Homo sapiens is a bizarre literary ape - one that, outside of working and sleeping, may well spend most of its remaining hours lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don't devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions - from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.
Jonathan Gottschall
I would argue that this is a big reason why humans so often get detracted into (nay, even manytimes demand) forays of folly. It's a species that enrobes itself in fatasy every day, so it is easily duped into believing that the current dubious scheme will magically solve its problems where other (or perhaps even the same one) has failed every time before.
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