Last week, the Texas State Legislature effectively banned Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at all state institutions and nearly ended the practice of Tenure in the state. Texas conservatives have not been acting in isolation: they follow over a year of an aggressive remaking of education in Florida that has seen the banning of conversations about being gay in primary school, the wholesale eradication of books in schools, a state-wide embargo against teaching Critical Race Theory, (CRT), and an ideological transformation of the higher educational system, the impact of which will take years to evaluate.
These actions have a kinship with other legal transformations across the United States, including an ongoing destruction of the social safety net, the banning of gender affirming therapies, and a broad attack on reproductive rights. Their advocates are fighting against what they claim is liberal indoctrination, but understanding how narrative works shows they are doing the opposite. They are acting in favour of perpetuating inequality and oppression.
There are two kinds of stories that make me see the political situation in the United States like this. The first is a little-known tale of the last Greek hero. The second comes from modern psychology and human development.
A heroic tale
The travel writer Pausanias and the biographer Plutarch both tell the story of the boxer Kleomedes. According to Pausanias (6.9.6-9), Kleomedes was victorious at the Olympics but was stripped of his prize for cheating. In his rage he went back home to Astypalaia and attacked a school containing over sixty children. He caused the roof to collapse on them and then fled to take refuge in the temple to Athena. There, he disappeared after hiding in a chest. When The Astypalaians sent a herald to the Oracle at Delphi to try to figure out what happened, the oracle responded, “Kleomêdês the Astupalaian was the last of the heroes—Honour him with sacrifices since he is no longer mortal.”
Pausanias concludes simply by stating that the Astypalaians followed the command of the Delphic Oracle and honoured Kleomedes into his own time.
I have had this story in my head for a few years now for several reasons. It echoes an essential aspect of ancient heroic narratives that people usually miss, heroes are dangerous to their communities. The Homeric heroes Achilles and Odysseus are marked out for this, Achilles prays for his own people to be killed to satisfy his insulted honour; Odysseus loses all his companions on his return home and then kills over one hundred of the youths left in Ithaca when he gets there. Herakles, as the Greek hero par excellence, sets this pattern: he loses his mind and kills his first wife (Megara) and is killed in turn by his last wife (Deineira).
Heroic narrative–especially that contained in Greek epic and tragedy–isn’t supposed to be propaganda; it doesn’t provide a simple guide on the journey through life. Instead, heroes are messy and complex figures who suffer and deal out suffering in turn. They are neither to be imitated or emulated; instead, they are like ancient case studies for reflection. The point of a heroic narrative is not to be like Achilles and Odysseus, but to learn how not to be like them. The point of reading these narratives together is not to imitate heroic society, but to create the space and the conversation to imagine a better one.
The story of Kleomedes the last hero has long reminded me of the alienation attributed to school shooters in the U.S., the way our narratives of these mass killers try to make sense of what shaped their actions. Kleomedes strikes out because he does not receive the honour, he thinks he is due, because he ends up being less the hero than the villain of his cultural narrative.
The traditional account that has the priest of Apollo declaring Kleomedes the last of the heroes is pointed. Apollo, as the god of epic poetry, signals that the heroic narrative has run its course. There’s no more space for heroes in the world once we acknowledge the real impact of what they do.
Heroic scripts and toxic narratives
The story of Kleomedes is in a way about what I now think of as toxic heroism. Characters who expect success or honour because of their traditional place in their society lash out at that society when their hopes are unfulfilled. There are echoes of this in nearly every mass shooting of the past decade. I think there’s something deeply embedded in this pattern in racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia too.
Studies in the way narrative works at a cultural level–and the pressures it exerts on groups and individuals–have shown how socially authorized tales like heroic narratives provide what some have called a “cultural script” or a master narrative. Our individual identities are made up of overlays of our experiences and the narratives that shape our relationships with others. A significant source of trouble–and often trauma–is when our personal experience (and personal narrative) clashes with what researchers have called a “master narrative”.
Master narratives speak to identities within a community to convey a historically authorised kind of identity: it is steeped in ideology and typically in support of a kind of political or economic status quo.
In the so-called Western world, we have master narratives that shape our notions of gender, race, ability, and agency. As authors like Kate McLean and Moin Syed emphasise, these master narratives provide guidelines for living, they exist everywhere, are often invisible, and in addition, possess a compulsory force marked by a kind of structural rigidity.
To challenge the essential frameworks of such a narrative is to threaten both individual identity and faith in a world that provides that identity with meaning and belonging. For those most fully invested in a dominant world view, the challenging of master narratives is tantamount to pulling apart the fabric of reality itself.
The politics of indoctrination
A common realisation among my colleagues who spend time on social media is that a wide number of accounts that purport to celebrate antiquity or educate about the achievements of ‘western civilization’ are deeply invested in a worldview that is monolithic, that is white, male, heterosexual, and interested in evaluating the world from these perspectives alone. On the other side of this anonymous groundswell are conventional academics invoking the bugbear of “cancel culture”. Plutocrats like Elon Musk bemoan the “woke mind virus” that is destroying us and hundreds of thousands of people amplify his message.
But note how those groups most loudly decrying indoctrination are those most deeply invested in traditional forms of indoctrination, in maintaining strict gender roles, in marginalizing women and people who can get pregnant by destroying reproductive justice, and by tamping down on every academic discipline that either seeks to fight injustice or can help us recognise it. Attacks on tenure in Texas, book banning in Florida, and revocation of gender affirming care throughout the United States are part of a concerted effort to make everyone live by the same script, regardless of who they get to be in the story.
Master narratives are a dangerous part of human culture because they support a narrow status quo that raises a few to the detriment of many. When these dominant scripts are challenged, people react reflexively because they don’t have the emotional or intellectual frameworks to understand what is happening. The most famous responses come with violence, but the greater long term and structural harm comes from the ground game, as lives are foreclosed and silenced from town to town, and state to state.
Schools should be the places where art and narrative are explored so we can understand the power they have over us; healthcare should be the service that maximizes the lives we can live together. For a simple confirmation of the influence of traditional narratives, look at what happens in our public discourse when a woman takes a heroic role, when a brown or black person is made a protagonist, or when a public figure does not adhere to our strict gender binary.
There’s no coincidence to the return of thinly veiled white supremacy and its retinue of hatreds over the past decade: it is a paroxysm in response to traditionally marginalized groups taking control of narrative themselves and modern technology allowing those who have been taught to see themselves at the centre of the world to know about it. Like Kleomedes, they lash out and bring the schools tumbling down.
Joel Christensen is Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Brandeis University. He has published extensively and some of his work include Homer’s Thebes (2019) and A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice (2018). In 2020, he published The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic with Cornell University Press.