In addition and more to the concern of this book, we ourselves are impacted by what we say and do. Drawing that lesson from various experiments, Daryl Bem (1972) formulated self-perception theory: we infer what we are like and what we believe from our actions. For example, in forbidden toy studies, children who were merely told to avoid playing with a toy or face mild punishment subsequently rejected the toy more than did those who had been threatened with more severe punishment for playing with it. Bem reasons: “If [the participant] has refrained from playing with the toy under severe threat, he can still infer that he may like the toy, but if he has refrained under mild threat, then he could conclude that he must not like the toy” (pp. 20–21). In other words, people gather information about themselves from situational cues, and “private stimuli probably play a smaller role in self-description than we have come to believe” (p. 4). When people say something under conditions lacking obvious coercion, punishment, or reward, they may infer that they are being truthful even to themselves. So, when Jim David Adkisson, alone in his duplex apartment prior to a mass shooting spree at a Tennessee church, wrote his manifesto explaining that he was upset by Democrats, he is likely to have believed he was, whatever his original state (Presser 2012). At the least, that discursive action fortified his belief. Similarly, although those who tell stories asserting racial superiority or denying climate change may be foundationally motivated to do so for material and/or so-called political reasons, they might come to believe their disingenuous stories anyway.8
To summarize, stories, including ones told dishonestly, affect us. But we should not rest with the observation that narratives get to us: we should ask how they do it.
INVESTIGATING NARRATIVE IMPACTS
The present study addresses a question the gist of which has been posed by scholars across the academy. Cognitive psychologist Richard Gerrig (1993) takes note of “how little is known about the ‘dimensions’ of narrative experience—that is the theory of aesthetics that remains undeveloped” (p. 175). Social psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock (2002) remark on how “little attention has been paid to the specific processes by which narrative or fictional communications might have persuasive effects” (p. 316). Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall (2012) observes: “There is still a lot to be discovered about the extent and magnitude of story’s sculpting power” (p. 152). We know that narratives drive collective action and need more information. Why does a story of injustice, degradation, triumph against the odds, or anything else provoke us?
I will tease out both the features that make stories generally impactful and those that make some stories more impactful than others. By impactful, let me be clear, I mean nurturing an emotional response, which may be something on the order of tranquillity, and not merely passion, rage, exhilaration, and the like. My main argument is that the most commanding stories remind us of the precariousness of our existence and offer hope of unremitting control and infinite existence or at least infinite significance. Their resolution is a recognizably stable self.
The five chapters that follow amount to an investigation of how narrative may drive mass harm. I take mass harm to be any practice in which many people are implicated which causes the suffering of many. Examples of mass harm include terrorism, counterterrorism, animal abuse, imprisonment, systematic sexual violence and tolerance thereof, slavery, war-making, and genocide. These harms are not equivalent, and I am not concerned to classify them except insofar as stories do. My aim is to clarify the ways stories influence thoughts and feelings which in turn encourage a variety of harms.
Chapter 2 examines the discursive processes that support mass harm and amasses a body of evidence of narrative impacts on mass harm. Case studies of mass harm reveal figurative expressions and narratives to be highly consequential. These studies tend to emphasize framing and thus legitimization of action. Figurative language, especially metaphors, and narratives set out harm agents as heroic or decent, harm-doing as acceptable or virtuous, and targets of harm as deserving or beyond concern. The overarching message of this body of work is that language powers action via its capacity to shape propositional content and its uptake. My review opens up the question for the rest of the book of what gives narratives engendering harm their emotional and thus motivating force.
Chapter 3 investigates the affective charge of narrative. It asks why narrative in general invites immersion and why some narratives are especially inviting. The answer I arrive at implicates narrative capacities for integrating meanings, constructing and—especially through story endings—putting a stop to dynamic agency, and moralizing experience. I draw heavily on cognitive theories of emotion, which tie emotion to one’s evaluation of experiences as important to one’s well-being. Nussbaum (2001) emphasizes the emotional aspect of issues of control over well-being. Nussbaum as well as Hogan (2003) help to clarify the density of emotion in terms of past experience, but I also discern an aesthetic pull from narrative as figurative device and (thus) site of ambiguity. Something about obscure messaging pulls us in. Becker’s (1973) theory of death denial allows consideration of narrative meaning for all time as a salve to existential anxiety. I conclude this chapter by developing the position that narrative arousal is a function of narrative’s capacity for holistic synthesis of experience and identity, which, paradoxically, depends in part on the indeterminacy of meaning (hence meaning of the self). Different stories provoke emotional reactions of varying force and engagement, from a sense of urgency to a mood of satisfaction, depending on how much preferred experiences and identities are under threat.
Chapters 4 and 5 apply these ideas to two rather different social spheres and narratives. They represent extremes of emotional engagement—dramatic versus dispassionate—in stories that underpin mass harm.
Chapter 4 makes sense of the draw of underdog stories in which humble and seemingly ineffectual but righteous heroes triumph in this world or in the eternal one, over mighty adversaries. The chapter draws on several empirical examples—religious parables, the film Rocky, antiabortion activism, and anti-LGBT activism. The underdog story rouses its audiences on the basis of assurances that heroes come under divine protection, that they are connected to but unique among fellows, and that their deeds have transcendent importance. The story declares its end with the hero’s triumph, thus denying adversaries future agency.
In chapter 5 certain narratives are shown to foster a mood of satisfaction, which presents as indifference to harms perpetrated by others. We are moved to accept the status quo or some set of arrangements carried out in our names. Here I analyze an influential criminological narrative, the so-called general theory of crime by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), which relates how individuals become criminals through negligent parenting. The narrative allows us to construct everlastingly good selves in contrast to irresponsible and inconsequential others and charts a path to our control, over self and others, in this lifetime. Whether dramatic or subdued, stories that fuel mass harm draw contrasts that reassure audiences of their morally right positions. I am in that audience, a fact that chapter 5 highlights. I am a sociological criminologist who is accustomed to pondering rather dispassionately the harms heaped upon criminalized persons, their families, and their communities. I am concerned about these harms, but I am also regularly able to set aside my concern. My affect when I think about penal harm is usually subdued, and my record of activism is, sadly, spotty. By theorizing the emotional impacts of the story of antisociality, I am in effect investigating my own comfort level.
Chapter 6 summarizes the aesthetic nature of destructive narrative influence, draws out theoretical implications, and identifies points of potential intervention based on the analysis—resisting certain stories and telling new ones that encourage “life-enhancing illusions” (Becker 1973, p. 158) rather than illusions that degrade and destroy.
CHAPTER TWO
The Cultural Grounds
of Mass Harm
Large-scale projects that cause suffering,