Genre shift: stories that fail & stories that work

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If the climate movement tells business-as-usual stories about a business-as-usual world, it is difficult to use these stories to achieve change.

The type of story—or ‘genre’—that the climate movement uses matters. This page makes the case that a shift from one genre to another can make the difference between ‘winning hearts and minds’ or losing the public debate.

Genre shift: the case of ‘Climategate’

When emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were hacked just ahead of the 2009 global climate change talks in Copenhagen, climate skeptics pounced. They claimed they had found a ‘smoking-gun’ (or even a ‘mushroom cloud’) showing that scientists’ claims about global warming were fraudulent.

The Financial Times reported that skeptics alleged that the emails showed ‘scientists plotting to manipulate data and hurling abuse at their sceptical peers’. The episode became known as ‘Climategate’.

Initially, climate sceptics were able to damage public trust in climate science, casting climate scientists as villains who distorted their findings for their own benefit. According to Smith and Howe’s analysis, it was only when attempts to defend climate science switched from a ‘business as usual’ story to a heroic story (see below) that the debate changed.

The following table analyses the Climategate debate in terms of genre, featuring a few technical terms to explain the different story types. The analysis draws on work done by Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe in Climate Change As Social Drama, as well as Philip Smith’s work on how narrative is mobilised for war.

When the fossil fuel industry and climate sceptics use stories to strengthen their position, the climate movement can reply with

a ‘nonstory consisting of disconnected, itsy-bitsy justifications ’ (Smith and Howe), or
a powerful story that changes the debate.

Genre	‘Climategate’
Heroism in pursuit of a better world
Genre: romance: (here, *not* stories of romantic love: ‘romance’ involves themes of heroism and overcoming obstacles in order to achieve a better world). heroes face and overcome obstacles, barriers, challenges and tests triumph over adversity a better world is possible through heroic action heroes are motivated by strong ideals stories sometimes feature the conversion of opponents to the side of the heroes there are sharp moral differences between story characters: heroes are motivated by of ‘sacrifice, sharing, and the pursuit of a common good’ (Smith and Howe). romantic narratives move towards a better world	Smith and Howe argue that climate scientists and their supporters only gained traction in the ‘Climategate’ debate when they used a heroic or romantic genre to tell their story. Faced by the onslaught of sceptics in response to climategate, defenders of climate science initially opted for a ‘business as usual’ (‘low mimetic’) defence—see below. Smith and Howe argue that only when the genre shifted, by casting the scientists ‘as the embattled protagonists of a romantic struggle against paranoid inquisitors were they able to stem the bleeding’.
‘Business as usual’ stories
(genre: ‘low mimesis’) people pursue money, power and technocratic goals (stories that emphasise the existing system and making it work better, efficiency, economic costs and benefits, and measurable goals are ‘business as usual’ stories). heroism is absent ‘business as usual’ shapes the way the world works there are no sharp moral contrasts between story characters or conflicts over fundamental values not much is really at stake problems can be fixed by offering economic incentives and applying standard routines and procedures the focus is local and on ordinary issues story events lack drama and are emotionally-flat and uninspiring The way that the news reports the latest economic growth figures is ‘business as usual’: the narrative is not inspiring or engaging.	The initial response to Climategate resorted to a business-as-usual story that relied on the integrity of scientists’ data and the soundness of their peer review processes. In the face of an ironic melodrama which portrayed climate scientists as ‘skulking villains… scientists and their defenders first fought back with ‘low-mimetic nonstory consisting of disconnected, itsy-bitsy justifications for each individual infraction. This checking-off-of-boxes response did nothing to restore trust’ —Smith and Howe.
Irony
The audience feels it is ‘looking down on’ the characters in the story. The story’s events are ridiculous or absurd. Characters are seen as morally inferior: the story invites audiences to mock them, and treat them as scapegoats who the audience must reject.	In the sceptics’ story, climate scientists were presented as driven by greed, prestige and ideology. They were accused of disguising data that did not fit their preferred models, and exploiting government funding. Climate sceptics cast themselves as the ‘real’ defenders of science, which was being corrupted by their adversaries. This story ‘put the audience in the position of knowing better than the scientists of guarding “sound science” against its debasers’ (Smith and Howe). Efforts to reply using ‘business as usual’ genre did not work: ‘overcoming the challenge of the assault on scientists’ reputation required a shift to the genre of romance’ – see above.

Genre, character and who do we trust?

Few of us know the technical details of climate science: our views on climate change often have a lot to do with who we trust.

This raises issues for storytelling:

does the story enhance trust in the key characters? If not, the story may fail.

Importantly, a shift in genre is a shift in characters’ roles in the story. The analysis of Climategate shows how this happens:

Genre	Role of characters
‘Business-as-usual’ (‘low mimesis’) genre	Key characters are simply doing their everyday job in an everyday world.
Irony	The central character is the object of ridicule
Romance	The lead character is a hero

business-as-usual stories did not build the credibility of scientists as ‘characters’ in the ‘drama’ of climate change.
ironic stories mocked them.
a heroic account enhanced their credibility and trustworthiness.

Credibility contests

Smith and Howe write:

When the limits of scientific knowledge are in question, “credibility contests” develop’… In important ways, the social drama of climate change that people actually get to see is a story about trust. In this sense, it is a story not just about science or nature but about how we know whom to believe—artists? politicians? children?’…

Reading through the spate of post-Climategate commentary from both the Right and Left, it is remarkable how rarely the actual details of the controversy are debated. Much like the science itself, the scientists’ emails seem to have interested a small minority of inside players. What mattered to everyone else was character. What kind of people are these scientists, their defenders and their critics? What makes them tick?

This process can be seen in other contexts.

In Australia’s 2019 election, did voters trust Bill Shorten? Questions of character are more complicated in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, however it is worth asking how effective Democrats’ stories about Trump’s character were. For many voters, the story of Trump as the CEO who would ‘drain the swamp’ and ‘build the wall’ had appeal, and Democrats were unsuccessful in telling stories that could deflate this image – with huge consequences for climate change, among many other issues.

Other genres: melodrama, apocalypse, tragedy, and comedy

Melodrama

Melodrama features:

sharp moral polarisation between good and evil.
‘good’ characters are pitted against the ‘bad guys’
sensational and dramatic events
tends to be simplistic, over-drawn and predictable
‘Climategate’ initially featured climate sceptics’ ironic melodrama: the ‘good’ sceptics defended science against the climate scientists who had corrupted it.

An issue:

do climate narratives that portray the fossil fuel industry as the ’villain’
have to be a simplistic form of melodrama?

Apocalypse

a struggle between radical evil and radical good
intense polarisation between characters, featuring the highest and lowest of human motivations.
the future destiny of the planet or civilization is at stake
the task of the heroes is to destroy evil: Smith writes: When radical evil is afoot in the world there can be no compromise, no negotiated solution, no prudent efforts to effect sanctions or to maintain a balance of power. This evil is so absolute that there is no possibility for trust or for upward conversion of the bad’.
Writing about war and narrative, Smith states:

Apocalyptic narratives are the most effective at generating and legitimating massive society-wide sacrifice and are today the only narrative form that can sustain war as culturally acceptable. Yet because they have raised the stakes so high they are exposed to risks of deflation. Those encoded as pure and those encoded as polluted, must act in ways that sustain this imagined scripting… Efforts to de-legitimate war typically involve… attempts to prick the balloon of apocalypticism through redescription of objects, actors, and motivations and thereby move our cultural frame of reference back down the genre hierarchy.

Comedy

The central characters lack something that they want
They face obstacles to achieving their goal, however these obstacles are ridiculous, absurd or humourous rather than morally unacceptable.
After confronting the obstacle, the heroes prevail. The ending often features an event such as a wedding, dance or celebratory meal.
In Frye’s account:

What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will” (p. 163).

Tragedy

the horror of suffering
social disintegration
chaos and destruction
emotionally powerful
misguided motivations and missed opportunities: if only some error had not been made, things could have been different
often portrays innocent and passive victims who have been betrayed or let down by the actions of others.
often fatalistic
Smith argues: ‘the tragic genre can lead to paralysis in political life rather than demands for intervention even though things are perceived to be going from bad to worse… Where tragic frames exist the corresponding structure of feeling is not one that sustains activism…’

Stories and images