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Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive thing, arguing that made-up stories cultivate our mental and moral development. But others have argued that fiction is mentally and ethically corrosive. It’s an ancient question: Does fiction build the morality of individuals and societies, or does it break it down?
-- Jonathan Gottschall, "Why Fiction Is Good For You" at Boston.com
The argument is that fiction is great in helping us to develop our sense of empathy, to free us a little from the idea that the world revolves around oneself. Yet, the way that Mr. Gottschall lays out the argument, it can sound like fiction does this by making saps out of us, by inducing us to believe in a fairy tale kind of world of happy endings.
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Take a study of television viewers by the Austrian psychologist Marcus Appel. Appel points out that, for a society to function properly, people have to believe in justice. They have to believe that there are rewards for doing right and punishments for doing wrong. And, indeed, people generally do believe that life punishes the vicious and rewards the virtuous. But one class of people appear to believe these things in particular: those who consume a lot of fiction.
In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV — as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries — had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly exposing us to the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place.
This is despite the fact, as Appel puts it, “that this is patently not the case.” As people who watch the news know very well, bad things happen to good people all the time, and most crimes go unpunished. In other words, fiction seems to teach us to see the world through rose-colored lenses. And the fact that we see the world that way seems to be an important part of what makes human societies work.
-- Jonathan Gottschall at Boston.com
_ _ _
I suppose society needs a lot of such saps in order to work at all. No doubt, religion is a particularly good sort of fiction for this, a fiction enriched unto the level of mythology, so that one hesitates to call it merely fiction, and even cold-hearted skeptics can sometimes wonder if maybe we do live in a blessed world, after all, and you just need to have a little faith.
-- Jonathan Gottschall, "Why Fiction Is Good For You" at Boston.com
The argument is that fiction is great in helping us to develop our sense of empathy, to free us a little from the idea that the world revolves around oneself. Yet, the way that Mr. Gottschall lays out the argument, it can sound like fiction does this by making saps out of us, by inducing us to believe in a fairy tale kind of world of happy endings.
_ _ _
Take a study of television viewers by the Austrian psychologist Marcus Appel. Appel points out that, for a society to function properly, people have to believe in justice. They have to believe that there are rewards for doing right and punishments for doing wrong. And, indeed, people generally do believe that life punishes the vicious and rewards the virtuous. But one class of people appear to believe these things in particular: those who consume a lot of fiction.
In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV — as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries — had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly exposing us to the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place.
This is despite the fact, as Appel puts it, “that this is patently not the case.” As people who watch the news know very well, bad things happen to good people all the time, and most crimes go unpunished. In other words, fiction seems to teach us to see the world through rose-colored lenses. And the fact that we see the world that way seems to be an important part of what makes human societies work.
-- Jonathan Gottschall at Boston.com
_ _ _
I suppose society needs a lot of such saps in order to work at all. No doubt, religion is a particularly good sort of fiction for this, a fiction enriched unto the level of mythology, so that one hesitates to call it merely fiction, and even cold-hearted skeptics can sometimes wonder if maybe we do live in a blessed world, after all, and you just need to have a little faith.
