Cultural narratives and their social supports, or: sociology as a team sport

On 15 January 2019, along with millions of people around the world, I was watching the live stream from the British House of Commons. Collectively, we saw the spectacle unfold. Parliamentarians shouting, booing, cheering and leering. Emotional speeches for and against the EU, Britain and Brexit, especially this Brexit. The Speaker of the House shouting ‘Order! Order!’, instantly becoming an Internet meme. Finally, we watched as MPs crammed into one crowded and another rather empty hall, posting illicit group selfies on Twitter, as Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal, for which she had negotiated for almost two years, was voted down. Which was exactly the outcome that everybody knew was coming. So why was I watching? Why were we all watching? There are many possible answers to this. The appeal of a good tragedy, promising to end with a stage strewn with corpses, the chorus lamenting human hubris. The effectiveness of a well-hyped global media event. The possibility to watch one of the fateful moments of twenty-first century. But having just read ‘From “having” to “being”’, Michèle Lamont’s inspiring BJS lecture, I think that an important reason for the global appeal of the Brexit saga is that it dramatizes the ‘diagnosis’ of the socio-cultural crisis that Lamont describes in her lecture. The anguish and anger of the increasingly uncertain, precarious, unrecognized ‘bottom half’, causing political instability and polarization – though not without the help from politicians, journalists and opinion makers who converted anguish into votes. The exhausted upper-middle classes, glued to their screens in their comfortable but heavily mortgaged homes, still shaken about the discovery that cultural hegemony does not make electoral majority. The sharp drawing of social boundaries against all sort of outsiders and so-called undeserving groups. But especially: the lack of coherent narratives, and the jarring absence of hope from the narratives provided by right, left and middle. The trumping of so-called rational economic or material arguments by cultural and symbolic considerations: values,1 belonging, community, worth and recognition. The Brexit crisis highlights that the contemporary social crisis, while rooted in widening economic divides, also is a crisis of cultural meaning-making. The Brexit debate seems to me like a ‘ritual of division’, maybe even an ‘anti-ritual’ (Douglas 1968, Van Gennep 2013[1901]). Rituals (as all sociologists know) unite people by mutual alignment, synchronized activity and joint focus on shared symbols (Alexander 2004; Collins 2004). Both in the House of Commons and in the global media event (Dayan and Katz 1994), there was alignment, joint focus, synchronized activity and shared symbols. As rituals are wont to do, it captured the essence of the situation: fragmentation. Mary Douglas called such occurrences anti-rituals: ritualized moments dramatizing socio-cultural inconsistencies and divides. While possibly divisive in content, they can be helpful in joining people in considering what is at stake. This particular anti-ritual even created a new symbol: a small man in a big chair, shouting ‘Order order!’ We were all watching as the British MPs enacted the great drama that affects not only the US but also the UK and most of (Western) Europe: how failing cultural narratives contribute to social crisis. Lamont’s lecture offers a grim diagnosis of the ‘ravaging effects of neoliberalism’, but also presents hopeful possibilities for a way forward. She proposes to look for new narratives to ‘broaden cultural membership’, create new ‘scripts of the self’, and ‘reframe’ stigmatized groups, and offers several suggestions for such narratives. This is a bold move in cultural sociology, a rather academic subdivision of sociology that – at least in the US context – typically steers clear of public interventions. Lamont’s lecture, moreover, is neither critical sociology nor policy advice, but something different: a new cultural public sociology (Burawoy 2005), or maybe a public cultural sociology. I have read Lamont’s lecture as an invitation: a call to sociologists to think through possibilities for creating and sustaining new cultural narratives, and to use sociological tools and insights to make these possibilities into realities. This invitation promises to offer a way out of the deadlock between ‘critical’ sociologists with ‘critical’ methodologies and more academic or ‘professional’ sociologists who steer clear of social commentary, or strictly separate their professional and political personas. Critique is the classical genre of public intellectuals and engaged academics. The emblematic critical sociologist is Pierre Bourdieu, as he was portrayed in the documentary Sociology is a combat sport (La sociologie est un sport the combat, 2001)2: the heroic, individual thinker-cum-fighter who uncovers hidden mechanisms, points out systemic flaws and injustices, speaks truth to power. But critique has lost its clout, ‘run out of steam’ as another heroic thinker/fighter, Bruno Latour (2004), phrased it. To many within academia, critique increasingly feels like a tired game, a trick every second-year student knows.3 Within the social sciences, there is a growing polarity between ‘critical’ scholars with ‘critical methodologies’, and more ‘professional’ academics who try to refrain from engagement, or carefully separate their academic and professional personas. (As a relative outsider, this polarity strikes me as especially marked in the UK, where it appears to overlap with a methodological divide). Simultaneously, outside the university, critique has run rampant. In the Internet era, the techniques of critique have been democratized to the point that most people easily expose the interest behind the seemingly disinterested and the power play behind every claim to truth. In the course of this democratization, moreover, these techniques of critique have broadened their allegiances. For decades, critique belonged to the left. Today, the strategies of critique are everywhere, but adopted most uncompromisingly by the new right (e.g., ‘fake news’, ‘the liberal media’). Lamont’s work offers a way out of this deadlock. She presents a sociology that is rooted in rigorous research, yet at the same time it is relevant and engaged. As in traditional critical approaches, it challenges accepted understandings, arguing that inequality and exclusion are cultural rather than exclusively economic or structural. But Lamont moves beyond critique, looking to use sociological insights to create new, viable and inclusive ways of meaning making. This is an ambitious programme, with big ideas and big questions. To implement this, she seeks to enlist many others: this programme requires the joining together of insights from different empirical studies and sociological subfields. Consequently, this sociology feels like a ‘team sport’ rather than a ‘combat sport’: an open-ended beginning of a new quest that can, and should, include many others. It is in this spirit that I have written this commentary: as a response to an invitation. I discuss three questions – each of them with huge ramifications – that directly follow from the programme of creating sustainable, inclusive cultural narratives. First, what makes a cultural narrative work? Looking at older success stories might allow for a form of ‘reverse engineering’, by looking at what worked for earlier successful narratives. The second question follows from this exploration of narratives that work: how do social factors and structures support such cultural narratives? Cultural sociology as a subfield has stressed the relative autonomy of culture vis-à-vis social structure (Lamont 1992; Swidler 1986). However, durable cultural narratives need to be socially and institutionally supported. The question is how this can be done, and how it can be done best. The third question regards the scope but also the limits of Lamont’s programme. It promises to generate many new questions that many sociologists consider themselves unqualified to address. How far can, and should, sociology go in thinking through solutions for societal problems? And what to do with the questions we cannot or will not answer? In her lecture, Lamont offers three suggestions for building cultural narratives about ‘being’ rather than ‘having’: 1. build on a plurality of criteria of worth; 2. provide inclusive frames for stigmatized groups; and 3. highlight ordinary universalism. Drawing on a wide range of literature, she identifies various causal pathways towards making these narratives work. I would like to push this line of reasoning further by proposing a strategy of ‘reverse engineering’: look for what worked earlier, identify why it works, and then translate this to another context.4 To move forwards I suggest a step back to look for existing successful cases (cf. Hall and Lamont 2009). Take the notion of ordinary universalism: the strengthening of everyday cultural beliefs about human connectedness and similarity like ‘we are all children of God’ or ‘we all spend nine months in our mother’s womb’ (Lamont 2000). While heartening, I doubt that such statements are of much help in polarized situations like the Brexit debate, or even in the more mundane context of family gatherings ruined by political divides (where people actually have spent nine months in the same womb).5 Moreover, Lamont’s suggestions for fostering these universal narratives are rather unspecific: do more research, then incorporate these research findings into political discourse. In comes ‘reverse engineering’. It seems to me that many expressions of ordinary universalism echo religious, humanistic or spiritual discourses. While I would not recommend re-secularization, religion is a useful analogy: arguably the most successful generator of narratives about social worth related to ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ (Calvinism being the notable exception). This comparison offers insights into the content of successful narratives (e.g., universal claims, creates community, promises salvation, rejects or counters worldly moralities) but also how these narratives can be spread and fortified. Religious beliefs generally rely on rituals and symbols to anchor them, and on stories bringing moral lessons to life fostering identification and empathy. A vast literature in psychology, literary studies and neurology has established the effectiveness of story-telling, especially fiction, for developing empathy (Keen 2006, 2018; Mar, Oatley and Peterson 2009). This might be a feasible strategy to promote moral universalism. Academically, it might lead to alliances with cultural scholars, neuropsychologists and psychologists of emotion rather than social psychologists with their investment in human ‘tribalism’. Practically, this angle suggests it might be more fruitful to work with media, cultural industries, artists and celebrities, and with schools and educational organizations, than with politicians or policy makers. Reverse engineering might also be used to identify risks and pitfalls of various strategies. I will not discuss these here, but I trust that possible downsides of religion are well known. The American dream is the classic example of a successful cultural narrative. Lamont’s summary of this dream is practically a recipe: it gave ‘American citizens a sense of normative direction . . . (towards building prosperity), standards by which to determine who belongs (the materially/professionally successful), and a notion of who deserves our trust (those who try) and of which groups deserve to be stigmatized (those who are lazy and lack self-reliance)’ Lamont (2019). While it became ‘impoverished’ (Lamont 2019) in neoliberal times, this narrative entailed ‘the promise of equal opportunity and social inclusion’ (Lamont 2019). Reverse-engineered, Lamont’s diagnosis is this: what works is a consistent moral framework of social and personal worth, with believable claims of universality that give hope to all. It is informative to compare this American dream with the markedly different ‘European dreams’ when Western Europe, like the US, entered a period of unprecedented growth and upward mobility. These countries were more homogeneous, but generally lacked an overarching cultural narrative: there are no British, Dutch, French or Danish dreams comparable to the American one. European narratives of social worth and recognition are rooted in strong states with extensive, though declining, welfare policies and Lamont and of individual and welfare narratives and The of of the welfare and it to from Western Europe, we a of of and to economic For culture and are important European but especially in and and states have also on a in the and a more in welfare states like the and and Western is an to think through the of different criteria of However, I to identify these as with plurality of criteria of worth in Lamont’s First, these criteria of worth are in social and the of themselves are is a of worth especially in the of are for not for in these the upper-middle classes, and also still as Western European plurality is in with strong group As with the American the downsides of the European welfare dreams became most when the neoliberal and In welfare the social and cultural has with moral and and The of welfare policies in with a strengthening of social boundaries against and but also against the European and In this it is that many support Brexit against their economic as for the cultural Lamont’s point that a cultural like is at least as strong a as economic However, in with the American this is not a of individual worth and but a narrative of (Lamont can we ‘reverse from these First, cultural narratives but they create groups and group the three narratives that Lamont universalism strikes me as the most of worth can be created and However, they or a more moral and social the European and American narratives provided for stigmatized groups. 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The is a good to generate and discuss ideas about narratives, frames and of the – but the of these narratives, and frames will have to Lamont’s this programme will the of This will with many many who have no about making moral and For professional this be the moral to their ideas into the to them I have read Lamont’s lecture as an invitation: a call to sociologists to think through possibilities for creating and sustaining new cultural narratives, and to use sociological tools and insights to create new, viable and inclusive ways of meaning making. In this I have on three questions that directly follow from this programme of creating sustainable, inclusive cultural narratives. First, what makes a cultural narrative work? how do social factors and structures support such cultural narratives? 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