Wednesday
Increasing attention is being paid these days to the dangerous power of storytelling. In addition to my own book, I’m thinking of Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative and Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, as well as Lyta Gold’s forthcoming Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality (I examine Gold’s ideas here and have posted a whole series of essays on Brooks, including this one. Today I turn my attention to Newitz’s book.
According to the publisher’s website, Newitz contends that “coercive storytelling” has always been America’s secret weapon, going all the way back to the American Revolution and reaching its apotheosis in the Cold War and twenty-first-century on-line influence campaigns. Operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare, she says, drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry.
Powerful weapons will always find their way into bad hands, of course, and according to Newitz, culture warriors have used such storytelling to transform democratic debates into “toxic wars” over American identity. The villains in these noxious stories are people of color, feminists, and LGBTQ+ folk, who “are singled out and treated as enemies of the state.”
It gets worse. The ultimate purpose of the stories is less to persuade people of their views (although that’s certainly part of it) than to delegitimize the very idea of objective truth. As reviewer Mark Dery summarizes Newitz’s thesis,
The goal isn’t so much to persuade people as to disorient them or, as Russian psywar operatives like to call it, maskirovka—“baffling people with bullshit.” Under Putin, says Newitz, “government agencies flood social media with misinformation.” Russians “don’t trust their government; they don’t trust educators and scientists; and they don’t trust one another,” a US Army psyop instructor tells Newitz. America is beginning to look a lot like Putinland.
While fully acknowledging the dangers Newitz identifies, reviews of her book have been less impressed with her solutions. Kirkus Reviews writes,
In the obligatory how-to-fix-it conclusion, Newitz emphasizes tolerance, agreeing to disagree, and promoting evidence over emotion….Searching for alternatives, the author promotes spreading democratic ideals through storytelling in “applied science fiction” or a transformed, “rejuvenated” public library. “When we immerse ourselves in the silence of the library,” writes Newitz, “we learn the most fundamental defense against psyops. Our minds belong to us.”
Whether or not libraries will save us, this certainly helps explain the wholesale attack on libraries we are seeing around the country. For a recent example, an Idaho friend has just filled me in on the assault by her state legislators on public libraries: they have just passed a new law decreeing that if a library doesn’t remove and relocate a book challenged by a patron within 60 days, that patron can file a lawsuit. A library that violates the law faces a mandatory $250 fine.
Dery is equally skeptical of another Newitz “hopeful dream,” which is that skilled first responders at tech platforms will spot “propaganda outbreaks” and contain them “before they burn through the public mind.” To which Dery essentially responds, “Good luck with that.” After all, we’ve just seen Mark Zuckerberg regretting that he censored false Covid information on Facebook, even though censoring false medical information may have saved thousands of lives. Dery writes that the prospect of seeing any social media CEO “doing anything that cuts into their obscene profit margins are less than zero.”
But it’s not like others have better solutions. In a New York Times article, Lyta Gold may write that fiction writers should “insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value.” Chances that readers will pay attention to such insistence, however, are also less than zero.
Oscar Wilde, for instance, tried this line of defense at his trial when the prosecution argued that Picture of Dorian Gray promoted homosexuality—or as the prosecutor put it, that “the affection and love of the artist of Dorian Gray might lead an ordinary individual to believe that it might have a certain tendency?” This led to the following interchange:
Carson–This is in your introduction to Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” That expresses your view?
Wilde—My view on art, yes.
C–Then, I take it, that no matter how immoral a book may be, if it is well written, it is, in your opinion, a good book?
W—Yes, if it were well written so as to produce a sense of beauty, which is the highest sense of which a human being can be capable. If it were badly written, it would produce a sense of disgust.
C–Then a well-written book putting forward perverted moral views may be a good book?
W—No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
C–A perverted novel might be a good book?
W–I don’t know what you mean by a “perverted” novel.
C–Then I will suggest Dorian Gray as open to the interpretation of being such a novel?
W–That could only be to brutes and illiterates. The views of Philistines on art are incalculably stupid.In Seduced by Story, Peter Brooks offers a different solution, advocating that students be required to take courses that focus on how narrative works. In so doing, his reasoning goes, they will be able to distinguish between harmful and beneficial uses of narrative.
My own recommendation is a variation of this: while I don’t think that every literature course has to focus on narratology, I believe that great literature has salutary lessons embedded in it because it gets us to grapples with life’s biggest question on an emotional, rational, and spiritual plane.
In other words, if one gets students excited about good literature, half the battle has been won. British-Indian author Salman Rushdie agrees. Responding in a 2018 essay to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House, he pointed out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers was “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
Unlike the toxic stories that Newitz describes, great literature has depth, nuance, complexity, and aesthetic power. Those who have had experience with such works are less likely to settle for the boring and one-dimensional stories that are the stock and trade of ideologues and political scoundrels. They’ll demand works that feed the soul, not fictions that prey on fear and resentment. Teachers and librarians are key to making sure they find these works.
