Narratives and the virtue crisis
For the past few years, I have been a notorious hater of narrativizing everything in one’s life. After the passing of my father and a friend of mine, I realized that many of the people closest to them had a habit of turning their own experiences, interactions, and relationships into narratives that, more often than not, were meant to draw sympathy or paint them as heroes. I found this deeply distasteful. I did not understand why anyone would feel the need to invent a relationship with the deceased. I figured that my closeness to both of these losses was a bad thing. The grief I experienced was unwelcome. My closeness was hardly an asset. I became so confused by this constant need to narrativize that I called out everyone around me who attempted to put their life into a grander narrative, often accusing them of doing so simply to justify their own actions. I hypothesized that one of the central issues facing our society was the constant need to narrativize, to place oneself into a story. Much of the “high school drama” I have experienced comes when these narratives clash or do not align. And the same can be said for some political discourse, though real motives are often convoluted and are not the subject of this essay.
After continuing to read Byung-Chul Han's works (namely, The Crisis of Narration), I have come to see the importance of narratives in society. Narratives give our lives purpose. By fitting personal narratives into larger societal narratives, we fulfill the Aristotelian ethos, seeing our lives as a part of something greater and as purposeful. I have come to believe that the problem is our lack of grander narratives. Human nature leads us to narrativize our lives, but the epidemic that is post-modernism strips the world of grand narratives, leaving us with a collection of individualistic, conflicting personal narratives. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives are not inherently evil. But in today’s society, it is difficult to place these stories into universal ideologies. Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that Marxism, Christianity, and psychoanalysis have all tried and failed to provide a communal ideology. Thus, our narratives become egotistical, revolving around only ourselves and leading to Newton’s crisis of individualism that is detailed in other essays.
MacIntyre also argues that the absence of the Aristotelian ethos—the notion that we as humans have a higher purpose or a function—is what makes discourse regarding morals and ethics so difficult. We enter such debates, not only with different ideas, but with no common narrative or ethical backing. What is moral to me is almost certainly different from what is moral to you. Perhaps we agree that murder is bad, but if we really inspect why we think that, our differing ethical systems will provide us with different reasons for condemning murder. Thus, we cannot have any real ethical/moral discourse. Enlightenment taught us to enter such debates using logic and reasoning, yet as Slavoj Zizek teaches us, no one operates without ideology, no one is coming from, as MacIntyre describes it, “a view from nowhere”. Logic does not exist in a vacuum; it is always based on something. Describing a view as logical and impersonal is disengenuous. It ignores the evolution of our postmodern society.
There is a simple solution to this problem: a revitalization of Aristotelian ethics. This is what MacIntyre describes as his personal ideology, calling himself “a revolutionary Aristotelian”. I am partial to these ideas in the context of Newton’s political crisis because, in this very project, I am pushing grander narratives. I am saying that we have to dream up a purpose for Newton. A liberal and wealthy city should have the goal of improving equality and the quality of life for all its residents. Accepting this grander narrative would make specific debates (around housing or support for Israel) much easier. We could operate from a singular framing narrative. With this agreed-upon structure, town hall debates might become productive and more substantive than young leftists calling Jake Auchincloss genocidal—a great example of people operating from compeltely different moral/ethical structures and discourse leading to no progress.
