Open up our stories.

Open up our stories.
Our stories hold the world together. In turn, we hold tightly to our stories. This seems like such a crazy cosmos, and we have only our stories to make sense of it. But in fact the universe has an order to it regardless of what we think. What’s more, the world is bigger than our stories; we can know more and more, but we can never know everything. Here and there our stories have gaps or twists or tears where they try to cover too much with too little. So as we try to understand the world and ourselves, it helps to start with open stories, ideas that are not fixed and finished. That way we can add or change them as we learn more. Just as important, open stories invite a lot of people to join the work and art of telling them.

This is not to say that every idea is equally valuable, or that we are open to all of them. On the contrary, we continue to learn and improve our ideas because we want to get them right.

These essays are about how we craft our political stories, and how we might make them better. Here are some practices that might help. These are all basic common-sense suggestions, but I repeat them because they’re hard to do in real life.


• Pay attention to how we develop stories.
In the normal course of my daily rounds I don’t often think about how I know things. I operate as if the world is just as I see it. Questions come up only when you and I are looking at the same thing, and seeing something different. Somehow one or both of us may be missing important information. (There’s a game in which the first person whispers a message to the second, who whispers it to the third, and so on down the line. When the last person says what he heard, lots of times it’s quite different from the original message.) We also have to ask how our minds are making sense of the information we do get.

We can compare how we develop big explanations to how scientists do it. Scientists are supposed to follow a procedure for finding out about the world: ask questions, look around, develop an explanation for what they see, then try to verify it in some way. Their explanations almost always borrow from what other scientists have said before. Sometimes they call their explanations models, and they can try them out, and make big and little changes, to see if they work. In science, no explanation is ever complete. There’s always something missing, and if the questions are important good scientists will keep looking for better answers.

To illustrate, just take a look at the the big explanations people used to have, and how these changed over time-- for instance, Ptolemy’s concentric spheres as an early model of the skies, later replaced by Copernicus’ idea of planets orbiting the sun. At times people saw the world as an illusion or merely the reflection of a higher, supernatural reality; time as an endless series of cycles or a progression to some final goal; sickness as the result of witchcraft; and education itself as passively accepting truth from authority. What do students study under the first model as compared with the second? How would you test which kind of education helps us most? All these ways of seeing the world guided people’s lives, including their political commitments. Over time, though, they and we developed other understandings and ways to live. The point is, no set of explanations is ever complete. Our models are always smaller than the world itself.

The old action-reflection organizing spiral is just another way to express the process of continuously learning from our experience (the Doris Marshall Institute handbook has a good description--see References). Many groups practice this in the course of campaigns, as they craft their messages (or, better yet, inquiries) for their constituencies.

That’s how we normally figure out everyday challenges, as well. We’re all a bit like scientists, constructing models of the world from what we see and what we’re told, and applying them to reality to see if they work. It’s true, we don’t have an army of undergrads running around collecting data for us, even though in our daily lives we have to be experts in a dozen fields, not just one. We also don’t win any prizes or front page photos for the most elegant explanation. Instead, we get the chance for more success in our lives, to make better choices, to have more fun.

Part of the process is trying out different explanations. In fact, we spend much of our lives juggling many perspectives, from the time we first come into contact with seriously different points of view. Not the caricatures presented by our favorite TV shows or web sites, but real people with complexity, passion and knowledge. Dealing with the parents, falling in love, managing the boss remind us that individuals see things differently, that we construct our knowledge from our own points of view. For me, going to school outside my home town helped a lot, too. Rich men’s servants recognize this peril, and wrap their kids in layers of ideological condom before sending them off to not be educated. But we learn anyhow; there’s no other way to navigate the social world. The few failures pry assault rifles with armor-piercing shells from Charlton Heston’s cold, dead fingers and mow down their classmates, or strap bomb vests onto 10-year-olds and send them on bus rides.

For most of us, the rigidity comes later. Our learning curves tend to flatten out over time, because our understandings bring us some success, or because the anxiety we feel from failure leads us to become ever more rigid and dogmatic. Maybe we become so fearful that we choose to deal only with people like ourselves, who reassure us that the vast universe is exactly like our back yard. As parents, teachers and managers, we may come to maintain our authority by adopting a pose of certainty that’s not really justified by our knowledge. We may even forget how we learned anything in the first place. We come to rely on our existing knowledge as if it were unchallengeable and unchangeable.

Something comparable can happen with our political stories as well. There’s a period of gathering information, and sorting it, and trying out various explanations to see what fits. Then we have to act, if only to declare ourselves or choose a side. Parents push us to choose very early, adopting the parents’ explanations without the experience behind them. It’s easy to stop learning at that point, because we figure the problem is solved, or because we feel committed by our public stand. That’s why parents push us to choose early--they figure we’ll be set for life. One problem is that we can adopt the parents’ conclusions while missing all their experience and thinking. That’s why, when teachers ask students to express opinions, we have to take care to make information and processing time available. Once we take a position, well-considered or not, we may feel bound to stick with it no matter what.

So how can we develop stories that guide action, without letting them congeal like grease on a grill?


• Reconsider the frames of reference.
Once upon a time --well, maybe a few times-- I saw the walls breathe, heard trees grow, traced the rainbow veins in my body. Nice experiences, but I didn't take them to mean that walls can really breathe. I understood pretty well that my mind was processing information in a way that didn't represent the whole of reality, but rather reflected my particular circumstances.

I don't always remember that when I think about politics, but it's still true. I pay a lot more attention now to the politics of Social Security than I did right out of school. I never missed a meal in my life, so I might have a different idea about food policy than, say, an Afghani child--or your average U.S. farmer. I was never pregnant, or under fire, or in a wheelchair, so I’m bound to have a different understanding of related political issues than someone who’s had these experiences. When we talk about the advantages we have, and our position in society, it's not only to identify ways we might be taking advantage of others, but also to remind ourselves how our experience affects our views of the world.

It is always experience mediated through ideas and explanations already established in our minds. Which of these frameworks do we choose when we want to study something, or make sense of new information? That's not always clear. Sometimes we have to dig below the surface.

Why, for example, did some of us hate Bill Clinton and others hate Bush, Junior? Why did some find these toadies so inspiring? I suspect our responses go beyond consideration of the specific actions and issues of these persons. George, for instance, fit perfectly my stereotype of the dangerously, arrogantly ignorant rich kid with a speeding car / snowmobile / fleet of aircraft carriers, while I’ve had to live carefully and cautiously lest I be squashed like a bug by exactly such folks. I’m guessing, by way of contrast, that some found Junior’s very clumsiness and mistakes endearing, since we are all liable to trip up once in a while, but our sincerity, determination and perseverance are what count. Many of these same folks loathed Clinton less for his (corporate) political agenda than for the Reaganesque cheerfulness with which he carved a path of devastation through the lives of his friends, family and political partners.

Why do many of us accept our bosses’ right to tell us what to do for eight or ten or twelve hours a day, while we complain bitterly about labor union bureaucracies? How can we be so generous to tsunami survivors while resenting the homeless in our neighborhoods-- and, even more, programs to help the homeless. Why are we sometimes so inspired by the bravery of soldiers --or Zapatista rebels in Chiapas-- yet we rarely think of the coal miners who risk life and health to power our air conditioners, farmworkers who breakfast on pesticides so we can feast on exotic fruits, or the meatpackers who climb inside the butchering machines to clean them in order to keep our Big Macs safe? I want to get at the underlying strata of images and interpreted experiences that frame our political choices.

The fact is, our understanding about any one issue is so complexly connected to our knowledge about everything else, so rooted in our basic life strategies, that we’re more likely to incorporate additional information into our existing stories than to change our minds. By itself, new data might jiggle the web a bit, tear a couple threads, but our maintenance spiders drop down and repair the damage in no time. 9/11 shook an awful lot of people, and so did the latest economic bubble. How much have those disasters changed the ways we think and act?

As we develop our political ideas, it helps to recall that the conclusions we come to are bound to be influenced by the questions we ask and perspectives we start from.

This can be playfully done, for instance by discussing all the background knowledge we have to have to interpret a cartoon or an optical illusion-- and the cues the cartoonists use to trigger our reactions. We can compare how different cultures see different constellations from the same stars. There are jokes and puzzles like that old yarn about the doctor who saves the son. The first time I heard it circa 1970, I didn’t get that the doctor was a woman; I didn’t think of woman doctors. Now, with same-sex marriages possible in a few places, there could be more than one right answer. Take a look at old ads or comic books, how they portray men and women and people of color. We can see how assumptions have changed since then.

We can also think about how we carry carry and present our own assumptions. When I worked at a social services agency, employees would often discuss the clients. One day a program director told how he'd found out a client was selling the bus tickets we gave out (to get people to work and job interviews). He told the story several times over the next couple weeks, in a cynical joking fashion, with vivid details. He had just told the story once again, when 2 guys came in and asked for bus tickets to get to work. As per policy, the secretary gave them the tickets, then announced, with a knowing air, almost with satisfaction, They are going to sell those tickets.

The way he used this information, the manager had taken a tiny sample and authorized it as a way to view all the clients. He modeled both personal indignation at some clients' cheating, and a way to express that as a sense of superiority over all clients. I didn't see the next round, but have no doubt, the staff would seriously or in a joking tone accuse other clients of cheating, which they would dutifully repeat in their dealings with each other. Then we all agree: low income people are low-lifes. We can generate big Stories from mere slivers of data.

We have no reason to flog ourselves for prejudice or gullibility. None of us can think without preconceptions. That’s how our minds sort the information we get. But as we become more aware of the origins of our ideas, the better we can judge their limitations and appropriateness to the tasks at hand. We need to understand where we’re starting from-- and be ready to move ahead.


• Don’t act on crummy information. Nothing new here. Evaluating information is a basic life skill. We certainly can’t move ahead politically without it. It would be nice to write, Let the truth be our guide. But we can’t ever expect to know the full truth. Information can be more or less complete, and more or less accurate. It makes more sense to talk about having enough accurate information to make decisions, or not; and how to keep our eyes and ears open even as we’re in the midst of the struggle. Among other things:

# Don’t rely on self-serving information-- stories that justify the teller (even when that’s us). Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Who says so? Why, the Winston company. The CIA smuggles drugs to enslave black people. Everyone knows they’re an evil outfit; this just proves it! By the same token, it’s obvious they invented AIDS and Abu Ghraibed the wise aliens who came to bring us peace. When our stories get too convenient it’s time to look for corroboration.

Once I sat in on a gathering of activists who’d been threatened, beat up, arsoned or shot at because of their environmental work. One of the most dramatic stories combined several elements of what other people said. Later on this person added, in thrilling whispers, even more shocking details. Her account was like a prototype of the kinds of attacks people had reported. Eventually we figured it out; she was borrowing and embellishing what other people said. Not all of it was true; possibly very little. But it fit very well the big story we were trying to tell, and so for a while we accepted her exaggerations. During that time her lies threatened the credibility of the other, very true reports.

We can help ourselves by checking twice when we hear or use a self-serving story.

# Get a second opinion. If you had a big decision to make about medical treatment, you’d probably want to talk to more than one doctor. Some political decisions can be pretty important, too. We get in trouble when we rely on single-source “common knowledge”--what “everyone” knows about welfare moms, Saddam Hussein’s intentions, student test scores, the “legal path” for immigrants. In fact, a lot of the noise that surrounds us comes from the same think tanks and media companies, if not directly from advertising or the White House itself. The well-documented problems of pack journalism infect the internet as well, with even less restraint. Repetitions that make the noise sound credible are not corroborating sources at all, just echoes. Lots of us, left or right, know this, but it’s still hard to resist the messages that hammer at us. Some people don’t watch TV any more. Many more people tell me, I saw it on the web. The echoes problem is complicated, but we can choose how much we expose ourselves.


# Apply the right information to the question at hand. For instance, Junior’s true intentions in invading Iraq were totally irrelevant to the question of whether there were any verifiable grounds for war, not to mention a strategy for winning. Also beside the point: the sex lives of presidents, until they lie about them. Whether children die from bus bombs or warplanes. Whether someone is a good person, as a condition for getting food stamps (everyone has the right to eat, even jerks).

Another way to put it: How does this information help solve the problem? Which can easily lead to: What is the problem, anyway?


# Listen for new insights in our conversations, not just to confirm old ideas. Some discussions are set-ups for groups to reach pre-determined conclusions and adopt them as their own. Bohdan (cited above) describes one such group, and how facilitators use the process to shape what appears on the surface to be spontaneous, open-ended sharing. Sales seminars, talk shows and community group trainings can all do this as well. It’s easy to signal the answer we’re looking for, reinterpret what people say to fit our categories (aka put words in someone’s mouth), or to ignore all the responses until somebody stumbles on the one we like. Hey, I’m a teacher, I know these practices. But I think we really miss out when we operate this way.

For sure there are things I want students to see, and I direct my questions to emerge those. Lots of times, though, my students see or focus on things I’ve overlooked. It’s important that neither they nor I dismiss our different insights. When our perceptions conflict, it’s a good opportunity to compare and deepen them. Goldberger et al (1997 p. 144) make the point that the difference between “real talk” and the kind of conversations we often have is that with real talk, we are looking for new understanding to emerge from what we say and hear.

If we hear only what we agree with, either we’re preaching to the choir, or not listening very well.

A related problem is the way we like to shoehorn information to fit the boxes we’ve already built. A friend of mine was telling me that Israel is just a tool of the oil companies seeking to control the Middle East. I think that would be news to the oil corps, but it sure simplifies the analysis. What about that preacher who explained H. Clinton’s candidacy as a racist plot? You know a hundred more examples. Let’s leave that stuff to the neocons.