After Augusto Pinochet resigned from power, financial investigators discovered that the Chilean dictator had used public funds to amass a private library of 50,000 books. 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 that there is a lesson here about the role of great literature or the lack of it 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, maybe not – Hitler apparently didn’t like the classics either. Whether or not there is any merit to my suspicion, then we have cause for concern about our own society.
Book sales may be up, but book readers are down. Higher education literature programs are emptying. More anecdotally, I’ve noticed that relatively few adults I know, regardless of their education level, political beliefs, or religious beliefs, read good fiction for pleasure anymore. Some of the younger generation, that is my generation, struggle even to watch a quality movie.
What is behind all this? Declining attention spans, courtesy of smartphones and the Internet, surely bear some of the blame. But that alone can’t explain the problem, because some of the same people who refuse to pick up Dante, Dickens, or Shakespeare will happily spend hours listening to podcasts in their heads, scrolling through dense online journalism, or reading nonfiction books. Another culprit, then, 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.
Literary critic Dana Gioia, targeting this attitude, sums it up like this: “Who has time for [literature] when so many important things need to be done? Art is a luxury, maybe even a distraction, not a necessity.” Tech entrepreneur Jason Fried puts his views more bluntly: “There are so many amazing things that are real; I don’t need to spend time on a made-up story.” Even historian Tom Holland, himself a former novelist and otherwise brilliant advocate of the humanities, admits that “like most people, I basically stopped reading fiction when I was 14. “Fact is more interesting than fiction” is basically what I’ve come to believe.”
These statements are no doubt well-intentioned. However, they are gravely mistaken. Because the value of classic fiction is not just about its ability to hold 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 that great literature is indispensable to this end.
For example, empirical research suggests that reading “literary” fiction enhances social skills and broadens empathy. According to the researchers, absorbing “narratives that focus on the deep portrayal of the subjects’ inner feelings and thoughts” empowers readers to put themselves in other people’s shoes and vicariously experience alternative perspectives. This, in turn, “enables the complex social relations that characterize [healthy] human societies.”
It has also been argued that classical fiction offers a unique insight into human nature written widely: insight that is crucial to solving political problems. This claim is counterintuitive, since the study of the social sciences and history is usually considered the proper preparation for the statesman. But as political scientist Richard Jordan points out in his article “History, Social Science, and the ‘Literary Consciousness’,” these disciplines suffer from methodological flaws to which great literature, by contrast, is immune.
Specifically, social science of the quantitative variety is subject to “selection effects” and “reverse causation.” Because it can only observe what people have chosen to do, not what they have chosen NO to do, its predictions about what people WILL choose to do are routinely biased. Moreover, because people’s choices are often influenced by their imaginations of the future, not just by their memory of the past, this form of science, which assumes linear causal temporal relationships, can never perfectly determine real world cause and effect.
History, on the other hand, is subject to chance. It deals exclusively with special, one-off cases, and therefore it is difficult to draw general conclusions. Jordan explains:
To determine the effect of one thing against another, an observer must have more cases than causes. For example, if we believe that five variables reliably determine the wisdom or folly of appeasement, we should have at least five cases to study. Of course, the number of variables that affect sedation is actually much greater – but not, unfortunately, the number of cases…. [W]With something as rare as appeasement, no conclusion drawn simply from history can even be called justified.
Humanist scholar Irving Babbitt recognized these limitations of social science and history many years ago. To remedy both, he praised the study of classical fiction.
Babbitt’s logic was simple: people prefer stories that ring true to their own experiences. We can therefore assume that those stories that achieve “classic” status do so only by appealing to millions of readers over hundreds of years. This suggests that those stories capture something truly universal about the human experience. “By innumerable experiments,” writes Babbitt Literature and the American College“the world gradually distinguishes the more essential from the less essential,” so that “we may take our direction from [the classics] and be guided by them to decide what is essence and what is accident in human nature.”
This “democratic” evaluation of fiction is only a slight variation on the perspective that Aristotle offers in poetry. Babbitt bases his belief in the classics on the collective wisdom of past generations; Aristotle would probably have more faith in the educated judgments of the virtuous elites of the past. But like the modern humanist, the ancient philosopher asserts that great literature “tells not what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.” This makes it “a thing more philosophical and higher than history: because [literature] tends to express the universal, history the particular.”
Jordan’s article updates this argument with modern terminology. Classical fantasy overcomes the selection effects of the social sciences and reverses causality, in his words, because it “isolates causal paths, disallowing causes outside itself.” Meanwhile, it overcomes the contingency of history by remaining “mean-preserving and low-variance.” Consequently, great literature can enhance one’s understanding of human nature—and the inherent potential for government—in a way that neither social science nor history ever could.
This argument only holds if the classics really “express the universal.” This depends on whether one shares Babbitt’s belief in the collective wisdom of the ages or, if one is more Aristotelian, on the virtue of the judgments of past elites. Still, the case for classic fiction should give chronic fiction haters some pause. A thriving society depends on statesmen and citizens with well-formed imaginations: people who can engage with a range of perspectives and identify what is universal in the human experience. And it seems that a well-formed imagination can depend on consuming good stories.
These stories may not be the end of culture. Jordan, for one, is convinced that “fiction is a complement to scientific and historical study, not a substitute.” However, it is clear that fiction matters. If our libraries ever become collectively barren of literature as great as Pinochet’s—or Hitler’s—the safety of our politics will surely be called into question.