Adnan Syed. Amanda Knox. Gerry and Kate McCann. Some news stories have a way of searing themselves into the public consciousness. Others outstrip them in suffering, in ghoulish drama, in initial narrative power. Yet these are the stories that recur again and again, tragedies that become part of the background in which we live our lives.
“The 300-mile jolly to County Durham seems left behind, faded from view, and no. 10 must be breathing a sigh of relief.”
Why these stories? They appeal to our inner gambler; a potent combination of high stakes, and genuine uncertainty. Wrong about the McCann’s? Are you unjustly condemning bereaved parents? Adding more anguish to the most wretched situation imaginable? Or are you blindly defending the lowest of the low, parents who wilfully allowed the death of their child? Two dramas, each offering us two roles. Just avengers or braying, vengeful crowd? The Sage or the Fool, duped? We are placed into the role of the chorus in a gripping Greek tragedy.
Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Cummings. The 300-mile jolly to County Durham seems left behind, faded from view, and no. 10 must be breathing a sigh of relief. It’s gone from being described as something that could decimate Conservative chances in the next election to barely worth a mention.
In part, this is attributable to Cumming’s statement. We watched a man in his garden relay, haltingly, the desperation of a father to care for an ill child. With this, the wind is blown out of the critic’s sails. No one wants to malign a man worried sick about his son. The introduction of doubt, albeit by a shoddily cobbled-together narrative with gaping holes (testing your eyesight by driving around a toddler?) tempered the rage, the ire and venom expressed throughout the country.
This doubt was a masterstroke. Doubt tips the balance. When a story is clear-cut, the small cost of offering an opinion is outweighed by the benefit of self-expression. Introducing even the smallest amount of doubt puts us at risk of cognitive dissonance, a painful updating of our self-perception. Anyone who’s had to say ‘I was wrong’ knows this isn’t pleasant, even more so when it is a public retraction. When both sides are low cost, low benefit to an individual, very little can have seismic effects. Consequently, comments were backspaced before they were posted, tweets cancelled, and an outsize muting of public feeling occurred.
Will these dividends pay off in the long term? Has the story been successfully quelled? It’s not possible to say definitively. Of course, it is perfectly plausible this story fades away, as attention shifts (rightfully) to Black Lives Matter and (less rightfully) myriad other governmental mishaps. And doubt has proved a well wielded weapon in the past. Cummings has a trademark method of creating a wave of suspicion around facts and statistics, to negate the force of data by piling on ludicrous claims so that numbers have no meaning anymore (£350 million anyone?).
“Tales are what we grow up with … they are the tools that allow us to survive as communities.”
Yet in this case, the default response may be less well suited. There is a key difference between statistics and stories. No one chooses to play about with logistic regression analysis, to isolate covariation, with p values and t values. Most of us disengage almost immediately, eyes glazed over. Facts are hard, getting a toehold on the real-world exhausting, and academia often impenetrable. Doubt here works well, because our brains are rarely going to willingly track back to the dull, dry, data.
But stories? Gossip? Drama and plays? Here is where our brains feel at home. We revisit them with ease. By nature, storytellers, they act as heuristics for us to comprehend the world. Tales are what we grow up with, narratives we tell ourselves give us our comprehension and sense of self, just as vital prehistoric hammer, they are the tools that allow us to survive as communities. Here, we are aware and accustomed to doubt. Indeed, it is the key to a great narrative, known by how they keep us on the edge of our seats, guessing. Adding a foil, a contrast brings the whole sordid affair into chiaroscuro — and in doing so, may allow the Cummings story to permeate far more readily into British minds.
Lauren Levine
Featured image courtesy of Trending Topics 2019.
