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.