Throughout history humans have constructed grand narratives to make sense of the world around them – Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Marxism, to name just a few. But in our age of skepticism, belief in grand narratives has declined. We are left with no clear story about who we are or where we are going. In this article, Matt McManus argues that the sense of meaningless and despair caused by the decline of grand narratives has been coopted by nationalist and authoritarian movements. McManus proposes that the answer is not another grand narrative, but a communal politics to fill the void of our postmodern age. In his classic book The Postmodern Condition the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard described postmodernity in terms of declining faith in “meta” or “grand” narratives. As the name suggests grand narratives are not ordinary stories. They are instead epic accounts of the world which try to encompass enormous swathes of events. Often tran…
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