The human mind thinks in narratives, but one of the features of contemporary political conversations is that we work largely in a narrative vacuum. This simply means that we do not clarify our narrative presumptions when we engage in discourse. Individuals may supply ad hoc narratives to explain where they are coming from, but there is no general assent to any one narrative. Narrative is necessary for clear thought because it is the mechanism that we use to align our intuitions and gather evidence about the world around us. This can come prior to thought, or it can help shape our understanding of political discourse. We should be deliberate in thinking about narratives. 

Examples of narratives are Thomas Sowell’s useful contrast between constrained and unconstrained visions of political economy. Nicholas Capaldi and Gordon Floyd focus on a contrast between Locke and Rousseau with specific emphasis on their legacies in democracies. These two examples reduce political disagreement to a dichotomy, which characterizes it as conflict. In what follows, I offer an approach that expands on these existing political narratives in order to highlight the features of narrative that are related to presentations of authority and progress. I will illustrate this with a description of four different narratives that help to emphasize trade-offs inherent in how we view political economy: fragility, modernity, decentralization, and evolutionary hypotheses. 

Fragility Hypothesis: 

The fragility view is as old as civilization itself: progress sows the seed of destruction and the uncorrupted must preserve the older ways. In the Hebrew Torah, history, and prophetic books, evidence of the corruption of creation is everywhere. The fall from the Garden of Eden, the tower of Babel, David and Goliath, and Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream all point to the inevitability of decay over time. Modern versions of this story of corruption include Malthus’s idea of a poverty trap, and, in the twenty-first century, the narrative of environmental crisis.

David’s victory over Goliath is the most compelling and accessible version of this tale. The Israeli people were in a bind. Their neighbors were equipped with better weapons and had at least one giant of a warrior who intimidated the troops into a standstill. It is faith and not power that allows David to win, and the Philistines, who are the more economically sophisticated, fail in a triumph of morality over material advantage. 

History confirms that Philistia had better weapons and better trade networks; we would perhaps call this higher GDP per capita. David’s people had God, however. A modern version of this story may be something like: the flyover states could survive direct challenges from the richer coastal states like California due to some purer commitment to truth that is lost when humanity progresses economically. In Genesis, shepherds are better than the urban people of Nimrod’s Babel. David remains closer to the nomadic roots of the people of God. David’s son Solomon is very wise, but he undermines his success by establishing diplomatic ties through marriage with the surrounding kingdoms, ultimately causing corruption of the kingdom. The moral is clear: Progress is corrupting. 

The fragility narrative rejects civilization as progressive. This understanding still resonates with people today. The idea that economic progress must cause environmental degradation slyly manipulates our narratives about progress. It downplays a path forward that could both increase well-being and work to establish better stewardship of the environment. 

The Modern Hypothesis

The modern view hopes to fix the corruption that comes with progress by directing progress toward an end. This view originates in the late medieval development of science but continues through the end of the nineteenth century. “Modern” is used as a technical term referring to the specific goal of unifying knowledge without contradiction. St. Thomas Aquinas begins to synthesize inquiry by refining and defending the scholastic method, a unity of knowledge with elaborate detail. In this view there are ways to get to the root of truth and establish, through deductive methods, further elaborations on truth as a mathematical field, inter-related pieces of one giant picture. Diderot’s encyclopedia, or Wikipedia today, would be the fulfillment of collecting all the world’s information and working out the coherent and resolved whole. 

A society that centered on natural law, would avoid the harms of corruption while still being able to progress toward a goal. For thinkers like Thomas, the goal was the discovery of God’s plan for humanity. John Locke also viewed the world in teleological terms, supposing that history was pointed toward an ultimate plan, which was ascendant. Later moderns, who rejected a personal God, kept the essential teleological aim of science as the discovery of unalloyed truth but without the supernatural element. Whig theories of history point to today as the best of all moments in history because they are the accumulated wisdom of all prior ages. This will continue to be true as we progress indefinitely. What defines the modern worldview is progress towards an ultimate end, the union of all knowledge. Regardless of theology, the teleological view must have acolytes and heretics. 

Decentralized Hypothesis

As modern thinking flourished, critique of modernism became important. Those arguing that perspective matters preserve an important domain for context, as we see for example in the twentieth century the Frankfurt school thinkers like Herbert Marcuse. In the decentralized view humans are seen as embedded actors making choices from their own, and importantly, different perspectives. Error is not fatal in a decentralized approach because there is no single unalloyed understanding of progress the way that moderns would have thought. Teleological positions define groups, but their narratives are limited to members of those groups. One way that this appears in political economy is through thinkers like Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments underscores the need for moral sentiments to be formed in groups. Smith later articulated a division of labor that incorporated distributed skills to the betterment of all. To move quickly to a unique consensus would be to violate the discovery of norms and the formation of the individual’s capacity for moral judgment. 

The concern for decentralization was not simply a pragmatic one, however. Radical reformers like Charles Fourier stressed that moral foundations are corrupted by large, anonymous societies. Fourier called for communities, called Phalanx houses, to push back against centralization and allow for social embeddedness. Like Smith, he believed that moral formation required small healthy communities. Economic progress was good, but not at the expense of community that forms moral intuition. There is some synthesis here between the fragility hypothesis and the modern view. Corruption increases with progress, but getting the institutions right offers the potential for favorable trade-offs. 

There is plenty of room in society to resist aggregation. Fundamentally, this is a rejection of the modern approach of unifying all knowledge. Science is more than a catalog of truths. Too much aggregation would lead to disintegration if important elements of humanity such as family, community organizations, and other features of disaggregated civil society disappear because of bias toward aggregation and efficiency. Too much is lost when civil society is replaced by federal agencies or AI algorithms. Thinkers like Tocqueville, Chesterton, and Belloc are examples of people seeking a balance between progress and civil society. American Federalism in the nineteenth century prioritized the institutional realization of the disaggregate approach, but later evolved into more centralized power which was used to restrain abuses. 

Evolutionary View

The most recent development in political narratives makes the act of rejecting a shared narrative its central feature. Its origins can be found in the evolutionary perspective. It is non-teleological because it is science only in its post-modern sense. The decentralized/disaggregated theories saw society as having no single defined goal and no ultimate purpose looming on the horizon. This lack of a shared narrative is also the type of corruption that the fragility hypothesis suggested comes with material advancement. The current lack of an orienting telos would make the moderns shudder, but it is the world we live in today. 

The evolutionary approach retains survival as the only characteristic, and what survives can be arbitrary. It is hard to tell history from an evolutionary perspective, but it suits the post-modern worldview very well. No groups won because of some ultimate morality (contra-Hegelian), but because they were adapted to a particular environment. In another simulation, other groups would have won. This means no lessons can be drawn from history. All morality is stripped out. 

As Lord Acton emphasized in his letter to Creighton, leaving the teaching of history to people like “Foude, Macaulay, Carlyle …” is a “great error.” An amoral perspective implies a lesson of vacuousness. Narrative is important for Acton because it is responsible for morality and ultimately the formation of a plan or goal. History has an important moral lesson to teach whether you are talking about Washington chopping down a cherry tree or teaching the 1619 project. It is not enough simply to make a plurality of moral lessons available when there is no way to articulate which ones are better. Narratives allow for discussion of morality in the context of real events, and lessons are not abstract truths that can be uncritically accepted. History is more than a set of facts about what happened; it is an input into the formation of plans about how to act today and tomorrow. 

Finding a Place for Civil Society

The narratives of political economy matter for students of both policy and civil society. There are trade-offs implied by the choice of narrative. All of this points to discursive tension: every group has a telos, but these are not reducible to a final answer for everyone in society. To remove reference to narrative is to dominate discourse with an evolutionary view and no means of evaluating. To embrace fragility is to be unnecessarily dismissive of progress and simply justify the status quo. To be disaggregate is to reject the unified vision of modernity a failure to adopt compelling norms of progress. To regard science as a God is to do teleological thinking without the sophistication of a theology that sorts out contradictions. No approach avoids a narrative; each can at best marginalize the conversation about which narrative approach is guiding our framing of reality.

It takes practice to clearly articulate trade-offs implicit in the choosing of a narrative. Take environmental policy, for example. Appreciating the threat implied by the fragility hypothesis helps to justify the action needed to unify both progress through innovation and better stewardship of the planet’s resources. The evolutionary approach can help us see how prioritizing the environment without adopting cleaner technology makes both goals harder to achieve. A healthy disaggregation of public assistance programs can reestablish human relationships and the reciprocity necessary to make civil society flourish. Modernity gives us one-size-fits-all education systems, and disaggregation explains why competition between schools improves student fit. Being aware of what narratives are motivating our interlocutors can help improve communication, but it can also help us to appreciate more subtle truths that are lost in the political conflict of our times. If we can better understand where people are coming from, we can benefit from trading with them.