Something Literary for Slow Sunday

We've mentioned earlier that the weekends tend to be slow: many bloggers don't blog, and more mainstream websites slash their production. Our traffic also drops, though the drop isn't nearly as severe as it was back in March; perhaps readers have become aware that we're one of the few blogs that keeps plugging away on the weekends. Anyway, we often use the weekends for a chance to offer more cerebral fare, like this passage from Neil Postman's Technopoly:

Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors. Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed bourgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us the hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B.F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.

We found it interesting for the simple reason that the efforts of the fiction writer and the social scientist are commonly deemed wholly different. That simply isn't the case. Both document the behavior of people as they confront and deal with problems. Like the novelist's fiction, the work of the social scientist, to quote Postman again, "is a form of storytelling. . . [B]oth a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes."