Do stories serve too many purposes? (3)

Here is a weird thing Tyler Cowen says: "We are biologically programmed to think in terms of stories."

Think of what that means. There have been millions upon millions of human beings who have lived and died and over those millions upon millions of cases thinking in terms of stories proved to be an adaptive trait. So much so that we are all biologically programmed to think in terms of stories.

If you set out to test the claim that thinking in terms of stories is a good thing, you could not come up with a better test. There isn't a computer on earth that could run a model to test that assumption as completely and convincingly as evolution has done for us.

Is it any argument at all to say—as Cowen has done—that stories can be wrong and provide examples of this? It might be if we could demonstrate that in some situations stories consistently and systematically mislead us. (Does Cowen deliver on that? I'll get to that later.)

But such an argument, if it could be made, could only apply to specific situations that would have to be carefully described. It would be like an optical illusion—"if I put a straight stick in the water it will appear to be bent because ...." An optical illusion that applied at all times would be more like the fact that we see things in terms of discrete colours instead of as a continuous variation of shades. You might even say, in some contexts, that seeing discrete colours is to see things "not as they really are." But, outside of a physics classroom, what possible practical use would such a move be?

Meanwhile, it's very useful to see colours. It's not just an accident that we are evolved to see the world in colours or in terms of stories.

Do stories serve too many purposes?

I tell myself my job is really important to get out of bed. It works and that is a good thing. But later I may need a different story to get me to get out of the rut my current job has me in so that I may look for a new one.

Is this a problem at all? It strikes me as more like the is-ought distinction. Logically speaking, no amount of description of what is the case ever warrants any conclusions about what we should do. But that issue, which is a bottomless canyon when Hume describes it, isn't even a crack in the sidewalk in real life. If I see my friend about to step in a pile of dog crap I warn them. Or I don't because I want to laugh at them. But, either way, I don't have any trouble going from what is to reaching a moral conclusion.

Sometimes we can't make up our mind. I sit up all night trying to decide which college to apply to. The facts don't help me. Yes, life is like that sometimes.

Is changing out story to serve different purposes any different? Sheila was madly in love with Rob and told herself a story about how he was going to be the man she would spend the rest of her life with. Now they have broken up and she is madly in love with Malcolm and tells herself a story in which Malcolm is the man she will spend the rest of her life and Rob was a mistake and she sometimes tells that story as an example of how close she came to making a tragic mistake.

Morals of stories

A few of the examples of stories that Tyler Cowen gives are really morals that might be drawn of stories. He gives far more story tags than story morals but it is our tendency to draw morals from stories that bothers him the most. He doesn't like "stories" such as "we have to get tough", "it's a conspiracy", "it's good versus evil", "my job is really important", "it's good guys against bad guys", "buy this car and you will have beautiful romantic partners and a fascinating life".

He has three kinds of objections to morals we draw from stories:

1. They are too simple.
2. They have to serve too many purposes
3. They can be used to exploit us in advertising and propaganda

I'll take these one at a time over the next few posts. But first a reminder, none of the above are actually stories. There are a lot of conspiracy stories. The number of possible conspiracy stories may be infinite for all we know. We never tell the conspiracy story we can only tell a conspiracy story. We never tell the good versus evils story we can only tell a good versus evil story.

A scary word

Okay, let's all sit down because I am about to introduce an incendiary word into the conversation. A word that frightens children and evokes an image of moral monsters. But I don't want anyone to think of it that way. I want to convince you that the word actually means something common and familiar. It occurs in the following sentence and I think you'll spot it right away.

The kind of moral argument that Tyler Cowen is pushing is called nihilism.

Okay, I know what you are thinking but nihilism is a pretty common and familiar position these days. This song is nihilist and so is this one. Lennon's song in particular has become the inspiration for a charity; it's not Mein Kampf. You could even say nihilism is the opposite of that book which describes life as a struggle.

What makes john Lennon, Peggy Lee and Tyler Cowen nihilists? It's a negative quality. These songs argue—and they both make a powerful and influential moral argument—that certain kinds of beliefs undermine our ability to be happy. Nihilists do not refuse to believe in anything at all. They believe in trees, rocks and glasses of orange juice just like everyone else. But there are certain very big moral organizing principles that they want to encourage us to give up on. They think that we can find freedom and happiness by doing so. Tyler Cowen is a nihilist in that sense.

His real target in that lecture is not stories but certain big moral ideas. Over the next few posts I'll try to prove that to you.


PS: A pedantic philosopher point. If there is one thing people think they know about nihilism it is that Nietzsche was a nihilist. He was not! If we put Tyler Cowen in a time machine and took him back to meet Nietzsche, Nietzsche would hate Tyler Cowen with a passion that would not be pleasant to contemplate. The last thing in the world Nietzsche wanted was for people to accept their messes.

The metaphors compared (2)

Tyler Cowen has picked his metaphor well just as Oakeshott did. If we look at it a bit, I think you will see that it is a brilliant metaphor.

We can leave a mess just like we can leave a park but we don't do so with the same attitude. A park is a place we visit and no one will condemn us for ignoring the park for a while. It's very different if we ignore a mess. And when we talk about leaving a mess we say things such as "running away from the mess".

Tyler Cowen is an economist and he is very interested in behaviourial economics. A mess is a good metaphor for him because our economic lives are not like history. We live here in the mess. There is a moral obligation to "face the mess". With the park, the moral of* the metaphor suggests we go to this place and act frivolously. With the mess, the moral of the metaphor suggests that we are trying to escape something if we can't face our mess.



* And yes, after praising Cowen for several posts, I just slipped the first critical jab in here like a picador quietly stirring the bull up for slaughter. The sharp implement was "the moral of".

The metaphors compared (1)

So we have a park and a mess. Let's think about what those two metaphors imply starting with the park.

A park is somewhere you visit and a place you can leave at will. There is a lot of stuff in a park; there are benches, paths, grass, trees, shrubs and play areas. When we exercise our opinions like a whippet we trace a line of convenience across the park and ignore the vast majority of stuff there. Like Cowen's stories, the whippet excludes a whole lot of territory. He is more interested in grass and paths because that suits what he likes to do (which is to run very fast). Likewise, we exercise our opinions by running them through the parts where they can travel easily ignoring the more complex and difficult terrain.

The historian Oakeshott admired the most was a guy named Frederick William Maitland. Maitland didn't write stories, he painstakingly went over source material looking for details that didn't fit stories. His most famous work as an historian was to pour over ancient parliamentary rolls and prove that the story of the English parliaments was NOT what everyone thought it was.

That's all good stuf and I'm with Oakeshott (and Cowen if he wants in) when it comes to history. But history is something we only do sometimes. We can leave history just like we leave the park and get back to our real lives.

Another metaphor

Okay, I'm going to try and make a very complicated point here and I may be hard to follow. I want to draw something about Cowen's idea of a mess out and I want to do it by comparing him to someone else who has an approach similar to his. The point of the comparison, though, is to highlight something unique to Tyler Cowen and not what he has in common with this other guy.

The other guy is an intellectual historian and philosopher, now dead, named Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott came from a school of historians who distrusted stories. They did so specifically because they distrusted a specific type of story called Whig history. What exactly that is doesn't really matter here. The thing that matters is that he doesn't like stories.

And he has a metaphor too. I'm going from memory so this won't be verbatim but Oakeshott says that history is increasingly a place where we exercise our opinions like we exercise whippets in the park on a Sunday afternoon.

Whippets are very lean, fast dogs sort of like greyhounds only smaller. Imagine you are looking down on a park from an upper story and every once in a while one of these dogs flits across the park, tracing a line, running very quickly—and then its gone.

The epistemological metaphor

When we talk about what knowledge is, we fall back on metaphors. Everyone does it. Plato, famously, used the metaphor of sight. To know what a thing is, you have to be able to see it clearly. Plato has been hugely influential. Most of us use that metaphor at least some of the time. Other people have compared knowledge to food, you have to chew it up and digest it to really have it.

What is Tyler Cowen's metaphor for knowledge?

Well, he is a post-Kantian; I know another confusing concept. What I mean by this is quite simple though. Cowen thinks what distinguishes what we really know from what we think we know is how we organize it. It's the way that knowledge is organized into a mental filing system that helps me determine what I really know versus stuff I am uncertain about.

The most important thing Cowen wants us to understand about knowledge is that it doesn't naturally organize. It sits there scattered all over the place and he wants to save us from believing knowledge is more organized than it really is.

The moral claim

Tyler Cowen also claims that stories make us unhappy. Because stories lead us to imagine our lives in certain ways, they also try to lead lives that are appropriate to these stories. But, Cowen asks, are our lives really like that?

When asked to describe what their life was like, Cowen tells us that most people defined in terms of stories. The most common example of the stories people saw their lives in terms of a journey (51%), a battle (11%), the seasons (10%), novel (8%), a race (5%), a live performance like a play (5%), or a carousel (4%). There are a few undecideds and "other" as well.

Very few people, Cowen points out, see their lives as a mess. And yet a mess is, he insists, what it probably is. He goes on to ensure us that this could be a good thing; that we would be happier* if we just accepted that our lives are messes. That's the moral claim. We just make ourselves miserable pretending that our lives are journey's when they are actually messes and we should stop doing that.



* I can't help but notice that the specifically moral argument he uses is more akin to Aristotle than typical modern morality. Modern moral arguments tend to be about making the right choices. But when people just talk about what really matters to them, happiness always looms large just as it does for Cowen here.

The epistemological claim

Cowen thinks stories mislead us in two ways.

First, he thinks they mislead us because they simplify matters. Stories, he says, cut out a whole lot of information. If you want to tell a story about Jesus, Alexander the Great, or Anne McCreary who lives at 231 Westmoreland Street, that story requires you to leave a whole lot of stuff out.

He's right about that.

Second, Cowen thinks stories can beguile us. He thinks they can present life in a light that is so compelling that we forget to pay attention to details that run counter to the story. Details we really ought to be paying attention to. I'm not so sure he is right about that.

What does Tyler Cowen get right?

I like to argue with people I think are very smart and who have something intelligent to say. I do this for selfish reasons. I think I learn more when I challenge people who strike me as intelligent and who maybe even intimidate me a bit. I am onto Tyler Cowen right now because I want to use his arguments about stories to get a better grip on the way Jane Austen uses stories.

Here is the question I am going to start with. What are the strongest parts of Cowen's argument? Or, to put it another way, here I am a Jane Asuten fan and , therefore, a guy who puts a lot of weight on stories—who thinks stories (especially her stories) are important and good ways to understand life—what is it about Cowen's lecture that should most shake me up? I think there are two things. There is an epistemological argument and a moral argument.

Okay, some may want to bail right now so as to avoid anything that features the word epistemological. It's a simpler and more complicated word than it seems. The simple aspect is all we need to know to get going on Cowen. Epistemology is about knowledge. It's about distinguishing what we really know from what we just think we know.

On to Sense and Sensibility

"We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne; our dear Willoughby went away before we could get through it. We will put it by, that when he comes again.... But it may be months, perhaps, before that happens."

Lines like this are so pregnant with meaning you could spend a lifetime on them. Not all the meaning can have been intended by the author. For example, some Shakespeare scholars nowadays argue that Shakespeare himself never finished Hamlet. That he wrote one play and then rewrote it and kept tinkering with it until he retired.

In any case, we have never finished with Hamlet. It comes back again and again. It really came back in Austen's lifetime. (Shakespeare, although always recognized as an exceptional writer, didn't become "Shakespeare" until the Romantic era.) The line above has been called Hamlet's walk on part in Sense and Sensibility. I think it's more than that. Buckle up, I'm going to make an audacious claim. I think that just as Austen ended up using the story elements from a Radcliffe novel to make a different sort of story in Northanger Abbey, in Sense and Sensibility, she takes the story elements of Hamlet and makes something else of them.

Before doing that, I have to explain what I mean by "story elements". I'm going to do that explanation by picking a fight with a guy named Tyler Cowen starting today.