For generations, this seemingly unsolvable riddle has occupied the minds of many Iranians: “Why were they able to do it, and we were not?” Why did Europeans and Westerners succeed in building societies in which human rights, relative prosperity, and tolerance became common currency, while we remain stuck in cycles of violence, dogmatism, and an inability to engage in dialogue with one another? The familiar, clichéd answers are well known: industry, democracy, the rule of law, and so on.
But Richard Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, offers a different—compelling and thought-provoking—answer that may well be the missing link. He argues that the moral driving force of the West was not great philosophers like Kant and Hegel, nor the clergy of the Church. The true heroes were novelists. Novels accomplished what a thousand years of sermons could not. Instead of appealing to the audience’s reason, novels targeted their emotions.
When you read Les Misérables, you are not confronted with a logical argument about why poverty is bad; you feel poverty in Cosette’s trembling and in Jean Valjean’s hunger. When Charles Dickens wrote about London’s orphanages, the comfortable London reader could no longer say, “These children have nothing to do with me.” The novel shattered the thick wall of indifference.
Before the emergence of novelists such as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, George Eliot, and Émile Zola, morality revolved around “obedience to command”—whether the command of God preached by the Church, or the command of reason advocated by Kant. The aim of traditional morality was always to force human beings, through logic or fear, to submit to a universal law. Rorty, however, believes that moral progress is not the result of discovering new philosophical truths, but of expanding the circle of solidarity with others. What does this “solidarity” mean?
Human beings are inherently tribal. We are kind to “our own” (family, fellow citizens, co-religionists), but indifferent or even cruel toward “others.” The achievement of modern Western civilization was its ability to expand the circle of “us” to include Black people, women, religious minorities, and even criminals.
According to Rorty, this expansion of solidarity was the work of the novel. The novel turned the “stranger” into the “familiar.” A young man sitting in Paris, reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, suddenly realized that the Black slave in America was not some strange creature; he too suffered, fell in love, and worried about his children. This magical moment of empathy is where true liberalism is born.
Rorty defines a liberal as “someone who believes that cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Novels were the primary tool for exposing the details of cruelty. They showed how social institutions, traditions, and even our small acts of negligence cause others to suffer.
If Rorty’s thesis is correct, then we must ask: why were we in the Middle East, and in Iran, unable to keep pace with this moral transformation? Didn’t we have literature? Of course we did—but our literature was predominantly poetry, not the novel. The difference, especially in our classical mystical poetry, is that poetry often seeks the universal, the heavenly, and the abstract. Hafez and Rumi invite us to soar into the skies, detach from worldly ties, and unite with absolute truth. This is magnificent and profoundly ennobling for the human spirit, but it does not necessarily cultivate civic responsibility.
Our poetry tells us, “Human beings are members of a whole,” a beautiful universal moral maxim. But the Western novel meticulously describes the stench of poverty, the pain of childbirth endured by a lonely woman, and the humiliation of a laborer. Through poetry, we become mystics; through the novel, we become citizens. Our culturetaught us to seek the “great Truth” and eternal salvation, while novels taught Europeans to seek the reduction of their neighbor’s suffering and the reform of small, earthly laws.
Our second problem was the dominance of ideology over narrative. Over the past century, instead of learning from novels that the world is complex and people are not simply black and white, our youth gravitated toward revolutionary ideologies. Ideology works in the exact opposite way of the novel. It divides people into “right” and “wrong” camps and permits cruelty toward those deemed wrong, in the name of a supposedly higher, sacred goal.
The novel, by contrast, reveals human complexity. It tells you that even the villain has a story, has suffered. Rorty believes that someone who has read many novels finds it harder to be dogmatic, because they know that truth is not one-dimensional.
Europe spent two hundred years strengthening its moral imagination through literature. They learned to put themselves in someone else’s place. Our educational and cultural systems, however, emphasized obedience, hero-worship, and sacrifice for ideals more than sensitivity to others’ suffering. We learned how to die—or kill—for our beliefs, but we learned less how to sit down and listen to the life story of someone unlike ourselves.
Rorty’s thesis may not be the whole answer, but it opens an important window. Development is not merely about importing technology or drafting a modern constitution. True development is a psychological and emotional transformation.
A society becomes “decent” when its people are capable of hearing one another’s stories—when witnessing the suffering of a child laborer, an oppressed woman, or a marginalized minority robs its citizens of sleep, not out of fear of hell or the law, but because their moral imagination is so strong that they feel the other’s pain as their own.
Perhaps we fell short because we read too few novels. Perhaps we wanted to save the world before learning that the “other” is also human. The path to making up for this backwardness may lie in returning to literature—not literature that preaches slogans, but literature that forces us to live inside another’s skin. Democracy, before taking shape in ballot boxes, must first take shape in libraries and in hearts softened by the magic of “Once upon a time…”