This week in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very interesting review of “Why?”, a book by Charles Tilly . The book is about trying “to make sense of reasons for giving reasons.” Sounds abstruse but really, the review makes some interesting points about story-telling in everyday life and serious heavyweight political debate. For example:
Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of the fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and abruptly terminated.
Gladwell gives a quick survey of the book with different examples from the abortion debate, creationism vs. science, a child playing tattletale and a moving story of an attempt to reconcile a mugger, his family and his victim. The conclusion is:
Tilly argues that we make two common errors when it comes to understanding reasons. The first is to assume that some kinds of reasons are always better than others – that there is a hierarchy of reasons, with conventions (the least sophisticated) at the bottom and technical accounts at the top. That’s wrong, Tilly says: each type of reason has its own role.
In business writing, each kind of reason has a place but the most neglected is the story. Yet human beings seem to be genetically hard-wired to tell and hear stories. The case study and the press release are really pale imitations of the kinds of stories we read in fiction or journalism. As my friend Stuart said to me: “we are the stories we tell about ourselves.”
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