’s own historical milieu. This precognitive commitment will affect all the other narrative choices the historian makes. Moreover, the whole process of creating narrative history is described by White as a subconscious desire to turn a meaningless reality into an imaginary order of coherence and integrity.

Amanda Alexander writes in 2016:

The Great War introduced, for the first time, a large contingent of educated, scholarly men, steeped in the motifs and themes of a classical education, to battle. Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Erich Maria Remarque are the best known of these war writers; their work has been established as the canon of war literature. Their poetry and memoirs replaced traditional tales about honorable and patriotic warfare with a new story of disillusionment and betrayal, horror and pointlessness. They portrayed a war where young men were sacrificed by the “Old Men,” their patriotic fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts.

This experience was not the only possible description of the Great War, and the trench poets were not the only people who were writing about the war. Scholars have pointed out that the trench poets produced only a small part of the literature that emerged from the war. They have drawn attention to the much larger body of work produced by civilian writers and the work of female writers and questioned the trench poets’ depiction of the front as the understanding of the Great War. Moreover, they have shown that this narrative, this interpretation of the war, was not an immediate reaction. Although some of the accounts of disillusionment and betrayal began to appear towards the end of the war, it was only with the sudden flood of books around 1927 that this particular story became established. It was at this time, the end of the 1920s, that “the disillusioned trench soldier emerged as the ‘authentic’ voice of the Great War.” From this moment on, their narrative pushed out the other accounts and became the only possible story about the war. Indeed, Watson shows that other experiences of the war had to be recast in these terms to be accepted as legitimate accounts of the Great War.

In this now ascendant narrative, one of the most common themes was the juxtaposition of the trench poet’s pity and love for fellow soldiers with antagonism towards the non-combatant population.

Anna Sussman writes:

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe uses the concept of a discreet, hypocritical Victorian gentleman to symbolize the press in the late 1950s and ’60s. Instead of giving its readers the whole story, the press, acting as one giant entity, decides what the public must know then delivers it, edited and retouched to perfection.

It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system. In the late 1950’s (as in the late 1970’s) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal’s fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one’s private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances.

Ed Caesar writes for British GQ May 15, 2018 about Tom Wolfe’s reporting on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination:

[Tom Wolfe:] “I went to Little Italy and everybody thought that their natural enemies had done it. You know, the Italians didn’t like the Jews so they blamed it on the Jews. The Jews blamed it on the Chinese. The Chinese blamed it on the Italians. And I thought these stories were hilarious. But when I got back to the newspaper… I’m sitting there looking for my piece and it’s not there. All they wanted was little old ladies collapsing in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral. That was it. They didn’t want any turmoil in the population over who did it, and that kind of thing. Newspapers are the last redoubt of people who want to observe the niceties. It’s strange. Something big happens, and whatever the proper reaction should be, that’s what you get.”

…Wolfe sees – has always seen – individuals as representatives of their group. The Italians blamed the Jews who blamed the Chinese. People are first and foremost a member of a race, or a class, or a certain stratum of society. In this regard, he’s a sociologist.

Wolfe explained as much to me when we talked about his novels. “You need psychology. But you don’t have a choice: that vertical line [of psychology] is going to intersect with this broad plane which is the society. And nobody can be a true individual because whatever you want to be is going to be pushed around and changed. We are all tremendously affected by the society that we’re in.”

[Gay Talese recalled:] “We spent a few hours together – going from downtown Manhattan (Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy); then came uptown, walking around the theatre district in the West Forties, uptown toward Columbus Circle… And I personally did not see much reaction at all from New Yorkers. I didn’t see anybody crying in the streets, didn’t overhear anybody lamenting aloud about the fatal shooting in Dallas etc. Yes, people had heard the news over the radio, or people were talking about the event among themselves as they stood waiting for a traffic light on a street corner; but there was no sign of the mournful masses that would later be the signature image on television.

“After I reported what I’d seen in New York, the editor didn’t want me to write anything. What I’d seen, or had not seen, did not conform to the ‘expected’ or ‘ideal’ response the situation seemed to call for, at least in the editor’s eyes. So there was no story in the Times by me that day. Nor, as I recall, was there anything by Tom Wolfe in the Trib that day. Here, on the same assignment, were two young men who would be identified as ‘New Journalists’ covering the same story and [on this great, headline-making day] getting nothing about it in print. We could not write what we saw, because we didn’t see what the editors and TV directors ‘saw’.”

Who determined that Dallas was the city of right-wing hate and that was the prism through which to understand the Kennedy assassination carried out by a communist?

Video description: “Larry McEnerney…led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.”

Here are some excerpts from this talk:

In a positivistic world, knowledge is just built up over time, and anytime you find out something that people didn’t know, you get to just add up to this model, and knowledge just keeps on growing and everybody’s happy. And that is dead.

There are conversations moving through time and there’s a bunch of people and they get to say what knowledge is.

Why on earth would these people get to say what knowledge is?

But the point is that’s the way it works. You may not like it, but that’s the way it works.

The good news is this thing does move through time. The other good news is this boundary is permeable. Stuff comes in and stuff goes out. Academic conversations excrete as they go.

They go along for a while and they say, whoa, we were doing that! Don’t do that anymore.

It’s not this buildup model. This buildup model assumed that everything was right. We don’t think that. We think a lot of what we think right now is wrong.

We just dunno what the wrong is and we don’t know what better is. We wanna know, we do, we wanna get better at it, but in order for us to do that, you have to be dealing with the stuff we say is knowledge.

The communities you’re entering have their own codes, a set of words that communicates value.

You must know the codes of the communities you’re working in and they are particular to communities.

Some codes are shared among a bunch of communities, some aren’t. You’ve got to know.

The code is, wow, are you smart!

You are so smart and you’ve contributed and you’ve advanced this, you’ve advanced this community through in fabulous ways, but there’s this little thing you got here that’s wrong. And now they say, oh yeah, well thank you for appreciating that. What do you think we have wrong? And then you better have an argument, not an explanation.

The University of Chicago writing program is not real popular in the world of writing programs and you can see why. A lot of people think we’re fascists.

Here’s what we teach people to do. We say, identify the people with power in your community and give them what they want. Lots of people have said to us in some version or another, you’re supposed to teach people to challenge the existing community. Well, actually, I just did, right? But notice that I did it inside the terms of the community.

You want me to go to this really important person, the editors of this journal and tell ’em they’re wrong? Yeah, I do. I need you to do it under the code. You wanna do it under the code. There’s polite ways to do it. There’s insulting ways to do it.

In a 1982 essay “Nomos and Narrative“, legal scholar Robert M. Cover wrote:

We inhabit a nomos – a normative universe. We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void.2 The student of law may come to identify the normative world with the professional paraphernalia of social control. The rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of a social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however, but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention. No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning.3 For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. 4 Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. In this normative world, law and narrative are inseparably related. Every prescription is insistent in its demand to be located in discourse to be supplied with history and destiny, beginning and end, explanation and purpose.5 And every narrative is insistent in its demand for its prescriptive point, its moral. History and literature cannot escape their location in a normative universe, 6 nor can prescription, even when embodied in a legal text, escape its origin and its end in experience, in the narratives that are the trajectories plotted upon material reality by our imaginations.

…The normative universe is held together by the force of interpretive commitments – some small and private, others immense and public. These commitments – of officials and of others – do determine what law means and what law shall be.13 If there existed two legal orders with identical legal precepts and identical, predictable patterns of public force, they would nonetheless differ essentially in meaning if, in one of the orders, the precepts were universally venerated while in the other they were regarded by many as fundamentally unjust.

…A legal tradition is hence part and parcel of a complex normative world. The tradition includes not only a corpus juris, but also a language and a mythos – narratives in which the corpus juris is located by those whose wills act upon it. These myths establish the paradigms for behavior. They build relations between the normative and the material universe, between the constraints of reality and the demands of an ethic. These myths establish a repertoire of moves a lexicon of normative action – that may be combined into meaningful patterns culled from the meaningful patterns of the past.

…The very imposition of a normative force upon a state of affairs, real or imagined, is the act of creating narrative. The various genres of narrative – history, fiction, tragedy, comedy – are alike in their being the account of states of affairs affected by a normative force field.

…Narratives are models through which we study and experience transformations that result when a given simplified state of affairs is made to pass through the force field of a similarly simplified set of norms. The intelligibility of normative behavior inheres in the communal character of the narratives that provide the context of that behavior. Any person who lived an entirely idiosyncratic normative life would be quite mad.

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, Rony Guldmann writes:

* …liberalism as now viewed by conservatives is an overarching cultural narrative of which the policy prescriptions are only symptoms. Liberalism is not just a political orientation, but a totalistic worldview and way of being that has crept into the American psyche itself and can always be discovered at work in the seeming trifles of social life and pop culture—suffocating conservatives from all sides. Liberalism is not sustained by reason and argument, but by the mores and pieties that liberals have quietly entrenched as the unquestioned, taken-for-granted background of things—a parochial ethos into which the populace has become progressively indoctrinated by small, often imperceptible increments. In issuing their claims of cultural oppression, conservatives seek to awaken their fellow Americans to this hidden reality.

* These disciplines and repressions have been culturally exalted as the achievement of a historically unprecedented self-possession, self-control, and self-transparency, the liberation of essential human faculties from the teleological illusions in which a benighted past once shackled them. But this self-congratulatory Enlightenment narrative conceals a darker and more complicated story that reveals molding and coercion where liberalism sees only liberation and “awareness.” What liberalism upholds as autonomous self-possession is in fact the internalization of the new restraints and inhibitions of the disciplinary society. The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount. These narratives trace our modern “innerness” to a certain psychic liberation from blind convention. But they overlook that this innerness is a kind of blind convention in its own right, the outcome of the disciplinary molding that quietly undergirds liberal ideals.

* …liberals believe in their heart of hearts that they enjoy a more self-regulating and self-transparent form of human agency than has been attained by conservatives, the “bitter clingers” lost in a hallucinatory world of imaginary cultural villains. But the Counter-Enlightenment narrative I defend reveals that what liberals celebrate as their higher-order rationality is in its subterranean structure a system of collective meaning-production, a hero-system that as such is on a par with the hero-systems of conservatism.

* Conservative claims of cultural oppression are right-wing populism turned post-modern. They protest liberalism, not as a public philosophy but as a meta-narrative—a way of thinking that, being no longer recognizable as such, has as Kimball says seeped into “the realm of habit, taste, and feeling.” Conservatives will frame the precise nature of liberals’ duplicity in a variety of ways. But they are united by the conviction that liberalism is sustained in existence by some all-pervasive social distortion, and that this distortion must be exposed if rhetorical parity between Left and Right is to be restored. Goldberg condemns the liberal denial of ideology as “offensive to logic, culturally pernicious, and, yes, infuriating.” And his exasperation is that of all conservatives, who find themselves perennially accused of moral and intellectual failure by those who lack any standing to condemn them. With acrobatic dexterity, liberals have eluded every attempt to hold them accountable, and have now been taken in by their own performances as dispassionate rationalists and pragmatists. With conservatives being the only remaining threat to those performances, to the liberal identity, they cannot but become another. The conservaphobia that oppresses them is neither a gratuitous free-floating vice nor a calculated political strategy, but thelogical corollary of liberalism’s basic self-understanding as somehow above the fray of sect and ideology.

* Conservative claimants of cultural oppression understand liberalism in much the same way that feminists understand patriarchy or post-colonial multiculturalists understand Eurocentrism: It is not just a just a set of political aims but an overarching ethos and narrative of which the explicitly political aims are only one expression, and not always the most important one. Liberalism inheres, not only in its principles and policies, but in the pre-reflective mores of the ambient culture, which are what prepare the population for those principles and policies.

* Goldberg urges conservatives to guard against being seduced by “the narrative of victimization.” That narrative is correct on the merits—conservatives “are called racists, bigots, fools, fascist, etc. every day by those who control the commanding heights of the culture.” But Goldberg believes that complaining about this can be counterproductive when it “concedes the authority of the liberal establishment to make such claims” and “encourages conservatives to internalize two unhealthy responses.” The first is “the burning desire to offend liberals just for kicks.” Though acceptable in moderation, this impulse can make conservatives come off as obnoxious, thus discrediting them. The other, antipodal but equally unhelpful, response is “self-hating conservatism,” which causes conservatives “to apologize for being ‘old-fashioned’” or to seek “to prove they ‘care’ too.” Hence the “abomination” of “compassionate conservatism.”

* The liberal narrative refuses to recognize this [1960s] chaos and its consequences. In occluding this, that narrative serves the twin ideological functions of 1) absolving liberalism of responsibility for the decay of traditional values and 2) portraying the ordinary American as still mired in unatoned racism, and so as requiring liberal interventions.

* The liberal narrative celebrates birth control as a crucial step in women’s liberation. But in like fashion, Goldberg observes that Margaret Sanger first promoted birth control by hitching a “racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation.” In persuading women that birth control was a “necessary tool for their own personal gratification,” Sanger “brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact ‘speaking truth to power.’”53Here as elsewhere, the problem with liberal individualism is not its excesses but its fraudulence, the hidden tribalistic impulses operating underneath the façade of that individualism, in which liberals do not truly believe.

* Moral relativism and subjectivism are not the transcendence of ideology—as the liberal narrative would have it—but, on the contrary, ideological weapons through which to disguise the injuries which the people of fashion would inflict on the common people. The latter’s moral degradation augments the political and cultural capital of the Left no less than vast armies of low-wage workers augment the profits of industrialists. This degradation is simply the currency of liberal ambition, merely another way for the anointed to set themselves against the benighted and their moral traditionalism.

* Our political attitudes emerge out of synaptically encoded moral narratives, which possess a dramatic structure comprised of heroes, villains, victims, helpers, and so forth. And this is in turn undergirded by an emotional structure which binds the dramatic structure to positive and negative emotional circuitry. Feelings like anger, fear, and relief are responses to developments within the dramatic structure—such as villainy, battle, and victory. This is why we feel elated when our political candidate wins and depressed when he loses. The candidate’s fate has been neurally integrated with our dopamine circuitry, which is activated by his victory and suppressed by his defeat. We aren’t born with these narratives, but their foundations become physically encoded in our brains quickly enough and constitute the lenses through which we see others and ourselves. Our choice of political candidate can sometimes change. But the “deep narratives” that ultimately drive our choices are strongly resistant to change. These have been synaptically encrypted into our physiology and cannot be altered absent a transformation in our broader brain structure.78To the extent change is possible, this will be, not because arguments have changed our minds, but because language has changed our brains, because the right words and images have strengthened some synaptic connections while weakening others to the point that political reorientation becomes possible.

* What liberals would dismiss as conservatives’ “vague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of some ethereal social fiber is, translated into non-anthropocentric terms, the gradual unraveling of a neurologically encoded heroic narrative, the erosion of its synaptic strength at the hands of a hostile cultural environment that fails to activate, and indeed works to de-activate, the synaptic connections that underpin conservatives’ identities and hero-system. These connections are as much a part of us as are our limbs, organs, and bank accounts.

* The feminist narrative tells us that women’s liberation is a struggle against the forces of patriarchy, against the various legal norms, social practices, and cultural prejudices that continue to confine women to a subordinate social station. But for conservatives, this is history as written by the victors, and so a history that silences the voices of the losers, non-feminist women, whose trials and tribulations never enter the liberal moral equation. Feminism is a struggle, not by all women against male patriarchs, but by an elite minority of powerful women against a majority of women who never felt compromised by traditional gender roles.

* Liberals adopt their moral stances in furtherance of a heroic narrative that places them at center stage and conscripts other groups as props…

* Though liberals seek to uplift the downtrodden, they do so as part and parcel of a heroic narrative that assigns them a privileged role for which others bear the cost. This cost was paid by Justice Thomas, who like all designated victims can enjoy the beneficence of the anointed and their victim/villain/rescuer narrative only inasmuch as he acknowledges that narrative and the anointed’s status within it as rescuers. In opposing affirmative action, Thomas denied that narrative and status, and so he became exposed to the racial prejudice from which liberal blacks are shielded.

* [Robert] Bork writes that the Supreme Court’s “pronouncements are significantly guided not by the historical meaning of the Constitution but by the values of the class that is dominant in the culture.” Having become colonized by the “parochial morality of an arrogant intellectual class,” the courts surreptitiously elevate a particularistic cultural ethos into a hegemonic narrative about the meaning of American ideals, all under the guise of thoughtfulness, enlightenment, progress, and so forth.