Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? Generalists are broadly knowledgeable, but specialists are proficient enough in their areas to have authority in a particular field, which Socrates values above general ability. He illustrates his opinion in the story Rival Lovers, recounted by Plato:

“I walked into the school of Dionysus the grammarian and saw there some extremely attractive young men of good family; their lovers were there too. Two of the boys happened to be arguing about something, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was.”

Socrates naturally injects himself into the argument and ends up establishing his position that specialty that leads to authority is superior to generality that leads to mediocrity. More notable, however, than the moral, is the vessel: this is the ancient Greek equivalent of a Penthouse Forum letter, basically; I never thought it would happen to me, but I walked into a Tri-Delt sorority house the other day…In short, it’s sexy.

Almost too sexy, in fact, to be literally true. As John Cooper explains, Rival Lovers “might have been a contribution to [the generalist v.s. specialist] debate in the years before Plato’s death in 347 B.C.E. Or else it might be a diatribe aimed by one of his former academic colleagues against Aristotle’s way of thinking, written after he began teaching in the Lyceum in Athens, in which case it dates from the last third of the fourth century.” In other words, the story, while possibly having some relationship to a discussion or discussions that once happened, was most likely contrived to position generalism and specialty as ‘rival lovers’ for academics at large; in reading or hearing the dialogue, a student can imagine herself as tempted by two inviting methods of study between which she must choose. The sexy conceit is just a charming frame for a subject matter so relevant to the passionate, eager, and bright.

As Cooper points out, people were interested in this debate were free to engage with the narrative and to dispute any part of it; unsurprisingly, that’s the sort of conversation that dialogues invite. A student or teacher could question any particular argument made by any particular character, and could in that way challenge the dialogue’s conclusions. This is, unfortunately, something we can’t do as members of the contemporary left.

Not that our movement is short on stories of this type. In fact, it’s saturated with them. Seemingly every campaign on the left somehow involves photographs of people holding up whiteboards with their personal stories written on them, and if you’ve not yet come upon one of those exhibitions, consider the prominence of the personal story at Occupy (RIP). Organizers of Occupied Stories, a website working in ‘solidarity’ with Occupy Wall Street, have this to say about the import of the personal story:

Occupied Stories is a story-sharing platform that recognizes the mainstream media’s claim to fairness and objectivity as both false and unrealistic—no story is objective, but a point of view. The truth behind any story is shared by the many who lived it, not by PR spokespersons or political pundits.

Our mission is to encourage critical reflection over blind acceptance and amplify the voices from the front-lines of social justice movements around the world.

Other Occupy-related projects have also aimed to aggregate the personal stories of anyone who happens to show up at an Occupy outpost and feels like saying some stuff. Fine by me; I like a good story, especially when the interlocutor has the decency to sexy it up a little bit. But note what the function of the story is intended to be, as per the paragraph above: to counteract the stories put forward by authoritative media sources, and thereby to further the political goals of the activists themselves.

Don’t be fooled by the assertion that stories are not ‘objective’ but rather merely ‘point[s] of view.’ The sentence that follows that one belies its disclaimer: these stories intend to get at truth, and since the paragraph states that such truth is shared, it can’t be truth of the solipsistic, subject-contained sort. In other words, the stories of activists are meant to be a counterargument to the stories of major media outlets, and the encouragement of ‘critical reflection’ is doubtlessly intended to persuade listeners/readers to support the political aims of the story-tellers rather than the media bigwigs.

So what do we do with these stories? The way they’re being used in the first place is a good clue. Instead of engaging in argument with the narratives major media outlets produce, the stories are simply offered up as, well, alternatives. They’re obviously meant to be taken more seriously than the official stories, but they do not directly engage. Why? Well, there’s something sort of sacral about the personal story on the left. You cannot question any part of them, and hence cannot dispute their conclusions. If you do, you’re likely to be accused of the now tumblr-famous offense known as ‘gaslighting‘ or silencing oppressed persons.

Gaslighting/silencing are undoubtedly bad things. But the trouble with drawing conclusions — especially actionable ones — from personal stories is that personal stories are not really reliable when it comes to truth value. I think most people are acquainted with the data here, but I’ll offer a quick rundown anyhow.

For a long time researchers have been documenting the tendency of sequentially recalled memories to change over time. More worryingly, they tend to change based on what the individual recalling them believes to be true about the world. In 1920, F.C. Bartlett had some people read folk takes from other cultures, and then asked them to recall the stories. Here’s what happened, from a paper entitled “Experiments on the Reproduction of Folk-Stories”:

“Relations of opposition, subjection, similarity, and the like, occurring in the original, are very commonly intensified. This forms one illustration of a deep-rooted and widespread tendency to dramatisation, and, in particular, all those types of relation about the apprehension of which feeling tends to cluster are readily exaggerated or emphasised.”

In repeated re-tellings, content with powerful emotional value was changed over time. Unsurprisingly, the same holds true of re-tellings of memories today. Consider these studies on how people recount memories related to 9/11. (A ‘flashbulb’ memory is a vivid memory of a particularly emotional/impactful event.) A summary of one study in particular states that:

“In this seven-city investigation, 3,000 adults answered survey questions about their memories of learning about the attacks at three points in time: one week, 11 months and 35 months later. Hirst and his team looked at how people’s flashbulb recollections, such as where and from whom they learned of the attacks, compared with their factual recollections, such as which airlines and how many airplanes were involved. It turned out that the rate of forgetting for both types of memory slowed and stabilized after a year. But overall flashbulb recollections declined more than factual recollections, possibly because nonstop media coverage bolstered people’s factual memories…”

Possibly, but it also appears that the language involved in the reconstruction of memory — especially that which evokes powerful emotion — has the ability to distort memories. This was the conclusion of the now-famous ‘car crash’ studies conducted with regard to eye witness testimony. It’s been corroborated by other studies on bias and recollection, with the ultimate conclusion being:

 “Memory is affected by retelling, and we rarely tell a story in a neutral fashion. By tailoring our stories to our listeners, our bias distorts the very formation of memory—even without the introduction of misinformation by a third party.”

So the situations in which we tell stories, and the language framing our retelling can both seriously impact their relationship with reality. Stories, through telling and retelling, take the shape that we want them to: they argue for conclusions we like. So, regardless of whether or not we intend to construct stories like Rival Lovers — that is, narratives engineered to usher along or demonstrate our already-held conclusions — it appears that, through telling and retelling our own stories, we end up doing something closer to that than to reporting ‘truth.’

In itself this isn’t a problem. Stories that help people understand arguments can be extremely illuminating. But the key here is that they’re stories for the sake of argument, and when argument is not allowed because taboos prevent engagement with personal stories or their conclusions, stories become more of a shield than a sword. Instead of actively contributing to agreement on a point through discussion/debate, they exclude the possibility of argument altogether, and protect a conclusion that may not be just or sensible or have any relationship with reality. I’ll also note that it’s this forcefield around personal stories on the left that leads to a total clutter of stories and the pure impossibility of reconciling opposing views; for instance, if two people from oppressed backgrounds utterly disagree on a topic based on their personal experience with it and both propose their stories as evidence, there’s literally no way of reconciling them. Argument isn’t possible, the story is supreme, and the conversation comes to a screeching halt.

I don’t mean to say here that there’s no place for personal stories in political movements. Personal stories can bond communities, contribute to catharsis, and can establish, in the absence of data, that a problem exists. Especially when systemic obstacles prevent people from registering complaints in a way that would contribute to the establishment of corroborated data, personal stories can be very helpful. But in those situations, the policy recommendation should be: look into this so that the systemic obstacle can be removed and some mechanism can respond to what’s happening.

Ultimately my recommendation is to keep in mind that, when making policy decisions, we’re in need of a truth we can all access. This doesn’t mean that stories or the realities of oppressed persons disappear; after all, the plural of anecdote does, at a point, become data: if 1,000 poor mothers are surveyed and asked to report on the security of their housing, the results will represent an element of their combined stories. What it means is that we can’t necessarily trust the vicissitudes of memory to produce the sort of ‘evidence’ we need to proceed wisely in matters of policy, and that the impenetrable bracketing of those stories harms consensus on the left.