Should We Bust Narrative Monopolies?

History is written by the victors used to be a mainstream argument of the cultural left. A better, juster world could and would only be achieved by challenging official history and letting the “subaltern speak.”

Carlo Ginzburg’s mesmerizing The Cheese and the Worms sought to retrieve and reconstruct the heretical ideas of everyday folk in the early modern period—in contrast to the official positions of the Church. Meanwhile, historical revisionism challenged the dominant, accepted narratives from the right.

The ethos of not marginalizing any voices is one that can cut in all political directions, and one of the reasons why current debates about censorship and free speech make strange bedfellows.

Today, the information and narrative monopoly of mainstream media, universities, and public intellectuals, however, is already in decline, thanks to social media. Worldview making, like beer brewing and knitting, has become yet another DIY “craft.”

We now live in the world theorized by the likes of Baudrillard and Lyotard, who proclaimed the “Death of Grand Narratives.”

Is this a good, “liberating” thing?

Should we wish for even more narrative fracture and “customized” worldview building? Or should we hope for more narratives (i.e., “myths”) to hold us together and give us a common language?

Baudrillard wrote in Simulacra and Simulation (1980) that consumerism would be the only thing holding together the imaginations and loyalties of citizens in Western capitalist democracies. If he’s right, is that good or bad? And if it’s bad, what do you propose as an alternative?