Consider the orgy of reason-giving that followed Vice-President Dick Cheney’s quail-hunting accident involving his friend Harry Whittington. Allies of the Vice-President insisted that the media were making way too much of it. “Accidents happen,” they said, relying on a convention. Cheney, in a subsequent interview, looked penitently into the camera and said, “The image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling. And it was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life.” Cheney told a story. Some of Cheney’s critics, meanwhile, focussed on whether he conformed to legal and ethical standards. Did he have a valid license? Was he too slow to notify the White House? They were interested in codes. Then came the response of hunting experts. They retold the narrative of Cheney’s accident, using their specialized knowledge of hunting procedure. The Cheney party had three guns, and on a quail shoot, some of them said, you should never have more than two. Why did Whittington retrieve the downed bird? A dog should have done that. Had Cheney’s shotgun been aimed more than thirty degrees from the ground, as it should have been? And what were they doing in the bush at five-thirty in the afternoon, when the light isn’t nearly good enough for safe hunting? The experts gave a technical account.

Here are four kinds of reasons, all relational in nature. If you like Cheney and are eager to relieve him of responsibility, you want the disengagement offered by a convention. For a beleaguered P.R. agent, the first line of defense in any burgeoning scandal is, inevitably, There is no story here. When, in Cheney’s case, this failed, the Vice-President had to convey his concern and regret while not admitting that he had done anything procedurally wrong. Only a story can accomplish that. Anything else—to shrug and say that accidents happen, for instance—would have been perceived as unpardonably callous. Cheney’s critics, for their part, wanted the finality and precision of a code: he acted improperly. And hunting experts wanted to display their authority and educate the public about how to hunt safely, so they retold the story of Cheney’s accident with the benefit of their specialized knowledge.

Another of Gladwell's examples involves abortion:

When we say that two parties in a conflict are “talking past each other,” this is what we mean: that both sides have a legitimate attachment to mutually exclusive reasons. Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of a fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and then abruptly terminated. Is it any surprise that the issue has proved to be so intractable? If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious. By Tilly’s logic, abortion proponents who want to engage their critics will have to become better storytellers—and that, according to the relational principles of such reason-giving, may require them to acknowledge an emotional connection between a mother and a fetus.

It's worth noting that the stories told by opponents of abortion about the lives that have been "lost" are confabulations made up to support their view. Just as those who have lived past lives never seem to have been scullery maids or serfs, but generally led exciting or interesting lives in the past, the children that aborted fetus grow up to be in these stories are always well-cared for and beloved. They never suffer from abuse, malnutrition or neglect, which children born in poverty, for instance, to families that cannot afford more children, are more likely to do.

Abortion opponents are thus essentially lying in the service of what they believe is a higher cause.

(Ironically, many of the same members of the religious right who have so emphatically demonstrated the emotional superiority of stories when it comes to abortion insist, when it comes to Genesis, on a reading of the Bible as a technical account. Thus do creationists, in the service of reasongiving exigency, force the Holy Scripture to do double duty as a high-school biology textbook.)

That this is true follows from the second of two common errors we make when reasoning about reasons:

The first is to assume that some kinds of reasons are always better than others—that there is a hierarchy of reasons, with conventions (the least sophisticated) at the bottom and technical accounts at the top. That’s wrong, Tilly says: each type of reason has its own role.

Tilly’s second point flows from the first, and it’s that the reasons people give aren’t a function of their character—that is, there aren’t people who always favor technical accounts and people who always favor stories. Rather, reasons arise out of situations and roles.

I'm not so certain that Tilly's first "error" is actually a mistake at all. I would think that in each particular circumstance there would be preferred type of reason, meaning that there is not a single hierarchy of reasons, but a catalog of case-specific hierarchies. So for any particular situation, one can indeed say which type of reason is the best kind.

The problem with stories, as the abortion example points out, is that they can so easily be perverted. While conventions have the vast experience of numerous human beings to support them, codes are consensual argeements made by interested people or the representatives of the citizenry, and technical explanations are backed both by expert knowledge and experience and, in many instances, the scientific method, anyone can make up stories, and often they can do so in a way that is convincing, not because they accurately reflect reality, but because they appeal to the prejudices and biases of the audience they're aimed at. Scientists have learned to suspect stories, and with good reason (although they can sometimes point the way to new channels of investigation).

It's hardly a new thought that one of the primary deficits often cited in the presentation of Democrats is the flaccidity of the stories they tell. It may not be too broad a generalization to say that Republicans are story-tellers while Democrats are analysts who present technical accounts when stories would be more effective at swaying voters -- but in shifting to telling more stories, we ought to be aware of the dangers of doing so. After all, as my son just reminded me, some stories are fiction, and some are non-fiction, and it's not necessarily true that the non-fiction ones are more convincing or powerful -- in fact, just the opposite is probably true.

[Thanks to Eliot for reminding me that I had intended to blog about Gladwell's article.]