The two books I read from Charles Tilly are “Why” and “Credit and blame”: both books explore how reasons shape social processes.
In “Why”, Tilly pointed out that giving reasons constitute a large part of our conversation, and these reasons serve as proxies of the social relationship between reason givers and receivers. Tilly posits that reasons are given mostly not for conveying truths, but shaping people relationship.
“Giver and receiver are confirming, negotiating, or repairing their proper connection.”
How the receivers perceive the reasoning, particularly their rejection of the reasoning determines the social relationship. Interestingly, when we reject others narratives, we intends to focus on the content and overlooked all these social dynamics at play.
According to Tilly, there are four types of reasons: convention, story, code and technical account. Conventions and stories fill up our daily conversation; we explain to others about our situations and our deeds. Stories are the way we convey exceptional events, usually they involved a few actors, stripped out of minor events that went unnoticed or forgotten. Stipulation of praises and blame are prescribed serving the moral message concluded from the story.
Code is the type of specialised language that used in professional setting like courts and hospital. Code maps pieces of facts into a standardised framework so that one can spot misconducts and track progress. Professionals actively convert dialogues into codes and translate code back into digestible messages to the target audience. The aim of codes is not about seeking truth; instead codes provide a framework to characterize if certain conditions are fulfilled based on the facts presented to us. Finally technical accounts are mainly restricted in the professional circles; difficult and complicated ideas are communicated through academic papers and powerpoint presentations filled with jargons.
Technical accounts, when well presented, are like superior stories: they get the key actors right via evidence based research, describe complex phenomena in a simplified way and assign cause-and-effect relationships. Tilly appreciated that superior stories keep people engaged as it is a form of reasoning people are more familiar to, while giving unfamiliar but well supported reasoning to events. Jared Diamond’s guns, germs, and steel and Jessica Stern’s I-was-there were two books excel at superior story telling with well researched evidence and vigorous investigations according to Tilly.
The second book “Credit and blame” focuses on the form of reasoning presented as stories. As in the first book, Tilly used the accounts of The Sept 11 event to show us how a common story about terrorism was weaved from collective experiences.
Stories facilitate our understandings, but over-simplify the event. Depending on the narrative, praise and blame are put upon the characters with a sense of morality. Tilly pointed out that praises put the story teller on the same side with the characters, while blames put the teller on the opposite side. Story teller and the praised usually agreed very well on the praising stories, while the teller and the blamed hugely disagree on each other, with the blaming party assigning accountability and the blamed evade as much responsibility as possible. Praises are usually assigned generously according to the story teller fondness to the character while blames are administered precisely and the consequences and punishment carefully calculated. Tilly warned us that blames generally tear social relationships apart, the blaming got very depressed or destructive in the persistent pursue of holding the blamed accountable.
The biases in a story are not subjected to thorough scrutiny. And we can be too used to the story format to raise questions, as we all experience the event and recall our experiences like a story. The story inherits our own biases: emphasize on actors and facts we deem important, ignore or forget those events that don’t align or irrelevant to our narrative. Unfortunately, Tilly argued that journalism is not far away from story telling, piecing some facts together to push forward a narrative: journalism turns into propaganda.
After reading both books, I can only come into the conclusion that human conversations are fickle and filled with lies. Of course, who wouldn’t modify the narrative to make ourselves feel better? A biased view is so intervene with one’s own stories that we ought to step back and think twice before believing what other people say; they couldn’t help themselves or just incapable of recounting their experience objectively.
That’s why when we catch the feeling of “wrong” and “inconsistency” in narratives, it is a good time to pay attention on the fallacy or even sophism. On the contrary, now we know that conventions and stories are usually inaccurate, we can free ourselves from taking them too seriously. That’s liberating.