• Stories matter.

• Stories matter.
Most of all it’s been hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that our beliefs shape our decisions, rather than the other way around. After all, so much of what we tell each other are evasions or rationalizations after the fact, high-sounding excuses for selfish or fearful actions. It seems a lot easier for us to find a principle that justifies what we want to do, than to follow our principles when they run against our desires.

# Making excuses. For instance, recently I was reading Harris' The End of Faith. It's an ambitious critique of religion in general. Like a lot of commentors, however, Harris reserves a special hostility for Islam. He backs up his argument with plenty of quotes from the Koran to show that holy war is a central, not deviant, element of Islam. Now, I haven't personally compared the body count in the various holy scriptures, so I can't be sure which god is the most bloodsoaked. But it's not fair to blame the world's violence on religion. Very few people murder or enslave --or sacrifice their own lives-- because Jesus whispered in their ears. We have much less mysterious reasons for what we do. Religions don't govern (though religious elites sometimes do, as in Iran); at most, they make rulers’ policies more acceptable. The same must be said for the many racist, sexist, militarist, boot-licking corporate scientists.

In fact, people all over the world show the same wide range of behaviors no matter what religion we belong to (or don't), and we always seem to find some authority to justify our actions. Let me take just one example from hundreds you and I could come up with. Theravada Buddhism claims, among other things, that there is no creator or savior god, that suffering is caused by attachment to the world, and that escape from countless rebirths requires extinguishing the self. Now you'd think that folks with these beliefs would act very differently from you or I. But according to Melvin Spiro, that's not the case. He found that Burmese Buddhists have acquired a whole set of religious practices that permit them to strive for wealth, kill animals and people, and seek help from various gods and spirits. Perhaps you can think of Christian practices that seem a stretch from Scripture-- say, that line about not killing.

We can likewise discount all sorts of political dogma. We invaded Iraq to spread freedom. Freedom means tax breaks for billionaires. Freedom means regulating sex but not the economy. We protect freedom by punishing immigrants. My neighbor said we have to save Operation Iraqi Freedom by censoring TV news. You know all these.

We tell a lot of stories just to make ourselves feel better. I want to feel valuable and valued by the bosses, so I tell myself how superior I am to the rabble. I want to steal my neighbor’s land without losing my sense of self-righteousness so I convince myself and the judge that she’s a witch; he hangs her forthwith. I’m afraid to stand up to the boss so I blame women who stand up to me. Endless ugly stories to cover our ugliest impulses. If stories are only the public excuses for doing what we want to do, they are not important; they are only misdirection to cover our true motives.

My point isn't that we are merely hypocrites, but that we can easily tailor our beliefs to our practices-- and that's a universal habit. And if our beliefs are so elastic --so convenient-- how can we insist that they determine our behavior?


# Stories guide us by explaining the world.

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“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
--Alisdair McIntyre (Frykholm 16).
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In fact many stories are more than excuses. We really do need ways to understand the world and what we need and how to get it. We develop our own stories from the stories we hear, the experiences we have, and what we want; in turn, our stories tell us what we can do and the best way to do it.

For example, it’s not always obvious that helping our neighbor or ripping him off would benefit or harm us. Two people in similar circumstances, with similar experience, may come to very different conclusions. My story might tell me that family is sacred, but that I have no responsibility for the folks across the street or on the other side of the world. Or I might see breaking and entering as immoral, and risky to boot, but spraying my lawn (and the neighborhood) with pesticides as a perfectly respectable thing to do. Knowing the law or the effects of malathion or the pawn shop value of the neighbor’s CD player won’t really help us understand these political calculations. For that we need to turn to the stories that encode our needs, experience, and strategies. Many experiments and surveys have demonstrated the common-sense proposition that our political acts depend on our understanding of the context and our own roles.

We also see every day how lies preempt truer stories and keep us from solving our problems. The folks who take their privileges for granted --who imagine it’s their own moral superiority that makes them healthy, or rich, or white, or straight-- will never understand their neighbors, because they cannot understand themselves. People who think conflicts in the Middle East are just protrusions of a much vaster, cosmic, necessary war between good and evil will continue to resist building peace in the here and now. Those of us who imagine the triumph of unregulated capitalism is somehow ordained by nature, like gravity or entropy, have no way to prepare for or deal with either global resource crises or the commercialized dissolution of our communities. If we define responsibility in such a way that blowing up a bus is terrorism, while the much deadlier policies that deny health care to millions, spew poisons into the air and water, and arm gangsters have no author, how can we ever hope to trace basic cause and effect in our world? If we understand freedom to be tearing across the mountains in an ATV, or treating other people like dirt without any backtalk, we might despise the people who think first of food, shelter and peace. If we think social rules pre-exist society, that their purpose is to control naturally weak and destructive people rather than to help us, then we have no way to justify adjusting the rules to our needs. If our solidarity with the oppressed is exhausted by defending bunnies or fetuses --so much cuter than ugly, messy, annoying people-- how can we even see ourselves and our fellows?

Some other poison paradigms: the ideas that

• order cannot exist without someone to tell us what to do

• we can trust authorities, because they know more than we do, because they have to keep secrets, but we can trust them because

• gods, presidents and CEOs can claim credit for all that’s good in the world, whereas suffering and killing are clearly the fault of the natural order, or people with funny names

• the United States is a uniquely good force in the world; indeed, it has a divine mission

• nature can be industrialized like some immortal factory robot, churning out endless treasure at ever increasing rates, with never a faltering, breakdown or undesigned variation-- and we can bet our very survival on such a fantasy

• things must be getting better because there is more stuff to buy.



# Stories to solve problems and build democracy. Our stories matter in another sense, too: they are one of the few fields where we can achieve an edge over the control freaks. Even in crisis, the corporate/Christian partnership has a vast superiority in terms of communicative and coercive resources. I’ll be so happy if the likes of Al Franken can establish a viable national leftish radio talk network, and if MoveOn doubles the funding going to liberal programs. I am marginally less grumpy since a Democrat took the White House. But there’s no way grassroots folks can outspend or out-threaten Halliburton and the other local gods. There’s no Democrat in sight who would challenge the institutional bases of Halliburton’s power, because there is not yet the popular base for such a project. (Obama has written about this, but showed precious little effort to change it in his campaign.) There are few legislative campaigns which, even when they win, undermine Halliburton’s authority. The fitful Living Wage campaign of the 1990s was one of the exceptions, because it demands that we think about sharing wealth on the basis of need-- which, far more than the relatively tiny cost, is why it was so bitterly resisted. When the Halliburton’s Treasury Secretary Paulson started buying bank stock at the end of 2008, to rescue big investors, he specified that he was buying non-voting stock: We’ll give you the money, but we don’t dare tell you what to do with it. It didn’t even occur to Osama’s finance gurus to challenge AIG’s awarding of hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars to its top execs, until the national wave of revulsion.

I think the financial crisis is going to wipe away some of this fussiness. Big government is back!-- at whose service remains to be seen. Nonetheless, we have to expect the corporations will continue to dominate the media and the courts and the economy without a much more fundamental political shift in this country. So we have to push radical change against and within very formidable institutions. We’ll have to reach beyond the standard sources of power, stop playing by the rules, and mobilize folks even as we are entangled in business as usual. Telling stories more effectively can help us do that.

We don’t necessarily need new stories. Folks already have all sorts of helpful understandings and strategies. A big part of our task is to help these emerge above the stinking cesspool of lies, spread them around and put them into action. We’ve always claimed to be The People, United, who Will Never Be Defeated. Well, the only guide to unity and victory and what we do after that are the stories we tell.

Segrest starts Memoirs of a Race Traitor this way: "I have struggled to find a voice to bring you back these stories [of racism and fighting racism]. . . . Could I turn bits and pieces of a large, bloody, violent puzzle into a coherent story that would move both ordinary and powerful people?" (p. 1). I have seen how powerful stories can bring us together or tear us apart; how they can set us up for submission or for successful resistance. And if some stories are not true, they still serve a purpose, creepy though it might be. It’s up to us to figure out what that is, and expose the lie. In this set of essays, I want to examine how we make our stories, and why, and maybe how we can change them to be more truthful and useful.


# Ideas and institutions. I don’t know if you remember Werner Erhard’s The Hunger Project. Yeah, he’s the guy who invented the est seminars, very big in spiritual circles circa 1971. Somebody in the organization decided it would be nice to help poor people. So they set up scores of discussion groups around the country, to discuss hunger. The idea was that people were starving because they weren’t thinking right about hunger. They were too negative. They just needed to think more positively.

That is not my claim.

To be clear: when we try to choose the best path for ourselves and our communities, the biggest obstacle is not lack of understanding but lack of choice. The main reason my neighbors and I don’t always have the same politics is that we don’t share the same range of options. If we all had access to good education, health care and jobs, we’d be a lot better situated to resist the killers who run this planet. Very few of us would choose to rob our neighbors and the next generation if we had easier ways to make a living and explore the world. So if we can push the new president to put into place a better health care system and reestablish some base level of worker rights, that will help make room for a more productive politics. Defending and enlarging the web of public social services has the net effect of making us less dependent on the axis of weasels (which is why they are so intent on trashing it.) But a healthy, functioning democracy requires changes even more fundamental.

Again, the puzzle is how to structure a better society before we achieve a shared understanding of the common interest. As long as the corporate-religious alliance has millions of dependents, it has the power to set the rules. We have to illumine and build the common interest despite a thousand institutions and policies designed to divide us. So thinking nice thoughts is not the whole of the revolution. Sharing them is a good way to start.

Here’s how I understand the civil rights and women’s movements of the last half century: the struggle had enough disruptive power to force institutional changes, and at the same time generated a substantial though often fairly shallow buy-in by broad sections of the nation. The incompleteness of our understanding of and commitment to these democratic gains, the unequal way the costs were spread, and the shifts in focus from education to regulation allowed right-wing preachers and politicians to mobilize many people in a fierce backlash against their neighbors.

We also know that the Reaganists were unable to overturn all the institutional advances, and that fact of somewhat greater opportunity has, over two generations, truly changed how most of us think and act. (For this reason I don’t agree with Piven and Cloward [1977] that institutionalizing reforms must inevitably weaken and corrupt political movements, though certainly we see plenty of examples.) Then I think how much further along we could have been, had we continued to push the debate even after the first policy wins.

To me, this business of political education is not a substitute for radical institutional change, but the indispensable preparation for it, and the ongoing necessity as we implement those changes.