Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - We Need a New Narrative

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Aug. 5, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

14:09

We Need a New Narrative

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	In chapter 15 of Alastair McIntyre's After Virtue, he lays out his theory of narrative.
	He observes that narratives make our world intelligible, that is, they allow us to understand what is actually happening around us and why.
	It isn't that we can't technically comprehend any individual event, it's that, without a coherent narrative in which to place each event, the cause, nature and consequence of them is unintelligible, and such knowledge does not allow us to develop wisdom.
	He notes that most of our social lives are conversant.
	Without conversation, we would have little hope of understanding one another, and conversations, too, follow a three-act narrative structure.
	As he puts it, Indeed, a conversation is a dramatic work, even if a very short one, in which the participants are not only the actors, but also the joint authors, working out in agreement or disagreement the mode of their production.
	For it is not just that conversations belong to genres in the ways that plays and novels do, but they have beginnings, middles, and ends, just as do literary works.
	They embody reversals and recognitions.
	They move towards and away from climaxes.
	I think he's correct about this.
	I've come to the conclusion that all of human life is bound up in the narratives that we tell ourselves, and without them we have no impetus to action and no firm grounding in the world.
	The stories we tell ourselves are the reasons that we do the things that we do, and this happens on an individual as well as collective level.
	Action itself, McIntyre tells us, has basically a historical character.
	He says, It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others.
	Indeed, we can examine the history of the West as a series of narrative cycles that have a beginning, middle, and end, each one before a new narrative cycle begins.
	In the example of England, we can take the end of Roman rule to be the end of the cycle of the Britons and the arrival of Hengist and Horsa as the beginning of the cycle of the Anglo-Saxons.
	Their story was about the conquest and control of their own island in the establishment of England itself as a Christian kingdom against the pagan Vikings.
	Their story closed with the Norman conquest and the new story of medieval England began, in which the flowering of chivalry and the expansive potential of England was unleashed until it became one of the foremost powers of the age.
	The medieval story ends in the Age of Enlightenment, in which European civilization self-actualizes and expands across the globe, forming vast empires, and the new story that is told is one of bringing mankind under the blessed rubric of technological development and liberal modernity.
	It is this crusading spirit of progress that underpinned the narrative of European empires, and I think that in the most part it was truly believed by those that espoused it.
	From the age of Sale through to the great cataclysm of World War II and right into the US invasion of Afghanistan, we have done everything in alignment with a story that tells us of how we will save humanity from itself.
	We can still see this impulse beneath all of modern activism.
	The narrative control that they impose over every facet of political life is harmonious.
	All humanity is the same, and it is our duty to save them through the magical power of human rights.
	Everything they do revolves around this teleology, and all of the fables they present us about all cultures being equal, or there being an infinite number of genders, or the plight of benighted asylum seekers, or Palestine, or whatever, are all in the service of lifting humanity out of its previous existence.
	This is the story that we have told ourselves since the time of Francis Bacon, and we have the conceit to call it enlightenment.
	The philosophical struggles of the 20th century have been a quest to reconcile what we believe to be true morally with what appears to be true actually, and the length that we have to go to try and make the two become one.
	And all of the best dystopian literature is predicated on the premise that man has the will and power to bring about this future, and that it will actually turn into something that we didn't mean for it to be.
	However, the narrative of enlightenment is fraying now and seems to be beyond repair, and we see the examples everywhere.
	Why is it that all of our high-minded views of cosmopolitanism and integration are rejected by the very people we are trying to integrate?
	How is it that there is such a prevalence of child rapists among the poor, vulnerable refugees that we are saving?
	Why is there such a raw ethnic resentment against those white men and women still carrying this burden?
	Aristotle is right that stories are a rhetorical argument about reality.
	If things are as we describe them, then necessary consequences follow.
	The problem that the West is facing is that the story we are telling ourselves does not accurately represent reality and we are not seeing the consequences that we thought we would find.
	The further that the consequences of human rights diverge from the expected utopia that they were supposed to bring about, the more strained and desperate the left's attempts at stifling the truth become.
	Even now, screeching racist or far-right or transphobe or whatever at those well-meaning people who are just trying to draw attention to the actual problems is taking on the aspect of pure desperation.
	Very large numbers of people entering the labor force in the UK are going to be migrants for one very simple and very straightforward reason, which is the same in both the USA and the UK.
	We are not replacing our working population with new young people born in the country.
	In other words, as boomers, people of my age come to retirement.
	They are not capable of being replaced by new young people who are their children or grandchildren because there just aren't enough of them.
	Therefore, if there's to be employment growth or even employment maintenance, we need migration.
	What do you study?
	I need business.
	Business, yeah.
	Spell business.
	B-I-B-I-No, B-E.
	I-S-S-I-N-S.
	Business.
	Bro, am I tripping?
	A little bit, yeah.
	Next question is: what is the sum of 45 and 55?
	You add it together, innit?
	95, no, 94.
	94, yeah, 94.
	That's 94.
	You got a mafs?
	Yeah, I pass.
	And what's your morning routine like?
	I wake up, go toilet, piss, brush my teeth, and then go back into bed, and then wake up again.
	No, cause I wake up late, innit?
	So I don't really sleep at night.
	Oh, yeah.
	Why do you, like, go back to sleep, though?
	I don't know.
	What do you be doing at night that you need to sleep again?
	I shouldn't know, man.
	They are not the same as us, and we didn't understand them, and the dire consequences of our decisions are the result of this mistake.
	This came upon me all at once as I was reading issue 4 of Islander magazine, and I'm going to excerpt from a couple of the articles which brought this all together for me.
	This issue is focused around the Spenglerian concept of the Felahin, named after the peasantry of Egypt, the Fellas, but applicable in any time and place.
	Indeed, the Felahin are the men without history, for whom civilization is something that happens to other people.
	They live life at the zoological level, unaware of the great events which happen around them, and in the way that they are connected to the wider story of a civilization.
	As Alastair McIntyre observed, without a story into which to contextualise events, they become unintelligible and therefore meaningless to those people who are rudely presented with them, and history furnishes us with many examples.
	In my own article in this issue called After Progress, I listed several examples in which the Fellas living amongst the ruins of great historical events looked upon them with bewilderment, having no frame of reference for what they were looking at nor caring to learn.
	My favourite example is drawn from Xenophon's Anabasis, in which the 10,000 Greeks on their retreat from Asia walk past the ruins of vast cities and discover from the disinterested locals that they were the cities of the Medes.
	However, they were in reality Assyrian cities that the Medes had destroyed.
	When British explorers discovered the same places 2,000 years later, they were told that the mounds which rose out of the desert contained buried cities.
	The British dug these up and found that this was true.
	They had discovered the ruins of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, the artifacts of which are now on display in the British Museum.
	The locals could have dug these up at any time within the intervening millennia, but they didn't, because they didn't find it interesting at all.
	What purpose does it serve to understand the story of the past to men who have no context for it in the present, let alone to those who might find it useful in the future?
	None at all, so the ruins lay buried in the desert for a people who do live within history to discover.
	Indeed, McIntyre seems to be completely vindicated here.
	It was the European explorers who viewed their story as the story of the great discoveries about the truth of history and of the world that put excavating the ruins of Assyria into a meaningful context.
	Without it, why bother?
	It was the same when the French began investigating the pyramids after Napoleon's conquest of Egypt.
	They had been plundered of anything of immediate monetary value millennia ago, but the story of the men who had built them had been alien to the Arab conquerors and forgotten until it was pieced together by the Europeans on the historical Faustian mission.
	And it was John David Ebert's article on the end of history and the last Felahin in this issue that finally revealed to me that for which I'd been searching.
	In it, he charts Oswald Spengler's stages of civilization, from the pre-culture phase of the half-nomadic tribes vying for resources, to the early culture phase, the spring, in which the civilization begins to tell itself the story of why it is there and what it's trying to achieve.
	This is where the formative ideas and foundational values set the civilization on its course throughout its future history.
	It then moves to the summer, in which the people living uncritically within their civilizational narrative bloom and expand outwards, through to the autumnal decay of the late culture period, where the state calcifies and the people within it care more for worldly goods than the purpose it originally embarked upon.
	This leads us to the final phase of winter, the collapse of meaning, and the beginning of cosmopolitanism, in which the intellectuals predominate over the agents, and the civilization becomes too conscious of its own flaws to continue.
	As Ebert puts it in the article, the world city intellect floating away from its ground of origin in Dason, which is rooted in the instinctive pulse, beat and rhythm of nature and the land, now overstrained in Wachseen, turns towards life itself and begins to cancel it too.
	When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, Spengler writes, life itself has become questionable.
	This collapse of morale is the point that I believe we are at now.
	We are cursed with too great a self-awareness about our own condition.
	The old stories of spreading democracy and human rights have been refuted by their own failures.
	And without an alternative narrative with which to direct our actions, we are at a loose end.
	And so we begin to tear down our own civilization for being incommensurate with the story that we inherited.
	So what we need is a new story, with which to explain our position in the world and within history itself, and it will be this that provides us with a purpose and a meaning as we move into the future.
	What we are living through is not the end of the West.
	It is just the end of the story of the Enlightenment.
	I don't know what comes next.
	Indeed, I don't think anyone could predict where we are going to go from here with any degree of accuracy, but I do think that this is what has happened, and I think this is where we ought to set our intellectual sights.
	Issue 4 of Islander magazine is available now and while stocks last, and I strongly urge you to get a copy while you can, as with each issue it is a beautiful collection of essays and art which has personally helped me understand what is happening in the twilight of our story.
	As always, there is only a limited print run of them and we will not be reprinting it.

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