Fiction VII

Fact as a Virtue

Fiction certainly has its virtues. It can enlighten and inform, exercise reading skills and increase vocabularies. It gives audiences access to concepts, landscapes and situations they would otherwise never encounter. At times it’s the best way to communicate important ideas, sometimes the only way.

Nevertheless, there are limits on the sort of information that be conveyed in this manner. Most of the time, the best way to learn about the world is to study it first-hand, or at least as close-hand as you can get.

While Newton’s bizarre life-story might be usefully illuminated by dramatisation, his Principia would suffer dreadfully. Calculus is difficult enough without it being further encoded into a human storyline. If you want to learn how to solve equations there’s no better way than studying equations directly – certainly more illuminating than studying narratives about people who themselves study the equations. In this case it’s definitely best to study first-hand.

In the last part I suggested that some of the virtues commonly ascribed to fiction are undeserved. As with mathematics, politics and human-nature are subjects best studied first hand. You might top-up your knowledge of these subjects with a fiction, or even be inspired to investigate further after consuming a fiction, but a fiction alone would be pretty worthless, in understanding these complex matters.

It may sound facetious, but I sincerely believe the best way to ‘lay bare the human condition’ is by reading pop science. The whole magnificent corpus of natural philosophy is available in lucid terms, written with the layman in mind. Evolution, genetics, psychology, theory of mind – these are our best hope of or seeing ‘directly into the human soul’. While fiction might provide gut-wrenching sensations of existence, pop science actually provides understanding, comprehension.

Just the same with politics. Watching The West Wing or Yes Minister might add colour and structure to your notion of government and civil service, but it’s no substitute for real politics. Without any accompanying knowledge of real politics political fiction becomes mere decoration.

I suspect a bit of self-deception is sometimes at play. It’s just so much easier to consume a fiction than go to source, and it’s a great bonus to think it’s doing us some good. Watching a drama about Newton is a far less daunting prospect than tackling his theories. Watching The Deer Hunter is far easier than reading Manufacturing Consent. Watching M*A*S*H is far easier than studying Korean history.

It’s a bit like the one about the lazy lit student – watches the film of the book instead of reading the book itself. Dramatisations of important discoveries and events are bound to be less of a struggle to swallow than material closer to source, but we tend to pay for that decrease in difficulty with a proportional decrease in useful learning.

The ease with which we gulp down most of our fiction is a pretty good indicator that nothing too profound is being acquired. Real learning – such as that carried out by lit students – is a difficult, head scratching, business. Uncritically consuming fiction, on the other hand, is a breeze.

For the consumer it might sound like a free lunch, but as usual someone ends up paying. It’s tempting to let our feelings towards fictions become a substitute for legitimate moral concern. Reading about child labour in nineteenth-century Lancashire feels like a moral act, but it’s far less disquieting, or implicating, than reading about child labour in Vietnam today – great surges of compassion, none of the guilt. It hurts less to read Dickens because it doesn’t implicate us. All the emotion with none of the culpability.

If we allow ourselves to project our compassion onto simple fictional victims instead of ugly reality, the consequences are anything but virtuous. If we allow ourselves the warm moral glow when there’s no chance of a moral effect it’s a net moral loss. Read in isolation, fiction won’t change the world. You can read and discuss Dickens until the cows come home, but it’s morally worthless if you never apply it to the present. It’s just milking away your morality, rather than acting upon it.