Fixed Narratives, Fixing Narratives

Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving

The NYT is really at its worst in this year’s campaign cycle, to the point that I’m a bit at a loss to imagine what’s going on in the newsroom. Their behavior is so programmatic that I have to think they’re consciously pursuing an obsessive, almost lunatic version of “balance” in their coverage of both presidential campaigns. It’s so over the top and calculated that it ends up feeling less like news coverage and more like an attempt to be a third side—not even being a referee but an advocate set against both campaigns on behalf of some imagined and very Rube Goldberg jerry-rigged “centrism”. Nate Cohn’s weird freak-out about how Harris was far to the left on economic policy right after she moved into the lead spot was a foretaste of what we’ve had ever since.

Today’s piece on why Harris is wrong that inflation has anything to do with price gouging is a good example of what this drive is doing to the clarity and structure of NYT news analysis. It’s not a patient laying out of the concept of inflation, nor an exploration of the history of inflation in post-Bretton Woods global economies. It’s not a methodical sector-by-sector look back at price increases during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath. It’s not a detailed analysis of whether there have been supply chain issues and which commodities have been affected most, or even what “supply chains” mean in the contemporary globalized situation, which is something quite different than what they meant in 1974, 1980, or 1990. The whole piece reads as if the conclusion was reached first and then the authors tried to find ways to make the conclusion hold. Which, I know, is not an unfamiliar habit in journalism or academia, but it’s a bad look when it is this obvious and this motivated.

Two junctures where I really found myself frustrated with the article was first that in fact some economists do say that “price gouging” and profit-seeking were one reason inflation remained high into 2022 and 2023. The article acknowledges that fact, but way down near the bottom of the inverted pyramid, whereas the lede frames the story as “politicians who have a message vs. the strong consensus of experts.” “Gouging” of some kind, fueled in part by the stimulus provided to consumers and nominal increases in wages in response to workers quitting their jobs, was so visible in 2022 and 2023 that some companies touted their continuing strategy of increasing prices to pad profits a part of their annual reports and have developed a marketing narrative to go along with it—that they want consumers to normalize a preference for “premium” brands where the main thing that’s premium about them is the price.

What really drove me nuts is a paragraph early on that sets out to rubbish the idea that companies are keeping supplies artificially low in order to pump demand and keep prices high. It drove me nuts first because there have been demonstrated cases of price manipulation of that kind in the last seventy-five years of global economic history. This is not folklore or conspiracy theory. Sometimes it’s not the companies, it’s speculative buyers that keep supplies low, but it absolutely can happen. More importantly, what the article offers as disproof that this was happening between 2021 and 2023 the following: “At least in theory, such a situation should be only temporary. New competitors should enter the market and provide products at a price people can afford.”

How many times are we going to have to endure certain branches of social science looking at the real world dumbfoundedly saying, “In theory, that shouldn’t be happening”? (Or perhaps in this case, journalists simplistically translating what they believe the social science to be saying.) In an article that is also trying to talk about the actual nature of global supply chains in the first third of the 21st Century, and that should also be talking about financialization of the global economy but isn’t, there should be some ample real-world reasons why things don’t work “in theory” in this way except in a limited subset of sectors of the economy. Food production and other consumables that most consumers buy at the grocery store especially do not conform to the “in theory” picture except around the edges. It’s possible to make your way onto the grocery store shelves with a new premium product made by a small company. But no way is anybody going to undercut the major players on meat, eggs, mass-produced food, toilet paper, etc. in the current market. Four giant companies control almost everything that goes on those shelves, and no “new competitor” could possibly “enter the market and provide products at a price people can afford”. A small handful of companies control food production at every single stage, and an extensive network of government subsidies and policies protect those existing monopolies. “In theory” here is just painfully naive.

If you’re going to do background analysis, either frame existing debates between experts honestly or do sophisticated data-driven journalism that doesn’t rush to tell a story that has to end up stacking up against a political campaign’s messaging. If you’re going to correct a political message, stick to more basic grounds where truth and falsehood are plainly distinguished.

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Onto a deeper kind of shift in narrative. I’ve struggled to think about how to write in this newsletter about the books and articles I’m reading. The previous formatting I was using was intended to keep me away from feeling like I was reviewing a book, but I tended to slide into that kind of evaluating language. What I want is something more like a commonplace, a reading journal: a reaction or response to something in a reading. I’ll keep working on how to do that.

To give an example, I’ve just finished Kevin Fedarko’s A Walk in the Park, which chronicles a difficult attempt at a thru-hike down the entire length of the Grand Canyon National Park where the hike did not stay down at the Colorado River or up on the rim, but moved along the cliffs and into the tributary canyons as needed or wanted.

I enjoyed the book quite a lot, but that’s the more review-adjacent assessment I want to (mostly) avoid tackling in this newsletter.

As I read, I ended up bookmarking a substantial number of passages that deal with Native American history within and around the Grand Canyon. At first, I was annoyed, because Fedarko’s early historical description of the Grand Canyon and various attempts to travel within it is relentlessly focused on European exploration and then the efforts of various white Americans to observe and travel the region. However, the book’s narrative shifts eventually as Fedarko’s own perspective shifts. He is essentially recreating his own changing consciousness from a Pittsburgh childhood where he formed a fascination with the Grand Canyon via book he got from his father to volunteering to work Colorado River travel expeditions in the summer to his own hike. As his own knowledge and experience grew, he incorporates not just what current Native Americans say about the Grand Canyon and their history of their disputes with the federal government and with developers but also a recognition that Native American societies have traversed and inhabited the canyon and its surrounds for a very long time. So by the end, I had no doubt of his understanding of the real history and of where an exercise like his hike stands within it.

Well, sort of. I keep trying to articulate how it’s not good enough to just be inclusive now, as if from this point going forward we can incorporate stories and people who have been kept out of the canon or excluded from what we know. Somehow the story has to change more fundamentally than that. If you’re teaching the Great Books in the belief that they contain universal truths that are relevant to being human, then the canon of the Great Books needs to incorporate the work of global antiquity. Not because that’s some showy “woke” gesture but because the claim of universal relevance requires that you make that change—that you are not just being inclusive from this point forward about what you think constitutes great literature but that you rewrite the canon going backward to the extent that you can. If I’m teaching about the history of global agriculture, I need to start including West Africa as an important site of early development—the way I tell the story has to shift.

It’s sort of the same thing here. Given what Fedarko comes to understand about where his own travels stand within history, I don’t quite understand why that doesn’t change his framing from the outset. I get that within his own life, he’s gone from thinking of the canyon as a place that white people ‘discovered’ and ‘explored’ to recognizing that it’s a place that Native American human beings lived within, knew, and traversed and that those human beings were later on violently dispossessed and their knowledge and understanding was rubbished or ignored by writers and travellers who saw their own experiences as being the only ones that mattered.

But if you’ve learned that, why not have that change suffuse your storytelling from the very beginning? Once you see it that way, all stories of hiking or travelling the canyon and its environs have to change a bit. You’re not going where no one has gone before except in the few cases of slot canyons where no one could have gone before. You’re doing something extreme and difficult in a way that’s very “cultural” in the sense that the previous (and still existing) inhabitants didn’t see the canyon as a place for doing extreme and dangerous physical exertion just because it’s there; they saw it instead as a place to live and thrive first and as a place with spiritual meaning second. I wouldn’t get upset if I read a book about someone determined to do parkour on every major cathedral in Europe, but I’d expect the parkourer to grasp that they are doing something kind of weird that is also extreme for the hell of it and that doing it might actually bother people for whom the cathedrals are spiritually important. I wouldn’t expect that “because it’s there” would stand as a reason for undertaking that project.

Every once in a while in the book, Fedarko takes note of how the ambition to hike the whole canyon in a particular way in a compressed time span costs him and his compatriots the opportunity to really appreciate the canyon aesthetically, spiritually, emotionally either because they have to keep moving, because they’re too tired, or because they’re in a very dangerous situation due to injuries and weather conditions. He also does seem conscious of how elaborate the infrastructure of the hike has to be compared to how Native Americans moved within this space for centuries—he and his collaborators have to have supplies cached for them in advance by a whole team of supporters, and they have to hike through dangerous conditions simply to avoid the even more dangerous conditions of high summer or they need to use expensive technological infrastructures simply to get where they are going. Whereas people just living in and relating to the canyon in other times could be more human in a situated and sensible way in how they did so.

Sitting on the couch, as it were, I keep wondering why knowing more about how Native American people have been and would still like to be in the Grand Canyon doesn’t divert or shift the elaborate and dangerous engagement with it that Fedarko and others have embarked upon. I never have any doubt about their love for the Grand Canyon, or how amazing it is as a place, but at some point I just wonder why the feelings that drive some people into exploring, climbing, and knowing places don’t drive them away from certain kinds of extreme engagements with those places. I would much rather that people like Fedarko kept hiking than all the helicopters that he described swarming the skies at one end of the canyon keep doing so, but I also had to wonder a bit at how various kinds of extreme climbing and hiking (as well as boating) are not themselves a bit at odds with respecting the beauty and history of the place. It’s a problem embedded in the idea of wilderness itself that is very apparent in the writing of Muir and many other environmentalists—in its purest form, it is about an ideal of the pristine absence of humanity that not only sidelines Native American presence but also provides a kind of sanction to the person who believes in that sense of wilderness—that they alone properly understand it and thus they alone properly should be allowed to behold it. If a wilderness had no human to see it, would it still be beautiful and sacred?