Too Much Month Left at the End of the Money

Sound familiar? Here is a comment that evokes just those feelings in me and did in my Political Psychology class as well. It shouldn't have, but it did.

Here's Robert Reich in his new book, Aftershock.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, assessing what had happened to the United States in the years leading up to the Great Recession, repeated the conventional view that "for too long, Americans were buying too much and saving too little." He went on to say that this was "no longer an option for us or for the rest of the world. And already in the united States you can see the first signs of an important transformation here as Americans save more and we borrow substantially less from the rest of the world." He called for a "rebalanced" global economy in which Americans consume less and China consumes more.

Geithner was correct about the transformation. But he misstated the underlying problem, of which the Great Recession was a symptom. The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able toprovide them.

I highlighted the "hard to swallow" part. I simply could not get myself to take it seriously.
Reich goes on to say--this is the remainder of that paragraph:

The American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.

I look at Reich's point at it characterizes the economy as a whole. The output of the economy has been redirected so that more has gone to the most wealthy and less to everyone else. I knew that. The economic inequality of our society is now at its highest levels since--a chilling date in this context--1928. I knew that. We can not expect to sustain aggregate demand without paying American workers enough money to allow them to buy things. I knew that.

But when it comes right down to it, you have to say that there is too much month left at the end of the money, and I just can't get myself to take that seriously. All my life, the only people who were characterized that way were ridiculed. Women especially. The family income just doesn't seem to keep up with the way I am spending. Oh dear! I guess we need more income.

In the macroeconomy, the situation is entirely different but my ears hear it the same way. The emotional revulsion I feel comes whether I understand it to be appropriate to the national economic picture or not. Thank God you can choose to vote what you think, rather than what you feel.

This is complicated for a lot of people by the fact that a lot of people they trust--members of the media and of Congress--are telling them that they ought to feel just this way--and that they should call this "feeling," thinking. I don't have that particular difficulty. When I hear those people, I say, "Oh...them again." I am not confusing what they call thinking with what I call "feeling." But I still have to fight the feelings.

Two chapters later, Reich tells the oft-told story of Henry Ford who paid workers at his Highland Park, Michigan assembly plant three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal called it "an economic crime." Ford thought that if he paid his employees enough money that they could afford to buy the Model T they were building, they would buy them and Ford would make a lot of money. Which he did.

It's a well-known story. I feel the sense of it in my body as well as in my mind. I feel it in just the same way I feel the shame of thinking there is too much month left at the end of the money, although the implications for policy go in exactly the opposite direction. What a mess.

Reich says that people bought what they could as long as they could afford it. When they ran out of money, they took on extra jobs. When that didn't do it, they maxed out their credit cards. When that came to its predictable end, they borrowed on the eternally rising value of their homes. Then the housing market crashed. There really isn't anything to do except to do what Henry Ford did. What we call the "economic crises of our time" are only symptoms of our inability to buy what we make.

I really hope I don't enjoy my disparagement of overspenders so much that I can't really feel the truth Reich is preaching. I can think it now, but I really believe that until we can feel it, it won't do us any good.

The Angel Gabriel and Gender Equity

Every year, Christmas means less to me and Advent means more. It’s not as bad as it seems. I have been unable to hold onto my preferred definition of Christmas. The commercial interests have taken it away the same way the creationists took away the Christian symbol of the fish. Christmas is now Santa Claus, “a right jolly old elf,” and his entourage. Advent, on the other hand, is still a religious holiday to me.

You can tell this is a year for studying Luke because Gabriel does not appear in Matthew. He does appear in Luke and he makes me nervous. Let’s consider the question of gender equity. Gabriel appears before Zechariah, the priest, and future father of John the Baptist. Raymond E. Brown, my source for all this,[1] calls him JBap and over the years I have come to like that. Gabriel said to Zechariah, “Your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son.” Zechariah replied, “How can I know this? I am old and my wife is getting on in years.”

We see immediately that Zechariah has been a successfully married man for a long time. If we knew no more than that he says he is “old,” but Elizabeth is only “getting on in years,” we would know that he has been married for a long time. What a classy guy! But Gabriel is not amused. “Since you did not believe my words…you will be silenced…until this has happened.” Gabriel is deeply offended, apparently. No reason, I suppose why an old man can’t impregnate the elderly and nulliparous old woman he has disappointed all these years. Still, this is God’s messenger and Zechariah really ought to have kept his incredulity to himself. And so, we would think, should Mary.


Gabriel continues on his rounds and stops next at the home of Mary’s parents, in Nazareth, which is where they live in the Lucan account. Gabriel says, “You are to conceive in your womb and bear a son.” Mary says, “How can this come about since I have no knowledge of man?”[2] Now to the casual observer, Zechariah’s response and Mary’s response are substantially similar. But Gabriel’s response to the two is not similar at all. Zechariah gets to be deaf and mute. Mary gets a son who “will rule over the House of Jacob forever.”


Being a little playful in the title, I raised the question of gender equity. But even without being playful, there is the question is what Zechariah did wrong that Mary did not do wrong. And if they did the same thing wrong, why was only one punished?

This post is not an attempt to answer that question. It is, rather, an attempt to say why it is not a very good question. It is based on a naïve view of how the scripture is to be read and understood. I will also suggest another way to understand it—following Brown—which gives a great deal of clarity about Luke, as a writer but not much at all about Gabriel, Zechariah, and Mary. I find it very satisfying intellectually but at the end, I remain just a little wistful that the question I began asking of this passage when I was a boy, is not really going to get answered.

The new question, a question much better adapted to the text and the Luke’s choices as the teller of this story, is this: Why did Luke handle the Zechariah story one way and the Mary story another way? The short answer is that these episodes are set in different backgrounds stories—Zechariah in Daniel and Mary in I Samuel. Luke tweaked each of them so he could both tell his story and evoke the echoes of other more familiar stories.

Luke is using the appearance of Gabriel to Daniel as the template for the appearance to Zechariah. The list of commonalities between the two is formidable. Both are called “visions;” Gabriel appears in both at the time of liturgical prayer; the visionary in both has offered a prayer in distress; both react to Gabriel with fear; and the visionary, in both cases, is struck mute. “By these echoes,” says Brown, “Luke is giving a new application to a common Christian reflection in which such Gospel motifs as the Son of Man and the Kingdom of God were related to Daniel 7:12—14.”

If we begin with Luke as the artist, this explanation accounts for why Zechariah was made mute. It is because Daniel was made mute and Luke wants his hearers to notice the background and feel some of the weight it gives to the gospel.

And the explanation for Gabriel’s response to Mary? The same, in a way. Luke builds the annunciation to Mary on Hannah’s canticle in I Samuel 2. Hannah prayed to God “in the bitterness of her soul.” Thereafter, she bore a son to her husband, Elkanah, and dedicated the son to temple service, as she had promised she would. Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving is a long one (see verses 1—10.), but even the beginning strikes students of Jesus’ life as familiar.

My heart exults in Yahweh
In my God is my strength
lifted up
My mouth derides my foes
For I rejoice in your deliverance

And there are six more stanzas like that, all of which serve as a canvas on which Luke can paint the Magnificat. So Mary was not rebuked because Hannah was not rebuked and Luke wants the hearers of the Magnificat to hear it as an echo of Hannah’s song.

I think that is a very satisfying solution to the reason Zechariah put himself in harm’s way by asking the same question Mary asked safely. It begins with a much better question than the one that troubled me as a boy and to this new question, there is a good answer. Luke is placing his new material within old and meaningful traditions.

[1] Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
[2] This is a shame, because men aren’t really that complicated. Patrick Jayne, on an episode of The Mentalist, compared men (in their relative complexity) to toasters. It’s almost easier to see Mary with Zechariah than with Joseph, particularly since Joseph doesn’t have a single line of dialogue in Luke’s account.

Marriage, "red in tooth and claw"

I started thinking about this when I ran across the article, “Housewives of God” in this morning’s New York Times Magazine. It’s worth reading if you are interested in marriage, evangelical conservatism, biblical interpretation, or what author Molly Worthen calls the “biblical-womanhood-industrial complex. That phrase is when I started really liking this article. I attached the whole article and if you want a fair account of it, you should click here. For me, it’s just a launching pad.

I react strongly to the positions taken by Priscilla Shirer, the person on whose life and views the article is focused. Strongly, but not in the same direction for each position. Shirer holds, for instance, that the Bible describes a kind of marriage that is God’s way and that is therefore incumbent on all Christians. The feeling I have for that argument comes very close to revulsion. If I gave all the reasons why, I’d never get to the point I want to make. Most of them are in my Page on biblical interpretation, which is here.

I do not feel at all uncomfortable with the marriage the Shirer’s have. It looks pretty good to me. By the evidence given in the article, they have a kind of marriage they both value, they love each other a good deal, and they are full partners in pursuing the goals of the marriage, which includes raising wonderful children. Take away the rationale for the marriage and just look at the marriage itself, and what’s not to like?

I’m pretty conservative about marriage—an odd thing for a man to say who in on his third wife—but the argument I would make to feminists who have nothing but scorn for marriages like this, is a liberal one.[1] Tolerance. I preach tolerance. The Shirers like it. It works for them. Priscilla Shirer’s ideology is not like yours and if they are successful in raising their children to value the family tradition, their children will not be the kind you like, but I say tolerance is a good thing. A certain social diversity is a good thing. And maybe just the smallest sliver of ideological self-doubt. is a good thing too.

The range of marriages I have seen that I would call “good marriages” is absolutely astounding. I have seen a husband and wife who dearly love each other divide the bill for a shared lunch into “his” and “hers” and negotiate about the tip. I have seen women who are substantially more powerful and more whole “submit” to their husbands out of a certain knowledge that “being who she is” would break him into tiny fragments. I have seen men substantially pad their lives with rewarding projects and relationships so they will have the resources to continue to love women who would otherwise exhaust them.

None of these marriages are the kind I would like to have myself, but they are marriages where the partners truly love each other and arrange their personal competences as they may (examples one and two) or who are making the best marriage that can be made under circumstances that would defeat lesser spouses (example three). I honor these marriages. I learn from them as I am able. But I don’t aspire to have a marriage like them and I don’t.
I am against “equality” as a goal in marriage mostly because it takes too much accounting to maintain it. I think equality in marriage should be a presupposition. If you get to comparing the fundamental worth of one partner to another, you will end in disaster no matter the conclusion you reach. And what is worse, it is silly.

On the other hand, equality isn’t similarity. It is true that the only way to police “equality” effectively, is to define the roles within a marriage as identical, but if you have a marriage where policing is the first priority, you don’t have much of a marriage. I like complementarity in my marriage. That is the kind of marriage I proposed to Bette and the kind to which she was attracted. If the equality is presupposed and the differences are developed over time as we choose within a gracious and thoughtful relationship, then Bette and I can afford to emphasize complementarity and we do.

But we have the kind of marriage we have because it is the kind we want. Neither of us thinks God has commanded us to have this kind of relationship. Neither of us thinks our marriage requires a “head of the house.” Neither of us thinks that marriages that are affirming and effective are “bad marriages,” no matter how much unlike ours they might be.

There seems to me no good reason why the contemporary turmoil over “what a marriage should be like” must be “red in tooth and claw.” Nature is “red in tooth and claw” and it must be. Marriage doesn’t have to be. In cultures like ours, predicated on individualism; in cultures like ours, in which romantic attraction is the green light for marriage; I simply can not see why marriages that work should not be celebrated by us all.

I hold that marriages should not be judged by what a collection of scripture fragments, each deprived of its context of meaning, defines as good. You can have any kind of marriage you like, so far as I am concerned, if you will just keep your notions of a divine marriage template to yourself.

[1] The bad guys in this accusation are not “feminists.” They are “feminists who have nothing but scorn…” Sometimes, with just a little attention paid to punctuation, you can say exactly what you mean. Not all the time.

Valerie Plame Wilson is Fair Game

Bette and I saw Fair Game last night. I’ve already admitted I don’t have a discriminating taste in movies and if you do, you ought to remember that when you are reading this reflection on it. I thought it was really good. This is the story of the Bush Administration’s outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, a CIA undercover operative and wife of Joe Wilson, a diplomat. Here's Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame Wilson.

I liked it in part because I remember all this. I read Joe Wilson’s piece in the New York Times in which he said his findings in Niger had been misrepresented. I remember the search for the administration tool who slipped Plame’s CIA status to Robert Novak, the columnist. I remember the controversy about “the sixteen words” in Bush’s address to Congress.[1]

In the movie, there is no ambiguity at all about the decision to out Plame. They need a new story. Wilson asks in a speech near the end of the movie, “How did the question change from whether there are WMD to who is Valerie Plame? How did it change from who put in the sixteen words’ to whether Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by his CIA wife?”[2] As the media master says in Wag the Dog, “Change the story, change the lead.”

I liked it because of very strong performances by Naomi Watts as Plame and by Sean Penn as her husband, Joe Wilson. We see her in the field in some very dicey situations. Very competent, very cool. We see her confronted by the publishing of her CIA identity. Incredulous and angry at the politics; hurt and disappointed by the response of the friends she had before they knew she was CIA. We see her practical and strategic with her mercurial husband; then, persuaded, contrite and supportive. She covers quite a range of action and passion and I thought she was very good.

The movie reminded me a lot of Matt Damon’s Green Zone, where he discovers first that there are no WMD at the places he is told to look, then why he is being asked to look where there are no WMD, then why President Bush really wants this war and what he will do to get it. In Fair Game, we see the domestic policy side of the same shell game.

Finally, I think the approach of the movie that moved me most was how the Wilsons’ lives just kept on during all this. A convention of moviemaking is that you introduce a character as an employee of some kind or other and after the introduction, you never see him at work because the movie can’t spare the time. Wilson and his wife go right on caring for their children. Bedtime stories are interrupted by the most brutal news from the CIA world. They have to choose between meeting a crucially important political ally and making sure the kids have breakfast. One afternoon they have the most important fight of their marriage at a playground. As important as it is, it is broken up by “he’s got my truck” squabbles between the kids..

Really important people in the middle of a major crisis, still taking their kids out to the playground and trying to come to grips with their separate approaches to the crisis. It is so realistic it hurts a little.

[1] “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”
[2] There is an ongoing gag about how to pronounce Niger. Wilson says, correctly, Nuh=zhare”” The tools, the dupes, and the bad guys all mispronounce it. It is a funny spot in a movie that needs a funny spot.

November 3, 2010: Day 1 of the 2012 campaign

OK. It’s November 11. It has been nine days since the midterm election and, although we don’t know yet who all the winners are, it’s time to sit down and wonder what happened. The questions that strike me as important are these.

Is this a shift in political direction in the U. S.?

What does this mean for our ability to deal with the Extra Jumbo Size problems?

What are the implications for 2012?

No. It’s not a shift in policy direction. The country has not decided it made a bad choice two years ago and now wants to go back to the Bush era. We need to begin by noticing that at the national level, there are two electorates—the presidential year electorate and the midterm electorate. The number of people who turn out to vote in presidential years is substantially greater than in the midterm years and a good deal more liberal. So the presidential electorate cast its vote in 2008; the midterm electorate in 2010. The presidential electorate will vote again in 2012. And so on.

Of course, that is not the only dynamic. Presidential administrations acquire a certain weight of failure and friction, particularly by the second term. If there are deeply divisive policy decisions, that makes it worse. If there are scandals, that too makes it worse. So I would be willing to see the Rs building up their strength for the 2016 election for those reasons among others. I don’t see that between 2008 and 2010.

So what did happen? First, the Ds won “too many” Congressional districts in 2008. They won districts they would not have won had the voter disgust with Rs been less strong and more than they would have won had they not had a dynamic presidential candidate. So you would expect a substantial number of those to revert to R control in 2010 and they did. Besides, they were only Blue Dog Democratic districts anyway.

In addition, the people who were worried about the economy (so they voted for Obama) are now angry about the economy (so they voted against Obama). And the Rs took a hellacious risk in opposing Obama in lockstep and it paid off for them. The Ds said “It’s not our fault,” meaning that they inherited the recession. But that was two years ago. The Rs said “It’s not our fault,” meaning that they have opposed each and every initiative of the Obama administration. People were angry enough at their economic hardship that the R excuses played better than the D excuses.

So it wasn’t a change of direction. It was economic uneasiness amplified by high stakes partisan opposition.

How about the Extra Jumbo Size problems? Well, they didn’t go away. The deficit is still large, as it should be. Running a deficit to bring the economy back to speed is standard practice and has been since the 1930s. The debt is still large. It is almost entirely the gift to the nation of the Republican Party, but however it got there, there it is and we’re going to have to do something about it. Globalization is still syphoning off jobs that used to be American jobs. The transportation, energy, and communications infrastructures are bad and getting worse. And the Baby Boomers are just now starting to achieve their Medicare and Social Security potential. Our fifty education systems continue to fall further behind our international competition. Oh yeah, and we’re still fighting two wars.

I think the prospects are pretty good for most of those. The report of the President’s Commission on Not Going Broke is due December 1 and it will call for a good deal of pain for everyone. The fact that this is mostly deferred pain will not make it less painful. It’s a bipartisan commission and the rejection of it’s’ recommendations will be bipartisan as well, but the great thing about it is that time is running out. The consequences of failing to deal with it are clearer.

The Bush administration’s flirtation with getting out of the entitlement mess by allowing people to opt out seems more like a drunken pass in a bar than the beginning of a promising relationship. So the entitlement programs are going to have to be cut and federal revenues are going to have to be increased. The closer we come to the edge of the cliff, the more persuasive the need for bipartisan action will be.

Besides, the Republicans are going to have to say something more than NO now that they control the House. In the midst of a recession, the interplay of Democratic “How about this?” and Republican “No to all of the above,” played pretty well. Now it is time for the Rs to say, “No, let’s do that instead.” But “instead” will be massively unpopular and the Ds will always win a battle of proposals. They control the policy agenda and have for years and the public opinion surveys show that people have more confidence in the D proposals than the R proposals on nearly any issue you want to name.

For that reason, I think the Rs are going to have to take quite a few steps in the D direction, at least on the Extra Jumbo Size problems and as the cliff edge looms, innovation will be rewarded.

And the implications for 2012? I think they are very good. First, it is a presidential year so it will be the opinions of the more liberal of the two electorates that will be consulted. Second, the moderation that Obama has shown in his policy initiatives during his first two years, and which has driven perfectly respectable liberals crazy, is going to be affirmed in the 2012 campaign. More daring policies might have worked better, had Obama been able to pass them, but they would also have been more vulnerable to caricature. He is going to reap the political benefits of his freshman term wariness.

Third, the Republicans are going to have to come up with a candidate. If it’s someone like Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, the right wing will sit on their hands the whole election. If it’s a Tea Party firebrand like Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the excesses of the Tea Party will be on display. They don’t have anyone who can mobilize one part of the party and pacify the other part. Yet. And if they did, they will still have to go up against an Obama who will be in full campaign mode.

People felt they lost touch with Obama when he took time off from the campaign to…you know…run the country. I think they haven’t forgiven him for that. But Republican control of the House will make Congress almost inert for the next two years and that is going to put Obama right back on the campaign trail, where the Republicans really can not, candidly, afford to have him.

They like him in some back room of the West Wing arm-wrestling Ben Nelson over why 49 states should pay for the health care changes and Nebraska should get them free. That’s the Obama the Rs like but if they wanted to keep that one, they should have been smart enough to postpone taking over the House and being forced to join the conversation about America's future.

It's the cavalry! We're saved!

It’s been a good day all day today. I’ve had good meetings with students, a good discussion with my Wednesday group at church, and a bunch of good ideas for my course on public policy next term. But nothing so far has been more wonderful than the piece I read in the New York Times this morning with the headline: Atheist Groups Promote a Holiday Message: Join us.

It wasn’t just the article itself, I suppose. Bette and I were having coffee together at our favorite Starbucks. They are still serving the Thanksgiving blend, which is a good rich brew. I was headed down to the office afterwards where I knew I would be able to pick up my new not-very-business business cards—the only card I have ever seen with a footnote on it. So I think the setting had something to do with the explosion of joy which greeted the new atheist advertising campaign.

My heart really goes out to these guys. To start with, they are against “religion,” rather than any religion in particular. I’m not a fan of “religion,” myself, so I wish them well. Counterpoised to religion is “reason.” So they are going to be pitching “reason” to the country that has the largest percentage in the industrialized world who refuse to believe that the earth orbits the sun, rather than vice versa. This is according to a Pew survey within the last year. We lead the world, too, it almost goes without saying in the percentage who believe that the world is only a few thousands of years old.

The second giggle is that they are being forced by the logic of the market to arm wrestle each other for what they are calling “market share.” This according to Mark Silk of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. This means that from the most practical of standpoints, whatever is good news for the Freedom from Religion Foundation is bad for the United Community of Reason. I guess if you’re going to get really involved in the race, you have to pick a horse. It won’t be long before they are having negative ads aimed at their competitors. I’d guess “More Atheistic than Thou” would be a good theme.

I think that American Atheists is my pick in the early going. They will be putting a billboard on the Jersey end of the Lincoln Tunnel—this would be the Lincoln who said, in his second inaugural address “…still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether” rather than some other Lincoln—and the billboard says “You Know it’s a Myth. This Season Celebrate Reason.” I would like them for that if there were no other reason. It’s way too long, for one thing. And it misuses “myth” for another. And it doesn’t say what “season” it has in mind, for another, or why reason should have a season. That sounds like the complaints I get from my PS 101 students along about midterm time.

American Atheists is also the group who, according to David Silverman, their president, said that the campaign is aimed at people who “might go to church but are just going through the motions.” Mr. Silverman, you may have them. I would rather see them taking up space at your place than at ours. Had you considered what to do when they continue going through the motions over at your place? It’s a tough group. They are more or less inert and seem to cherish their inertness. Whatever you can do to dent it will be a service to us all.

I am reminded of a nicely graphic passage I’ve read many times, so it’s probably in Never Cry Wolf. It says that the wolf and the caribou are allies. The wolves remove the old, the sick, and the disabled caribou from the population. The removal of these from the breeding pool does wonders for the health and vitality of the caribou herd, not to mention what it does for the wolves. So I can imagine the Presbyterian churches—the only ones I really know anything about—and the American Atheists mutually benefitting each other and both passing the benefits down to their progeny.

I am old, however, and I have grown wary. I’m not one to count his caribou before they are eaten and I don’t want to hope for too much. What if the atheists are wrong about this? What if the “unchurched”[1] really don’t care enough to raise the question at all. What if this is, as I think it is, really a question of “issue salience?” If that is the case, then the first task of the new atheist marketers will be to argue that the question is urgently important. Once the urgency of the issue has been raised—it is now salient—then the utility of the atheist response to the issue becomes relevant.

I’m not really hopeful. Establishing salience is a bitch. Still, there appear to be new allies entering the field so it is no time for me to despair. And just in time for Christmas.

[1] Meaning this to include the un-mosqued, the un-synagogued, the un-templed, and the un-covened as well.

Telling Stories

I’ve been thinking lately about how stories affect us. I’m not thinking principally of stories-with-a-moral, like Aesop’s Fables. I’m thinking about do-you-remember-the-time-we… stories.

Stories are “nomic” agents as Peter Berger likes to say, or “ordering” agents.[1] There are three nomic mechanisms available to us. There are the principles, like “stealing is wrong.” You level your own behavior against that that rule and see how you look. There is no disagreement that our thoughts and relationships are ordered by principles and rules.

There are stories which have the principal function of illustrating some rule or other. I said I think of Aesop’s Fables as a good example. My mother used to read the story of the (harmless) stork who was trapped in a net set for the (harmful) crows, but who deserved his fate, in a way, because…wait for it…”You are known by the company you keep.” I was a mouthy kid and, if I had had the wit, I would have responded, “Wow! What bad news for Jesus!” But I didn’t.

Then there are the other stories, which are the ones I want to consider today. We tell the stories we like to tell and both the telling and the hearing affect us. And why do we like the stories we like? Some are just fun to tell. Some evoke a good time of our lives or a good event. Some, we say, we “resonate with,” which is a powerful, if obscure, way to characterize them.

Paraphrasing Aesop, I think I’ll say that we are known by the stories we tell. Further, I think there is a sense in which we even know ourselves by the stories we tell. How can this be?

First, stories are told from a point of view. There are, for instance, “victim stories,” and “winner stories;” there are “benefactor stories” and “beneficiary stories.” Which ones have resonance with us tells a lot about either who we are or, at least, where we are in our lives at the moment.[2] It is more than that, though. It is also that the characters in these stories serve to attract us or repel us. If I like to tell “beneficiary stories,” for instance, the good guys are the people who provided the benefits, and the people who noticed that I might need some. I am not, in these stories, the prodigal who has squandered his 401(k); I am only a person who was in need of help at some point and who was delighted to receive it. My guess is that makes me more attentive to situations where I could be the source of beneficence and might even make me less likely to be judgmental of a person who could use a little help. You’d like to think it would work that way.

But when I started this, I was thinking about the effects of stories on groups. Maybe family groups. I have always liked to hear and tell Hess stories. The women I have married have liked to tell the old Way and Miller and Brendle stories and, over time, some of the Hess stories in which they have played a part. Or college years stories. Do you remember what we found under the ivy on one of those ivy covered walls? I love all those and they bear on who “we,” whatever “we” is on our minds at the moment, are.

Some stories tell about an “us” that extends back in time a long way. Does “David v. Goliath” still affect us?[3] Does the old Kemmis family story of a defiant wife during the colonies’ revolutionary turmoil still affect the Kemmises of Missoula Montana? Of course it does. Does the old story of the Anabaptist fugitive who turned back to save his pursuer from drowning still affect Anabaptists? Yes, it does. Does Galileo’s defiance of papal authority still cause fans of the Enlightenment to salivate? Yes, it does. And no one I know saw “Cap’n John” Kemmis’s wife rebuke the British or the Anabaptist pay with his life for his compassion to an enemy or Galileo defy the church. How do these stories affect us? I mean, by what means do these stories affect us?

I have three means in mind. These three means are what I am calling the second way stories affect us. The first, remember, was the choice of point of view. Let me lay them out and you can turn them over in your mind and see if they make sense. I got these from an old book, too.[4] Snell and Gail Putney say that we need others as our mirrors, our models, and as the receivers of our actions. I have worked with that simple little three-part division for a long time now and it very often brings clarity.

Following this line of thought, “our stories”—the stories that belong to some “us” that extends over a very long time—affect us by providing mirrors, models, and recipients. Let’s imagine, for instance, that I have been told Hess family stories my whole life. The Hesses in these stories come off looking pretty good. If you are a member of a multigenerational family with a sense of itself, that won’t surprise you. My paternal grandfather, Abram Z. Hess, was, according to the story that has been passed down, strongly opposed to the building of a platform in their church. I suspect he thought it was incipient elitism. They discussed it a long time and then voted. He lost. So he showed up the next morning as part of the work party that had assembled to build the platform.

This isn’t an Aesop-style story, but as I identify with the only clearly drawn character in the story, I imagine his indignation at this stupid idea and his frustration at being on the losing side. I reflect on what he did with those feelings so that he could whole-heartedly affirm the generous collegiality that sustained the work party. I think, not with the middle of my mind, but off at the margins somewhere, that maybe I should be that way. I’ve been losing the textbook debate in the Political Science Division for about ten years now. Maybe I should stop pouting and join in finding a more agreeable solution. That is clearly where the sympathies I gave my grandfather would take me and I believe that the models in our stories affect us just like that.

If our stories offer models, they also offer mirrors. I look at myself in the light of the stories I know. Like a bat, I send little sounds toward the stories and I get back the echoes that tell me where I am and, if I am in luck, whether there is food in the area. I push off of the villains in the stories, assuring myself that I am not like them. I hope I am like the heroes in the stories and listen to the echoes to see whether I am. There is a constant self-assessment imbedded in knowing these stories and it is an assessment not only of “me” but of “us.” If this were all conscious, I might think about my family, “We did pretty well”—remembering both the stories that illustrate the goals some family member has reached and also the failures some family member has had to endure. But it isn’t conscious. It is not only below the radar. It is before the radar.

Third and finally, we need receivers of our actions. Social roles tend to come in pairs (or “dyads,” if you have a social science background) and the simple fact is that if I want to be a beneficiary, you will need to want to be a benefactor, and vice versa. If I broadcast my victimhood, I will attract victimizers. If I love steadfastly through good times and bad, people will have my back through good times and bad. That’s not just mutual obligation or tit for tat. It’s playing out the roles in the stories we all know. I am sure that is true of individuals and I suspect that it is true of groups as well. If I were in a family that had an ancient clan rival, I would know for sure.

I think that is the way stories affect us, particularly if the “us” is a group with a long historical tail. And it’s all the more powerful because it isn’t conscious. We reach out emotionally to the good guys in our stories and lean back away from the bad guys. These are not so much the stories that belong to us as they are the stories by which we belong to each other.

[1] Berger is best known for the book he wrote with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. I stumbled across it at a bookstore at Syracuse in 1967 and have lived in it ever since.
[2] One of the things I noticed, for instance, about my brush with depression in 2006 was the speed with which my loser stories aligned themselves into something that felt like a net when it dropped on me and even more like a net when I tried to get out of it. None of those stories was new, but the speed with which they reassembled themselves in my mind truly astounded me.

[3] Apart, that is from the well-known maxim that if you don’t have size, you will have to depend on outside shooting.
[4] This is 1964 in downtown Dayton, Ohio. The book is, The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society.