On Sith-Busting

The potential for straw man arguments in “challenging the narrative that…” discourse

I think academics have a responsibility to justify our place in society. Given, at least here in Canada, the huge investment of people’s tax dollars into the academic infrastructure, I don’t think we can just take that money and assume we owe no accounting for it. Personally, I do think the investment is worth it. I think having an arm of society whose task is to hold up a mirror to the world – one that is not motivated by financial gain – is a valuable check on society’s direction.

But if that’s our goal, then when we hold up that mirror I think we need to be sure that what we’re reflecting is something that is really there. And here’s where a common academic trope falls short, in my opinion.

The trope of “narrative challenging”

One thing I come across quite frequently, both inside and outside of singlehood studies, is the idea that a theory or finding is valuable because it, “challenges the narrative that…”. That sentence fragment is then completed with some belief that is ostensibly held by society, and the author positions themselves as in opposition to that narrative. For example, in an earlier Substack post, I noted that my own work was accused of feeding, “the popular narrative that single people aren’t really happy.” That author, of course, positioned herself as challenging that popular narrative.

There’s a subvariant of this, where the belief attributed to people in society is that they view a particular group as uniform. For example, in discussing society’s view of whether singles want to be partnered, that same author writes, “It means challenging the myth that what all single people want, more than anything else, is to become coupled” (italics original).

I will say that I felt quite proud of myself when in the course of writing this piece, I came up with the term Sith-Busting for this one.

Why might “narrative challenging” be dangerously addictive?

Of course, questioning society’s narratives is an important part of academic work. We wouldn’t be doing our job of holding up a mirror to society properly if we simply greenlit everything we saw.

But one reason the use of this trope always raises my antennae is because it’s a rhetorical device that allows the author to set their own terms for whether their argument is successful since they get to define the opposing view. If used in an undisciplined way, the person using this trope can create a low bar for how good their argument needs to be.

For example, if I am “challenging the narrative that” all single people want to become partnered, I need only present one case where an unpartnered person does not want to become partnered to get over the low bar I, myself, have created. What this approach arguably sidelines is how common this exception to the rule is. In this case that means sidelining how common it is to not want to partner – which perhaps is the more important question.

How do we know the narrative being challenged is actually a thing?

Certainly, societal narratives are real. There are entire industries set up to track them, such as opinion polling. So when one claims to be pushing back against a societal narrative, it should be fairly easy to begin that argument by providing the evidence that people actually believe the narrative that is being pushed back against, yes?

But that’s not how this kind of argument typically works. As in the examples provided above, the author simply asserts that society holds a particular narrative, then goes to work disproving what they say the narrative is. For example, those earlier examples both point to the idea that society believes that you need a romantic relationship to be happy. But does the evidence say that laypeople actually believe that?

Do people believe you need a relationship to be happy?

In a recent paper, researchers developed what they termed a Relationship Pedestal Beliefs scale, that was designed to examine the extent to which people see a romantic relationship as central to people’s happiness. And it turns out that the average participant in the study mildly disagreed with items like, “No one is truly complete without the love of a romantic partner,” and mildly agreed with items like, “People don’t have to be in a relationship to be happy.”

So recall earlier an author was setting herself up as challenging narratives that you need a relationship to be happy. The irony here then is that, rather than pushing back, that author was actually reinforcing what many people already believe. How often is that the case in “challenging the narrative that…” arguments?

“Narrative challenging” needs to be contextualized and supported with evidence

One important note about the data showing that people mildly disagree that you need a relationship to be happy is that most of the participants in that paper were single people. Although one study including partnered people, and it showed they too mildly disagreed that you need a relationship to be happy, it’s harder to be sure when it’s only one study. I wouldn’t be surprised if people who are in relationships, as part of mentally justifying their relationship, actually would at least mildly agree that you need a relationship to be happy. Ultimately, that’s an empirical question.

But this point highlights how the “challenging the narrative that…” trope rarely specifies who holds the narrative and under what conditions. And more generally, it makes clear that there has been little obligation in making this style of argument to provide evidence that the narrative you are supposedly challenging actually manifests in the real world.

When worldviews collide

In my opinion, this is likely because this trope is typically used in research communities where certain values and worldviews are shared by the researchers, and in that sense what they agree society believes is perhaps revealing of those values and worldviews. But it is also what is fun about a truly interdisciplinary topic like singlehood studies; people come along with different worldviews and point you to hidden assumptions that you didn’t know you had. It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes:

Ideas that we don’t know we have, have us. – William A. Williams

So all I’m asking is that if you find yourself writing the phrase, “challenging the narrative…” just check yourself for a minute, and see if you can find any evidence that that narrative you are challenging is actually a thing. It will make your work richer, and pay more respect to the people who pay our salaries.