The Limits (and Virtues) of Superiority

Abstract

We live by our reasons. Charles Tilly’s new book is a marvelously thoughtful set of ruminations on this convention, and I find myself thinking with the book whenever I hear reporters talking about terrorists’ motives or doctors rendering patients’ prognoses or colleagues excusing their neglect of each other’s e-mail. Tilly’s argument about the reasons we give for our own and others’ actions is simple and compelling, often eye-opening, and eminently teachable: Reason-giving creates, ratifies, or repairs social relationships. Bosses give different kinds of reasons to subordinates than they give to equals; professionals give different sorts of reasons to clients than clients’ friends give; close friends give different reasons from strangers. Reasons matter because we live in social relationships. They matter for another reason, too. We get a glimpse of it when Tilly writes that as a child, he and his four siblings wore hand-me-downs, ate government-issue cornmeal and salads of locally picked dandelions, and grabbed whatever part-time work was available. What did it mean to live through the Depression? “We told ourselves a story of decent people buffeted by hard times.” The Tilly family “depended on stories to organize our lives, and our relations to other lives.” That is it: We live in social relationships, and we also live in our reasons. Reasons create us and our relationships even as we are using reasons to create or repair the social relations that elicit some kinds of reasons and forbid others. Reasons are the storylines that make our action meaningful to ourselves and others. Tilly cautions that people don’t give reasons because of some “universal craving for truth or coherence” (p. 14). If the point here is to banish any notion of a first-moving drive for meaning from the vocabulary of social science, that is fine with me. But I think the book knows even more than it tells: Sometimes it understates its own evidence on the meaningful structure of both reasons and relationships. People may not give reasons out of some deep existential need for coherence, but meaningful coherence and meaningful relationships structure what kinds of accounts we can give, and even what kinds of selves we can be. Why? discusses four classes of reasons—conventions, stories, codes, and technical accounts. The book is an example of what Tilly terms a “superior” story, one that uses the