Hildegarde

Okay.  I’m on round two of winter health crud here–this time it seems to be just your standard cold, sore throat, feel like yuck, you know what I mean.  But with the schedule I  keep, I’m bone tired and can’t sleep in until  Sunday–my younger son has classes on Saturday, which means getting up at three thirty even on the week-ends–so I’m feeling a little disorganized.   So let me try to cover a few things without worrying about the structure of the whole, so to speak.

First, I never said that fiction didn’t “change lives.”  I said the humanities–literature, music, art (and history, but I’ll get to this in a minute)–didn’t make us good people, and it doesn’t.  On the individual level, the jury is still out on what people like Arnold claimed that an understanding of the humanities would do–that is, make the individual better than he would have been without them–and I’ll leave determination of the truth or falsity of that to whoever figures out how to test it.

But on the society-wide and culture-wide level, there’s no doubt at all–it is narrative that shapes out societies and changes them.  And those changs are often enormous.   Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more to turn public sentiment against slavery, and make it impatient of resolution, than the thousands of abolitionists tracts and lectures that had been issued across the county in the decades that preceded it.  When Virgil wanted to give  Rome a sense of identity, he didn’t write a philosophical tract on the glories of the Empire, he wrote The Aeneid, convinced that it was the Iliad and the Odyssey, not Aristotle and Plato, that had made the Greeks the great civilization they were.

Human beings live and die by narrative, and this narrative is almost always at least partially finctional.  It is always consciously shaped.  Remember how I said I’d get back to history?   History has always been considered one of the humanities–not the “social sciences”–because from the beginning, history has been about producing narratives and claiming them to be ‘true stories!”

I don”t mean that there”s no such thing as fact in history. Of course there is.  The problem is that, if all you had was a list of facts, without framework or interpretation, you wouldn’t have anything particularly useful, or particularly of interest to just about anybody.  Herodotus and Thucydides both knew this, and they felt no compunction at all about making up speeches to put in the mouths of historical figures, or turning entire events into platforms for moral instruction.

These days we’re more careful.  We don’t do anything so blatant as simply to make up what somebody is supposed to say.  But we don’t just stick to the facts, either, because we can’t.   A list of all the facts that make up the Civil War would tell us very little about the Civil  War–that’s why Bruce Catton writes narratives called histories, not fact sheets.  And even if every single fact he gives is verifiable, the further fact is that he only gives us some of them and leaves others out.  In that choice itself the “facts” are fictionalized, and history becomes an art and not a science.

If you don’t believe me, think about a scientist conducting an experiment about a new drug, who decides to keep in the data on one set of side effects but to leave out the data on another set.

Like it or not, narrative is the most important fact about us individually and as a society, and narrative is what both makes us what we are and pushes us into change.

What’s more, the Great  Conversation has, in the West as in everyplace else, always been carried on primarily through the arts (and therefore fiction), not through philosophy or other nonfiction work.

Robert was wrong to say I care very little about the nonfiction end of the Canon.   Any look at The Western Canon According to Me will show that at least half of it is taken up with nonfiction.

But the simple truth is that philosophers speak mostly to each other.   If their ideas remain in philosophy texts without being translated in any way into fiction, those ideas will be of no ultimate important to civilization at large.   Sartre and Camus both understood this, which is why, aside from writing philosophy, they always made it a point to write novels that embodied that philosophy as well.  And to this day, you can learn a lot more about existentialism as philosophy and as way of life from The Stranger than you can from Being and Nothingness.

Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom and its ideas had no currency in everyday life whatsoever until a generation which had been reared on Atas Shrugged discovered it.  Suddenly it was popular enough for multiple reprintings and references on Internet web sites by people who know no more of Leibniz or Macchiavelli than I do of carburetors.

Human beings think in narratives, and the narratives they think in determine their personal identities and the nature of the societies they live in.   Change a society’s narrative, and you change everytbing about it.

And that will, I guarantee you, change lives.

What’s more, once a narrative becomes strongly entrenched, it maintains itself even if it’s drastically, destructively wrong.

Consider both Karl  Marx and Sigmund Freud, two thinkers whose chief claim to fame is to have come up with some of the worst ideas every written down on paper, almost all of which have been decisively refuted on almost every level.  

I say almost every level, because Ayn Rand notwithstanding, there’s been very little in the way of counternarrative out there to deconstsruct the worst of the idiocies their narratives left behind.   In the case of Marxism, the effect has been even stronger than it might have been because its narrative is in fact an offshoot of an older one, with enough of that older one’s elements to feel “naturual” to the people taking it up–Marxist narratives are always variations on the Gospel,  with History made to stand in for  God and Oppressed Humanity made to stand in for Christ on His Cross.

A  philoosphy that is never expressed in narrative dies, or becomes a simple academic enterprise of interest to nobody but scholars in universities.   It you want to chane the world, you must tell a story, and get other people to adopt your story as ‘true.” 

All of the great questions of our time will be decided not by logical discussion,  not by philosophical or political debate, but by which naratives come to be adopted by the most people.  Abortion, gay rights, the welfare state, pre-emptive war, the Islamic resurgence–you name it, and the best and most compelling story will win. 

What strikes you as more immediate and true–the stoy of the rape victim who finds herself pregnant by her rapist and is trapped, screaming and desperate, with no way out of undergoing even more pain and suffering?  or the story of the small child in the womb, trusting to its mother and the rest of the the world to feed and comfort and protect it, suddenly attacked by knives and suction cups and ripped to pieces?

Or how about this–the story of an old and suffering woman, condemned to die a slow death from a debilitating disease, without hope, without relief from pain, unless someone will help her put herself out of her misery?  or the story of the old woman who is suffering but still wants desperately to live, constantly in fear of the “medical professionals” around her who think her clinging to life makes her a “greedy geezer’ and is completely irrational, determined to “put her out of her misery” even if she thinks that isn’t what she wants?

Our narratives are who we are, and the Great Conversation is first and foremost a history of and competition between narratives. 

And, if that’s a hobby, it’s the most important one ever invented, far more important than most of the rest of what we do.