Dear Subscribers,
Do you remember signing up for this Towers of Babel Substack many moons ago? (Tagline: Our love of Story has become an addiction, and it’s killing us.)
Totally okay if you don’t remember because I haven’t sent you an email in… forever. I figured you were nice enough to subscribe, so I’d be nice enough not to clog up your InBox. You gave me a nod of recognition; I gave you your time back. A win-win! 😊
I’m checking in now for two reasons.
Jon, Stephanie & Elizabeth
Not everything I wrote over the past few years is worth remembering. But here are three posts I still think about and that you might enjoy:
Jon Stewart's “naive worldview”: The comedian has an epiphany about humor, politics, and power. Short version: The Daily Show failed. (AUDIO here)
Stephanie Foo (a former producer for This American Life and Snap Judgment, among other shows) is told to find a more “surprising angle” for a story because the threat to shoot a journalist in the head is not surprising enough.
Elizabeth Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a staff writer for The New Yorker, comes to realize that maybe stories are not as powerful as she once imagined. (AUDIO here)
You can see everything else here.
Time to leave Babel
When you realize you’re saying the same thing over and over again, as I eventually did, then it’s time to move on. So after sharing the many ways we’re dangerously addicted to Story, I’ve begun to explore ways to break the addiction.
Enter: Out of Babel, which I launched last December.
Out of Babel is still about stories, but this time it’s about the big ones — the “master narratives” or “super-stories” or what you might call “narrative-based worldviews” that frame all the other stories we tell.
The project’s tagline is: Do Jews and their Story have a future in the Diaspora? (It depends on the Stories that drive everyone else.)
To which you might say: I’m not Jewish, so who cares? But I humbly submit that if the Jewish Story cannot survive outside of Israel, in the liberal democratic world, then almost every other Story will vanish, too. Some megalomaniac — a modern-day Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar, Hitler, Stalin — will rise up and mesmerize the masses with a narrative that singles out some enemy within. What if that Story demonizes you?
Put another way: What happens when people become frustrated by democracy’s demand that we keep talking and debating, no matter what? What happens when we tire of democracy’s never-ending and inefficient conversation — what you might call secular Talmudism? History shows us, again and again, that people run out of patience.
On the other hand, history doesn’t run in circles.
I hope you’ll subscribe.
all the best,
Alan
