Couch Potatoes

Philosophy books are notoriously poor sellers in the modern bookstore. I'm not talking about self-help philosophy, I'm talking Schopenhauer. It's not universally true, and it's not an easy statement to make (but watch me make it in sentence one because I am not an easy person) because spirituality, religion, and self-help, among others, have turned "philosophy" into New Age garbage, but it's mostly true.

I'm not here to confirm or deny this. I'm stating it to bear up my point: reaching the masses via a philosophical treatise (viz Aristotle) has become pretty difficult stuff. It happens, but not too often, and it usually winds up being New Age garbage as witnessed above. You have to be a damn good writer to write a philosophy book which is readable.

However, you do not have to be a good writer at all to write mass-market fiction. So many erstwhile philosophers, who in previous eras would have been consigned to the dustbin of history, couch their philosophy in fiction. I'll throw out a name: 1984. It's a philosophical tract in disguise. You think you're getting Asimov, but you get Marx. But it's not Marx. It's future-Marx, and you don't get him either, you get excerpts.

Historical fiction can tread a fine line in this arena. Sometimes the historical part is setting, or even plot, but the point is to tell an entertaining story. Sometimes the writer does "research" and includes "previously unknown facts" which play to a particular message the author wants to get across. I can name names again, but I won't, because Dan Brown is a jackass. That too is not an easy thing to say... oh, who am I kidding, yes it is.

So we have two dangers of this couching. Firstly, fiction is not as deep as philosophy. Literature already has to abstract its message by the simple fact that it is literature; we wouldn't read a book which simply said, "This book is about the existence of God," would we? I hope not. And there's nothing wrong with abstraction. Points can be made more easily sometimes by subtlety. Philosophy and fiction are meant to serve different ends. Because philosophy can come right out and say what it means, it is already deeper than fiction by its genre. Deep is a bad word to use. I just can't think of a better one.

Secondly, people think that fiction which has some historical or philosophical couching is all real. This is perhaps more a problem of people being stupid, but it still deserves notice.

I don't really know why I myself couched my point in a discussion of fiction. My point is simple: Dan Brown is a jackass. Neil Stephenson is quite possibly a jackass. George Orwell is a jackass. Aldous Huxley is as well. Don't be lazy. Write a philosophy book, or a scholarly non-fictional book on historical evidence for points raised. Doing anything less is being a jackass.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.