68 Psycho-acoustics and
linguistics
can enrich the
?
?
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
Ragtime, jazz, rock, blues, soul, and rap grew out of African American musical forms, which originally incorporated African rhythms and vocal styles.
~
So what happened in 1910 that supposedly changed human nature? The event that stood out in Virginia Woolf's recollection was a London exhibition of the paintings of the post-Impressionists, including Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and van Gogh. It was an unveiling of the movement called modernism, and when Woolf wrote her declaration in the 1920s, the movement was taking over the arts.
Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast {410} aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes. Modernist architecture culminated both in the glass-and-steel towers of multinational corporations and in the dreary high-rises of American housing projects, postwar British council flats, and Soviet apartment blocks.
Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Victorian era and to the nai? ve bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was supposed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place. And science, supposedly, was offering the same message. According to the version that trickled into the humanities, Freud showed that behavior springs from unconscious and irrational impulses, Einstein showed that time and space can be defined only relative to an observer, and Heisenberg showed that the position and momentum of an object were inherently uncertain because they were affected by the act of observation. Much later, this embroidery of physics inspired the famous hoax in which the physicist Alan Sokal successfully published a paper filled with gibberish in the journal Social Text. 47
But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois pleasure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda. In a review of a book defending the mission of modernism, the critic Frederick Turner explains them:
The great project of modern art was to diagnose, and cure, the sickness unto death of modern humankind. . . . [Its artistic mission] is to identify and strip away the false sense of routine experience and interpretive framing provided by conformist mass commercial society, and to make us experience nakedly and anew the immediacy of reality through our peeled and rejuvenated senses. This therapeutic work is also a spiritual {411} mission, in that a community of such transformed human beings would, in theory, be able to construct a better kind of society. The enemies of the process are cooptation, commercial exploitation and reproduction, and kitsch. . . . Fresh, raw experience -- to which artists have an unmediated and childlike access -- is routinized, compartmentalized, and dulled into insensibility by society. 48
Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible.
The goal of postmodernist art is to help us break out of this prison. The artists try to preempt cultural motifs and representational techniques by taking capitalist icons (such as ads, package designs, and pinup photos) and defacing them, exaggerating them, or presenting them in odd contexts. The earliest examples were Andy Warhol's paintings of soup can labels and his repetitive false-color images of Marilyn Monroe. More recent ones include the Whitney Museum's "Black Male" exhibit described in Chapter 12 and Cindy Sherman's photographs of grotesquely assembled bi-gendered mannequins. (I saw them as part of an MIT exhibit that explored "the female body as a site of conflicting desires, and femininity as a taut web of social expectations, historical assumptions, and ideological constructions. ") In postmodernist literature, authors comment on what they are writing while they are writing it. In postmodernist architecture, materials and details from different kinds of buildings and historical periods are thrown together in incongruous ways, such as an awning made of chain-link fencing in a fancy shopping mall or Corinthian columns holding up nothing on the top of a sleek skyscraper. Postmodernist films contain sly references to the filmmaking process or to earlier films. In all these forms, irony, self-referential allusions, and the pretense of not taking the work seriously are meant to draw attention to the representations themselves, which (according to the doctrine) we are ordinarily in danger of mistaking for reality.
~
? ? ? ? Once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for
? their decline and fall become all {412} too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability -- stripping away pretense -- to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!
Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction. As we saw in preceding chapters, the visual system of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects. We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to feed us information about the consequential things out there, like rocks, cliffs, animals, and other people and their intentions.
Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical structure of the world. It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one. 49 Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play. 50
When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of art at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with them and what effect they hope to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of course, people can be taken in by a clever liar, but they are not trapped in a false world of words and images and in need of rescue by postmodernist artists.
Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, especially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited. 51 Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes from the desire for attention on the part of the artists. {413}
In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the senses. On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and lightweight. 52 In his 1913 book Art, the critic Clive Bell (Virginia Woolf's brother-in-law and Quentin's father) argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences. 53 People use beautiful in phrases like "beautiful huntin' and shootin'," he wrote, or worse, to refer to beautiful women. Bell assimilated the behaviorist psychology of his day and argued that ordinary people come to enjoy art by a process of Pavlovian conditioning. They appreciate a painting only if it depicts a beautiful woman, music only if it evokes "emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces," and poetry only if it arouses feelings like the ones once felt for the vicar's daughter. Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty. "54 Postmodernists were even more dismissive. Beauty, they said, consists of arbitrary standards dictated by an elite. It enslaves women by forcing them to conform to unrealistic ideals, and it panders to market-oriented art collectors. 55
To be fair, modernism comprises many styles and artists, and not all of them rejected beauty and other human sensibilities. At its best, modernist design perfected a visual elegance and an aesthetic of form-following-function that were welcome alternatives to Victorian bric-a-brac and ostentatious displays of wealth. The art movements opened up new stylistic possibilities, including motifs from Africa and Oceania. The fiction and poetry offered invigorating intellectual workouts, and countered a sentimental romanticism that saw art as a spontaneous overflow of the artist's personality and emotion. The problem with modernism was that its philosophy did not acknowledge the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure. As its denial of beauty became an orthodoxy, and as its aesthetic successes were appropriated into {414} commercial culture (such as minimalism in graphic design), modernism left nowhere for artists to go.
Quentin Bell suggested that when the variations within a genre are exhausted, people avail themselves of a different canon of status, which he added to Veblen's list. In "conspicuous outrage," bad boys (and girls) flaunt their ability to get away with shocking the bourgeoisie. 56 The never-ending campaign by postmodernist artists to attract the attention of a jaded public progressed from puzzling audiences to doing everything they could to offend them. Everyone has heard of the notorious cases: Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of sadomasochistic acts, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (a photo of a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine), Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung, and the nine-hour performance piece "Flag Fuck (w/Beef) #17B," in which Ivan Hubiak danced on stage wearing an American flag as a diaper while draping himself with raw meat. Actually, this last one never happened; it was invented by writers for the satirical newspaper The Onion in an article entitled "Performance Artist Shocks U. S. Out of Apathetic Slumber. "57 But I bet I had you fooled.
Another result is that elite art could no longer be appreciated without a support team of critics and theoreticians. They did not simply evaluate and interpret art, like movie critics or book reviewers, but supplied the art with its rationale. Tom Wolfe wrote The Painted Word after reading an art review in the New York Times that criticized realist painting because it lacked "something crucial," namely, "a persuasive theory. " Wolfe explains:
Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time. . . . All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer -- waiting, waiting, forever waiting for. . . it. . . for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there -- waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well -- how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not "seeing is believing," you ninny, but "believing is seeing," for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. 58 {415}
Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for "linguistic transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world more radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity. 59 This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles. "60 In 1998, first prize went to the lauded professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest, assures us that this is not a satire. The rules of the contest forbid it: "Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread. " A final blind spot to human nature is the failure of contemporary artists and theorists to deconstruct their own moral pretensions. Artists and critics have long believed that an appreciation of elite art is ennobling and have spoken of cultural philistines in tones ordinarily reserved for child molesters (as we see in the two meanings of the word barbarian). The affectation of social reform that surrounds modernism and postmodernism is part of this tradition. Though moral sophistication requires an appreciation of history and cultural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are a particularly good way to instill it compared with middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional education. The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to how people entertain themselves in their leisure time. The conviction that artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from
? ? ? ? ? ? ? the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry for status (see Chapter 15). As the critic George Steiner has pointed out, "We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. "61 Conversely there must be many unlettered people who give blood, risk their {416} lives as volunteer firefighters, or adopt handicapped children, but whose opinion of modern art is "My four-year-old daughter could have done that. "
The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to be proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal lives, and many embraced fascism or Stalinism. The modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the September 11,2001, terrorist attacks as "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" and added, enviously, that "artists, too, sometimes go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world. "62 Nor is the theory of postmodernism especially progressive. A denial of objective reality is no friend to moral progress, because it prevents one from saying, for example, that slavery or the Holocaust really took place. And as Adam Gopnik has pointed out, the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like "racism is bad. " But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class -- personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy -- are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass Utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it's none of our damn business.
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
~
A revolt has begun. Museum-goers have become bored with the umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring dismembered torsos or hundreds of pounds of lard chewed up and spat out by the artist. 63 Graduate students in the humanities are grumbling in emails and conference hallways about being locked out of the job market unless they write in gibberish while randomly dropping the names of authorities like Foucault and Butler. Maverick scholars are doffing the blinders that prevented them from looking at exciting developments in the sciences of human nature. And younger artists are wondering how the art world got itself into the bizarre place in which beauty is a dirty word. These currents of discontent are coming together in a new philosophy of the arts, one that is consilient with the sciences and respectful of the minds {417} and senses of human beings. It is taking shape both in the community of artists and in the community of critics and scholars.
In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly announced a new "movement" in the arts, Derriere Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative. 64 If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement "a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters. "65 Ideas similar to Derriere Guard's have sprung up in movements called the Radical Center, Natural Classicism, the New Formalism, the New Narrativism, Stuckism, the Return of Beauty, and No Mo Po Mo. 66 The movements combine high and low culture and are opposed equally to the postmodernist left, with its disdain for beauty and artistry, and to the cultural right, with its narrow canons of "great works" and fire-and-brimstone sermons on the decline of civilization. It includes classically trained musicians who mix classical and popular compositions, realist painters and sculptors, verse poets, journalistic novelists, and dance directors and performance artists who use rhythm and melody in their work.
Within the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to reestablish human nature at the center of any understanding of the arts. They include Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Patrick Hogan, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner. 67 A good grasp of how the mind works is indispensable to the arts and humanities for at least two reasons.
One is that the real medium of artists, whatever their genre, is human mental representations. Oil paint, moving limbs, and printed words cannot penetrate the brain directly. They trigger a cascade of neural events that begin with the sense organs and culminate in thoughts, emotions, and memories. Cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, which map out the cascade, offer a wealth of information to anyone who wants to understand how artists achieve their effects. Vision research can illuminate painting and sculpture.
68 Psycho-acoustics and linguistics can enrich the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? study of music. 69 Linguistics can give insight on poetry, metaphor, and literary style. 70 Mental imagery research helps to explain the techniques of narrative prose. 71 The theory of mind (intuitive psychology) can shed light on our ability to entertain fictional worlds. 72 The study of visual attention and short-term memory can help explain the experience of cinema. 73 And evolutionary aesthetics can help explain the feelings of beauty and pleasure that can accompany all of these acts of perception. 74
Ironically, the early modernist painters were avid consumers of perception research. It may have been introduced to them by Gertrude Stein, who studied psychology with William James at Harvard and conducted research on {418} visual attention under his supervision. 75 The Bauhaus designers and artists, too, were appreciators of perceptual psychology, particularly the contemporary Gestalt school. 76 But the consilience was lost as the two cultures drifted apart, and only recently have they begun to come back together. I predict that the application of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to the arts will become a growth area in criticism and scholarship.
The other point of contact may be more important still. Ultimately what draws us to a work of art is not just the sensory experience of the medium but its emotional content and insight into the human condition. And these tap into the timeless tragedies of our biological predicament: our mortality, our finite knowledge and wisdom, the differences among us, and our conflicts of interest with friends, neighbors, relatives, and lovers. All are topics of the sciences of human nature.
The idea that art should reflect the perennial and universal qualities of the human species is not new. Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays, comments on the lasting appeal of that great intuitive psychologist:
Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.
Today we may be seeing a new convergence of explorations of the human condition by artists and scientists -- not because scientists are trying to take over the humanities, but because artists and humanists are beginning to look to the sciences, or at least to the scientific mindset that sees us as a species with a complex psychological endowment. In explaining this connection I cannot hope to compete with the words of the artists themselves, and I will conclude with the overtures of three fine novelists.
Iris Murdoch, haunted by the origins of the moral sense, comments on its endurance in fiction:
We make, in many respects though not in all, the same kinds of moral judgments as the Greeks did, and we recognize good or decent people in times and literatures remote from our own. Patroclus, Antigone, Cordelia, Mr. Knightley, Alyosha. Patroclus' invariable kindness. Cordelia's truthfulness. Alyosha telling his father not to be afraid of hell. It is just as important that Patroclus should be kind to the captive {419} women as that Emma should be kind to Miss Bates, and we feel this importance in an immediate and natural way in both cases in spite of the fact that nearly three thousand years divide the writers. And this, when one reflects on it, is a remarkable testimony to the existence of a single durable human nature. 77
A. S. Byatt, asked by the editors of the New York Times Magazine for the best narrative of the millennium, picked the story of Scheherazade:
The stories in "The Thousand and One Nights" . . . are stories about storytelling without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and death and money and food and other human necessities. Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentences of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles, and ends. 78
John Updike, also asked for reflections at the turn of the millennium, commented on the future of his own profession. "A writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true," he wrote, and "the unit of truth, at least for a fiction writer, is the human animal, belonging to the species Homo sapiens, unchanged for at least 100,000 years. "
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Evolution moves more slowly than history, and much slower than the technology of recent centuries; surely sociobiology, surprisingly maligned in some scientific quarters, performs a useful service in investigating what traits are innate and which are acquired. What kind of cultural software can our evolved hard-wiring support? Fiction, in its groping way, is drawn to those moments of discomfort when society asks more than its individual members can, or wish to, provide. Ordinary people experiencing friction on the page is what warms our hands and hearts as we write. . . .
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
So conflicted and ingenious a creature makes an endlessly interesting {420} focus for the meditations of fiction. It seems to me true that Homo sapiens will never settle into any Utopia so complacently as to relax all its conflicts and erase all its perversity-breeding neediness. 79
Literature has three voices, wrote the scholar Robert Storey: those of the author, the audience, and the species. 80 These novelists are reminding us of the voice of the species, an essential constituent of all the arts, and a fitting theme with which to wrap up my own story.
<< {421} >>
THE VOICE OF THE SPECIES
The Blank Slate was an attractive vision. It promised to make racism, sexism, and class prejudice factually untenable. It appeared to be a bulwark against the kind of thinking that led to ethnic genocide. It aimed to prevent people from slipping into a premature fatalism about preventable social ills. It put a spotlight on the treatment of children, indigenous peoples, and the underclass. The Blank Slate thus became part of a secular faith and appeared to constitute the common decency of our age.
But the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering. Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of "a government of laws and not of men. " It blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions.
The Blank Slate is not some ideal that we should all hope and pray is true. No, it is an anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity, our inherent interests, and our individual preferences. Though it has pretensions of celebrating our potential, it does the opposite, because our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully complex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet. Regardless of its good and bad effects, the Blank Slate is an empirical hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and must be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is true. The modern sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution are increasingly showing that it is not true. The result is a rearguard effort to salvage the Blank Slate by disfiguring science and intellectual life: {422} denying the possibility of objectivity and truth, dumbing down issues into dichotomies, replacing facts and logic with political posturing.
The Blank Slate became so entrenched in intellectual life that the prospect of doing without it can be deeply unsettling. In topics from childrearing to sexuality, from natural foods to violence, ideas that seemed immoral even to question turn out to be not just questionable but probably wrong. Even people with no ideological ax to grind can feel a sense of vertigo when they learn of such taboos being broken: "O brave new world that has such people in it! " Is science leading to a place where prejudice is all right, where children may be neglected, where Machiavellianism is accepted, where inequality and violence are met with resignation, where people are treated like machines?
Not at all! By unhandcuffing widely shared values from moribund factual dogmas, the rationale for those values can only become clearer. We understand why we condemn prejudice, cruelty to children, and violence against women, and can focus our efforts on how to implement the goals we value most. We thereby protect those goals against the upheavals of factual understanding that science perennially delivers.
Abandoning the Blank Slate, in any case, is not as radical as it might first appear. True, it is a revolution in many
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? sectors of modern intellectual life. But except for a few intellectuals who have let their theories get the better of them, it is not a revolution in the world views of most people. I suspect that few people really believe, deep down, that boys and girls are interchangeable, that all differences in intelligence come from the environment, that parents can micromanage the personalities of their children, that humans are born free of selfish tendencies, or that appealing stories, melodies, and faces are arbitrary social constructions. Margaret Mead, an icon of twentieth-century egalitarianism, told her daughter that she credited her own intellectual talent to her genes, and I can confirm that such split personalities are common among academics. 1 Scholars who publicly deny that intelligence is a meaningful concept treat it as anything but meaningless in their professional lives. Those who argue that gender differences are a reversible social construction do not treat them that way in their advice to their daughters, their dealings with the opposite sex, and their unguarded gossip, humor, and reflections on their lives.
Acknowledging human nature does not mean overturning our personal world views, and I would have nothing to suggest as a replacement if it did. It means only taking intellectual life out of its parallel universe and reuniting it with science and, when it is borne out by science, with common sense. The alternative is to make intellectual life increasingly irrelevant to human affairs, to turn intellectuals into hypocrites, and to turn everyone else into anti- intellectuals.
Scientists and public intellectuals are not the only people who have pondered how the mind works. We are all psychologists, and some people, without {423} the benefit of credentials, are great psychologists. Among them are poets and novelists, whose business, as we saw in the preceding chapter, is to create "just representations of general nature. " Paradoxically, in today's intellectual climate novelists may have a clearer mandate than scientists to speak the truth about human nature. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives happily ever after. Life is nothing like that, we note, and we look to the arts for edification about the painful dilemmas of the human condition.
Yet when it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz! "Pessimism" is considered a legitimate criticism of observations of human nature, and people expect theories to be a source of sentimental uplift. "Shakespeare had no conscience; neither do I," said George Bernard Shaw. This was not a confession of psychopathy but an affirmation of a good playwright's obligation to take every character's point of view seriously. Scientists of human behavior have the same obligation, and it does not require them to turn off their consciences in the spheres in which they must be exercised.
Poets and novelists have made many of the points of this book with greater wit and power than any academic scribbler could hope to do. They allow me to conclude the book by revisiting some of its main themes without merely repeating them. What follows are five vignettes from literature that capture, for me, some of the morals of the sciences of human nature. They underscore that the discoveries of those sciences should be faced not with fear and loathing but with the balance and discernment we use when we reflect on human nature in the rest of our lives.
~
The Brain -- is wider than the Sky -- For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and you -- beside --
The Brain is deeper than the sea -- For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue -- The one the other will absorb --
As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --
The Brain is just the weight of God -- For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound -- And they will differ -- if they do --
As Syllable from Sound --
The first two verses of Emily Dickinson's "The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky" express the grandeur in the view of the mind as consisting in the activity of the brain. 2 Here and in her other poems, Dickinson refers to "the brain," not {424} "the soul" or even "the mind," as if to remind her readers that the seat of our thought and experience is a
hunk of matter. Yes, science is, in a sense, "reducing" us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three- pound organ. But what an organ! In its staggering complexity, its explosive combinatorial computation, and its limitless ability to imagine real and hypothetical worlds, the brain, truly, is wider than the sky. The poem itself proves it. Simply to understand the comparison in each verse, the brain of the reader must contain the sky and absorb
? ? ? ? the sea and visualize each one at the same scale as the brain itself.
The enigmatic final verse, with its startling image of God and the brain being hefted like cabbages, has puzzled readers since the poem was published. Some read it as creationism (God made the brain), others as atheism (the brain thought up God). The simile with phonology -- sound is a seamless continuum, a syllable is a demarcated unit of it -- suggests a kind of pantheism: God is everywhere and nowhere, and every brain incarnates a finite measure of divinity. The loophole "if they do" suggests mysticism -- the brain and God may somehow be the same thing -- and, of course, agnosticism. The ambiguity is surely intentional, and I doubt that anyone could defend a single interpretation as the correct one.
I like to read the verse as suggesting that the mind, in contemplating its place in the cosmos, at some point reaches its own limitations and runs into puzzles that seem to belong in a separate, divine realm. Free will and subjective experience, for example, are alien to our concept of causation and feel like a divine spark inside us. Morality and meaning seem to inhere in a reality that exists independent of our judgments. But that separateness may be the illusion of a brain that makes it impossible for us not to think they are separate from us. Ultimately we have no way of knowing, because we are our brains and have no way of stepping outside them to check. But if we are thereby trapped, it is a trap that we can hardly bemoan, for it is wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and perhaps as weighty as God.
~
Kurt Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron" is as transparent as Dickinson's poem is cryptic. Here is how it begins:
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. 3 {425}
The Handicapper General enforces equality by neutralizing any inherited (hence undeserved) asset. Intelligent people have to wear radios in their ears tuned to a government transmitter that sends out a sharp noise every twenty seconds (such as the sound of a milk bottle struck with a ball-peen hammer) to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of their brains. Ballerinas are laden with bags of birdshot and their faces are hidden by masks so that no one can feel bad at seeing someone prettier or more graceful than they. Newscasters are selected for their speech impediments. The hero of the story is a multiply gifted teenager forced to wear headphones, thick wavy glasses, three hundred pounds of scrap iron, and black caps on half his teeth. The story is about his ill-fated rebellion.
Subtle it is not, but "Harrison Bergeron" is a witty reductio of an all too common fallacy. The ideal of political equality is not a guarantee that people are innately indistinguishable. It is a policy to treat people in certain spheres (justice, education, politics) on the basis of their individual merits rather than the statistics of any group they belong to. And it is a policy to recognize inalienable rights in all people by virtue of the fact that they are sentient human beings. Policies that insist that people be identical in their outcomes must impose costs on humans who, like all living things, vary in their biological endowment. Since talents by definition are rare, and can be fully realized only in rare circumstances, it is easier to achieve forced equality by lowering the top (and thereby depriving everyone of the fruits of people's talents) than by raising the bottom. In Vonnegut's America of 2081 the desire for equality of outcome is played out as a farce, but in the twentieth century it frequently led to real crimes against humanity, and in our own society the entire issue is often a taboo.
Vonnegut is a beloved author who has never been called a racist, sexist, elitist, or Social Darwinist. Imagine the reaction if he had stated his message in declarative sentences rather than in a satirical story. Every generation has its designated jokers, from Shakespearean fools to Lenny Bruce, who give voice to truths that are unmentionable in polite society. Today part-time humorists like Vonnegut, and full-time ones like Richard Pryor, Dave Barry, and the writers of The Onion, are continuing that tradition.
~
Vonnegut's dystopian fantasy was played out as a story-length farce, but the most famous of such fantasies was played out as a novel-length nightmare. George Orwell's 1984 is a vivid depiction of what life would look like if the repressive strands of society and government were extrapolated into the future. In the half-century since the novel was published, many developments have been condemned because of their associations to Orwell's world: government euphemism, national identity cards, surveillance cameras, personal data on the Internet, and even, in the first television commercial for the {426} Macintosh computer, the IBM PC. No other work of fiction has had such an impact on people's opinions of real-world issues.
? ? ? Nineteen Eighty-four was unforgettable literature, not just a political screed, because of the way Orwell thought through the details of how his society would work. Every component of the nightmare interlocked with the others to form a rich and credible whole: the omnipresent government, the eternal war with shifting enemies, the totalitarian control of the media and private life, the Newspeak language, the constant threat of personal betrayal.
Less widely known is that the regime had a well-articulated philosophy. It is explained to Winston Smith in the harrowing sequence in which he is strapped to a table and alternately tortured and lectured by the government agent O'Brien. The philosophy of the regime is thoroughly postmodernist, O'Brien explains (without, of course, using the word). When Winston objects that the Party cannot realize its slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past," O'Brien replies:
You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.
~
So what happened in 1910 that supposedly changed human nature? The event that stood out in Virginia Woolf's recollection was a London exhibition of the paintings of the post-Impressionists, including Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and van Gogh. It was an unveiling of the movement called modernism, and when Woolf wrote her declaration in the 1920s, the movement was taking over the arts.
Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast {410} aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes. Modernist architecture culminated both in the glass-and-steel towers of multinational corporations and in the dreary high-rises of American housing projects, postwar British council flats, and Soviet apartment blocks.
Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Victorian era and to the nai? ve bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was supposed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place. And science, supposedly, was offering the same message. According to the version that trickled into the humanities, Freud showed that behavior springs from unconscious and irrational impulses, Einstein showed that time and space can be defined only relative to an observer, and Heisenberg showed that the position and momentum of an object were inherently uncertain because they were affected by the act of observation. Much later, this embroidery of physics inspired the famous hoax in which the physicist Alan Sokal successfully published a paper filled with gibberish in the journal Social Text. 47
But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois pleasure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda. In a review of a book defending the mission of modernism, the critic Frederick Turner explains them:
The great project of modern art was to diagnose, and cure, the sickness unto death of modern humankind. . . . [Its artistic mission] is to identify and strip away the false sense of routine experience and interpretive framing provided by conformist mass commercial society, and to make us experience nakedly and anew the immediacy of reality through our peeled and rejuvenated senses. This therapeutic work is also a spiritual {411} mission, in that a community of such transformed human beings would, in theory, be able to construct a better kind of society. The enemies of the process are cooptation, commercial exploitation and reproduction, and kitsch. . . . Fresh, raw experience -- to which artists have an unmediated and childlike access -- is routinized, compartmentalized, and dulled into insensibility by society. 48
Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible.
The goal of postmodernist art is to help us break out of this prison. The artists try to preempt cultural motifs and representational techniques by taking capitalist icons (such as ads, package designs, and pinup photos) and defacing them, exaggerating them, or presenting them in odd contexts. The earliest examples were Andy Warhol's paintings of soup can labels and his repetitive false-color images of Marilyn Monroe. More recent ones include the Whitney Museum's "Black Male" exhibit described in Chapter 12 and Cindy Sherman's photographs of grotesquely assembled bi-gendered mannequins. (I saw them as part of an MIT exhibit that explored "the female body as a site of conflicting desires, and femininity as a taut web of social expectations, historical assumptions, and ideological constructions. ") In postmodernist literature, authors comment on what they are writing while they are writing it. In postmodernist architecture, materials and details from different kinds of buildings and historical periods are thrown together in incongruous ways, such as an awning made of chain-link fencing in a fancy shopping mall or Corinthian columns holding up nothing on the top of a sleek skyscraper. Postmodernist films contain sly references to the filmmaking process or to earlier films. In all these forms, irony, self-referential allusions, and the pretense of not taking the work seriously are meant to draw attention to the representations themselves, which (according to the doctrine) we are ordinarily in danger of mistaking for reality.
~
? ? ? ? Once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for
? their decline and fall become all {412} too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability -- stripping away pretense -- to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!
Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction. As we saw in preceding chapters, the visual system of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects. We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to feed us information about the consequential things out there, like rocks, cliffs, animals, and other people and their intentions.
Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical structure of the world. It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one. 49 Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play. 50
When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of art at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with them and what effect they hope to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of course, people can be taken in by a clever liar, but they are not trapped in a false world of words and images and in need of rescue by postmodernist artists.
Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, especially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited. 51 Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes from the desire for attention on the part of the artists. {413}
In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the senses. On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and lightweight. 52 In his 1913 book Art, the critic Clive Bell (Virginia Woolf's brother-in-law and Quentin's father) argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences. 53 People use beautiful in phrases like "beautiful huntin' and shootin'," he wrote, or worse, to refer to beautiful women. Bell assimilated the behaviorist psychology of his day and argued that ordinary people come to enjoy art by a process of Pavlovian conditioning. They appreciate a painting only if it depicts a beautiful woman, music only if it evokes "emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces," and poetry only if it arouses feelings like the ones once felt for the vicar's daughter. Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty. "54 Postmodernists were even more dismissive. Beauty, they said, consists of arbitrary standards dictated by an elite. It enslaves women by forcing them to conform to unrealistic ideals, and it panders to market-oriented art collectors. 55
To be fair, modernism comprises many styles and artists, and not all of them rejected beauty and other human sensibilities. At its best, modernist design perfected a visual elegance and an aesthetic of form-following-function that were welcome alternatives to Victorian bric-a-brac and ostentatious displays of wealth. The art movements opened up new stylistic possibilities, including motifs from Africa and Oceania. The fiction and poetry offered invigorating intellectual workouts, and countered a sentimental romanticism that saw art as a spontaneous overflow of the artist's personality and emotion. The problem with modernism was that its philosophy did not acknowledge the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure. As its denial of beauty became an orthodoxy, and as its aesthetic successes were appropriated into {414} commercial culture (such as minimalism in graphic design), modernism left nowhere for artists to go.
Quentin Bell suggested that when the variations within a genre are exhausted, people avail themselves of a different canon of status, which he added to Veblen's list. In "conspicuous outrage," bad boys (and girls) flaunt their ability to get away with shocking the bourgeoisie. 56 The never-ending campaign by postmodernist artists to attract the attention of a jaded public progressed from puzzling audiences to doing everything they could to offend them. Everyone has heard of the notorious cases: Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of sadomasochistic acts, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (a photo of a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine), Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung, and the nine-hour performance piece "Flag Fuck (w/Beef) #17B," in which Ivan Hubiak danced on stage wearing an American flag as a diaper while draping himself with raw meat. Actually, this last one never happened; it was invented by writers for the satirical newspaper The Onion in an article entitled "Performance Artist Shocks U. S. Out of Apathetic Slumber. "57 But I bet I had you fooled.
Another result is that elite art could no longer be appreciated without a support team of critics and theoreticians. They did not simply evaluate and interpret art, like movie critics or book reviewers, but supplied the art with its rationale. Tom Wolfe wrote The Painted Word after reading an art review in the New York Times that criticized realist painting because it lacked "something crucial," namely, "a persuasive theory. " Wolfe explains:
Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time. . . . All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer -- waiting, waiting, forever waiting for. . . it. . . for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there -- waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well -- how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not "seeing is believing," you ninny, but "believing is seeing," for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. 58 {415}
Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for "linguistic transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world more radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity. 59 This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles. "60 In 1998, first prize went to the lauded professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest, assures us that this is not a satire. The rules of the contest forbid it: "Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread. " A final blind spot to human nature is the failure of contemporary artists and theorists to deconstruct their own moral pretensions. Artists and critics have long believed that an appreciation of elite art is ennobling and have spoken of cultural philistines in tones ordinarily reserved for child molesters (as we see in the two meanings of the word barbarian). The affectation of social reform that surrounds modernism and postmodernism is part of this tradition. Though moral sophistication requires an appreciation of history and cultural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are a particularly good way to instill it compared with middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional education. The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to how people entertain themselves in their leisure time. The conviction that artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from
? ? ? ? ? ? ? the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry for status (see Chapter 15). As the critic George Steiner has pointed out, "We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. "61 Conversely there must be many unlettered people who give blood, risk their {416} lives as volunteer firefighters, or adopt handicapped children, but whose opinion of modern art is "My four-year-old daughter could have done that. "
The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to be proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal lives, and many embraced fascism or Stalinism. The modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the September 11,2001, terrorist attacks as "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" and added, enviously, that "artists, too, sometimes go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world. "62 Nor is the theory of postmodernism especially progressive. A denial of objective reality is no friend to moral progress, because it prevents one from saying, for example, that slavery or the Holocaust really took place. And as Adam Gopnik has pointed out, the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like "racism is bad. " But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class -- personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy -- are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass Utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it's none of our damn business.
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
~
A revolt has begun. Museum-goers have become bored with the umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring dismembered torsos or hundreds of pounds of lard chewed up and spat out by the artist. 63 Graduate students in the humanities are grumbling in emails and conference hallways about being locked out of the job market unless they write in gibberish while randomly dropping the names of authorities like Foucault and Butler. Maverick scholars are doffing the blinders that prevented them from looking at exciting developments in the sciences of human nature. And younger artists are wondering how the art world got itself into the bizarre place in which beauty is a dirty word. These currents of discontent are coming together in a new philosophy of the arts, one that is consilient with the sciences and respectful of the minds {417} and senses of human beings. It is taking shape both in the community of artists and in the community of critics and scholars.
In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly announced a new "movement" in the arts, Derriere Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative. 64 If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement "a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters. "65 Ideas similar to Derriere Guard's have sprung up in movements called the Radical Center, Natural Classicism, the New Formalism, the New Narrativism, Stuckism, the Return of Beauty, and No Mo Po Mo. 66 The movements combine high and low culture and are opposed equally to the postmodernist left, with its disdain for beauty and artistry, and to the cultural right, with its narrow canons of "great works" and fire-and-brimstone sermons on the decline of civilization. It includes classically trained musicians who mix classical and popular compositions, realist painters and sculptors, verse poets, journalistic novelists, and dance directors and performance artists who use rhythm and melody in their work.
Within the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to reestablish human nature at the center of any understanding of the arts. They include Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Patrick Hogan, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner. 67 A good grasp of how the mind works is indispensable to the arts and humanities for at least two reasons.
One is that the real medium of artists, whatever their genre, is human mental representations. Oil paint, moving limbs, and printed words cannot penetrate the brain directly. They trigger a cascade of neural events that begin with the sense organs and culminate in thoughts, emotions, and memories. Cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, which map out the cascade, offer a wealth of information to anyone who wants to understand how artists achieve their effects. Vision research can illuminate painting and sculpture.
68 Psycho-acoustics and linguistics can enrich the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? study of music. 69 Linguistics can give insight on poetry, metaphor, and literary style. 70 Mental imagery research helps to explain the techniques of narrative prose. 71 The theory of mind (intuitive psychology) can shed light on our ability to entertain fictional worlds. 72 The study of visual attention and short-term memory can help explain the experience of cinema. 73 And evolutionary aesthetics can help explain the feelings of beauty and pleasure that can accompany all of these acts of perception. 74
Ironically, the early modernist painters were avid consumers of perception research. It may have been introduced to them by Gertrude Stein, who studied psychology with William James at Harvard and conducted research on {418} visual attention under his supervision. 75 The Bauhaus designers and artists, too, were appreciators of perceptual psychology, particularly the contemporary Gestalt school. 76 But the consilience was lost as the two cultures drifted apart, and only recently have they begun to come back together. I predict that the application of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to the arts will become a growth area in criticism and scholarship.
The other point of contact may be more important still. Ultimately what draws us to a work of art is not just the sensory experience of the medium but its emotional content and insight into the human condition. And these tap into the timeless tragedies of our biological predicament: our mortality, our finite knowledge and wisdom, the differences among us, and our conflicts of interest with friends, neighbors, relatives, and lovers. All are topics of the sciences of human nature.
The idea that art should reflect the perennial and universal qualities of the human species is not new. Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays, comments on the lasting appeal of that great intuitive psychologist:
Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.
Today we may be seeing a new convergence of explorations of the human condition by artists and scientists -- not because scientists are trying to take over the humanities, but because artists and humanists are beginning to look to the sciences, or at least to the scientific mindset that sees us as a species with a complex psychological endowment. In explaining this connection I cannot hope to compete with the words of the artists themselves, and I will conclude with the overtures of three fine novelists.
Iris Murdoch, haunted by the origins of the moral sense, comments on its endurance in fiction:
We make, in many respects though not in all, the same kinds of moral judgments as the Greeks did, and we recognize good or decent people in times and literatures remote from our own. Patroclus, Antigone, Cordelia, Mr. Knightley, Alyosha. Patroclus' invariable kindness. Cordelia's truthfulness. Alyosha telling his father not to be afraid of hell. It is just as important that Patroclus should be kind to the captive {419} women as that Emma should be kind to Miss Bates, and we feel this importance in an immediate and natural way in both cases in spite of the fact that nearly three thousand years divide the writers. And this, when one reflects on it, is a remarkable testimony to the existence of a single durable human nature. 77
A. S. Byatt, asked by the editors of the New York Times Magazine for the best narrative of the millennium, picked the story of Scheherazade:
The stories in "The Thousand and One Nights" . . . are stories about storytelling without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and death and money and food and other human necessities. Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentences of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles, and ends. 78
John Updike, also asked for reflections at the turn of the millennium, commented on the future of his own profession. "A writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true," he wrote, and "the unit of truth, at least for a fiction writer, is the human animal, belonging to the species Homo sapiens, unchanged for at least 100,000 years. "
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Evolution moves more slowly than history, and much slower than the technology of recent centuries; surely sociobiology, surprisingly maligned in some scientific quarters, performs a useful service in investigating what traits are innate and which are acquired. What kind of cultural software can our evolved hard-wiring support? Fiction, in its groping way, is drawn to those moments of discomfort when society asks more than its individual members can, or wish to, provide. Ordinary people experiencing friction on the page is what warms our hands and hearts as we write. . . .
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
So conflicted and ingenious a creature makes an endlessly interesting {420} focus for the meditations of fiction. It seems to me true that Homo sapiens will never settle into any Utopia so complacently as to relax all its conflicts and erase all its perversity-breeding neediness. 79
Literature has three voices, wrote the scholar Robert Storey: those of the author, the audience, and the species. 80 These novelists are reminding us of the voice of the species, an essential constituent of all the arts, and a fitting theme with which to wrap up my own story.
<< {421} >>
THE VOICE OF THE SPECIES
The Blank Slate was an attractive vision. It promised to make racism, sexism, and class prejudice factually untenable. It appeared to be a bulwark against the kind of thinking that led to ethnic genocide. It aimed to prevent people from slipping into a premature fatalism about preventable social ills. It put a spotlight on the treatment of children, indigenous peoples, and the underclass. The Blank Slate thus became part of a secular faith and appeared to constitute the common decency of our age.
But the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering. Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of "a government of laws and not of men. " It blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions.
The Blank Slate is not some ideal that we should all hope and pray is true. No, it is an anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity, our inherent interests, and our individual preferences. Though it has pretensions of celebrating our potential, it does the opposite, because our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully complex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet. Regardless of its good and bad effects, the Blank Slate is an empirical hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and must be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is true. The modern sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution are increasingly showing that it is not true. The result is a rearguard effort to salvage the Blank Slate by disfiguring science and intellectual life: {422} denying the possibility of objectivity and truth, dumbing down issues into dichotomies, replacing facts and logic with political posturing.
The Blank Slate became so entrenched in intellectual life that the prospect of doing without it can be deeply unsettling. In topics from childrearing to sexuality, from natural foods to violence, ideas that seemed immoral even to question turn out to be not just questionable but probably wrong. Even people with no ideological ax to grind can feel a sense of vertigo when they learn of such taboos being broken: "O brave new world that has such people in it! " Is science leading to a place where prejudice is all right, where children may be neglected, where Machiavellianism is accepted, where inequality and violence are met with resignation, where people are treated like machines?
Not at all! By unhandcuffing widely shared values from moribund factual dogmas, the rationale for those values can only become clearer. We understand why we condemn prejudice, cruelty to children, and violence against women, and can focus our efforts on how to implement the goals we value most. We thereby protect those goals against the upheavals of factual understanding that science perennially delivers.
Abandoning the Blank Slate, in any case, is not as radical as it might first appear. True, it is a revolution in many
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? sectors of modern intellectual life. But except for a few intellectuals who have let their theories get the better of them, it is not a revolution in the world views of most people. I suspect that few people really believe, deep down, that boys and girls are interchangeable, that all differences in intelligence come from the environment, that parents can micromanage the personalities of their children, that humans are born free of selfish tendencies, or that appealing stories, melodies, and faces are arbitrary social constructions. Margaret Mead, an icon of twentieth-century egalitarianism, told her daughter that she credited her own intellectual talent to her genes, and I can confirm that such split personalities are common among academics. 1 Scholars who publicly deny that intelligence is a meaningful concept treat it as anything but meaningless in their professional lives. Those who argue that gender differences are a reversible social construction do not treat them that way in their advice to their daughters, their dealings with the opposite sex, and their unguarded gossip, humor, and reflections on their lives.
Acknowledging human nature does not mean overturning our personal world views, and I would have nothing to suggest as a replacement if it did. It means only taking intellectual life out of its parallel universe and reuniting it with science and, when it is borne out by science, with common sense. The alternative is to make intellectual life increasingly irrelevant to human affairs, to turn intellectuals into hypocrites, and to turn everyone else into anti- intellectuals.
Scientists and public intellectuals are not the only people who have pondered how the mind works. We are all psychologists, and some people, without {423} the benefit of credentials, are great psychologists. Among them are poets and novelists, whose business, as we saw in the preceding chapter, is to create "just representations of general nature. " Paradoxically, in today's intellectual climate novelists may have a clearer mandate than scientists to speak the truth about human nature. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives happily ever after. Life is nothing like that, we note, and we look to the arts for edification about the painful dilemmas of the human condition.
Yet when it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz! "Pessimism" is considered a legitimate criticism of observations of human nature, and people expect theories to be a source of sentimental uplift. "Shakespeare had no conscience; neither do I," said George Bernard Shaw. This was not a confession of psychopathy but an affirmation of a good playwright's obligation to take every character's point of view seriously. Scientists of human behavior have the same obligation, and it does not require them to turn off their consciences in the spheres in which they must be exercised.
Poets and novelists have made many of the points of this book with greater wit and power than any academic scribbler could hope to do. They allow me to conclude the book by revisiting some of its main themes without merely repeating them. What follows are five vignettes from literature that capture, for me, some of the morals of the sciences of human nature. They underscore that the discoveries of those sciences should be faced not with fear and loathing but with the balance and discernment we use when we reflect on human nature in the rest of our lives.
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The Brain -- is wider than the Sky -- For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and you -- beside --
The Brain is deeper than the sea -- For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue -- The one the other will absorb --
As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --
The Brain is just the weight of God -- For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound -- And they will differ -- if they do --
As Syllable from Sound --
The first two verses of Emily Dickinson's "The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky" express the grandeur in the view of the mind as consisting in the activity of the brain. 2 Here and in her other poems, Dickinson refers to "the brain," not {424} "the soul" or even "the mind," as if to remind her readers that the seat of our thought and experience is a
hunk of matter. Yes, science is, in a sense, "reducing" us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three- pound organ. But what an organ! In its staggering complexity, its explosive combinatorial computation, and its limitless ability to imagine real and hypothetical worlds, the brain, truly, is wider than the sky. The poem itself proves it. Simply to understand the comparison in each verse, the brain of the reader must contain the sky and absorb
? ? ? ? the sea and visualize each one at the same scale as the brain itself.
The enigmatic final verse, with its startling image of God and the brain being hefted like cabbages, has puzzled readers since the poem was published. Some read it as creationism (God made the brain), others as atheism (the brain thought up God). The simile with phonology -- sound is a seamless continuum, a syllable is a demarcated unit of it -- suggests a kind of pantheism: God is everywhere and nowhere, and every brain incarnates a finite measure of divinity. The loophole "if they do" suggests mysticism -- the brain and God may somehow be the same thing -- and, of course, agnosticism. The ambiguity is surely intentional, and I doubt that anyone could defend a single interpretation as the correct one.
I like to read the verse as suggesting that the mind, in contemplating its place in the cosmos, at some point reaches its own limitations and runs into puzzles that seem to belong in a separate, divine realm. Free will and subjective experience, for example, are alien to our concept of causation and feel like a divine spark inside us. Morality and meaning seem to inhere in a reality that exists independent of our judgments. But that separateness may be the illusion of a brain that makes it impossible for us not to think they are separate from us. Ultimately we have no way of knowing, because we are our brains and have no way of stepping outside them to check. But if we are thereby trapped, it is a trap that we can hardly bemoan, for it is wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and perhaps as weighty as God.
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Kurt Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron" is as transparent as Dickinson's poem is cryptic. Here is how it begins:
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. 3 {425}
The Handicapper General enforces equality by neutralizing any inherited (hence undeserved) asset. Intelligent people have to wear radios in their ears tuned to a government transmitter that sends out a sharp noise every twenty seconds (such as the sound of a milk bottle struck with a ball-peen hammer) to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of their brains. Ballerinas are laden with bags of birdshot and their faces are hidden by masks so that no one can feel bad at seeing someone prettier or more graceful than they. Newscasters are selected for their speech impediments. The hero of the story is a multiply gifted teenager forced to wear headphones, thick wavy glasses, three hundred pounds of scrap iron, and black caps on half his teeth. The story is about his ill-fated rebellion.
Subtle it is not, but "Harrison Bergeron" is a witty reductio of an all too common fallacy. The ideal of political equality is not a guarantee that people are innately indistinguishable. It is a policy to treat people in certain spheres (justice, education, politics) on the basis of their individual merits rather than the statistics of any group they belong to. And it is a policy to recognize inalienable rights in all people by virtue of the fact that they are sentient human beings. Policies that insist that people be identical in their outcomes must impose costs on humans who, like all living things, vary in their biological endowment. Since talents by definition are rare, and can be fully realized only in rare circumstances, it is easier to achieve forced equality by lowering the top (and thereby depriving everyone of the fruits of people's talents) than by raising the bottom. In Vonnegut's America of 2081 the desire for equality of outcome is played out as a farce, but in the twentieth century it frequently led to real crimes against humanity, and in our own society the entire issue is often a taboo.
Vonnegut is a beloved author who has never been called a racist, sexist, elitist, or Social Darwinist. Imagine the reaction if he had stated his message in declarative sentences rather than in a satirical story. Every generation has its designated jokers, from Shakespearean fools to Lenny Bruce, who give voice to truths that are unmentionable in polite society. Today part-time humorists like Vonnegut, and full-time ones like Richard Pryor, Dave Barry, and the writers of The Onion, are continuing that tradition.
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Vonnegut's dystopian fantasy was played out as a story-length farce, but the most famous of such fantasies was played out as a novel-length nightmare. George Orwell's 1984 is a vivid depiction of what life would look like if the repressive strands of society and government were extrapolated into the future. In the half-century since the novel was published, many developments have been condemned because of their associations to Orwell's world: government euphemism, national identity cards, surveillance cameras, personal data on the Internet, and even, in the first television commercial for the {426} Macintosh computer, the IBM PC. No other work of fiction has had such an impact on people's opinions of real-world issues.
? ? ? Nineteen Eighty-four was unforgettable literature, not just a political screed, because of the way Orwell thought through the details of how his society would work. Every component of the nightmare interlocked with the others to form a rich and credible whole: the omnipresent government, the eternal war with shifting enemies, the totalitarian control of the media and private life, the Newspeak language, the constant threat of personal betrayal.
Less widely known is that the regime had a well-articulated philosophy. It is explained to Winston Smith in the harrowing sequence in which he is strapped to a table and alternately tortured and lectured by the government agent O'Brien. The philosophy of the regime is thoroughly postmodernist, O'Brien explains (without, of course, using the word). When Winston objects that the Party cannot realize its slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past," O'Brien replies:
You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.
