Dorothea’s decision, seen from a full-spectrum perspective, has meaningful signal on at least five distinct bands. It is an emotional choice, of course: whether to marry the man she loves. But it is also a moral choice, bound up in her obligations to her late husband, however distrustful his codicil had revealed him to be. Like almost every marriage plot in the nineteenth-century novel, it is a financial choice, tied to an inheritance, with significant implications for Dorothea’s economic standing. The fact that the economics are tied to the estate Dorothea dreams of improving means it is also a deeply political choice, shaped by the new intellectual ideas just emerging at that moment in history. And it is a choice framed by the stark possibility of shame and exile from the community she belongs to, in this case a small provincial town, with all its “frustrating complexity.”
To make matters even more complicated, the decision is bound to set in motion a chain of future events that will shape the lives of many people beyond Dorothea and Ladislaw. You can measure the different bands in terms of the relative numbers of individual people they influence. The emotional level belongs to two lovers and their immediate family, gossip implicates hundreds, while political movements and reform ideologies shape and are shaped by thousands of lives. Giving up Lowick could threaten Caleb Garth’s growing trade as an estate manager, thus threatening the budding romance between Fred and Mary; it would certainly affect the living conditions of Lowick’s farmers and working poor. But perhaps Dorothea can do more good in the world by supporting Ladislaw’s career as a man in a world where, for better but most likely for worse, men control the political conversation. The choice cannot be reduced down to a simple list of pros and cons because the downstream effects of the decision are so difficult to predict. Would her emotional (and presumably sexual, though of course Eliot is typically restrained on that dimension) happiness as Ladislaw’s wife ultimately satisfy her enough to make up for the loss of her community and her social aspirations for Lowick? Will Ladislaw’s efforts in the political arena ultimately counterbalance the damage she might do to the tenants at Lowick by abandoning her plans?
Ironically, for many readers of Middlemarch, the choice that Dorothea ultimately makes turns out to be the least inventive element of the entire book. She runs off with Ladislaw, abandons her social projects at Lowick, and supports his political career as a wife and mother of two children. Eliot defends her less ambitious path in the novel’s famous closing lines: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” In a novel filled with so much formal inventiveness, with a character so clearly pushing at the boundaries of conventional female heroes, Dorothea’s choice strikes many critics as being more conventional than one would have expected, certainly more conventional than the choice that Mary Ann Evans herself made, in concocting an entirely sui generis definition of marriage with Lewes. The novelist was, in real life, more imaginative than her imaginary creation.
But the fact that Eliot found such rich complication in the “hidden life” of a figure like Dorothea is also what makes the novel so important. Just because your life may not be as heroic or world-changing as Darwin’s or Eliot’s doesn’t mean the decisions you face in that life are not full spectrum. This is partly what the realist novel brought to the forefront of human consciousness: that ordinary lives were fascinating, too, if you looked at them with enough perspicacity. Admittedly, Dorothea’s life, even with her more conventional last act, could hardly be called ordinary. But think of Lydgate and the threadlike pressures influencing the decision to replace the vicar. That could be any of us, wresting with a fraught decision to switch schools for one of your kids, or debating whether to take a job offer in a new city.
Recall that extraordinary passage from Middlemarch where Dorothea discovers the shocking reality of Casaubon’s will: “Her world was in a state of convulsive change,” Eliot writes; “the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew.” Whatever approach we decide to take when making decisions of this magnitude, those two imperatives stand out: wait, and think anew. We can do the math of linear value modeling, or build scenarios in our heads, or sketch out a chart of impact pathways, or hold our own private charrettes. But whatever approach seems to work best—given the unique situation we are confronting, and our own distinctive mental habits and aptitudes—the two things we will almost always benefit from are time and a fresh perspective.
OTHER MINDS
Novels like Middlemarch do not give us simple prescriptions for making the complex decisions of our own lives. They are not simple morality plays. The trick of making complex decisions does not lie in a set of invariable rules, because every complex decision, by definition, is unique. All the techniques we have explored in the preceding chapters ultimately involve strategies for perceiving the decision map more clearly, understanding its singular characteristics, and not getting stuck in familiar habits of thought or preconceived models. Great novels—or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing—give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of the simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacy. They map all the threadlike pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.
It is not an accident that so many of these tools and strategies that help us wrestle with complex decisions revolve around storytelling. Running multiple simulations of experience, imagining alternate realities—these are ancient practices, as old as myth and folklore. The evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have convincingly argued that our appetite for fictional narrative is not just the result of cultural invention, but instead has deep roots in the evolutionary history of the human brain. Echoing the complaints of the teenage Mary Ann Evans about the frivolous escapism of novels (“Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?”), Tooby and Cosmides begin with a puzzle: Why do people willingly spend so much time (and money) exploring events and experiences that are, by definition, not true?
[O]rganisms should have an appetite for obtaining accurate information, and the distinction between true information and false information should be important in determining whether the information is absorbed or disregarded. This “appetite for the true” model spectacularly fails to predict large components of the human appetite for information. When given a choice, most individuals prefer to read novels over textbooks, and prefer films depicting fictional events over documentaries. That is, they remain intensely interested in communications that are explicitly marked as false. The familiarity of this phenomenon hides its fundamental strangeness.
Why do people waste so many cognitive cycles contemplating information that is demonstrably false? Part of the answer is that human intelligence actually depends on varying hypothetical degrees of truth and falsity. The simple black-and-white distinction between the two realms is actually much blurrier. Even without getting into postmodern theories of truth and its social construction, in everyday life, human brains shuffle across a vast gradient of truth. Tooby and Cosmides describe some of them: “the might-be-true, the true-over-there, the once-was-true, the what-others-believe-is-true, the true-only-if-I-did-that, the not-true-here, the what-they-want-me-to-believe-is-true, the will-someday-be-true, the certainly-is-not-true, the what-he-told-me, the seems-true-on-the-basis-of-these claims, and on and on.” Being able to bounce back and forth between those different regions of truth is not a sign of nihilism. It is, instead, the sign of a discerning, imaginative mind.
Stories exercise and rehearse that faculty for
juggling different frames of truth, in part because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act. When Casaubon adds the damning codicil to his will, he is working in the realm of the might-someday-be-true. When Dorothea worries about the town gossips’ reaction to her marrying Ladislaw, she is exploring the what-others-believe-is-true framework.
Stories serve a function not unlike the ensemble forecasts of modern meteorology. When Lewis Fry Richardson first proposed his “Weather Prediction by Numerical Process,” the approach was limited by the bottleneck of pre-digital calculation; the weather itself changed faster than anyone could complete the “numerical process” for predicting it. Weather forecasting dramatically improved its accuracy once computers were fast enough to generate hundreds or thousands of iterations of the same forecast, playing out all the various scenarios and looking for patterns in the results. Fictional narratives offer a similar boost. By telling one another stories, we free ourselves from the bottleneck of an individual life. Stories, as Tooby and Cosmides put it, mean we “are no longer limited by the slow and unreliable flow of actual experience. Instead, we can immerse ourselves in the comparatively rapid flow of vicarious, orchestrated, imagined, or fictional experience. A hunter-gatherer band might contain scores or even hundreds of lifetimes’ worth of experience whose summary can be tapped into if it can be communicated . . . With fiction unleashing our reactions to potential lives and realities, we feel more richly and adaptively about what we have not actually experienced. This allows us not only to understand others’ choices and inner lives better, but to feel our way . . . to better choices ourselves.” In a sense, you can see the appetite for fictional narratives as an extension of the “openness to experience” trait that was so prominent in Philip Tetlock’s successful forecasters. Novels and biographical histories allow us to open a kind of perceptual door into other people’s experiences, to live vicariously through the unique challenges of their existence, watch them from the inside as they wrestle with their own hard choices.
That capacity to project into the “inner lives” of other people is of course a central requirement in most important personal decisions. When Lewes and Evans contemplated their future life outside the boundaries of acceptable Victorian morality, a significant part of the decision revolved around the imagined reactions of other people: the close ties of friends and family and colleagues; the weaker ties of the social milieu they traveled in. Evaluating the potential consequences of their actions demanded that they project themselves into the thoughts and emotions and moral codes of these people. Would Evans’s family reject her, or would they eventually make peace with her “alternative” lifestyle with Lewes? Would the chattering classes of London be so scandalized by the relationship that the couple would be forced to move elsewhere, or would the gossip quickly move on to another story and leave Evans and Lewes in relative peace?
Psychologists and cognitive scientists refer to this ability to imagine the subjective life of other people as having a “theory of mind.” People vary a great deal in their other-mindedness. People on the autistic and Asperger’s side of the autism spectrum are usually challenged in their ability to conjure up these mental models; their brains seem less likely to instinctively speculate on what other people are thinking. But most of us can run these mental simulations so quickly that we don’t even notice we’re doing it. We notice the subtle raised eyebrow of the supervisor we’re talking to and we automatically build a mental simulation of what she might be thinking: Is she skeptical about the point I’m trying to make? Am I confusing her?
For hard choices, of course, that rapid-fire mental modeling has to leave the realm of instinct and become a more deliberate affair. Just as we have to mentally simulate what we think will happen to the real estate market in the neighborhood we’re contemplating moving to, we also have to simulate the emotional responses that the move will trigger in the people close to us. Will the kids make friends quickly at their new school, or will they struggle in the first months without a preexisting network around them? Will your partner be frustrated by the longer commute to work? As with so many elements of the hard choice, there are few generalizable rules that govern those simulated minds. We are all fingerprints. But what is generalizable is the importance of building those mental models, taking the time to think through the subjective responses of the individuals influenced by the decision at hand.
In the months that passed as I assembled my case for the California move, I was effectively writing a story myself, a story about how this westward migration would delight and strengthen our family—give the kids a richer connection to nature, force us all to build a different mental map of what “home” meant. But in all honesty, I never bothered to construct an alternate story. Right before we bought the house we eventually moved into, a quirky little storybook-style cottage with a small garden up on a hill overlooking the bay, I took my father to see it. I was certain he would find it as intoxicating as I did. But he seemed more worried than exuberant, and afterward, he called me and tried to talk me out of buying it. “Lexie’s going to get really lonely up on that hill,” he said prophetically, about my wife’s future response to California living. But I dismissed it as a father’s usual concern over any big change in his child’s life.
We were both building scenario plans, but my father was doing something else as well: he was running a premortem. And it was a premortem based on a sensitivity to how the decision might play out from my wife’s point of view. That empathy, that knack for peering into another person’s mind and imagining how some theoretical event might feel, is almost by definition one of the most important virtues in making complex decisions. If the point is to calculate the greatest happiness for the greatest number, what better skill than the ability to predict the presence or absence of happiness in other people’s minds? Some might argue that empathy as a trait is less vital when decisions take on a mass scale, since it is not always useful to condense down a thousand or a million mental states into a much smaller group of “average” mind-sets. Most empathy is grounded in the granular connection to people we know, face-to-face. But for personal decisions, like our California move, empathy lets you run the projection cycles much faster if you genuinely know the person into whose mind you are projecting.
This is the other reason reading novels turns out to enhance our decision-making skills. A few years ago, a pair of scientists at the New School in Manhattan published a study in Science that quickly became a viral sensation on social media, particularly among former humanities majors. The study assigned a range of reading materials—popular fiction, literary fiction, and nonfiction—to a group of subjects, and then evaluated whether the reading improved their “theory of mind” skills. The study found no change in the subjects who had read popular fiction or nonfiction, but detected a statistically meaningful improvement in other-mindedness after reading even a small amount of literary fiction. Subsequent experiments have failed to replicate the effect, but many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with enhanced theory of mind skills. We don’t know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their abilities to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity. Cinema and photography can take you to other worlds with more visual fidelity; music can excite our bodies and our emotions. But no form rivals the novel’s ability to project us into the interior landscape of other minds.
Eliot saw that projection as a kind of moral imperative. “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men,” she observes at one
point in Middlemarch. As Rebecca Mead writes, “Her credo might be expressed this way: If I really care for you—if I try to think myself into your position and orientation—then my world is bettered by my effort at understanding and comprehension.” The novel is an empathy machine. That act of mental projection presumably strengthens the ties between us, in the moral view that Eliot took of it. But that ability also makes us better decision-makers. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I’m-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can’t run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way the meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It’s true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories of our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband’s estate and matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating that move to the suburbs, Middlemarch doesn’t tell you what to do. No form of outside advice—whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or a pop-psychology paperback—can tell you what to do in these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel—along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored—does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called “a keen vision and feeling,” and keep you from the tendency to “walk about well wadded with stupidity.” The novel doesn’t give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads.
Farsighted Page 19
