Event: Speed skater Dan Jansen loved his sister Jane, and had promised her he'd win an Olympic gold medal.
Event: In 1988, his sister died of leukemia on the day of his 500m race.
Event: Dan Jansen fell during that race.
Event: Dan Jansen continued training, and also married and had a daughter, whom he named after his sister.
Event: In 1994, he again qualified for the Olympics, won a gold medal, and skated a victory lap with his daughter.
None of those events is astonishing in isolation. But arrange those events to fit a Sticky Narrative ... and you get this:
More below the fold....
Sticky Narratives, Part III - Some Progressive Glue (Non-Cynical Saturday)
This week Morning Feature has looked at Big Narratives - stories that try to explain wide swaths of history and experience - with a focus on which narratives stick in the public mind. The stickiest narratives are not always the most reliable. Thursday we saw that we usually test narratives against our own experience, and that's rarely a large enough sample set. Yesterday we discussed why we prefer familiar narratives, and the role Big Narrators like movies and television play in making narratives more familiar and thus stickier.
On both days, I've concluded by saying this is bad news for progressives. We can't snap our fingers and expect people to Think Bigger and Reason Better. Some of our Big Narratives are unfamiliar or, worse, are familiar as scary stories. We can't ever get total control of our society's Big Narrators. The problems are real, and they won't go away, but neither should we throw up our hands. Today we'll talk about some solutions to help progressives advocate our Big Narratives better - to tell stickier stories - and that starts with....
Knowing our audience.
For our Big Narratives to have majority support, we need them to resonate with a familiar character: Fred. He is our archetypal median voter, and we need him to have a majority. We have to write our stories for Fred ... and too often we don't.
For example, we progressives advocate Big Narratives that we believe are more reliable. We believe those Big Narratives, translated into policy, would mean more good things happening for more people and fewer bad things happening for fewer people, or at least more help available when bad things do happen. We often have facts to support that belief, but most of those facts are statistical. They rely on a large sample set and an understanding of how systems shape probabilities, and as we discussed last November, Fred doesn't look at life that way:
In terms of being in touch with ordinary people's lives, his "news" is as good as or better than than what he'd get from the media. It's anecdotal, but that's okay with Fred. He's not a systems-and-statistics kind of guy. He takes life one day at a time, one person at a time, and one problem at a time. On the one hand, that means he's pretty grounded; he knew there was something wrong with the economy long before the media were thinking of using the word "recession," because he saw it happening in the lives of his regulars.
On the other hand, Fred doesn't have a unifying political theory. He'd like to feel more secure in his job and his home, and he'd like to see his regulars happier than they have been for the past few years. He'd like government to help where it can, or at least not make things worse, and that's his political theory.[...]
Appealing to Fred based on self-interested facts may not work, because he may not see those facts in his test sample: his life and the lives of the people he knows. Our ideas will help many Freds, but they may not immediately and obviously help the one Fred you meet later today or next week. What story do you tell him?
Beyond self-interested facts: moral values.
I left an elision at the end of the quote above, because there was more to that paragraph:
Because Fred is a people person who takes life one day, one person, and one problem at a time - based mostly on personal anecdotes from his own life and the lives of his regulars - he's what George Lakoff calls biconceptual: progressive on some issues, conservative on others, often depending on how the issue is discussed. His core values are mostly progressive values, but he doesn't trust government enough to be a reliably progressive voter.
Fred may not be a systems-and-statistics guy. He's a "people person." And that's good news for progressives, because if Fred cares about people, his core values are mostly progressive values. It means he's willing to do something because "it's the right thing to do," even if he might not see any immediate and obvious personal benefit. Indeed, he does things like that - for that reason - probably every day of his life.
Fred likes to do the right thing, when he knows what that is, because often having done the right thing is the best comfort we get in the chaos of life. Bad things happen to all of us, but when we've done the right things we have fewer regrets and feel more confident in working to fix what went wrong. That matters ... a lot.
So we progressives need to let Fred know what is "the right thing to do." But we can't just bang him over the head with it. We need to stories, and they need to be familiar. That's also good news, because....
Progressive values are familiar.
Despite the claims of many on the right, our progressive Big Narratives aren't "radical," or if so that's only because those narratives have been ignored. People matter more than profits is simply "don't be selfish," a narrative we've heard since childhood. The earth is our home, not our trash can is simply "clean up after yourself," again something we've heard since childhood. We need good government for #1 and #2 is simply "we have to work together," a story as old as humanity, and indeed the key to our species' survival.
We don't have to offer "new ideas," and indeed the "change" we advocate as progressives is simply the application of moral lessons most people already know ... moral lessons Fred already learned and believes. We need to show Fred how those lessons apply to today's problems, and show him that our "change" is, in fact, very familiar. We're encouraging him to support for society the same values he applies in his own life. And we do that through moral parables that celebrate those values.
Moral parables: progressive Big Narratives.
The Visa ad is compelling because it tells a moral parable. It's a story with a progressive Big Narrative: Recovering From Adversity. Bad things happen, sometimes horribly painful things, but they don't make you a failure or mean you're damned forever. Instead, you get up and try again. When you succeed, you carry - literally, in that case - the memory of setbacks along the way.
Of course not everyone will bounce back from adversity so dramatically. But that isn't the point. As between a society where people who fall are cast aside as failures, and a society where people who fall are urged to get up and try again, the second will see more successes. The ad offers an archetype - an idealized example - of a reliable narrative. It tells us that getting up and trying again is "the right thing to do," and it is.
It also tells us not to forget our setbacks along the way, so we'll help others who suffer setbacks. Jansen did that when Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette learned her mother had died during this year's Olympics. He reached out to her with words of support and encouraged her to "skate with your mother in your heart." Rochette's family also supported her staying at the Olympics, and her courage and grace earned a bronze medal, and the admiration of all who watched.
These are just two skaters, one three-billionth of the earth's human population. Neither is perfect. But we can still celebrate Jansen's story of courage and perseverance, and later his kindness to Rochette. Moral parables like this reinforce "the right thing to do," even when their characters do have flaws and haven't always done the right things.
That resonates for Fred, because he's made his mistakes in life too. It helps to see that even people who've made mistakes can still come back and do "the right thing." He wants to do that, and when it comes to his politics, we progressives need to tell stories that show him what "the right thing to do" is.
Those Big Narratives ... will Stick.
+++++
Happy Saturday!