Tell Me A Story: Fact From Fiction
If you’re like me, you spent two years writing a paper on Moral Fictionalism. (Really it was about comic books, but I had to hide that under a bunch of fancy academic language to get the paper approved.) If you’re interested, you can take a trip to Millikin University and find the paper in the archives as well as the typo I made on page 1 despite two years of editing.
The paper is 40 some pages long and I have a hunch I’d get some sour looks if I tried to replicate it here. A brief summary is simply that Fictionalism, (a response to moral error theory), proposes that we treat moral claims like stories, rather than assertive statements. Talking about morality as Truth claims with a capital “T” makes morality a combative endeavor. If we instead treat moral claims as stories, they can be engaged with in a more exploratory manner rather than an adversarial one. Let me try to simplify that a little further.
“Once upon a time…”
That might be one of the most powerful phrases in the English language. With four words, we know two things about what we are about to hear. 1.) The story is made up. It’s not true. 2.) The story has a moral to it. The story has a lesson or a demonstration buried deep inside of it for us to discover. We don’t teach children proper behavior through philosophy textbooks, we do it with the brothers Grimm. We use stories because they work. They are easier to digest than assertive moral claims.
In a recent interview, Ta-Nehisi Coates made a similar observation. Coates, who has written extensively on social justice for the African American community for The Atlantic and other outlets, was describing the difficulty in discussing the origins of the Civil War. It was slavery, by the way, as outlined in the speeches and letters given by secession leaders in which they cite slavery as their specific motivation for doing what they did.
Coates claimed that when he tries to have these discussions, there is immediate resistance. As Coates put it, the resistance wasn’t to the facts but to the implications of the facts. You don’t have to look any further than the chaos over taking down confederate monuments to see this being played out. Acceptance of the facts would require a change in world view. It would require a change to the stories the culture had told. For Coates, the way through this stalemate is meeting story with story.
Story doesn’t feel as threatening as “statements of fact”, not on the surface. Anyone can read a story, because it’s “just a story.” It’s fiction, it’s not real. Good fiction centers itself on fact, though. Good story is subversive. Stories seep into our blood and become part of our behavior and moral code. The fiction we encounter molds our reality more easily than statements of fact because we don’t fight story. Fiction is the sugar that helps the medicine of fact go down.
I still live by the moral compass of some of the fictional characters I encountered in my youth. That doesn’t mean I believe I will ever acquire the powers of Superman. I had that moral example early on though, and probably in more ways than I’m aware of, have tried to live up to that image. If you had given me a morality textbook at that age, it wouldn’t have worked. I needed fiction to understand “moral fact”.
And check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, “The Water Dancer.” Experience the power of fiction for yourself.
