Hello. My name is Jesan Sorells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast. Bonus. There's usually no book reading on these bonus episodes. These are usually long form rants, raves, or interviews with interesting people doing interesting things at the spacious intersection of literature and leadership. Because listening to me talk with interesting people about interesting projects is still better than reading and trying to understand yet another business book.
In the continued spirit of violating our own rules and boundaries this year on the show, or at least maybe not this year, maybe this quarter, we are introducing to you today a short essay that relates to leadership even though it happens to be a critique of literature and storytelling from the late nineteen thirties.
I discovered this essay as background to yet another essay I was reading that was critiquing the postmodern problem, the uniquely postmodern problem of providing narrative advice or wisdom in a postmodern world of fragmented communications to people who are desperately in need of, well, wisdom. In reading the essay that we are going to cover today on the show which comes in at 14 pages and is subdivided into 19 different sections, it is not an easy one to mentally digest.
However, on this show we have covered many difficult texts and we aren't going to stop now. The author of the essay we are analyzing for leaders today would appreciate, I think, the ultimate conceit of what we are attempting to achieve on our podcast by discussing his work and leveraging insights from it to offer solutions to a core problem that bedevils us in leadership even almost a century later, especially at the end of our fourth turning.
Today, we will be reading excerpts from and summarizing some of the interesting ideas within the essay, The Storyteller, Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Lesko by Walter Benjamin. Leaders. The communicability of experience is decreasing, which has damaging results for the transference of wisdom based on life experience and book knowledge across generations. And despite our best efforts in the West to locate it, the abyss of the problem seems to have no bottom.
And so we're going to pick up today from The Storyteller, Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov by Walter Benjamin. You can get a copy of this essay. It is open source online. You can actually get it from, Stanford University, MIT, Cambridge, and a number of other locations online. I wouldn't recommend going and grabbing the PDF of it. It's worth your time as a leader to read. Starting at the beginning, we're gonna read section one paragraph
one. Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. To present someone like Lescov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us, but rather increasing
our distance from him. Viewed from a certain distance, the great simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him or rather they become visible in him just as in a rock a human head or an animal's body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision. This distance and this angle of vision are prescribed for us by an experience which we may have almost every day. It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to
an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions were taken from us, the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious. Experience has fallen in value, and it looks as if it is continuing to fall into
bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world, but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. With the first World War, our process began to become apparent, which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent, not richer, but poorer in communicable
experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth, and there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.
A generation that had gone to school on a horse drawn street car now stood under the open sky, a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds. And beneath these clouds, in a field of force, of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
There are several points in that first section of the essay that resonate, with me, particularly as a person who reads literature looking, searching, examining words of the past and seeking out wisdom that can be applied in the far flung future from when those words were originally written.
I wasn't the only one looking for wisdom in leadership and when you look into and explore and learn a little bit about the life of Walter Benjamin who is a name that I had known, or at least I had recognized floating around underneath several other essays that I had read
over the course of many years. You begin to realize that his ideas about the need for experience and his philosophy and cultural critique of media influenced many many folks including Marshall McLuhan and many others down through the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin was born July 1992 and died 09/26/1940. He was a German philosopher, cultural critique, media theorist, and of course an essayist. He was associated with the Frankfurt school in Germany which
automatically tags him as a Marxist. However, he was a contextual thinker who combined insights from German idealism because he was German, Romanticism, of course Marxism, Jewish mysticism, we'll talk a little bit more about that later, and Neo Kantianism, to understand a post world war one Germany and a world in general that was in the intergerum between the end of world war one and the beginning of world war two consistently and permanently in chaos.
Sound familiar? He was friends with the playwright Berthold Brecht whose plays we will be covering later on this year on this podcast so stay tuned for that. He's also related by marriage to Hannah Arendt whose book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, we will also talk about on this show in June. That's gonna be a vibrant conversation that you won't want to miss.
Benjamin considered his research and writing to be theological in focus though he eschewed recourse to understanding the world through the lens of either a Christian or the presence of a Jewish God. He was much like Kierkegaard looking for the transcendent without actually wanting to talk about or deal with the actual meaning of the transcendent.
In 1940 to escape the encroaching Third Reich who was looking for him desperately as they were for any intellectual Jew in Europe, Benjamin committed suicide at the age of 48 and he had always flirted by the way he'd always flirted with suicide, and flirted with thoughts of suicide. So he even had friends who had committed suicide. So this was not something that was sudden or an idea that was
unknown to Benjamin. Upon his death, his work achieved more recognition than in the decades than in the decades following his death, than it ever did in his life. He had the unfortunate bad fortune, depending upon your perspective, to be born at a time when a man such as him was merely seen as a person howling impotently at the moon. Back to the essay, back to the storyteller reflections on the work of Nikolai Lesko by Walter Benjamin.
By the way, I think Benjamin would be fascinated by the presence of the internet. I think he would drown in the deluge of social media but I also think that he would have severe critiques for a communication culture in which instant communication that would seem to say nothing actually now has fully manifested at scale. But don't let me try to convince you. Let's listen to what Benjamin has to say. We're gonna read section five of his
essay. And I quote, the earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story and from the epic in a narrower sense is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel becomes possible only with the invention of printing. One can be handed on orally. The wealth of the epic is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock and
trade of the novel. What differentiates the novel from all of the forms of prose literature, the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience, his own or that reported by others, and he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The
novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommesurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life's fullness and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living.
Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom. If now and then in the course of the centuries, efforts have been made most effectively perhaps in Wilhelm Meister's Wanderer to implant instructions in the novel. These attempts have always amounted to a modification of the
novel form. The Bildungsroman, on the other hand, does not deviate in any way from the basic structure of the novel. By integrating the social process with the development of a person, it bestows the most fragile frangible justification on the order determining it. The legitimacy it stands it provides stands in direct opposition to reality, particularly in the bildungsroman. It is the inadequacy that is actualized.
The nature, the true nature of storytelling there put forth by Benjamin is that of a process that should come out of the oral tradition. Right? It should somehow deliver profundity. It should somehow deliver wisdom. The storyteller, to quote from Benjamin, takes what he tells from experience, his own or that reported by others, and he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his
tale. The technology of the novel, and we'll talk a little bit about technology not in this section but in the next area, the next part, the technology of the novel disrupts that just like the technology of the cell phone or the technology of the movie camera or the technology of the computer or the technology of the Internet or the
technology of the car. Technology seeks ruthlessly to disrupt the transference of wisdom via telling of a story from one human to another and of course at scale this fractures and has terrible consequences for all of us. This is because storytelling is an artisanal form of communication that can be tied deeply to craftsmanship care, and the best parts of articulating wisdom from contending with the boundaries of material reality.
By the way, this is reflected in the book that we covered last month in our bonus episode, Matthew Crawford's shop class as soul craft. Storytelling, which again is an extension of the oral tradition as Benjamin noted was killed probably five eighty five years ago by the gradual grinding forces of the technology of the printing press. The nature of the technology that underlies the novel itself resists the transmission of wisdom in a way that the oral tradition does not.
There's an example that Benjamin points to, in his essay, and it's in section six seven, section seven, in the second paragraph. It's a it's a story, that he relates from, the Greeks, and I'm gonna read you the story. He says this and I quote, the first storyteller of the Greeks was Herodotus. In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his histories, there is a story from which much can be learned. It deals with, Semonites.
When the Egyptian king Semonites had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Semoniteis on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass, and he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing the spectacle, Pasa Minaitis, sorry, stood alone, mute and
motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground. And when presently he saw his son who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old impoverished man in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning.
Make from that what you will in our modern time, But that's a story, not a novel, not a novella, not a movie, not a TikTok, not a Facebook post, not a tweet, not a YouTube video. That is a document. That is a set of information, right, that does more than just give us facts. It gives us a feeling. It might be a feeling we don't like. It might be a
feeling we have to struggle with. It might be a feeling that causes us psychic trauma, but it is a feeling that comes directly out of the oral tradition nonetheless. The preference of people for consuming information via new technologies, which are many of which I've already mentioned like the printing press, novels, newspapers, magazines, cell phones, even social media versus accepting received wisdom via an oral tradition has a psychological basis. People like
the new. That's why people read the news. Heck, this goes back even further than Walter Benjamin if we want to get real. When the Apostle Paul was going to speak to folks in Athens, the men of Athens were curious to hear from him. You can read about this in Acts seventeen and and eighteen. They were curious to hear from him because, and I quote, they always wanted to hear about new things. Back to the essay, back to the storyteller, reflections on the work of Nikolai Lesko by Walter Benjamin.
By the way, in this, essay, he does, in his attempt to analyze storytelling wisdom and the transfer the psychological transfer of wisdom from one generation and even from one society to another. Benjamin does critique the work of the Russian writer Nikolai Lesko. And I'll say a little bit about him. Lesko was a contemporary of Tolstoy and even Dostoyevsky, but he was less read than both Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky. As a matter of fact, in the essay, Benjamin has this has this quote when he talks about craftsmanship and he says and I quote, This craftsmanship storytelling was actually regarded as a craft by Lascaux himself. Writing he says in one of his letters is to me no liberal art but a craft it cannot come as a surprise that he felt bonds with craftsmanship but faced industrial technology as a stranger Tolstoy must have understood this occasionally touches this nerve of
Lescov storytelling tap to sorry. Tolstoy who must have understood this occasionally touches this nerve of Lescov's storytelling talent when he calls him the first man who, quote, pointed out the inadequacy of economic progress. It is strange that Dostoevsky is so widely read, but I simply cannot comprehend why Lescov is not read. He is a truthful writer, Close quote. That's from Tolstoy. Right? And I think the reason why Leskov was not read and Dostoevsky was is because of the impact of
nihilism. A craftsman attempting to deal with the bonds of material reality without being nihilistic or defeatist particularly in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when no one knew anything and the industrial revolution in a Russia that had just come out of serfdom, well, that writer was going to be seen as naive at best and uninteresting at worst. Particularly as a formerly oppressed people. We're in a rush to consume the new. So we're gonna pick up with section eight.
I'm gonna read this paragraph from Walter Benjamin, and I quote, there is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than the chaste compactness, which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller foregoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the
story's claim to a place in the memory of the listener. The more completely it is integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. This process of assimilation, which takes place in-depth, requires a state of relaxation, which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places, the activities that are intimately associated with boredom are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this is the gift of listening is lost, and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost
when the stories are no longer retained. It It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tale in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This then is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.
This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship. Matthew b Arnold would agree, the author of shop class as soul craft. He would agree that this process of assimilation, which takes place in-depth, requires a state of relaxation, which is becoming rarer and rarer.
There are authors, some of whom will remain unnamed, who have said and who have agreed with Benjamin on this one as well, and I quote, if sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. Well, what is the thing we demand from our technologies today? What is the thing we demand from even our stories?
Well, we demand that we never be relaxed because we live in a world of anxiety which is the obverse of depression. We demand that we never be bored. I think of the titular line from Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. Oh well, whatever, nevermind. Yeah, okay. That's not the titular line. The titular line is here we are now. Entertain us. The yapping cry of the twentieth century was to be entertained particularly after the horrors of both World War one
and World War two. I mean the Harlem Renaissance and the jitterbugging of jazz of folks in jazz clubs occurred at the exact same time in New York City as the jitterbugging and entertaining of folks in the Weimar Republic occurred in Germany at the exact same time that f Scott Fitzgerald was noting that Gatsby couldn't find himself no matter how much booze and how much dancing and how many women he bedded spastic activity does not bring wisdom medicating for anxiety and for depression does not
bring wisdom being entertained constantly either by a supercomputer in your pocket or by other people at a party does not bring wisdom boredom silence sleep these things allow us to integrate all of the wide variety of experiences that we have in our lives that we seem to take for granted and they allow us to use our brains which by the way we talk a lot about evolution in our society and cultures this is just a side thought we talk a lot about
evolution in terms of natural selection but we don't talk about evolution in terms of the evolution of silence when the Egyptian king who beat his head upon seeing his house servant in a Persian procession when he beat his head with frustration he did so in a world where noise did not abound he actually had to think about it unfettered capitalism progressive socialism authoritarian marxism quote, unquote our democracy or constitutional republicanism can't provide wisdom to the postmodern
western man. A man drowning in noise so loud he can't even get bored enough to relax, much less to hear himself think. The essay that drove me in the direction of this particular essay and got me thinking about this, which I think is relevant for our podcast and for the leaders listening to it, the essay that drove me here was out of the Hedgehog Review by a fellow named Alexander Stern, published this year, in 2025 in late January.
And the title of the essay is, the story of advice, Narrative Wisdom in a Fragmented World. And, in the essay right at the beginning, he relates this, and I quote, in a column for The Point magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, comes out against advice. She makes her case using an anecdote involving the novelist Margaret Atwood.
Asks about her advice for a group of aspiring writers, Atwood is stumped and ends up offering little more than bromides, encouraging them to write every day and to try not to be inhibited. Callard excuses Atwood's banality, blaming it on the fundamental incoherence of the thing she was asked to produce. Advice for Callard occupies a nebulous terrain between what she terms,
quote, instructions and, quote, coaching. You give someone instructions, she writes, as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some further goal, Whereas coaching affects in someone a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value and athletic or intellectual or even social triumph. The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and condense the time intensive personal work of coaching into
instructions. The young person is not approaching Atwood for instructions on how to operate Microsoft Word. This is from Callard's writing that Stern is quoting. Nor is she making the unreasonable demand that Atwood become her writing coach. She wants the kind of value she would get from the second, but she wants it given to her in the manner of the first, but there is no there. There. Close quote. I agree with mister Stern. There is no there. There.
And in his critique of instructions in his critique of coaching and advice he mentioned benjamin essay and thus got us here. By the way, other writers have commented on this problem of there being no there there. Steven Pressfield talks about it in his book, The War of Art, and Seth Godin talks about it in his great non business business book linchpin. One of the ways I think to overcome this problem of a lack of boredom are our confusion with instructions and coaching with wisdom.
One of the ways to overcome this postmodern deeply fragmented incoherence we have in the world. One of the ways leaders I think can be helpful to have the positional authority and the status to be able to insist
on a certain standard. One of the things that we need to do, one of the things I think that would that would benefit us one of the pieces of well advice I would give leaders is that the reprioritization of memory has to occur and it has to occur as a way to deal with the death of the past But it also has to occur as a tool, designed to create epistemic meaning for
the future. Because this is the thing that we have been robbed of as leaders in our postmodern era, which makes us open to all kinds of information, but not real wisdom based on promises delivered by split tongued technologists. So you may say that I don't, I'm a I'm a little bit of a split tongue hypocrite myself. You might say
that. You might say, hey. You have a podcast and you offer advice and you offer instruction and you read these pieces of literature and you you read these essays, and you read these nonfiction books, you assiduously try to avoid business books, but you go into places, novels included, where, you know, everything that Benjamin talks about the novel itself is guilty of. And so what are you doing? Are you undercutting your own project? I
don't think so. I don't think I'm undercutting my own project by talking about what Benjamin or by addressing Benjamin here and introducing Tim to you in this episode today. I don't think I'm undercutting myself at all. Matter of fact, I think I'm I'm I'm shoring up the eroding beachhead of this podcast. So podcasting technology in and of itself is designed to tell stories.
Think about maybe the true crime podcasts that you listen to or think about a really really good Joe Rogan interview or Theo Vaughn or whoever. When you listen to those people they, yes, are seeking to pull information out of their guest or out of the topic but at a certain point a switch happens and people start telling the host, telling themselves, telling the listeners stories. Storytelling, and this is where I separate from Benjamin, is going
to be consistent in our lives. It's gonna be something that we as human beings can't abandon, but we will, and this is the hard part, we will abandon the the transmission of wisdom through that storytelling medium because we actually don't have any wisdom to give. The piece that sent me off on thinking about this the critique of fragmented a fragmented fragmented communication world. The piece that set me off on this critiqued Margaret Atwood.
Now I got to admit I don't think much of Margaret Atwood as a novelist. I don't think The Handmaid's Tale was that brilliant. I've tried to read a couple of her other books. I just can't get in to Margaret Atwood. For me personally with Atwood as an author there's no there there. But that doesn't mean that there's no there there for others. Right? And so what may not be for me might be for someone else. By the way, that's wisdom. That's
not instruction. But how do I get to there? How do I how do I make that determination? How do I wind up lapping up on the shores where it's okay for me to dislike Margaret Atwood and use the technology of the podcast or dislike Margaret Atwood? I don't know her. Dislike her writing. Podcast or dislike Margaret Atwood.
I don't dislike her. I don't know her. Dislike her writing. Right? And for me to say that on the technology of a podcast, utilizing the technology of a podcast, imagining myself talking to someone who is sitting across from me today, even though no one is is sitting across from me today this is a solo show and to do it in a way that hopefully gives some sort of wisdom to leaders who might be listening and might be along this journey with me.
How do I get there from here? Well, Benjamin, of course, gives me an idea. In section nine, he says this of his essay, and I quote, the storytelling that thrives for a long time in the middle of work, the rural the maritime and the urban is itself an artisan form of communication as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller in order to
bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. Close quote I love that when you tell a story you're bringing a piece of yourself to it and in the best forms of human communication human interaction I can see people still insisting that the clay pot they are getting, yes, it must contain
something in it. But even more importantly even more importantly, it must have the it must have the handprints of the potter embedded in it. What does this mean for us here at the end of the fourth turning as leaders? Well I think it means a few things. Number one: every generation has to relearn the wisdom that the previous generation considered to be table stakes for existing in the world, for understanding reality and for preserving the gift of feedback which is also a story by the way to the
future. There is wisdom that
defies the technologies used to transmit it. Some of that wisdom comes out of some of our oldest books like the bible, the Torah, the Quran, Benjamin even brings up Herodotus those things will survive regardless of what technological form they are put in and they may even outlast the earth itself these forms of wisdom ancient and deep encompass the oral tradition but the oral tradition then leverages the technology to avoid being rendered extinct by it and if you are a leader
that's really the wisdom there not the tip such as it were that's the wisdom leverage technology to avoid being rendered extinct by it we are coming up at the end of the fourth turning we are turning into a high into a first turning and the wisdom achieved and attained the hard won wisdom achieved and attained in a previous chaotic fourth turning during a first turning, during a high, when the jitterbugging is going on, the alcohol is flowing, the
jazz is thumping, and everyone's feeling pretty good. The wisdom that was attained in the past chaos, no matter how it's transmitted or what technology is used to transmit it, is typically
ignored, dismissed, or shuffled away. And this is because of the principles of the first turning the ideas and the psychological posture that underlie the people who are living through it and I quote from the wikipedia article about the first turning according to Strauss and Howe the first turning is a high which occurs after a crisis during the high institutions are strong and individualism is weak society is confident about where it wants to go collectively
though those outside the majoritarian center often feel stifled by conformity.
Close quote. The next generation of folks we have coming up, generation alpha and behind them generation beta, I guess we're gonna start with the alphabet again, are going to be profit idealists in the mold of folks who, well the mold of folks who in the last great turning in America were either very very hyper confident GIs coming out of World War II or if you go back a little bit further were the folks that were very very confident going into the civil war profit
idealist types always exist in a high and folks like myself nomads the thirteenth generation such as it were we always get dismissed in a high our wisdom gets shuffled away all the way to the edges outside the majoritarian center. This time will be a little bit different though because of technology, because of our insistence on the internet, because of social media. It will be a little bit different this time, but I don't know that it's going to
be that much different. I think our technologies that I think I know our technologies serve us and increasingly we serve them But it's a weird symbiotic story that we tell each other. What I do know is this this is a piece of wisdom at the close
here leadership will still be necessary even in the first turning. As a matter of fact leadership will probably be even more critical in the first turning because the naive, the ingenues, and the people just not paying attention will need all of the wisdom they can get from wherever they can get it because wars strife depression and upheavals insist on happening in every turning. And, well, that's it for me.