ow the telling of a good story Shapes a whole culture

Rarely indeed have philosophers written on the importance of
story-telling for the moral life. Yet that is how we become the
people we are. The great exception among modern philosophers
has been Alasdair MacIntyre, who wrote, in his classic After
Virtue, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can
answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself
a part?’” Deprive children of stories, says MacIntyre, and you
leave them “anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.”
No one understood this more clearly than Moses because he
knew that without a specific identity it is almost impossible not to
lapse into whatever is the current idolatry of the age – rationalism,
idealism, nationalism, fascism, communism, postmodernism,
relativism, individualism, hedonism or consumerism, to name only
the most recent. The alternative, a society based on tradition
alone, crumbles as soon as respect for tradition dies, which it
always does at some stage or another.