Counter-Narrative

How Progressive Academics Can Challenge Extremists and Promote Social Justice

H.L. Goodall Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781598745627
• eBook ISBN: 9781315431475
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Goodall portrays a world caught up in the middle of a narrative arms race, where the message of the political right has outflanked the message of the political left. It is a world where narratives used by the far right inch ever closer to those employed by right-wing extremists in the Muslim world. Rather than dismiss the use of political narratives as a shallow tactic of the opposition, Goodall promotes their usefulness and outlines a number of ways that liberal academics can retake the public discourse from the extremist opposition. This is an essential text for the aspiring public intellectual and will appeal to students and scholars of qualitative methods, communications and media, and political science alike.

1. The Battle of Narratives

The history of all hitherto existing society is not the history of class struggles, but instead the history of narrative struggles. Storytellers, from the creators of hieroglyphics to the inventors of alphabets to the perpetrators of gods and myths, gospels, wars, ideas, science, and sura, stood in constant opposition to one another and carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open, battle of narratives, a battle that each time ended either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of an old story that once held sway over entire populations and was thought to be true.¹

For these reasons, we must agree from the outset that this call to narrative engagement, this call to revolution and to the reconstitution of society is dangerous. Why dangerous? Because, in fact and in fiction, there is no more urgent call, no more magical spell, than the spells of well told stories and the irresistible call to identify with powerful core narratives. At the center of this call to reconstitute society through narrative engagement is the dire need for narrative accountability, the right of every free thinking citizen to cry foul when her or his narrative space has been ruptured by bad stories, ideological distortions, misrepresentations and lies, and brazen stupidity passes for reasoned discourse and/or coherent narrative.

What is often lost in these rhetorical flare ups is that the ability to tell a story well does not necessarily mean that the story you hear is true. Some of history’s monsters were legendary storytellers. Some of today’s most egregious violators of our narrative trust are themselves honey-tongued manipulators, talking heads, politicians, and terrorist leaders or spokespersons. And some of these narratives, such as the call to martyrdom used to recruit children to the cause of jihad, strap lethal bombs on themselves in exchange for the promise of seventy-two virgins, and detonate those bombs and their bodies in crowded public spaces because they are told this is what Allah demands, are evidence enough of the enduring lure of powerful narratives and their very real danger.

But those of us who believe in the power of narrative to alter perceptions of reality, to change minds, and to influence choices of action should not be quelled by the fear of the misuses of these powers of persuasion. It is not productive. We understand the problems inherent in any narrative strategy. But that should not stop our advocacy, our campaign for narrative engagement, because there is too much at stake. There, I have posted the requisite ethical and moral caution, you read it, and together we move on.

Consider yourself warned: not only are compelling core narratives dangerous, and narrative engagement with the violent ideological narratives of others dangerous, but also reading this book and acting on its advice is dangerous. It is dangerous because it speaks the truth at a time when the battleground is already prepared, sides have already been chosen, and chaos and disorder are everywhere. The stakes have never been higher nor the fight more worthy. Welcome, brave warrior, to the narrative revolution!

Let us begin this revolution, this reconstitution of society, with a statement of first principles. So first and foremost we are, as Walter Fisher expresses it, homo narrans—humans as storytellers.² It is our ability to tell stories, and to make lives and cultures out of them, that separates us from all other animals. Mastering this skill, to tell compelling, motivating, and uplifting stories, elevates some gifted storytellers, even those with foreign-sounding names, to the White House, while others, who themselves may also aspire to high office or higher status or perhaps just a tenured professorship somewhere preferably not in the Midwest, don’t realize their dreams.

This is because those less narratively equipped among us, although they may be just as good-looking, but who are less able to invent rhetorical visions capable of inspiring listeners, less able to poetically organize and authentically deliver them—people who, for example, jot down talking points with felt markers on their palm—are those persons who are often and—let us not mince words here—unkindly considered to be dumb-asses,³ by comparison.

Those who rise to the challenges of reclaiming the narrative do not suffer dumb-asses gladly. We define as a common enemy the 29 percent of Americans who believe that a “hillbilly palmpilot”⁴ deserves a crack at the White House. Those 29 percent are no doubt dumb-asses, too. Or, in a poll released the day after the first House passage of the health care reform bill, of the overheated denizens of this right-wing ideological swamp:

67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.

57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim.

45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president.”

38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did.”

Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”⁵

But the dumb-asses are right about one thing: we are living right now at the crossroads of a righteous narrative struggle for the very soul of America. It is being waged daily between those of us who believe that intelligent leadership enhanced by a credible and poetic narrative is preferable to leadership by inarticulate dumb-asses. It is being waged daily by educators who believe that the future of the world depends on the stories we tell about what truly matters in life, about peace, about social justice, about the eradication of poverty, disease, and ignorance, instead of the corrupt ideology of business schools and conservative Republicans that teaches its students to value only greed, the accumulation of personal wealth, and the ruthless spirit of advanced absentee-owner capitalism that is spread through their books and given public voice on Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

This is the enemy who is near. This is the enemy who is also well financed. This is the enemy who is selling an old story that divides the world into those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Constitution and the Holy Bible, and those who maintain that these narratives must be understood within their historical contexts and with a clear view of the consequences that are entailed by a literal reading. They want to take our country back to the polite white values and lifestyle of the mid-eighteenth century and, if possible, refight the Civil War. States rights, not federal rights. No taxes on profits. No health care reform. No equality for women. No minimum wage, which is, of course, only another way of saying “wage slavery.” And so forth.

The enemy wants to restore the Reagan Caliphate. They want to abolish support for public education by lowering taxes as well as lessening teachers’ salaries. Why? Because an educated public is likely to become a critical public. A critical public will be attuned to the lack of sound reasoning. A critical public will not respond favorably to a lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Or history. And so it is that conservatives have declared war on education. You know why. Because a critical public capable of easily recognizing “plainfolks propaganda” passing for truth is the last thing the enemy needs or wants.

The enemy is a clear and present danger to our preferred American way of life. And this enemy has a loud voice and controls big corporations, most of the votes in both political parties, and all the conservative media. But make no mistake. The near enemy is, collectively, nothing less than a radical extremist narrative and as we saw with the Oklahoma City bombing no less an imminent threat than our enemies living an ocean or more away.

Narratives endorsing violent extremism are spreading. It’s not just the dumb-asses in the 29 percent that we need to counter. It is their influence over the young, the future generations. For this battle of narratives is destined to be an enduring war, and if you agree to be part of our revolution, understand that you are volunteering for the long haul.

Narratives, Fisher teaches us, must do two things well: they must “hang together” as narratives and they must “ring true” for audiences. Narrative probability and narrative fidelity are the cornerstones of narrative power. For too long the old left—our academic and professional left, the brothers and sisters of this revolution—failed both tests of narrative power. For too long, those of us who see the world differently than our enemies do have been divided among ourselves by allegiance to a diverse array of smaller stories and as a result have lost our way back to a common storyline.

Instead, ours has been a meandering multivocal political folktale teetering on the brink of narrative incoherence. It’s like an overreaching ambitious novel of American life that tries to be about everything and as a result becomes confusing and contentious and loses the interest of readers and listeners, which is what has happened to the far left.

We have also burdened our story with the theme of pride in our moral superiority. No one likes hubris. And—this is key—we have written our narrative of America—the land of hope and opportunity, of freedom and dreams—with an infinite sadness punctuated with dysfunctional Congressional fecklessness and inefficiency and our resulting public despair.

Tell me honestly, how is this version of our nation, much less our revolutionary mission, at all narratively satisfying? It is not satisfying. It is boring. It is weak. It is a tale of woe. Of powerlessness. Of futility. We have become like the old drunk at the corner bar quoting John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; some people feel sorry for him but no one is really listening to him. Not anymore.

That left—the old guard left—had its narrative chance and blew it. It gave up on a great storyline in exchange for special interest politics and political correctness, neither of which made most Americans identify with the narrators or want to know what happens next. But it did make a lot of them turn the page. And open another book. The Book of Reagan, illustrated by George Herbert Walker Bush and narrated by George W. Bush.

The lesson about narrative that those of us on the left must learn begins with a question: does our current tale of woe hang together? The answer is: no. There are too many small stories crowding out the larger narrative. The antidote is President Obama’s commitment to progressive ideas and values that allow for diverse local interpretations of meaning, thereby empowering all of our special interest camps to identify with it without explicitly saying so.

The second lesson also begins with a question: does our tale of woe ring true? To answer that question I have to ask another, analogous one: how many academics does it take to screw in a light bulb? This very question was recently posted to a department email listserv by Dan Canary, a colleague of mine, and I reprint below the responses he gave:

Answer: Well, that answer depends on one’s theoretic perspective!

For example:

For an empiricist: At least three—one to screw it in and two others to assess intercoder reliability;

For an interpretivist: One would first need to know the social construction of what it means to screw in a lightbulb;

For an ethnographer: S/he would sit in the dark to understand the culture of the room;

For an autoethnographer: S/he would sit in the dark, then write about her/his experience;

For a critical cultural person: Damn the hegemonic lightbulb company that has power over the means to see!

I had to add to it. So I wrote back a couple of small corrections to two of the entries:

For the ethnographer: S/he would sit in the dark waiting for an opportunity to interview the empiricist, the interpretivist, the autoethnographer, and the critical cultural person, meanwhile collecting notes about the culture of the dark room and wondering why some people insist on light, anyway.

For the autoethnographer: S/he would sit in the dark, then write about the experience, discovering along the way that s/he was the light bulb.

See the analogy? Of course you do. Our love of diverse theoretical orientations and methods has damned us academics to an empty pluralism. Just as its love of diverse causes damned the left to behave much as warring tribes behave in a civil war. We have been committed to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Before We Begin…
• Chapter 1: The Battle of Narratives
• Chapter 2: Binary Opposites and Narrative IEDs
• Chapter 3: Birthers, Social Justice & the Texas Textbook Massacre
• Chapter 4: Left at the War
• Chapter 5: The Academic Dilemma
• Chapter 6: Learning from Obama and Learning from Our Enemies
• Chapter 7: The Core Counter-Narrative
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author