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Whenever I corner someone who claims that they don’t like to read fiction, their reasons all boil down to something like this:
“I just don’t see the point.”
And I completely sympathize. Sometimes reading fiction can seem like a giant waste of time. After all, we have bills to pay, a train to catch and bagels to line up for. Sometimes the practical shit does get in the way, leaving us with no time for paper-and-ink-induced hallucinations.
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, I think on some level we do understand the importance of carving our time for reading fiction. But there definitely will be days when we’re a little bit on the fence, so I'm wondering: Is there a point to this at all?
This is a valid question because, unlike nonfiction, engaging with imaginary worlds will yield no immediate rewards. It won’t make you more money or more attractive at a party. In fact, overdoing it will gift you the aura of being hopelessly distracted and out of touch with reality.
But here’s the deal: if the aforementioned thoughts bubbled up in your head, it’s not fiction’s fault for being impractical, but it’s your fault for being too WEIRD to enjoy fiction.
Relax, I’m not calling you weird. WEIRD in this case is an acronym psychologist Joe Henrich developed in 2010 to stand for: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.
Based on this acronym, Jonathan Haidt argued in The Righteous Mind that the WEIRDer you are, the more you’re likely to see a world full of separate objects. The WEIRDer our worldviews are, the more we tend to approach the world as separate individuals. In comparison, less WEIRD people tend to see the world relationally since their identities are informed by the community.
Hence, WEIRD people’s concerns are more aligned with the so-called practical shit because their world views colour the world as sets of problems to be solved and goals to be achieved from the vantage point of being a separate individual. Whereas things like storytelling, myth and community-oriented activities (dancing, clubbing, etc) will seem less appealing.
However, according to Haidt, though WEIRD people primarily act out of self-interest, their capacity for functioning as a group still remains. He called the conditions The Hive Switch and whenever the switch flips, we turn from individuals to members defending/promoting a community. In other words, even the most individualistic among us still reserve the ability to drop our petty concerns and become part of the human race.
Let’s come back to reading fiction. In a sense, engaging with an imaginary world is essentially one of these hive switches. A long stretch of reading suspends all practical concerns as we begin to think about our place in the world through our imagination. And when we’re exposed to a fictional universe with different laws and people we’ll never meet in real life, it opens up new ways of handling the world as we know it after we return to daily life.
Beyond that, fiction opens the space for imaginative idealism (coined by Christopher Castiglia). This is something pure information cannot give us since data and realism can only articulate what is instead of what could be. Since the late 1980s, the literary discourse has been thoroughly dominated by critiquing what is and not articulating what could be (see my article here). Viewed in this light, literature gives us a language to articulate a better world and remains indispensable, but that’s a whole different article.
Back to the original question: is there a point to fiction at all? Well, there isn’t and there is. It’s useless for those bent on being practical but it is utterly priceless for those daring enough to imagine, feel and articulate a world that hasn’t been born just yet.
Until next week
Robin
What’s New?
This week, I discussed a powerful idea that completely changed how I write called the Uneven U principle. This video covers it all and give it a watch!
Well, apart from being entertaining and exposing our minds to new lines of thoughts, points of view and places in time, fiction seems to me uniquely able to teach things - about human interaction, ways of flourishing, alleys towards doom, etc. - in a way, a work of non-fiction simply cannot achieve. We humans are wired for story, and it has, since time immemorial, been the prime vector for propagating knowledge, especially about the most fundamental truths we hold dear.
I love the concept of WEIRD as a predisposition to facts and away from stories. Genuinely compelling
I think people who don't read fiction develop "shallow axioms." The basic rules that they reason with end up unsophisticated and relatively provincial, even if those rules are profoundly powerful in a localised way. For example, a hardcore capitalist can become fabulously successful if they work hard, have some smarts, and have a bedrock belief that companies are only responsible for their shareholders, that taxation is theft, and that if labor doesn't like their deal, they should quit.
But fiction gives us "The Ones that Walk away from Omelas." Profoundly short, not even a story, more a scenario. If you are open to fiction, you cannot escape LeGuin's implied question of whether you are one who walks away or not, and in fact she makes no explicit ethical statement. But by reading it, we are unmoored by our simplistic, non-fiction rules like "10,000 hours" or "grit" and encouraged to see how things may actually work.
Fiction is more powerful than simply a tool for community. It is a tool for resetting and challenging our axioms, and WEIRD people have far too many of them.