One reason we deplore the dumbing-down of the school curriculum and
the rise of the Internet and its hyperlink culture. Perhaps we don’t
all read very much that we would count as great literature, but we’re
apt to feel guilty about not doing so, seeing it as one of the ways
we fall short of excellence. Wouldn’t reading about Anna Karenina,
the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our
imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities?
If someone now asks
you for evidence for this view, I expect you will have one or both of
the following reactions. First, why would anyone need evidence for
something so obviously right? Second, what kind of evidence would he
want? Answering the first question is easy: if there’s no evidence
– even indirect evidence – for the civilizing value of literary
fiction, we ought not to assume that it does civilize. Perhaps you
think there are questions we can sensibly settle in ways other than
by appeal to evidence: by faith, for instance. But even if there are
such questions, surely no one thinks this is one of them.
What sort of
evidence could we present? Well, we can point to specific examples of
our fellows who have become more caring, wiser people through
encounters with literature. Indeed, we are such people ourselves,
aren’t we?
I hope no one is
going to push this line very hard. Everything we know about our
understanding of ourselves suggests that we are not very good at
knowing how we got to be the kind of people we are. In fact we don’t
really know, very often, what sorts of people we are. We regularly
attribute our own failures to circumstance and the failures of others
to bad character. But we can’t all be exceptions to the rule
(supposing it is a rule) that people do bad things because they are
bad people.
We are poor at
knowing why we make the choices we do, and we fail to recognize the
tiny changes in circumstances that can shift us from one choice to
another. When it comes to other people, can you be confident that
your intelligent, socially attuned and generous friend who reads
Proust got that way partly because of the reading? Might it not be
the other way around: that bright, socially competent and empathic
people are more likely than others to find pleasure in the complex
representations of human interaction we find in literature?
There’s an
argument we often hear on the other side, illustrated earlier this
year by a piece on The New Yorker’s Web site. Reminding us of all
those cultured Nazis, Teju Cole notes the willingness of a president
who reads novels and poetry to sign weekly drone strike permissions.
What, he asks, became of “literature’s vaunted power to inspire
empathy?” I find this a hard argument to like, and not merely
because I am not yet persuaded by the moral case against drones. No
one should be claiming that exposure to literature protects one
against moral temptation absolutely, or that it can reform the truly
evil among us. We measure the effectiveness of drugs and other
medical interventions by thin margins of success that would not be
visible without sophisticated statistical techniques; why assume
literature’s effectiveness should be any different?
We need to go beyond
the appeal to common experience and into the territory of
psychological research, which is sophisticated enough these days to
make a start in testing our proposition.
Psychologists have
started to do some work in this area, and we have learned a few
things so far. We know that if you get people to read a short,
lowering story about a child murder they will afterward report
feeling worse about the world than they otherwise would. Such
changes, which are likely to be very short-term, show that fictions
press our buttons; they don’t show that they refine us emotionally
or in any other way.
We have learned that
people are apt to pick up (purportedly) factual information stated or
implied as part of a fictional story’s background. Oddly, people
are more prone to do that when the story is set away from home: in a
study conducted by Deborah Prentice and colleagues and published in
1997, Princeton undergraduates retained more from a story when it was
set at Yale than when it was set on their own campus (don’t worry
Princetonians, Yalies are just as bad when you do the test the other
way around). Television, with its serial programming, is good for
certain kinds of learning; according to a study from 2001 undertaken
for the Kaiser Foundation, people who regularly watched the show
“E.R.” picked up a good bit of medical information on which they
sometimes acted. What we don’t have is compelling evidence that
suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading
Tolstoy.
Not nearly enough
research has been conducted; nor, I think, is the relevant
psychological evidence just around the corner. Most of the studies
undertaken so far don’t draw on serious literature but on short
snatches of fiction devised especially for experimental purposes.
Very few of them address questions about the effects of literature on
moral and social development, far too few for us to conclude that
literature either does or doesn’t have positive moral effects.
There is a puzzling
mismatch between the strength of opinion on this topic and the state
of the evidence. In fact I suspect it is worse than that; advocates
of the view that literature educates and civilizes don’t overrate
the evidence — they don’t even think that evidence comes into it.
While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it
looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is.
Now, philosophers
are careful folk, trained in the ways of argument and, you would
hope, above these failings. It’s odd, then, that some of them write
so confidently and passionately about the kinds of learning we get
from literature, and about the features of literature that make it a
particularly apt teacher of moral psychology. In her influential book
“Love’s Knowledge,” Martha Nussbaum argues that the narrative
form gives literary fiction a peculiar power to generate moral
insight; in the hands of a literary master like Henry James, fiction
is able to give us scenarios that make vivid the details of a moral
issue, while allowing us to think them through without the
distortions wrought by personal interest.
I’m not inclined
to write off such speculations; it is always good to have in mind a
stock of ideas about ways literature might enhance our thought and
action. But it would be refreshing to have some acknowledgment that
suggestions about how literature might aid our learning don’t show
us that it does in fact aid it. (Suppose a schools inspector reported
on the efficacy of our education system by listing ways that teachers
might be helping students to learn; the inspector would be out of a
job pretty soon.)
I’m confident we
can look forward to better evidence. I’m less optimistic about what
the evidence will show. Here, quickly, is a reason we already have
for thinking the idea of moral and social learning from literature
may be misguided.
One reason people
like Martha Nussbaum have argued for the benefits of literature is
that literature, or fictional narrative of real quality, deals in
complexity. Literature turns us away from the simple moral rules that
so often prove unhelpful when we are confronted with messy real-life
decision making, and gets us ready for the stormy voyage through the
social world that sensitive, discriminating moral agents are supposed
to undertake. Literature helps us, in other words, to be, or to come
closer to being, moral “experts.”
The problem with
this argument is that there’s long been evidence that much of what
we take for expertise in complex and unpredictable domains – of
which morality is surely one – is bogus. Beginning 50 years ago
with work by the psychologist Paul Meehl, study after study has shown
that following simple rules – rules that take account of many fewer
factors than an expert would bother to consider – does at least as
well and generally better than relying on an expert’s judgment.
(Not that rules do particularly well either; but they do better than
expert judgment.)
Some of the evidence
for this view is convincingly presented in Daniel Kahneman’s recent
book “Thinking Fast and Slow”: spectacular failures of expertise
include predictions of the future value of wine, the performance of
baseball players, the health of newborn babies and a couple’s
prospects for marital stability.
But why, I hear you
say, do you complain about people’s neglect of evidence when you
yourself have no direct evidence that moral expertise fails? After
all, no one has done tests in this area.
Well, yes, I grant
that in the end the evidence could go in favor of the idea that
literature can make moral experts of us. I also grant that moral
thinking is probably not a single domain, but something that goes on
in bewilderingly different ways in different circumstances. Perhaps
we can find kinds of moral reasoning where experts trained partly by
exposure to the fictional literature of complex moral choice do
better than those who rely on simple moral rules of thumb.
I haven’t, then,
in any way refuted the claim that moral expertise is a quality we
should aspire to. But I do think we have identified a challenge that
needs to be met by anyone who seriously wants to press the case for
moral expertise.
Everything depends
in the end on whether we can find direct, causal evidence: we need to
show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive
difference to the people we end up being. That will take a lot of
careful and insightful psychological research (try designing an
experiment to test the effects of reading “War and Peace,” for
example). Meanwhile, most of us will probably soldier on with a
positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by
nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment.
I have never been
persuaded by arguments purporting to show that literature is an
arbitrary category that functions merely as a badge of membership in
an elite. There is such a thing as aesthetic merit, or more likely,
aesthetic merits, complicated as they may be to articulate or impute
to any given work.
But it’s hard to
avoid the thought that there is something in the anti-elitist’s
worry. Many who enjoy the hard-won pleasures of literature are not
content to reap aesthetic rewards from their reading; they want to
insist that the effort makes them more morally enlightened as well.
And that’s just what we don’t know yet.