
Does reading fiction make us better people? - clouddrover
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190523-does-reading-fiction-make-us-better-people
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cyberjunkie
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I wonder if reading only, and only
fantasy and fiction makes people lose their grip on reality.

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Retra
Maybe you're just being vague, but I don't think that's even possible. I would
say the effect is more that that it can innapropriate supplement their
understanding of reality in matters that aren't contradicted by reality --
high-minded concepts that are popular subjects of discussion, but very
marginal in day-to-day living seem to often driven by experiences with
fiction, and that might be inappropriate. (E.g., People often assume space
travel is inevitable or far easier than it is due to fiction.)

On the other hand, so many kinds of error can be distilled down to a failure
to understand the difference several orders of magnitude make, so I wouldn't
blame fiction per se.

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azhu
Yes. Humans experience life as a narrative, and the wider the set of narrative
experience a person can understand the wider the set of humans that person can
get along with or connect together.

Does reading fiction guarantee that a person will not do bad things? Do we
require reading fiction to be good people? Of course not.

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mykowebhn
I'd also be interested in a related question: Does writing fiction and
philosophy make us better people?

I always thought unequivocally yes, but then you have the cases of Martin
Heidegger, Gunter Grass, and Milan Kundera.

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djmips
Everyone can have blind spots that originate early and persist but I still
feel like the answer is yes. In your examples at least two of them are
condemned for actions at a young age no?

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mykowebhn
For Grass, he may have been condemned for actions at a young age.

For Heidegger, he was in his 40s and 50s during the Nazi regime. Also, I would
recommend reading up on what he did to Husserl. A book that goes into detail
about Heidegger's actions during World War II is here [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Existentialist_Cafe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Existentialist_Cafe)

