Should a story have a moral? Is a painting, song, or poem a fable in disguise?

Such questions may sound egg-heady, beside the point. Who debates aesthetics when the world is going to hell?

When I was an undergraduate (1969-1973), such questions were discussed eagerly. My teachers at college belonged to a movement called the New Criticism. The New Criticism treated “a work of literature… as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.” The old idea of literature as moral tutelage was all wrong. A poem was about itself, not how to live one’s life. T.S. Eliot had promoted this thesis in his criticism. He got the idea from Flaubert and other nineteenth century Frenchmen. Didactic art was wrong-headed and old hat. You could be a loathsome person and make good art: art existed “for art’s sake.”

It only took me fifty years to wake to the opposite conclusion.

Yes, a poem or story or essay is a machine, ably or ineptly made, that either succeeds or fails. How these machines function fascinates, if that’s your fancy (it is mine). But there’s a reason for any work of art to exist. It’s not just decorative; it answers a human need, and points us, explicitly or implicitly, in a direction. We need art to help us navigate. The more one thinks, the more complicated life gets. Hamlet shows us a way.

I became a moralist, a sort of secular preacher, not because I knew the way, but because I needed to find one. Morality is the study of how to be, how best to spend our allotment of time. We stand at a crossroads: there’s a better or worse way forward, and no going back. How do we decide? My forbears at the crossroad made this work of art this way. What were they telling me? What might I learn from their example?

A story with no moral has a moral: that morality doesn’t matter. If we waste our lives, so what? I find that moral pernicious. My generation extolled doing our own thing, what we felt like, and look where it got us – to unprecedented misery amidst unprecedented prosperity. Absence of purpose makes waking up a drag. The MAGA movement, like any cult, supplies exciting purpose. It’s more fun feeling furious than bored.

Art exists for heart’s, not for art’s sake. Every sentence I read or write cross-examines me. True or false? Agree or disagree? Am I heading right? Morality is no fusty fuddy-duddy yesterday concern, but our most urgent challenge. Art is a sextant. We triangulate our whereabouts from the stars. Where am I now? Where do I hope to go?

We live in a trying time. Whatever our politics, we all feel threatened by tomorrow. Dread makes it hard to focus.

How do we find our way out of this mire, back to gladness and calm? By using our heads. That’s what morality is all about – thinking one’s way to goodness. Every choice we make is moral. Every work of art is a compound of choices, pointing in a preferred direction. All art is didactic: it teaches – what its maker believes is good. Are we convinced or repelled?

Morality, once the center of education, has been booted from the curriculum in favor of practical accomplishments. Both must be taught – how to do things and why. Literature should be taught both mechanically – how does Hamlet work? – and morally – why should we care, did the prince choose right? The more we practice morality, the better we get at it.

Should a story have a moral? It does – and it must.