The limits of mimesis. Seeing Others, by Michèle Lamont. Educated, by Tara Westover.

Many narratives are merely that. Narratives.

Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont’s new book Seeing Others is a summary of her research on the topic of equality. It is by gaining recognition, Lamont argues, that groups become more equal and valued in society. Lamont believes that while psychologists focus on the inner mind, and economists focus on allocation of resources, the “intangible, collective, cultural dimension of worth” is overlooked.

It seems plainly wrong to say that the intangible, collective, and cultural are overlooked in modern society, but that is only a stepping-stone to the bigger claim: by creating new narratives, we can empower people and change their lives, and bring about a more “meaningful, just, and fair society.” It is the open integration of others—seeing them, as per the title—that matters. Only by “acknowledging people’s existence and positive worth” can we create social change.

Despite the fact that this thesis is obviously true, and accords with common sense, it is also limited and overstated. Lamont’s conclusions are based on qualitative research with 180 people, but presented as definitive. Take the idea that the media “often” centres our attention on individual heroes. Lamont gives as examples The Great Gatsby, American Psycho, and The Wolf of Wall Street—strange choices when your argument is that we take individual heroes too seriously, as those works all centre on people who are, to greater or lesser degrees, morally bankrupt. In at least the case of Gatsby, they also place huge stress on the role of culture, on the way that by not seeing others, we fall into tragic fault. Indeed, that might be one of the biggest general lessons of literature. The idea that Gatsby represents the “narrow norm” of individual heroes is just wrong. Lamont has failed to see Gatsby.

The list of such quibbles is too long to remain interesting for very long. Tax cuts are explained as incentivising the rich to make more money, which is hardly a complete way of thinking about tax cuts. The best example Lamont has of factions trying to “leverage the power of narratives” is Newt Gingrich and the Republican party of the 1990s. Although the interviews that the book is based on were conducted thirty years ago, Lamont simply states that economic conditions in the interval make the findings more relevant as “all but a few” have been “left empty handed.” That is empty political rhetoric, not suitable for a book of this nature. As Chris Pope said, “The United States in 2019 had the highest levels of disposable income of G7 countries for 9 out of 10 income deciles.”

So while there is no argument from me that the humanities have a role to play in shaping society, Lamont’s bigger arguments often feel like partisan political points, rather than something that belongs in a book by a professor of sociology.

And much as it is true that narratives affect culture (Lamont quotes a study saying a TV show led to reduced teenage pregnancy), too much faith is placed in the ability of media to change minds. Sometimes, narratives change because society is already moving on. Advertising was not only notoriously sexist in the 1950s, it was deeply segregated—there were adverts produced by Jewish agencies, for Jewish consumers, reading Jewish magazines and newspapers—often for the same products being advertising to the white consumers. It was the same for African Americans, with the difference that almost no black people worked in advertising, and those who did were janitorial staff.

This is because America was segregated. Many Jewish communities in the 1950s wanted to live separately, for religious and cultural reasons. Advertising wasn’t the medium to change that. And for black Americans, it wasn’t until the Civil Rights movement had made significant progress, and society had begun to change, that advertising followed suit. There is much less role for advertising to change society than we think. See, for example, the way all corporate media about employment is far more diverse than the employee base of the companies in question See, too, the slow change in diversity numbers among staff. The recent Apple advert about environmentalism comes years after this became a major issue. It’s an example of advertising catching up to an already changing society. For sure, it’s a contribution to the change, but the idea that reshaping narratives will reshape norms is just too simple.

It put me in mind of James Agate writing about whether play goers wanted realism or something more exaggerated in the plays they went to see. In A Short View of the English Stage Agate gave examples of the plays that had done well that year (1925): one was about a romantic betrayal involving one party’s mother, another about a pair of ladies who drink too much, and a third about a man who forces his wife to dine with “an entirely improper young woman.” As Agate said,

These plays were successful because they dealt in situations which might conceivably happen to someone else, but couldn’t by any stretch of nervousness happen to you and me.

His point was that what happens on the stage is not a reflection of reality, far from it. Nor did they start a spate of hard drinking and romantic folly. There were several points in Lamont’s book where this basic point—that film and television is a distortion as much as a reflection—hasn’t been given enough account.

This is not to say film and television don’t affect what we think of each other. Imagination breaks the path that reason follows. The ideas we are exposed to are the ideas we are stuck with; and people often find their ideas through narratives. But where I disagree with Lamont is the effect size, the potency, of this phenomenon. Television often breaks a very narrow path, irrespective of how diverse it is. It is a good thing that Netflix is far more diverse than the television of the 1950s. But America is still a nation riven by race despite those changes.

Many narratives are merely that. Narratives.

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After hearing Tara Westover discussing J.S. Mill’s essays on religion, I had to read her book. How many other people have such enthusiasm for Mill that they enthuse about those essays? Educated is a memoir, a runaway success from 2018 that was so popular it was recommended by Barack Obama, J.D. Vance, Bill Gates, and Vogue. Westover tells the story of how she escaped her abusive family (the brother is violent, the father psychologically domineering) and became an educated person, by attending several elite universities and coming under the influence of kindly professors and nineteenth century philosophers, not least John Stuart Mill. Having been brought up to believe in a highly restricted idea of femininity, Westover felt dizzy reading Mill’s line, from The Subjection of Women, that on the question of what a woman is, nothing final can be known.

While I would have liked to read more about Mill, Westover knows how to turn pages. Educated is compelling, full of shocking details. Westover embodies the “show don’t tell” dictum of modern writing. Though Westover is clearly indebted to the modern genre of family and abuse memoirs, she owes much to Mill’s Autobiography.

The idea that education is core to liberation is fundamental to the early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. Westover makes this argument almost entirely by example. Thus, like Mill’s autobiography, Educated is a bildungsroman. It narrates the journey of its protagonist to maturity, and charts her confrontations with moral and intellectual improvement. Becoming educated is how Westover escapes both the limitations of her family’s extreme isolation and religious beliefs, and how she comes to see that she was a victim of abuse.

All families where one generation is more educated than another will face divisions, especially where there was an existing power imbalance. Being able to defy your past is part of becoming educated. Westover’s new perspective came from more than ideas. Obviously she learned from her friends, teachers, advocates — but also from the group, the anonymous crowds in lecture halls who know so much that she had never known. And not just knowledge, but social norms, ways of behaving. The more time she spent around these new people, the more detached she became from her old life.

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There is a common thread between Seeing Others and Educated. The idea of mimesis, the idea that we copy each other. Lamont takes mimesis as a dominant force: Westover sees that mimesis is only one half of what happens when we absorb an influence. There is also the inner life.

If mimesis is a mirror, the inner life is a lamp. We don’t just mimic each other, we also shine out into the world. These two ideas—the mirror and the lamp—are twin strains of literary criticism, documented in M.H. Abrams’ classic book The Mirror and the Lamp. Literature was largely mimetic—copying nature—until Romanticism made it largely personal—expressing the self.

Romanticism cared about the inner spark, the genius native to the individual. That spark might shine as brightly in a madman as a poet. Rather than being a “narrow norm” that limited social change, the human individual was viewed as illimitable.

In our rush away from supposed myths of lone genius and individual accomplishment, we have left behind this important counterpoint of mimesis. That is what is missing from Lamont. We don’t absorb influence without the mediation of our pre-existing selves. We copy each other under our own influence. Something inside you has to precede the mimesis, and thus guide it. Not all narratives are influential for this reason.

If you are interested in changing the world, Westover has more to teach you.