Folklore has a bit of an identity crisis. It treads fines lines, spilling over into ethnography or anthropology too easily. It also has a bad rep from things like the Third Reich, which immediately understood the value of inventing a folklore for national consumption and adoption. Folklorists have “discovered” that Hollywood films follow a standard story line, much to George Lucas’ apparent surprise when he wrote the original Star Wars script. But such storytelling goes back well before the bible to the time of shamans. Writers have known this structure for millennia.

Now, Bill Ivey, of the American Folklore Society, and head of the National Endowment for the Arts under Clinton, presents an argument for folklore in policy-making. He doesn’t really succeed.

Folklore listens. It records stories, jokes, songs, plays, books – everything that makes up a society. As Ivey admits, this also includes urban legends, fake news and ulterior motives. One of its illuminati, Richard Dorson, defined it as “the hidden submerged culture lying in the shadow of official civilization.“

The problem it seeks to solve is, at base, communication. The West thinks it’s better. It has a better way, better insight, better tools, better institutions, and better attitudes. Maybe so, Ivey says, but it has all been squandered in 250 years of “Enlightenment”, to the point where the majority no longer believes it, and actively seek to undermine it. Ivey postulates the end of the Enlightenment as “the exhaustion and rejection of social justice, elites, secularism, science, and political participation as underpinnings securing progressive modernism.” We see it in the rise of populism and nationalism worldwide. Trump is a symptom.

But the book never successfully makes the case that folklore can reverse the situation or lead the way into a solution. It is mostly a history of folklore as a discipline. It is a history of its notable proponents, its unfortunate relationship with government, and the internal arguments that make it more or less valuable – I can’t tell from the text. At no point does folklore present itself as expert in economics, or as the expertise needed to make Ivey’s claims against politicians, economies and enlightenment that he does throughout. It is a 145-page editorial that pretty much any liberal scholar could have written except for the profiles of “celebrity” folklorists.

At bottom, Rebuilding an Enlightened World is deeply dissatisfying.

David Wineberg ( )