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Philosophical Insights from Great Literature

photograph of tall stack of children's books

I expect that some of you are feeling a little worn down, it has been a tough year. And so I want to try something a little lighter than usual, I want to talk about some of the philosophical lessons we can learn from great literature.

Of course, by great literature I mean great children’s books.

I should perhaps mention that the inspiration for this post is a passage in chapter four of G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy. There Chesterton notes, in passing, that many great ethical principles can be extracted from children’s fairy tales.

“But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous lesson of “Jack the Giant Killer”; that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of “Cinderella,” which is the same as that of the Magnificat— EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the “Sleeping Beauty,” which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep.”

So let us extend this analysis, what are some philosophical lessons we can learn from great literature?

To make things more difficult, let’s also limit ourselves to non-obvious lessons. Obviously, we can learn from The Little Engine That Could about the value of optimism and hard work. And obviously we can learn Where the Wild Things Are lessons about emotional management and community. But those books are, at least in part, written to teach us those lessons. What I’m looking for are hidden lessons, insights deeper than the author’s own awareness.

For example, I don’t know if Crockett Johnson read much of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when writing Harold and the Purple Crayon. But whether he had Kant in mind or not, I know of no story that so well captures the Kantian idea that the world we experience, even up to and including space and time, are a construction we create out of the order our minds to impose on the world.

Nor are the insights of that book limited to metaphysics. Consider the profound psychological insight revealed when Harold, after drawing up an apple tree bursting with fruit, frightens himself away from the good things he created by enlisting a frightening dragon to guard the tree. How often, I wonder, do we fence ourselves off from goods simply because we overreact to the fear that others may take something we think our own?

Or perhaps some of you are looking for a more political lesson to draw from the book. And so we reach the point of the book where Harold was looking for his own window. And since “he couldn’t think where it might be. He decided to ask a policeman.” But of course “the policeman pointed the way Harold was going anyway,” and so Harold learnt, even from a young age, the way that police power is employed to maintain the, even unjust, status quo.

But let us move on from Harold and the Purple Crayon. 

There is the profound lesson of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie; that your reward for doing a good deed is not usually the relaxation of conscience, but rather the deepening of charity and so a dawning appreciation of the higher and harder acts of love still required of you. And then there are the prosaic lessons of Goodnight Moon. First on the value of attending to the commonplace goods of the everyday, and second the value of taking goodbyes and goodnights seriously, since you never know for certain that you will both wake again in the morning.

There are some obvious Aristotelian themes on temperance in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. (What with how unhealthful attempts to indulge appetite, rather than leading to relief, merely result in the appetites growing all the more persistent; and how he is only sated when he eats his proper food of a single leaf). But there are also deeply hidden philosophical nuggets. For instance, do you remember how the pages of that book grew with each passing day? You could see what foods were coming up, but not yet see their quantity nor read what the effects of indulgence would be. What a profound commentary on what happens to us when we try to pursue future goods. We see, at least somewhat, the good we are after. But we are insensitive to quantity, and rarely notice the unfortunate unintended consequences of the pursuit of the apparent good.

Of course, sometimes the philosophical lessons of children’s books are more abstract and less practical. Thus, in Chapter III of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (entitled “In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle”) Pooh starts tracking what he thinks is a Woozle, only to find as he tracks that a second Woozle seems to have joined the first. Piglet joins the hunt, and before long yet another type of animal seems to have joined the pack they are tracking. Eventually Pooh realizes that he has “been Foolish and Deluded,” because of course it was his own tracks that he was chasing.

This is, of course, almost identical to the story that John Perry tells in his famous and rightly acclaimed “The Problem of the Essential Indexical”:

“I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch.”

Perry might extract more philosophical insights about the essential indexical than our foolish and deluded Pooh does. But I’m still glad to know that our bear of very little brains came up with the raw material for the philosophical insight 53 years before Perry did.

I hope you’ve found these examples entertaining. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, more hidden philosophical lessons to be drawn from children’s books, but I’d rather hear the examples others come up with. Send me an email with your own favorite examples of hidden insights from great literature; I’ll eventually make a follow up post either here or at least on my personal blog.

But What Are We Doing Here?

Before I end this post, I just want to head off a certain potential skepticism. Some of you may doubt that it is the business of the ethicist to be extracting lessons from children’s books. Philosophers are trying to make great new ethical discoveries, seeing ethical truths others have missed! Why bother with the moral insights so humdrum as to trickle down to the tales we tell kids?

Well, perhaps there is sometimes a role for ethicists to find new ethical truths, identify unnoticed principles, or apply principles in original ways. But I don’t think that is what ethicists should usually be doing. Consider, for instance, this footnote in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason:

“A reviewer who wanted to say something censuring this work hit the mark better than he himself may have intended when he said that no new principle of morality is set forth in it but only a new formula. But who could even want to introduce a new principle of all morality and, as it were, first invent it? Just as if, before him, the world had been ignorant of what duty is or in thoroughgoing error about it.”

Kant’s point, and I think it is a good one, is that ethics is not like natural science at least in this one respect: ethical truth is something to which humanity has always had access just in virtue of being human. We do not need to discover ethics the way we discover that force equals mass times acceleration. Rather, we need to recognize and remember those ethical truths which, in a sense, we already knew. Thus, it is the job of the ethicist not to invent new principles, nor even discover unknown truths, but to give us new and clearer formulations of those principles which we somehow had already.

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Diversity in Children’s Books: A White Author’s Quandary (Part II)

This post originally appeared September 29, 2015.

In Part One of this two-part post on the moral importance of providing children with diverse books, I concluded that white authors need to write about non-white characters, or else they gravely falsify the “reality” presented in their stories. We don’t live in an all-white world. We don’t have all-white readers. Our non-white readers need to see themselves in our stories; our white readers need not to see themselves, exclusively, in every single story.

But how do we do this? As so often happens, the “how” can be even more ethically challenging than the “what” or the “why.”

Assume I’m creating a classroom scene (my specialty as an author is school stories). How do I let readers know the racial or ethnic identity of my characters? For starters, I need to give my characters names that suggest a wide range of national origins, even as sometimes this feels self-conscious, evidence that I’m trying too hard for cheerful “Sesame Street” multiculturalism. But how else can I convey to readers the racial or ethnic identity of the kids in the class?

Two approaches here seem equally problematic. One is to come right out and label characters by race or ethnicity: “Jenny, an African-American girl in the front row, raised her hand to answer Ms. Singh’s question.” This would work, in my view, only if we called attention to the race and ethnicity of every character in the same way: “Sam, a Caucasian boy of Swedish ancestry, raised his hand. . .” That this falls in such a startling way on our ears makes clear the extent to which authors treat “white” as the default setting, where characters are understood to be white unless otherwise specified.

To avoid this, authors often use other markers for race, such as describing a character’s skin tones as “creamy café au lait” or “rich chocolate mousse.” But this is clearly as racially heavy-handed as the first option. We don’t describe white characters by comparing their complexions to food, remarking that her skin was “like pink lemonade” or “like vanilla pudding.” Sometimes diversity can be suggested in other ways: by mentioning a character’s long blond curls, or tight black braids, or by a cultural reference to a favorite food or family holiday celebrated. Oh, but it can feel so blatantly earnest!

Because my books are often illustrated, I have an easy – or cowardly? – way of avoiding this dilemma: rely on the pictures to do deftly what words can do only clumsily. Illustrators can’t escape depicting characters as having skin tones, facial features, or hair that indicate ethnicity, unless (which many do!) they draw anthropomorphized animals instead. But this means that sometimes I am surprised to find that I have created diverse characters without consciously setting out to do so.

My Franklin School Friends chapter book series presents a trio of best friends. Kelsey stars in Kelsey Green, Reading Queen; Annika stars in Annika Riz, Math Whiz; and Izzy stars in Izzy Barr, Running Star, the third book in the series. The illustrations show Izzy as Black, perhaps triggered by my description of her short tight braids. I’m pleased about this. I like the idea of best-friendship across racial lines that is celebrated in these books. But . . . I’m nervous that my star reader is white, my star math student is white, and my star athlete is Black. Doesn’t this perpetuate stereotypes that whites excel academically while African Americans excel in sports?

Perhaps. But in my Gus and Grandpa easy reader series, while Gus and Grandpa are white, the other child character who appears in almost every book is Ryan Mason: the perfect, high-achieving neighbor boy, the kid who has the fanciest bike and the scientifically dazzling show-and-tell projects. The illustrations show Ryan as Black. So this works against the cultural expectations arguably reinforced by Izzy.

This leads me to conclude that, while we certainly don’t want our stories to perpetuate stereotypes, we also don’t want to be so paralyzed by fear (is my character too stereotypically Asian? or too carefully constructed to refute stereotype?) that white authors give up on including diverse characters at all. What we need is not fewer characters of color in our stories, but more. I have now created a Black kid who loves to run and one who is an enviably perfect next-door neighbor. In other books I have an Asian American girl who knits sweaters for homeless shelter dogs and a Latino kid who is doing a science fair experiment that involves trying to explode a pickle.

No one character in any one book can bear the weight of representing all people of color any more than any character in any one book can bear the weight of representing all white people. We need lots of books about lots of kids, with different skin colors and various cultural backgrounds, doing a whole bunch of cool things and wrestling with a wide range of kidlike problems. We need, desperately, to foster and promote work by authors of color, but white authors can’t just write safely in an all-white bubble. We need to write out of our comfort zones. Or else, fifty years hence, the all-white world of children’s books will continue to be as all white as it is today.

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Diversity in Children’s Books: A White Author’s Quandary (Part I)

This post originally appeared September 22, 2015.

For the first time in census history, the majority of children living in the United States are now children of color. But the vast majority of children living within the pages of American children’s books are white. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which releases annual statistics on the number of U.S. children’s books by and about people of color, in 2014 only 8 percent of children’s book authors were nonwhite (African American, Asian American, American Indian, or Latino), and only 11 percent of characters. Little progress has been made in diversifying children’s book publishing since librarian Nancy Larrick published her famous 1965 essay, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” fifty years ago.

Why does this matter? Rudine Sims Bishop uses the following metaphor to explain. For children of color, diverse books serve as mirrors: “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” For white children in a white-dominant society, diverse books serve as windows: “They need books that will help them understand the multicultural nature of the world they live in, and their place as a member of just one group, as well as their connections to all other humans. . . . If they see only reflections of themselves, they will grow up with an exaggerated sense of their own importance and value in the world.”

As a children’s book author and professor of children’s literature, I’m going to take it as ethically uncontroversial that we – all those who work in some way to produce and disseminate books for children – should strive to remedy the current situation. This means prioritizing the recruitment and retention of diverse editors and the encouraging and fostering of diverse authors. It means supporting organizations such as We Need Diverse Books, “a grassroots organization created to address the lack of diverse, non-majority narratives in children’s literature.” It means accepting the challenge posed by Prof. Michelle H. Martin, one of the speakers in last year’s Prindle Institute symposium on Race and Children’s Literature, to buy diverse books as holiday and birthday gifts for the children we love.

As a white children’s author, however, I want to focus on the thorny question of what I can do to make my own books more representative of my readers. First I need to ask the hard question of whether white authors have the ability to write convincingly about characters of color, or the cultural authority to do so.

Can white authors write about non-white characters and “get it right”? It’s hard to know what would even count as “getting it right,” as the experience of any cultural, ethnic, or racial group is not one uniform, monolithic thing, presenting a single clear comparison point against which various representations can be judged. There are as many ways of being Black as there are of being white. It’s somewhat easier, perhaps, to see what would count as getting representation of another group wrong. It would be to write in a way that relies on stereotype and cliché, especially in a way that perpetuates negative assessments and expectations. Here the judges, in my view, can only be members of the non-dominant group themselves (noting that disagreement here is to be expected). Thus, as children’s books can’t be put into the hands of young readers without prior gatekeeping by editors, booksellers, librarians, and teachers, this speaks to the importance of having a significant number of non-white persons serving in these positions.

But are white authors even entitled to write about the experience of non-white people? Do we have, as it were, the right to do so? While surely we need to reject the general principle that nobody can write outside of the confines of his or her own narrow, insular, personal experience, when white people write about people of color, we face the further issue of cultural appropriation: exploitation of members of marginalized groups by privileged members of the dominant group. White authors writing about non-white characters can seem one more example of white people taking what belongs to others: bodies, land, artifacts, and now, stories.

I myself would feel cautious about writing a book about a non-white main character that focuses centrally on that character’s experience of racism. Maybe it’s because I think I’d be bound to get it wrong, because I can’t imagine being able fully to know what it’s like to be a Black person in the United States in 2015. So maybe it’s the previous concern about accuracy of representation that is doing the work here. It just feels hubristic to think that I could tackle that experience, “whitesplain” it to others, with any confidence. Another, more imaginative writer might legitimately feel otherwise.

That said, I’m no longer willing – ethically willing – to write an all-white world into creation in my books. Children need and deserve diverse books. I have to do what I can, within these limits, to provide books that reflect the classrooms and families of the real world in which my readers live.

In the next post, I look at the ethical challenges that arise in trying to do this.