A Reflection on my Novels and What They Reveal

I’m editing the final book in my series of philosophical fiction, set in Egypt in 1934 and 1935. As I’ve said here many times, the stories simply came to me as a mental movie, playing in my mind’s eye and ear for five years, with all the dialogue and details already there. The story chose me to tell it. It was out of the blue. My job was just to write what I was seeing and hearing.

And yet, somehow, mysteriously, the books are all about me. I hope they’re also all about you. But I just came to realize that they’re about my deepest hopes and dreams and values and aspirations. They’re about my fears and joys and uncertainties and suspicions. They’re about weakness and strength, wisdom and virtue, friendship and animosity, uncertainty and hope, life and death.

The stories are all quite particular, but the lessons are universal.

And I’m bringing these tales into the world very differently from the vast majority of my books. Instead of contracting as I have for my nonfiction books with a Doubleday or Penguin to publish many tens of thousands of copies and place them into bookstores nationwide, announcing them in big circulation newspapers and magazines, as well as on radio and television, I created my own imprint, found the right people to help in this endeavor of love, and have published them in the new format of print on demand for paperback and hardcover, with the two basic ebook formats also available. That has allowed for something I’ve never been able to do before.

First, I have total control of what goes into print, including the great cover art done by my daughter. And there is something else. After the prologue to the series, The Oasis Within, was available for about the first six months, I realized I wanted to re-edit it. And I was able to, right then. I didn’t have to wait years, until 20,000 or 50,000 copies of the original edition had sold and that many people had bought less than the best I could do. I could make the improvements right away. And the same thing happened with The Golden Palace. Less than a year into its life, it got a new paragraph on the first page, and dozens of small changes throughout that enhanced it immensely. I had never been able to do that with a book before. And as readers have written me about their experience with these novels, their insights have helped me in editing subsequent books. There has been a feedback loop I’ve never had before. And it’s made the books better. This should be a universal experience for writers and readers.

The one problem is that I don’t have a national promotion and marketing machine behind these books. So they have to find their readers on their own. And they are, but very slowly. My workout partner told me today that he just finished The Mysterious Village and really loved it. I was so glad to hear and told him that he’s probably the fourth person to get that far in the series! I was exaggerating a little. But just a little. It will have been worth the seven years of work so far, and the rest of the eight years I anticipate, for them to have a few great readers whose lives are enhanced and maybe even transformed by the stories. And of course, it would be even more gratifying to see even more people enjoying and using the books for the renaissance of understanding about wisdom and virtue, life and death, that they can potentially provide. They’re about success and failure, struggle and victory, defeat and persistence, and the power of committed partnerships along the way. They’re about leadership and love, and staying on your path even when it’s hard, and giving others what they need as you also discover your own deepest needs and gifts. The stories are about so much. And they reveal so much.

In all my philosophy, business, and life nonfiction books, I tell stories from my own experience. You get to know my kids, my wife, as well as friends and neighbors and both the silly things and the deeper things that I’ve encountered along the way. And in the novels, there are no stories about my life. Yet, somehow, they’re the most autobiographical of anything I’ve ever done, the most deeply revealing, and if I had written nothing else ever, I would want to leave them for my kids, and grandkids, and anyone who might be interested in the experience of a philosopher meandering from the mid twentieth century into these first days of the twenty-first, and trying to get his bearings for making the world a slightly better place with the ancient wisdom that’s exactly what we need now.

For the series, go to www.TheOasisWithin.com.

Sapiens: Human Reality and Fiction

I just heard a fascinating TED talk, due to the recommendation of a friend. The young Israeli historian Yuval Harari gives a short and fascinating account of how human beings, of all creatures, rose to rule the world. The talk is reportedly a shortened version of his book Sapiens, which I have not yet read. The book is widely praised as not only historically astute but also deeply philosophical. I’m no historian, so I can’t judge that. I think his talk showed some interesting psychological and anthropological insight, but that it also displayed some overly simplistic and sloppy philosophy. We need to be able to disentangle the two.

Harari claims that we’re able to do two things that other species can’t manage. We can organize ourselves to work together (1) flexibly, and (2) on a large scale. Ant and bees can organize on a large scale, but their behavior seems determined, and not flexible in any robust sense. They don’t ever decide to displace the Queen and substitute a democratic form of governance, for example. They do what they’ve always done. Other species, like chimpanzees, can do things together flexibly, but not on a large scale. Harari gives the example of filling a large stadium with 100,000 people who come together in an orderly way to watch an event, as juxtaposed to what chaos would result with 100,000 chimpanzees in the same space.

He then claims that we are able to do both these things because of the power of the imagination. He says we imagine a God and a heaven with rewards after death for good behavior during life, and get a lot of people to believe this imaginative conception, and thereby bring about large scale order and cooperation. He calls any such story an imaginative fiction that brings people together. In his talk, he contrasts realities like a banana or a coconut or a mountain with what he calls the fictions that allow us to live in a distinctively human way. Another big example is what he calls the fiction of money. We are told that a dollar bill or a hundred dollar bill has value, and we all accept this fiction, and that’s what allows modern economies to work. We also buy into another fiction that people have rights, natural human rights, and that’s what allows modern democracies to work. But, Harari vividly and imaginatively suggests, cut open a human body and you’ll find a brain and a heart and lungs, but no human rights. Rights are a fiction, he says. But when enough of us accept the story, we can organize and do things we couldn’t otherwise have done. Chimps don’t buy into fictions. They deal with realities. But that severely constrains their possibilities.

Many others have talked about “the social construction of reality.” The great sociologist Peter Berger was the first I ever read on this topic, in his book of the same name. We do spin out stories, simple or elaborate narratives to make sense of the world and our lives, and when we come to believe them, that helps us live and work together in new ways. But why call these stories fictions? Harari’s examples seem to indicate that he accepts as realities only things that are manifest to the five physical senses, like human body parts, bananas, and mountains. But what of the postulated entities of physics that account for the manifest realities around us? What of the realities discerned by animals with senses other than ours? What of such things as love and friendship? Add up the manifest physical attributes of two people. Where is the friendship? Does it not exist? Is it a mere fiction? Why should our physical senses be in such a simplistic way the sole arbiters of reality? This isn’t science, at all, or even a sophisticated scientism, but what’s more widely known as a crude empiricism that we have no good reason to think is other than itself a fiction.

Does the imagination only invent? Or does it sometimes discover? Often, the advance of science and technology consists in someone, or many people, imagining something and then subsequently finding it to be true, or to be feasible because of what is now discovered to be true. The imagination in such cases seems to be as much an apparatus of discovery as of invention. It builds stories, yes, and in that sense, it fabricates. But are all its fabrications fictions? Of course not. The idea of a fiction, or a concocted falsehood that many people are somehow made to believe isn’t at all necessary or crucial for the story Harari is telling. Some of the imaginative narratives we tell bring us together to create conventions of usage, as in the case of money, and other stories may limn realities invisible to the crude senses on which we otherwise depend. Harari gives us no evidence or argument to the contrary. He merely asserts. But what might make us suppose that's ever been a reliable path of discovery, or a good sign of truth?

When we do think flexibly and on a large scale, we discover logic and the many dynamics of evidence assessment related to truth. And we come to see that assumptions like those Harari makes are more than merely questionable. They’re simply indefensible. Unless you want to think like a chimp.

For the book that Mark Zuckerberg loves and is recommending to everyone, and that I hope to read soon, click: http://amzn.to/2ur8xDR

A Good, Virtuous Character

The New York Times Book Review recently asked two writers, Thomas Mallon and Alice Gregory, a question about characters in novels that's often been discussed before. It was posed like this: Can a Virtuous Character Be Interesting? The most common, received opinion is that a scoundrel, scalawag, deviant, or miscreant is much more interesting to read about than a normal garden-variety good guy. The argument usually given for such a view is simple. Imagine this story: A guy is born into a great and psychologically healthy family, he grows up around good friends, attends a fine school, is very nice himself, graduates from an ideal college, meets the perfect life partner, and lives happily ever after. It would not be the typical page turner. "Wait. I have to finish this chapter. Somebody just nicely asked our hero to pass the salt and I've got to see what form of graciousness he displays to comply!" 

We're often drawn to flawed characters. For one thing, we may see in them, on full parade, various traits that we've felt in ourselves and rightly suppressed. It's instructive and sometimes even fascinating to witness them fully developed and on display. In a related way, truly despicable characters in fiction make us look not so bad, after all, by contrast - which is surely one of the reasons reality television shows are so popular. And then, in another way, we may enjoy the insight that such portrayals can give us into the souls of people we actually have to deal with now and then outside the realms of novels.

Most good writers can provide long lists of baddies who have been more interesting to read about in the history of literature than almost any of the goodies. But should writers aspire more, and work harder, to depict goodness rather than focusing on so many types of evil?

Alice Gregory has something worthwhile to say about it all. She writes:

A truly radical 21st-century novelist wouldn’t ask us to see ourselves in made-up villains, and then, hopefully, revise our opinions of the real ones in our own lives. Rather, they would ask us to see the arduous and often acrobatic effort that goes into living a life of common decency. They would coerce us into believing that virtue is interesting and fun to think about and far more dazzling to encounter than malevolence.

In her 1947 book “Gravity and Grace,” Simone Weil wrote: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

I think that's well said, both by Gregory and Weil.

I've just finished the most unexpected adventure in writing, over the course of my entire life, A movie started playing in my head one morning about four and a half years ago, and I immediately rushed to write down everything I was seeing and hearing. It was the most amazing process of writing I've ever experienced, and quite different from the rational and heavily planned creation of a nonfiction book of philosophy. The movie kept playing, and an entrancing prologue book, recounting a trip across the desert in Egypt in 1934, quickly came into being, and has been followed by seven subsequent much longer novels, so far. The prologue, The Oasis Within, is a short book just shy of 200 pages, and is going to be announced here soon, as it will be published within the month.

The Oasis Within, and its novel series that follows, are all my favorite books I've ever written. And the main characters are all very good guys. They display everyday virtue in dazzling ways. They do confront evil, and great danger, many times, and in wildly varied forms, but they are themselves great people I'd love to know. And they're the opposite of boring. In fact, they may be the most fascinating characters I've ever been introduced to, in any story. But maybe that's just me. And they confirm richly Alice Gregory's point.

I'll announce it here when the first of the eight books laying out their story is available. It will be very soon. A twenty-first century novelist is about to do something very different.