I always spending time in the novelist Teju Cole’s head, and I was struck by his most recent piece in the New Yorker, a meditation on how President Obama, whose billing of himself as a serious reader has been a way of selling him as a serious, empathetic man, has also become an active user of drone strikes to kill terrorists and suspected terrorists. He argues that enjoying the way literature makes you empathize with someone else, even someone very different from you, doesn’t necessarily mean that said empathy extends once we look up from a book, much less once we’re entrusted with immense power:

Toni Morrison, in her Nobel lecture in 1993, said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” This sense of literature’s fortifying and essential quality has been evoked by countless other writers and readers. When Marilynne Robinson described fiction as “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification” she was stating something almost everyone would agree with. We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa. We persist in this belief regardless of what we know to the contrary: that the Nazis’ affection for high culture did not prevent their crimes…

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

I also think it’s worth noting that empathy, while a worthwhile value, is actually a fairly neutral tool when it comes to literature. Convincing your reader (or viewer) to suspend disbelief and to enjoy spending time seeing the world through your characters’ eyes is a basic task of fiction. But it can be employed to any number of ends. Which is why so many people fall for Atlas Shrugged, or end up with bad ideas about what sex should look like from Norman Mailer and Philip Roth.

Novelist Teju Cole is Twitter’s foremost literary entrepreneur. His “Small Fates” project, which compresses a person’s life and death down to 140 characters, is a fascinating exercise in probing Twitter’s limits as an art form.

But I’m profoundly ambivalent about his newest project, a series of Tweeted musings on the American drone program. On the one hand, his entry on Tuesday — essentially seven fictionalized Small Fates of people killed by drone strikes — brilliantly humanizes some of the more problematic parts of America’s targeted killing campaign. One of Cole’s victims was killed in a “signature strikes,” wherein missiles are launched not because of concrete intelligence indicating the target is a part of a terrorist organization, but because the person or group of people ” bear[s] the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban” targets. This tactic raises serious legal and ethical questions, the answer to which determines whether real people live or die. Cole’s work skillfully draws the public’s attention onto the all-too-often invisible foreign victims of our counterterrorism policies.

On the other, not all of Cole’s drone writing is so revealing. About a year ago, Cole wrote a series lumping together drones with Downton Abbey and Virgin Atlantic’s name for its first class section to show that “height” was “the commanding metaphor” of our time. At the time, it struck me as fruitless postmodern metaphor-play. I still think that now, but I’d add that, unlike his recent entry, it’s didactic and unhelpful. Virgin Atlantic’s semantic choices, while maybe obnoxious, don’t shed light on why the targeted killing program continues or what to do about it. The question “those people down there, are they really people?” that Cole suggests links the things he lists isn’t one whose answer explains the American targeted killing program. America’s use of drones in the war on terrorism is an incredibly difficult policy question, one that isn’t amenable to simple moralizing. Drawing attention to the moral stakes is one thing; reducing disagreement to a world-historical dispute over “for whose sake this world exists” is quite another.

The promises and pitfalls of Cole’s writing on drones aren’t created by his his chosen medium, as a lazy analysis might suggest, but reflective of the broader limitations of literary approaches to argument about politics and philosophy. Non-fiction has the luxury of being able to be boring: it can reflect every nuance, every subtle detail of an argument, however much rote recitation of facts that might require. Even narrative journalism, with all its literary trappings, still has a basic obligation to string together an argument based on the facts.

Fiction, by contrast, is about a universe that isn’t real. It isn’t about making an argument with facts that exist in our world; it’s about creating a new one. That world may be very similar to ours, but it isn’t the same thing. Fiction isn’t a direct argument, with clear premises and conclusions; it’s a means of pointing us in a certain direction. This can be brilliantly illuminating: think 1984 on the nature of totalitarianism. But the insights that book, brilliant as they are, could very well have wrong. Winston Smith’s world isn’t necessarily ours. We know from firsthand accounts of life in totalitarian nations that the book’s account of the psychology of repression is chillingly accurate. But other world-pictures, like Ayn Rand novels, miss the mark, yet remain stubbornly influential on the real-world outlooks of a shockingly large number of people. The seductive appeal of a worldview grounded in fiction can lead to mistaken judgments about the real world it obliquely argues about.

Cole’s blend of cultural criticism and life-like fiction in his drone writing blurs the line between non-fiction and fiction, as does the pseudo-journalistic portrayal of the hunt for bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. Both are ways to use the tools of literature, word and screen, to heighten our awareness of our real past, present, and future. That’s a laudable goal. But art can mislead as much as guide, a point that Plato first recognized when writing about art and poetry in The Republic:

There is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again…the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action — in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

The irony, of course, is that The Republic itself is a fictional dialogue.

My decision in the Morning New’s Tournament of Books is finally live, so I can reveal that I picked Teju Cole’s Open City over Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, and I can finally discuss both books without tipping my hand about what—or how—I’d be judging.

There’s a fascinating discussion in comments about the key event in the book. Julius, a somewhat depressed psychiatrist who is the main character in the novel, spends much of the book reconnecting with Moji, a girl he knew when they were both growing up in Nigeria. But towards the end of the novel, Moji reveals her real motivations for getting to know Julius as an adult: Julius sexually assaulted her when they were young teenagers, and she’s wanted to see if he remembers his actions and feels regret or remorse. Commenter Neighbors73 raises an objection that others brought up as well: “I guess I’m the only one who is still struggling with the idea of a 14 year old boy forgetting he’s a rapist?”

I can understand why some readers might find this jarring. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t. The power of that conversation between Moji and Julius lies in its dissonance, the fact that an event that was shattering for one person was forgettable for someone else. And this is the kind of thing that can happen when we don’t treat boys and girls equally about what consent means. It’s just as important to teach boys that no genuinely means no as it is to teach girls to say no in the first place. Putting sole responsibility on women is a sick joke when men can override their lack of consent.

And when we don’t teach boys what consent genuinely means, and why obtaining it is critical, this is where we get these horrendous differences in memory. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that someone would forget a one-time sexual encounter in a lifetime of them if that’s the way their lack of knowledge and empathy lead them to read an assault. And I find it all too plausible that a 14-year-old could rewrite what for a woman was a lifechanging sexual assault into a routine, and barely-remembered hookup at a party. Julius didn’t forget assaulting Moji because he’s a sociopath who can easily put a rape out of his mind—he forgot assaulting Moji because he doesn’t understood himself to have assaulted her in the first place. This doesn’t absolve him of moral responsibility, then or now. In fact, it shows him to be more globally detached and inconsiderate than we’d previously seen. It’s a revelation that forces us, and Julius, to revisit everything we’ve come to understand about him.