Should Reading Make Us Better People?

The idea that literature makes us better people has an appealing simplicity. We read about lives unlike our own, learn to recognize motives and emotions we might otherwise miss, and emerge from the encounter more patient, more sympathetic, more humane. This belief has often been used to justify literary education. If novels and poems cultivate empathy, then reading becomes not only an intellectual pleasure but a form of moral training.

The trouble is that literature offers no such guarantee. A person can read widely and remain cruel, vain, incurious, or selfish. History provides enough examples of cultivated people behaving badly to make any easy connection between literary sophistication and moral character difficult to defend. Great books do not operate like medicine. Reading King Lear does not automatically produce compassion for aging parents. Reading Dostoevsky does not inoculate anyone against fanaticism. A reader can encounter a work of enormous moral complexity and still take from it only what confirms the beliefs they already hold.

Plato's suspicion of literature began partly here. Poetry has enormous power, which means that it can educate badly as easily as it can educate well. The stories a culture tells shape its sense of courage, honor, justice, and the good life. For Plato, this influence made literature too important to leave unscrutinized. Aristotle responded differently. Tragedy, in his account, allows an audience to experience pity and fear through imaginative participation. Art does something to us emotionally, even if precisely what it does remains more difficult to explain.

That older debate continues in modern arguments about empathy and reading. Martha Nussbaum has written persuasively about literature's ability to enlarge the moral imagination. A novel can place us inside circumstances we have never experienced and compel us to attend to the particularities of another life. Yet this capacity may be less a matter of teaching moral lessons than of complicating the reader's perspective.

This is one reason difficult literature can be educational. Good novels rarely provide the clean moral architecture of a fable. Their characters disappoint us, contradict themselves, misunderstand their motives, behave generously for selfish reasons and selfishly for generous ones. Consider Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, in which almost everything the narrator believes about the people around him slowly becomes unstable. The experience of reading the novel involves learning to distrust the apparent clarity of a story. The reader has to revise judgments repeatedly.

Iris Murdoch understood morality partly as a problem of attention. We fail other people because we reduce them to versions that are convenient for us. We see the irritating colleague, the disappointing child, the rival, the stranger, rather than the complicated person who exceeds our description of them. Literature can resist this reduction. It asks us to look longer. This does not necessarily make us good. However, one could argue that it may make goodness more difficult to fake.

A serious literary education therefore has less to do with extracting moral messages from books than with learning habits of attention. A student who finishes a novel by asking what its lesson was has often been trained to flatten precisely what makes literature valuable. The more demanding question concerns what the book made difficult to see simply. Literary education can teach us to notice contradiction without immediately resolving it, and to remain attentive to another consciousness even when we find that consciousness unpleasant.

Writers encounter the same problem from the opposite direction. Beginning writers often protect their characters from ambiguity. A sympathetic character may be made too innocent while an antagonist is made conveniently cruel. The author's moral judgment reaches the page before the character has had time to become fully alive.

This is one place where author mentorship can become especially valuable. A good writing mentor does not tell a writer what moral position a story ought to take. The mentor helps the writer recognize where judgment has replaced keen observation. A comment such as "I don't believe he would do this" or "you seem to be protecting her here" can force the writer back toward the character as a person rather than a vehicle for an argument.

The process can be uncomfortable. Writers frequently begin with strong feelings about their characters, especially when a story draws upon personal experience. A mentor provides enough distance to reveal where anger, affection, embarrassment, or loyalty has narrowed the imaginative field. Literature has never required writers to possess no moral commitments. The goal is to prevent those commitments from making the fictional world smaller than the people who inhabit it.

The best literary mentorship therefore resembles the best literary education. Neither supplies a set of correct interpretations. Both cultivate attention. The student learns to stay with a difficult passage. The writer learns to stay with a difficult character. In each case, understanding comes from resisting the urge to resolve complexity too quickly.

Perhaps literature's moral value lies here. Books cannot make readers virtuous by themselves, and writers cannot manufacture virtue in an audience by placing the right lesson inside a story. Literature can, however, make certain forms of moral laziness harder to sustain. It can remind us that another person is always more complicated than our account of them.

That is a modest claim for literature, but it may also be a more meaningful one. Reading does not teach us automatically to be good. At its best, it teaches us to look closely enough that goodness becomes a more demanding task.