Michael Fischer’s recent book, How Books Can Save Democracy, is a worthwhile and timely short read for psychiatrists, therapists, and the general public. Fischer is the Dicke Professor in Public Humanities at Trinity University. He argues that reading fiction and non-fiction can promote relational, cognitive, and emotional qualities that would improve democratic dialogue and bring insight. Not surprisingly, these qualities undergird Mental health and the therapeutic relationship as well.

His book opens with a scene from “The Waiter’s Wife,” a short story published in 1999 by acclaimed writer Zadie Smith.

In the story, friends have a heated political discussion. As Fischer summarizes: “[T]he sudden quarreling…foreshadows the pessimistic feeling of many people today that sharp political differences are not only unresolvable, but they are inescapable, like a spreading wildfire burning out of control.” But in the story, the subtle empathy of a passerby changes everything, and “instead of consigning the other person to hell or false consciousness, [the women] become more willing to share the world with each other even as they disagree.”

Of course, our American story is not as simple as longtime friends who have hit a snag. But Fisher suggests that perhaps fostering that perspective would bring us round again towards the shared emotional journey of a nation of neighbors, if not necessarily friends. Perhaps that perspective could even help us forge friendship out of our clannish feud.

Drawing on the 2018 book How Democracies Die, Fischer highlights “two norms especially important to democracy: mutual toleration, which motivates competing political parties to accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, which encourages elected leaders to regard the holding of political office as a temporary privilege, not an opportunity to seize power once and for all.” In other words, just as in relationships, democracies founder on zero-sum, win-lose biases.

Fischer calls on distinguished Harvard professor and political theorist Danielle Allen to remind us of “practices of political friendship,” and what de Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart”: “the attitudes toward one another that citizens must cultivate in their daily lives to sustain democratic institutions.” In her 2004 book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, Allen invokes the nurture of trust, which is psychologist Erik Erikson’s earliest developmental stage — critical for any relationship. As Allen writes:

Trust is not something that politicians alone can create. It grows only among citizens as they rub shoulders in daily life—in supermarkets, at movie theaters, on buses, at amusement parks, and in airports – and wherever they participate in maintaining an institution, whether a school, a church, or a business.

Allen also chaired an American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission, whose 2020 report recommended significant democratic reforms that would advance the practice of democracy that “is not a battle whose purpose is annihilation of the enemy; it is, if it works, a game of infinite repeat play that includes ever-more participants.”

Advancing this case for a vision of democracy that works, Fischer turns to Robert Mnookin’s Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight. Mnookin, former chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, notes three core democratic values exemplified by Nelson Mandela: receptivity to compromise, readiness to ask for and extend forgiveness, and empathy.

Fischer also draws on Charles Dickens, Percy Bysshe Shelley, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and others to underscore the importance of “nurturing the underlying relationships, values, and attitudes that sustain democracies.” The most important: becoming a person “on whom nothing is lost,” and cultivating attentiveness to relationships.

As I read these as a psychiatrist, these could be summed up as cultivating love, empathy, and compassion for both self and others, not as a panacea, but as a pathway, to our wellness and the wellness of the whole.

Wholeness must come out of our split, divided consciousnesses. In “The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned,” the novelist Rachel Kadish writes that she “asks her students to write down a phrase they find abhorrent”–and then “spend ten minutes writing a monologue in the first person spoken by a fictitious character that includes the offensive statement they have just written.” Fischer writes:

The exercise sparks an unexpected moment of empathy, as the students experience something they previously thought impossible: “repugnance for a behavior or worldview coupled with recognition of shared humanity.”

Kadish’s observations recall an influential 2013 study that suggests empathy increased when readers were emotionally transported by a short story. Emotional transportation is defined as “a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative.” Losing ourselves in a story helps us identify with the story’s characters, feel for their journeys, and amplify connection to a bigger, more inclusive picture.

Surely, literature, both fiction and non-fiction, can help us feel for our own shared journeys, grow our ability to mindfully observe unfolding narrative, and help us see that our enemies are not so much people as they are qualities of mind.

Fischer concludes, “If hatred can gather momentum and spread, so can compassion and understanding. The future of our democracy depends on it.”