The Limitations of Narrative

Smart piece by Elizabeth Stoker Breuning:

Personal stories that lack fact checking leave the arguments they bolster incredibly vulnerable. Worse yet, relying on one person’s testimony for the central argument invites probing of individual people, as happened in this case — the victim’s friends have turned on her and her classmates are gossiping about her trauma to a sudden flood of reporters. Self-styled reactionary cyber Sherlocks have already begun digging up and sharing personal details about her and her family. Placing the weight of entire arguments on the shoulders of specific people, especially those who have survived trauma, thus seems unfair both to them and the success of the arguments.

Leftist analysis is at its best when it focuses on systematic critiques. Erdely’s piece was arguably engaged in just such a project, though the undoing of its anecdotal obsession has undermined that thrust. The strength of leftist critique is that it concerns itself with the broad, the historical, the powerful, the structural. Contrast this with right-wing accounts of politics, which focus on individual choice and disposition, private and personal interests, and folk-legendary tales of bootstrapping.

There’s a reason Ronald Reagan preferred ticky-tacky bullshit tales of welfare fraud (such as the woeful story of Linda Taylor that gave us the pejorative “welfare queen”) to structural analysis. These days right-wing blowhards like Paul Ryan keep the ignominious tradition alive. The Wisconsin congressman has opined, for example, that free school lunches are bad because he heard of a little boy who wanted a brown paper sack to signify parental love.

Evidently, the implosion of the Rolling Stone story indicates a real dilemma: without the compelling anecdote that opened the story, it wouldn’t have gotten nearly the attention that it did. But reliance on individual stories is a dangerous road to go down.