We all love stories, but principles should trump anecdotes in debate

By David McElroy · April 9, 2013

There’s nothing like a good old fashioned tragedy on the news to make a political point. Whether we admit it or not, most of us unconsciously feel this way. An anecdote is a cheap and easy way to score a point, but is it really good in the long run for public discourse? Maybe not.

You might have heard about the knife attack at a Houston college campus Tuesday that injured at least 15 people, sending 12 of them to hospitals. As soon as I saw the news, I thought about what gun-control advocates would be saying about the story if the assailant had used a gun. So I posted a sarcastic comment about it on Facebook.

“Police in Houston say 15 people were stabbed on a college campus there today,” I wrote. “This is proof that it’s time to get serious about banning assault knives — since they clearly have no purpose other than stabbing innocent people.”

A number of other people who agree with me on the issue of gun rights agreed and chimed in with their own comments. It felt good, because there was a story that illustrated very clearly what we believed. We felt that it made our point and that felt emotionally good.

I’ve been thinking about this tendency to use “anecdote as argument” a lot lately, and I’m not really happy with it, even though I do it as much as anybody else does.

In 1984, Neil Postman published the influential book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” You can say that it dealt with the philosophy of media, but it’s more applicable than that sounds. Postman was a social critic who made a career of questioning things that other people took for granted. He could seem a bit of a Luddite at times, because he questioned things that seemed clearly good to everyone else, such as television and technology in general.

Postman said that television was dumbing down public discourse, and things have gotten far worse since 1984. On Facebook, graphic “memes” have become a substitute for rational argument and thinking. There’s no room for nuance. There’s no room for anything except an oversimplified graphical representation of a position, accompanied by a few crude words to further oversimplify the issue. The various political sides don’t really discuss their positions. They merely lob these graphics at one another. Whoever has the funniest or hardest-hitting graphic wins.

In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Postman looks at different ages of media and shows how the dominant medium of an age drives the shape of public discourse for the time. When print was dominant, words and ideas were very important. Those who wanted to participate in public debate learned about ideas by reading and by listening to long lectures that mirrored the format of books. It was during this age that abstract ideas became more and more important, changing the world as more and more people learned to read and were convinced of certain ideas.

But Postman says the age of television is very different. As a medium, it’s not capable of the same sort of abstract depth that print is. It can show what physical objects look like better than any medium we’ve ever had. It can show the here and now. It loves action and color. But it is forced to dumb down abstract ideas, because ideas are boring as television. As a result, people watch televised “news” thinking they’re getting the equivalent of an old-fashioned newspaper, but they’re getting a dumbed down version that merely makes them feel that they’ve been educated about issues.

Television loves stories. There’s no better medium today than video or film when it comes to telling stories in emotional ways. So we all become accustomed to life and ideas and issues being presented as a series of stories rather than as underlying principles.

Humans have always loved stories. The last few hundred years has been about the slow triumph of abstract ideas as people came to think more and put aside prejudices based on mere anecdote. We’ve continued to love stories as entertainment, but principles have driven more of our public policies.

That’s been changing since the advent of television, though. We’re back to ordering societies based on anecdotes rather than principle. And as news has changed to fit the strengths of the medium of television, it’s become more and more about stories again. This has been reinforced by the fact that everybody using social media today (such as Facebook and Twitter) has been trained by television to look to anecdotes to make points.

So instead of discussing the principles underlying an issue such as gun rights, we throw stories at each other, just as my friends and I were happy to embrace the Tuesday Houston stabbings as a way to make our points. And it’s everywhere around us.

Those who favor restrictions on guns were quick to spread the story from Tennessee about a 4-year-old boy who accidentally used a deputy sheriff’s gun to shoot and kill the deputy’s wife in her home. For those who want more government control of guns, it was a clear case of the danger of having guns around. It was an anecdote that supported their world view, so they shared it and felt that they were making their case.

Those who favor gun rights were just as quick to share a story from Miami about a man using a gun last Friday to protect himself and his family when an armed robber came into a Burger King at lunch to rob everyone. One of the victims pulled out his own gun and shot the robber in the leg. For those who favor the right of individuals to carry their own guns to protect themselves, the story proved their point, so they shared it far and wide and felt that they were making their case.

The problem is that both of the stories are simply anecdotes. They don’t address the underlying principles. They don’t deal with anyone’s rights. They simply deal with the stories of specific individuals in specific circumstances. They don’t prove anything.

Before the age of television, I’m not sure such isolated stories would have been accepted as proving points, but in the age of television — supported by social media — such stories are everything.

We owe it to ourselves and to our opponents to make cases that are clear and honest, based on solid principles and facts instead of just random anecdotes. Unfortunately, that’s not what works in the court of public opinion now. Everybody wants a story. Everybody wants emotions.

I consider myself far more likely to be interested in the underlying principles behind the things I believe than most people today are. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the same way. But we’re influenced by the television and Internet culture that we’re a part of. Stories and emotions win. Facts and principles generally lose.

It’s a depressing state for public discourse. I have no idea how to change it. For starters, I suggest avoiding what passes for “television news” — which is an oxymoron, as far as I’m concerned — but that’s not enough. The problem is so big that a few of us kicking the TV habit isn’t enough.

I have no idea how to change this (because I don’t know how to fight a dominant medium such as television), but the subject at least needs to be discussed.

In the meantime, I’ll probably keep right on doing the same thing myself sometimes — and then realizing that I’m just falling into the bad habits of the rest of society.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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