April 23, 2020
To Prepare for a Crisis, Read Fiction
Fiction and policy too rarely mix. The learned policymaker reads reports and journal articles, books and research papers, all aimed at injecting the highest-quality thinking into key judgments. These inputs — even the inevitable classics — are almost relentlessly nonfiction. In my own field of national security, one turns often to Thucydides and Hobbes, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, Waltz and Kissinger. It’s far less common to see those soaked in foreign policy or economics or health spend time with Tolstoy or Dickens, Mishima or Achebe, Marilynne Robinson or Michael Chabon.
Today’s global crisis demonstrates why they should. As policymakers make hurried judgments with vast, life-altering consequences, they draw on a stock of intellectual capital assembled over decades. Every discipline — psychology, economics, biology, history — examines the world through a particular prism. Yet only fiction invites us inside the minds of others, transports us across time and place, and produces in us a kind of experience we could otherwise never attain. By enmeshing us in its characters and stories, reading fiction helps policymakers better understand the human condition, and more ably fashion responses to it.
Read the full article in War on the Rocks.
More from CNAS
-
The United States Can’t Afford to Turn Away Chinese Talent
Commentary
Intellectual property theft is a real concern, and China has been the world’s foremost infringer. But a blanket exclusion of Chinese students from U.S. academic and scien...
By Elsa B. Kania & Lindsay Gorman
-
Richard Fontaine Appears on Technology by Design
Podcast
Richard Fontaine is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He came to Durham back in February and took some time to sit down with us to discuss the differen...
By Richard Fontaine
-
Sharper: America's National Security Workforce
Commentary
The greatest source of strength in American national security is the people who lead and serve within its institutions. The ongoing U.S. response to the global coronavirus out...
By Emma Moore, Chris Estep & Cole Stevens
-
Now’s Not the Time for Isolationism
Commentary
The coronavirus is a public health tragedy. If the United States isn’t careful, it could turn into a geopolitical one, too. How the U.S. manages—or mismanages—the coronavirus...
By Michèle Flournoy & Lisa Monaco
