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Monday, May 16, 2005
Hard-Wired
According to Denis Dutton, “The basic situations of fiction are a product of fundamental, hard-wired interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice and adversity.” This notion--that literature, as the “storytelling” art form, arises from biological imperatives that are “hard-wired"--has become an article of faith, the official dogma, of a certain hardline Darwinian approach to art and culture, epitomized perhaps by Steven Pinker, but ultimately derived from what is called “evolutionary psychology.” As Dutton further explains:
These values counted as much in the Pleistocene era as today, which is why evolutionary psychologists study them intensively. Our fictions are populated with character-types relevant to these themes: beautiful young women, handsome strong men, courageous leaders, children needing protection, wise old people. Add to this threats and obstacles to the fulfillment of love and fortune, including both bad luck and villains, and you have the makings of literature. Story plots are not unconscious archetypes, but follow, as Aristotle realized, from human interests and the logic of what is possible.
What I don’t understand about this line of thinking is why it doesn’t include among the “fundamental” interests human beings express an interest in storytelling itself, more broadly in the creation of art and the satisfaction this brings simply for its own sake. Dutton makes these remarks in a review of The Seven Basic Plots, by Christopher Booker, the subtitle of which is “Why We Tell Stories.” How about: We tell stories because they have an inherent fascination, especially when we are able to tell them in such a way that we actually extend our understanding of what a “story” is able to convey?
But this view of narrative as the mold from which works of literary art might emerge seems to be anathema to the likes of Dutton and Pinker. Pinker spends an entire chapter of The Blank Slate chastizing modern artists and writers for not realzing that art is a Darwinian adaptation any deviation from the established dicatates of which is a crime against human nature. Any degree of self-consciousness in the creation of art especially seems to raise his hackles. Postmodernists, he announces in wide-eyed disbelief, “comment on what they are writing while they are writing it,” a practice evolutionary psychologists apparently consider just plain decadent. How dare these writers attempt to explore what might be the possibilities of art beyond those innocent, biologically pure imperatives fixed in place by our “ancestral environment”!
Dutton is critical of Booker for his reliance on Jungian “archetypes” in his taxonomy of storytelling, but as far as I can tell there’s not much difference between reducing narrative literature to the interplay of archetypes and reducing it to “fundamental, hard-wired interests.” Both approaches value literature for what it reveals about the human mind, about culture as a product of the human mind, about generic “character types” and predigested themes--for everything, in other words, except its value as literature, as something that provides aesthetic pleasure despite the fact that some people think there are finally only seven plots available to it or that it usefully allows evolutionary psychologists something to study “intensively.” I don’t begrudge anyone the right to study literature for whatever non-literary reasons he/she has in mind. I do object to characterizations of literature--appearing in high-circulation publications such as the Washington Post--that even while pretending to dismiss claims to have found “a single key to literature,” merely offer up another ill-fitting key of their own.
Comments
You’re overly reductive of Dutton’s position.
Pinker on these matters (in *How the Mind works*): “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?”
Jerry Fodor’s definitive response (from a review in the LRB): “Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.”
Evolutionary psychology seems to have the allure of the “scientific,” but most of it really cannot withstand much scientific scrutiny. The usual argument is (A) Human beings do such and such. (B) Therefore such and such is the product of evolution. (C) So let’s speculate on what evolutionary value such and such has. Le’ts invent a fictional narrative about why cave men might do such and such.
But of course, they always want to say that some activities are intrinsically “human” and others are not.
Making self-conscious comments on the process of story telling is not some postmodern exception to the normal narrative impulse. It is present in the novel from the beginning, with Cervantes, and persists throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. It was eclipsed briefly in the Henry James period, then came back with a vengeance a little later.
--Jonathan Mayhew
Not by much. Not nearly as reductive as Dutton is of fiction or music.
Human beings make things. Human beings have a sense of time. Therefore human beings make temporal things—like narratives and music. That impulse is much broader and deeper than can be accounted for by using Dickens (or certain parts of Dickens) as the exemplar of all narratives or Brahms (or certain ways of treating Brahms) as the exemplar of all music.
Even in the course of Dutton’s review, he has to start making an “evolutionary” split between low art and middlebrow art of the contemporary Anglophonic middle-class. If the evolutionists ever bother to look at the actual range of narrative and music produced across all cultures, their explanations would dissolve into a snarl of unverifiable contingencies, Victorian moralizing, and trivial truths. (E.g., that Austen “explication”: We enjoy a feeling of inclusion because it gives our genes a evolutionary advantage if we’re included in a group. Ah, thanks, I can read Austen with a clear conscience then!)
I guess another problem, to add to what Ray says here, is the circular way in which these arguments tend to be presented. There doeesn’t seem to be much predictive power in the evolutionary explanation for this particular Jane Austen example, for example. Why is it any better than saying “Some people enjoy these novels because they enjoy feeling superior to some of the characters.”? The addition of Darwiin seems perfectly otiose. (We are “hard-wired” to be snobby at times.)
Lest I be accused of dualism or worse, and at the risk of repeating myself....
The point is that evolution doesn’t micromanage.
I’ve read reasonable accounts of how bipedalism or tool-making might have been enabled as a side-effect of previously developed traits, and then proven advantageous to the species in taking over ecological niches. And I’ve read similar accounts for language.
But no rational biologist or linguist seeks the evolutionary advantage of indicating a domestic canine by a monosyllable beginning and ending with voiced plosives. At that point, biological boundary conditions having been set, the explanatory power is in cultural history.
“Evolutionary psychologists” go even farther, though. They seek the evolutionary advantage of preferring “dog” to “chien”.
A couple of comments: I don’t think Pinker’s responsible for the strong versions of these arguments; he’s merely the popularizer. The application of evolutionary psychology to aesthetic experience comes through Tooby and Cosmides to Joseph Carroll (whose essays, incidentally, often appear in Dutton’s Philosophy and Literature). Carroll’s better work doesn’t consist of Just-So stories about why we like Jane Austen; he merely states that because writing/reading novels stimulates whatever part of brain responsible for creating elaborate cognitive models of the world and our place in it, and because the ability to generate those cognitive models is part of our evolutionary heritage, there’s a necessarily evolutionary element to our aesthetic experiences. (The lesser work of evolutionary psychologists on literature would recapitulate Jung.)
Carroll’s on far shakier ground, however, when he says things like “All formal literary structures are prosthetic developments of evolved cognitive structures that serve adaptive functions.” While there’s certainly an element of truth to that, it countermands his other arguments about the plasticity of the evolved cognitive structures that allow us to have aesthetic experiences in the first place. Coupling these claims produces the uninteresting claim that sometimes we like novel aesthetic experiences and sometimes we prefer familiar ones. Why is this truth so utterly prosaic? Here’s a start:
There doeesn’t seem to be much predictive power in the evolutionary explanation for this particular Jane Austen example, for example.
There shouldn’t be much predictive power in evolutionary explanations period, since evolutionary explanations should only document the historically contingent circumstances that favored the preservation of this trait over others. Because whatever mental modules we have are pliable--that is, after all, one of the advantages they provided homo sapiens--there’s still a real cultural influence on any given person’s aesthetic appreciations. Let me put this another way:
I think what Pinker and evolutionary psychology are trying to do--stuff mind back into brain and brain into body--is necessary to understanding some basic truths about how we evolved to interact with other people in complex social environments. Can it be taken too far? Of course. There’s no reasonable evolutionary explanation for my of Ulysses, but I think there’s a reasonable evolutionary explanation for why Danielle Steele’s The Klone and I likely sells better.
[Unrelated note: My monitor’s misbehaving so I’ve had a difficult time revising what I’ve written. If anything’s particularly stupid, I blame Dell.]
Sins of EP have been covered better elsewhere (cf the Gray et al pdf linked thereat). The distinction in treating aesthetics as product rather than by-product may not make much difference, but it does make for a better story.
"he merely states that because writing/reading novels stimulates whatever part of brain responsible for creating elaborate cognitive models of the world and our place in it, and because the ability to generate those cognitive models is part of our evolutionary heritage, there’s a necessarily evolutionary element to our aesthetic experiences.”
To me, that claim sounds tautological, and has no real explanatory value. An “evolutionary element” as opposed to what? Everything we do or are capable of doing is “evolutionary” in that weak sense. Who could possibly deny that claim? This is one of the “trivial” thruths that Ray was referring to, I believe. We have evolved to have certain cognitive powers, which we use to read literature. Whatever part of the brain we use to read literature, has evolved in such a way that it is able to read literature. What am I missing here?
The Evolutionary Psychologists tend to be very post hoc ergo propter hoc. But let’s step back and give these (probably) intelligent people credit for some kind of intuition, even if they make a mess of it.
Ezra Pound’s famous poem about the apparition of faces in a crowd is evocative. Because crowds at train stations are mysterious and beautiful. In some way that corresponds to the embodied contingencies of human existence.
Yes, no, maybe? What follows from this?
“The Phantom Menace” is compelling. Because the death of Qui-Gon Jinn is glorious and noble. In some way that corresponds to the embodied contingencies of human existence.
Yes, no, maybe? What follows from this? Is it the same assertion as the previous one, or is it different?
Your comment is compelling and beautiful to me, because it in some ways corresponds to the embodied contingencies of my human existence, in fact, it makes me think of embodied contingencies just through the use of that beautiful phrase “embodied contingencies.”
Jonathan,
I didn’t call it an “uninteresting claim” for no reason; nor did I imply that it’s productive of interesting readings of literary texts. I defended the “weak sense” in which everything, including aesthetic experience, is evolutionary because any hint of biological determinism is usually enough to obscure even the weakest sense in which aesthetic experiences are, necessarily, a product of evolution. People who value cultural artifacts often declare anathema the idea that biology plays any role in the production or appreciation of those artifacts. This blanket dismissal extends even to legitimate attempts to identify--via sound, empirical research--the evolutionary utility of human behavioral patterns. The entire field shouldn’t suffer for the sins of its most enthusiastic proponents.
Forgive my obtuseness here, but I don’t believe that anyone actually does deny “that biology plays any role...” That would mean that the person would deny that the biology of the eye is necessary in the perception of a painting. Usually the argument is whether a so-called “biological” factor has any explanatory relevance above and beyond this obvious level. For example, my capacity to get excited about a work of art depends on my biological capacity to get excited in the first place. Does anyone actually deny this is the case?
I read books with my spiritual eyes, not my biological ones. The aesthetic sublime hits me without any biological mediation.
A. C.: “There’s no reasonable evolutionary explanation for my of Ulysses, but I think there’s a reasonable evolutionary explanation for why Danielle Steele’s The Klone and I likely sells better.”
In other words, what you consider poor taste is biologically determined and what you consider good taste is not? Talk about popular narratives.... Unfortunately for that hierarchy, genes stay the same while tastes can change. It’s even possible to develop a taste for contemporary romance novels where one didn’t exist before.
What’s evolved is a species which is sometimes capable of deriving pleasure from books by Joyce and sometimes capable of deriving pleasure from books by Steele. It remains to be seen whether these capabilities will prove biologically advantageous. Check back in a few hundred thousand years.
My understanding of aesthetics is all about the biology. But the study of biology involves more than speculating about the motives of evolution.
I read books with my spiritual eyes, not my biological ones. The aesthetic sublime hits me without any biological mediation.
Question is whether your spiritual eyes are connected to your biological something, and if so what can we say about it.
Petals on a wet, black bough are interesting to binocular color vision. Such boughs tend to be cool and humid which is also an experience for hairless monkey skin.
Faces in a crowd are interesting to social primates who have the capacity of long-term social relationships with other social primates. Faces seen only once invite an unusual projection of imaginative possibility and guesses at their owners’ personalities.
The example poem connects these two and says what seems like a higher-order social phenomenon of the possibilities of faces is just as immediately hard-wired as the appeal of colorful petals, despite its complexity.
The death of Qui-Gon Jinn—self-sacrifice of an aged badass with teaching credentials—is a trope that has a special meaning to social primates, that depends on even more seeming abstraction. But perhaps it’s also inevitably as mind’s-eye-catching as a colorful petal.
If so, is evolutionary biology the best way to frame the discussion?
In other words, what you consider poor taste is biologically determined and what you consider good taste is not? Talk about popular narratives.... Unfortunately for that hierarchy, genes stay the same while tastes can change. It’s even possible to develop a taste for contemporary romance novels where one didn’t exist before.
Quit responding to what I say instead of what I mean, namely that Ulysses confounds readers’ basic expectations, and while those expectations are cultural constructs, those cultural constructs must interact with whatever evolutionary predispositions we have for particular narratives. The transparency of narrative in a Danielle Steel novel makes it easier to access both the cultural and evolutionary predispositions. It’s not a matter of taste; simply a matter of access to whatever mental modules are responsible for that cultural/biological interaction to occur.
What’s evolved is a species which is sometimes capable of deriving pleasure from books by Joyce and sometimes capable of deriving pleasure from books by Steele. It remains to be seen whether these capabilities will prove biologically advantageous. Check back in a few hundred thousand years.
I don’t think Carroll and company are interested in literary eugenics. If pressed, they’d say the work they do is merely descriptive in the way that, say, linguistics is merely descriptive. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many EP advocates are linguists. Pinker’s work in developmental psycholinguistics pushed him into thinking about the acquisition of meaning, etc. etc.
My understanding of aesthetics is all about the biology. But the study of biology involves more than speculating about the motives of evolution.
Neither was Darwin, which is why he eliminated all references to evolution that, like yours, impute motive to it. I’m not interested in doing so either; however, I am interested in the development of language by means of natural selection, and that won’t be accomplished without an understanding of how the brain’s wired. If our stereoscopic vision and thumbs and ability to use language are all (as I think Derek Bickerton argues, but I could have that wrong) regulated across similar brain structures, well, I’d like to know the reason we’re cross-wired in that particular way. And if language is hard-(if cross-) wired, and it’s the basis for our understanding of the world, it stands to reason that some of the thought processes associated with it are also hard- (and cross-) wired.
"All formal literary structures are prosthetic developments of evolved cognitive structures that serve adaptive functions.”
The word “prosthetic” is vaguely pejorative here, and sort of a giveaway. He could have written something like:
“All the elaborate structures of culture are elaborations, correctives and improvements on deeply-rooted urges and inclinations which can be explained by biological evolution. However, in the same way that a newborn infant, in contrast to a newborn cockroach, is helpless and incapable of survival without diligent parental care, the purely-biological human psyche would be scarecely capable of functioning at all. For a feral, unacculturated human, the splendid life of the feral pig would be a distant and utterly unattainable goal.”
Even if there are seven basic courses (soup, casserole, roast, salad, etc.) some of them (like the convenience of soup) may have arisen from considerations external to evolution.
Apparently we evolved to like melodrama. Hence potboilers. But then there is also “Ulysses”. Etc.
What specifically are Dutton and Pinker hoping to add to the discussion of literature (as distinct from any other social phenomenon like cooking)? Are Dutton and Pinker singling out literature as proof that they are “learning how language works”? Well, literature is something different from language, just as fine cuisine is different from digestion. We have learned how digestion works. It doesn’t seem to have impacted 5-star restaurants. (Or has it?) I think Pinker would be ecstatic if language became as well-understood as digestion in his lifetime. But supposing this happens, it’s still unclear what this will have to do with literature.
Or are P & D being attacked for claims that have only been made implicitly and may not have been intended? Would they say “we’re only explaining a love of fat and sugar; the existence of linzer torte is beyond our theory”?
... but in that case it’s hardly news that people like fat and sugar.
"Or are P & D being attacked for claims that have only been made implicitly and may not have been intended? Would they say “we’re only explaining a love of fat and sugar; the existence of linzer torte is beyond our theory”?”
I don’t think that anyone who reads that chapter in The Blank Slate could conclude that Pinker would be this charitable.
A.C., “... if language is hard-(if cross-) wired, and it’s the basis for our understanding of the world...” indicates a need for a bit more lab-work and cross-cultural survey before wild speculation can produce any useful results. (Where “useful”, to be sure, means “true” rather than “publishable”—clearly the second is what most popularizers have in mind.)
One of the pleasures of “Ulysses” is that it violates reader expectations, true. That’s an aesthetic pleasure, and as hard-wired as any other. Jokes do it all the time.
Conversely, the apparent narrative transparency you ascribe to Steele (which could also be ascribed to most of the Iowa / “New Yorker” fiction and most of the conservative poetry I’ve read) hasn’t always been the most popular style around. Biological changes can’t account for fashion changes—the time period’s too short.
On the other hand, biology might be able to account somewhat for changeability and variety of tastes. But at that point we’re in a different sort of discourse than what evolutionary psychologists purvey. The claims will be fewer, drier, and less flattering to the status quo.
Ray,
I’m not going to defend the failures of current EP, only say that contrary to the “progress” of Theory or Criticism, because EP is connected to the hard sciences (and is criticized, productively, by many within them) that I won’t dismiss the possibility that the sometimes rather banal insights of contemporary EP thinkers, may in the future, lead to something quite valuable. I understand the problems that Daniel points to--Pinker does make policy recommendations based on current EP theories--but I’d say that the arguments of Pinker and company are far stronger the more closely allied they are with cognitive science, neurobiology, neurolinguistics, etc. That said, there’s a way in which these conversations always end with people talking at cross categories, and this one--though far more civil--is no different.
I’m not attributing universal narrative transparency to Steel. It’s transparent now; Dickens was transparent in the nineteenth-century, but any high-schooler forced to read the abridged and Americanized version of Great Expectations will tell you it’s not transparent anymore. That’s because “transparency” is the product of a particular formal, social and cultural education; Danielle Steel’s narratives aren’t transparent because we’re biologically predisposed to understand Danielle Steel’s narratives. The thought that we might’ve evolved so that we might one day read Danielle Steel novels…
...isn’t germane to the conversation. And productive of existential crises even in the hypothetical. I think one problem is that you may be confusing what I’m saying with what the typical EP proponent would say. My entire argument here could be summed up in a cliche: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
As for how I’ve evolved to feel about the fact that my entire argument can be summed up in a cliche…
To take civility to extremes, I’m in complete agreement with you on the value of cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and linguistics to aesthetics. Journals in those fields make up most of my reading that couldn’t be called “literary”, and if I was ever to go to grad school, that’s what would bring me there.
My intense dislike for ev.psych. comes from the conviction that its popularity is due solely to its fatuity. Its readers are swallowing the bathwater and leaving the baby behind. (Because babies seem too difficult.)
I agree that many contemporary cultural scholars could benefit from better understanding of science. I disagree that popular ev.psych. counts as science—any more than that absurdly overreported soundbite “email makes you dumber!” did.