Novel Perspectives???

Yesterday, I posted a link to The Onion’s satire about fictionology. today, a perfect example of an intelligent person who chooses a value system that lets her choose fiction over fact because it helps her to feels better about herself. Check out this essay by Martha Montello, Novel Perspectives on Bioethics at the Chronicles of Higher Education. She argues that we ought to be learning our ethics from fiction, and base our moral decisions on fairy tales and science fiction.


It’s a basic structuralist, post-modern argument. She is, in part, reacting against some of the Christian right groups involved in public lobbying on a Bill before the Kansas Legislature, who are citing the Bible as an authoritative moral statement against cloning and stem-cell research. Her argument implies that she doesn’t accept the moral authority of the Bible and would prefer to treat it as one of many context-sensitive historical narratives.
Of course, many people do take their cultural and moral cues from books and movies, and people generally find fiction much more engaging, entertaining and convincing than science, philosophy, theology, political theory and economics, or even the news. Many people have nothing else to inform or ground them. Fictional narratives are basically imaginative, dramatic, emotional constructs which may present a moral argument in a dramatic way. In fact there is usually a moral assumption, if not a conscious metaphor within any fictional narrative. When a fiction writer plays out a scenario, moral and cultural values come into play. Philosophers and theologians commonly analyze dramatic works for moral content. For instance I just finished Michael Ignatieff’s book The Needs of Strangers, in which he uses King Lear to illustrate several points about real basic human needs. I don’t know if should expect a logical and reliable moral argument in every dramatic work. When we deconstruct drama for moral content, we can often quickly decode the author’s cultural and personal moral program.
The idea of reading fiction to explore the range of human emotions and inform decision on policy and law isn’t purely a post-modern idea, or a particularly bad idea. Bureaucratic policy making and legal reasoning tends present itself as rational, when it is more technocratic. Canadian writer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ralston_Saul has been a forceful critic of this approach, and American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written extensively about the emotional content of ethics, law and policy, with at least one book arguing for the need to read literature to get emotional involvement in law and policy.
Are all narratives are created equally? Which ones merit reading to make a particular decsion. That is one of the problems of post-modernism. It elevates literary criticism into a secular theology.
This essay was looking at public hearings into legislation in Kansas, where everyone was being careful to claim status as a Bible-reading Christian. The question what people might think about the issues if they had read certain books is interesting – but I am pessimistic about basing policy decisions on favourite literature. I also think it was not helpful to talk about selected modern novels in a way that implies that they should be equally privileged with the Bible, the Koran, and the holy books of religions in public discourse.


Comments

One response to “Novel Perspectives???”

  1. garth danielson Avatar
    garth danielson

    People should stay at home and read. It keeps them quiet and off of the streets. Just think how good that would be. Out of my hair, ummm. I have personally believed for many years that good lessons can be learned from books, the Bible’s a good one, there are others, some of which are fiction, some are non-fiction. I prefer the fiction, I like a good story. More important to me in reading books is the reader, or me, can start to get an understanding of what other people are thinking, get into someone’s head. See what they are all about. The better you know someone the less likely you are to kill them, unless they are in your family. Bad joke but people in one country having a knowledge of the humanity of people in another country are less likely to be scared and go over there and kill them.
    Right now I am in the head of a young woman in Louisianna who dating a vampire, then there’s murder, aaauuugh. I am reading the first book in Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series. It’s ok. I’ve read almost 50 books so far this year and I am betting I have learned something.
    Where are you on the stemcell research thing? Cloning? I’m all for it, I want to have that race of geneticly superior powerful humans take over the world. But seriously I can’t see cloning humans except for parts and that doesn’t seem right. I have never believed that the clone of you taking over your memories and continuing your life is you. You are dead. This was a theme in John Varley stories and other writers use it too, but he really liked that idea, working it like a dog with a bone. Besides there’s almost enough people born naturally to harvest from. Wasn’t there some sf book years ago about a society that used crime and punishment to harvest parts. Maybe it was a Ray Bradbury story.
    I can see cloning cells for various things, like organ replacement. What would be good would be to be able to clone a heart, a liver, something you can’t get enough parts of, new eyes. Better yet, micro organisms that go into your body and work with your cells and fix or replace the broken part. I just love DNA, now there’s a superior being. I just don’t know how we are going to be able to pay for all of this, maybe we can give up war to pay for the health industry, just a thought. Anyway time for bed.

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