Archive for April, 2010

Posted on April 27, 2010 - by David

Mentalism, Madness, and the Mind

The Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences announces a Student Conference on:

Mentalism, Madness, & the Mind

The conference will be held in Room 312 of the George Sherman Union,
775 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
Saturday, May 1, 2010, 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm

The public is welcome.

This Student Conference was inspired by the discussions of Professor Liah
Greenfeld’s Modernity Seminar participants from the 2009-2010 academic year.
These discussions addressed the relationship between culture and the mind by
examining mental illness of unknown etiology–schizophrenia and manic
depressive illness–in an historical comparative perspective. The panelists’ bring
their diverse backgrounds–trained in disciplines including sociology,
anthropology, political theory, philosophy, and neuroscience– to bear on their
presentations on mentalism, madness, and the mind.

Conference Program

1:00 pm

Opening Remarks by Katrina Demulling

1:10 pm to 3:00 pm
Panel I. Comparing Mentalism with Existing Explanations of the Mind and Culture

David Phillippi, “Evolutionary Psychology: A Stone Age Mindset”
Megan Faralli, “Psychoanalysis and Culture”
Mark Simes, “Social Neuroscience: Premises and Promises”

3:20 pm to 5:50 pm
Panel II. Understanding Mental Health and Mental Disease

Anna Graves, “Pregnancy Cravings through the Lens of Medical Anthropology”
Henry Feng, “Red Badge of Courage, Invisible Scars of War: Understanding Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder Through the Broken Identities of Combat Veterans”
Javier Soler, “Megalomania and Modernity”
Ben Solomon, ” A Cultural Prescription: The Key to Psychological Recovery”

5:50 pm
Concluding Remarks by Prof. Liah Greenfeld

Posted on April 18, 2010 - by David

Darwin in the English Department?

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article on the “Next Big Thing” in English, discussing the growing movement of scholars looking to incorporate science, or more specifically, theories of evolutionary psychology, into the study of literature:

Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said “it’s a new moment of hope” in an era when everyone is talking about “the death of the humanities.” To Mr. Gottschall a scientific approach can rescue literature departments from the malaise that has embraced them over the last decade and a half. Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded.

A student of literature myself, I was required on more than one occasion to read these ridiculous works of criticism and reference them in my own critical essays, so I can certainly feel Mr. Gottschall’s pain. But does rejecting the useless modes of interpretation that were popularized over the last few decades mean that Darwin becomes the authority on the modern novel?

At about 5 and half minutes in to this video, part 3 in a series of 6 interviewing scholars “on literature and science,” listening to Gottschall made it clear to me that some people in the humanities are pretty much fed up and ashamed of the failure of literary study to provide the kind of objective, enduring knowledge that science has been able to give us, and they feel it’s high time to start sharing in science’s success.

5:41

…the ideas of one generation of literary scholars can rarely survive the critique of the next generation of literary scholars, and it’s a very different model than what you find in the sciences, where again, in the sciences, they’re mostly wrong too, but there is also this slow accretion of information, knowledge, concepts, that most reasonable people have to admit are probably true, and so my hope is that we can retain the best aspects of our traditional modes and supplement them with new tools from the sciences.

Soon after the initial article was published, a debate titled ‘Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities’ appeared on the New York Times website, with a number of authors and English professors contributing their opinions. There was nothing resembling unanimous agreement about the value of this new approach, but there was a general consensus that the humanities are suffering from a serious lack of funding and lack of interest. Without even considering the interaction of various social and institutional forces leading to this state of crisis in the humanities, I can say from experience that most people who don’t study literature (and plenty of us who do) are very skeptical about its usefulness. I remember this embarrassed, can’t-look-you-in-the-eyes-or-speak-clearly feeling that would wash over when someone asked me what I was studying and I had to admit that I was an English major. The response to my confession was usually, “so what do you wanna do, you wanna, like, be an English teacher?” and I would mumble something about wanting to write. What I wrote were poems, and a lot of my marginal work (i.e poems scribbled in the margins of the notebooks I was supposed to be filling with pertinent information from class) was dedicated to the frustration and disillusionment of studying literature.

So I can understand the element of personal crisis that leads a literary scholar to look for a more solid foundation to stand on. In last few minutes of the video posted above, Joseph Carroll describes how his frustration with the condition of literary scholarship drove him to a kind of intellectual breaking point:

8:54

“I need something more wholesome, more adequate, more coherent, closer to the truth, and then I went and read Darwin and I had a sort of cleansing vision of deep time, humans emerging out of millions of years of evolution, it just cut through all of the… intellectual confusion at superficial levels that prevailed in literary study, so I set about trying to reconstruct literary study… working from the ground up…using an evolutionary vision of human nature as the basis for reconstructing all the concepts that we need to understand literature”

So what does this kind of work actually look like?

One example is The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, a collection of essays from the evolutionary perspective published in 2005, with contributions from Gottschall and Carroll as well as several of the other authorities. I think this review, by Travis Landry of the University of Washington, published in Evolutionary Psychology, (an obviously friendly audience), is telling:

On the heels of these dueling forewords [by E.O. Wilson and Frederick Crews] comes the editors’ anecdotal introduction, highlighted by a rather unremarkable recounting of the misunderstood Darwinian graduate student, Jonathan Gottschall (“Jon’s Story”), who finally meets his open-minded, maverick mentor, David Sloan Wilson (“David’s Story”). They state the collection’s three guiding questions: What is literature about? What is literature for? What does it mean to apply a scientific perspective like evolutionary theory to a non-scientific subject like literary studies? An attempt to resolve these queries begins with part one, “Evolution and Literary Theory.” This section aims “to grapple with some of the problems and opportunities presented by the collapse of the constructivist foundations of contemporary literary theory” (4). Perhaps someone should tell the constructivists (apparently all literary critics who are not naturalists) about this “collapse.” In any event, the editors are quick to qualify: “a more restrained version of social constructivism is fully compatible with the emerging evolutionary models of human nature” (4). Such disclaimers, grounded in the reassurance that “the nature-nurture dichotomy is a false one” (4), represent a recurrent strategy used throughout The Literary Animal to ease imagined misgivings about takeover, but they do little to temper an all too often pedantic tone and the unmistakable, unapologetic imbalance of power, evident each time it boils down to which side holds the knowledge key.

While Landry does find some things to praise in The Literary Animal, he’s clearly turned off by the air of superiority running throughout the work, and he restates this criticism in the final paragraph of his review:

There is little doubt that this text contains enough quality ideas to merit an attentive read, and its intended public, both in the humanities and the sciences, should take advantage of this resource in order to become better informed about a legitimate discourse that does not seem likely to fade away anytime soon. Nonetheless, one repeatedly gets the sense that these naturalist critics would be better served without their ‘us against the world’ mentality. The empirical chest thumping and emblazoned rhetoric that permeate this work quickly wear thin and may ultimately alienate the very literary critics these scholars hope to convert. In the final analysis, greater humility and a more respectful voice are certain to be more persuasive and will ultimately allow the interpretive fruits of this evolutionary enterprise, which is strong enough to stand on its own, to do the talking.

Landry, I’m afraid, misses the point. All the talk about an evolutionary perspective complementing existing approaches, about taking both culture, (whatever they mean when they use that word), and biology into account seems to amount to little more than a strategy of temporary appeasement before the final takeover. If that sounds paranoid or harsh, consider what Joseph Carroll has to say about the brand new journal, the Evolutionary Review, of which he is a founding member and co-editor:

…the aim of the journal is to give evidence that evolutionary perspective, “this view of life,” one of Darwin’s phrases, is adequate to encompass every aspect of human concern…

…the idea is that the evolutionary perspective is an ultimate, encompassing, final, absolute, total perspective… this is what makes people most nervous outside the field… you start talking about thousand year reich, you know, and you think “well you’ve got global, imperialist ambitions intellectually,” and it’s true [chuckles], it’s absolutely true… there’s a wager, the wager is that the evolutionary perspective is adequate… as the central linking conceptual framework that forms a genuine scientifically established foundation of knowledge for everything in the social sciences and the humanities, we think that’s true…

This attitude renders empty all their talk about “consilience” and “emergent properties” (see pt. 4 of the “on literature and science” series). In short, culture is seen as determined rather than constrained by biology. It’s difficult for me to understand how the theory of evolution and ideas about the behavior of stone-age man are adequate for understanding the humanities, which Joseph Carroll himself calls “the highest level of emerging complexity.”

William Deresiewicz, in an essay called ‘Adaptation: on Literary Darwinism’ published in The Nation last year, gives a strong critique of this movement, providing good background on the history and nature of its goals, and summarizes the dismal state of affairs which allowed the evolutionary perspective to enter the discussion. By touching on the work of a number of the prominent figures in this emerging field, Deresiewicz is able to address some of the most glaring problems with the evolutionary psychological approach. It’s definitely worth reading; I can say that he states some of my own criticisms in more detail and in better context than I am able to do here. Towards the end of the essay, he gets to what is, as far as literary scholarship is concerned, perhaps the most important point:

Seeking to displace Theory, literary Darwinism may end by becoming it. Each is reductive. Each leads in outlandish directions that make sense only to initiates. Each has a penchant for hero worship. (For Dutton, the father of natural selection is not “Darwin,” but “Darwin himself.” Carroll makes a trinity of Darwin, Wilson and Pinker.) Each is predictable. If Marxist criticism is always about the rise of the bourgeoisie, literary Darwinism is always about mate selection or status competition. Each looks to literature only for confirmation of its beliefs. Shakespeare, it turns out, agrees with Darwin, as he once agreed with Freud and Frye. (Though if science is the exclusive standard of truth for the Darwinists, it’s not clear why it matters whom Shakespeare agrees with.) Authors who won’t get with the program–who don’t deal with mate selection or status competition, or refuse to solicit our attention in evolutionarily correct ways–are demoted in rank. (Darwinian aesthetics exhibits a strong antimodernist animus, as if it were unnatural to prefer Conrad to Kipling, or Rothko to Rockwell.) That so many of the greatest works of literary art–the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Hamlet, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Faust, Moby-Dick, the novels of Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Woolf and Coetzee–are ultimately concerned not with mate selection or status competition, however seriously they might consider such matters, but with the human place in the cosmos; that such a commitment is precisely what begins to distinguish these works from the kinds of things that are better studied with polling data and cheek swabs; that the finest books demand a criticism that attends to what makes them unique, not what makes them typical: these are not possibilities that literary Darwinism envisions.

From what I can see, evolutionary psychology used in the study of literature functions in essentially the same way as the theories which Carroll and Gottschall are so critical of. It is just another game for clever people to play, but the authority of the name ‘Darwin’ and the use of buzz-words like “selection” “adaptation” and “fitness” create the illusion that this is somehow a more empirical, ‘scientific’ approach.

In part 2 of the series, Philip Kitcher, philosophy professor from Columbia, criticizes the general and haphazard way in which a few pieces of evolutionary theory get applied to humans:

9:10

“It always amazes me the ease with which people who have spent years of their lives as it might be working on some other organism, social insects for example, very well studied, E.O Wilson has an amazingly deep and detailed knowledge of the behavior of social insects, people think “well you know I’ve done social insects and now it’s just a matter of applying the same principles to human beings,” but you know we aren’t actually that similar to the social insects, there are quite a lot of differences and those need to be taken into account…”

I’m obviously very skeptical not only of this approach to literature, but of evolutionary psychology in general. If biology studies life, and physics studies the laws governing the physical world, what does evolutionary psychology study? It can’t study so-called “evolutionary man,” because he’s not around for us to talk to, nor has he left records by which we can know him. Furthermore, the assumption that the human mind is a product of evolution over millions, or at least hundreds of thousands of years means that historical comparison over the past few thousand years probably won’t tell us much. What emerges then is a universalistic view of the mind which looks at the complex, diverse, symbolic behavior of human individuals and societies and tries to pinpoint the more basic, animalistic drives that are working underneath to determine the behavior. Under the multitude of dramatically different cultures, they find a set of motives/traits common to all man, destroying the possibility of a culture possessing its own internal logic that may not have developed towards “evolutionary fitness.”

As I said earlier, the occasional reassurances that they are not trying to replace or override discussion of culture, but to complement it, seem pretty hollow. When they use the word culture, they are talking about the shared practices of a particular society, not the general symbolic process of culture, Culture with a capital C, if you will. If there is no accounting for the appearance of particular cultures other than as products of biological evolution, as adaptations to specific physical environments (i.e no theory of culture as an emergent phenomenon, something more than biology) then obviously Culture as such is reduced to evolution/genetics/the functioning of the brain, and with such a view, there is in fact no reason that evolutionary psychology should defer to, or even consider, any other approach to the humanities.

My own approach to literature changed when I began to study with Liah Greenfeld in 2004, as a sophomore English major at Boston University. Those of you who have been reading this blog are hopefully becoming acquainted with her work. The following is a very brief summary of some of the fundamental principles of her view which lead me to reject the position of evolutionary psychology.

• Humans lack a genetically given order necessary for survival
• We derive this order from society
• Society is structured symbolically, on the basis of culture– the process of symbolic transmission of human ways of life across generations .
• This symbolic process occurs simultaneously on the individual and collective levels, with individual human minds as the only the active elements of culture.
• Culture is an emergent phenomenon and a reality sui generis. As Greenfeld writes, “the neural processes by means of which the cultural process occurs serve only as boundary conditions outside of which it cannot occur, but are powerless to shape the nature and direction of the cultural process.”

True ‘consilience’ would take full account of the emergent nature of culture. As the characteristic which distinguishes humanity from all other forms of life, culture is the proper subject for the empirical study of humanity in all its aspects, and it is precisely such a science that Greenfeld is attempting to establish. Up until now, her published work has dealt most directly with modern culture, but her forthcoming book seeks to establish the theoretical groundwork and philosophical justification for the empirical study of humanity, while examining a particular phenomenon which she believes is culturally caused, (mental illness).

I think it’s evident to anyone who watches those videos that there is a highly personal aspect to the work these people are doing. Like myself, I bet they entered college with a passion for literature and a notion that they were embarking on a quest for deep truths – that they would, in fact, learn something about human nature. But the humanities, as an institution, could not live up to our hopes. So, Carroll and Gottschall and the rest of them turned to science, and it’s easy enough to see why. Science enjoys a privileged place in modern society, and though part of this can be explained culturally and historically, (Greenfeld has written extensively about the emergence of science as a social institution in 17^th century England), the fact remains that science has given as more objective knowledge of reality than any other method of inquiry. In ‘Literature and Science as Social Institutions,’ Greenfeld writes, “However indirect and imperfectly systematic and effective, science, one has to conclude in all fairness, is the most direct, systematic, and effective way to objective, valid empirical knowledge available to mankind.” The thing is, evolutionary psychology is not science. It is a set of theories (and not a particularly coherent one) that some people are using to understand the world around them, in effect, to provide the mental order that nature neglected to encode in our genes. For me, it is not a satisfying view of the world. It does not help me understand the society I live in, it does not explain why I think the way I do, it does not ring true with my experience. Science, at its most basic, is a method, and when a particular science is developed and equipped to study specific aspect of empirical reality, valid and valuable knowledge can be gained. Because culture does not constitute merely a more complex level of a biologically given nature, but a qualitatively distinct layer of reality, a new science is called for. With the construction of the ‘New Humanities,’ these scholars literally want to take us back to the Stone Age. My goal is to help build the alternative.

These thoughts are being developed into a longer piece comparing evolutionary psychology to mentalism – the name given to the theory Liah Greenfeld has developed, to be presented at a student conference at Boston University on May 1, 2010. Details will be posted soon.

Posted on April 8, 2010 - by David

Health Care Reform and Impossible American Ideals

Since Barack Obama’s election in November of 2008, health care reform has been at the center of our nation’s attention. This debate has been almost inseparable from discussion of the ongoing economic crisis, both because of the question of what effect reform measures might have on the economy, and because many individuals are unemployed or making less money and cannot afford health insurance. Naturally, because the most visible players in this game are politicians, much of the discourse surrounding the health care debate has been boiled down to Democrats vs. Republicans, or, (to essentially say the same thing twice), liberals vs. conservatives. Obama and the Democrats have been demonized by their opposition as socialists instituting a totalitarian regime, and the responses of those pushing for reform have not been much kinder.

As we all know, the new legislation has been passed, and with the sounds of celebration on one side and apocalyptic lament on the other, it still seems easiest to conceive of this issue in terms of a conflict between two political parties or groups with opposed economic interests. It strikes me, though, that there is a more basic and more powerful force driving this debate, and it goes straight to the heart of what it means to be an American. This is the contradiction between our two supreme national values: liberty and equality.

The chapter on America in Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, provides an excellent analysis of how conflicting ideals of liberty and equality have shaped the nation’s history and identity.

“It must be realized that individualistic-libertarian nationalism sets itself an impossible task. A nation, ideally, is a society composed of individuals equal in their human worth. But in fact such perfect equality cannot be achieved. The reality of an individualistic nation and its ideals are necessarily inconsistent, and this inconsistency breeds discontent and frustration.” (449-450)

Before America was truly a “nation,” (according to Greenfeld’s careful account this was not until after the Civil War), and in fact even before independence from England, liberty and equality existed here to a greater degree than in any country across the Atlantic, conferring on the individuals who experienced these values an unparalleled sense of dignity. Of course, despite rhetoric about the natural birthrights of all mankind, initially only white male land-owners could enjoy these rights. The inconsistency between social reality and the professed ideals would inevitably have to be confronted. Greenfeld writes of the decades preceding the Civil War:

“That equality in American society had advanced beyond anything imaginable elsewhere at the time cannot be disputed. But the American society was also committed to equality to an extent that was unimaginable elsewhere. Thus, while the reality in America in this regard was incomparably better than in any other society, the gap between it and its brilliant ideal was nonetheless wider.”(452)

“Inequality inherent in social reality was blatantly inconsistent with American national commitment. In a society which believed that “all men are created equal,” the denial of equality meant that one was not human, was less of a human than others.” (453)

Of course, slavery, the most blatant contradiction of the national principles, was eventually abolished, and, though it took almost another 60 years, women were given the right to vote in 1920. In many ways, the course of American history can be characterized as an attempt to close the gap between social reality and the national ideals. But there is an important distinction between equality of rights under the law and equality of conditions. Equal rights can be, to a large extent, provided by government, but they cannot guarantee that conditions will be equal. On the contrary, in a free society where individuals are not only able, but expected to achieve for themselves what they can, inequality of conditions will necessarily result. Even if we admit that “all men are created equal” does not mean that everyone is born with the same natural ability, Americans still desire equality of opportunity – the sense that we all start on a level playing field, that achievement will not be dictated by inherited wealth, geography, or social connections. But common sense and observation tell us that equality of opportunity is not achieved through equality of rights. The federal government, then, becomes a means of creating equality of conditions:

“In a society which sets great store by equality, economic inequality acquires a significance which goes beyond the effects of differences in material well-being. It is necessarily seen as unjust by the “have-nots” and is perceived as an affront to their dignity, because it belies the proposition that all men are created equal and have equal rights to life and happiness. Equality in liberty (that is, self-government) becomes less important in such situations. In fact, rather than being regarded as an absolute good, it is likely to be seen as a tool for the perpetuation and concealment of existing inequalities. Liberty is infinitely divisible; other goods are not. An increase in the liberty of another does not imply a proportional decrease in one’s own; increase in another’s share of a finite quantity of something, whether power or wealth, does. When these resources become scarce, the demand for equality of opportunity, dignity, and respect commensurate with one’s abilities gives way to the demand for equality of result. It is clear that equality of opportunity, which does not provide for the equality of result, would appeal more strongly to those who have the qualifications necessary to realize the opportunities open to them. It is also clear that in the early American society, actually characterized by equality of conditions, equality of opportunity would be generally acceptable without special provisions for the equality of result because it would appear that the latter was implied, inherent in the former. But when actual equality of conditions no longer obtains, the provisions for equality of opportunity only (the legal equality of rights) must appear unsatisfactory. The transformation in the nature of desired equality began to be evident in America in the 1830s. It initiated the transformation in the perception of the functions of the government: government as essentially a protective agency (guarding against encroachments on the people’s rights by others) no longer appeared sufficient; there was a feeling that it should act as a distributive agency. This, in turn, affected the attitudes towards centralization, making it acceptable and even necessary.” (439)

We know that equality of health care does not exist, and this bothers us. It is difficult to accept that some individuals might be held back from achieving their goals or providing for their families, that children might not grow up to enjoy life on earth to the fullest, because they could not afford a treatment that millions of others receive. At the same time, we understand that health care is not an infinite resource – many opponents of the new legislation who are more or less satisfied with their current health insurance fear there will be “rationing” of care. This idea is offensive to the American mind, because it limits the individual’s ability to obtain the level of care he has worked hard for. Those wealthier individuals who currently enjoy a high level of care also fear having to pay a greater portion than others in order to fund a system which threatens to limit their choices. Can coverage be expanded without also being limited? It seems some must give more so others can receive more. While the goals may be liberty and equality, this legislation may actually send a contradictory message. If some people experience a reduction in their level of care, does that tell them that hard work doesn’t pay off after all? Does providing coverage to the uninsured send the message that they are unable to provide for themselves?

Of course there are also serious concerns about how this health care bill will impact the national debt. If the nation’s commitment to equality results in a worsening of the economic situation, liberty and equality will be put at further risk.  But the supreme value we place on the individual life, and the belief in equal access to all forms of treatment as a fundamental right, may prove to be dangerously expensive. In a March 31^st article from the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Molly Cooke says it’s time to give up the old lie that doctors give 100% to each and every patient, and advises that considerations of cost must be taught in med school:

“…we must abandon the myth of the physician as single-minded advocate for any amount of benefit for every patient. We make all kinds of choices in caring for patients; some involve denying care that patients perceive as — and that might actually be — beneficial. Given that we make value-based decisions about the deployment of other finite resources, such as our time and the use of beds in the intensive care unit, why not about costly treatments? In fact, numerous studies in the United States and Europe confirm that bedside rationing of care is common practice. Problematically, it is done in an occult and unpredictable manner.”

Practical as this sounds, I think these are tough words to hear for most Americans. When it comes to health and life, the idea of dollar-value calculations is extremely distasteful to us. It is not that we are fundamentally opposed to the idea of discontinuing care or deciding against a potentially beneficial treatment. It makes perfect sense to us when a family decides it’s time to “pull the plug” on a relative whose chance of recovery is virtually non-existent. We don’t question the cancer patient who finally elects to move home and receive hospice care rather than undergo another risky and painful surgery, even though it could buy him some extra time. We accept these decisions because they are made on the basis of individual dignity and liberty. Of course, with advances in medicine and technology our options are constantly multiplying. That any of these options might be denied to us on the basis of cost almost amounts to cultural blasphemy, but this may be the reality.

A New York Times article published online yesterday also acknowledged the impending cost crisis in health care. Author David Leonhardt identifies some of the same cultural values I mentioned above as obstacles, but is hopeful that reform measures which require that patients be provided with more information may actually help to keep spending down:

“The health act requires Medicare and other agencies to help hospitals and doctors give patients more information — which is practically a no-lose proposition. In the course of receiving more control and more choice, two distinctly American values, patients will probably help hold down costs.”

Whether or not this proves to be true, it’s interesting that this potential solution still relies on the sense of individual liberty and dignity.

My intention is not to guess at whether or not health care reform will work, but to suggest that the principles driving this national debate are older than the nation itself. In an introduction to President Obama’s speech following the historic signing, Vice-President Joe Biden told us that, “For much too long, for much too long, Americans have been denied what every human being is entitled to — decent, affordable health care.” I am sure that 200 years ago, no one in the nation could have imagined health care as a basic human right, but the identification of the American value of equality with basic human rights would have made perfect historical sense. For better or worse, it seems America will keep striving to create a world that matches our impossible ideals.