After Augusto Pinochet stepped down from power, financial investigators discovered the Chilean dictator had used public funds to amass a 50,000-book private library. It included everything from texts on Napoleon’s campaigns to the philosophical musings of Antonio Gramsci. And yet, virtually no classic works of fiction could be found among the stacks.
I suspect there is a lesson here about the role of great literature, or the lack thereof, in the formation of the statesman and the citizen. Perhaps it would be a stretch to suggest that Pinochet’s aversion to said literature predisposed him to become a mass-murdering autocrat. Then again, perhaps not—Hitler, apparently, also disliked the classics. Regardless, if there is any merit to my suspicion, then we have cause for concern about our own society.
Book sales may be up, but book readership is down. Higher-education literature programs are hollowing out. More anecdotally, I have observed that relatively few adults I know, regardless of their education level, political persuasion, or religious beliefs, read good fiction for pleasure anymore. Some in the youngest generation, i.e. my generation, struggle even to sit through a quality movie.
What is behind all of this? Declining attention spans, courtesy of smartphones and the internet, surely bear some of the blame. But that alone cannot explain the problem, for some of the same people who refuse to pick up Dante, Dickens, or Shakespeare will happily spend hours on end listening to high-brow podcasts, scrolling through dense online journalism, or reading nonfiction books. Another culprit, therefore, must be the prevailing spirit of utilitarianism, which measures all media by its entertainment or educational value—and judges classic fiction as lacking in both.
The literary critic Dana Gioia, taking aim at this attitude, sums it up thus: “Who has time for [literature] when so many important things need to be done? Art is a luxury, perhaps even a distraction, not a necessity.” Tech entrepreneur Jason Fried puts his own views more baldly: “There are so many amazing things that are real; I don’t need to spend any time on a made-up story.” Even the historian Tom Holland, himself a former novelist and otherwise great advocate of the humanities, admits that “like most men, I basically stopped reading fiction when I was 14…. ‘Fact is more interesting than fiction’ is basically what I have come to believe.”
These statements are doubtlessly well-intentioned. Nonetheless, they are sorely mistaken. For the value of classic fiction concerns not just its ability to hold the interest—which, I would argue, is far greater than Fried and Holland give it credit for—but its contribution to human development. And there is reason to believe great literature is indispensable to that end.
For example, empirical research suggests that reading “literary” fiction enhances social abilities and expands empathy. In the researchers’ words, the imbibing of “narratives that focus on in-depth portrayals of subjects’ inner feelings and thoughts” empowers readers to put themselves in other people’s shoes and vicariously experience alternative points of view. This, in turn, “enables the complex social relationships that characterize [healthy] human societies.”
It has also been argued that classic fiction provides unique insight into human nature writ large: insight that is crucial to the solution of political problems. This claim is counterintuitive, since the study of social science and history is typically considered the proper preparation for the statesman. But, as political scientist Richard Jordan points out in his article “History, Social Science, and the ‘Literary Conscience,’” these disciplines suffer from methodological drawbacks that great literature, by contrast, is immune to.
Specifically, social science of the quantitative variety is subject to “selection effects” and “reverse causality.” Because it can only observe what people have chosen to do, not what they have chosen not to do, its predictions about what people will choose to do are routinely biased. Furthermore, because people’s choices are often affected by their imagining of the future, not just by their remembering of the past, this form of science, which assumes temporally linear causal relationships, can never perfectly determine real-world cause and effect.
History, on the other hand, is subject to contingency. It deals exclusively with singular, one-off occasions, and it is therefore difficult to draw general conclusions from. Jordan explains:
To determine the effect of one thing versus another, an observer must have more cases than causes. For instance, if we believe five variables plausibly determine the wisdom or folly of appeasement, we must have at least five cases to study. Of course, the number of variables affecting appeasement is in fact much larger—but not, unfortunately, the number of cases…. [W]ith something as infrequent as appeasement, no conclusion drawn purely from history can even be called well-justified.
The humanist scholar Irving Babbitt recognized these limitations of social science and history many years ago. To remedy them both, he commended the study of classic fiction.
Babbitt’s logic was simple: People prefer stories that ring true to their experiences. Those stories that attain “classic” status do so only, we can therefore assume, by appealing to millions of readers across hundreds of years. This suggests those stories capture something truly universal about the human experience. “By innumerable experiments,” Babbitt writes in Literature and the American College, “the world slowly winnows out the more essential from the less essential,” such that “we may take our bearings from [the classics] and be guided by them in deciding what is essence and what is accident in human nature.”
This “democratic” appraisal of fiction is only a slight variation on the perspective Aristotle offers in his Poetics. Babbitt bases his faith in the classics on the collective wisdom of past generations; Aristotle would probably place more confidence in the educated judgments of past virtuous elites. But, like the modern humanist, the ancient philosopher asserts that great literature does not “relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.” This makes it “a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for [literature] tends to express the universal, history the particular.”
Jordan’s article updates this argument with modern terminology. Classic fiction overcomes social science’s selection effects and reverse causality, in his words, because it “isolates causal pathways, disallowing causes outside itself.” Meanwhile, it overcomes history’s contingency by remaining “mean-preserving and low variance.” Consequently, great literature can amplify one’s understanding of human nature—and consequent potential for statesmanship—in a way that neither social science nor history ever could.
This argument only holds if the classics really do “express the universal.” It depends on one sharing Babbitt’s faith in the collective wisdom of the ages or, if one is more Aristotelian in bent, putting stock in the virtue of past elites’ judgments. Nonetheless, the case for classic fiction should give some pause to the chronically fiction-averse. For a flourishing society depends on statesmen and citizens with well-formed imaginations: people who can engage with a variety of perspectives and identify what is universal about the human experience. And it seems well-formed imaginations may depend on the consumption of good stories.
Those stories may not be the end-all-be-all of culture. Jordan, for one, is adamant that “fiction is a complement to scientific and historical study, not a substitute.” Nonetheless, it is clear that fiction matters. If our libraries ever become as collectively barren of great literature as Pinochet’s—or Hitler’s—the soundness of our polity will surely be in doubt.
This post was originally published on here
