The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday, that I thought would make a great topic for this week's Fiction Friday: does a good story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest novel ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad." 

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot. 

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A couple that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looked at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  In the most recent incarnation of the Doctor, the episode "Orphan 55" pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me tell you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to see what the lesson was.  Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we'll figure it out.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Two of my most explicitly moralistic tales, the short stories "Last Bus Stop" and "Loose Ends" (both available in my collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows), are about the fragility of life and how we should look after each other because we never know how long we have -- but I think in both cases the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.  

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

A ban on questioning

When I was sixteen years old, I signed up for a class called Modern American Literature.  I wasn't much of a reader -- English and History tended to be my worst subjects by a large margin -- but the class seemed better at least than slogs like Shakespeare and Nineteenth Century Poetry.

The teacher was a young woman named Ms. Beverly Authement, and her enthusiasm was infectious even for a mediocre student like myself.  So when it came time for us to choose books to read, I went through the list with at least a slightly better than average attitude.

The problem is, I hadn't heard of almost any of the books on the list, and wasn't sufficiently motivated to ask for suggestions, so I picked one more or less at random.  My choice was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

And my mind hasn't been the same since.

The story is the tale of a 17th century Peruvian priest, Brother Juniper, who is trying to make sense of the deaths of six villagers in a bridge collapse.  Why would God do such a thing?  What linked the six?  There had to be a reason, after all, that he selected these six to die, and no others.  So Brother Juniper delves into their histories, finds out what circumstances led to their being on the bridge the moment it broke apart and plunged them to their deaths.

And in the end, he concludes that either there is no reason for such things, or the reason is so subtle that it is beyond the human mind to discern it.  And in the devastating last pages, Brother Juniper is found guilty of the heretical action of doubting the divine will by the Inquisition and is burned at the stake, along with all of his writings.

Heavy stuff, and not something that you'd usually think of as a page-turner for a sixteen-year-old male.  But I couldn't put it down.  And the questions it opened in my mind took me to a new place in my understanding of the world -- which is what all good books should do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is why the actions of some parents and the response of the administration in Tallahassee, Florida are so completely wrongheaded.

A summer reading list for Lincoln High School included Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a novel told from the point of view of an autistic fifteen-year-old.  It has been lauded as a masterpiece, and in fact was recently turned into a Broadway play.  But the book contains swearing, and represents some adults as struggling with the truth of religion.

So a cadre of parents approached the principal asking that it be removed from the list, and the principal capitulated.

The parents are saying this isn't about censorship.  "I am not interested in having books banned,” said Sue Gee, who spearheaded the effort.  “But to have that language and to take the name of Christ in vain — I don’t go for that. A s a Christian, and as a female, I was offended.  Kids don’t have to be reading that type of thing and that’s why I was asking for an alternative assignment.  I know it’s not realistic to pretend bad words don’t exist, but it is my responsibility as a parent to make sure that my daughter knows what is right or wrong."

She's "not interested in having books banned?"  Then what does she call "removing a book from a reading list because of ideological objections?"

And you know, Ms. Gee, if reading one book that asks some deep questions is enough to shake your daughter's faith, then there wasn't much there to begin with.  It's something that has struck me more than once; the tendency of the religious to represent their god as all-powerful and all-knowing and invincible, but simultaneously to feel like the whole edifice is so vulnerable and weak that it will crumble if a few people ask questions or have different viewpoints.

So what should a parent do if a child brings home a book that brings up some troubling points, or uses inappropriate language?  Discuss it with her.

After she reads it.

Because we're not talking about assigning Portnoy's Complaint to third graders, here.  These are young adults who soon will be off in college or at jobs, and will have to face a great deal more questioning of their own motives, beliefs, and attitudes than could ever come up in a single novel.  Keeping kids in some kind of protected, isolated hothouse out of fear is only going to have the effect of making it an even ruder shock when they run into the real world -- which will happen sooner or later no matter what.

Teenagers should be reading things that make them ask questions, that challenge their assumptions, that leave them changed by the last page.  If these things aren't happening, then reading turns into one of two things -- an echo chamber for what they already believed, or a set of literary drills with no purpose other than to force them to keep their eyes moving across the page.  As I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "It is perfectly acceptable for you to leave this class in June with your beliefs unchanged.  It is not acceptable for you to leave with your beliefs unquestioned."

But such an attitude is intensely frightening to people like Gee, who apparently consider any exposure their children have to different worldviews a threat.  Worse still is the fact that the principal, Allen Burch, caved in and removed the book from the list rather than fighting the demagogues who made the demands.

And in the end -- as usual -- the students lose.  Because these sorts of acts are completely antithetical to education, a word whose etymology is from the Latin verb educare, meaning "to draw out of."  We often forget that, don't we?  Education isn't about stuffing facts into children's brains; it's about drawing out of them what they're capable of becoming.

Or as Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka put it, "Education should be a grenade we detonate beneath stagnant ways of thinking."

The different flavors of "why"

In my last few posts, we've been looking at some of the various reasons that people believe odd, counterfactual things.  We've looked at fear, wishful thinking, lack of knowledge, and being hoodwinked by fast-talking, plausible charlatans, each of which plays its role in drawing people into the ethereal realms of pseudoscience.

There's one more, though, that we haven't looked at; and that is the desperation people have to know why things happen.

Most folks are uncomfortable with the idea of chaos -- the thought that there are random forces at work in the world, that some things are simply the result of chaotic processes that we couldn't predict if we tried.  This idea was brilliantly investigated in Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which I can truly say is one of the few books that changed my life.  When I read it, in my Modern American Literature class when I was in 11th grade, I felt like my outlook on life would never be the same.

In it, Wilder's main character, Brother Juniper, an 18th century Franciscan monk, witnesses the collapse of a rope bridge in Peru.  Five people are on the bridge at the time, and all die.  He sets out to trace the history of the five victims, to see if there was some underlying reason why those five people, and no others, were killed.  And in the end, he realizes that if there was an explanation -- if god really did have a plan in engineering this situation -- it is so subtle that we could never know what it is.  And for this heresy, Brother Juniper and his book are both burned at the stake in the public square.

We always, somehow, want to know why.  And when science came along, there was a lot of hope that it would supplant religion in answering that question.  In some ways, it succeeded; but it didn't give people the answers to the "whys" that most were looking for, because there are different flavors of "why" -- and science is exceptionally good at answering one of them, and not so good at the other.

There are proximal "whys" and ultimate "whys," and the first is easy, and the second spectacularly difficult.  I saw a good example of the difference when, in an AP Biology class a few years ago, I asked, "Why are virtually all marsupials found in Australia?"

A student responded, in complete seriousness, "Because that's where they live."

Well, yes, but that's not what I was looking for.  I was looking for a deeper why -- an answer to the question of why marsupials had survived in Australia, but very few other places (the North American opossum being the sole counterexample).  And that's a difficult question, one that requires speculation.  Frequently questions of "ultimate why" either lead to unprovable guesses, or else are outside of the provenance of science to answer.

Which is why people have been turning to woo-woo craziness to explain the devastation that Typhoon Haiyan has wreaked upon the Philippines this past weekend.

Why did the typhoon form?  Why did it become so powerful?  Why did it take the path it did?  Science can explain how it formed, and give some answers to the proximal "whys," answers that involve steering currents and sea-surface temperatures.  But as far as the ultimate "why" -- why Haiyan devastated the city of Tacloban, why it struck where it did and not somewhere else -- science is silent.

So we're already seeing the nonsense rearing its ugly head.  Haiyan was created as part of a super-secret experiment by the US military, using a microwave burst.  It was sent on the path it took because the US was trying to divert radioactive water coming our way from Fukushima.  Even further out, we have loony evangelicals claiming that god sent Haiyan to devastate the mostly-Catholic Philippines in order to punish them for "worshiping idols."

It's not hard to see how some people see science as offering incomplete answers.  Because it does, honestly.  Whenever we're in the realm of "why" we have to be careful, as scientists, because the ultimate "whys" often don't admit easy explanation.  Even such simple "whys," often taught in elementary school science classes, as "why do giraffes have long necks?" are almost certainly oversimplified answers to questions that are much more difficult to answer than they would have appeared at first glance.

So no wonder some turn to other realms, where the answers to "whys" come hard and fast -- conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and (okay, I know I'm gonna get flak for this) religion.  Those models for understanding the world give the comfort of explaining why things happen -- sometimes, even the horrid things like illnesses, accidental deaths, personal losses... and typhoons.  Science is silent on the ultimate "whys," most of the time, and if you are uncomfortable with that, you either have to do what I do -- remain uncomfortable -- or leap outside of science.

Because, as Brother Juniper learned, if you don't make that leap, you just have to accept that sometimes the events in the world are subtle and unexplainable.