Flattening the World and Why Stories Matter

An open letter to Katy Carl

What follows is a much-delayed response to Katy Carl’s open letter to me of January 24 titled On Moral Weight, which is itself only a chapter in what is becoming a lengthy (though fruitful) conversation.

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Dear Katy,

Yes, we flatten the world, both in our vision and with our language. And, yes, this flattening is a source of anguish and frustration. But we can’t live in the world without flattening it. Our brains just don’t work like that. And this explains (in a roundabout way) why stories are so important.

The human brain mostly operates in real-time. We have to be able to walk down the street without bumping into lampposts. The brain does not just have to recognize lampposts, it has to recognize them before we crash into them. We have to hunt in real time, or our prey will escape. We have to cook in real time, or our food will burn. We have to care for our children in real time or they will wander off and be eaten by wolves. Most of our lives are, of necessity, lived in real time.

Selective attention, and meaning preceeding vision are optimizations that the brain uses so that it can operate in real time. The brain shows us a world of objects instantly, without requiring us to ponder every pattern of light to extract its meaning. But it also selects the objects that we most need to pay attention to, flattens the details, and blocks out the rest. All this is necessary for real-time operation.

Our language is also designed for real-time operation. A word like tree flattens a vast and wonderous world of flora into a single bland syllable because we need to be able to say, “Watch out for that tree,” in real time before our friend crashes into it. That language is built on stories all the way down is an optimization that the brain uses so we can communicate a lot in a few words.

Real time is a concept from computer science that describes systems that have to calculate their results within a specific timeframe. An autopilot not only has to calculate how to steer an airplane around a mountain, it has to calculate it in the time remaining before airframe meets granite. Real-time is the time in which, for any given task, a decision must be made and action taken.

Though it is not the word I would choose, I suppose it is fair to say that there is a kind of blindness involved in real-time vision because the brain is choosing not to see, not to give meaning to, things that the body has a low probability of crashing into. And thus it is reasonable for the artist to say, wait, slow down a minute, look around, there is more to see here. There definitely is more to see. Real-time vision has filtered out so much of what is before us. But to see it, the brain has to shift into a different operating mode, a mode we can call contemplation.

As a child grows up and learns to see and to name objects and understand their relationship to one another, they initially accept it all as simply real. Roses are red, violets are blue, water is wet, the stove is hot and it burns if you touch it. But there comes a point where someone asks them, or they ask themselves, the awful question: “How do you know?”

“How do you know?” is a terrifying question. Douglas Adams made a wonderful satire out of the notion of the philosophers of the universe creating a giant computer, Deep Thought, to find the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything. Deep Thought’s answer was 42, but Deep Thought pointed out that the philosophers did not actually know what the question was. But I would suggest that we do know what the great question of life, the universe, and everything is. It is: “How do you know?”

“How do you know?” is a gateway to contemplation, and perhaps also the trigger to the other great contemplative question: “Is there more?” After all, it is when you begin to question how you know what you think you know that you begin to question if all you know is all there is to know.

These matters require contemplation. But contemplation can’t happen in real-time mode. That’s how people end up walking into lampposts. We need to find a quiet safe place for contemplation so that the brain can turn off real-time mode and direct its energies elsewhere. But even when we hide away from the dangers of wolves and lampposts so that we may put our brains in contemplative mode, we are still saddled with vision and with language designed for real-time use.

And so, yes, as you say, our language is flattening. Just as we need to be able to recognize a tree as a tree without attending to every twig and leaf, we need to be able to name a tree without describing every twig and leaf. And that is why, as you say, “we stubbornly cling to the idea that ‘knowledge’ of a thing consists of dictionary definitions of that thing, repeatable formulae about the thing, concrete examples of the thing that even a seventh-grader can grasp.” Because we are limited creatures, and we need these flattening optimizations to function.

And yes, this flattening means that there is something personal, something local, about our experience of the universe which can lead some to label it “subjective.” And some might conclude that their subjective experience is singular and cannot be compared or combined with anyone else’s. And some might conclude that they create the universe by force of will as they observe it. And yes, as you say, these positions are two sides of the same error. Because you are right. We have to give due attention and dignity to both the observed and the observer.

The tree is a real object, existing apart from my looking at it. I, with my limits, regard the tree from an angle, as it were. I receive a flattened image of the tree. I observe it and describe it with a vision and a language developed for real-time use. I can stop and contemplate a particular tree and develop a much more detailed appreciation of it, but it will still be a flattened view of the tree. You are stuck with the same limitation, as we all are. Our experiences are all subjective in the sense that they are generated by the flattening that our individual brains do to the real-world tree. But — here’s where the objective part comes in — the tree that your mind flattens in one subjective way and the tree that my mind flattens in a potentially different subjective way is the same tree.

And this is where someone will ask the dreaded question, “How do you know.” To which my response would be, “I take it as an axiom, and so do you.” Because whatever they say in abstraction about subjectivity or objectivity, no one actually acts like they disbelieve in the reality of the tree. No one acts as if you can’t combine your observation about trees with mine to form a statement that is true for everyone. Not with their real-time brain, at least.

However much people claim to believe these things in abstract, they never act like they believe them in reality. If they are sitting in their easy chair contemplating the nature of reality and deciding that it is all an illusion and at that moment their neighbor knocks on their door frantically shouting that their house is on fire, they do not reply that the flames are merely the neighbor’s subjective experience; they run out of the house and call the fire brigade. Nobody acts like they believe the world is an illusion.

It seems to be the case that the contemplative mode of the brain can sustain ideas in isolation. That is, it can hold, with great passion, to one idea that stands in contradiction to another idea that it holds with equal passion, or an idea in contemplative mode that it cannot, or will not, live out in real-time mode.

Real-time mode cannot tolerate this lack of integration. Real-time mode not only recognizes objects, it recognizes them in relation to each other and organizes them into a coherent scene that follows known principles of organization and development. If it can’t do this, it gets disoriented, which often results in physical symptoms such as nausea. Real-time punishes the lack of coherence.

The contemplative mode clearly does not punish lack of coherence in the same way. Indeed, achieving coherence in contemplative thought is hard. And, unlike real-time mode, the contemplative mode of the brain does not force us to do this and does not make us feel ill if we don’t do it. The body does not punish us for having incoherent ideas. Thus people can live with incoherent ideas all their lives. And we probably all do.

Even those who say that everything is subjective will also say that they believe in the scientific method, which, of course, depends on the axioms that the universe is real and coherent. If the universe were not real and coherent then there could be no coherence between individual experiments. If people could not reliably share reports of their experiments in this coherent world, there would be no repeatability in science, no building of one theory upon another. And yet I have not once met a self-proclaimed subjectivist who demonstrated or expressed practical doubt of the scientific method.

But if incoherence does not cause discomfort in the contemplative part of the mind, I think the particularity of experience does cause it discomfort. Asserting the reality and coherence of the universe does not provide a personal and particular answer to the awful questions, “How do you know?” and “Is there more?” And it is our particular limitations that we run up against whenever we ask ourselves these questions. In particular, we are never quite certain, and, in particular, there is always more that we have not seen or understood. That is the essential anguish of the contemplative mind. It is perhaps why some modes of contemplation seek release from the body and from reality, to escape the anguish of particularity.

But I think the particularity of our experience is not something to flee from. I think the particularity of experience is an essential feature of existence. To know trees, one must know a particular tree. To know love, one must love a particular person. It is not possible to love in general without loving particularly. It is a reality that can only be realized in the particular. The particularity of our experience then, is not just a limitation or impediment to our knowledge of the real, it is also a necessary condition of it. The reason there is more than one tree is that particularity is an inherent characteristic of the universe, not an accidental one. A Platonic universe has only one lion and only one tree. But ours has many. To know the real, we must know the particular, not just the abstraction. So don’t talk to me about truth or beauty; show me a beautiful thing; tell me a true story.

This fundamental particularity of existence is the reason that particularity is the essential characteristic of fiction, and why the experiential truths of fiction are fundamentally more convincing to us than the abstractions of philosophy.

Our limitations, even the necessary flattening of reality that is an inevitable part of human experience, are an essential aspect of particularity. If we were unlimited, there would be no particularity in our experience of the universe, and then its essential particularity would be hidden from us. In seeing everything, we would miss the essentially human property of seeing and knowing particularly.

And the particularity of our vision and experience is fruitful because it gives rise to art, which is our attempt to locate the particularity of our experience in the coherence of nature by asking the artist’s essential question: “Do you see it too?” which is a close cousin of the great and awful questions, “How do you know?” and “Is there more?”

But if we accept that our flattened vision is still a vision of the real, the question still arises whether that flattened vision is sufficient to the task. To use your phrase, is reality such that the adequation of the mind to reality is possible? You are right that past ages assumed that it was, but as we have learned more about the brain and its operation, I don’t think it unreasonable for people today to question it.

Clearly the flattening that is inherent in our real-time vision is largely sufficient to task. We generally manage to avoid walking into lampposts. We catch our prey often enough to feed ourselves. We usually manage not to burn our dinner. We keep a sufficient number of our children from being eaten by wolves for our genes to be passed on. This adequation of flattened, real-time vision and flattened real-time language to the business of keeping ourselves and our children alive is clearly a matter of evolutionary advantage — only those creatures that can keep children alive can pass on their genes and continue to exist as a species.

But is there any such evolutionary pressure on our contemplative mind? In some sense, perhaps, since works of contemplation such as scientific theories have made human life better and led to more of our children surviving. But curiously this has taken evolutionary pressure off the human race. We are now more apt to adapt our environment to ourselves than to adapt our genes to our environment. Foolish philosophers are no less likely to pass on their genes than wise ones. Where the fruits of contemplation are concerned, therefore, we don’t see anything like the consistency of results that we see in our real-time vision. If our real-time faculties were only as consistent as our contemplative faculties, we would constantly be wandering off cliffs and being eaten by bears. So we are left to question whether our contemplative faculties are actually adequate to the tasks we put them to.

Interestingly, the adequacy of our contemplative faculties to their task is one of the first items asserted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The very first paragraph of the catechism says “[God] calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him…” It is not with our real-time mind that we seek, know, or love God, but with our contemplative mind. Our confidence in the adequacy of our minds (your confidence and mine, I mean here, Katy) is creedal. Even with all of the particularity and flattening of our vision that is inherent in our limited nature, we are assured that we have been given minds sufficient for the task of seeking, knowing, and loving God, at least to the extent that God deems necessary for our current condition.

For the rest of my readers, a question: Do you have confidence in the adequacy of your contemplative faculties for their task? What do you take that task to be? And if you are confident, on what is your confidence based? Please comment below.

Whatever our confidence in the adequacy of our contemplative faculties, it is clear that the universe does not discipline our contemplative mind in the strict and immediate way that it disciplines our real-time mind. The real-time mind learns pretty quickly that the stove is hot and that it hurts to walk into lampposts. The contemplative mind does not suffer pain in the same way, and so is not immediately and brutally corrected for its errors in the way the real-time mind is. You can spend a lifetime with your hand on the philosophical equivalent of a hot stove and never feel the burn.

But if the contemplative mind does not feel that kind of real-time pain, it is not without its own agonies. The typical discomfort of the contemplative mind is what we might call a philosophical anguish, an anguish perhaps born of that very particularity and flattening of vision with which the contemplative mind is afflicted just as much as the real-time mind. Even the assurance that the contemplative mind is as capable as God deems necessary in our present condition does not relieve us of the anguish of never being able to reach a final and definitive answer to the great contemplative questions, “How do you know?” and “Is there more?” to which the agonizing answers are always, “You can’t be certain,” and “There’s always more.”

The particularity of our vision is also a source of anguish. Indeed, it is that anguish that leads us to art. Part of the anguish of art is the recognition that, however long we stare at something, our view of it will remain flattened. The limited artist and the limited viewer alike yearn for the unlimited vision which we know to exist but for which we simply lack the faculties to obtain. This is why we so often find ourselves saying in frustration, “No, that’s not quite it, that’s not the fullness of it. If only we look harder, there will prove to be more to see.” Because, the unbearable answer to the awful question is, “There’s always more.”

But no matter how hard we look, we will still have a flattened view. There’s always more, and however much more we see, there will still always be more. And while contemplation does not happen in real-time, it does happen in a lifetime. Our contemplation is finite, and the longer we spend seeking more complete visions of any single object, the less time we will have to look at the wider world. You can go wide or you can go deep, but in neither case will you exhaust reality, or escape from the flattened vision. There is always more.

Part of this sense that there is always more is, of course, the sense that there is a spiritual world in addition to and in companionship with our physical world. The real-time brain does not deal with the spiritual world. It is a concern of the contemplative brain. And the spiritual world lacks the testable properties of the physical world. When people say that spiritual claims are purely subjective, I think what they are really saying is that they are non-falsifiable. Falsifiability is important in science. A statement that could not be proved false if it were false is not testable according to the scientific method and is therefore not a scientific claim. And indeed, statements about the spiritual world are non-falsifiable. That does not, of course, mean that they are false. But, as noted above, the contemplative realm is not subject to the same discipline as the real-time realm. Mistakes about spiritual matters could indeed cause one to burn, but not with the immediacy of putting one’s hand on the stove.

The intellectual false step that the subjectivist makes, therefore, is simply that they fail to distinguish between falsifiable and non-falsifiable statements. But they don’t make that mistake in the real-time world. They are perfect objectivists when they walk down the street, being careful not to walk into lampposts. If instead of saying, “Everything is subjective,” they were to say, “Your spiritual claim is a non-falsifiable statement about an inapparent entity,” we could happily agree with them and point out that our belief had a different basis and a different method.

But, of course, these objections are usually not general philosophical positions at all. They are attempts to bolster certain specific claims, notably claims to self-authorship and exemption from the consequences of certain actions and choices. In most cases, “Everything is subjective,” means nothing more than, “I mean to have things my way on these issues even while maintaining objective claims about everything else.” Sometimes it means nothing more than, “I’m not interested in arguing about this.” It is, in short, a kind of philosophical “Get out of jail free” card played by people who don’t behave like they believe it in their day-to-day lives, and don’t want to have to justify themselves.

It is also, of course, that these are not the questions that the current age occupies itself with. You are right that we live in an age of exact specification, an age of method. I spent 35 years winning my daily bread by the exact specification of method, and that cannot but have shaped how my mind works. And yes, my approach to contemplative realism (and many other things) does tend to be, “Give me the exact specification of your method so that I may test it.”

I don’t think there is anything particularly new about the habit of exact specification, or about a concern with method. I think we can see both of them as significant concerns going back as far as we have written records. And even before written records, we find artefacts that it is hard to imagine were produced without the use of exactly specified methods.

That said, we do belong to a technical civilization in which exact specification has become a key virtue. It might be the key virtue of the age, the virtue which unlocks everything else. One of the things that exact specification enables is the encapsulation of function. Encapsulation is the ability to permit function without understanding. Thus a modern car uses encapsulation to allow you to drive without understanding how internal combustion works. An eighteenth-century coachman had to know a great deal more about horses than a modern taxi driver has to know about cars.

Encapsulation allows us to co-operate to build things that no one person could build for themselves from scratch. No one person could build a cell phone from scratch. No one person could even design a cell phone from scratch. It took a team of experts years just to figure out how to make glass tough enough for the screen. A cell phone is a collection of encapsulated systems that, like a car, enable you to use them without knowing how they work. Because of encapsulation, the people at the top of the design pyramid can design a working phone out of components without needing to understand how any of the components work internally.

If you hear technical people talking about APIs (application programming interfaces), they are talking about encapsulation. And the exact specification of the API (which is what I spent much of my technical communication career doing) is what makes encapsulation possible. Without this encapsulation, commonly called black-boxing, most of the things of ordinary life in modern society simply would not exist. They would be too complicated for anyone to design or make from scratch.

Something akin to this happens in the intellectual and artistic life. You can’t black-box ideas to quite the same extent that you can electronic components, but in mathematics, for instance, there is a collection of equations that solve known problems and that allow mathematicians to work without having to go back to first principles every time. They don’t have to know exactly why a particular equation works to use it correctly in their own work. Mathematicians have been practicing exact specification since time immemorial. Similarly, a scientist does not have to understand the full background of every scientific theory that they rely on in conducting their own experiments or forming their own theories. Encapsulation through exact specification allows us to achieve things together that we could never achieve individually.

Language itself is a form of encapsulation. This is part of the meaning of “stories all the way down.” If I say, Paris or the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, a crowd of images and stories floods into your head, and because of that, I can tell a story about a girl who goes to Paris and sips coffee in a cafe by the Seine and meets a studious young man who is writing away in a notebook, and already the music is playing in your head and your heart is hoping they will find a way to make it work. This encapsulation of images, stories, and emotions in individual words is what makes storytelling work.

Of course, this encapsulation is not the same as the black box encapsulation of the technical world, since you do need to have learned all those stories about Paris for the mention of Paris to have this effect on you. Nonetheless, once you have learned those stories, the word Paris brings them all back in an instant. One gets the full romantic ambiance of Paris not as a slow retelling of all those old remembered stories, but as an instantaneous rush of impressions as if the state of just having heard all those stories is recalled in toto on the instant. This seems to me something very close to miraculous, and yet if it were not so, there would be no poetry, no stories, no imaginative literature of any kind. I don’t know how it works, but very clearly the mind is encapsulating experience in language in a very powerful way.

But such encapsulation is neither perfect nor consistent. We don’t all attach the same images and stories to the word Paris. The one day I spent in Paris was hellish, so any romantic associations I may have left come from movies, not the real thing. This is one of the sources of the anguish that is to the contemplative realm what physical pain is to the real-time realm. Incomplete and inconsistent encapsulation slows down discussion and creates confusion, creating a demand for more precise definitions that encapsulate ideas more effectively.

But that demand for encapsulation also creates anguish, because precise definitions flatten the world. And this, of course, is exactly where our extended discussion began: with me asking for you to flatten contemplative realism to a succinct definition so that I could compare and contrast it to other artistic vectors, such as fairy tales, particularly as a means of representing spiritual realities in fiction, and you protesting the anguish which the flattening of definition would cause you, and the violence that that flattening would do to your vision of contemplative realism.

Perhaps as people have come to appreciate the power of encapsulation and exact specification in the physical and technical realms, they have come to feel the lack of them in the philosophical realm, and the anguish that this causes has led to people being less confident in the ability of the philosophical realm to give any adequate conception or explanation of the world. Thus many people may have come to prefer purely mechanical explanations of the world not necessarily because they are more intellectually coherent but simply because they cause less contemplative anguish.

In other words, the problem is perhaps not that people believe the nihilistic things that they say, but rather that they say them as a way to avoid having to think through what they actually believe. It is, as you say, that most young people today say that they do not believe that they have free will. And yet, they talk as if they believe that they have free will, and they hold others accountable for their actions in a way that makes no sense if other people do not have free will.

There is a sort of tragi-comic farce that emerges from trying to engage this question. Why would you attempt to convince someone that they don’t have free will when you don’t believe that they are free to change their mind? Why would you protest against a war when you do not believe that either side has the freedom to choose not to fight? All of life becomes a ghastly play in which automatons act out arguments with the appearance of meaning and significance but with no ability to do or say anything other than what the logic of their programming causes them to do and say. It would be like two versions of ChatGPT trying to negotiate a peace treaty, an exercise that could equally end in love and rainbows or in screaming vitriolic hatred willy-nilly.

I also can’t help but note that it is that part of the population with the most deterministic and mechanical view of reality, the engineers and software developers of our technical civilization, who are most enamored of speculative fiction, which is to say, of fairy tales. Perhaps this is another sign of the gap between their declarative beliefs and their lived experience. Declaratively they may dismiss objective moral values, yet in their fiction they demand tales of good vs. evil. Declaratively they may affirm a purely mechanical universe, yet in their fiction they want magic and romance and dragons.

What this highlights for me is that not only are the truth of propositions and the truth of experience distinct from each other but, in most of us, they can be completely at odds with each other.

The propositions we say we believe often have nothing to do with the way we act or the way we see the world. There are no real-time subjectivists. The contemplative brain may say that reality is an illusion, but the real-time brain still avoids walking into lampposts. The contemplative brain may say that we have no free will, but the real-time brain still pauses to consider whether or not to eat a Twinky. No one ever takes a relativist position on their ownership rights to their house, their car, or their bank account. The real-time mind is thoroughly, resolutely, and universally objectivist and believes unquestioningly in free will, a belief it expresses through actions, not words.

Part of this, at least, seems to have to do with the fact that belonging matters more to most people than abstract truth. We do not acquiesce to propositions because we believe them to be objectively true. We acquiesce to them because affirming them is a condition of membership in our tribe. As I noted in my last essay, changing your mind means not only changing your ideas, it means changing your community. Most of the young people who say that they do not have free will are not philosophers who have thought deeply about the issue and understood its implications. They would probably never have thought about it at all, except that it is a shibboleth of their tribe, and to contradict it could lead to exile, a Twitter pile-on, or, at the very least, an argument about a subject they care nothing about and are not prepared to argue well. In the contemplative domain, not only is there no punishment for holding incoherent ideas, there can be positive rewards for it as well.

And, of course, as Catholics, you and I, Katy, also belong to a community that requires our ascent to a creed as a condition of membership. I am not a Catholic, nor do I affirm the creed, because I came up with all it contains through independent inquiry. I did not develop my own theory of creation and then adopt Catholicism because it fit what I had already deduced myself in every particular. There is a great deal that I believe because the Church requires me to believe it as a condition of membership. There are parts of it that seem strange to me, parts where I would certainly have come to an opposite conclusion if left to my own reason. I accept these things without understanding them because I want to belong to the church.

If I were asked why I want to belong, I would say something cautionary about my inability to fully discern my own motives, and then give a twofold answer. I would say first, because the church can put God in my mouth, and I cannot do that for myself no matter how hard I try. And second, because I am aware of the inadequacy of my own mind, and of the terrible limits on my time, which seem more terrible with every passing year, and so it seems essential to me to attach myself to a long matured body of belief that has been worked out and argued through by many people who are wiser than me. The Church, in short, goes to great effort to make its teaching coherent — far more than I could ever do with my limited time and mind.

Some people will be critical of this second reason of mine, saying that I should make up my own mind about things. But I would point out to them that they accept modern science in the same way, and for the exact same reasons that I accept both modern science and Catholic doctrine. I have neither the mind nor the time to work everything out for myself and so I must trust what seems like the best firm in each respective business.

But just as I have not worked out my faith from scratch but have accepted it as the product of a community I hold to be wiser than myself, so it is with everyone else. They have chosen their creeds by choosing their communities. And by choosing their communities they have adopted, as shibboleths essentially, the teachings of their communities, regardless of whether they make coherent sense or whether what they say they believe corresponds in any way to how they live or act every day. And because their beliefs are shibboleths, most people, including Catholics, react nervously and defensively when they are challenged, since it is not just their ideas, but their membership in their communities that is at stake.

Which brings us back to the question of whether we have any hope of affecting this state of our civilization by writing novels. You suggest that stories have a somewhat limited influence on people.

Yes, people may choose to let themselves fall temporarily under the sway of a story. ... But in the end, people don’t have to do this, in the way that all healthy and mature people capable of the task ultimately do have to face the lived reality of every day. When it comes to story, they can opt out. They can shut their eyes and cover their ears. When it comes to taking up the thread of survival, they, we, do not have that luxury.

I don’t think you are giving story enough credit here. Lisa Cron suggests that our need for story is fundamental, that it is wired into our brains. Stories are how the brain learns and its basis for navigating the world. And because stories are experiences, not propositions, stories are more accessible to, and influential on, the real-time mind. Far from being something we can opt out of, stories are how we face the lived reality of every day. Stories are our great survival advantage.

More than this, I think that the unique property of stories is that they unify the real-time and contemplative minds. If one fights a battle, one does so in real-time, with little time for contemplation. If one hides in a locked room in a peaceful town to contemplate battle, one is left only with abstractions. But if one reads a battle scene by a great author, or simply listens to an old soldier around the campfire at night, the real-time and contemplative faculties are engaged at the same time. This is the unique power of story.

The form of the novel provides the conditions under which both aspects of the mind can be engaged simultaneously. Your comfy chair provides the security that the contemplative mind requires to awaken and attend. But the fact that the mind processes stories the same way that it processes real life experiences means that the real-time mind is activated as well by the unfolding events of the story. Indeed, I suspect that it may be through stories that experience makes its way from the real-time to the contemplative mind, and provides something to contemplate about.

This business of the real-time and contemplative minds both being active as we read a story is important because it brings into the contemplative mind the real-time mind’s insistence on coherence. You are not punished for incoherence in philosophical contemplation. But you are punished for an incoherent plot or characters in a story.

This kind of dual awareness is, I believe, a unique feature of stories. It is why we crave stories as much as we do. It is also, I would suggest, where we are most conscious of the moral weight of things. I introduced the concept of moral weight into this discussion to describe the operation of real-time vision. Moral weight, I said, determines where our selective attention is focused as we walk down the street, something that belongs to the real-time side of things. You brought the concept of moral weight to the contemplative realm. But it is in the dual awareness state created by stories that the function of moral weight in the real-time mind and its function in the contemplative mind, are united and can thus change how that moral weight is felt and lived and appreciated.

And it is precisely for this reason that I think serious popular fiction could make a difference. Because we don’t have to persuade people to believe in free will or in moral weight in the real-time side of their mind, the side which is engaged by the action of a story. As you say, they shed their habitual skepticism there. That skepticism was only an incoherent collection of shibboleths populating the contemplative side of their minds. But a story forces the confident belief of the real-time mind to enter the contemplative world, and so the dual awareness produced by a story can bring these two parts of their minds into confrontation with each other in a way perhaps nothing else can.

And perhaps I have more confidence than you in the power of this. You say, “how little change outside of itself, by itself, a single story is likely to effect.” And yet, I wonder where the effect is properly to be measured. Is it in their beliefs, which are mostly just the shibboleths of their community, or is it in their actions? The influence on their actions is, of course, much harder to measure than a change in their expressed sentiments, and a story won’t make anyone a saint. But the real-time side of us learns from experience, not propositions, and it is the real-time side of us that governs much of our daily conduct. A story does not have to rebuke foolish philosophies in its text. All it has to do is cause the sensible real-time side of the reader’s mind to rebuke the foolish shibboleths that inhabit its contemplative side.

You say that it is because you believe stories to be optional, something that can be abandoned in the struggle for survival, that you prefer to work in the realist mode. You say, “But realism, the mimesis of the fabric of experience, also more closely approximates how we relate to the real stories we live inside.”

But I would point out that those are not the kinds of stories that ordinary people, people living closest to the limit of survival, tell. The stories they tell themselves are fairytales — the stories that ordinary people living ordinary lives have been telling themselves for millennia. And as noted above, the technocrats of the modern machine prefer fairytales as well, in the form of fantasy and science fiction.

Realism, on the other hand, is an invention of elite writers with an academic interest in literary craft. Ordinary life, as the subject of literature, is something espoused and valued by people who are not generally living ordinary lives. The man who follows the plow is not sitting around the fire at night telling tales of plowmen. He is telling tales of gallant princes saving fair maidens from dragons because in his heart he is a prince. And to his wife and to his children and to his friends he is a prince indeed. The man who tells tales of plowmen is a man who has never turned a sod in his life.

Not, of course, that most of our literature has been written by people living ordinary lives. It’s too expensive a hobby for that. But one of the things that troubles me about realism (and modernism, and post-modernism, and all forms of literature that focus on the contemporary and the quotidian) is that they tend to participate in the psychologizing of experience, which is to say the flattening of human experience into exactly specified diagnostic propositions. This is not universally true, of course, but realism is a magnet that pulls in this direction.

It seems to me that to the extent to which we are in a cultural or civilizational crisis, the crux of the matter is not the ability to see, or even the question of spiritual reality, but the question of whether we are to account for human behavior and human experience in psychological terms or in moral terms. And while realism tends towards the psychological account, fairy tales tend towards the moral account. Indeed, fairytales are suffused with the moral weight of things.

Indeed, I cannot help but feel that there is something of a contradiction in someone who rails, as you do, against the tyranny of exact specification being devoted to what is, in effect, the literature of exact specification. After all, what is realism but the exact and detailed specification of quotidian life? What can it mean for a writer to see with great intensity but that they should see into the finest details of things and record them with great exactness? It is precisely where the project of exact specification fails that the author resorts to metaphor, to romance, and to fairytale, hoping to achieve by a juxtaposition of fantasies some approximation of a truthful but elusive experience that escapes exact specification. The realist seeks to nail down by exact specification what is known. The teller of fairy tales seeks to capture some hint and sensation of the more that is out there yet defies exact specification.

I am not, of course, suggesting that you should abandon your genre or adopt mine. I am merely saying that I can’t quite follow your justification for it. But, of course, you don’t need to justify it, to me or to anyone else. Good art is its own justification, regardless of genre. And we should work — must work, I believe — in the genre that best fits our talents and our aspirations. It does seem largely true that the genre chooses the author, rather than the other way round. We must tell the stories that are given to us. And so to the extent that we seek to sacralize a genre, it should be the genre that chose us.

Indeed, over the course of this long conversation I have come to feel that I may have had hold of the wrong end of the stick from the beginning. I thought that contemplative realism was saying, we want to sacralize fiction and we think realism is the best genre to do that. And so that was the proposition that I sought to refute with my defense of fairy tales. But now I come to think that what contemplative realism was saying is, we love realism and we want to sacralize it. And if I had understood it in that sense, I should have had no objection. I should have said, hey, I’m trying to sacrilize fairytales. Let’s compare notes.

Moral weight might be that point of intersection between your project and mine. Moral weight, as you pointed out earlier, comes from the spiritual side of our vision, whether we acknowledge it or not. But I have already gone on much too long, so the function of moral weight in literature, and the very large questions which you rightfully raise of how we are to assign moral weight to things in stories will have to be a subject for another essay and another day.