Stories Are to Make Us Wise and Brave

Stop saying art is useless. Stories meet a basic biological need.

The purpose of stories is to make us wise and brave. This is not an aesthetic claim, but a biological one. Our brains are wired for story, and that does not happen for no reason. The brain is wired to crave stories because it needs them. It needs them because life is hard, and to face it, it must become wise and brave.

The world seems somehow to have forgotten this biological function of stories. It’s as if being useful was somehow vulgar and beneath the dignity of art. Culture writer J.F. Martel says that art “pulls us out of the pragmatism that would insist that everything we do has to have a use.” I’m not sure why being useless is a good thing. Or why we need pulling out of a world of useful things. But art is not useless. Art performs a vital biological function.

I won’t discuss all of art here. I’ll stick to stories, on which I can speak with more confidence than I can on other branches of art. Those who know them better can speak to their usefulness. I will speak to the usefulness of stories. Indeed, stories are not only useful; they are essential. Their function, wired into our brains, is to make us wise and brave.

It is true that there are people of a utilitarian mindset who scoff at art and call it useless. But why do the defenders of art accept the premise and, instead of defending the usefulness of art, try to make a case for useless things? The utilitarians are wrong about art. It is not useless. The problem is that the utilitarians measure utility solely in productivity. Productivity is important, of course. But if you are going to be productive in this crazy world, chances are that you will meet challenges that will require you to be wise and brave.

Let’s stop trying to justify uselessness, therefore, and say confidently that art has a purpose, and that the purpose of stories, in particular, is to make us wise and brave.

How do stories make us wise and brave? They do it by giving us experiences. It is experiences that make us wise and brave. From the beginning of our lives, our brains seek out experiences. We stare. We reach out and touch. We put things in our mouths. We learn to crawl and then to walk and then to run and then to ride a bike so we can get closer to more things to stare at and touch and put in our mouths. We follow other people around and try to do the things they do and go the places they go. This begins to make us wise about the world we live in, and brave enough to face it.

But there is a problem with experience in the flesh. For one thing, it can be dangerous. For another, the experiences offered by our local environments are limited. Stories let us sail the seas and fight battles. They let us run with a wolfpack and be a spy. They let us do grown-up things while we are still children, and childish things when we are old and grown. Stories let raw recruits sitting around the fire on the eve of battle experience the fight to come in the stories of old soldiers, and thus, perhaps, on the morrow, stand where they might have run, triumph where they might have known defeat, live where they might have died. Stories are how we get wise about life and learn the courage to face it.

But there is more than this. Stories are in some sense heard twice. Through some strange and wonderful trick of the mind, stories allow us to be present in the moment of battle, but also safe in our armchair, able to experience and to contemplate at the same time in a way that is seldom possible in the rush of experience in the flesh. Stories, we might say, are distilled and optimized experiences. They are drunk down in the fury of action and the calm of reverie at the same time. Stories are in many ways better than life at making us wise and brave.

A lot of people seem to devalue experience these days. Perhaps that is because they have so little of it. They have been brought up on ideas, though they often don’t understand the ideas they have been taught because they don’t have the experience to understand the words that express the ideas. Ask them what literature is for, and they will tell you that literature exists to express great ideas. The study of literature, in their eyes, is the process of distilling the ideas out of stories.

But there is a very obvious problem with this approach. Different people seem to come away with different ideas from the same story. If the author was actually trying to get an idea across, they should have noticed that a novel or a poem was an unreliable medium and that an essay would have served the purpose much better.

The notion that reading a novel or a poem is a kind of Easter egg hunt for artificially hidden ideas is also popular with teachers of literature. Perhaps this is because it gives them something to teach and something to grade on. Students who find five ideas in Pride and Prejudice get an A, those who find four get a B, and so on. (No points are awarded if the ideas found are not proto-feminist, anti-colonial, and critical of the entire English social structure since the time of William the Conqueror.) If they were not hunting for ideas, what would students and teachers do with their time after they had read the book? But while this idea-hunting often seems to make people self-righteous and angry, it does nothing at all to make them wise and brave.

Some may feel that it in some way diminishes the arts to give them a foundation in a base biological need, though, as embodied creatures, it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. Some may feel that this foundation in base needs somehow takes away the romantic grandeur they associate with art, or makes art less of a high and sophisticated pursuit. But while we could say that the heights of culinary sophistication have to do entirely with wringing the last ounce of pleasure that the taste buds are willing to surrender, and nothing to do with increasing the nutrient content or balance of food, I would suggest that stories continue to perform their base biological function of making us wise and brave to the furthest sophistication of the art, and that the difference lies in the more subtle ways in which it can make us wise and brave about the finer points of our moral and physical lives.

Let’s talk about wisdom a bit. Wisdom has traditionally been seen as a property of the elderly. It is gained by living a long time. It is gained, in other words, by having many experiences. But it is increasingly seen as based not on a lot of experience, but on a lot of ideas. The DIKW pyramid is a common expression of this idea.

By Matthew.viel - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110373265

There has been much criticism of the DIKW pyramid, including from an earlier incarnation of me. It is wrong in all kinds of ways. But the way that it is wrong that interests us here is its association of wisdom with the accumulation of ideas. Wisdom is not the accumulation of ideas but the accumulation of experiences.

But why is an accumulation of experiences useful if it doesn’t translate into ideas? Well, because trying to navigate the world in real time guided only by ideas doesn’t work. Call it the difference between thinking fast and thinking slow if you like, but living by ideas means analysing every experience into philosophical categories, expressing those in language, comparing those statements to your principal ideas, arguing your way to a conclusion, and then applying the conclusion to action in the real world. And by the time you have done all that, the rabbit is back in its burrow, the fire has gone out, and night has fallen, leaving you cold and hungry in the dark.

You don’t learn to catch a ball by calculating its trajectory with a slide rule. You don’t have the time or the data to do it that way. But still, we all learn to catch a ball. We do it by experience. That experience involves dropping it on the ground many times, being hit in the chest by it a few times, and being hit in the face by it once or twice. But it does not involve any math. It does not involve understanding the effects of gravity and air resistance on the vector of a spherical object. It just involves experience and a little courage. Yes, this is where the courage comes in. At least part of it. Experience hurts sometimes. But we persevere because we need the experience to gain wisdom, and in doing so we learn courage.

But it’s not just catching balls. Very little of how we live our daily lives is guided by ideas. Most of it is based on wisdom gained from experience. Ideas do sometimes play a crucial role in our decisions and our lives, but this is the exception, not the rule. It must be so, because when we stop to make decisions based on ideas, it takes a very long time and a lot of careful thought to work out the right answer. The world moves too quickly to do that most of the time. Most of the time, we evaluate and act based on a tacit understanding of the world that we could not put into words if we tried. We act on wisdom.

More important still, it takes wisdom to recognize those times when we need to stop and think. Without the wisdom to recognize that the present moment requires a step back, a time to think and to question what is happening and what we should do about it, we would just blunder on regardless, leaving chaos in our wake. Finally, stopping and thinking does us no good if, when we have thought the situation through and seen what must be done, we don’t have the courage to do it.

At the same time, wisdom provides a necessary check on ideas. Our ability to recognize a good idea, to understand it completely, and to apply it to a particular situation in life is distinctly limited. Ideas can sometimes lead us to completely mad conclusions. It is then wisdom’s task to call a halt and say that this looks like folly. We need wisdom and ideas working in tandem, and therefore we should devote time to deepening our wisdom, and steeling our courage, as well as time to developing our ideas. We need to devote time to reading stories lest ideas unchecked by experience and wisdom lead us to madness and folly.

Wisdom is not a product of ideas, but a parallel way of knowing and of governing our lives and our actions. It is the one that we depend on most of the time to make most of the decisions and take most of the actions in our lives. We need to develop wisdom, and the courage to act on wisdom, just as much as we need to learn ideas. Wisdom is gained by experience. Ideas are gained by discussion and reasoning. Our opportunities for experience and our opportunities for discussion and reasoning are limited in everyday life in our local area. To make up the deficit, we turn to essays to learn ideas and to stories to gain wisdom and courage.

Wisdom and ideas influence and refine each other. Without experiences, there would be nothing to have ideas about. Without the abstraction provided by ideas, wisdom would struggle to develop general principles and to develop the tools, techniques, and engineering principles on which our material lives depend, or the principles of conduct and relationship on which our moral lives depend. Wisdom and ideas are not competing, but cooperating elements of our minds. Which is also to say that if we become obsessed with ideas and fail to feed wisdom with experiences, both our wisdom and our ideas will suffer. This is why stories, the source of wisdom, should not be hijacked for the expression of ideas.

Stories are fun because that is how the brain rewards us for bringing it the experience it needs to become wise and brave. But there is a problem with the brain’s reward mechanism. In some ways, it is astonishingly sophisticated. In other ways, it is as easily duped as a sailor on leave who meets a pretty girl in a bar in a strange port.

This is obvious enough with our appetite for food. Our brains reward us for bringing it fat and salt and sugar. These were things that were rare and valuable back when we were hunter-gatherers, barely keeping the wolf from the door — if we had a door. Today, salt, fat, and sugar are ridiculously cheap and plentiful, but the brain still rewards us for giving it a Big Mac, fries, and a Pepsi. The pleasure we take in food is supposed to motivate us to seek essential nutrients. Today, it is just making us fat.

We can get the reward the brain offers by only giving it part of what it seeks. The brain wants nutrition, but we can trick it into giving us gastronomic rewards by giving it only part of the spectrum of nutrition it is looking for. Similarly, we can trick it into giving us erotic rewards by giving it only the infertile aspects of copulation. And in the same way, we can trick it into giving us the rewards of stories by giving it only those aspects of stories that do little or nothing to make us wise or brave.

This may do a lot to explain the state of modern publishing. Much of it is based on shaving off some aspect of story to trick the brain into giving the reader the rewards of story without doing anything to make them wise and brave. This is what the genrefication of publishing is about, each genre representing a different sliver of story blown up out of proportion, just as a candy store or a fast food joint serves a sliver of a diet blown up out of all proportion.

Why? What has the publishing industry got against wisdom and bravery? Probably nothing if it sold books. What does McDonalds have against complete nutrition? Probably nothing if it sold Happy Meals. It’s just easier to make and sell the parts rather than the whole.

Indeed, when the world demanded salads, McDonalds started serving salads. So why hasn’t the world demanded wisdom and bravery from the publishing industry?

Perhaps because the drive for wisdom and bravery evolved in a world that was difficult and dangerous. But life today is not as difficult or as dangerous as it used to be. Whatever instinct our children may have to seek challenging and dangerous experiences to grow in wisdom and bravery, their parents, far from encouraging and directing this exploration, will do everything they can to keep their children from it.

Meanwhile in video games children discover all the exciting parts of danger and adventure shorn of all the actual peril, or imaginative participation in peril, that develops wisdom and bravery. Wisdom and bravery cease to have any role in game play, replaced entirely by fingertip dexterity and learning the rules and quirks of the software.

Today we expect the government to make life easy and safe, so what need have we to make ourselves wise and brave, what need have we to teach our children to be wise and brave? Better to shield them from experiences which may, after all, be uncomfortable or even dangerous.

The problem with this is that it leads to an imbalance between experience and ideas, and thus we have college students with their heads positively brimming with ideas but so poor in experience that they have not the wisdom to see the folly of their ideas, nor yet the courage to defend them when they are challenged. This, of course, suits the ideologues who control the universities these days. Ideologues believe in nothing but ideas. It’s in the name. Letting students become wise and brave would give the game away.

What therefore must we do? The need for wisdom and bravery has not, in fact, gone out of the world. The fact that many seem to think it has only means that more wisdom and bravery will be needed to get us out of the mess we are making. Considering that much of that mess is caused by ideas run amok might lead us to believe that we should focus our reading and our writing to counter these ideas with better ideas. But wisdom and ideas go hand in hand. Without the wisdom and courage born of experience and nourished on stories, we will be as wild and foolish in our ideas as our opponents. It’s time to get back to stories — whole stories, stories true to human experience — stories that can make us wise and brave.