Myth, class & morality: narratives and power

This week, three things have made me think hard about the ways in which groups and societies develop narratives to guide their collective thinking. That's a subject much on my mind anyway, as we prepare for DTMD 2017, our conference on information & narrative in Gothenberg this year (and also my colleague David Chapman and I have been finishing revisions on a paper about information). However, two podcasts (both based on books) and a blog post have concentrated my mind on the relationship between power and narrative.

First, the blog post. In an online Harvard Business Review piece, Joan Williams argues for a more nuanced understanding of the American class system, and especially the relationship between the (white) working class and what she calls the poor. The former are the ones who have been left behind by globalization and the shift of manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere; however it is the latter towards whom leftish politicians have focused their policies, often for excellent reasons. This causes resentment among those white working class people, and it's precisely those people who have so disastrously voted for Trump. She also makes the interesting point that those white working class people frequently resent the professional classes, labelled by populists as 'elites', as they perceive professionals as bossing them around; but don't have the same resentment towards the super-rich.

I find this really helpful in making sense of the Trump victory. A very similar story could be told in the UK of the Brexit vote - of working-class voters, left behind by globalisation and a shift away from manufacturing, who became convinced by populist demagogues and the rightwing press that the problem was immigration and the EU.

But the reaction of the left has been unhelpful in both the US and UK. Faced with emotive campaigns full of falsehoods, their reaction too often has been fact-driven and lacking in an equivalent sense of emotion. I've written in a previous post about the selective information involved in the interpretation of the Brexit and US election campaign falsehoods.

A stronger alternative was presented in a talk at the Royal Society of Arts by Alex Evans who talked about a myth gap, based on his recent book. His argument was that progressives have a chronic problem in establishing good myths - large-scale stories based as much on feeling as fact - and that over a number of issues, they have instead tried to present facts without these myths. By contrast, he argues, the right is good at myth-making - creating and reinforcing a persuasive story which explains a deep concern, even if it is in the face of the facts. He says that "it is only by finding new myths, those that speak to us of renewal and restoration, that we will navigate our way to a better future".

These myths sound a lot like narratives. And like narratives, a key question is: how are they created? Who has the power to create them? Whose power do they reinforce?

And that takes me to one more idea from a podcast: a BBC In Our Time discussion of Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche distinguished two forms of morality: one based on power and control, which he called 'master morality', and one based on subversion and service, which he called the 'slave morality'. The latter forms (if I understand it right) when certain groups in a society become powerless, and instead of seeking to overthrow the powerful, instead set up a worldview that says that power itself is a corrupting and wicked force, and service to others is preferable and morally right. This was the journey of the Jewish people in their exiles in Egypt and Babylon, and of the formation of Christian morality under Roman oppression. Nietzsche didn't think much of 'slave morality', being a bit keen on power himself, but to me it's admirable (whatever its name) and at the root of all positive value systems.

These two forms of morality are their own sort of myth, but it brings me to a thought: that it's really not possible for good people to change a bad system by taking it over and trying to make it better. That has been the attempt of the left for 20+ years, and it's not working well. I think instead that progressives have to subvert the value system, to build a wider grouping that encompasses working class people again, and to look towards service rather than power. Only then can will we have a narrative, a myth, that's big enough the counter the negative myths that have led us to the disasters of Brexit and the Trump presidency.