Framing the story

When my children were learning to drive, I admonished them to be careful and avoid accidents. I cited my own record of safe driving. In 35 years of driving, I would say, I’ve never been in a wreck. Do likewise.

My admonition failed. Each of the kids got in a fender-bender. It failed in another regard. After one of their accidents, my brother ratted me out. He noted to the kids that I had been driving for 36 years, and had crashed a car a mere month after getting my license.

The lesson from this, besides practicing what one preaches, is that history can be read quite differently from different starting points. For Israel, the current war began with the slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7. For Palestinians, the war began decades earlier, with the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Each narrative is true as far as it goes. The disagreement comes from how far back it should go.

This tendency to choose convenient starting points for narratives can be found all across history. Today’s Democrats broke the American bank with their profligate Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans say. No, it was the misguided and unnecessary Republican wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Democrats counter. No, it was the Democratic Great Society of the 1960s. No, it was the military-industrial complex of the 1950s that Republican Dwight Eisenhower shed crocodile tears over. No, it was the Democratic New Deal of the 1930s.

Narrative framing affects how one views the struggle for equality in the United States. The killing of George Floyd shows how deeply racism is embedded in American society, say progressives. Wrong, say non-progressives: the civil rights reforms of the 1960s show that significant change is possible. So why, demand the progressives, did it take a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment to enforce the promises they contain?

Framing can shape one's view of the human propensity for war. In 1945, after the two worst wars in history, within scarcely more than a generation, it was tempting to think humans are inherently brutal. But in 1913, it was possible to think that big wars were a thing of the past. Europe, at least, had been at peace for a century. In 1815, after nearly a millennium of European conflict, war appeared the default setting of human existence.

The structure of world affairs looks different from different narrative starting points. Since the emergence of nation-states in the 17th and 18th centuries, the nation-state has been the basic unit of world affairs. The peoples of the world relate to one another through the nation-states to which they belong. Such people as don’t have nation-states to themselves—Kurds, Palestinians and others—often see them as essential to improving their lot.

But before there were nation-states there were empires that comprised different peoples, and there were Christendom and Islam, which organized believers confessionally. The clock of history can’t be run backward, but it’s a potentially worthwhile thought experiment to ask if the Israeli-Palestinian problem would be easier to resolve if the two sides were haggling over a two-province solution within a larger entity, rather than a two-state solution where each state is essentially a law unto itself.

The place of humanity in the cosmos looks different from different starting points. From the Stone Age to the present, we Homo sapiens have come a long way, increasing in numbers, sophistication and capacity to control our environment. But if our story starts with the Big Bang, we’re a rounding error of time and an imperceptible blip in the fabric of the universe.

It’s said that victors write the histories. This isn’t always true. For decades after 1865 the Southern version of the Civil War dominated American thinking about that conflict. 

But even if you can’t write the history, if you can frame the narrative you’ve got an edge in the debate.