It is reported that Harold Macmillan, heir to a successful publishing company, claimed that one of the pleasures of becoming British Prime Minister was that he had more time to read novels. That was almost sixty-five years ago, and it is not a statement one could imagine a contemporary Western political leader making. For one reason, modern politicians like to present themselves as ordinary people, just like the voters whom they represent, and since they assume that most voters do not read books they likewise pretend not to. Instead, they allow themselves to be filmed playing golf, watching football, and taking their kids to the cinema, to celebrate their normality, to reaffirm their averageness. The second reason is that they think they are much too busy, rushing from one meeting to another, speed-reading briefing documents and policy papers, talking with special advisors and party operatives, worrying about the daily news cycle, and the changing trends in the polling data that they collect incessantly. The closest they might come to admitting to opening a real book, as opposed to a policy file, is when they publicise their annual summer holiday reading list, which will tend to be a small number of fashionable non-fiction titles, thereby trying to connect themselves to certain popular concerns of the day.
Reading for pleasure is considered a luxury, or worse an indulgence that the modern politician can and should do without. This is especially true of the reading of fiction – or “story books” – which is assumed to be appropriate only for children and those adults with surplus time on their hands, such as pensioners or academics. By contrast, those who carry the burden of responsibility of government – in “the real world” – consider themselves too busy to be bothered with make believe.
This aversion to fiction is problematic for two reasons. First, because I suspect our governments would be better run if our leaders spent less time rushing around trying to appear busy and more time reflecting carefully on the big decisions they are required to make. Taking time to read would be a sign of intelligence not of negligence. Second, because I think governments would make better decisions if political leaders had greater insight into how their policies impact on the lives of ordinary people, and the best way to understand that is through the development of imaginative sympathy, for which the reading of novels is an essential ingredient. We should want our politicians to read more fiction because it would increase the chance of them becoming better politicians.
I have recently read Geoffrey Parker’s biography of Charles V, the Habsburg Emperor who lived during the first half of the sixteenth century. Charles was not a great reader himself – he much preferred hunting – but at certain periods of his rule he was advised by men who were well read. One of them was Mecurino di Gattinara, a Savoyard scholar and jurist, who served Charles’s aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, before becoming Charles’s chief advisor for a decade. I had not previously heard of him, although I recognised his name because there is an excellent Piedmont wine that comes from the area of his birth. Gattinara was influential in setting Charles’s strategic priorities in the first half of his reign, and for warning against the long-term risks that might arise from short-term expediencies. Some historians have suggested that if he had lived a few years longer (he died in 1530, aged sixty-five) he might have been able to negotiate a compromise between the German Lutheran reformers and the Roman Catholic traditionalists, thereby preventing the impending schism in Western Christianity.
In her biography, Mercurino di Gattinara and the Creation of the Spanish Empire (London, 2014), the historian Rebecca Ard Boone, writes:
Whether through talent or training, Gattinara’s greatest asset as an advisor was his ability to see situations from the perspective of his opponents, subjects, and patrons. Whether they were Aztec peasants in New Spain, Lutheran foot soldiers in Germany, duchesses in Brabant, kings in England, or popes in Italy, they all had interests and motivations, and Gattinara made it his business to understand them. (p.69)
This seems to me a good summary of the paradigmatic qualities we should associate with an effective politician, or political advisor. While some individuals might have more talent than others for seeing situations from diverse perspectives, all politicians would benefit from training in how to do this. Reading, especially the reading of fiction, forms a central part of such training. Not only does it help us to understand better the situations of others, but it also helps us understand our own predicament. I remember reading a remark made by a Russian intellectual to the effect that, having read War and Peace for the tenth time he now understood the meaning of his own life. No doubt this was an exaggeration, but it is an instructive one.
Inevitably, our individual experience of life is limited: by the place and time of our birth, by our status and occupation, by the character and range of our acquaintances, by our work, our travel, our interests, and our lifespan. What we know directly is but a small part of what might be known. Not only is it a modest sub-set it is also unrepresentative: it is that modest sub-set of knowledge of the world that attaches to us because of who we are. Our experience is therefore not just limited, but partial too. If we want to understand more of the world and to understand the world more objectively, we need to step outside of our own experiences and draw on the perspectives of others, preferably others who are dissimilar to us in important respects; we need to learn to see the world through the eyes of those who lived at different times, or in different places, and whose work, life experiences, ambitions, and expectations are unlike ours. By defamiliarizing our own little world, to some extent we can see further, more clearly, and more impartially.
There is a limit to this process, not just because we can never know all that there is to be known, but also because all knowing subjects must be located somewhere. We can expand our narrow perspective by including others, but all perspectives, however enlarged, remain anchored in some time, some place, with some set of parochial prejudices. Knowledge extends the scope of our subjectivity, but we do not thereby become objective. The view from nowhere, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Nagel, is not a view at all. The point here is that we cannot see the world from every possible vantage point, but by multiplying and diversifying the several vantages points from which we can see, we develop a richer and less partisan perspective. For example, in the past year, as well as re-reading several authors whose work I know well and greatly enjoy – Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Elena Ferrante, and Henry James – I have also read works by authors who were less well known to me, and whose experience of the world is or was significantly different to mine: Maaza Mengiste, James Baldwin, Natalia Ginzberg and Nawal El Saadawi.
There is more to reading fiction than skimming the words on the page, which is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving a greater empathetic understanding. The real skill, which can be learned, is to allow for the plausibility of the narrative voice; that is, to grant that what someone else has imagined and put into words, drawing from their experience of the world, might also have been my experience of the world: this story, this character, this situation, this fate, could have been mine too. This is where the quality of the writing matters. If the plot – or its telling – is implausible, if it does not capture the attention, if it is peopled with characters who lack credibility, then it is easy not to care, not to empathise, not to imagine that this story might have happened to me. Bad fiction does not enlarge our subjectivity.
A well told story will stimulate the imagination, even if the story itself is not that interesting. Just as the secret of a good joke is all in the timing, so too the success of a fiction is all in the telling. That is why certain ancient stories – in the Western tradition, those recounted by Homer, Ovid, and Sophocles would be good examples – remain compelling even though the events they describe are often fantastical or grotesque. The point is not, did this really happen as described, but rather, if this had happened to me how would I have felt and responded. Good fiction forces us to step out from the security of the space we comfortably inhabit, to imagine ourselves in a less familiar, riskier, and more perplexing world.
Reading should make us less sure of ourselves, and therefore more willing to listen and learn from others. Which brings me back to politics. Party politics in many Western societies seems to place greater emphasis on simplifying the world and its problems than acknowledging how difficult and intractable they are. In part, no doubt, this is because political leaders do not read widely enough to realise how inadequate their pet solutions are to the problems at hand. In part, however, it is the case that politicians reflect the culture from which they are bred, and in the West that culture is reproduced, day by day, week by week, year by year, by the choices we, the citizens, make about how we live. If the voting public lacks the desire to see beyond the easy options, it is not surprising that our politicians play to this reluctance rather than confronting it.
Political complacency is the consequence of a failure of imagination, which is in turn the product of a culture whose stories are too familiar and insufficiently disconcerting. A better society needs better stories, but they are already there, lurking undiscovered between the covers – whether paper, cloth, or hardback, or indeed in electronic form – within many of the vast range of stories that are easily available to us, if only we give ourselves the time to discover them. Modern Western politics sometimes seems like a horror show, but there is a solution close to hand, for there is a spectre haunting Western society, the spectre of good literature.