Towards a New Narrative
blending system and conversation
Our liberal friends have always seemed to have command of The Narrative over the last few centuries. One way or another, it has always revolved around a notion of Heaven on Earth, to replace the Christian promise of Heaven after death. The promise of perfection has altered over the decades. It seems to me that the vision of perfection usually involved a combination of human rights and a political paradise. The notion of right began with the establishment of rights for non-nobles, and then progressed from rights of the middle class, rights for workers, rights for women, rights for Negroes, then rights for non-heterosexuals. The champions of these rights were always educated people, and the vision of paradise was always some campaign for political perfection led by the educated class.
Competing Narratives have tended to be responses and objections to the supremacy of the educated class that usually concedes the higher ground to the educated. I think it is time to change that and to consstruct a Narrative that understands the supremacy of the educated class as an era, an historical epoch, that is now coming to an end to be replaced by something else.
I have previously published a Commoner Manifesto and also a Populist Manifesto using Marx’s Communist Manifesto as a model. That was good fun, but I feel that a New Narrative should not be as political and combative as Marx; it should just be a story of how the world works.
For most of us, our world begins at the end of the Middle Ages with the Reformation and the Enlightenment. There is a good reason why we think so, The modern world begins in 1440 with the invention of the printing press by goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg and the spread of the printed book. One of the first books printed was the Bible, and the consequence of that was that a lot more people could develop their own indidivual opinion about what th Bible meant. Thus the Reformation, starting in Wittenberg, Germany, with Martin Luther and with John Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland. Luther famously translated the Bible from Latin into German and printed in 1517 his Ninety-five Theses disputing various doctrines of the Catholic Church. Back when only monks in monasteries wrote books on parchment by hand only a few people got to dispute. The kings and bishops could control the process. But with the Age of Gutenberg, and the growth of trading and cities, things got out of hand.
If the Reformation was primarily a religious revolution driven by the printing press, the Enlightment, starting a century later in the 17th century was a secular revolution involving philosophy, science, politics, economics, and things got even more out of hand, with not just religious disputes communicated far and wide by printed books and pamphlets but every other kind of idea as well.
If the Reformation and its printed Bibles unleashed a widespread discussion of religion the Enlightenment unleashed a much bigger discussion of everything, going from the question of who would go to Heaven to who ought to rule the secular world. Not surprisingly the various actors in this intellectual ferment decided that people like them ought to be setting the rules. And thus came the revolutions of the 18th century, that decided that politics ought to be decided by middle-class intellectuals and not by royal blood.
Another thing was happening at this time. The world of ideas, of philosophers and thinkers, began to interact with the world of artisans and makers. Thus science began to be inserted into the inventions of inventors.
The Age of Gutenberg transformed the world: religion, science, politics, making and buying and selling. And at the center of it all were the intellectuals with the skills and the will to create ideas and visions of the world and implement them. And so it was.
The Age of Gutenberg also transformed the world of power. Political regimes in 1400 had nothing like the power of regimes in 1900. And the intellectual class was right in the middle of all this because it perceived the opportunity for intellectuals to rule the world. And between 1789 and 1918 all the regimes in Europe transformed from royal blood to middle-class intellectual.
Some time in the 19th century the Age of Gutenberg and printed books transitioned into the Age of Mass Media and mass produced and distributed newspapers, as the communcation of ideas transitioned from a world in which governments controlled the Narrative with difficulty to a world in which only regime Narrative saw the light of day.
It is probably not accidental that the Age of Mass Media has seen the most unjust and warlike and genocidal political regimes in all history. This was enabled by the technology and the culture of mass media that allowed political regimes to enforce a single narrative and censor and repress alternative narratives. It would probably have been much more difficult for totalitarian regimes to arise and engage in world wars and purges and mass arrests of political opponents in the absence of the technology of Mass Media. And, because the ideological agenda of the educated class had come to dominate the public square in the Age of Gutenberg, the Narrative imposed from the top in the Age of Mass Media ruthlessly pushed the political and economic ideas of the educated class, which almost always involved imposing and maintaining various initiatives of top-down bureaucratic and administrative control, ranging from manipulating opinion for world wars and massive government programs to the mobilization of public opinion to support and implement mass imprisonment, population migration, and mass killings of civilians. Obviously, such totalitarian agendas would have been much more difficult without the narrative control and censorship of Mass Media.
No culture lasts forever, and the logic and reason and system of the Enlightenment was first challenged by the Romantic movement of the early 19th century, if not earlier by Kant’s notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances. This intellectual thread winds through various German thinkers, involving the “discovery” of the unconscious, the narrative philosophy of Nietzsche, and the Lebenswelt of Husserl. In the ideas of Habermas the opposing cultures of system and Lifeworld interact; the dominatory world of system interacts with the intersubjective Lifeworld in which humans share their experience of the world in conversation using their shared language.
In this emerging world that balances system with shared experience a new age of media is emerging, the Age of Interactive Media featuring conversation rather than narrative. Perhaps the cultural revolution of “woke” is a last hurrah of the Age of Mass Media and its One True Narrative programmed from rigid systems of intellectual narrative.
If this is so then we should expect the near future to feature a disassembly of administrative systems and one-size-fits-all government programs as people renegotiate their relations in conversation rather than impose their system from on high.
And the world transitions from the Age of Mass Media to the Age of Independent Media from the culture of the bullhorn to the culture of conversation.