Learning From Literature

How novels help us better grasp the human condition

Dominic Cummings, who is no slouch as both a political player as well as an analyst of the decadence of the West’s political systems, points out that his perceptions of the current state of politics have been better informed, in at least some cases, by literature than by science.

The more non-fiction I’ve read the more obvious it’s seemed that some aspects of politics and power are far better described by great artists than they are, and probably ever can be, by academics/scholars. Tolstoy’s description of how meetings really work at the apex of power in a crisis tells you far more than academic studies, which usually overrate the seriousness of the people involved and underrate the absurd, the vanity, the farce — and tell you far more than the absurd official Covid Inquiry (by lawyers, for HR) will tell you about what really happened. And you can’t understand a lot of history without understanding the artistic fashions of the times. You can’t understand the spiritual crisis of the West without reading Fathers and Sons, The Devils etc.

He wrote a very thoughtful and detailed review of Tolstoy - who also had a deep impact on my own perspective on human events - back in 2022, in which he explained why the great artist can articulate what even the fully-informed political player cannot.

You can learn more about politics if you really study a few classics and case studies than almost everybody involved in it figures out in a lifetime. But there are deep aspects of politics in Tolstoy that you don’t really read in history books, at least not with the same depth and insight, because it takes an artistic genius to portray the feelings and atmosphere with honesty. (Occasionally there is someone in politics who is also a brilliant artist. Some of Bismarck’s setpieces are masterpieces but they’re often more artistic masterpieces, refined in the re-telling, than historical masterpieces honestly recording what happened.) Often I’ve tried and failed to explain something that’s at the edge of my consciousness, I can’t write it because I can’t capture it in my mind, it floats away as I try to grasp it, but then I read Tolstoy and there it is, the thing I couldn’t articulate but immediately see is true.

This is as true of SSH as it is of politics. No matter how clearly I point out the obvious delusions of the Gamma from the outside, nothing can paint their essence as unmistakably as Fyodor Dostoyevsky described Rodion Raskolnikov’s internal thought processees, in Crime and Punishment.

The visage speaks volumes…

As our understanding of the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy deepens, it will be interesting to see how authors are able to apply it to their work, and hopefully, provide us with even greater insight into it.