For a brief, impressionable period of my life, I believed in literature.

I believed in its singular importance, that there was something about it, over and above other pursuits, that made it the path to wisdom and moral clarity. Between my early teens and late twenties, I pursued reading like a convert undertakes devotion.

Then it ended. Not the devotion—that remains intact—but the conviction. There’s nothing like surrounding yourself with extremely erudite, well-read people to disabuse you of the notion that great literature will necessarily make for a good, let alone great, human being.

I studied with a writer who would throw himself on a sword for my favourite authors and despised, as he put it, “third-world types” (which included relatives of mine). I taught with a fellow literature scholar who researched post-colonial drama while denigrating the post-colonial country we taught in. He also once threatened to punch me in the face.

I’ve known too many well-read people who were also kind of jerks.

But long after I’ve seen it let me down, I still love literature. I still believe it can pave the path to salvation. Why, though? Why does anyone hold fast to a belief even long after they find evidence contradicting it? I imagine anyone whose faith gets challenged has to deal with such questions. This is a very old conundrum, and it keeps repeating.

The idea that literature can make us better people came up earlier this year during the publicity push for Vigil, the latest George Saunders novel. As his interviews stress, Saunders is a nice guy, and he writes in the belief that literature retains the power to form kinder human beings. You can see his conviction on display in a commencement address from 2013, as well as in his 2021 nonfiction book about Russian literature, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Saunders is not alone in thinking this way. In the same year he delivered his speech, two social psychologists published a widely discussed article in Science arguing that reading literary fiction improves “Theory of Mind,” the ability to understand the intentions and beliefs of other people. The most prominent proponent of this idea has to be the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has spent years arguing that entering into the lives of strangers, in the way only a book truly allows, trains readers to be more understanding. Literature works our empathy muscles.

The problem with this argument is that for every George Saunders there are dregs of contradictory jerks. The post-colonial bigot and the first-world snob are only two of the many I have encountered, and most everyone I know has their own shiny lineup to contribute. (Maybe for some, I myself am one of these examples.)

“Who doesn’t know a lot of big readers who are jackasses from head to toe?” writes New York Times critic Dwight Garner in his review of Saunders’s novel. “Writers who insist on the morally improving nature of fiction . . . tend to be the ones to avoid.”

Whether literature provides a moral education, or any kind of education at all rather than just functioning as escapism, is a debate that has serious ramifications. Funding for the arts and humanities, as well as enrollment in arts and humanities majors, has declined in the past decades. If you can prove that literature isn’t just about teaching you to read—because, let’s be honest, you can teach that without assigning Shakespeare or Toni Morrison—but about forming better citizens, then you can make a case for increased structural support for the humanities.

But this case has never been easy to make.

Over 2,100 years ago, Saint Augustine marvelled at humankind’s willingness to weep over the fate of fictional people in stories but to care so little for their fellow characters in real life. If literature improves us, shouldn’t it direct our sympathies toward the world?

Critics have long wrestled with the fact that great literature does not make people immune from barbarism. The same culture that reared its children on Goethe and Schiller also produced Hitler. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazis, wrote a dissertation on a Romantic playwright.

Perhaps this is to be expected. It’s not like books come populated with saints. The majority of unpleasant people I have known I didn’t meet in real life. I encountered them in stories. Then again, I come across many to admire in these stories too. In the last month alone, I fell in love with a young woman working in a grocery store in Texas and a middle-aged mom in suburban Los Angeles. I also met soldiers who saved lives and travelled across America and back, accumulating experiences that would take multiple exceptional lifetimes to amass.

No one’s life is long enough to grant as much as a library offers, especially when you consider that so much of what it offers involves fantastic worlds and bygone eras. Reading introduces us to the immensity of the world.

Let’s call this the Reading Rainbow argument, after the beloved PBS show that encouraged children to crack open a book by promising them untold adventures. “I can go twice as high,” the show’s theme song goes. “I can go anywhere / Friends to know / And ways to grow / A reading rainbow.”

The idea is not so dissimilar to arguments put forward on behalf of travel, learning another language, or getting to know people outside your bubble. Where reading differs is that these are not actual people we are meeting, and their settings and situations are but simulacra of the living, breathing world. That’s what irks Augustine: How can you get worked up about fictions when you ignore what’s unfolding before your eyes? The problem with poets, Plato similarly argues, is that their creations are too many steps removed from reality.

Whether or not you buy Plato’s argument will depend on which part of reality you are focused on. When we have a nightmare, the events that occur in the dream are not actually transpiring, but the fear they provoke is genuine. Something similar seems to occur when we read. Some research suggests that the emotions we feel in response to a story’s villains and love interests are not so different from the ones we feel when someone angers or captivates us in real life.

I think we’ve always understood this. If in his day and age Augustine hadn’t noticed how authentic audience reactions were, I doubt he would have felt the need to criticize them. For anything to be threatening, it has to first and foremost be plausible.

Aristotle understood this too. Otherwise, he could not have argued that an audience’s emotional reactions to tragedy could be purgative. In his defence of theatre, Aristotle says that a fiction works when it presents characters whose actions seem plausible. That’s why even a story as unlikely as Oedipus’s can function as a realistic portrayal of human psychology.

In emphasizing the plausibility of plot and character, Aristotle is able to turn over-the-top storylines into paradigmatic examples and make fiction more truthful than nonfiction. A work of history tells us what happened, Aristotle says, whereas fiction tells us what could happen. That makes it apposite beyond a limited set of circumstances. It’s why we still find relevant something as unlikely as ancient Greek tragedy.

In the twentieth century, the notion that fiction rehearses real life got yoked to the logic of evolutionary biology. Suddenly, fiction’s removal from reality was its boon, not its defect. The idea is pretty simple: Reading literature is like playing make-believe, and make-believe prepares us for the real thing.

All mammals play make-believe. When your kitten is pouncing on its siblings in the litter, it is exerting a whole lot of effort on behalf of a made-up scenario. It’s not out on a savannah stalking prey. And it’s not going to go hungry if it falls flat on its face. This is all just fooling around. But through that fooling, the animal hones vital skills for survival.

According to evolutionary arguments, the games we humans play rehearse important skill sets too. It’s why little girls and boys play dress-up, battle imaginary bad guys, and throw tea parties for their dolls. Ninja and host alike are figuring out how to make sense of the complex emotions that might arise later on, not just in tea soirees and mock skirmishes but in more plausible moments of tension, conflict, and social innuendo.

Reading literature is a more elaborate form of make-believe, which can be packaged between a front and back cover and shipped around the world. I’m never going to discover that I inadvertently murdered my father and married my mother. But the emotions that Oedipus enacts onstage—the dread of powerlessness, the hubris that comes from taking responsibility—are ones that do rear their heads in life.

When we call something “literature,” when we ascribe importance to it, it’s because it makes us swoon. Literature rehearses the extremes of human behaviour: passion and vitriol, vengeance and horror and mendacity, sacrifice and devotion, love. It’s the main reason we imbue books with the power to make us better people. The experiences that change us and confirm us are the kinds of experiences that are deeply felt and—fortunately and unfortunately—rare.

We don’t get many chances to live life to the fullest: the day I met my future wife, for example, or when I first held my child. The list of life-fulfilling moments is always shorter than we like, no matter how full the lives we lead. I keep harking back to the same half-dozen or so experiences, and everyone I know does the same. When my parents told me stories, they told me the same stories. When my friends and I reminisce, we cover well-trodden territory.

It’s not because our lives suddenly stopped being interesting. But interesting is not the same as transformative. Most of life is not filled up with profundity; most of literature is.

Of course, films also transport us to other worlds. Personally, I am more often moved to tears by music than books. If literature is a form of rehearsal, what makes it worthier of our commitment than the other ways we play—not just other forms of art but also video games or social media?

The consensus among many who lament the purported “death of reading” as a result of the rise of algorithmic content is that TikTok and Facebook make us dumb, whereas reading, especially of challenging “literary” stuff, once made us smarter. Literature takes commitment and concentration; most of what captures our attention online does not.

This is not the first time we have tasked reading with improving our intellects. “To cloath Instruction with Delight” was a popular precept among eighteenth-century defenders of novels, and it recalls Horace’s first-century-BC motto: utile dulci, to mix “the useful with the delightful.”

This is also the point of Reading Rainbow: to make something that’s good for us seem fun. Vicarious experience, play, and make-believe are all about the enjoyment that comes with emotionally investing in a story. In adapting Aristotle’s ideas for a post-evolutionary world, literature devotees transformed “Delight” from the ruse into the objective. It was the delight itself that instructed.

This marks a huge change. When novels first began to circulate widely, they were considered too delightful. In the 1700s, moralists worried that readers were getting absorbed by books to the point that audiences conflated reality with fiction. A 1785 critique of reading claims that novels “instill intellectual frivolity” and give girls—usually it was girls moralists worried about—“unrealistic ideas of what to expect from their future.”

Not so long ago, if your kid had her nose in a book, she wasn’t thought of as a master of the art of concentration. The book itself was evidence of frivolity. Hence, as those nasty French villagers put it in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: “Look there she goes, that girl so peculiar / I wonder if she’s feeling well / With a dreamy, far-off look / And her nose stuck in a book / What a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle.”

I hate this line of argument. I don’t want to hear that the things for which we praise reading nowadays are the same we used to condemn, thereby implying that what we dislike about new forms of storytelling today (TikTok and the like) will one day be acceptable. I don’t buy it. As I said earlier, I may have lost my conviction, but I haven’t lost my devotion. I want someone to prove literature right, to prove true my own experiences with books. When I read, something happens that’s just different. I can feel it.

Luckily for people like me, vicarious experience is not the only way we have justified literature. The not-so-hidden agenda of the Reading Rainbow argument is to get kids to be better readers, which means to better understand how human beings use language. In other words, this is about words.

That’s all a work of literature is in the end—a hobgoblin of phrases and sentences, the things we employ not just to tell fake stories but to confess real crimes and feign true loves, not to mention remind co-workers and reprimand children and remember all the everyday things we have to get done.

Words are useful, and books are helpful at teaching us to use them better. “Better,” though, doesn’t just mean grammatical structures and proper spellings. Better words, in the twentieth century, came to be associated with morally superior, less dishonest forms of living.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell argues that “lazy” language makes for lazy thinking, both of which feed into bad politics. Since words are the domain of our public conversations and private thoughts, when language grows corrupt, so do our governments and our authentic selves. But we are not necessarily doomed. Orwell writes:

Orwell’s message is straightforward: Fix your words, fix the world. Given Garner’s assessment that writers who preach the gospel of literature are usually the ones to avoid, it’s surprising that Orwell’s reputation has only grown in the last eighty-odd years. Orwell is one of the few authors we read for wisdom and moral probity; Nineteen Eighty-Four is regularly cited for its insights on political corruption. (It hit the best-seller list during Trump’s first presidency.)

Then again, Orwell’s injunctions centre more on language than on stories, allowing him to make a case for literature without having to do so explicitly. None of this artsy-fartsy nonsense about the emotional pull of phony people. We’re talking about the effects that our words have on real life. Nowhere in “Politics and the English Language” does Orwell claim that the key to linguistic regeneration lies with literature. But how could it not be implied, at least today, given the canonical status his novels have achieved?

Since ethics is usually conceived of as a relationship between people, it makes sense that pro-literature arguments would stress the vicarious-experience element of storytelling: Step into another’s shoes, train your empathy. Orwell has shown, though, that we can make ethics be as much about communication as behaviour. It’s not just how you act but how you speak. The words we employ are now part and parcel of the actions we undertake.

“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” Such a sentence could easily fit into “Politics and the English Language,” but this quote is not Orwell’s. It comes from Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Morrison, who like Orwell has only grown in stature in recent decades, succeeds at uniting the major denominations of pro-literature belief in one remarkable testament. She emphasizes vicarious experience: “Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

She also restates Orwell’s ideas about the responsibilities words hold in public life: “Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.” She incorporates contemporary anti-internet arguments too, albeit avant la lettre. TikTok may be able to show us belief’s wide skirt—it, too, uses language—but I don’t think anyone is going to claim it can function as a kind of meditation.

Only literature rehearses real life, deploys language at the highest level, and forces your concentration and commitment, Morrison says, not just to provide delight but to impart a deeper, perhaps even moral, kind of instruction.

I want to believe this. After all, I write; I teach books. The late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño said that his “homeland is the Spanish language.” I’ve always felt that way about English. There has never been a moment in my life when my language didn’t feel like the place where I belonged.

But I know a kid who feels differently. He’s smart as a whip and I love him to death, but words are not what he returns to when he’s adrift. He’s happier with bricks and bolts, with things he can hold in his curious hands. I know another kid who’d prefer to live in numbers and another for whom there are not enough words in any language to convey what she feels, though a guitar’s six strings will suffice. In order for something to affect us deeply enough to improve us, we ourselves must have an affinity for the medium through which it communicates.

Words and stories are one way. For many people they are the most important way, and for many years they were the most useful way. It used to be that we emphasized reading because the most efficient form of rehearsing complex scenarios was with a book. It used to be that most information got communicated with written words and that the most complicated kinds of communication required lots of them. I still think that holds true. However, it is much less true today than it used to be.

But if you are someone like me, who feels differently and thinks better when encountering great books, then you need literature. Nothing will replace it. Not because nothing else does what it does, but because nothing else does what it does for you.

It just so happens that you and I are like millions of others. I would not have loved literature if I hadn’t been encouraged to read and forced to read things I didn’t think I would like. No way was I picking up Shakespeare of my own volition. Luckily, I didn’t have a choice. Thanks be to the teachers who still believe in the morally improving nature of literature. Without their naïveté, I wouldn’t be the much better—if still far from perfect—individual books made me.

Literature is special. Because it is itself, and nothing else. In that sense, it’s like music or biology or gardening or anything that makes us feel things we hadn’t expected, about ways of living we had not foreseen. That should be more than enough to warrant our devotion.