It had been a few months since I’d graduated from college, and I was running out of money and still struggling to find a job. The major on my diploma might have offered a clue as to why: Slavic Languages and Literatures. One night, despairing about my dismal career prospects, I heard my dad call to me from the den. “Hey, there’s a new comedy I just finished called ‘Ad­ventureland.’ I think you’d relate to it,” he said with a grin. I started watching. When I got to a certain scene, it clicked. Cut to two young people talking in a nightclub. “What are you majoring in?” the girl asks. “Russian literature and Slavic languages,” the guy answers.

“Oh, that’s pretty interesting. What career track is that?”

“Cabbie, hot-dog vendor, marijuana delivery guy. The world is my oyster.”

Absent from this list was junior editor at National Review. But as it turns out, that’s the job I found not long after.

Studying the humanities may not yield the kind of practical value-add that programs in, say, corporate finance or electrical engineering do. But, as Northwestern University’s Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro argue in their new book, now more than ever, we need the kind of mindset that a true liberal-arts education fosters. At a time of worsening polarization, a style of thinking the authors term “fundamentalist” is eating away at productive discourse, making the kind of back-and-forth necessary for a democratic society to function all but impossible. Surveying the cultural landscape, the authors offer a grim diagnosis: “Dialogue is dying, and righteous indignation abounds.”

Morson, one of the world’s foremost Slavists, and Schapiro, a renowned economist and Northwestern’s outgoing president, identify three main characteristics of fundamentalist thinking: certainty in the correctness of one’s position, belief in the perspicuity of truth, and adherence to a foundational text considered inerrant. Think of an orthodox Marxist explaining away all historical events as confirming the “science” of dialectical materialism, or a Freudian dismissing all criticism of psychoanalysis as evidence of reactionary “complexes.” On the opposite extreme, relativists who deny the existence of any truth or the human ability to grasp it exhibit a funhouse-mirror image of this style of thought. The authors describe these two sides of the same coin in a characteristically pithy passage:

“Negative fundamentalists,” as we might call them, share with their positive counterparts the assumption that knowledge, to be real, must be certain, like mathematics or physics. But they deny that such knowledge is possible. Both agree that it is all or nothing — one affirming “all” and the other “nothing.”

In practice, Morson and Schapiro write, “the essence of fundamentalism is to deny the existence of a principled middle ground.”

Viewing one’s opponents as irredeemable means one will view any compromise with them as inherently illegitimate. So it isn’t difficult to see the threat that fundamentalist thinking poses to democracy. The authors warn that the logical endpoint of this mindset is the kind of totalitarianism that marred so much of the 20th century. The appetite for denouncing one’s opponents as evil, immoral, absurd, etc. does not dissipate with time or with victory over any particular enemy. Instead, the authors point out, “as soon as one side has won, the logic of hatred is applied to divergences among the victors, and when one faction of the victors wins out, it divides in the same way.” The result is a societal “slide” in which positions once thought so extreme as to be inconceivable can quickly become not just acceptable but compulsory.

Minds Wide Shut is a sequel of sorts to the authors’ previous book, Cents and Sensibility, which considered what economists could learn from the humanities. To me, however, the book makes a great companion volume to Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind. That book and the article on which it was based explored how a culture of “safetyism” was causing young people, particularly those on campus, to think in ways that were leading to unprecedented growth in anxiety and depression. When surveying the list of cognitive distortions that mark the culture of safetyism — mind-reading, catastrophiz­ing, emotional reasoning, inability to disconfirm, dichotomous thinking — one is immediately struck by how many of these traits overlap with the hallmarks of fundamentalist thinking. Embracing the fundamentalist mindset leads to misery for the individual and tyranny for the group.

The United States of 2021 still has a long way to go before sinking into the kind of totalitarianism the authors rightly warn about. But as Morson and Schapiro make abundantly clear, all signs indicate that we are heading in the wrong direction. How, then, to pull back from the brink?

Great literature — think Eliot, Austen, the realist novels that define the golden age of Russian literature — offers us a way to think that is antithetical to fundamentalism, because its wisdom is bound up in exploring human nature in all its irreducible complexity. Where fundamentalists offer glib certainty and argue their positions from preconceived theory, realist literature portrays a complex web of different characters and perspectives. In such fiction, “while some points of view are truer and more moral than others, none is unquestionably right.” In other words, the masterpieces of realist literature, to paraphrase the founder of this magazine, show that truth in life is asymptotic: One can approach it in various degrees but never arrive at it fully. What’s more, realism in literature done well rests on a foundation of dialogue. The genre is inherently “dialogic” in the sense in which the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (on whom Morson is arguably the world’s leading expert) used the term. The best novels show that “one must stop regarding one’s own perspective as the unchallengeable center of things, like the Ptolemaic earth,” instead accepting it as one point of view “among many, like one planet among many.” Nowhere is this truth made more apparent than in reading masterpieces such as War and Peace or Crime and Punishment.

Minds Wide Shut falls flat in a few places. The beginning, for instance, is heavy on academic-style throat-clearing as the authors somewhat tediously define and caveat the terms of their argument. Still, their argument on the whole is compelling, and one can only hope society listens to it.

In the 19th century, Dostoevsky fa­mously wrote that “beauty will save the world.” If there’s one thing to take away from Minds Wide Shut, it’s that Russian literature can do the same in the 21st.