TO PREPARE FOR A CRISIS, READ FICTION

RICHARD FONTAINE APRIL 23, 2020
COMMENTARY

Fiction and policy too rarely mix. The learned policymaker reads reports and
journal articles, books and research papers, all aimed at injecting the highest-
quality thinking into key judgments. These inputs — even the inevitable classics
— are almost relentlessly non ction. In my own eld of national security, one
turns o en to Thucydides and Hobbes, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, Waltz and
Kissinger. It’s far less common to see those soaked in foreign policy or
economics or health spend time with Tolstoy or Dickens, Mishima or Achebe,
Marilynne Robinson or Michael Chabon.
Today’s global crisis demonstrates why they should. As policymakers make
hurried judgments with vast, life-altering consequences, they draw on a stock of
intellectual capital assembled over decades. Every discipline — psychology,
economics, biology, history — examines the world through a particular prism.
Yet only ction invites us inside the minds of others, transports us across time
and place, and produces in us a kind of experience we could otherwise never
attain. By enmeshing us in its characters and stories, reading ction helps
policymakers better understand the human condition, and more ably fashion
responses to it.

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The military has long understood this. The Marine Corps commandant each year
issues a reading list for personnel at every rank. This year’s list includes not only
novels one might expect, like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Killer Angels,
but also Ender’s Game and Ready Player One. James Stavridis, a retired admiral and
former supreme allied commander, describes ction not only as a sanctuary in a
violent world but also the opposite, “a kind of simulator where you imagine
what you would do in a stressful, dangerous situation.” Gen. Martin Dempsey,
former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta , wrote that ction creates “a mental
laboratory” that “invites us to explore challenges and opportunities we might
otherwise overlook.”

It does this and more. Novels hone powers of observation and insight. They
increase mental exibility and help policymakers anticipate situations. They
illuminate other mindsets, cultures, places, and times. The best ones induce a
sense of empathy in their readers, and they help render policy approaches more
e ective and more humane.

*            *            *
As the coronavirus pandemic began, Eliot Cohen, the dean of Johns Hopkins’
school of international a airs, wrote about the literature of plague. Noting the
clamor for rational, technocratic responses to a biological scourge, Cohen drew
on Poe and Camus to illuminate other dimensions. A reliance on evidence,
reason, and hard science is, of course, necessary and right. But the policymaker
in crisis needs to go beyond statistics and models to understand, in Cohen’s
words, “the logic of fear and dread that is also part of an epidemic.” That logic,
he added, “is ignored at our peril.”

The logic would be clear to readers of The Plague. In Albert Camus’ telling,
pandemic produces not just panic but also a yearning for the quotidian — an
echo, perhaps, of today’s resistance to social distancing. Father Paneloux
sermonizes against the sins of humanity, portraying the plague as brimstone
sent from heaven to punish. Cottard turns to smuggling, hoping the crisis will
endure inde nitely. Citizens put on their Sunday best to attend the theater and
carry on their old rounds. And Dr. Rieux daily risks infection by treating the
a icted, not because he’s heroic but because he’s a doctor, and that’s what
doctors do. Like today’s nurses, grocery store workers, and delivery personnel,
he rose to the job that needed doing.

Fiction expands one’s mental horizons, and poor policy too o en stems from
narrow ones.

Take science ction, which, unusually, is a popular genre among visionary

defense policy thinkers. Neuromancer showed readers the possibilities of arti cial
intelligence and simulated reality as long ago as 1984. Asimov’s Foundation
series, with Hari Seldon’s theory of “psychohistory,” anticipated big data
analysis two decades before that. More recently, Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy
has made the rounds. These and other tales invite us to imagine the as yet
unimaginable.

An entire eld of intelligence analysis is devoted to scenario planning — an

obvious focus of those who ask how the coronavirus pandemic caught so many
policymakers at-footed. The goal is to enhance policymakers’ mental exibility
by having them consider detailed, alternate possibilities and the potential
responses to them. Novels do just that, o en in a more detailed and compelling
way than most analytical exercises ever could.

They also admit us directly into the thoughts of another. Via ction we see into
the minds of healers, like Dr. Rieux; those of the dying, as with Ivan Ilyich; or
even the deceased, like Addie in As I Lay Dying. Billy, in Slaughterhouse-Five,
conveys a sense of post-traumatic stress disorder. Claudius, in Robert Graves’
work, oscillates between ultimate power and everyday minutiae. Salman
ushdie, in Midnight’s Children, allows us to witness the ruminations of those
living through political upheaval, while Haruki Murakami invites readers into a
hallucinogenic world of utter weirdness.

In taking such literary journeys, policymakers can better appreciate — and thus
diagnose — the human condition. Novels will never supply all the solutions, any
more than non ction does, and may not provide any of them. But they can
prompt leaders to ask better questions about the contours of existence, and
derive more nely tuned responses to them.

Soren Kierkegaard famously wrote that when all innovations in his time —
railways, steamboats, the telegraph — aimed at making life easier, he chose to
make it more di cult. The best novels similarly render life more complicated
rather than simpler. The policymaker makes decisions with imperfect
information, in situations of uncertainty, with unpredictable and potentially
grave consequences. They must bring to this challenge an openness to the world
in all of its di cult complexity.

Key to it all is the sense of empathy that ction can help breed. Policy o en
abstracts away from the individual lives touched by it, and policymakers are in
constant danger of rendering judgments from a cloistered existence. And yet
policy a ects humans, directly and profoundly. It must be humane, and the
mental habits formed by reading ction can prepare policymakers to respond
empathetically. Never is this more important than during a society-upending
calamity like today’s pandemic.
What should policymakers do in a viral crisis? Much of ction suggests they do
as all other citizens should, which is to say: what they can. In To the Lighthouse,
Virginia Woolf showed meaning is carried not just by grand pronouncements
and sweeping changes, but also by “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches
struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Today a million daily miracles matter.

*            *            *

The responsibility to respond amid crisis goes beyond policymakers, of course,

to every healthy citizen. And here too ction is instructive.

In the Icelandic masterpiece Independent People, the o -broken farmer Bjartur

walks scores of miles through the countryside with his adult daughter Asta
Sollija. Herself broken, humiliated, tired, and ill, she stops, unable to go any
farther. She is quite literally at her end. Bjartur turns to Asta, picks her up, and
carries her on his back as they together hobble to a new home. He does what he
can.

Therein lay a match struck in the dark. At a time of closed cities, spreading fear,
and social distancing, everyone — policymakers and everyone else — has
someone to help carry.

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Richard Fontaine is chief executive o cer of the Center for a New American Security in
Washington, D.C.

Image: Pixabay

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