How literature teaches us to be better people

There's a reason that literature is considered part of a broad field called the "humanities": Literature helps us learn more about what it means to be a human being, and it teaches us to do a better job at managing our lives in our inescapably human incarnations.

A good story, whether a fable or a true account, plucks us from our own tired perspective and gives us a fresh take on the world. There is special value in taking the time to immerse ourselves slowly in the tale, as well as in turning the page to begin a new tale that will provide yet another perspective.

A journalistic approach

It shouldn't be surprising that true reports help one learn more about the world. In one sense, reading a true personal essay can be as educational as reading a newspaper. William Bradley, in an essay for Utne Reader called "Acquiring Empathy through Essays," says:

"Of course I never had the experience of serving in Her Majesty's Indian Imperial Police, but reading George Orwell's experiences in his essays 'Shooting an Elephant' and 'A Hanging' gave me some idea of what doing so was like, and why imperialism is such a terrible thing." Essays, Bradley goes on to say, "give us a record of someone else's consciousness" and enable us to "understand other people in general in a deep and significant way" even when we don't like what they're saying. One might, he warns, "wind up becoming a more patient and compassionate person as a result."

An inventive approach

Fiction, too, despite the official ruling that it is "not true" by definition, awakens readers to deep truths. One method by which this happens is the opportunity given to the reader to perceive and feel from another character's perspective. That the events "didn't really happen" is largely irrelevant; the reader may be able to feel them just as readily and powerfully as if they actually occurred.

In David Huddle's novel "La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl," a character reads a fictional story about a drowning, and when he retells that story, pretending that it is true, he feels the emotion behind the image. Huddle spins the story thus:

"He'd read about those boys' drowning in a book of short stories for his English class at Choate, but since he knew that Colleen wouldn't listen to him if he told her something he'd read in a book, he'd pretended to have been right there on the riverbank, watching. Now he was surprised at the emotion that welled up in him — as if he'd actually seen the blue faces of his fifth-grade classmates."

This emotional capacity isn't just a quirk of this particular fictional character. It exists in many people, and it can be used for more than lying and manipulation. More positively, it can be used to expand one's horizons to imagine what one might feel if one were in a certain situation, thus prompting one to prepare for future possibilities. It can also help one to learn empathy for others who have already experienced something similar.

In other words, reading the details of a drowning — even one that didn't really happen — can help one mentally prepare for dealing with emergency situations or confronting one's own mortality, and it can provide insight into what someone who has witnessed a drowning may have felt, thus opening a potentially better connection with that person.

A non-interactive approach

Fiction provides a kind of sustained moral exercise. It doesn't ask the reader for an immediate decision about what to do in the moment, as the story's concerns aren't necessarily tied to the reader's real world. Instead, by implicitly asking the reader how they would act in some other world, or by asking the reader merely to observe what other characters do in that world, the story affords the reader an extended period of time to carefully consider their thoughts: unrestrained, unobserved and free of consequences.

Annie Murphy Paul wrote in a 2013 article for Time, "Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer," that research over the last decade by Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley has shown that people who read fiction are better able to understand others. This is partly attributable to the depth and speed at which the reader processes the story.

As Paul puts it:

"'Deep reading' — as opposed to the often superficial reading we do on the Web — is an endangered practice...different in kind from the mere decoding of words...A book's lack of hyperlinks, for example, frees the reader from making decisions — Should I click on this link or not? — allowing her to remain fully immersed in the narrative." There is much to be said in favor of the interaction provided by the Internet. Yet there is also a deeply human value in taking time to immerse oneself deliberately in a mental journey.

A diverse approach

In "Literature, empathy and the moral imagination", Heather McCrobie cites the work of Martha Nussbaum. "By encouraging us to exercise our moral imagination," McCrobie explains, "we develop our capacity to put ourselves in another person's situation so that those who are different to ourselves in circumstance, identity or practice can no longer be dehumanised." Then, "after we have 'lived' people through literature, it is harder to find them alien or disgusting," because we have shared experiences or at least the impression or imagination of those experiences, and they have become human to us. It is furthermore significant that there are multiple stories - none of them able, on their own, to fulfill single-handedly the reader's need for stories. Humanity has many voices and perspectives, and that is exactly what books give us.

Literature improves our lives

Those who love to read know that a good book can lighten or darken one's mood, reveal layers of meaning in a simple sequence of events, and even change the course of one's life. If you want to increase your empathy and your sense of belonging to the collectivity of humanity, by all means, meditate, pray, talk to your friends, talk to your enemies — and consider reading a novel, too.

Originally posted to Helium Network on March 5, 2014.

Image: Jason Hutchens, Wikimedia Commons © Creative Commons Attribution license, version 2.0

Molly Worthen, in a Sept. 4, 2020 opinion for the New York Times, points out the complexities of empathy.

"Our capacity to see one another as fellow humans, to connect across differences, is the foundation of a liberal pluralist society. Yet skeptics say that what seems like empathy often may be another form of presumption, condescension or domination. In his 2016 book Against Empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom argued that empathy can cloud rational judgment and skews toward people 'who are close to us, those who are similar to us and those we see as more attractive or vulnerable and less scary.' The scholar and activist bell hooks put the matter more starkly. White desire to feel Black experience is predatory, exploitative, 'eating the Other,' she wrote.

It’s impossible to perfectly inhabit another person’s experience. The important question is the value of the effort, and whether it leaves us separated by an asymptote or a chasm. Can a straight TV writer create an authentic gay sitcom character? If an author of European descent writes a novel from the perspective of Indigenous people, is it an empathic journey, or an imperialist incursion? 'I don't want to throw out what empathy is trying to do,' Alisha Gaines, a professor of African-American literature at Florida State University, told me. 'I'm very critical of it though. Empathy has to be considered in the context of institutions and power.'

* * *

The college students I interviewed for this story stressed the role of empathy in firing up their curiosity, critical thinking and self-interrogation. 'People often dismiss emotion as a weakness,' Andie Horowitz, a political science major at the University of Michigan, told me. 'But a certain level of emotion makes you interested in something, wanting to find the truth.'"

See also: The historian Lynn Hunt on how fiction promotes empathy.

See also:

"Moral analysis doesn’t silo fiction as something separate from life. It involves the same skills one uses to make decisions on a daily basis.

And that means that it exposes the reader in a way that a more academic analysis doesn’t. The reader who is unable to perceive the ethical nuances in a text or who is unable to sympathize with the characters’ struggles — the one whose comments inevitably begin with “Why didn’t they just …?” — is often the least empathetic and spiritually developed in their personal life.

And yet that exposure is exactly why it’s worth doing.

I don’t think the point of joining a book club is to improve our reading skills. That would be horribly empty, if we were just reading books in order to become better readers of books. I think we read books to become better people, and we can’t become better people unless we admit that we are flawed and human and insensitive and that we vitally need the perspective that this book is capable of providing."

"The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions," Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books, November 2, 2022

Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy: The types of books we read may affect how we relate to others. Julianne Chiaet, Scientific American, October 4, 2013

In 2025, most Americans read fewer than four books. Brittany Allen, Lit Hub, January 5, 2026

"The most important work you will ever do on yourself will not come from a self-help book or even therapy. It will come when you choose to start noticing and caring about things outside of yourself.

Therapy and self-help literature can only take you so far. Therapy only works if you use the tools your therapist is trying to share with you."

— Get Out of Your Head and Head Out Into the World: Life changes when you start noticing what’s happening outside, Jason McBride, Weirdo Poetry, May 24, 2026

Still unconvinced that God exists: Holes in the argument from objective moral values

Within the "Conversations with Matt DeLockery" Christian podcast available free on iTunes, four episodes titled “Looking for a God” (Parts 1-4) deserve a little attention, although, as I show below, they fail to present a convincing argument for the existence of God. Together, the episodes total one hour, and they were released on four different dates in October and November 2017.

'1 - Intro to the Moral Argument'

The first episode is a solid introduction. DeLockery's stated intent is to examine whether human behavior implies God's existence. He believes that God’s existence is “probably the most foundational question there could possibly be on any subject, because it touches on everything else,” especially the question of whether human purpose is given to us or whether we invent it for ourselves and the question of the afterlife. He explains the importance of critical thinking and gives a brief overview of common arguments about God’s existence. He says that, in discussions about whether morality is objective or subjective, "we’re looking for an answer to the question: Are there any basic foundational principles that say how humans should operate in relation to ourselves, other people, the world around us, and so forth?"

'2 - Objective vs. Subjective Moral Values'

The second episode has some flaws.

He defines "objective" as "hard fact": something that is true for people regardless of what culture they belong to and regardless of who recognizes it as an objective truth or who may believe it to be a subjective truth or falsehood.

He defines "subjective" as preference or opinion. Throughout the episode, apparently unwittingly, he goes back and forth about whether such preference is personal or social, and unfortunately this detail leads to the failure of his argument.

In this passage, he says the subjectivity can be either personal or social.

“Subjective moral values are things that we feel or are socially right or wrong. [emphasis mine] These vary from group to group and can and do change. Think about the phrase ‘everything’s relative.’ If a particular moral value is relative, then it is subjective. Moral values being ‘relative’ and moral values being ‘subjective’ are really two ways of saying the same thing. However, if a particular value is not relative, then it is ‘objective’.”

But then he asks listeners to ask themselves what they personally feel, their "immediate gut reaction," about the question of sex trafficking. Specifically, when they examine the source of ther moral opinion that sex trafficking is wrong, he asks listeners to decide: is their belief due to “social pressure,” a “social ‘no-no’,” or is sex trafficking “actually wrong”? Here, DeLockery implies that you can determine that something is objectively right or wrong based on what you subjectively feel. This is confusing at best. An "immediate gut reaction" is practically the very definition of subjectivity and is not a good way to demonstrate hard facts about the world.

The confusion is repeated:

“Are there things that are really good or bad, and are not merely based on social preferences? In my opinion, I think that there are many more values that are subjective or relative. However, not all are. I think sex trafficking is morally wrong. I think taking advantage of poor people is morally wrong. I think loving and caring for others is morally good. And I don’t think these things are merely preferences. They are not relative; they are not ‘to each his own.’ I think there really are at least some moral values that are objective because I think that’s how the world is. It’s not because I want to believe that there is something right or wrong with certain things. It’s because when I look at the world, I see [my emphasis] that there really is[my emphasis] something right or wrong with certain things. That is how I perceive the world when I look around me.”

By starting with the individual or social definition of subjectivity and, by some conscious or unconscious sleight of hand, dropping off the individual so that only the social remains as the hallmark of subjectivity, DeLockery allows the individual to be the arbiter of the objective. Even had he started with a purely social definition of subjectivity, this schema would not endure long, because the question would arise how a number of infallibly objective individuals suddenly become fallible and subjective when they organize into a society or culture.

Another problem is revealed by his choice of "sex trafficking" as an example. He assumes that his audience is sufficiently educated to recognize the phrase "sex trafficking" (defined as kidnapping and selling or exploiting people, often minors and often across international borders, for sexual purposes); that they recognize it is illegal in most countries; and that they are aware that everyone around them shares values that place them in opposition to it (likely, since he speaks to an audience interested in modern Christian apologetics). His example works reasonably well and makes its point rapidly precisely because everyone in the room already knows everyone else's general orientation on this topic. There are, however, people who practice sex trafficking; there are places where it is considered culturally acceptable to give girls to older men for marriage or as a form of collective punishment, and people from those cultures might have different definitions of "sex trafficking"; there are scenarios, such as war, in which kidnapping and rape become commonplace when they were not so before; and there are sociopaths or rebels among us who might know the socially appropriate thing to say when asked for their moral opinions but do not actually hold these feelings. So, asking the room to examine their personal feelings on a given moral question does not prove that the answer to that question is universally held. It matters how you ask the question, who is in the room, and how they choose to respond. It is not at all like placing a rock and asking someone to kick it to prove that it is a "hard fact." Anyone, regardless of their belief, culture, situation, or capacity, will trip over a rock or walk into a wall placed in front of them, but they will not all agree on values, which makes it difficult to prove that any given value is indeed objective. My own "immediate gut reaction" to value statements can always be contradicted by someone else's gut reaction and it will be difficult to arbitrate between us. It seems better to say that our moral intuitions matter and yet are fallible.

It is also confusing why the objective value is said to be true regardless of what anyone believes about it, yet apparently the only way to investigate the value is to ask "What do you believe about it?"

'3 - Evolution and Morality'

Believing that he successfully demonstrated in the previous episode that objective values exist, he now inquires where those values come from. According to him, God is one option:

“Now, there really isn’t much of an argument that a god could create moral values, or objective moral values. It’s pretty simple: If there is a god who can create everything, then creating a specific way that he wants his creatures to function is pretty straightforward. God makes man. God can provide a set of operating instructions to explain how man best functions. Pretty simple.”

In my estimation, this is not, to the contrary, at all simple because there is little to compare it to. As a human, I can engineer nonliving objects and, through selective breeding or environmental control, tinker with or influence living beings. In so doing, I control how they do operate, but I do not control how they should operate. The only way I can change values and rules about how any object or being should operate is by changing the values and rules of the society in which we participate — which is, by definition, in the realm of the subjective. If I were "God," it is not obvious how that status would enable me to create values and rules that are objective, nor how a value or rule could possibly be a hard fact about the world rather than just my opinion (albeit a divine opinion) about what I want my creations to do. Thus the question of whether God can create objective moral values cannot be dispensed with so easily. But it is dispensed with, so onward we go.

Could values have evolved? In examining the possibility that objective values resulted from "biological evolution," DeLockery doesn’t start with any pre-human or non-human type of animal. He only asks about how social learning might have occurred to promote human survival. He believes it’s clear that evolution — assuming that evolution is a real process, a position to which he does not commit — can produce subjective values (those that can “vary from place to place, from group to group”) but cannot produce objective values. At best, evolution could somehow aid us to "discover” objective values.

Now he changes his definition of “objective.” An objective fact, he says here, is one that “cannot change.” This contradicts a nuance of an example he gave in Episode 2. There, he said that the statement “gas-powered cars need oil to function properly” is an objective fact because of “the way gas-powered cars are currently made [my emphasis]...This does not change, and will not change, until the ways cars are manufactured changes [my emphasis].” The objective fact indeed can change to reflect the underlying conditions that support its validity. But here in Episode 3 he declares that an objective moral fact cannot change.

He says that, while evolution may help humans discover objective moral values, it can only produce subjective moral values. The type of values generated through evolution meet “the definition of subjective because it’s everything about how it affects the other person, how it is perceived by the other person, not whether it’s inherently the way that the human machine was made to function.” Note the assumption that the human machine was made at all (by a creator) which was assumed indirectly in Episode 2 when objective moral values were discovered by immediate gut reaction.

He concludes that, since objective values exist (as asserted in Episode 2) but could not have evolved (as asserted in Episode 3), they must have been created by God. He does not consider any alternative origins of values — say, for example, the result of a careful reasoning process.

'4 - God, Morality, and Euthyphro'

He presents Plato's Euthyphro dilemma: Can God arbitrarily choose values or is God held to a standard above himself? Neither is attractive, so DeLockery solves it with a third option: God is identical with those values. The values reflect God's character. The objective values with which we concern ourselves reflect the values of our Creator just as a painting reflects something of its painter. This is all merely asserted, not properly argued, and this is the shortest of all four episodes.

Thanks, Obama!

Twitter recommendation

First, the son:

This makes us say:

1. "Thanks, Obama!"
2. "Consumer confidence" is the prevailing "vibe." It is odd to ask people to feel grateful for or impressed by their own attitude toward their own purchasing power. We need to compare perceptions against facts. The bank deregulation pending in Congress includes only modest "changes for consumers that ought to be a given,” according to Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform. In the longer term, consumers are likely to be hurt by the bank deregulation, which is the main legislative change in progress.
3. Regarding the hashtag at the end, are these things really what "Make America Great"? What else could be missing from the list?
4. To whom do we give thanks for this? A leader? A divine agent pulling strings? Other people who share our opinions? Can we name anyone who worked hard to make good things happen?
5. It's ill-mannered to ask a nation to direct their holiday gratitude for something you or your father supposedly did, no matter how significant or well deserved. It's called Thanksgiving, not Thanksgetting.
6. Giving thanks for statistics is dicey. We should pay attention to the real human beings in front of us. This tweet may not be welcome, productive, or sensitive Thanksgiving conversation if one of the individuals at your table doesn't have a job or is on food stamps.

A few hours later, the father:

1. Since our country is only "starting to do really well" and the military is only just now "getting really strong," what does that say about our history?
2. The Department of Veterans Affairs is always supposed to take care of veterans. That is its mission.
3. We have nine Supreme Court justices. Which one is great — the one you appointed?
4. The "highest Stock Market EVER" doesn't directly help the half of Americans who aren't invested in stocks.
5. It isn't clear exactly what "record" is being set by cutting what kind of regulations and what that is supposed to achieve.
6. The unemployment rate was under 5% in 2007 when the financial crisis began. The crisis occurred in large part because there weren't enough regulations on banks. Obama was elected in 2008 and began working on legislation to fix the problem, introducing regulations like Dodd-Frank. Unemployment (which takes months, if not years, to begin to correct) spiked to 10% in late 2009 and then it dropped during the last seven years of Obama's presidency. It was 4.6% when you were elected in Nov. 2016, 4.8% when you were inaugurated in January, and 4.2% in Sept. 2017. You have aimed to eliminate Dodd-Frank via the Financial CHOICE Act. Without adequate regulations, over the very long term, the country may set itself up for another financial crisis.
7. Indeed, the last time unemployment was any lower (3.9%) was in the final month of the Clinton administration (Dec 2000). Bill Clinton's administration is the benchmark to beat. Since we are at the "lowest unemployment in 17 years," it sounds as if jobs already came back so you can stop taking credit for them "coming back."
8. "We will build the WALL" is not even an accomplishment. It is imaginary and ideological. It is aspirational — if you are a fascist.

Better recommendation

Published in early 2017, Stephen Cataldo's Cognitive Politics helps left-leaning folks work through strategies for meaningful conversations with people with whom they have political disagreements.

On reading: Quotes

"Rather than reading a book in order to criticize it, I would rather criticize it because I have read it, thus paying attention to the subtle yet profound distinction Schopenhauer made between those who think in order to write and those who write because they have thought."
- Miguel de Unamuno, Ensayos, Vol. 2, p. 1013. Quoted in Clive James' Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 767.

"Unstudied, our books are parchment and ink, no more; learned, they live in us."
- Leonard Fein, Where Are We?: The Inner Life of America's Jews (1988) New York: Harper and Row, 1988. p. 32.

"...I'm not one of those arrogant fools who form their opinions as oysters form their pearls, and then shut them away where nothing can touch them. I have my own ideas and beliefs, but I can hear the rest of the world breathing."
- Amin Maalouf, Balthasar's Odyssey (2000) Translated from the French by Barbara Bray. New York: Arcade, 2002. p. 10.

"The hallway is washed in the smell of library: melancholy scholarship, paper and dust mites. There’s no trace of the shut-in old lady smell, the powder and outmoded perfume. Instead, there’s a hint of beeswax from the furniture, damp oil paint and turpentine, but above all the autodidact scent of knowledge. It is almost too much, too selfconscious, like a stage set built to house Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein. This person is bookish. Neith glances down a hallway and sees, yes, more books."
- Nick Harkaway, Gnomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. p. 35.

”...she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart...”
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Originally J. B. Lippincott Co., 1965). New York: Perennial, 1999. p. 134.

”Throughout all the ages, men have been trying to fathom the meaning of life. They realize that if some direction or some meaning could be given to the whole thing, to our actions, then great human forces would be unleashed.”
- Richard P. Feynman. Lecture: "The Uncertainty of Values" presented at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1963. Printed in The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, 1998. p. 32.

"We must not be willing to suffer through quiet lives of discontent."
- Stephen Butler Murray, "Deliverance Where the Streets Have No Name." Printed in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Edited by Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2003. p. 47.

”Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2004. p. 1.

"The way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism is not to change the system but to read good books."
- Thomas Moore. Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. p. 143.

"I never feel I have a duty to read something. I read because I love it like I love chocolate. I don't read a book because everyone else likes it."
- Isabel Allende. "Isabel Allende: Starts fresh writing, reading every Jan." Interviewed by BOOKS (Amy Sutherland). The Boston Sunday Globe, Jan. 19, 2014. p. N16.

"Wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammenstoßen und es klingt hohl, ist das allemal im Buche?"
When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow thud, is it always in the book?
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"Your employer [the queen] has been giving my employer [the prime minister] a hard time." "Yes?" "Yes. Lending him books to read. That’s out of order." "Her Majesty likes reading." "I like having my dick sucked. I don’t make the prime minister do it."
- Alan Bennett. The Uncommon Reader. New York: Picador, 2007. p. 86.

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. That's why I read so much, John Snow. And you? What's your story, bastard?"
- The character Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, in Game of Thrones, Season 1, Episode 2

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Photo of Archivo Histórico del Atlántico (Barranquilla, Colombia) by Wbohorquezm - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link to photo

Quotes: We need to be space age 'crew' who 'think like an ecosystem'

"Today we are living in a 'space age' and, strangely enough, even though our culture is a pioneer in space navigation and space exploration, we really don't understand the value of space at all."
- Alan Watts

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."
- Marshall McLuhan

VIDEO for homeowners: Jeff Davis tells you how to make your house energy-independent (DIY system)

"Each civilization has its own kind of wastes and its own ways of being negligent. The tendency remains much the same, even though we now sweep it all into the scientific term pollution. Like the tendency to kill, the tendency to waste and to foul the nest seems to be inscribed in the genetic code of the species."
- Rene Dubos

"To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem."
- Douglas P. Wheeler

Sources

Alan Watts. What is Zen? Novato, CA: New World Library, 2000. p 64.

Marshall McLuhan, quoted in United Press International, quoted in The Week, April 22, 2011, p. 21.

Rene Dubos, Beast or Angel? Choices That Make Us Human. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. p 44.

Douglas P. Wheeler. Quoted in "Sunbeams," The Sun. January 2010. p. 48.

Quotes: On the rise of militarism and the need for compromise

Sara Paretsky:

"When Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in the weeks following 9/11, the name of the act itself seemed to me to be Orwellian, the kind of title Stalin or Hitler or Franco might have chosen, one that tried to force people to choose sides. “You are either with us or against us,” Mr. Bush famously told the world, but he was delivering the same message at home. “You’re a patriot or a terrorist,” the Patriot Act screams in its very title. Indeed, in the run-up to the now-famous elections of 2006, when the Republicans lost control of Congress, Mr. Bush toured the country, proclaiming that a vote for Democrats meant, “The terrorists win and America loses.”

The Economist:

"The attempts of his [Obama's] secretary of homeland security to replace the word "terrorism" with "man-caused disasters" attracted much ridicule."

Arjun Appadurai:

"...the war unleashed on 9/11 was above all a war between two kinds of systems, both global in scope. The first may be described as vertebrate, the second as cellular. Modern nation-states recognize their common belonging to the vertebrate world and, like the last dinosaurs, see that they are in a desperate struggle for survival as a global formation."

Arjun Appadurai. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. p. 21.

Susan Bordo:

"I once heard a speaker at an elite university sharply criticize the hierarchical, "binary" thinking of the (then) Republican administration, its good guys/bad guys, we-are-the-saviors-of-the-Western-world mentality. Without missing a beat, the speaker went on to congratulate the assembled audience for "of course" being "beyond such hierarchical, dualistic thinking." Pardon me, but I think the notion that there are those who are unimpeachably "beyond" and those that are hopelessly stuck in the muck is just a bit "binary." (Note, too, the presumption that one can tell the good guys from the bad guys on the basis of neighborhood.)"

Appadurai again (p. 3):

"No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius.

Andrew J. Bacevich in 2008:

”In consonance with this "military ascendancy," these American hawks are inclined to see the United States as already beset by acutely dangerous threats, with even greater perils lurking just around the corner. With a low tolerance for uncertainty, they are highly attuned to the putative risks of waiting on events, while discounting the hazards posed by precipitate action. This perspective found classic expression in September 2002, when Condoleeza Rice rejected a lack of detailed intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program as a reason to postpone a planned invasion of that country since "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." For his part, Vice President Cheney was even more explicit. Even a remotely suspected threat could provide a sufficient rationale for action. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon," Cheney once remarked, "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."”

Bacevich again, in 2011:

In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, a professor of sociology at Columbia, dubbed this perspective "military metaphysics," which he characterized as "the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military." Those embracing this mind-set no longer considered genuine, lasting peace to be plausible. Rather, peace was at best a transitory condition, "a prelude to war or an interlude between wars."

Amos Oz:

"I think peace is possible because there is fatigue and exhaustion on both sides. I am a great believer in fatigue and exhaustion. Most human conflicts — not only international conflicts but even individual conflicts — don't solve through a magic formula. They die down through fatigue and exhaustion. And finally I see syndromes of blessed fatigue and exhaustion both on the Israeli side and on the Palestinian side. Not on the side of the fanatics; they never tire. But the majority is tired and ready for a sad compromise. And compromises are sad by definition. There is no such thing as a happy compromise."

Or, as a proverb has it: “The perfect compromise is the one nobody likes.”

Sources

Sara Paretsky. Writing in an Age of Silence. Verso, 2007. p. xvii.

"Two cheers and a jeer." The Economist. April 11-17, 2009. p. 26.

Arjun Appadurai. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. p. 21, 3.

Susan Bordo. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997. pp. 18-19.

Andrew J. Bacevich. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. p. 83.

"The Tyranny of Defense, Inc." Andrew J. Bacevich. The Atlantic. Jan/Feb 2011. p. 76.

Amos Oz, interviewed by Tom Ashbrook on the On Point radio program, Oct. 31, 2011. http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/10/31/amos-oz-on-israeli-life?autostart=true

Quotes: On why societies and groups trend away from democracy

Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet:

Nor did men any longer dare to divide humanity into two races, the one fated to rule, the other to obey, the one to deceive, the other to be deceived. They had to recognize that all men have an equal right to be informed on all that concerns them, and that none of the authorities established by men over themselves has the right to hide from them one single truth.”




Benjamin Franklin:

"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”




Wendy Brown:

"Democracy requires that citizens be modestly oriented toward self-rule, not simply value enhancement, and that we understand our freedom as resting in such self-rule, not simply in market conduct. When this dimension of being human [homo politicus] is extinguished [in favor of homo economicus], it takes with it the necessary energies, practices, and culture of democracy, as well as its very intelligibility.

* * *

Democracy is always incomplete, always short of its promise, but the conditions for cultivating it can be better or worse. My point was that democracy is really reduced to a whisper in the Euro-Atlantic nations today. Even Alan Greenspan says that elections don’t much matter much because, “thanks to globalization . . . the world is governed by market forces,” not elected representatives. Voting has been declining for decades everywhere in the Western world; politicians are generally mistrusted if not reviled (except for Varoufakis, of course!); and everything to do with political life or government is widely considered either captured by capital, corrupt or burdensome—this hostility to the political itself is generated by neoliberal reason. Thus, today, the meaning of democracy is pretty much reduced to personal liberty. Such liberty is not nothing, but could not be further from the idea of rule by and for the people.”




Virginia Woolf had a character say in her first novel in 1915:

"...we'd better talk about life for a change. Questions that really matter to people's lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And when we've made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it..."

* * *

...she professed herself certain that if once twenty people — no, ten would be enough if they were keen — set about doing things instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish almost every evil that exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people with brains — of course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably, where they could meet once a week...




Tom Carson:

“If you wonder who made [liberal] hauteur respectable, try Adlai Stevenson. The most celebrated exchange of his two campaigns against Dwight D. Eisenhower went like this: ‘Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you,’ cried a woman at a rally. Ever humorous, the Democratic nominee twinkled. ‘Madam, that’s not enough,’ he said. ‘I need a majority.’ That quip was one of the most appalling things ever said in public by anyone running for president, because either you believe in democracy or you don’t.”

Jamelle Bouie ("Defeating Trump Is Just a Start," NYT, Dec. 15, 2023):

"Unfortunately, as the law professor Aziz Rana observes in a recent essay on political freedom in Boston Review, there are scarcely any spaces in the contemporary United States where ordinary Americans practice the habits of democracy and inhabit a more reciprocal, participatory and solidaristic vision of freedom. Decades after Ronald Reagan led a sweeping attack on the idea of the commons in American life, Rana writes, 'there are vanishingly few sites in American life — at work or in politics — where these experiences actually exist.'"

Yuval Noah Harari:

"In the economic sphere too the ability to hold a hammer or press a button is becoming less valuable than before, which endangers the critical alliance between liberalism and capitalism. In the twentieth century liberals explained that we don’t have to choose between ethics and economics. Protecting human rights and liberties was both a moral imperative and the key to economic growth. Britain, France and the United States allegedly prospered because they liberalized their economies and societies, and if Turkey, Brazil or China wanted to become equally prosperous, they had to do the same. In many if not most cases it was the economic rather than the moral argument that convinced tyrants and juntas to liberalise.

In the twenty-first century liberalism will have a much harder time selling itself. As the masses lose their economic importance, will the moral argument alone be enough to protect human rights and liberties? Will elites and governments go on valuing every human being even when it pays no economic dividends?"

Richard Flanagan:

"In the end, politics is not about focus groups and numbers; it is about the power of stories to galvanize and forge the thinking of societies."

Jeff Schmidt argues that people who have studied and who adhere to standards in this-or-that field, those who consider themselves or are considered "professionals" in the field and who adjust their worldviews and live their lives accordingly, may tend toward authoritarianism when it is related to upholding the standards or the overall vision of their field since the masses cannot be expected or trusted to uphold it.

"...although professionals may be liberal on this or that question of the day, they tend to be very conservative on a long-standing issue of much greater importance to society: democracy. Discuss politics with a liberal professional and you will not hear a word in favor of a more democratic distribution of power in society, perhaps because in the professional’s view ignorant nonprofessionals make up the large majority of the population. Even the most liberal professionals tend toward authoritarianism in their social visions.

* * *

And the liberal doctor who offers a cocktail party opinion against authoritarian police practices? Go to that doctor’s office with a medical problem and see her lean toward the traditional authoritarian doctor-patient relationship. Professionals are liberal on distant social issues, issues over which they have no authority at work and no influence outside of work."

To allow for willing participation in democracy, we have to find the facts and principles that we can agree upon and use those as a starting point for a connection that allows us to work together.

Quoting Ned Resnikoff — "When political actors can’t agree on basic facts and procedures, compromise and rule-bound argumentation are basically impossible; politics reverts back to its natural state as a raw power struggle in which the weak are dominated by the strong,” — Brooke Gladstone commented:

"Even if each of our realities is unique, our common cultures and environments ensure that we share some fundamental principles. That is what enables consensus, and that is what is under attack. By degrading the very notion of shared reality, Trump has disabled the engine of democracy."

"The right is a coalition of people who have never been on the wrong side of power’s arrangements. It is a coalition organized around the preservation of those arrangements." (Brennan Kenneth Brown, Right-wing Conservatives Cannot Make Good Art. Why?, Medium, April 21, 2026)

Sources

Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. (1794) Translated by June Barraclough. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, Inc. 1955. p 129-130.

Benjamin Franklin, quoted in the Montreal Gazette. The Week, Oct. 11, 2013, p. 19.

Booked #3: "What Exactly is Neoliberalism?" Wendy Brown, interviewed by Timothy Shenk. April 2, 2015.

Virginia Woolf. The Voyage Out (1915).

Tom Carson in The American Prospect, quoted in The Week, Dec. 23, 2011. p. 14.

Yuval Noah Harari. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York: Harper, 2017. p. 313.

Richard Flanagan. The Sunday Age (Australia) September 2, 2001. Quoted in Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 463.

Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) Kindle Edition.

Brooke Gladstone. The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time. New York: Workman Publishing, 2017.