stories
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As we proceed into a postmodern world, we are bereft of a narrative that can provide courage and optimism; we are facing what Václav Havel and others have called “a crisis in narrative”. Old gods have fallen, either wounded or dead. New ones have been aborted. “We are looking”, he said, “for the new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions”. In other words, we seeks new narratives to provide us with “an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and faith”.
Neil Postman -
I regard history as the single most important idea for our youth to take with them into the future. I call it an idea rather than a subject because every subject has a history, and its history is an integral part of the subject. History, we might say, is meta-subject. No one can claim accurate knowledge of a subject unless one knows how such knowledge came to be. I would, of course, favor “history” courses, although I have always thought such courses out to be called “histories” so that our youth would understand that what once happened has been seen from different points of view, by different people, each with a different story to tell.
Neil Postman -
I mean by “narrative” as story. I refer to big stories - stories that are sufficiently profound and complex to offer explanations of the origins and future of people; stories that construct ideals, prescribe rules of conduct, specify sources of authority, and, in doing all this, provide a sense of continuity and purpose. Joseph Campbell and Rollo May, among others, called such stories “myths”. Marx had such stories in mind referring to “ideologies”. And Freud called them “illusions”. No matter. What is important about narratives is that human being cannot live without them. We are burdened with a kind of consciousness that insists on our having a purpose. Purposefulness requires a moral context, and moral context is what I mean by a narrative.
Neil Postman -
Who writes the songs that young girls sing? Or the tales that old men tell? Who creates the myths that bind a nation and give purpose and meaning to the idea of a public education? In America, it is advertisers and, of course, the popular musicians and filmmakers; maybe even the hollow mean gathered around swimming pools in Beverly Hills, inventing stories we call television sitcoms.
Neil Postman -
If I may amend Niels Bohr’s remark, …, the opposite of a profound story is another profound story, by which I mean that the story of every group may be told inspiringly, without excluding its blemishes but with an emphasis on the various struggles to achieve humanity, or, to borrow from Lincoln again, the struggles to reveal the better angels of our nature. This is what once was meant by cultural pluralism.
Neil Postman