Casey Chalk writes for the Federalist about one way to boost civic virtue.
Americans don’t read literature much any more. According to a YouGov survey, 40 percent of adults did not read a single book last year and the median American likely read less than two novels. That’s the case even though the number of Americans holding a four-year degree has more than doubled since the 1970s. I sense, perhaps, a collective shrug from many — who cares if Americans don’t read fiction? Those who favor republican government should care. Reading is a marker of the relative health of a democratic society.
Studies show those who regularly read literature score higher on measures of emotional intelligence, seeing other people’s perspectives, and social cognition. Yet as Joshua Hren argues in More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination & the Spirit of Literature, that’s a minor benefit. Hren says that reading literature “enhances our vision beyond the empirical,” and “cultivates the kind of contemplation by which the soul might purge illusions and recognize reality for what it really is.”
What is Hren talking about? Those who were forced to read To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby may rightly ask, do such texts really have the ability to transform us into better people? Yes, actually. It’s not just about considering others’ perspectives. Literature often makes a more effective point that can have a visceral effect that’s deeper than dry, rhetorical logic. “Literature emerges as an innately complex corrective to our overly easy moralistic proclamations,” writes Hren. “It can take the moralistic man through an analogical pilgrimage.”
In other words, it’s one thing for someone to technically define courage, prudence, or long-suffering. It’s another thing to be drawn into exemplars of them in War and Peace, The Grapes of Wrath, or Brave New World.
