Why Novels Are A Flight Simulator For Real Life

Even though it seems to have spawned more debates over director Aaron Sorkin than the supposed evils of Facebook, Sorkin’s new movie, “The Social Reckoning,” reflects a growing awareness that technologies shape us, for better or for worse. Critics and admirers may argue over how much blame social media deserves for the current problems of loneliness, peer pressure and bullying, narcissism, and political polarization, yet underlying the debate is the idea of the power of “persuasive technology,” a term Stanford University behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg first used in the late 1990s. To Fogg, persuasive technologies were modern computer-based systems that subtly influenced human behavior. Yet centuries before the arrival of the smartphone or Facebook, the novel was quietly performing a similar cultural function. It, too, was a persuasive technology. The difference is that it persuaded through stories rather than with notifications, algorithms, clicks, and likes.

Yet today the novel seems to be dying. Surveys in Britain and the United States show plummeting rates of long-form reading (basically anything over 1,000 words — such as this essay). Publishers still produce bestsellers and book clubs continue to emerge, but the data seem to suggest that the short attention span encouraged by endless streams of digital content on social media is making many unable to engage in “deep reading,” and especially the sustained concentration required by a novel, anymore. That a decline in reading is bad for society is a rare point of agreement between those on the Left and Right sides of the political divide. Therefore, it might be worth thinking about what, in our societal shift away from books to becoming the “too long, didn’t read” generation, we might be missing.

This question struck me as I read Philip Hensher’s “A History of the Novel in Britain.” Examining the period when what we recognize as “the novel” was emerging, Hensher stresses how “the novel quickly becomes and remains a form of intense social exchange.” Novels, he explains, developed out of “conduct books,” which told morally worthy stories, a bit like longer versions of those “Aesop’s Fables”-type stories such as “The Hare and the Tortoise” many of us read as children. In conduct books, the main characters were flat and two-dimensional, their exaggerated actions functioning purely to point to certain virtues or vices. Hensher notes, however, that “the novel springs … from a desire to show a clearly imagined audience how life might be lived.” His argument, essentially, is that the novel becomes a kind of simulation machine, revealing the relationships, successes and failures of people who, though fictional, live recognizably human lives.

Now, there is one aspect in the debate on a decline in reading that we don’t talk about much: Nobody reads as much as they think they ought to. There are always many “great books” one hasn’t gotten around to reading. Plus, regardless of those “100 books you must read before you die” lists that periodically appear, there is no magic prescription for what constitutes the books one must read. People’s tastes in books are as subjective as their tastes in food. 

Nor is what follows an argument that reading makes someone morally good, which is as absurdly simplistic as the claim in Sorkin’s new movie that unregulated social media makes one intrinsically bad. If reading made one a better person, Germany might have avoided its horrific descent into National Socialism. Few societies in the world were more educated or more literate than Germany in the 1930s. Yet Germany’s intellectual elites did not challenge the rise of Nazism; rather, significant numbers of German academics and students actively embraced the Third Reich.

The novel’s great benefit is not that it is a machine for producing virtue. It is a machine for producing experience. Jordan Peterson argues in “Maps of Meaning” that narrative allows societies to transmit behavioral knowledge across generations cheaply and efficiently. As one of the 20th century’s most passionate proponents of stories, C.S. Lewis, put it: “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.” Essentially, we learn what particular choices might feel like from the inside and where they might lead. In the arena of social relations, the novel works, according to psychologist Keith Oatley, a bit like a flight simulator. 

A flight simulator allows pilots to accumulate experience before they find themselves responsible for flying the plane. It recreates routine and emergency procedures in a safe environment where mistakes become lessons rather than disasters. A pilot learns how to recognize developing problems and to appreciate how decisions made in one moment can have consequences much later. By the time a real emergency occurs, the pilot should already have encountered versions of it before. Modern armies employ a similar philosophy. Systems such as the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES) and Simunition allow soldiers to train in realistic combat scenarios without the dangers of live ammunition. Soldiers learn what a battlefield feels like before it becomes real. 

Novels can perform a similar function in the social and moral sphere. They allow us to experience real-life scenarios before life places us in them. Now, I read novels for pleasure and am not thinking of how to better myself when I pick a book. People read for all sorts of reasons. Reading, as Spencer Klavan puts it, is “an act of pure freedom.” Yet while some people dismiss novels as an escape from reality, the opposite is often true: They can also enlarge reality by allowing us to experience more of life than our own biography could ever contain. 

If we think about reading this way, it gives us an important motivation to take the time to read a book when it might seem more expedient just to watch the movie. Because, it turns out, an important point is not just about the acquiring of stories, but about how our brains acquire them. 

Novels differ from films and television as they demand more from the imagination. A film gives us a fictional world that someone else has created; a novel asks us to build some parts ourselves. We have the outlines but need to flesh out the faces, colors, and textures from our own imagination. A 2023 study at the University of York found that participants who had been reading things performed better on subsequent imagination tasks than those who had been watching films, suggesting that reading stimulates imaginative thinking more actively because the mind must generate images rather than simply receive them. From the brain’s perspective, explains Keith Oatley, long-form reading is remarkably similar to thinking about real people and real situations. And that might actually be useful once in a while.

Here is an example of how experience acquired through novels might help us. Say we are contemplating engaging in a risky and uncertain lawsuit; Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House,” with its account of a grindingly destructive and ultimately fruitless legal case, might give us pause. We imagine we will win, but what happens if no one wins? “Bleak House” gives us a simulation of that outcome. 

Or perhaps by spending time with what many agree is the pinnacle of fictional social network building, George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” we can observe, and therefore remember, how seemingly insignificant decisions affect lives and communities in momentous ways. To give some illustrations from Eliot’s fictional town of Middlemarch: an idealistic young woman marries the wrong man because her naive ideals blind her to his defects, which are obvious to everyone else. An apparently unimpressive character turns his life around because the woman he loves won’t accept him until he becomes a better person. Another, full of glorious potential, fails in his dream to transform the town because he refuses to address seemingly minor character flaws that eventually undo him. As readers, we get to see these small decisions play out over decades.

The architecture of social media encourages a different set of habits. The business model of most social media platforms involves immediate engagement: clicks, likes, shares, and reactions delivered in seconds rather than the slow accumulation of understanding over hours or days. Whatever its benefits may be, social media maximizes attention to the present moment. A novel asks us to follow a choice to its consequences; a feed asks us to move on to the next stimulus before those consequences have even had time to unfold. 

If there is a reckoning to be had over the rise of social media, it may lie not only in the rise of a technology that captures attention, but in the decline of one that cultivated judgment. In losing our ability to read, we may be losing one of modern civilization’s most effective instruments of moral and psychological improvement.

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Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.

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