Change Theory Deep Dive Part 2: Ideas and Stories
Social Change, Week 4
As I mentioned in week 1, various theories of how change in human society occurs can be evaluated against the six questions from Trevor Noble. This week was a deep examination of one side of the materialist-idealist question: the argument that we should think about changes in ideas resulting in a change in our material circumstances, rather than the changes in the material world changing our ideas1.
Let’s start with the most basic question: what exactly do we mean by the word idea? This 1988 interview with Isaac Asimov gives an opportunity to hear how he relates the various forms that thought an information can take. Connecting the dots, ideas are possible states of the world2, beliefs are those ideas we assent to / add to our personal collection, evidence is data consistent with an idea that we use to select or justify our beliefs, and an ideology is an organized collection of ideas that we can choose to make beliefs as a package and that give some shape to our identities. Asimov, then, in the interview, is defending his scientific ideology (that ideas should be believed in proportion to their evidence), and his belief in the idea that dogmas (belief not based on verifiable evidence) shouldn’t guide policy in modern society3.
Ideas are usually expressed in language4. This seems too obvious and pedestrian to mention, but it seems like our language constrains our thoughts in ways that may make some ideas more likely and others inaccessible to us. On the other hand, it may be that the most basic form that ideas can take may not even be in language, but in music and other art. Music may have predated language as a vehicle for human emotional communication and synchronization. Often, sung chants have animated protest movements and served as a unifying totem for an idea of social change.
Ideas as Images of the Future
Images of the future, as I talked about back in February 2023, are how ideas about the future are communicated. This can be as simple as a couple of words (flying cars! eating bugs! blockchain for iced tea!) all the way up to scenarios with narratives, art, artifacts, or (beyond the reach of traditional futurists but important anyway) science fiction movies or books taking place in a possible future. Polak argues in his classic Images of the Future that having positive images of the future (whether of technical or social progress in this world, or of divine provision for a better world to come) is critical for societies to succeed. Indeed, that’s the principal idea animating Ray Bradbury’s 1984 short story The Toynbee Convector: the protagonist, seeing himself surrounded by malaise and cultural stagnation due to a lack of hope for the future, builds a time machine, travels forward 100 years, documents all the amazing advances and problems solved, and inspires everyone to believe in a positive future enough to build it5. This is the opposite of what we’ve been doing with climate change, for example: climate scientists have been trying to motivate people since the 90s by claiming we just have a few years to act before humanity is doomed, and the main effect has not been emissions cuts but climate anxiety that makes people less able to effect change in their lives.
For a skeptical view of the “positive-future-images-driving-success” argument, see this article by the futurist Alex Fergnani. First of all, what if Polak just read the correlation backward, and societies that are successful naturally have more positive images of the future? Then he dives into the psychology literature, and contrasts positive future images that we see as plausible enough that we can work out a path to them (“expectations”) vs those that are more or less just idle fantasy6; the former increase motivation to work toward them, where the latter do not7. His biggest recommendation to stay on the right side of the line is to avoid utopias and stick with futures that can connect to the present via backcasting.
Ideas as Stories
Stories, with a deeper narrative arc, act as a vehicle for communicating and transmitting ideas that go beyond images. Professor Mudge has a four-step model of storytelling: an idea is articulated, then a story is formed that communicates the idea, then the story is told, then some audience listens to it. This model helps isolate the various stages of the process; for example, will the shape of the story follow something like Joseph Campbell’s monomyth8, the Japanese model of kishotenketsu, or something else; will the story be told in face-to-face (high human effort and very localized impact) or via TV (way bigger reach via technology, but potentially much lower investment by those receiving it), and so on.
People frequently make the argument that stories are a dominant mode of sensemaking for humans and that the right stories drive massive change. However, whenever I look at lists of the books or films or art or poetry that changed the world, I come away deeply underwhelmed by the tiny or tangential impact of most of them. My guess is that the impact of stories in culture is hard to see because it’s most powerful at the level of the individual and the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, and at the level of the stories that emerge from, react to, and slowly change our underlying culture.
The second chapter of Krznaric’s History for Tomorrow is about how to build tolerance in multiethnic societies, but I think it comes down to these tiny and big stories. He draws a few examples of societies that have done it moderately well (medieval Muslim Spain, modern-day Singapore and Spain)9, and finds a common element: policies and circumstances that force people to interact frequently across ethnic lines. In al-Andalus this meant a shared language (Arabic) and commercial relationships in urban settings; in Singapore, it looks like racial quotas per apartment building and pushing people into common areas. I don’t think Krznaric states this explicitly, but it seems clear to me that the kind of mixing or bumping elbows that creates more harmonious relations in urban areas is one-on-one, in the butcher shop, at the PTA, or on the soccer team, rather than as unified ethnic groups. In a week where children are barely able to go to school because of national narratives about immigrants as pet-eating barbarians, it’s clear that more of this kind of localized bridge-building is desperately needed, because it helps communities build more of a we-story with a shared future rather than the kinds of deep competitive stories that come from things like Great Replacement narratives.
How Much Do Society’s Ideas Matter?
So after all of this, we are brought back to the main question: are our ideas the main driver of our reality, or is reality the main driver of our ideas? A 2006 academic debate from the Cato Institute10 shows a few different ways to look at the question at the level of culture (the background idea-set or ideology of a society). Max Weber’s ideas of the Protestant work ethic enabling the adoption of capitalism is the starting point. Lawrence Harrison opens the conversation by noting that even in multicultural societies, some cultural groups seem to consistently do better than others, and he links this to values around work, saving, education, etc. Harrison argues that politics can influence culture, but that it is ultimately culture that drives a society’s success. Gregory Clark notes that the values being measured as “culture” are often a rational response to the institutions surrounding people — it just makes sense for people to be less trusting in North Korea than in South Korea, given the trustworthiness of the state apparatus. Peter Boettke sees culture as affecting the cost to society of enforcing particular rules, but the rules are the main driver of success. James Robinson notes that the examples of successful ethnic enclaves are problematic because they are often an intentional political choice to spur development without creating a rival native power center. Separate from the Cato debate, Anne Swidler offers a reframing that I like quite a bit and gives us a way out of this puzzle. She argues that culture isn’t a set of values, but a toolkit of view, symbols, and stories for solving problems that arise. She notes moments where the values and ends of societies have changed pretty dramatically, but the pattern of action is much stickier; one example is how the Bible and its stories were used to defend slavery and then to motivate its abolition. During more “settled” times, the culture can operate on autopilot, but when things are less settled, ideologies fight to modify the culture by creating new habits.
One recurring example of ideas reacting to changes in the material world but failing to make much lasting difference is the case of moral panic, where some element of society tries to put the brakes on change. One example is the way the bicycle democratized transportation, and allowed people (especially women) mush greater freedom of travel. All the concern about how society would be ruined, and yet bicycles continued to become cheaper and more normalized11. Similarly, the mid-1980s saw a panic over the lyrics in music12, led by the wives of Washington elites. The music industry agreed to self-police with the Parental Advisory sticker to avoid the specter of government oversight, but the movement doesn’t seem to have done much to keep explicit music out of the mainstream. It seems like some changes need the right idea to enable them when conditions are otherwise right, but that ideas have a really hard time swimming against material reality.
Of course, both directions for that causal arrow are plausible, and you can probably imagine times in your life where each seems to have been the case. If you’ve ever been inspired to change your life’s trajectory by a story you read, then you’ve experienced the Idealist position; if you’ve ever had a life experience that changed your views about something, that’s the Materialist position. The question, then, is which approach is a faster and more reliable path to understanding.
I feel like there’s a lot to unpack here, because ideas could be about what is (like a scientific theory), about what could be (options, future possibilities, etc), or what should be (when a possibility has a positive value judgment). These seem practically pretty different, but I don’t have a pithy way to think about the distinctions.
It’s interesting, looking back, to see the blind spots in the prevailing views of the time, including the belief that overpopulation was the single biggest problem and that it would make it impossible to relieve deep poverty. In fact, populations are on track to peak before long because modern people just don’t want children at the replacement level, the whole paradigm is tinged with eugenics, and extreme poverty was just in the beginning stages of precipitous decline.
Though some ideas are so embedded into the way we think and the institutions we use that we don’t really ever articulate them — these are the ones that can really get us stuck.
The story relates to the work of futurists even more directly when it’s revealed that [REDACTED].
This is tricky, because we want to encourage ideas that strain plausibility. Jon Sweeney once explained his approach as “no angels, no aliens”.
He does argue that fantasies, compared to present undesirable realities, can create the motivation to make a change, as people realize that elements of the future are holding us back. I’m not sure what to do with this, because it kind of undercuts his main argument…
Note that this has an implicit theory of change embedded in it — society in the “normal world” is static, and only by facing the challenges in the “special world” can the hero change and bring the change back to the community.
The fact that he has no examples of places where it has worked better than only intermittent race riots shows that this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve.
This is their “Cato Unbound” journal, so it’s not necessarily just the Institute’s official libertarian views, but you can imagine the kind of people who are likely to submit articles to it.
At least until they were replaced by automobiles, made possible by the bicycle industry advocating for better roads and pioneering new methods of mass-producing parts.
Part of this was connected to the larger Satanic Panic, which didn’t seem to have a lasting effect beyond making 80s and 90s kids feel deprived and that their parents were lame.