Conspiracies and Audiobooks
Two Updates about Storylife
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. I will return to regular Iliad posts later this week
I know I promised not to talk a lot about my book Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things that came out on January 14th, but I did want to share two things: first, Yale University Press sponsored a blog post about conspiracies that builds on the book. And, second, the audiobook format was released on February 18th.
In the post, I start by talking about weather related conspiracies from the fall, when the same groups that often deny the validity of human climate change were also claiming that hurricanes Helene and Milton were engineered by the Democrats to disrupt voting in swing states. I use that apparent contradiction to talk about how conspiracy theories rely on narrative forces of coherence and correspondence. We need to focus less on their ‘truth’ and more on why people are predisposed to accept worldviews that run contrary to nature and their own advantage.
I present my analogy of narrative as a living thing, as a kind of virus as a way of decentering the debate of fact and fiction and focusing more on what story does:
“The weak form of my argument is that narrative is something like a virus, which needs people to survive but whose mutations and adaptations are unpredictable. The stronger form of my argument is that narrative is essentially alive, with its own agency and interest in the world.”
Story is a human evolutionary characteristic that sets us apart from other animals; it is both a tool and a part of us, if we follow cognitive scientists who see narrative as instrumental not just in our sense of selves but in the development of consciousness. “Fake news” has been as instrumental in shaping human history as “facts”. And part of this is because of the relationship between narrative and a human sense of identity and agency:
Conspiracies develop in part as a rejection of a particular narrative that challenges communities’ sense of identity—they assert a view of causality and reality that at times is reaffirming and at other times creates a sense of belonging and a potential for regaining control of a world that is foreign or frightening. The problem, however, is that we treat conspiracies as if they are different and special. I believe that they are just a particularly damaging form of narrative.
It has been hard to promote a book while the world is falling apart. This is especially true when the content of the book addresses part of why the world is falling apart. The solution—a richer, deeper engagement with narrative from a young age and more—is not a quick fix and is ill-fit to facing up to the specter of actual fascism and the dangers of climate change.
Storylife was released as an audiobook on February 18th from Tantor Media. Don’t worry (or hope or fear?), I am not the narrator. The narrator is Graham Rowat who speaks more energetically than I do.
I am really delighted that there is an audiobook for a few reasons. First, I think it is a nice nod to the performance context of Homeric epic (people didn’t stand around reading Homer!). Listening is very different from reading something—it engages with and activates memory in surprising ways. Second, this is also an accessibility issue for people who are sight impaired or have reading issues or are just two busy to sit down.
Third, I am an audiobook junkie. I have been a member of audible since 2011 and have spent over four months of continuous time listening to audiobooks over that period. I started listening while commuting from Round Rock, Texas to San Antonio and continued, often while doing errands or domestic tasks or even running (when I don’t mind being slow).
Take a listen, there’s a sample on YouTube.