The Reading Experience

Intuitive Sociobiology

In a review of Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism, David Barash writes:

It isn't clear exactly where Darwinian literary analysis will lead us, although a growing band of merry pilgrims - evolutionary as well as literary - are starting the journey. . . My guess is that these voyages will inject new vigor, as well as rigor, into the concept of human nature. What, we might ask, makes literature great … or even good? I suspect that there are two basic components: first - and probably most difficult to assess or analyze, from a biological as well as aesthetic perspective - is the sheer artistry and, in especially notable cases, brilliance with which a verbal representation is made. Second - and most amenable to evolutionary assessment - is the degree to which the characters are at least minimally "believable." After all, one of the most damning critiques to be made of a novel is that it is somehow unbelievable, which is to say that the characters must at least accord with some minimum standard of what most readers know, intuitively, to comprise the behavioral repertoire of Homo sapiens.

I am to some extent hesitant to quibble with Barash's description of what "makes literature great," since I agree wholeheartedly that "the sheer artistry and, in especially notable cases, brilliance with which a verbal representation is made" is the best answer to the question that we'll get. (I'm not so sure I agree that that this quality is impossible "to assess or analyze"; literary criticism may not finally be able to account for the way such artistry comes into being, but it can surely identify and describe it.) However, why not simply stop here? Why go on to impose on works of literature a standard that is finally external to the aesthetic ambitions--the "artistry"--of literature itself? In this case, why demand that it become some kind of case study of human psychology, an exercise that reveals the "behavioral repertoire of Homo sapiens"?

Most probably Barash considers the ability to depict human behavior in a realistic way (realistic in the terms of evolutionary psychology) to be part of the writer's "artistry." Fiction--and Barash seems to be thinking exclusively of fiction--whose characters are unbelievable as representative human beings fails to rise to the level of literary art. (Could it finally be "brilliant" if, by this criterion, it manifested such a fatal flaw in character creation?) But if the true measure of greatness in literature is verbal artistry, can this really be limited by a secondary requirement that the verbal artist also be a certified psychologist? Indeed, a psychologist of a strictly Darwinian kind? I honestly can't see how the two things are related, although I will readily admit that some great writers have also created "characters" of remarkable psychological depth and admirable fidelity to human nature. Isn't it possible, nevertheless, for a writer to be undeniably gifted as a verbal artist but create characters whose conformity to the "behavioral repertoire" we all recognize is shaky, perhaps deliberately so, indeed, might not even seem like "characters" in this ordinary sense at all?

Barash himself backtracks a bit in his conclusion:

This is not to claim that fictional figures ought to behave with perfect fidelity to the various icons of sociobiologic reality: kin selection, parent-offspring conflict, male-male competition, female choice, and so forth. After all, they are fictional! And literature is not photo-journalism or descriptive anthropology. Noted literary critic Harold Bloom has emphasized that to be enduring, literature must have about it a degree of "strangeness," something uncanny that somehow unsettles the reader, making him or her sit up and take notice. I agree, but with this modification: it must not be too strange, not so uncanny as to be beyond the scope of intuitive sociobiology. Augustine famously asked God to give him chastity, "but not yet." Great literature may well have to give us strangeness … but not too much.

Not too much strangeness? Doesn't a little violation of chastity go a long way? Just as it's impossible to retrive one's virginity once it's gone, doesn't a little bit of strangeness beyond the established boundaries of psychological realism already make those boundaries kind of blurry? What difference does it make if you go a few extra steps? Either it's "canny" or it's not, and if literature doesn't have to be entirely answerable to the strictures of the evolutionary psychologist, why does it have to be answerable at all?

Collective Formations

In an article ostensibly about art forgery, Denis Dutton (philosophy professor and Editor of Arts & Letters Daily) concludes with these words:

Establishing nominal authenticity serves purposes more important than maintaining the market value of an art object: it enables us to understand the practice and history of art as an intelligible history of the expression of values, beliefs, and ideas, both for artists and their audiences — and herein lies its link to expressive authenticity. Works of art, besides often being formally attractive to us, are manifestations of both individual and collective values, in virtually every conceivable relative weighting and combination. Clifford Geertz remarks that “to study an art-form is to explore a sensibility,” and that “such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation” whose foundations “are as wide as social existence and as deep” (Geertz 1983). Geertz is only partially right to claim that the sensibility expressed in an art object is in every case essentially social: even close-knit tribal cultures produce idiosyncratic artists who pursue unexpectedly personal visions within a socially determined aesthetic language. Still, his broader description of works of art, tribal or European, is generally apt, along with its corollary is that the study of art is largely a matter of marking and tracing relationships and influences.

This explains why aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects — to be enjoyed without regard to any notion of their origins — are unsatisfactory. If works of art appealed only to our formal or decorative aesthetic sense, there would indeed be little point in establishing their human contexts by tracing their development, or even in distinguishing them from similarly appealing natural objects — flowers or seashells. But works of art of all societies express and embody both cultural beliefs general to a people and personal character and feeling specific to an individual. Moreover, this fact accounts for a large part, though not all, of our interest in works of art. . . .

Despite his mild caveats about "idiosyncratic artists" and "personal character and feeling," Dutton is expressing a view of art held these days by a number of philosophers, scientists, and social scientists, especially those who consider themselves "Darwinians", that art is mostly the product of biological impulses hard-wired into the brain, impulses that prompt us to create works of art for primarily ritualistic and "collective" reasons. (Some of these scientists simply stop at asserting that art is the byproduct of certain biological operations that appeal to our preferences for "symmetry" or that allow us to feel satisfaction at task-fulfillment, etc., leaving it to the evolutionary psychologists or the anthropologists like Geertz to speculate about how art evolved as a social adaptation.) It is a view that is astonishingly hostile to "aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects" (the "just" is oh so telling), and is, in many of its manifestations, especially hostile to artists or critics who deviate from the biological/cultural dicta announced by those such as Dutton and presume to create or champion works of art that don't follow the time and gene-honored customs they've explicated for us.

And, in my opinion, it's all poppycock. The initial move is to proclaim, in some formulation similar to Dutton's, that art proceeds from "both individual and collective values," but to both slight the importance of mere "individual" values (they're all traceable to the genes, anyway) and to skirt around the problem of defining "values" at all. Art is determinedly influenced by society and culture and that's that. To give more attention to "just" aesthetic concerns would be to "endorse precisely the concept of the eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet, in which Assyrian shards, tropical seashells, a piece of Olmec jade, geodes, netsuke, an Attic oil lamp, bird of paradise feathers, and a Maori patu might lay side by side in indifferent splendour." In other words, all of these pretty things are trivial in comparison to what art can tell us about culture, and aesthetic analysis is irrelevant to the more important task of "marking and tracing relationships and influences."

Besides being an overwhelmingly tedious conception of what art and the study of art can be, this approach is, as far as I can tell, simply wrong in terms of what artists and writers, at least in the "Western" tradition, have actually done. Perhaps ur-artists in their "ancestral environments" performed the function assigned to them by Dutton and Geertz, but could someone name for me any great artists in the modern world who did not "pursue unexpectedly personal visions," who instead regarded their art as a wonderful opportunity to embody various cultural beliefs? Who thinks Milton wanted merely to be part of a great "collective formation," no matter how devout his religious or political beliefs, or that Paradise Lost, one of the greatest "embodiments" of "values, beliefs, and ideas" in all of literature, is not first and foremost, is not primarily, a great "personal vision"? Who reads or views Shakespeare to experience his plays' "socially determined aesthetic language"? How absurd.

To say that an artist or writer works in a context that has been established by his/her experience of his/her society's practices or assumptions is at best trivial, at worst simply tautological. What other experience is he/she going to have? Her work expresses salient social or cultural presuppositions or "refects" her society's various realities and their ideological foundations. So what ? Is this all it does? Is this the most important thing it does? It was to do these things that she became an artist? A writer who comes to his work, inevitably, with all of the "individual values" he has acquired over time produces a poem or a novel behind which can be seen his. . . individual values? This is very silly.

Beware all "thinkers" who come bearing news they've discovered how to explain art (or most human activities, for that matter) by appealing to our "human contexts." It's the first clue that these thinkers likely don't know very much about art, probably don't even much like it. This is a corollary to my suggestion in an earlier post to avoid those who presume to direct us to what is beyond the "merely literary" in works of literature. In this case, we are informed by those of whom we are assured they know all about those "human contexts" that of course art is not worth the attention of serious people if all we are doing is noticing that which is "merely art."

In Which the Blogger Gets In Over His Head

I have just finished reading one of those books that finally seems both irritating and intriguing. It's a nonfiction book called Darwin's Cathedral, written by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University. (Published in 2002, it is yet another of those books that all too often sits on my "to read" shelf for a long time before I actually get around to reading it.) In the end, I feel that I learned a great deal from the book, and that much of it has to be right, but also that at least as much just has to be wrong.

I believe I am fairly well acquainted with modern Darwinian theory (at least for an English major), but of course I cannot really judge the book's scientific merits with any great authority. It is written to be comprehensible to the general reader, although a consequence of this is that the book ultimately seems rather skimpy, short on detail and its argument based on only a few, rather conveniently chosen illustrative examples. Furthermore, the real interest of the book, at least to me, lies in the implications of its thesis if Sloan's analysis proves to be correct, including implications for literature and its role in human society, as I hope to discuss at the end of this post.

Wilson argues on behalf of "group selection," a concept that has for quite a long time been considered discredited in evolutionary theory and that proposes we think of natural selection as working on groups as well as individuals. This argument takes dead aim at Richard Dawkins's notion of the "selfish gene," which, in Dawkins's version of Darwinism, would have adaptation occur solely at the level of genes that work to make individuals more or less fit in adapting to their environments. "Group selection" is a more specific instance of what Wilson calls "multilevel selection," which "expresses the possibility that natural selection can operate at more than one level of the biological heirarchy." It can also operate on groups, which are seen as social organisms of a sort that can "evolve into adaptive units." In other words, some groups are also more or less fit in adapting to their environments, and in his most radical move Wilson proposes that societies themselves can be seen as "groups" in this sense.

Further, in his introduction to the book, Wilson reveals that he takes group selection theory to have very profound implications indeed: "I do not believe that human nature is fundamentally selfish, such that genuine altruism and morality become illusions. I do not believe that human nature can be explained entirely in terms of genetic evolution, such that it was set in stone during the Stone Age. I regard human evolution as a rapid and ongoing process, made possible by mechanisms loosely described as cultural, which means that human nature will never be set in stone, for better or for worse." In Wilson's account, neither altruism nor morality are human attributes made possible primarily through genetic expression; both are behaviors that themselves evolve along with the groups from which they emerge, and they so evolve because in very practical terms they work.

The group within which selection works most effectively, or so one would gather from reading his book, is the one created by religion, which Wilson spends most of his book both explicating and defending. Religious beliefs allow self-contained societies to adapt themselves to their circumstances, in effect making those societies able to function in ways that ensure their survival in evolutionary terms. Wilson's first and most notable example is the 16th-century Swiss city of Geneva as administered by John Calvin and his accompanying Reformation religious doctrines. Writes Wilson: "Calvinism is an interlocking system with a purpose: to unify and coordinate action. The goals may be difficult to define precisely, but they certainly include what Durkheim referred to as secular utility--the basic goods and services that all people need and want, inside and outside of religion. The interlocking system includes explicit behavioral prescriptions, specific theological beliefs, and a mighty fortress of social control and coordination mechanisms. Thinking of a group as an organism encourages us to look for adaptive complexity, and this search has paid off in the case of Calvinism."

Ultimately it is the "secular utility" of religion that Wilson is most concerned with. Religion has survived as a human belief system because it does make its adherents--as groups, not as individuals--themselves more likely to flourish and reproduce, etc. This core of Wilson's argument I find compelling. In fact, just recently I visited the Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hamphsire and was struck while touring around the place just how much the Shaker community of the 18/19th centuries seemed to resemble the social structure of Calvinism that Wilson describes--the same sort of efficient organization, the same sort of social pressure to conform to the rules inherent to that form of organization. And the Canterbury Shakers did flourish--at least for a while. But by the early part of the 20th century their numbers were declining rapidly, the last male "elder" dying in 1939, a few venerable female Shakers living on for a few more decades. So while the Shaker "group" clearly did provide "secular utility" up to a point, beyond it the Shaker way of life proved finally a failure. Why? (Beyond the fact that the Shakers practiced celibacy, something that did not prevent them from growing in membership previously, however.)

Although the Shakers did provide support for the expression of individualism to a limited extent--artisans and craftsmen of various kind, who often produced practical objects of very skillful design--truly individual creativity and thinking was otherwise quite clearly discouraged, as it must have been in Calvin's Geneva. Say what you will about American individualism, it does allow for its share of cranks, eccentrics, and artistic geniuses, people not really encouraged to inhabit religious communites like these, and there's not much mention of these sorts in Wilson's book--not much mention of art at all. It seems to me the Shakers declined during a time when American culture was becoming increasingly characterized by its appeal to individualist sensibilities, something the Shakers were finally unable to counteract. It also seems to me that Wilson's group selection theory fares badly when the "social organism" in question is a society, whether American or otherwise, where personal preferences are largely given their due.

Unless of course the theory itself has been formulated partly as a response to the perceived excesses of such a society, as in effect a weapon to be brandished in the still ongoing cultural wars. (This is something I found to be the case with Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate as well, as much as I respected much of what the book had to say.) Don't all those atheists, the moral relativists, the bellyaching artists understand that we human beings act according to biologially wired precepts (in Wilson's case, culturally wired as well) which it is folly to resist? Wilson, a scientist, even seems to think scientists should watch their steps: "It is interesting to speculate that science is unique in only one respect: its explicit commitment to factual realism. Virtually every other human unifying system includes factual realism as an important and even essential element but subordinates it to practical realism when necessary." [That is, they ignore the facts.] ". . .I think that science might profit by becoming more religious along certain dimensions. . .Science needs an effective structure that implements a spirit of community as much as any other human unifying system." (Quotes, page 230.)

Surely Wilson would say the same thing about "artistic communites" or "philosophical communties" or "intellectual communities." All of them need to subordinate their respective activities--in each case a search for something like "truth"--to the needs of "practical realism". As it happens, there is a movement in contemporary literary criticism/theory that explicitly seeks to merge literature and literary criticism with Darwinism. This movement is perhaps best represented by Joseph Carroll's 1995 book Evolution and Literary Theory. Carroll's subject is not group selection, but he too finds too much non-Darwinian thinking and free-floating individualism among the learned classes, specifially literary theorists. He argues "for the view that knowledge is a biological phenomenon, that literature is a form of knowledge, and that literature is thus itself a biological phenomenon." He doesn't just mean that literature is written by human beings, but that it is implicated in "the relationship between the organism and its environment. I shall argue that in both the human sciences and the humanities this relationship, as a structural concept, should take a postion of heirarchical priority over every other concept." In other words, literature and literary study should work to illuminate the biological adaptiveness of the human "organism" to its existing conditions.

Those who truly believe in the specific religious doctrines they profess probably would take no comfort from Darwin's Cathedral, since it values religion entirely for its secular benefits. But it is consistent with a certain kind of conservative thought which affirms the importance of religion because it literally keeps the mass of people in their place. Literature, art more generally, is also affirmed in such a scheme to the extent it contributes to this effort. The Darwinian view of literature to be found in a book like Evolution and Literary Theory also, in my view, works to insure good order, in this case seeking to keep writers and critics in their proper place. As much as I find the Darwinian explanation of the origins of life and of human behavior to be convincing, almost certainly correct, the versions of Darwinism to be found in books like these rather puzzle me. As I understand it, natural selection works by seizing on individual variations that prove salutary in the long run. Yet these professed Darwinian thinkers seem hostile to such individual differences where culture or art are concerned. What am I missing?

Science and Literature

In what must have been a deliberate move, Arts & Letters Daily linked both to this article and to this essay on the same day. In the first, Edward Rothstein speaks approvingly of "Being Human," an "anthology" released by the Bush administration's bioethics council in its ongoing effort to stave off stem-cell research. It appears to be top-heavy with literary examinations of the folly of too much science. (Among the writers Rothstein mentions are Hawthorne, George Eliot, Whitman, and Jonathan Swift.)

The second, otherwise an interesting and insightful essay by Paul A. Cantor on the attitudes toward science of the 19th century Romantic writers, comes to a conclusion the bioethics panel would no doubt endorse: that these writers offer "a sobering sense of the dangers of a scientific wisdom completely severed from poetic wisdom." In other words, "pure" science needs to leave well enough alone.

I want to discuss not the merits of stem-cell research but rather the appeal to literature as a way of conducting the debate over this kind of science. Since Rothstein prominently mentions Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," and since this story is another version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which Cantor uses as a primary example, I'll use the story as the vehicle for my own perspective on the subject.

"The Birthmark" could certainly be seen as a cautionary tale about human overreaching, which is undoubtedly a large part of what Hawthorne had in mind. But of course works of literature can be used to illuminate any subject under the sun. 1984 has been claimed as a story justifying every conceivable political point of view and as illustrating mutually incompatible themes. (This is not a weakness of the book, rather one of its strengths.) It is hard to imagine that Hawthorne would have objected to all of the real scientific advances that have in fact been made since his time (almost all of them increasing human happiness and decreasing the suffering he depicts so often in his work) as "overreaching." He merely wished to point out one possible consequence of the rise of the scientific attitude. I think he would in fact have been appalled to know that his work was being used not just to slow down scientific research on a sensitive subject, but to stop it all together. Cantor speaks of "the chief point of contact between Romantic poetry [Hawthorne was himself a Romantic] and modern science" as being that "both are creative forces and put a premium on bringing new things into the world." Hawthorne was a conservative, but not a reactionary.

More to the point, the use of Hawthorne's story as a strategic thrust in the culture wars ought to be parried by an analysis of the relevance of literature in this context. Cantor writes that "The basic lesson Frankenstein can teach us is this: science can tell us how to do something, but it cannot tell us whether we should do it." On the other hand, neither can literature. Literature poses questions, but rarely does it provide the anwers. The slipperiness of literature and its interpretation arguably makes it a poor choice as a polemical weapon at all. Only ethics can ultimately resolve the conundrums posed by stem-cell research, and again since works of literature can be claimed as exempla in any and all ethical systems, simply to say that Hawthorne (or Whitman or Tolstoy or Mary Shelley) warned us against the dangers of scientific excess (if he did) doesn't get us very far.

I write as someone who believes intensely in the value and the ultimate "relevance" of literature. I even think that Hawthorne's story is well worth reading for the insight it might provide the individual reader on the delicate balance between "scientific wisdom" and "poetic wisdom." But I also believe that the greatest obstacle to an understanding of literature's relevance is its misuse by various interested parties in advancing extra-literary agendas. It's real value--aesthetic and experiential--gets obscured in discursive rhetoric. Reading Hawthorne or Mary Shelley won't tell us much about stem-cell research. Reading them scrupulously, however, might tell us something about how seriously to entertain a document such as "Being Human."