Storyville

Turning every issue into a drama is warping public policy.

David Link from the January 1995 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

Personal stories are not the only basis on which politics can be conducted. Personal stories are illustrations, but they fit into a bigger picture--an analytical framework, a statistical pattern, a social context, a philosophical point. Isolated from such broader contexts, personal stories can be entertaining but can lead away from reason, not toward it; every story has a counterstory somewhere. Every woman skulking down a back alley has a counterpart, a child somewhere on a swing. Every man about to be executed has a mother, but he also has a victim, who also has a mother. And every single story is only one, one among a multitude that could be told. The black guy who didn't get the job because of unfair prejudice has a story to tell, but so does the white guy across town who's unemployed because of an affirmative action policy, not because he wasn't qualified. Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson both know how effectively stories work in the public world.

The problem boils down to a terrible irony--when public debate relies on the empathy engendered by stories, our compassion can be used to paralyze us. The reason we do not use the death penalty more than we do is not "legal technicalities," or too many liberal judges, or laws that are exceedingly lax. The reason we do not execute more people is that we are frozen in place by compassion when it comes down to the wire. The possibility that we might execute the wrong man is the most horrific story imaginable. While acknowledging its statistical improbability, Justice Blackmun said in Callins v. Collins that even the rare possibility of being party to such a story was too much for him.

When Justice Blackmun announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, it was his compassion as a judge that was most often mentioned, not only his compassion for women in Roe v. Wade, or for criminal defendants who might have been convicted wrongfully, but compassion for minorities of all kinds. But compassion for one party is often hostility to someone else. In public debate, compassion is a fiction maker's trick without a fiction maker's control over context. Compassion for welfare mothers is good, but where is the compassion for taxpayers whose obligations are continually on the rise? In the dramatic style, one person's story will ultimately count for more than someone else's, which must be rejected. What does his compassion for women say about Justice Blackmun's compassion for potential children?

Drama gives us pleasure, but as it moves out of fiction into the real world, it carries greater and greater dangers. By focusing public debate on hurt feelings, we almost guarantee we will hurt someone's feelings--the person whose feelings are not being focused on. Public policy cannot focus everywhere at once. And when it tries, we get contradictory policies--attempts, for instance, to cut taxes, increase entitlements, and balance the federal budget all at once.

I don't know if there's any way back from the dramatic style. It arises from too many factors that are inevitable aspects of both human nature and the technological world--the eternal appeal of stories, the pervasiveness of the greatest storytelling medium in history, our inherent desire to be compassionate and caring, the certainty of human conflict. There is no way our news organizations will give up the greatest audience attraction they have at their disposal, and as increasingly factionalized interest groups continue to benefit from the attention and success of pathos and pity, they, too, will hang tough with what works.

But as we grasp at every available theory to explain baffling phenomena of our times, such as why an increasing number of juries are failing to convict criminal defendants (particularly in high profile cases), it may be worthwhile to consider this one: that the most lavishly compensated defense lawyers have seen the changes in our culture affecting the priorities we all have. Judgment and empathy are in eternal conflict, but in recent years empathy has gained a considerable edge because of our extravagant exposure to drama, our intimate familiarity with other points of view. It takes less and less effort to exploit that reality in a courtroom. And courtrooms are only one among a hundred places where we let our compassion tip the scales and then wonder why things turned out the way they did.

Back in the 1940s, a catalog of classes at the University of Southern California law school listed "Rhetoric" as a mandatory course. Today, you would be hard pressed to find a class in rhetoric at any school. But we live in the most rhetorically complex society in history. The dramatic style is one of the most powerful persuasive devices imaginable, and it has become the most common way we debate public issues. Unfortunately, it produces an inevitable downward spiral--drama can only be answered by more and better drama.

But the dramatic style can be recognized as a style, as a rhetorical device that uses facts for its own purposes, that openly manipulates an ambiguous reality, that exploits compassion. The tools for discerning and analyzing drama as a style are fundamental, not only for lawyers, but for anyone who participates in democracy. Yet we do not teach students this--that what is best about us, our compassion and our empathy, can be and frequently is used against us. Until we learn to cull what meager information we are given these days out of the dramatic context within which it's presented, we will continue to be a nation bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the storytellers who surround us on all sides.