Megan McArdle On Art & Politics

See Against Art in Politics, and Politics in Art. Excerpts:

"I reject the unspoken assumption here that art is supposed to make you better--the novel as a sort of secular religious work. This is a long tradition in American literature, and it goes back to an era when art was supposed to be a sort of religious religious work, and many families shunned books that didn't offer appropriately treacly moral themes. Most of those novels are now forgotten, and the ones that remain, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, are mostly regarded as historical curiosities, not mighty fine reading. History has mostly rewarded the ambiguous and the transgressive, not the sermons-with-a-cast.

Art isn't very good stand-in for Sunday School teachers, for all that we repeatedly imbue it with the job of shaping morality--"poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", said Shelley, and it's a damn good thing he was wrong. Having a keen eye for detail, a a morose grasp of the tragedy of the human condition, and hypertrophied verbal mental muscles does not make you a good policy analyst. George Orwell, who was more of a gimlet-eyed realist than most ideological writers, nonetheless believed a fair amount of ludicrous nonsense, such as his assertions that collectivism was necessary because a capitalist society could never produce enough to win World War II.

Of course, talent may give you the ability to construct a convincing alternative universe where all the difficulties are imagined away, and more than one person has confused this with the ability to identify what schemes will work in the real world. After all socialism was prosperous and peaceful--in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and other novels in the genre. The novels are often very convincing, and indeed seem to address all possible objections. Yet in practice, socialism was mostly good for killing unreasonably large numbers of people--30,000 alone building the massive Magnitorsk steelworks that were trumpeted as the sort of thing that could only done by collectivism. We should thank God that capitalist democracies don't make such appalling waste of human life.

But when art-as-politics airbrushes out the dead people at the steel works, it can be very convincing, which is why advocates like it; Uncle Tom's Cabin did more for the Abolitionist cause than a hundred thousand lectures. The problem is, it can convince of the bad as easily as the good--Gone With the Wind reached many more people than Uncle Tom's Cabin, in part because--despite its ugly racial politics--it's a much better book with richer characters and more believable action. There are also the heroic misfires, where the author rouses fierce passions about the wrong issue. Soviet documentaries about the horridness of American life inspired the audience with subversive thoughts about our prosperous avoirdupois and profusion of consumer goods. Upton Sinclair envisioned The Jungle as a socialist manifesto which would inspire people to rise up and tear down the system; what he actually wrote was a food-safety tract which inspired massive sanitary regulation of the meatpacking industry.

You see the point: what makes a political narrative convincing is not the correctness of its ideas, but power of the characters and the imagery--the most powerful images in The Jungle are the grotesqueries of mass butchering, and that--not the injustice of capitalism--is what people fastened onto. Worse, the most convincing feature of all may simply be the author's facility at imagining away the difficulties--and the most successful works are often those where the limits of the author's imagination are closest to those of the imaginations of his audience.

Because it is the power of the narrative, that we are responding to, not the soundness of the ideas themselves, we have no way of knowing whether we have been convinced of good things or bad. Policing art so that you only get "good" ideas from it is even more futile--the quest for stirring narratives which reinforce what you already believe is no healthier in a person than in a society. In some sense, we live inside a well-imagined novel, and so it's not exactly surprising that even when we're confronted with new evidence, it's emotionally difficult to discard the "evidence" of our own "experience". In some fundamental way, great political narrative has the power to make you, not smarter and better, but stupider and more passionate. Feminists who admire political fiction should think hard about the ways in which women have learned to love their restrictions through the fiction that romanticized them. If you are saying to yourself, "which is why it's so important to combat this with the right sort of moral narratives" then you are simply begging the question."

"Yet the glamor of narrative and wordplay are incredibly powerful tools can blind us to their drawbacks. There's evidence that novels and movies activate the parts of our brain dedicated to social learning, and so we internalize the "lessons' of authors as if they'd actually happened (have you ever watched an otherwise intelligent person systematically destroy their relationships because their template was some archetype from a book or a movie?) Narrative knocks down the defense mechanisms that usually operate when we're reading: the little voice saying "this is just some guy's opinion.""