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March 30, 2006
The Public Talk
"… we think in terms of stories."
Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature
Human communities live by telling stories of themselves; we seek to understand ourselves, our institutions, our problems, and our goals by relating them causally to one another; and we organise the self-understanding by relating perceptions and facts together in narratives. And it is an important insight that in human world how things are perceived and described determines to a crucial extent what they are and what they can become. Phenomena of moral, political, social life do not present themselves as unquestionable objective facts with clear significance. In order to determine whether unrestricted economic competition is a desirable framework of society or a lamentable moral vice, we normally need to be reasonably clear about the story such principle holds a place in. In other words we need to make clear whether we are telling, for example, a story of market economics or a story of man's path to salvation.
The unfolding of these stories is a most fascinating subject of inquiry. Not because it would provide the inquirer with a privileged vantage point from which to disinterestedly observe a parade of self-deceptive narratives, ideologies and false consciousnesses which past and present political societies have invented. For it does not appear likely that we could, or indeed desirable that we should, tell no rather than some stories of our collective self-understanding. The great metaphors (of, say, democracy, right, market, independence, salvation, nation, justice, purity &c.) we use to speak about ourselves and our societies are importantly what keeps us alive and peacefully together, by enabling us, for instance, to cope, through sets of shared perspectives and terms, with problems of political decision and collective order in face of the ultimate diversity and unpredictability of men and things. It is precisely for this reason that most fundamental political disputes and dichotomies revolve around placing facts into competing interpretative frameworks (like "social justice" vs. "free enterprising individual").
Neither is such inquiry into the nature and genealogy of our stories motivated by an attempt to lay bare, behind a putative facade of deceptive fallacy of public rhetoric—at the level of "real" motivations and causes— some version of stark and disillusioned "truth" of man, society, and history. Although it is indisputable that an attempt to unveil the functional and contextual nature of our stories of public self-understanding always involves a temptation to yield to varying degrees of cynicism regarding any claim of such stories to validity and sincerity. It is admittedly difficult, in other words, to inquire into particular circumstances of the historical origins of a notion, like that of democracy, and still maintain an unshaken commitment to the universal and absolute validity of such notion. How can one assert that something is historically and contextually contingent, arising under particular circumstances from particular social practices, and yet at the same time that it holds a universal value raising a self-evident claim to our loyalties and commitment? Strictly logically speaking, such delineation of the problem probably entails insoluble contradiction. It has been one, however, with which European civilisation has been confronted more or less ever since it started coping with the experience of having encountered, with the dawn of early modernity, on a large scale those often wildly different social practices of cultures of other continents. The modern mind has ever since been at least latently troubled by awareness that its own habits, perspectives it takes for self-evident and granted, its very assumed criteria of validity, may be rendered relative and problematic by an unexpected encounter with an irreconcilable otherness; other habits, other values, other stories.
Described on these terms, the problem appears abstractly philosophical to the point of desperation. However, there are highly practical and topical issues concerned here. (Only thanks to the inordinately overstretched use of the term "terrorist"—implied by the rhetoric of the war on terror frequently bordering on hysteria—is the Russian president Putin able to phrase his war in Chechnya in terms of struggle with international or islamist terrorism and, worse still, only thanks to that can Lukashenko's regime in Minsk intimidate the Belorussian political opposition by threatening to criminally charge dissenters with terrorism.)
If it does matter, indeed, how we describe things; if how we speak about things, in human world, determines to a large extent what the things are, then we had better pay very close attention to how words are being used to invoke images in our public discourse, to what our public speakers "do" with the words.
Posted by david at March 30, 2006 08:08 AM