Why Timothy Snyder Lied about Jonathan Gottschall and Steven Pinker in The New York Times
My first thought after reading Timothy Snyder’s review of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox in The New York Times was, “Jeez, did Gottschall sleep with this guy’s wife or something?” Snyder’s own most popular book, On Tyranny, is written as a series of lessons and includes chapters titled, “Remember Professional Ethics” and “Believe in Truth.” Yet something in The Story Paradox bothered him so much he jettisoned his own professional ethics by distorting—and flat-out lying about—its contents, and he did it in perhaps the most prestigious newspaper in the English-speaking world. The most likely explanation for the review’s copious errors is that Snyder never actually read the book; he instead flipped through it looking for points he could arrange into a narrative of his own about the evil Gottschall and his ridiculous ideas about the dangers of story. But why would a professor of history at Yale, one who’s garnered a modicum of fame over the past few years through his appearances on multiple news outlets, one whose book has been on the bestseller lists for the past five years—why would this guy suddenly forget all his own warnings about the dangers of propaganda so he could go on to create some of his own?
With his review, Snyder creates a fictional version of Gottschall and his book that bear a striking non-resemblance to their real-life counterparts. The version of The Story Paradox you’ll discover if you actually read the book has Gottschall acknowledging the much-touted benefits of becoming immersed in a good story, including a boost in empathy, particularly for the types of people represented by the protagonist. He goes on to point out, however, that the flipside is also true: stories often inspire suspicion, fear, and hatred as well. The haunting example he cites in the introduction is the Tree of Life killer, who believed an ancient story about evil Jews trying to take over the country, believed it so sincerely that he went to a synagogue with a gun and murdered 11 people, wounding several others. As effectively as storytellers seduce us into partisanship on behalf of their protagonists, along with real-life people embroiled in similar struggles, they also tempt us into indulging our darkest impulses when dealing with antagonists, which in fiction means cheering on the heroes as they mete out brutal justice, and in reality can mean cheering on violence against people thought to be in the same camp as those antagonists—or even actively participating in such violence.
Snyder’s made-up version of the book, on the other hand, has Gottschall fumbling through a bunch of books before concluding “that no one has ever undertaken his subject, the ‘science’ of how stories work.” Gottschall’s actual gripe in the relevant section near the end of the book (190) was that story science is absent from psychology textbooks; he writes in the introduction, “Today a broad consortium of researchers, including psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary ‘quants,’ are using the scientific method to study the ‘brain on story’” (13). No matter—Snyder goes on to whip up a tale of a quixotic scholar, ironically trapped in his own self-stroking story even as he warns of the dangers of becoming trapped in your own stories, ignorant or disdainful of every past scholar’s contribution, obsessed with statistics and algorithms to the point where he doesn’t even bother to read the great works of literature he’s subjecting to his brand of cold-blooded analysis, all so he can arrogantly declare he’s discovered insights that have been perfectly obvious to every real scholar of literature for decades. Oh, and his efforts somehow pander to the powerful while exacerbating economic inequality—or at least failing to offer keys for how to fix it. Gottschall himself satirized Snyder’s review in a postmortem for Quillette, writing,
my reviewer began by dispensing with effete norms against ad hominem argument to spin a tale of a cartoon heel named Jonathan Gottschall—a fool who sees himself as an intellectual colossus. Gottschall also has an unfortunate mental condition that causes him to shout mad, dangerous things. All history is useless, Gottschall shouts, before going on to hypocritically cite a bunch of history books. Down with the humanities, Gottschall cries, and down with humans too! Up with Zuckerberg! Up with big data and the robot overlords! Down with the wretched of the earth! Up with the big evils of unrestrained capitalism and “power”!
What stands out about Snyder’s fictional characterizations when placed alongside the relevant passages in the book is that there’s almost no chance he arrived at his defamatory view of Gottschall through any good faith effort at understanding his positions. The review is a deliberate smear.
Whose perspective?
Snyder’s take on the subject matter of The Story Paradox is just as absurdly off-base. At one point, he suggests that Gottschall writes “creepily” about a young girl in a fictional snippet he composed himself, adding that “The story will be different when not narrated from a place of complacent omnipotence, for example if it is told from the perspective of the woman.” This is precisely the type of innuendo—see, Gottschall is a creepy misogynist—journalism students are taught to avoid (or used to be anyway). There’s also the small problem that Gottschall in fact did write the vignette from the girl’s perspective. This mistake is hardly the exception. The review’s central points are, to a one, based on bonkers misconstruals. Snyder somehow even managed to miss the book’s central thesis; he complains that Gottschall “promises a paradox in his title, but none is forthcoming.” I could quote the passage in the introduction where Gottschall describes the paradox in detail, but you don’t need to read beyond the subtitle to get the idea: How Our Love of Stories Builds Societies and Tears Them Down.
Based on the number of errors and the quality of the prose, it looks as though Snyder devoted no more than a few hours to scanning the book and scribbling his takedown. Along with the myriad mischaracterizations, his review is filled with choppy non sequiturs and odd solecisms, like when he claims, “Little is original in his analysis. His notion that stories tell us arose out of the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s.” His notion that stories tell us what? And how can Snyder know if Gottschall’s analysis is original if he can’t accurately state what that analysis entails? Even if we ignore the poor grammar, Snyder’s point is just silly. He’s referring to Lévi-Strauss’s theory of a universal language of myth, which the anthropologist posited operates on a dynamic juxtaposition of binary opposites. Though Gottschall does describe a “universal story grammar,” at no point in The Story Paradox does he put forth the idea that opposing binaries lie at the heart of effective stories, unless you count good guys versus bad guys, which wasn’t at all what Lévi-Strauss had in mind. The only similarity is that both Lévi-Strauss and Gottschall are interested in universals. (Also recall that this charge of unoriginality is coming from a guy who achieved notoriety among the politically left-leaning for comparing the opposition leader to Hitler.)
Here’s Snyder’s take on the theory put forth in The Story Paradox: “The universal story hard-wired into our brains is, says Gottschall, one in which everything gets worse until it gets better.” Apparently, Snyder thinks that was Lévi-Strauss’s theory as well. He goes on to recite a list of stories that don’t have happy endings, supposedly exposing the absurdity of Gottschall’s argument. Now, Gottschall does at one point cite a research finding that stories which get worse and worse until a happy resolution occurs at the end are far more popular than those with other plot structures. But he never claims that structure is universal (102). What he says about the universal structure of stories is this:
The universal grammar of storytelling has, I propose, at least two major components. First, everywhere in the world stories are about characters trying to resolve predicaments. Stories are about trouble. Stories are rarely about people having good days. Even comedies, though they often end happily, are usually about people gutting through bad days—often the very worst days of their whole lives. Second, as corny as it may at first sound, stories tend to have a deep moral dimension. Although sophisticated novelists, historians, or filmmakers may deny that they’d ever sink to expressing anything like a “moral of the story,” they’ve never stopped moralizing for a moment. “The poets,” says Nietzsche, “were always the valets of some morality.”
Stipulated: If you ransack your brain, you’ll be able to name exceptions. But they will be exceptions that prove the rule—statistical outliers dominated by experimental works like Finnegan’s Wake. On the other hand, maybe it seems obvious to you that stories are this way. But academic literary theorists would mostly deny it. And, if you think about it, it’s not a bit obvious that stories should be this way. Many of us might expect to find storytelling traditions where stories mostly function as escape pods into hedonistic paradises where pleasure is infinite and moral trespass in unknown.
We never do. (100)
It would be bad enough if Snyder had merely relied on the cheap strawman tactic of turning Gottschall’s qualified point about a statistical trend into an absolutist claim that can be refuted with reference to a few exceptions, but Snyder doesn’t even refer to the right section of the book in his effort to convince us of the weakness of Gottschall’s theory. (That, Professor Snyder, is what happens when you skim instead of reading.)
Okay, so what’s going on here? Why would a public intellectual of Snyder’s stature accept the commission to review a book he couldn’t bring himself to read, only to go on to write a review that’s so caustic, contemptuous, careless, and dishonest that anyone who does get around to picking up Gottschall’s book will see at a glance that the reviewer is sanctimonious, superior, mean-spirited, and completely full of shit? Something interesting must be happening behind the scenes to make Snyder so reckless with his reputation for honest scholarship, something urgent enough to overshadow any concern for his integrity.
What might that something be?
Gottschall sees a clue in Snyder’s outsized objection to his endorsement of the work of Steven Pinker. The section in The Story Paradox where Gottschall refers to Pinker is only a few paragraphs long, but Snyder devotes almost as much space in his short hit piece in the Times to a seemingly damning critique of Pinker’s findings. This prompts Gottschall to posit,
At the bottom of the reviewer’s contempt is an allergy to two traits Pinker and I share. We both seek to bring a scientific mindset to traditional humanities questions, and we both feel obliged to question the ideological excesses not only of the right wing, but also of the intellectual left.
I think Gottschall is correct on both points, but if Snyder simply despised these men’s positions on a few hot-button issues, he could have addressed them honestly. Instead, he does two things legitimate scholars aren’t supposed to do: he makes his criticisms personal, and he bases those criticisms on a deliberate and gross misreading of the work under review.
So, what made Snyder think Gottschall and his book must be so bad they didn’t deserve a fair hearing? Let’s look at both factors Gottschall identifies, beginning with ideological excesses, and see if they adequately account for what Snyder wrote in his hatchet job.
Leftist Ideology at Elite Universities
In an ideal world, we could take book reviews at face value. Scholars would assess each other’s ideas and writing, then relay to the rest of us their expert take on what a book covers, what informs its perspective, and how successfully the author achieves her goals. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. Instead, with ideological positions taken in advance, reviewers all too often take it as their mission to campaign for or against the author of the book under consideration. And the rhetoric they use in the service of these campaigns has far more in common with what you hear on cable news than in any reason-based scholarly debate.
The sad reality is that we live in an age when large swaths of academia have come under the sway of a political ideology which holds that ideas must be weighed, not by their truth value, but by their imagined consequences. What an author intends to convey to readers, in other words, is far less important than the impact these academics insist the work will have on the wider society. Surveys designed to explore the distinction between liberals and leftists find that the latter tend to define themselves in terms of their anti-capitalism and their radical antipathy toward the current societal order, with all its supposedly oppressive systems and structures. Liberals on the other hand are far more likely to define themselves according to their advocacy of choice and their embrace of science. Leftists understand liberals endorse many of the same progressive social reforms they do, but they fault liberals for wanting incremental, as opposed to radical change, often, the leftists insinuate, because the current order affords liberals some form of privilege they want to safeguard. Another way of looking at this is that while liberals want to tweak the system to move us ever closer to a world where everyone enjoys the same freedoms and opportunities, leftists see the system as inherently oppressive, so they want to tear it down and establish an altogether new one.
Here’s how that precept plays out in academic disputes. The core assumption of the leftist ideology is that, whether we know it or not, whether we’re willing to acknowledge it or not, we are all engaged in a struggle either to maintain the political and social status quo or to dismantle it. As linguist John McWhorter describes this foundational tenet:
Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.
The work of any author, leftists would have us believe, must therefore be understood in the context of this struggle to tear down the institutions and structures that empower some at the expense of others—whether that author has any desire to comment on that struggle or not. That’s why you get this bizarre passage in Snyder’s review of The Story Paradox:
Part of Gottschall’s tale of himself is that his views will offend the powerful. Yet his own account of the world does nothing to challenge the status quo. He treats political conflict only as culture war, a view that is more than comfortable for those in power. His most feared enemy, he says, are left-wing colleagues; he portrays their thinking as entirely about culture. One would think, reading him, that left and right had nothing to do with economic equality and inequality, a subject Gottschall ignores.
Though he claims to have read “2,400 years of scholarship on Plato’s ‘Republic,’” Gottschall misses the famous point in Book IV about the city of the rich and the city of the poor. In a country where a few dozen families own as much wealth as half the population, the opportunities for storytelling are unevenly distributed. Gottschall has nothing to say about this. He believes that we live in a “representative democracy” in which the stories told by the powerful simply reflect our own stories. No need, then, to think about the Electoral College, campaign finance, gerrymandering, or the suppression and subversion of votes. Gottschall offers not a challenge to the powerful, but a pat on the back.
Recall that Gottschall’s book is about the effects of storytelling, not economics. Essentially, Snyder is criticizing The Story Paradox for what it’s not about. Nowhere in the book does Gottschall come down in favor of the political left or the right, as the book is not directly concerned with politics. He does express concern over the lack of viewpoint diversity in journalism and academia, as nearly everyone working in these fields is politically left of center, but that comes right after a long section about the dangerous, if entertaining, absurdity of “the Big Blare,” his epithet for Trump, who he won’t even name. Nowhere in the book does he express the view that “the stories told by the powerful simply reflect our own stories,” but he does discuss how the left has adopted “a history from the point of view of the enchained, the plundered, and all the restless ghosts of the murdered” (136).
What’s going on here is that Snyder, not having read the book, is treating it as little more than a Rorschach, giving us a window onto his own menagerie of ideological bugbears. Is Gottschall concerned with inequality, campaign finance, and voter suppression? To leftists, it doesn’t matter if he is or not; what matters is whether his book deals with them explicitly enough—regardless of whether that’s what the book is about.
There’s another point raised by this passage I only feel justified in adding because Snyder himself gets so personal. Gottschall is a research fellow at Washington and Jefferson College, while Snyder is a full professor at Yale. Snyder is probably also making quite a bit of money from his bestselling book On Tyranny, along with all his media appearances. So what we have here is a very rich and somewhat famous scholar at an elite institution using his privileged access to the pages of the paper of record to take to task a much less well-off researcher with no status to speak of, for not expressing adequate opposition to economic inequality. Makes you wonder how sincere Snyder’s calls for reforming the system really are; he certainly looks comfortable enjoying the benefits of that system himself. Your complaints about the evils of hierarchies ring a bit hollow when you’re shouting them down from your perch atop of one. (Such a resoundingly negative review in the Times almost certainly cost Gottschall considerable book sales as well.) Snyder can ridicule Gottschall for fearing that his “views will offend the powerful,” but Snyder himself is one of those powerful people. And there’s no mistaking how offended he was.
It’s an amusing irony that Snyder, without any supporting quotes, accuses Gottschall of portraying himself as “a heroic scholar whose original insight challenges our preconceptions, leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics,” when Snyder himself told an interviewer for The Yale Daily News: “The bad news is that our republic is in a lot of trouble. The good news is that On Tyranny is a practical guide for how to defend a republic, how to defend individual freedoms, so if a lot of people are reading it, that’s good news.” Snyder’s renown as a popular historian has grown immensely over the past few years, as he’s been a go-to source for explaining how Trump poses the same kind of threat to American democracy as guys like Hitler and Stalin posed to their people. Writing for City Journal, journalist Lee Seigel charges that “Snyder has become a one-man industry of panic, a prophet whose profitability depends on his prophecies never coming true.” Seigel then argues that Snyder “could flourish only in a country so far removed from ‘totalitarianism’—a word he freely applies to America—as to seem historically blessed with eternal freedom.”
I’m not sure what Gottschall’s politics look like, but the only “terrifying left-wing academics” he mentions in The Story Paradox are the ones who might come after him for “saying anything even mildly heretical regarding the Left’s sacred narratives” (176)—a line that doesn’t appear until the penultimate chapter in the book (and, given Snyder’s review, seems strikingly prescient). Gottschall in fact only brought up how he “managed to tread on powerful toes” (175) to emphasize how strange it is that he can criticize the Catholic Church, tech oligarchs, and Trump supporters without concern, but he nonetheless has to worry about what leftist academics like Snyder will do.
Snyder tips his hand with this odd mischaracterization, in case we had any doubt regarding his own membership in that “enemy tribe” he hallucinates Gottschall charging against. In addition to all his dire warnings about Trump ushering in a new age of still greater authoritarianism in America (which, I admit, I don’t find all that implausible), Snyder has also recently compared Republican efforts to ban the teaching of The 1619 Project in public schools to Putin’s efforts to memory-hole elements of Russian history like the Great Famine—despite the fact that several of Snyder’s fellow historians have stated unequivocally that many of the central claims in The 1619 Project, in particular the notion that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery, are completely wrong. As Seigel points out, “it is hardly undemocratic for two competing versions of history to clash, especially when it comes to what should be taught to young children.”
The key point here is that Snyder isn’t using history to show us the dangers of tyranny; he’s using an insanely overstrained historical analogy to cudgel his partisan rivals. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Gottschall warns of historical narratives being put to just this sort of divisive use.
Biophobia and Leftist Anti-Science
What Snyder probably knew before reading—i.e., scanning—The Story Paradox, was that Gottschall is part of a group of literary scholars who apply theories from psychology, in particular evolutionary psychology, to their research on narrative. Among leftist academics, evolutionary psychology is thought to be a thinly veiled effort at justifying the political status quo, helping to sustain all the wicked hierarchies and hegemonies baked into our civilization. Evolved traits and behaviors, these leftists believe, are not amenable to reform; if it’s in our genes, in other words, it can’t be changed. Since one of the central tenets of the Foucauldian ideology that holds sway among these academics is that ideas must be assessed according to their political implications and their imagined consequences—as opposed to being evaluated in terms of accuracy or truth—the idea that any behavior or social dynamic has a biological dimension is treated as anathema.
This isn’t the place to detail all that leftists get wrong about evolutionary psychology, which is pretty much everything. Suffice to say surveys show that adaptationist psychologists vote for liberal candidates at the same rate as any other psychologists, and while I’ve been reading books about evolutionary psychology for decades, I don’t know of a single one that argues against political reform by claiming that human nature is completely fixed or “hard-wired,” the term leftists insist applies. Think about it, these researchers are fascinated with hunter-gatherers because they live closer to the way humans have lived for most of their time on earth. One of the most fascinating through-lines in The Story Paradox connects research among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines to surveys of Western readers’ attitudes about characters in Victorian novels. How could anyone compare a hunter-gatherer society with a modern civilization and conclude that social dynamics can never change? (And hunter-gatherer societies are quite diverse in their own right.)
But Snyder’s prejudice against Gottschall probably goes deeper than his aversion to any single field in the behavioral sciences. Snyder complains that The Story Paradox is a “bonfire of the humanities.” Even though Gottschall only cites psychologist Steven Pinker as part of a three-paragraph-long aside about how material conditions are improving for most people in most parts of the world—despite the bad news from journalists and historians—Snyder felt obliged to comment on the reference:
Gottschall’s view about our nonfictional world is that “almost everything is getting better and few things are getting worse.” It is hard to see how he can judge the past against the present, given his dismissal of both history and journalism. He relies upon Steven Pinker’s “data” on the issue of violence, though there is no such thing. Pinker cited others; his peculiar choices are usefully examined in “The Darker Angels of Our Nature.” In the fields I know something about, Pinker cherry-picked with red-fingered fervor; his best numbers on modern death tolls come from a source so obviously ideological that I was ashamed to cite it in high school debate. Like Gottschall, Pinker is a friend of contradiction. He supported his story of progress in part by pointing to rising I.Q.s at a time when I.Q.s were in fact in decline. He began his book by noting that the modern welfare states are the most peaceful polities in history, and concluded it by embracing a libertarianism that would lead to their dissolution. Pinker was telling us a story; it is a story Gottschall likes, and thus it is ennobled as “data.”
Of course, Snyder’s take on history is just as much a story as Pinker’s. The problem is the two stories have diametrically opposed plot trajectories. If there’s any data supporting Pinker’s version, it’s only natural Snyder would seek any justification on offer for dismissing them. I mean, the thought that a psycholinguist from Harvard, one who traffics in evolutionary psychology no less, managed to discover something astonishing and consequential about history, something which actual historians like Snyder never noticed or even bothered to look at—that must be infuriating.
At the risk of being indelicate, the entirety of Snyder’s passage about Pinker—and I mean every word aside from the quote—is bullshit. Gottschall criticizes both history and journalism for their negativity bias and for hewing to us-versus-them storytelling that adds vitriol and outright hatred to contests between identity groups. (Now, why might Snyder take that personally?) He at no point goes in for wholesale dismissal of these fields. “Of course, not all histories give us such sharp and rousing grammar,” Gottschall writes. “These tend to be academic accounts that lay out all the clutter of historical facts, while resisting the urge to neatly weave the true facts into merely truthy tales” (132). “Journalism performs an absolutely essential, and frequently heroic, social function as a de facto fourth estate,” he also writes. “But like every other sort of storytelling, journalism has great capacity to do harm as well as good” (107).
It’s hard to know which of Pinker’s sources Snyder is so cravenly alluding to without any actual citation, because he relies on so many, and Pinker is far from alone in coming to the conclusions he does based on these sources. I have no illusions about being able to settle the controversy about whether violence has declined through history in this small space, but I can say it’s clear from the earliest pages of the introduction that the authors of the book Darker Angels (a play on the title of Pinker’s book on declining violence Better Angels) are reporting from inside the same ideological bubble as Snyder. On both sides of the ongoing debate, you have competing claims of cherry-picking and ideological bias, but I’ve yet to see an analysis that would call into question the general and quite dramatic downward trends Pinker writes about.
On the topic of contradictions: how could Pinker have “cherry-picked” his data about violence through history when “there is no such thing” as data? And if there’s no such thing as data, how does Snyder know Pinker is wrong? Further, if there’s no such thing as data, how can disputes like this ever be resolved? IQs, meanwhile, rose an average of three points per decade through most of the 20th Century as part of a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, which has reversed slightly in a few Western European countries where the increases had been going on the longest, a minor, localized reversal that has scant impact on the larger trajectory. So, this is Snyder showing us what real cherry-picking looks like.
As for Pinker’s embrace of libertarianism, well, it’s entirely fictional. He endorses social spending and market regulation. He even donated substantially to Obama’s 2012 campaign. Here’s the operative quote from his book Enlightenment Now: “The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism” (365).
Why this sloppy and mendacious attack on Pinker when his work plays such a small role in The Story Paradox? Early in his review, Snyder has Gottschall claiming that “no one has ever undertaken his subject, the ‘science’ of how stories work.” This is yet another lie, as Gottschall discusses and references the work of multiple other researchers and literary scholars. (The references section runs to 30 pages.) What Snyder is likely implying here is that Gottschall is neglecting the work of literary theorists who weren’t scientists (which is also untrue); the scare quotes are meant to call into question the distinction between what modern research psychologists do and what the people literary theorists enjoy citing, guys like Freud or Jung or Lacan, were doing, in the same way he calls into question Pinker’s work: “it is a story Gottschall likes, and thus it is ennobled as ‘data.’” The designation “science,” like the honorary term “data,” we’re to believe, serves merely to elevate some ideas over others based on arbitrary preferences—or worse, as part of an effort to secure the designator’s privileged status in society. (I feel I have to point out that if people on the left make these arguments, we can’t pretend to be outraged when those on the right throw them back at us—as they do when discussing evolution, climate change, or various pandemic interventions.)
It occurred to me while reading Snyder’s pseudo-review that the recent emergence of radical leftist beliefs in arenas outside of academia can be thought of as the revenge of the humanities scholars. Both Pinker and Gottschall lament the total routing of the humanities by the sciences, as funding for the latter dwarfs that of the prior. But what gets lost in discussions about funding is the fact that many of the odd tropes and strictures of the left originated in humanities departments, including the prioritization of “lived-experience” over scientific evidence, the dismissal of scientific rigor in favor of Manichean ideologies, the emphasis on implicit forms of bigotry, and the obsession with power and its distorting, self-perpetuating influence on every aspect of culture.
Whatever bridge scholars like Gottschall and Pinker hope to build between science and the humanities, their counterparts on the other side are waiting to knock it down, hoping all the while that those waiting to cross with their olive branches wind up buried in the rubble. The alliance these pro-science, “third culture” advocates hope to form is seen by humanities scholars as a poorly disguised invasion. Just as Snyder sneers at Pinker’s “data,” he sees Gottschall’s commitment to psychology and science more generally as little more than the trappings of his membership in a rival tribe. He writes,
Gottschall chooses quantity over quality, tabulating surveys about novels rather than reading them himself. He cannot quite see that what the internet creates is an endless psychological experiment and not a story. By allowing the tools of big data and psychology to guide him, Gottschall blinds himself to this essential point about our contemporary reading experience. He is not wrong that social media algorithms draw us into unreflective narcissism. What he misses is that it is precisely psychology and big data, his own allies, that supply the digital commercial and political weapons that trap us in stories where we are always on the good side. Gottschall warns us of such stories and rightly so. But in his analysis of their multiplication and intensification he has confused the villain with the hero. In conflating human storytelling with automated manipulation, he has gone over to the side of the machines, without realizing that he has done so.
Gottschall didn’t just tabulate surveys about novels; he helped create the survey questions, which would be pretty difficult for someone who hadn’t read them. By now, you won’t find it at all surprising that Gottschall never claims the internet is a story and that he has no trouble seeing it as an experiment. “Social media,” he writes, “is a powerful if inadvertent experiment into what sort of narratives actually win out in story wars as measured by quantifiable views, likes, and shares” (85). And he at no point conflates human storytelling with automated manipulation; he instead warns that the manipulators are using the same tools as human storytellers:
The cold scientific vocabulary of surveillance capitalism seems far away from the warm old craft of tale-telling. But these “behavior modification empires,” as the computer scientist Jaron Lanier calls them, collect this data largely toward the goal of targeting us with narratives that are more engaging, more emotionally arousing, and ultimately more persuasive. In the end, it’s about getting us to buy whatever’s on sale—from a harmless new widget to a socially toxic virus of thought. (66)
Has Gottschall really “gone over to the side of the machines”? Here Snyder is relying on the alchemy of ambiguity to convey a conclusion he reached through what Pinker calls “voodoo resemblance.” The psychology Gottschall relies on uses experiments and statistics; the behavior modification empires also use experiments and statistics; therefore, Gottschall is on the same side as the imperials. It must have never occurred to Snyder that the two may be using similar tools for completely different ends. After all, why would Gottschall warn us about what his supposed allies were doing if he wanted their manipulations to succeed?
What the passage reveals more than anything is Snyder’s inability to escape from the tribalism at the heart of his belief system, which is itself based on a story of evil capitalists and their machines facing off against heroic academics who know the value of all things truly human. Even when he agrees with what Gottschall has written, he still strains to find fault with it. In the closing paragraphs of his review, Snyder, not realizing his points are becoming increasingly incoherent, attempts a grand finale of ad hominem dismissal.
Gottschall confesses that he was “confused about this book,” and it is not hard to see why. If everything is story, then all we have is our own; and our own story makes us feel good, until the moment comes when it doesn’t. Gottschall visibly suffers in these pages as psychology becomes his personal tar pit. In the end, he flails in the direction of “facts” and “science,” terms he has already reduced to cliché by confusing them with common-sense nostrums. Even had he told us what he meant by “facts” and “science,” he gives no clue as to how our brains would escape their supposed hard-wiring for story and think in such terms.
In his last gasp, Gottschall invokes the Enlightenment. One of its mottoes was “dare to know.” Kant, who used that phrase, knew that the liberation from others’ stories begins with liberation from one’s own. Gottschall does the opposite: Drowning in his own story, he grabs us by the ankles. Voltaire’s Candide was miles ahead of Gottschall: Understanding stories means knowing when to laugh at them. This book is just sad.
Here Snyder, desperate for some secure footing to deliver his coup de grace, simply flipped back to the first page, where in the second sentence of the book, Gottschall explains what he was doing at a bar, at a point when he was trying to come up with a title and an organizing theme. He wasn’t claiming to be confused about how to help readers escape their own and other people’s stories. But how beautiful the irony, how poetic the justice, if the guy presenting himself as a hero sounding the alarm about the dangers of getting caught in stories could be shown to be trapped in his own. Silly Gottschall didn’t realize though that he’d happened upon a problem he lacked the cleverness to solve. His only recourse is to point to the same science and Enlightenment that have brought us to our current, terrible condition—the data showing that it’s not so terrible notwithstanding.
Sad indeed—but Snyder is lying here too. Gottschall couldn’t be trying to present himself as a genius hero if he opens his book talking about how confused he was in the late stages of writing it. Most importantly, Gottschall never claims our love of story is “hard-wired” in the sense that we can’t possibly escape it. Anytime we read a scientific journal article or sit through a PowerPoint presentation, we’re forgoing the joys of storytelling. And Gottschall does explain how science helps us to escape:
The strength of science resides not in individual geniuses like Newton or Darwin but in an ingenious collective process, which—with its demands for mathematical rigor, peer review, and replication—guards against predictable human failings from outright lying to unconscious prejudice. Though the scientific method is a prophylactic against bias, it’s not a perfect one. Academic scientists, too, lean strongly to the left, and we must assume this shapes the questions they ask and the interpretations they favor. (177)
How do you keep from drowning in your own story? Surround yourself with a bunch of people who have a bunch of stories of their own and have them check your work.
This gets us to another of Gottschall’s ideas for a solution—viewpoint diversity in academia and journalism. Many of the points that set Snyder off come from the same section in The Story Paradox, where Gottschall discusses the political homogeneity of our scholars and reporters. One of the numbers he cites comes from a survey of history departments, where for every conservative you’ll find 33.5 liberals (these surveys don’t distinguish between liberals and leftists). This imbalance not only prevents the error correction that comes from pitting differing views against each other; it also leads to greater extremism. Gottschall explains,
When homogeneous groups are insulated from skepticism and counterarguing, they stampede toward the most extreme position in the room. When you have a room full of partisans, the question asked is seldom “Are we going too far?” It’s usually “Are we going far enough?” This tendency is so strong and predictable that [Cass] Sustein calls it “the law of group polarization.” (174)
When you factor in the negative characterizations of people holding rival views that are all too frequently embedded in ideologies, it’s easy to understand Gottschall’s concerns. Yet he finds that whenever he brings this issue up to his colleagues, they respond with a shrug. This is part of why the public outside of academia is often so skeptical of information emerging from campuses. In most academic departments, the left-right skew is between 8 and 13 to one. In the country as a whole, about 25% of people identify as liberal and 37% conservative.
It must have been this section of the book that gave Snyder the impression that Gottschall’s “most feared enemy” is the tribe of his “left-wing colleagues.” Recall that Snyder went so far as to characterize The Story Paradox as Gottschall’s story of himself “leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics.” While it’s true Gottschall expresses his fears about left-wing cancel culture, his general point isn’t that the left is necessarily wrong about its beliefs. Indeed, he writes in this section that he’s focusing “on the failings of my own tribe, the academics” (174). So why does Snyder claim that Gottschall is charging against an enemy tribe? More importantly, why doesn’t Snyder say anything about Gottschall’s actual point? For Gottschall, the dangers of ideological homogeneity and the phenomenon of cancel culture are two sides of the same coin. He writes,
To proceed as though intolerance, intimidation, groupthink, and homogeneity of ideology would not lead to timid party-line scholarship (a sort of miniature version of Soviet Lysenkoism) would be to yield to the epistemological equivalent of flat earthism. It would be to cluelessly insist that the facts academics have ourselves uncovered about the deep biases of human cognition and ideology don’t apply to us. (176)
Yet this is precisely how Snyder proceeds. When confronted with a challenge to his ideology, he fabricates a series of lies about the nature of the challenge and attacks the heretic’s reputation, all the while certain of his own righteousness.
Gottschall’s true goal with The Story Paradox, however, wasn’t to call out viewpoint imbalances or push back against cancel culture. He hopes rather to spur others into action to explore all the remaining mysteries of storytelling and its effects on our thoughts and behavior. He writes in the conclusion,
If we hope to address civilization’s largest problems, we need a much better sense for the sneaky ways that stories work on our minds and our societies. This means encouraging scholars across the humanities and human sciences to embark on a massively interdisciplinary effort in the new field of narrative psychology, combining the thick, granular knowledge of the humanities with the special tools of the sciences. (191)
In the minds of humanities scholars like Snyder, however, such an interdisciplinary alliance would amount to a surrender in a much larger, much more consequential conflict.
An Ideological License to Lie
Gottschall offers readers still other ways to ward off the potential harms of story. For one, while the universal story grammar puts trouble and conflict at the heart of nearly every narrative, that conflict needn’t be between individual humans or groups. Consider movies like Babel and Castaway. It’s conceivable we could arrange history into narratives with plenty of engaging conflict that nonetheless resist the temptation to cast entire groups as evildoers. We can even do this in our own personal lives. “For example,” Gottschall writes,
when I sense myself getting worked up into a fit of moralistic outrage—when I catch myself dehumanizing a person by turning them into a villain—I take a deep breath and try to imagine the story differently. In this way, I exert some sort of executive control over the automatic process of my brain. If I can’t or won’t do this, I’m not the master of the stories in my head, I’m just their slave, and I’m all the more degraded because I can’t even sense the chains that hold me. (192)
Astoundingly, Gottschall even resists casting Snyder as a villain. He writes in his Quillette article about the review and its fallout, “To be clear, I don’t think the reviewer told lies. If he meant to deceive readers he would have done so with a lot more care, without putting his own reputation for accuracy and trustworthy judgement at risk.” What’s happening, Gottschall goes on to theorize, is that Snyder has a story playing out in his head in which guys like Gottschall and Pinker are agents for the enemy, trying to sneak their way into the home camp, so they can lay waste to all he holds dear. “That someone as smart as the reviewer can read a book bristling with warnings about the pitfalls of narrative psychology,” Gottschall writes, “and still blunder into the biggest traps, leaves me feeling pessimistic indeed.”
I’m afraid Gottschall is flattering himself if he believes Snyder actually read more than one or two of the warnings in his book. And it doesn’t make sense to say that Snyder didn’t lie but rather succumbed to story. The simple fact is that Snyder lied because he succumbed to story. I too was shocked that Snyder would make so many false claims in his review, claims whose falsity could be so easily detected. But if Snyder arrived at all those errors due to some confusion or misunderstanding, that would betray a level of incompetence almost as damaging to his reputation as dishonesty. There’s no denying Snyder made claims in his review that he could have easily seen were misrepresentations had he simply gone back to check the pages he was referring to. The man is a professional scholar. What Gottschall’s laudable, even heroic, efforts at graciousness are keeping him from either seeing or admitting is that Snyder obviously views him as so far beneath contempt that he doesn’t care whether he gets caught lying about his book.
Snyder despises Pinker and Gottschall both, and I doubt he’s ever really read either of their work. All he needed to know before smearing them in his review was that they belong to a particularly detestable tribe, one whose members are united in their mission to infiltrate the sacred bastions of Snyder’s own tribe, so they can continue to prop up the wealthy elites, those parasites who for generations have gotten fat on the suffering of the people whose stories go unheard. And Snyder isn’t the least bit worried that someone like me will expose his lies. He won’t read this post. He doesn’t have to worry about his fellow tribespeople reading it either, any more than he has to worry about them reading The Story Paradox.
Even as I write this, I admit it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around how intellectuals can convince themselves it’s okay to lie. Whenever I encounter one of these dishonest reviews, my brain can’t resist imposing a truth-seeking frame on the reviewers’ moral and political campaigning. Isn’t it necessary, or at least optimal, to fully understand a problem before crafting a solution? If we discover our understanding is wrong or incomplete, then isn’t there an opportunity for a better solution? Aren’t solutions based on a faulty understanding of the issue bound to fail, almost certainly in a way that causes still more problems? And if we lack recourse to systematically collected evidence, i.e. data, then what are we left with aside from competing ideologies and stories with contradictory morals?
Reading The Story Paradox played a big role in helping me see what was really going on. (Scott Alexander’s essay Conflict versus Mistake also helped a lot.) Throughout the book, Gottschall compares being trapped in a story to LARPing, or Live-Action Role-Playing. The only difference is LARPERs know the stories in which they’re casting themselves as protagonists are fiction; guys like the Tree of Life killer truly believe they’re saving the world.
The realization I came to was that, for many reporters and academics on the far left, our globalized civilization is a vast conspiracy of the ultrawealthy to steal from and otherwise exploit everyone else—which is strange in light of how many of these opinion-makers are themselves wealthy. These elite scholar-cum-activists believe us plebians are all living in a real-life version of The Matrix, just with billionaires playing the part of the machines. So, when someone like Pinker comes along and argues that capitalism is, on balance, better than any of the alternatives we’ve tried so far, they respond, not as though he’d made a claim that was verifiable or falsifiable, but as if he’d engineered a subroutine to the program that makes it harder to convince the clueless masses they need to wake up to the real world. That Pinker’s book was endorsed by Bill Gates didn’t exactly help. What those of us still trapped in this matrix see as texts making straightforward arguments, the academics who’ve woken from it see as cascading lines of green code spelling out the contours of our nightmarish alternate reality. Until the entire system is blown to smithereens, none of us is free, and some of us will continue to suffer far more than others.
For academics like Snyder, this real-life matrix really does share a lot in common with a machine. It runs on numbers and systems and its inhabitants are taught to worship charts and statistics. Those who’ve woken from it believe that what the world needs is more human interaction and more knowledge derived not from systems and data, but the poetic sharing of “lived experiences.” Recall Snyder’s line about how Gottschall “has crossed over to the side of the machines.” Sure, science is okay in its place, as long it’s guided by members of the woke elect. But any attempt at applying it beyond the bounds of its traditional remit, say, in fields like history or literature, must be resisted at all costs, resisted as strenuously as any invasion, lest the billionaires and their machines gain a foothold in the last redoubt of our humanity, sealing its doom.
What it’s taken me a long time to appreciate is that leftists believe in their matrix not as a metaphor but as the true reality. They’re not LARPing, in other words; they’re acting out fantasies they believe are as real as the sun in the sky. That’s why it’s so easy for them to treat Pinker and Gottschall as beneath contempt; these defenders of the old oppressive order are not even human, not in any sense that matters. The great struggle of our time is not about figuring out whose ideas are right and whose are wrong so we can choose the best solutions to our society’s problems. That time has long since passed. What good is evidence or data anyway when it comes from the same matrix we’re on a mission to destroy? The great struggle now is about identifying the enemies to reform, the friends of the machines, and making sure everyone knows how bottomlessly evil they are.
Snyder tries to convince readers of his review that it’s Gottschall who’s trapped in a story, thinking he’s the hero. But it’s Snyder who has access to a ready supply of certainty about who deserves to be treated with fairness and dignity and who doesn’t. It’s Snyder who’s so sure of his own beliefs and so sure of his own assessments of others’ moral character that he has no compunction about publishing grotesque falsehoods if it keeps their evil from spreading. And he’s not alone. In campuses and newsrooms all over the country and beyond, academics and journalists are crusading to erode the boundaries between scholarship and activism, the personal and the political, what’s fair and what’s politically expedient, what counts as honest reporting and what’s deemed necessary to say by their fellow academics, all because they’re suffering aggressively from the same collective delusion.
Am I turning Snyder into a villain? I appreciate Gottschall’s point that Snyder has fallen victim to his tribe’s story, and that creating propaganda against Pinker and The Story Paradox may have seemed like a rational, even heroic course given his beliefs. Visiting Snyder’s website, I even see he’s helping to raise funds for humanitarian aid to Ukraine. So, no, I don’t have any interest in convincing anyone that Snyder is a bad person. That’s not to say I have a very high opinion of the man. The last thing this world needs is another demagogue, ideologue, or true believer of any stripe. One thing that’s clear is that as much as Snyder hates right-wing propaganda, after his review of The Story Paradox in the Times, he can no longer claim he’s doing anything qualitatively different with his own writing and commentary than guys like Mark Levin or Glenn Beck, his fancy Yale professorship notwithstanding. These guys are all playing the same damn game, just on different teams. But whereas sport often brings out the best in competitors, the game of left versus right brings out the very worst in citizens.
That Snyder couldn’t see Gottschall’s wonderful, fascinating, and disturbing book as anything other than the latest move in that dreadfully stupid game is truly sad.
***
Also read:
THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: A LIGHT READ WITH WEIGHTY IMPLICATIONS
TED MCCORMICK ON STEVEN PINKER AND THE POLITICS OF RATIONALITY
THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW
