Like trying to judge a glass of milk by looking at the cow

Interesting thoughts from Megan McArdle in Against Art in Politics, and Politics in Art on the gulf between what an author writes and the life they actually lead.

Other good quotes:

you cannot improve your library by purging all the authors with terrible ideas; you can only empty it.

George Orwell, who was more of a gimlet-eyed realist than most ideological writers, nonetheless believed a fair amount of ludicrous nonsense, such as his assertions that collectivism was necessary because a capitalist society could never produce enough to win World War II.

Upton Sinclair envisioned The Jungle as a socialist manifesto which would inspire people to rise up and tear down the system; what he actually wrote was a food-safety tract which inspired massive sanitary regulation of the meatpacking industry.

Because it is the power of the narrative, that we are responding to, not the soundness of the ideas themselves, we have no way of knowing whether we have been convinced of good things or bad. Policing art so that you only get "good" ideas from it is even more futile--the quest for stirring narratives which reinforce what you already believe is no healthier in a person than in a society. In some sense, we live inside a well-imagined novel, and so it's not exactly surprising that even when we're confronted with new evidence, it's emotionally difficult to discard the "evidence" of our own "experience". In some fundamental way, great political narrative has the power to make you, not smarter and better, but stupider and more passionate. Feminists who admire political fiction should think hard about the ways in which women have learned to love their restrictions through the fiction that romanticized them. If you are saying to yourself, "which is why it's so important to combat this with the right sort of moral narratives" then you are simply begging the question.

She can be quite pointed:

Authors aren't good policy architects. They're also not good moral philosophers--they're good at dramatizing moral conundrums, which is not the same thing as resolving them. Look at how some major authors resolved relatively simple questions like "should I cheat on my wife with this nubile fan?" "Would it be a good idea to stick my annoying wife in an asylum for the rest of her life and never visit her?" "Should I use my position as a screenwriter to double as an inept propagandist for the Soviet Union?" "Might it be a good idea to abandon my children to whoever will care for them?" "Should I stab my wife if I am mad at her?" "Who should I support in World War II--my own country, or the Nazis?" "Should I try to get a murderous felon released and feted by the New York literary establishment in the brief time before he kills someone else?"

And here is a thought that gets to the heart of the matter:

The job of literature is to engage us with the world, not to sanitize that world so that we can't think bad thoughts.