For most of
my adult life, I’ve been both a philosopher and fiction writer. Through both, I’ve
tackled the deep questions that most engage me, especially questions of faith,
social justice, human sexuality, and violence. The imminent release of my debut
novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, has got
me thinking about the relationship between these two things that have so shaped
the course of my life.
Two Distinct Roles
Fiction and
philosophy are two distinct approaches to engaging with questions central to
understanding the human condition—questions about our values and basic
assumptions, about the things that shape our worldviews and, by implication,
how we respond to our world, what kinds of lives we strive for and what choices
we make.
Fiction does
so by telling stories about people—distinct individuals who have their own
perspective on things, who live in a concrete environment, and who have
problems. Fiction is about these
individuals in these circumstances,
facing and trying to overcome the problems they face.
Philosophy explores
these questions by developing various alternative answers to these questions,
and then formulating and critically evaluating arguments for and against these
alternatives in the effort to determine which answers have the stronger arguments
in their favor.
Both disciplines
focus on the human condition, on issues about who we are and how we ought to
live, how we should understand our world and our lives and the point of it all.
But each has a different primary role.
Here’s my
sense of these distinct roles. Fiction at its best inspires us to ask questions about the human condition—new
questions, or old question asked with greater urgency or honesty or openness. Philosophy
at its best helps us to decide which questions we have to answer (however tentatively) in order to live our lives,
and it provides a means of fairly and honestly seeking out answers that make sense
to us while also enabling us to understand why different answers might make
sense to someone else.
In brief,
oversimplified terms, fiction prompts us to care about the questions;
philosophy offers a path to look for answers.
Of course
there is overlap here. Great fiction can help us explore answers to our questions,
and philosophy can help us to ask new questions and see why they matter. The
difference is one of emphasis. But the emphasis matters. It matters especially
to me, as a writer of fiction and as a philosophy teacher.
The Limits of Philosophy
In my role
as a teacher of philosophy, I pose to my students questions that we then explore
philosophically. Some of those questions are ones my students care about
already. But that’s not always true. When it’s not, what do I do? I’ve tried to
get them to see the importance of the question by presenting alternative
answers, showing how there are arguments for and against each, and showing that
each answer has different implications for how we ought to live.
Sometimes
that works. But if I rely on philosophy alone to inspire my students to really
care about these questions, I have far less success than if I pause to tell a
story that dramatizes the question’s
importance. Tell a story, and the students listen. Tell the right story, and
they see why the question matters.
Tell a story featuring a character they care about, facing a problem relating
to the question, and they care about
the question.
Furthermore,
I’ve discovered that sometimes when it looks like a student cares about a
question, what they really care about is their preferred answer. The question,
and the inquiry it triggers, is not for them something they value. On the
contrary, they see it as a threat. It
treats as dubious or debatable
something they don’t want to treat that way.
As Plato
stressed, we are furthest from the truth not when we are uncertain but when we
are in the grip of false certainty. If we think we have the answer, we stop
asking the question. Or, perhaps more accurately, we stop believing that the
question matters as a question. Instead,
we only care about it as a layup to the slam-dunk.
Like a catechism,
the question is posed not to prompt inquiry but to set the stage for announcing
our answer. Put simply, it is treated like a closed question.
When
students confront a question in this spirit, arguments that challenge their
preferred answer are not something to be taken seriously and wrestled with but,
rather, something to be discredited. Something to be attacked.
When someone
treats a question that way, they aren’t
in a place where they can do honest philosophy about that question. At best,
they can be philosophical apologists:
they can recite the arguments in favor of their preferred answer and bash the
arguments against. To do honest philosophy about a question, the question must
be treated as open.
Open Questions, Closes Questions, and the
Power of Stories
Now there
may be a time and a place for refusing to treat a question as open, and hence
to refuse to approach it philosophically. If someone asks whether Black people
are really human with a human’s right to life, I would think it better to
insist that this is not an open
question, that the right answer is they are fully human with a human being’s
right to life. Perhaps, also, I might say a few words about why—but without legitimizing the opposing
arguments and objections by taking them as serious arguments and objections
worthy of consideration.
In other
words, there are cases where it is more than fitting to treat a question as
closed. But how do we decide when this is true? I’d look to stories. In the
case above, I’d look to stories from the point of view of Black people living
in environments where their full humanity is treated like an open question. Stories
that lay out what that’s like.
On the flip
side of things, imagine a story set in a community where a particular religious
question is treated as closed. Suppose the community thinks that non-Christians
are all damned. The main character, let’s call him Bill, meets a practicing Jew
for the first time—Jacob, let’s say. Through a series of events, they become
friends. Bill, desiring to save Jacob, tries to convert him, prompting conflict
and ultimately an angry challenge to the idea that Jacob is only acceptable if he gives up his faith and
identity to become something utterly alien. Bill goes through an anguished internal
struggle. Does he really believe that Jacob, who is a good person, who is committed
to his faith and appears to love God deeply, is doomed to hell?
Bill is
further torn by competing perspectives and testimonies—especially from Jacob and
from his beloved mentor and pastor, Luke. In the end, the friendship with Jacob
falls apart. Jacob is clearly deeply wounded by what he describes as Bill’s
intolerance. Bill returns to the pews of his church but is now grieving, and he
can’t listen to what Luke preaches with the comfortable confidence he used to
have.
It is at
least conceivable that such a story, powerfully told, could inspire a Christian
reader to wrestle with the question of whether Jacob is saved—that is, to treat
the question as open—when previously it had for them been closed. This might
happen even if the reader doesn’t actually change their answer to the question.
I think that
most of the time, stories are more
likely to open us up to questions
that we might have previously treated as closed, rather than closing questions
we’d previously treated as open.
This is true
because of the ability of stories to expand
the range of our experience. They help us to see the world through someone
else’s eyes, to get a sense of what something is like that we haven’t
experienced personally. Often, the reason we treat a question as closed is
because we haven’t personally had an experience that challenges the answer we’ve
come to accept. Such personal experiences are the primary pathway to being jarred loose from fixed ways of seeing
things.
But stories
can offer another way—vicarious experiences
to supplement our own. The point is that stories inspire us not only to care
about questions we didn’t think were important before, but also to treat
questions as open—or as closed—that we didn’t treat that way before. And they
do this by their power to give us vicarious experiences, a sense of what it
would be like to face challenges we’ve never faced or to see things in a way we
haven’t before.
If someone
with a fixed idea is presented with philosophical arguments that challenge that
idea, their spontaneous reaction is defensiveness.
Something they believe is being attacked, which means they are being attacked. The walls come up, and they become even
more entrenched in their position than they were before.
But tell
someone a story, and there is a different response. A leaning in. An opening
up. This is the power of stories.
Stories, Propaganda, and the Need for
Philosophy
But it is
one thing when a story opens us up to new questions. It is something else when
it leads us down a narrow narrative tunnel to a single answer, an answer so
vividly rendered that we lose sight of any other possible answers. Plato was
worried about oratory and poetry because it has the power to persuade even if it offers no
instruction. This is the dark side of storytelling: it’s potential to function
as propaganda.
The worst
fiction is preachy. Few stories can survive
preachiness, and teachers of creative writing warn against it for good reasons.
A preachy story tells you what to think, what to believe. It’s in-your-face about
it, and it is off-putting. I think our aversion to preachy stories tells us
something about what stories are supposed to be about: not answering our questions, but encouraging us to wrestle with
questions by shedding light on them.
Stories are
meant to expand the range of human experiences available to us, thereby providing
us with more data than we had before,
more information with which to wrestle with the big questions. But if we want
to wrestle with those questions fairly and honestly, we need to do it in a way that
considers the arguments for different answers, the objections to alternative
arguments, the ways that different human experiences feed into alternative
answers, etc. In other words, we need to get philosophical.
A story
overreaches when it becomes preachy—it tries to draw too universal a conclusion
from something that is essentially particular. Stories are about particular
people in particular settings facing particular problems.
But
propagandistic stories are not necessarily preachy. In fact, the best
propaganda is not preachy at all. Rather, propaganda tells a particular story
without ever telling you explicitly what to believe. Instead of telling us what
to believe, the most crafty propaganda creates a story experience that fits
with the view the propagandist wants us to believe: vicarious experiences that,
typically, reinforce those preconceptions or prejudices that serve the
propagandist’s interests, making it less likely that we will question them.
Two kinds of
propaganda are particularly significant. First, there is propaganda that relies
on othering. It tells a story in
which the protagonist, who belongs to the same group as the audience,
encounters the Other (someone who
belongs to a different and unfamiliar group). And not only is the Other the
source of the problem the main character faces, but the Other turns out to be
just as bad (or worse) than the audience fears they are based on their preconceived
ideas.
The other
kind of propaganda is what I think of as manufactured
discontent. It follows the model of the dandruff shampoo commercial where
the first step is to make the viewer worry that they have dandruff and that
others are rejecting them because of this (by dramatizing a scene in which exactly that happens). The second step
is to introduce the shampoo as the solution to this manufactured problem (by
having someone buy the shampoo, use it, and suddenly be embraced by those who
had previously rejected them).
For this
kind of propaganda, the aim is to hit on common sources of anxiety—and to magnify
our anxiety about them. For the hero of the propogandist’s story, these aren’t niggling
worries to be lived with. They aren’t things to be solved by an inner change of
attitude. In the fictional world the propagandist creates, there are people out
there free of these worries who are living idealized lives. As the story
unfolds, what might have been something the reader hardly worried about is now
something that clearly is a matter of concern—because it is standing in the way
of protagonist’s best life. A threat to happiness. Fortunately, the thing the
propagandist is selling comes along to fix things, and our hero lives happily
ever after.
Propaganda,
by its nature, relies on caricatures, stereotypes, and clichés. That is, it
relies on reinforcing a single narrow body of experience through repitition. A
single story along these lines—a single story in which audience fears and
preconceptions about the Other prove all too real, or audience anxieties are
presented as serious impediments to happiness that are cured by the right
shampoo or ideology—isn’t enough to push the audience towards a specific
answer. Propaganda works through volume (one kind of story dominates) and
through marginalization (alternative stories go unheard).
When we look
to stories to give us the answers, we
are empowering the propagandist, because it is only in the hands of
propagandists that stories will tell us what to believe. This is one reason why
we need philosophy—why stories are not enough. When stories are not controlled
and shaped by propagandists, they open us up to considering new questions and
they shed light on those questions by expanding the scope of our experience.
But then we need to think about those
questions, making use of our own experiences and the range of vicarious
experiences that we receive from the stories others have to tell.
The
necessary follow up to good stories is philosophy. Not necessarily academic philosophy, but philosophy
nonetheless.
If we aren’t
prepared to do that work—that philosophical work—of thinking things through for
ourselves, we become easy prey for the propagandist. This is true because,
simply put, we need to come up with answers to some of the more pressing
questions of life. If we don’t find those answers through thinking
philosophically about our experience and the range of vicarious experiences
that diverse stories provide, we risk putting ourselves into the propagandist’s
hands. And in their hands, stories narrow the range of our experience in
the way well-worn grooves in a trail narrow the path a cart will take. We find
ourselves channeled reliably towards the answers the propagandists want us to
have.
