Master Narratives

John Leo has some great comments on the Newsweek wrap up on the Duke Lacrosse scandal.

The game was given up by this priceless quote, "We had the right story, it was just that the facts were wrong."

The facts in this case were those of the Duke Lacrosse scandal. The facts are still in dispute but what does not seem to be in dispute is that the players in question were not guilty of rape, not even consensual sex. It is also clear that the prosecutor and now disbarred lawyer Mike Naiphong withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense, an offense for which he was disbarred.

The story was of racist white youths from privileged backgrounds preying upon black women. This story started to unravel early on, though not after the team was treated to collective punishment, public humiliation and millions in lawyers' bills.

The problem, though, is not that the press had a narrative they tried to impose on the facts, it is that they had only one. They should have been testing not if the facts can be rendered consistent with the privileged racist narrative, but if the privileged racist narrative did better or worse than the, in the words of Tom Wolfe, "The Great White Defendant" narrative.

Imposing a story on the facts is what the human mind does. One cannot avoid trying to impose some model/frame/template/story on the facts. without some background causal theory you don't even know what constitutes a relevant fact in the first place. There is a large body of research in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence to social psychology to attest to the human mind's power and proclivity to impose a schema on the facts.

So, if we must inevitably impose narratives on the facts, the important thing is to at least have an alternative narrative to test it against. Having one is dangerous because often a narrative works, it is just that another one works even better. and because we are, as Simon says, 'cognitive misers', we are apt to stop with the first one that works.

The 'privileged racist white boys' narrative had an initial plausible fit with the facts, it is just that, not being interested in testing an alternative narrative, the press continued with it long after it had become apparent to those willing to test another narrative that it didn't work.

Of course, there were, in the end, enough inconsistencies to break the fit between the original narrative and the facts without having an alternative narrative. But observers who were willing to test two narratives at the same time were much more quick to notice these inconsistencies. If "The Great White Defendant" story had been in the running from the beginning in the minds of the press observers, the "Rich Privileged Racists" story would have dropped out of the race long before it had done some much damage. Who knows, maybe Naiphong would even still be a lawyer.