The Literary Hero and the Rejection of Exemplarity
Why Reductionism Breeds Incuriousness, Impairs Honesty, and Perpetuates a Crisis of Moral Authority
Readership in Decline
By virtue of my encounter with a discussion of secular spirituality and well being, and therefore the pursuit of living well, I find myself contemplating the hero, more specifically the hero of literature as a role model.1 Once, it was uncontroversial to turn to books for guidance, not just entertainment. That idea is under siege.
As the digital age ripens, one sees a dramatic change in attitude towards books, and feels something precious is sliding through our fingers. Figures, both historical and literary, have fallen into disfavor. Modernity rejects the hero, and dismantles the idea of the selfless, virtuous actor. Instead, all are selfish, hypocritical, riddled with vices such that one is inclined to believe there is no moral authority to look towards. When everyone is play acting, there is no possibility for ideals, and for striving.
Indeed, when someone fervently argues, with eyes shining, that this source, this is where goodness derives, this is what can guide us to salvation, one ought to be most skeptical. Clearly, ideology is being smuggled in under the folds of a clerical robe. Still, what concerns me here is what one can do with such a position? Does that mean that everything ought to be subject to equal skepticism? Is there no expertise? No truth? No models by which to live well? It seems to me that losing our taste for such thinking entirely is also unwise.
I am driven to consider this topic based on conversations and past arguments among my peers. As a result, one may be inclined to believe that the issue is contained to the seminar room and within the bounds of campus. Or that it is merely anecdotal evidence, rather than rigorous empirical study. Insofar as experience situates one within larger empirical trends it serves as a spur toward the truth, rather than toward spuriousness. Also, one need only open their eyes for a second to realize that ideas do not remain quarantined by the grounds of the University. Of course, what I claim may not be universally applicable, for little is, but it does point towards a disturbing and widespread phenomenon.
People do not read the way they used to. I willingly risk of paying lip service to old fogies, out of touch with changing times, when I make this claim. Such a critique is misplaced. Times change, technology marches ahead, and our habits change along with it. As a result, we do not read the way we used to. Medium matters, because medium determines what sort of content thrives. The way changes, and so do the people. I don’t think this particular change is for the better, even if there are many advantages of digital media. While not attempting to deny the usefulness of digitalization, in practice deep, slow reading, is exchanged in favor of light, brief, and fleeting content. Such things have their own allure, it’s true, but like sirens that attraction is leading us onto the rocks. Our attention span suffers, our willingness to sit still, our ability to talk with each other, and yes, to read books.
I used to think I was only suffering from some sort of paranoia, that this was only a personal struggle. At every turning point, at every new beginning, people cry doom about new technology that isn’t fully understood. While one ought not to exaggerate the danger, there is still room for substantive concern regarding digitalization. I watched room after room of students paying a price tag equal to, or even exceeding, the median annual household income for an education and not reading the assigned material. Imagine paying a household's yearly income for an education, and not cherishing the privilege. If one doubts this claims validity in general, ask any professor about their experience of teaching literature in the last decade. Undoubtedly they will defend their students if attacked directly, but the insider view, when one gets closer, reveals that they also are alarmed by the state of things. After commiserating with a half dozen professors upon this subject, I began to suspect I was observing a trend. The work of the psychologist Johnathan Haidt, what he calls The Great Rewiring, helped provide some empirical backbone.2 How could literacy not suffer as a product of the nearly infinite number of distractions our screens provide.
The art of reading well is sliding through our fingers.
The mentality one observes on campus is hard to read charitably. The demeanor of such students posits: “I’m forced to take these classes, what a damn bother, I guess I’ll just tune it out as best as I can. Nothing useful to be found here.” While this is not a direct quote of an individual, it is a remark often repeated nearly verbatim, with only a little facetiousness sprinkled in. Such thoughts epitomize missing the forest for the trees. The thing one needs from from a seminar is conversation, disagreement, the pleasure and pain being right and wrong, and of expanding the mind. Hypothesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. It’s that old thing about the journey and the destination. Pretty common theme for literature too, it turns out.
One might argue, and many have when I’ve voiced similar concerns, that I ought to mind my own business. What problem is it of mine if other people don’t like reading? I completely understand the intuition that gives rise to this counter argument, but it fails to grasp the symbiotic nature of a socratic style course. Because the quality of the learning is determined by engagement, it is a breach of a social contract made by signing up for a course and taking a spot from another person not to put one's best foot forward. (Certain professors had waiting lists two-three semesters deep, so every spot counts). Not only does playing games on one's laptop in class disrespect everyone involved, including oneself, it also damages the efficacy of the learning space. A socratic seminar cannot function in a way that produces the desired result if three quarters of the participants contribute nothing, and never open the books.
In line with what the co-authors Jonathan Haidt and Gregg Lukianoff of the best seller, The Coddling of the American Mind, suggest, this problem of readership is but a part of a crisis of citizenship that has proliferated across the American university landscape. The decline of interest in engaging with difficult, perhaps tedious, and dismaying arguments that upend one’s cherished beliefs as the raison d’etre of the university is both a symptom and cause of wider societal issues. One of the noxious fruits of this trend is reductionism.3
The Age of Reductionism
We are living in a period of skepticism pushed to its extreme. Cynicism proliferates. This is not the fault of technology alone, though that is an element. Regardless, we have lost trust in major institutions, be they esteemed offices of leadership, legacy magazines, or higher learning. Arguably, one ought to be skeptical. No one wants to be a dupe, and each of us takes particular satisfaction in not being the person with the wool over their eyes. What I’m saying is that pleasure produces a kind of myopia of its own. Such blindness leads people, well intentioned in many cases no doubt, to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Such is the trouble with reductionism.
There is no truth. It’s all part of someone pushing a grand narrative. It’s about oil. Systemic oppression. The status quo. It’s about asserting economic control. In short, things are not what they seem. Indeed, the constant barrage in the news media would make it hard to feel otherwise. One begins to suspect that even the most mundane walks of life harbor dangerous and evil ideas.4
What one ends up with is radical skepticism, which super-charges reductionist tendencies for the end of simplifying matters to fit with a political narrative. Coming to a text with a narrative already firmly in place, one tends to find what they expect to find: moral bankruptcy. This is no way to treat literature because close reading turns up all sorts of flagrant and mischievous ways wherein art defies the categories artificially imposed upon it centuries later. Great art slips through the grasp of hindsight, and cannot be pressed down neatly into a little gilded cage. Imagine if it could be contained in this way. Art would certainly be a dull thing indeed, stagnant and drudging.
One must constantly reassert that to disbelieve everything is as foolish as to believe everything. One must avoid making unbelief a belief.
My internal dissonance concerns the heroic model juxtaposed with the creation of a propagandized cultural myth. Clearly, there is danger in accepting the heroic model as a guide, for it can easily be leveraged by bad actors as a means of control over ones heart and mind.
Yet this begs the question, where does one look for guidance? To politicians? Seems like a long search is in order; indeed, a snipe hunt. To celebrities? The hedonistic and unstable elite, addled by too much fame too young? They don’t seem like a good starting place either. They have not stood the stern test of time. All one needs to dismiss such a source are the personality cults that arise around such figures, and the obsessive behavior associated the fans of celebrities that is both disturbing and destructive. Where next to look? The men and women of history? Here one begins to see something that offers purchase. In all of our history there have been those rare people who have knowledge and insight worth attending. They probably owned slaves though, and ought not to be celebrated (ie. not taught), as one hears students say in seminar rooms.
While admittedly a bit facetious, one does indeed hear such arguments. It is a mistaken way of viewing historical figures, be they literary, political, or philosophical. It presumes that a person with an idea that has gone out of fashion must necessarily be wholly rotten. It presumes that the foundation of such thinking is based on premises that one must wholly reject because we are far wiser than they, living in the twenty-first century. It presumes, arrogantly, that bad people only have bad ideas. This is one of “the great untruths” that Haidt and Lukianoff argue against in The Coddling: “life is a battle between good people and evil people.” The distillation of people equally complex as ourselves into one category or another just doesn’t do justice to human nature. As Walt Whitman writes “I am large, I contain multitudes” (Whitman, 51).5 Humans contain multitudes, and only with this in mind can one reason rightly. But it is certainly easier to dismiss an idea one doesn’t like out of hand than to work through the implications. Thus the wisdom of the past slips through our fingers, sliding away, with our attention span, down into an abyss.
Finally, this brings us back to the hero of literature. Why privilege fiction, mere entertainment some argue, as an outsized source of moral guidance? I offer three arguments. First, psychologically, one gains solid traction by way of the immediacy of narrative. We are an innumerate species. We cannot easily identify with a population. The empirical work of the psychologist Paul Slovic reveals that after a single individual, a person's empathy melts away.6 Two people induce less of a response than one, and on down in a cascade. The hero of literature, therefore, has our full attention.7
Secondly, fiction embodies the minds of many of the greatest creative thinkers of history. This becomes more apparent the further one travels back through the record, because there are periods of history where most of the cultural documentation has been lost. What one finds preserved are stories, sometimes transcriptions of oral traditions, which are typically mythology, poetry, and epic. Hence we have those great works which seemed worth preserving during dark years, when resources were already scanty. Many excellent texts have surely been lost, and some may, perhaps, have been greater than what remains to us. Still, we must work with what tools to hand. These records can be read with care, and used to reconstruct an understanding of the world, or at least direct one’s attention profitably.
Thirdly and finally, the hero of literature, flawed or otherwise, is not real. This is essential. They are not real, but seem to be. In their seeming, they cast off the shackles of time and space. They are the immortal beings of imagination. That does not diminish them, it frees them. They are free to trouble us, to defy us, to seduce us, and I argue, to guide us.
I recognize that it’s foolish to imagine that any hero, or figure of secular or religious wisdom was a person without flaws. Still, it seems to me that each of us must come to the text with our own finely tuned instruments and discreetly make off with anything valuable we can get our hands on. When one robs a house surely they don’t take everything. They don’t take out the trash, the dishes from the cabinet, or, probably, the books from the shelves. (On that count, there is such a thing as not knowing what you’re missing, as the philosopher Sam Harris often repeats).
Unlike a jewelry store, it is better to steal from a book than borrow. Abduct the knowledge and make it one’s own such that only the slyest fellow thieves are aware of the true owner of the property. If someone suspects you’re smuggling something in from outside, something stolen, they might rightly grow suspicious and check their own pockets. Up comes the guard, and the ears snap shut like the jaws of a clam. The trick is too inundate oneself so deeply with ideas that they weave together into a web of connections which conceals their origins by way of a charming dazzlement of the eyes, as of dew laden spider thread refracting sunlight.
This point requires special emphasis because there is a prevailing idea among my peers that argues books are not mines to be pillaged for their ore. There is something delicious about rejecting a proposal in this way as Imperialist, and Appropriative. I’m sure thinking in this way feels good, just as it's fun to tear down a structure. I’m much more concerned with what is built back in place of the old artifice being razed. How can one be Imperialist, a nasty slur today, by wanting to gain something by reading? Does my reading rip gold from the mine of the natives and leave nothing behind for them? Of course not. Therefore, such a critique is ridiculous on its face. A book is an ever replenishing source, and what can be extracted of its contents, by way of examination, differs across the individual, and is a distinct process. To deny such a use of reading denies the utility of literature as anything more than mere entertainment. No one is harmed by reading to learn for its own sake. No one is harmed by seeking for guidance. One must take what good ideas they can find, and discard the bad. Thus, harm arises when someone reads badly.8 Why, then, would it be beneficial to studiously not train this skill?
Nothing disturbs and irritates me more than people with strong opinions about a text which they clearly have not read. Seeking to diminish texts, to place them beneath one’s notice, is a product of dangerous ideological thinking. The idea of recording language is a gift from our ancestors, the single greatest invention of our species, and these methods of the past are the foundations upon which the future is built.
What bothers me is not that other people don’t have the same passion as me. It would be pompous to repeat in favor of literature that “they just don’t know what they're missing” and mean it in all seriousness. No indeed. They might be right in saying I don’t know what I’m missing about physics, or biology, sports betting, or knitting. I say might because I encounter these interesting fields indirectly, while reading. Still, fair is fair, and I’m sure I’m missing fantastically interesting things everywhere, all the time. Such is life. However, literature, the love of sitting in a chair and exerting ones mind to understand the recorded ideas of another human, is a skill under valued and rapidly degrading.
The problem is imminent, and not merely the decline of a venerable avenue of knowledge. Our ability to think deeply, appreciate nuance, and inhabit foreign and disturbing ideas declines with our readership. It would be rash to blame this upon students, and call it laziness. Of course, the matter is not so simple. Rather, the true source is distraction, and a new mood of thought that does not serve literature well. Such a mood is more like to religious thought than to scientific.
Of special concern are the fruits of orthodox thinking, that is, the reduction of works and figures down into their perceived wrongdoing. What begins as an attempt to acknowledge the darkness of history, and dismantle particular figures as idols to be worshiped, devolves into a dismissal of the great products of the past. Such dismissal breeds a particular mood of incuriousness that is the death of learning. If all grand narratives are false, we need not trouble ourselves with all those foolish ramblings of unenlightened beasts, more like apes than they are to us. Even those that called themselves enlightened were really living in the dark, and just didn’t know it. But we know better. So runs the argument, usually couched in obscure language (Orwell, 15).
Of course, such a view of literature is self-defeating. We ought not to read or be taught Conrad because he was called a racist? Nonsense. Teach Heart of Darkness, and read Chinua Achebe’s essay alongside it. Debate whether or not the layers of narration within the story defy an attempt to reconstruct biographical information. We must ground ourselves in the facts, otherwise our arguments amount to clairvoyant constructions of authorial intent from the art itself. Such biographical fallacy will shortly lead us to imagine with certainty that Vladimir Nabokov was a pedophile, Virgil The Grand Imperial Propagandist, and so forth.
One can take this another step and argue that even biographical information is not sufficient evidence that a work itself is so morally corrupt it cannot be taught. Such erroneous thinking starts one's feet down towards the abyss where intellect goes to die. Clearly, the solution to perceived immorality is not censorship. Who decides what is too vile to be considered? Just as one fights bad speech with more speech, one deals with “problematic” works with more reading, more thinking, more uncensored discussion. Otherwise, people are led to argue earnestly that Dante Alighieri was a propagandist for the Catholic church, forgetting that he was cast into exile by the church, and told to remain there, by the Pope. Also, one finds some interesting religious figures along the roadside in the Inferno, no doubt related to this politically motivated banishment. This charming anecdote was passed along to me by a friend in the classics department and it is revealing of a particular kind of reductionist attitude towards literature, and art generally, that is prevalent today.9 Ironically, such censorship and dismissal has more in common with the late medieval church than its advocates would care to admit.
This unfortunate anecdote is not a singularity, nor is it, sadly, unusual.10 George Orwell’s words echo eerily out of the past and crystalize the problem of such thinking. He writes, “everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole truth” (Orwell, 54).11 When free thought, and thereby literature, is made to dance to the tune of ideology, it ceases not only to be free, but to be of any substance. The problem Orwell describes as conspiring against the writer also hampers the student today. One watches with dismay as people everywhere are turned into “minor officials” reiterating ideological themes passed down the chain for distribution.
This problem is especially pronounced when one loses their taste for reading works themselves because they have been reduced down to something vile. To hold works and their authors in contempt before having read them is to dismiss them without a hearing. Intellectually, this is a fatal mistake.
Orwell articulates this problem with his particular incisive and merciless clarity of thought. He stood as a bastion against totalitarianism, and it is disturbing how applicable his arguments are in twenty-first century American seminar rooms. When juxtaposed with The Prevention of Literature, the situation in the university classroom today, plagued by distortions and virtue signaling, takes on a sinister light. How can a student hope to resist the lull of orthodoxy which has wrapped the artistic and intellectual world in a stranglehold?
The Alternative to Reductionism
Is it faulty thinking to assume that one's literary heroes, be they authors, or characters are the rigid, fixed example for acting in the world? Of course. An incautious embrace of such a theory might lead to tilting at windmills. I’m suggesting that reading fiction of significance, deeply, carefully, and introspectively can serve as a guide. One finds ample instances of ideals to strive for, but, importantly, many instances of mistakes and wrongs that illustrate what not to do. The goal of this process is to cultivate the ability to rethink one's previously cherished beliefs, and to improve oneself via a slow but sure march in the right direction. The process I’m describing is one of continuous evolution with no final destination.
Though a process without end may seem daunting, fortunately adhering to the prescription requires only a few simple principals.
First, curiosity. One must be driven to find out why. Dogmatism cannot stand against curiosity. Reductionism cannot hope to justify itself to someone who has gone the distance, actually read the work in question, and engaged with the relevant contextual information. Though many ideas are not worth taking to heart, the process of rejecting them requires first curiosity and then understanding. It requires the discomfort of occupying a thought fully and entertaining it without full acceptance. One need not accept the what but must embody the how.
Second, open-mindedness. One must constantly be cognizant of the fact that they may be quite wrong about their most fundamental beliefs. Though a simple principal, it is hard achieve. Still, merely keeping the possibility in mind goes a long way to avoid accepting ideas as articles of faith. Instead, one must insist upon their logical soundness.
Third, humility. This is the antidote that the author and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni insists upon in the conclusion of The Age of Grievance. Though also seemingly simple, it is poignant in our particular moment. Wrapped up in the reductionist mood is the arrogant belief that great works of art can be torn down and rejected by accusation of immorality. Dismissal without first listening is pure arrogance. It presumes that one knows better, and that they have nothing to learn. The antidote is humility, because it acknowledges that “thematic” political messaging fails to do justice to complex, ambiguous masterpieces. One cannot cram ambiguity into a slogan, and therefore must be conscious of the bewildering number of things they do not know, and that ideology won’t teach.
There is no perfect cure to our unfortunate current predicament. It is possible that we will never restore a shared epistemological foundation, that divisiveness will forever be privileged over reason, and grievance over generosity towards the ideas of others. Doubtless, some of that vitriol has slipped into my thoughts here. Still, that has been more of a device than an earnest sentiment, and that should be made clear. Similarly, the use of I, we, and one seeks to show that this is a problem of the collective, and individual and also of personal interest. What is earnestly advocated are the three simple bases for good citizenship: curiosity, open-mindedness, and humility. With these in mind, one can look towards the great works of literature for guidance in the pursuit of living well. If you be not of faint heart, read on.
References
Slovic, Paul & Västfjäll, Daniel. (2015). The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide. 10.1515/9783110376616-005.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Chapter IV. Apophthegms and Interludes, §146.
Harris, Sam. Waking Up : A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. 2014 First Simon & Schuster hardcover ed. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language and Other Essays. Oxford City Press (2009).
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation : How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. 2024. New York: Penguin Press.
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. The coddling of the American mind: how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. New York, NY (2018).
Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself : With a Complete Commentary. 2016. Iowa City: University Of Iowa Press
Harris, Sam. Waking Up : A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. 2014 First Simon & Schuster hardcover ed. New York: Simon & Schuster. I’m also particularly indebted to a discussion between Paul Bloom and Sam Harris over at Making Sense. Find the episode here.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation : How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. 2024. New York: Penguin Press.
“The practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.” (O.L.). My use of the term will be to characterize a view of literature that would distill complex, often ambiguous texts down to a simpler level as a means of dismissing them from conversation.
Murray, Douglass. The Madness of Crowds : Gender, Race and Identity. 2019. London: Bloomsbury Continuum.
Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself : With a Complete Commentary. 2016. Iowa City: University Of Iowa Press
Slovic, Paul & Västfjäll, Daniel. (2015). The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide. 10.1515/9783110376616-005.
Narrative, of course, is a double edged sword. I gesture to this many times throughout. The simplistic, convenient narrative, certainly ought to be subjected to heathy skepticism. That is not how I intend narrative here.
I often think of Kierkegaard’s aside in Fear and Trembling about the unwise man of the congregation who hears the parish priest’s rendering of The Binding of Isaac and who rightly seems a madman when he returns home to prove his faith by sacrificing his son.
I insert the caveat that in terms of constructing a syllabus for a real class, it is necessarily a zero sum game. One cannot include everything. One has to choose. Who chooses and why matters.
Whole books have been written on the cognitive distortions that this type of thinking produces. A few to consider are as follows: The Coddling of the American Mind, by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. The Age of Grievance, by Frank Bruni. The Morning After the Revolution, by Nellie Bowles (I have only heard the author interviewed on this last, but as a former writer for the N.Y.T., and accredited journalist, the book has all the markers of authenticity one hopes to find). The War on the West, by Douglass Murray. The Identity Trap, by Yascha Mounk. Unfortunately, the list could go on.
Orwell, George. The Prevention of Literature. Oxford City Press (2009).