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How reading fiction can make us kinder towards ourselves and others

We live in the era of distraction. With our consumption limited only by the speed at which we can scroll through our feeds, today’s trends are shorter-lived than ever before[1]. This is a time when silence is rare and thinking deep costs more effort the more sophisticated our gadgets become. Taking a moment to detach and think sometimes feels like a superhuman feat. Let’s nevertheless try to take a moment to consider the astounding impact this technology has had on us. We have become so good at distracting ourselves that our technology has made us more distractible[2].  With ever shorter attention spans, we long for ever more perfect distraction. That’s as vicious a vicious cycle as there ever was. The ever more effective platforms of distraction thrive on novelty. They are literally modelled on the slot machines of Las Vegas[3]. A new meme, a new influencer, a new diet, the latest outrage- for a moment they are all there is and then they disappear. We have never had so many ways of spending our time, and yet who really thinks that we have become better at using it? This constant distraction leaves us unprepared to confront that which we are escaping from: the reality of our relationships with others and ourselves. By always keeping an eye on our screens, we lose touch with that reality, but never quite manage to make it disappear. Whenever our phones’ batteries run out and no sockets are in sight, we are terrified of the depths that we have left unexplored- and even mighty Tic Toc cannot change that.

Life is difficult, and always has been. Far from being a complaint, it is a fundamental fact. People, no matter how smart and no matter how wealthy, are struggling through life, never quite sure what tomorrow might bring. We are contradictory at our very core. On some days, we wake up and everything seems to glow with positive energy. For no obvious reason, other days feel like they’re predestined to devolve into psychological torture. What’s more, our behaviour doesn’t just seem to depend on the weather or on the time of the day. It also appears to be influenced by the people we are surrounded by. To our colleagues and to our relatives, we might appear to have different, maybe even incompatible personalities[4]. Your hard-headed disciplinarian boss might turn out to also be the affectionate son of a sick mother. Perfect consistency exists only in works of fiction. We rarely stop to think about this, and whenever we do, it usually seems to make little sense, and ends up scaring us. However, take an honest look at yourself, and you will recognize those contradictions within you. It is only too understandable to hide that mess away from others. Even if you tried to explain it, would anyone understand? Instead, we put on our personas and give our best to look straightforward and predictable.

That’s certainly useful to an extent- after all, a society composed of unpredictable individuals seems unlikely to survive for long. However, we know that our behaviour shapes our identity[5]. Walking around all day acting like we’ve got everything figured out, staying busy and distracting ourselves not just means we avoid grappling with that messiness inside, it also makes us forget that everyone else is walking around with a persona, too. We risk becoming our persona, because our world makes it so tantalizingly easy to never take our masks off. Convinced that we know others and ourselves, we judge others and ourselves harshly. Life stories are fed through a kind of meatgrinder and are reduced to records of likes and dislikes, tweets and posts. Intentions become clear, characters shallow. The world of Instagram is a stage[6], and we play our assigned role even in between selfies. In making our lives conform to this second-rate caricature of life we risk missing out on all that is most beautiful about it.

It is that process of grappling with our deep ambiguity, that results in the most sublime art. Michelangelo’s Pieta, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Wagner’s Ring- they all speak to us so powerfully because they confront the paradox at our core head on. Their world is ambiguous and confusing. It is the world we recognize in ourselves and that we live in every day. Good fiction similarly dares us to look beyond the superficial. Tolstoy’s War and Peace[7] guides us through that ambiguity like no other work of fiction I’ve read so far. It comes to life through characters so glaringly human that readers cannot help but recognise themselves in them. The tension between harmless appearances and the hidden world runs through and leaves its mark on every chapter. The world of the St Petersburg salons with its superficial small talk, manufactured outrage and virtue signalling, is eerily familiar to anyone caught up in the 24-hour news cycle. Where the Petersburg salons functioned as welcome opportunities for harmless distraction, “Keeping up with the Kardashians” and the latest shitstorm on Twitter are their supercharged offspring. Just like Anna Pavlovna’s salon was governed by an implicit code of etiquette, preventing anyone from saying something actually meaningful, so our modern salons are designed for maximal Oxytocin release. Thoughtfulness and moderation, on the other hand, are discouraged by their very business models. By avoiding deep conversations and living in our portable handheld salons, we risk never connecting with others in any meaningful way.

We only wonder if other people might not really be the well-polished, easy to understand personas they appear to be, when we face that ambiguity inside ourselves. Like Tolstoy’s characters, we sometimes feel like we’re adrift in an ocean, sometimes catching sight of the shore only to be swept under the next instant. We know how the never-ending attempt to make out a purpose can be exhilarating one day and depressing the next. What wouldn’t we give for a reliable compass to show us the way through it all?  All these are quintessentially human experiences. In a way, they define what it means to live. There is no escaping them. Not in any salon, and not in any feed. Sooner or later, again and again, they catch up with all of us. War and Peace is not the key to a life free from these experiences. It is, however, a powerful reminder that we are not alone.

Tolstoy’s characters experience all the highs and suffer through all the lows, they make horrible mistakes and do tremendous good. Along the way, they despair, find hope, love and loathe. Their plans and predictions rarely come true, and although they mature, they remain always torn, always human. It feels like the novel, by giving us insight into these lives, asks us to not be afraid of that uncertainty, that ambiguity that will never leave us. Instead, by helping us accept it within ourselves and others, it makes us kinder towards both ourselves and others. After all, we are all just trying to stay afloat in that same ocean.

This sense of solace that War and Peace leaves us with might explain why the book seems to find its way to readers when they most need it. When I told my grandfather a few weeks ago that I was reading the novel, he told me that he read it twice over as a young officer during the darkest days of the Cypriot Civil War. Wherever you are now, if you recognise any of the experiences I described, set aside time for yourself, think deeply, don’t be afraid of meaningful conversations- and read War and Peace.

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[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/tuod-aoi041119.php

[2] It also poses a plethora of other dangers: https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/more-social-media-regulation

[3] As detailed by Natasha Dow Schüll in “Addiction by Design”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design

[4] There is, for example, research indicating that just using a different language can impact our “major five” personality traits: http://www.utpsyc.org/Nairan/research/bilingual.pdf

[5] Our habits seem to have a profound influence on our identities. Successfully adopting a habit can go a long way towards shifting one’s self-perception: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01504/full

[6] To paraphrase Shakespeare: As You Like It Act 3 Scene 7

[7] A book described by the author himself as “not a novel, even less a poem and still less an historical chronicle”, but in fact containing elements of all three.

How we can use the pandemic to clear up our thoughts and improve our communities.

Personal Spheres of Influence

Faced with death and disease our first priority is to protect ourselves and our families. The primal instinct to survive might be helpful for those of us being chased by a tiger[1], but it cannot sustainably guide society-wide reactions to global threats such as the current pandemic. It also leaves us emotionally vulnerable at a time when we need to be more resilient than ever. For life in general, but in critical situations in particular, it is helpful for each of us to adapt their circle of concern to their circle of influence. In other words, we need to make sure that we worry only about things that we can actually change, and waste as little thought as possible on matters that are simply outside our sphere of influence.

Translated to our current situation, this piece of stoic wisdom might mean that instead of panicking about how painful the experience of falling ill might be, we should focus our energy on maintaining hygiene and following official instructions. If everyone managed to discipline himself in this way, we wouldn’t have to worry about unrelated issues such as whether our local supermarket has adequate supplies of toilet paper. The toilet paper panic serves as an example of what a tennis player might call an “unforced error”. We’ve got the greatest pandemic in a hundred years on our hands- do we really need to make up new problems on our own? Like a tennis player, we need to work on ourselves first. Once we’ve arrived at a healthy mindset, we can more effectively fight the disease. Success starts from within.

Communal Spheres of Influence

The idea of making our spheres of concern and spheres of influence overlap, doesn’t just apply to us personally. We can use the same framework to determine what our communities should prepare for. We might not be able to prepare our communities for every eventuality, but we can do our best to minimize risks. In order to do so we must first identify our communities’ most important interest, then assess the degree to which these interests are threatened and finally determine the actions that lie within our communal sphere of influence. Let’s go through each of these steps one by one.

Identifying our communities’ most important interests is the crucial prerequisite to assessing risks, since the more important the interest, the more worrisome a threat to it becomes. We must ask ourselves who we are as a society, and decide what we are not willing to give up on no matter what. Many people will doubtlessly find that fundamental rights like freedom of speech, systems of governance such as democracy or values like equality before the law are what fundamentally characterises us. Without these, and the infrastructure that ensures their translation to our everyday lives, our societies would not, in the eyes of most of us, be recognisable. For most of us, the list of vital characteristics would include respect for the dignity of the individual and the need to maintain a strong and accessible healthcare-system. We need to have an ongoing and open-ended debate on these vital interests. I am convinced that, even if we never achieve a perfect consensus, the debate will lead to a clearer picture of what we hold to be most important. The fact of a debate like that being led publicly will alert decision-makers to the fact that we as citizens expect risks to these vital interests to be taken seriously. However, the Covid-19 epidemic illustrates that the identification of these threats, the second step, is not always straightforward.

Playing Russian Roulette: Uncertainty vs Prediction

Every country has its own story to tell about how it happened to underestimate the pandemic. There is for example an infinity of reasons why a government might have failed to stockpile masks or ventilators. What unites all of them is that in hindsight they appear absolutely unconvincing. The loss of life and the economic disruption we are currently witnessing are of such a magnitude that we must wonder why the argument for prevention lost out so decisively.

Very few people within government seem to have taken preparation for an airborne pandemic seriously[2]. While many healthcare workers and academics have dedicated their lives to warning us of the dangers of airborne pandemics, it appears that their warnings were not accorded priority. It has been clear for years that a pandemic like the Spanish flu (which in the years after WW1 killed over 25 Million people at a time when the world was far less connected and far less populated than today) could occur and do massive damage. The problem is, that disasters such as a pandemic or a global financial crisis are impossible to predict with pinpoint accuracy. The sheer complexity of the world means that, while it is possible to identify vulnerabilities, even our most advanced models cannot reliably predict such catastrophes. The risks therefore remain dangerously vague, and lend themselves to being ignored.

While we are unable to attach accurate numbers to such probabilities, nothing prevents us from focussing on preparing as best we can to deal with this uncertainty. Wherever we find that our vital interests are vulnerable, we need to invest in resilience, precisely because of the uncertainty involved. People do not wait until the first time they crash through their car’s windshield to put on their seatbelts. Similarly, we should not wait until disaster strikes to invest in preparatory measures.  Covid-19 is a perfect example of clear vulnerability linked with vague risk and our failure to invest in resilience now stands thoroughly exposed. Each year we ignored it we were playing Russian roulette. In late 2019, our luck finally ran out.

Democracy works

Is it too far-fetched to link the absence of any public debate on disaster preparedness ahead of Covid-19 to the absence of preparatory government action? In democracies it is essential that citizens understand and participate in the process of identifying their communities’ vital interests, because public debate tends to shift government action. However, Covid-19 illustrates that democratic states relying on public awareness have not been the only ones guilty of avoiding prudent preparation. In fact, decision-makers in authoritarian systems have displayed their lack of foresight at least as impressively as their democratically accountable counterparts.

It is often pointed out in discussions about the relative merit of democracies and so-called “enlightened” dictatorships, that democratic governments tend to ignore long-term threat mitigation in favour of pandering to the electorate to ensure electoral majorities. Democratically elected governments, so the argument goes, have little incentive to expend resources on fighting inconspicuous but potentially disruptive threats such as Covid-19, because such measures would only translate to electoral success in the unlikely event of such a crisis occurring within that electoral cycle. History has proven this argument wrong time and again, but a brief look at the various responses to the current Coronavirus outbreak suffices to illustrate that prudent governance is not limited to authoritarian systems.

While China has already declared victory over the virus, the credibility of government communications is questionable to say the least: having hushed up the outbreak in late 2019, the official number of fatalities reported by the Chinese authorities is now subject to serious doubts[3]. The authoritarian system’s supposed effectiveness might after all be most evident in its control of the media narrative rather than in the implementation of lifesaving measures. It is only natural that the Chinese Communist Party focused on containing both the spread of the truth and that of the disease, since its legitimacy depends heavily on being seen to deliver positive outcomes. The democratic West however, need not be tempted to copy the response of a system that treats truth itself as a type of viral disease.

In fact, the effectiveness of government policies seems to depend greatly on the degree to which governments are trusted to be truthful. Governments that trusted citizens to deal with sober truths, such as the severity of the disease or the uncertainty involved in dealing with an unprecedented challenge, laid the foundation for relationships of trust between themselves and the population. Playing down dangers, communicating false confidence or even covering up deaths are political tactics that sacrifice human lives for short-term party-political interest. Strong relationships of trust, on the other hand, can be relied on when governments pursuing policies informed by science communicated those clearly and coherently, thereby resulting in minimally invasive but maximally effective action.

While there are real examples of democratically elected governments exhibiting bad leadership, there is no necessary connection between democracy and bad governance. The crisis so far has instead demonstrated that while effectiveness depends on good leadership, healthy democracy and sound leadership go hand in hand.

This finding should move leaders to follow up any exit from the current shutdown with similarly sober assessments of what needs to be done in order to ensure radically improved resilience going forward. Any exit strategy will need to be founded on clear principles and communicated to citizens, if it is to work out. The difficult balancing exercises involved in any such exits should not be hidden away from the public, but rather explained and justified. Citizens trust governments that are honest about uncertainty.

Ticking Bombs

Covid-19 is, like all crises, not merely a challenge, but also an opportunity to reassess. We need to ask ourselves which of our vital interests are, like our health-services, particularly vulnerable to disruption. Are coastal cities for example prepared to deal with the consequences of overshooting 1.5 degrees of global warming? Shouldn’t we, even if we were on course to achieve that target (and we aren’t) nevertheless undertake the necessary precautions, just in case our models fail to accurately reflect reality (as they frequently do)? Shouldn’t we make sure that our militaries are prepared for a variety of threats while simultaneously increasing the resilience of the domestic and international institutions that underpin peaceful cooperation? Considering the scale of the measures needed to cope with the risks posed by environmental degradation and a shifting geopolitical landscape, we cannot afford to wait.

It is on us to hold governments to account for failing to prepare. We need to make it crystal clear that we are not willing to continue being driven through the fog without our seatbelts on. If we learn to value resilience as individuals and societies, there might be a silver lining to this crisis after all.

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[1] Yes, there apparently still are people being chased by tigers today. If you haven’t yet watched that Netflix series on the crazy world of exotic animal ownership in the US, you should do so asap.

[2] Despite early warnings by Nassim N. Taleb and Bill Gates:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-03-31/nassim-taleb-says-white-swan-coronavirus-pandemic-was-preventable-video

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[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/world/asia/coronavirus-china.html