Storytelling for a Crisis: Reading Herodotus with Joel Alden Schlosser

Podopticon

I like the classical authors. They’re fun. So many of them speak in earthy remarks, like, you can’t know you’re happy until you’re dead. Stuff like that. Whatever’s the opposite of a cheerful nonsense slogan.

But another reason to turn to the classics, even especially one Herodotus, is right here in this episode, which turns out to be timely–in so far as the humanities seem always now to be in a crisis.

Joel Alden Schlosser is my guest, and the crisis he addresses in his book, Herodotus in the Anthropocene, is not the humanities but climate. And yet, he shows us exactly why we need authors like Herodotus, and by extension the humanities.

Among the things Joel and I discuss are: types of equality and freedom, the notion of the known-world, collective action, despotism, the interplay of human freedom and earthly flourishing, Herodotus’s uniqueness, his use to us in the Anthropocence, and more–essentially what storytelling might do that shouting facts does not.