literature as moral fiber supplement

The Mundane Comedy

By in books, history, literature as moral fiber supplement, the statusphere

Roman Helmet Guy:

But if this answer is correct, it leads us to a troubling conclusion: New books are not worth reading. Why? Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything. Especially not those of us who are likely to get platformed by a major publisher.

…In conclusion I leave you with a rule of thumb for actually understanding the human condition by engaging deeply with a wide breadth of human experience and perspectives: Half the books you read must’ve been written before WW2, half of those must’ve been written before the American Revolution, and half of those must’ve been written before the fall of Rome.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the fashionable line among the cognoscenti was that reading literary fiction makes you “more empathetic.” Whatever the research actually said, the audience mostly heard the part it wanted to hear: Look at how admirable I am — so sensitive, so intelligent, so morally improved by my refined tastes. Now we get “long-ago-ism,” the mirror image of presentism: read “the classics” because modern culture is all groupthink, and old books will make you wiser and set you apart from the ignorant mob. And again, you can watch the audience seize the incentive: Look at how amazing I am for doing this.

It’s a perennial spiritual comedy. The self is infinitely adaptable. It can turn romance novels into “self-care,” and it can turn Thucydides into a caste marker. Either way, the point isn’t the book; it’s the glow. “I only read dead authors” can become its own Reddit — a pre-approved identity with pre-approved contempt.

The sober objection isn’t that old books are bad. It’s that they’re being sold, explicitly or implicitly, as a way to graduate from the human condition: read the right authors and you’ll become less stupid, less credulous, less vain, less herdlike. But no matter whether you read J. D. Robb or Herodotus, you’re still a confused animal, prone to the same rationalizations, the same fits of resentment, the same stupid mistakes, the same posturing and self-deception that humans have always practiced. Reading Thucydides won’t prevent you from wanting to be admired; it may simply supply better words for the desire.

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James notes the deeper difficulty: the apparently unexceptionable call to support the classics against the fashions conceals a dilemma, because all the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and may arrive disguised as fashions when they do. That should be enough to ruin any attempt to outsource discernment to a publication date. “Old” is not a sacrament, and “new” is not a sin. Time may alter the odds, but it doesn’t relieve you of judgment. You never get to stop weighing, measuring, and deciding what’s alive and what’s dead.

In fact, the fetish for old books can produce its own refined version of cliché. We mock the man for whom every political event he dislikes is Hitler; the helmeted antiquarian can fall into a classier variant, where every modern event has its precursor in Herodotus. The past becomes a stencil. You get the pleasure of analogy without the burden of particulars. But the particulars are precisely what matter: technology, scale, speed, institutions, incentives — everything that makes this moment different from the ones you’ve read about. The classics are not an answer key; they are lenses, and lenses can distort as well as clarify.

There’s also a more mundane point: the raw material of “human nature” isn’t scarce. You can find it in Target as easily as in Tacitus. The difference is that the Target experience doesn’t come with an introduction by Penguin Classics. Vanity, cruelty, tenderness, boredom, status games, self-serving moralism, genuine decency — the whole human condition is on display in the food court and in the Facebook comments for anyone who cares to look.

But the mall and the timeline don’t arrive pre-sifted. The chaff is still attached to the grain, and the sorting has to be done by you. That’s exactly what the would-be aristocrats resent. They prefer the fantasy of sitting in a chair with a pipe, imbibing the “best of” insights through a curated narrative, spared the indignity of wading through the unwashed muck of reality where the same human motives appear without a classical frame. But if you can’t find human nature in the mall, you won’t find it in Plato either.

So yes: read old books. They puncture the spell of the present. They remind you that your era’s obvious ideas are contingent, and therefore questionable. But don’t read them as a way to feel inoculated against folly. The past is useful precisely because it shows how little we change — and how easy it is to tell ourselves that we have.

One Side of a Personality

By in books, foolosophy, literature as moral fiber supplement, moralizing

Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism.

— George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. As Ye once riffed (prophetically) during a live performance, “I get my quotes from movies because I don’t read, or from, like, go figure, real life or something. Like, live real life; talk to real people; get information; ask people questions; and it was something about, ‘You either die a superhero or you live to become the villain.’” As clever as that sounds, receiving all of your information from the SBF ideal of six-paragraph blog posts, or from the movies and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as foolish as identifying as someone who chooses to eat only fast food.

Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue.

I would defend the practice of reading simply because it is, so to speak, my home. As Michael Oakeshott put it, “What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity.” I have always been a reader and always will be, and as such, the aggressively illiterate types that Williams talks about are beneath my contempt — although, I would add, I didn’t need to know that Kanye West, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sean McElwee hated books to gauge their lack of character; that should have been obvious to anyone beforehand. All that said, though, I have no desire to proselytize on behalf of the “virtue” of concentration and refinement, let alone witness to the heathens. I know many people who will cheerfully inform you that they haven’t read a book since high school, and yet they are still good people in all the ways that matter. Conversely, I would just point to any number of authors and academics as proof that a lifetime’s immersion in literature doesn’t necessarily do anything to develop character or general intelligence. By all means, spend your time reading. Just don’t fall prey to the conceit (that particularly seems to afflict writers for the Atlantic) that you’re “progressing” in any way by doing it.

Fanciful Fiction

By in extraordinary popular delusions, literature as moral fiber supplement

Mark Brown:

Governments that seem to have done best “are led by people who read fiction” she said, naming Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Iceland and Sanna Marin in Finland among them.

“They are all people who read fiction. What fiction gives you is the gift of imagination and the gift of empathy. You see a life outside your own bubble. If you’re sitting there reading your endless biographies of Churchill or Attlee or whatever, you’re not looking at the world outside your window. You’re not understanding the lives of ordinary people who populate the country you’re supposed to be governing. My advice to any politician is: go and read a novel and you’ll understand the world better and you can imagine a changed world better.”

We’re probably all familiar with the self-serving delusion among literary types that reading fiction makes you an all-around better person, a delusion that should be swiftly extinguished through familiarity with authors, publishers, and academic English departments. I just appreciate that McDermid adds the fresh twist that reading biographies (and, presumably, other non-fiction) means you’re ignorant and incurious about the world around you. Oh, honey, I can imagine a changed world just fine. By reading history, though, I find myself immune to the fantasy that self-proclaimed agents of change, like the BLM/Antifa brownshirts, are going to be any different from earlier power-hungry, bloodthirsty mobs. My advice to anyone, politician or citizen, is to aim for accuracy, not empathy.

The Moralizing of the Story

By in art, augean stables, extraordinary popular delusions, literature as moral fiber supplement, ohferfucksake

Et tu, Rebecca Goldstein?

People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people’s emotions.

Right—a recent study shows how reading literature leads to increased compassion.

Exactly. It changes our view of what’s imaginable.

 

The poor panda just can’t take much more of this.

This made him laugh, though.

The Improvers of Mankind

By in art, conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions, literature as moral fiber supplement

Emrys Westacott:

Here we come up against an embarrassing paradox lying at the heart of so much literary criticism. According to the most common species of critical analysis, a major part of the significance and value of much great literature is moral; the works communicate moral insights, moral truths, and moral warnings. But if this were correct, one would expect those who read most–that is, professors of literature, high school English teachers, editors, publishers and authors—to exhibit at least some of the supposed benefits that extensive engagement with literary texts is supposed to bring. But who would ever suggest that this is the case? Are the people who have swallowed shelves loaded with Milton, Goethe, Austen, Tolstoy, James, Shaw, Proust, Kafka, Marquez, Solomon, and the rest typically kinder or more trustworthy than people who are unversed in literature?  Do they tend to be more insightful about people and relationships? Are they less prone to self-deception? Do they make better parents or partners? Are they typically less self-centered or selfish? On the nation’s campuses, are English departments little oases of moral sensitivity and self-awareness? My experience has been that there is zero connection between how much a person has read, or how able they are to offer clever insights into literary texts, and their exhibiting any sort of enhanced moral awareness or commitment. The argument here is admittedly crude, but it still needs to be met. Anyone who thinks good literature is morally beneficial needs to persuade us that there is a causal connection between certain habits of reading and certain kinds of virtue.

…There is, in fact, a rather simple explanation of why no such causal connection exists. Most of us, most of the time, read literature for the same reason that we listen to music, watch films, visit art galleries, and so on: not for edification but for entertainment. This does not imply that we are shallow philistines compared to higher-browed aesthetes; the enjoyment we derive does not have to be simpleminded, thoughtless, or superficial. This is a crucial point. We can take pleasure in all sorts of things: in vivid sensations, aroused emotions, intellectual challenges, virtuosity, accuracy of representation, being surprised, being shocked, sheer beauty, subtlety, power, irony, wit, the capturing of a mood or feeling, cognitive insight, learning, enlightenment, moral deliberation and metaphysical reflection. But the value of the experience, and our motive for opening ourselves to it, lies overwhelmingly in the pleasure we experience rather than in any self-improvement we supposedly derive.

The first paragraph is important, because barely a week goes by without someone offering us a bite-sized, chocolate-coated, frosted sugar snack of an empty-calorie news morsel purporting to show that reading books justifies your narcissistic self-esteem (thankfully, there are usually fresh fruits and vegetables available as well). Lawd knows I’ve made the same point a few times myself. But I think the second paragraph brings up another point which deserves more recognition (one I may likewise have expounded upon). Westacott is right that we have a lingering sense of guilt over activities which are “merely” fun, amusing or enjoyable, and Lawd also knows I’m getting awfully tired of my inner sanctum of books and music being disturbed by people barging in, desperately looking for a place to escape the baleful glowering of John Calvin’s ghost. If you truly have anything profound to offer, it will express itself whether you listen to synthpop or chamber music, whether you read modernist fiction or detective novels. Stop looking to surround yourself with signifiers of profundity and just embody it.

How Oft Would Vice and Virtue Places Change!

By in art, augean stables, extraordinary popular delusions, literature as moral fiber supplement

Lee Siegel kicks the remaining shit out of the trendy idea that fiction-reading correlates neatly with conventional standards of moral character:

Perhaps it is appropriate, in our moment of ardent quantifying—page views, neurobiological aperçus, the mining of personal data, the mysteries of monetization and algorithms—that fiction, too, should find its justification by providing a measurably useful social quality such as empathy. Yet while the McGuffey Readers and their descendants used literature to try to inculcate young people with religious and civic morality, the claim that literary fiction strengthens empathy is a whole different kettle of fish.

Though empathy has become something like the celebrity trait of emotional intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sensitivity and gentleness popularly attributed to it. Some of the most empathetic people you will ever meet are businesspeople and lawyers. They can grasp another person’s feelings in an instant, act on them, and clinch a deal or win a trial. The result may well leave the person on the other side feeling anguished or defeated. Conversely, we have all known bookish, introverted people who are not good at puzzling out other people, or, if they are, lack the ability to act on what they have grasped about the other person.

To enter a wholly different realm, empathy characterizes certain sadists. Discerning the most refined degrees of discomfort and pain in another person is the fulcrum of the sadist’s pleasure. The empathetic gift can lead to generosity, charity, and self-sacrifice. It can also enable someone to manipulate another person with great subtlety and finesse.

Can’t Find a Better Man

By in art, augean stables, extraordinary popular delusions, literature as moral fiber supplement, ohferfucksake

 

In other words, by forcing you to think, empathize, and assume instead of handing you prototype characters whose actions and personalities can be squarely understood, literary fiction is literally making you a more caring and emotionally intelligent person.

And another study has shown that writing this type of self-serving horseshit on idiotic pop-culture blogs, or being the type of moderately-educated would-be snob who will immediately rush to share the link to such self-serving horseshit with other similarly-described simpletons through social media and thus momentarily validate hizzorher otherwise empty existence, is literally making you a much stupider person. I kid, of course. No one’s gotten around to doing that study yet, though I’m certain my suspicions will be confirmed. In the meantime, here’s Charles McGrath expanding upon the most obvious criticism one could make:

And the disconnect between art and morality goes further than that: not only can a “bad” person write a good novel or paint a good picture, but a good picture or a good novel can depict a very bad thing. Think of Picasso’s Guernica or Nabokov’s Lolita , an exceptionally good novel about the sexual abuse of a minor, described in a way that makes the protagonist seem almost sympathetic.

Yet art, when you experience it, seems ennobling: it inspires and transports us, refines our discriminations, enlarges our understanding and our sympathies. Surely, we imagine, we are better people because of it. And if art does this much for those of us who merely appreciate it, then it must reflect something even better and truer and more inspiring in the lives and character of the people who actually create art. We cling to these notions — especially that art morally improves us — against all evidence to the contrary, for as the critic George Steiner has famously pointed out, the Holocaust contradicts them once and for all. “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening,” Steiner writes, “that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” Or as Walter Benjamin once wrote: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.”

…Also.

All of Those So Proud Won’t Improve Upon It

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, extraordinary popular delusions, literature as moral fiber supplement

Annie Murphy Paul:

Recent research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that deep reading—slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity—is a distinctive experience, different in kind from the mere decoding of words. Although deep reading does not, strictly speaking, require a conventional book, the built-in limits of the printed page are uniquely conducive to the deep reading experience. A book’s lack of hyperlinks, for example, frees the reader from making decisions—Should I click on this link or not?—allowing her to remain fully immersed in the narrative.

That immersion is supported by the way the brain handles language rich in detail, allusion and metaphor: by creating a mental representation that draws on the same brain regions that would be active if the scene were unfolding in real life. The emotional situations and moral dilemmas that are the stuff of literature are also vigorous exercise for the brain, propelling us inside the heads of fictional characters and even, studies suggest, increasing our real-life capacity for empathy.

Sigh. You know, having been an enthusiastic reader since childhood, I’m almost ideally suited to be favorably disposed toward this message. Wouldn’t my ego just love to believe that my ability to concentrate intently on printed material made me wiser, deeper, more authentic? Luckily, I retain enough objective perspective to realize what a load of happy horseshit that would be. It’s just one skill set out of many, and by no means the most important. (Ironically, it’s hard to escape the impression that, for all the talk of empathy, advocates for the progressive benefits of literature seem to find it difficult to sympathetically imagine that a life lacking in sustained, focused concentration and reading for pleasure could still be fulfilling.)

Don’t get me wrong — I’m perfectly content with reading being my main hobby, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. But it’s not like reaching a certain level of knowledge or experience or empathetic wisdom elevates you above the storm and stress of everyday life, allowing you to always feel serene or in control. Complexity is not a uniformly “positive” thing. Your problems and obstacles likewise increase in complexity as well.

And if being able to vicariously experience such vivid emotions and moral complexity makes us “better” people, wouldn’t it follow, then, that the creators who envisioned such situations to begin with would be better as well? If reading great literature is such a net positive, shouldn’t the writing of it indicate an exquisitely developed moral perspective? To just go ahead and put too fine a point upon it, are we to understand that great writers are rarely, if ever, shitty excuses for everyday human beings?

This Is Not a Storybook of Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After

By in art, books, extraordinary popular delusions, literature as moral fiber supplement

Patricia Vieira:

The problem with most arguments in the debate about reading is that they posit literature as an instrument used to achieve a certain goal: either the good of the individual (it is good for you) or the good of society (it makes you good). Leaving aside the issue of deciding whether what makes you good is not, ultimately, good for you, a more fundamental question arises: why does literature need to be defended at all?

The anxiety to justify literature is symptomatic of our age, when all activities should have an easily identifiable objective. The difficulty with literature, as well as with music or the fine arts, is that it has no recognisable purpose or, in Immanuel Kant’s elegant formulation, it embodies “purposiveness without purpose”. Reading certainly has myriad effects, but it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how it influences each person and harder still to translate this impact in terms of quantifiable gains.

Literature breaks the continuum of the everyday and makes us stop and think. The linguistic experimentation that is the hallmark of the literary estranges us from the most commonplace of tools, our language, while the fictional elements of novels, plays and poems offer us a glimpse into a reality that is not our own.

Several months ago, there was some article making the rounds that claimed some sort of proof for the idea that reading fiction made you a better person. I think it was Arts & Letters Daily that pithily remarked how, if that were true, English departments should then be oases of enlightened, saintly behavior. That’s probably all the refutation it needs, but I’ll add a pair of pennies: it’s a progressivist delusion that the “bad” parts of humanity can be surgically excised, or selectively bred out of existence. Reading widely may increase the breadth and depth of one’s understanding of human experience, but the basic elements of that experience will still include all the things moralists call vices or sins. Reading widely may increase the cognitive tools at one’s disposal, without touching the perennial drives which motivate the use of those tools. All the condensed human experience and wisdom in the world won’t eliminate the forks in the road that we all constantly encounter and put us on a direct path to perfection.