No More Learning

Multidecade, child-obsessed parenting, Harris points out, is an evolutionarily recent practice. In foraging societies, mothers carry their children on their hips or backs and nurse them on demand until the next child arrives two to four years later. 49 The child is then dumped into a play group with his older siblings and cousins, switching from being the beneficiary of almost all of the mother's attention to almost none of it. Children sink or swim in the milieu of other children.
Children are not just attracted to the norms of their peers; to some degree they are immune to the expectations of their parents. The theory of parent-offspring conflict predicts that parents do not always socialize a child in the child's best
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? interests. So even if children acquiesce to their parents' rewards, punishments, examples, and naggings for the time being -- because they are smaller and have no choice -- they should not, according to the theory, allow their personalities to be shaped by these tactics. Children must learn what it takes to gain status among their peers, because status at one age gives them a leg up in the struggle for status at the next, including the young-adult stages in which they first compete for the attention of the opposite sex. 50
What first attracted me to Harris's theory was its ability to explain a {391} half-dozen puzzling facts in the part of psychology I work in the most, language. 51 Psycholinguists argue a lot about heredity and environment, but they all
equate "the environment" with "parents. " But many phenomena of children's language development just don't fit that equation. In traditional cultures, mothers don't say much to their children until they are old enough to hold up their end of the conversation; the children pick up language from other children. People's accents almost always resemble the accents of their childhood peers, not the accents of their parents. Children of immigrants acquire the language of their adopted homeland perfectly, without a foreign accent, as long as they have access to native speaking peers. They then try to force their parents to switch to the new language, and if they succeed, they may forget the mother tongue entirely. The same is true of hearing children of deaf parents, who learn the spoken language of their community without a hitch. Children thrown together without a common language from the grownups will quickly invent \ one; that is how creole languages, and the signed languages of the deaf, came into being. Now, a particular language like English or Japanese (as opposed to the instinct for language in general) is an example of learned social behavior par excellence. If children cultivate a fine ear for the nuances of their peers' speech, and if they cast their lot with their peers' language over their parents', it suggests that their social antennae are aimed peerward.
Children of immigrants soak up not just the language of their adopted homeland but the culture as well. For their entire lives, my shtetl-born grandparents were strangers in a strange land. Cars, banks, doctors, schools, and the urban concept of time left them baffled, and if the term "dysfunctional family" had been around in the 1930s and 1940s it would surely have applied to them. Nevertheless, my father, growing up in a community of immigrants who had arrived in different decades, gravitated to other children and families who knew the ropes, and ended up happy and successful. Such stories are common in chronicles of the immigrant experience. 52 So why do we insist that children's parents are the key to how they turn out?
Studies also confirm what every parent knows but what no one bothers to reconcile with theories of child development: that whether adolescents smoke, get into scrapes with the law, or commit serious crimes depends far more on what their peers do than on what their parents do. 53 Harris comments on a popular theory that children become delinquents to achieve "mature status," that is, adult power and privilege: "If teenagers wanted to be like adults they wouldn't be shoplifting nailpolish from drugstores or hanging off overpasses to spray I love you lisa on the arch. If they really aspired to 'mature status' they would be doing boring adult things like sorting the laundry and figuring out their income taxes. "54
Even the rare finding of an effect of the shared environment, and the equally elusive finding of an interaction between genes and the environment, {392} emerge only when we substitute peers for parents in the "environment" part of the equation. Children who grow up in the same home tend to resemble each other in their vulnerability to delinquency, regardless of how closely related they are. But that similarity only holds if they are close in age and spend time together outside the home -- which suggests they belong to the same peer group. 55 And in a large Danish adoption study, the biological children of convicts were somewhat more likely to get into trouble than the biological children of law-abiding citizens, which suggests a small across-the-board effect of the genes. But the susceptibility to crime was multiplied if they were adopted by parents who were criminals themselves and who lived in a large city, which suggests that the genetically at-risk children grew up in a high-crime neighborhood. 56
It's not that parents "don't matter. " In many ways parents matter a great deal. For most of human existence, the most important thing parents did for their children was keep them alive. Parents can certainly harm their children by abusing or neglecting them. Children appear to need some kind of nurturing figure in their early years, though it needn't be a parent, and possibly not even an adult: young orphans and refugees often turn out relatively well if they had the comfort of other children, even if they had no parents or other adults around them. 57 (This does not mean that the children were happy, but contrary to popular belief, unhappy children do not necessarily turn into dysfunctional adults. ) Parents select an environment for their children and thereby select a peer group. They provide their children with skills and knowledge, such as reading and playing a musical instrument. And they certainly may affect their children's behavior in the home, just as any powerful people can affect behavior within their fiefdom. But parents' behavior does not seem to shape their children's intelligence or personality over the long term. Upon hearing this, many people ask, "So you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my child? " It is a revealing question, and I will consider it at the end of the chapter. But first, the public reaction to Harris's theory, and my own assessment.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ~
The Nurture Assumption was, by any standard, a major contribution to modern intellectual life. Though the main idea is at first counterintuitive, the book has the ring of truth, with real children running through it, not compliant little theoretical constructs that no one ever meets in real life. Harris backed up her hypothesis with voluminous data from many fields, interpreted with a keen analytical eye, and with a rarity in the social sciences: proposals for new empirical tests that might falsify it. The book also contains original policy suggestions on tough problems for which we sorely need new ideas, such as failing schools, teenage smoking, and juvenile delinquency. Even if major parts turn out to be wrong, the book forces one to think about childhood, and therefore what makes us what we are, in a fresh and insightful way. {393}
So what was the public reaction? The first popular presentation of the theory was in a few pages of my book How the Mind Works, in which I presented the research behind the three laws of behavioral genetics and Harris's 1995 paper explaining them. Many reviews singled out those pages for discussion, such as the following analysis by Margaret Wertheim:
Never in my fifteen years as a science writer have I seen the subject I love so dearly abused so greatly. . . . What is so appalling here -- quite aside from the laughable grasp of family dynamics -- is the misrepresentation of science. Science can never prove what percentage of personality is caused by upbringing. . . . By suggesting that it can and does, he invites us to see scientists as at best nai? ve and at worst fascistic. It is precisely this kind of claim that, in my opinion, is giving science a bad name and is helping to fuel a significant backlash against it. 58
Wertheim, of course, confused "the percentage of personality that is caused by upbringing," which is indeed meaningless, with the percentage of variance in personality that is caused by variation in upbringing, which behavioral geneticists study all the time. And scientists can show, and have shown, that siblings are as similar when reared apart as when reared together and that adoptive siblings are not similar at all, which means that the conventional wisdom about "family dynamics" is simply wrong.
Wertheim is sympathetic to radical science and social constructionism. Her reaction is a sign of how behavioral genetics -- and Harris's theory, which aims to explain its findings -- touches a nerve on the political left, with its traditional emphasis on the malleability of children. The psychologist Oliver James wrote, "Harris's book can be safely ignored as yet another application of Friedmanite economics to the social realm" (an allusion to the economist who, according to James, stands for the idea that individuals should assume responsibility for their own lives). He suggested that Harris was downplaying research on parenting because it "would indirectly pose a real challenge to the theories of advanced consumer capitalism: if what parents do is critical, it calls into question the low priority given to it, compared with the pursuit of profit. "59 Actually, this fanciful diagnosis has it backwards. The most vehement propagandists for the importance of parents are the beer and tobacco companies, which sponsor ad campaigns such as "Family Talk About Drinking" and "Parents Should Talk to Kids About Not Smoking. " (A sample ad: "Daughter speaks to the camera, as if it were her mother, reassuring her that her words about not smoking are with her, even when her mother is not with her. ")60 By putting the onus on parents to keep teens sober and smoke- free, these advanced consumer capitalists can divert attention from their own massive influence on adolescent peer culture. {394}
In any case, Harris drew even more venom from the political right. The columnist John Leo called her theory "stupid," ridiculed her lack of a Ph. D. and a university affiliation, and compared her to deniers of the Holocaust. He ended his column, "It's not time to celebrate a foolish book that justifies self-absorption and makes non-parenting a respectable, mainstream activity. "61
Why do conservatives hate the theory too? An axiom of the contemporary American right is that the traditional family is under assault from feminists, a licentious popular culture, and left-wing social analysts. The root of social ills, conservatives believe, is the failure of parents to teach their children discipline and values, a failure that can be traced to working mothers, absent fathers, easy divorce, and a welfare system that rewards young women for having babies out of wedlock. When the unmarried sitcom character Murphy Brown had a child, Vice President Dan Quayle denounced her for setting a bad example for American women (a headline of the time: "Murphy Has a Baby; Quayle Has a Cow"). Harris's review showing that Murphy's baby would probably have turned out fine was not welcome. (To be fair, concerns about fatherlessness may not be ill founded, but the problem may be the absence of fathers from all the families in a neighborhood rather than the absence of a father from an individual family. These fatherless children lack access to other families in which an adult male is present, and worse, they have access to packs of single men, whose values trickle down to their own peer groups. ) Also, the Great Satan, Hillary Clinton, had written a book on childhood called It Takes a Village, based on the African saying "It takes a village to raise a child. " Conservatives despised it because they thought the whole idea was a pretext for social engineers to take childrearing out of the hands of parents and give it to the government. But Harris quoted the saying too, and her theory implies
? ? ? ? ? ? there is some truth to it.
And then there were the experts. Brazelton called the thesis "absurd. "62 Jerome Kagan, one of the deans of scholarly
research on children, said, "I'm embarrassed for psychology. "63 Another developmental psychologist, Frank Farley, told Newsweek:
She's all wrong. She's taking an extreme position based on a limited set of data. Her thesis is absurd on its face, but consider what might happen if parents believe this stuff! Will it free some to mistreat their kids, since "it doesn't matter"? Will it tell parents who are tired after a long day that they needn't bother even paying any attention to their kid since "it doesn't matter"? 64
Kagan and other developmentalists told reporters about the "many, many good studies that show parents can affect how children turn out. "
What were these "many, many good studies"? In the Boston Globe, Kagan {395} laid out what he called the "ample evidence. "65 He mentioned the usual see-no-genetics studies showing that smart parents have smart children, verbal parents have verbal children, and so on. He observed that "a 6-year-old raised in New England will be very different from a 6-year-old raised in Malaysia, Uganda, or the southern tip of Argentina. The reason is that they experience different child-rearing practices by their parents. " But of course a child growing up in Malaysia has both Malaysian parents and Malaysian peers. If Kagan had considered what would happen to a six-year-old child of Malaysian parents who grew up in a New England town, he might have thought twice before using the example to illustrate the power of parenting. The other "evidence" was that when authors write their memoirs, they credit their parents, never their childhood friends, with making them what they are. An irony in these feeble arguments is that Kagan himself, in the course of a distinguished career, often chided his fellow psychologists for overlooking genetics and for accepting their culture's folk theories on childhood instead of holding them up to scientific scrutiny. I can only imagine that on this occasion he felt compelled to defenc his field against an expose by a grandmother from New Jersey. In any case, the other "good studies" produced by defensive psychologists were no more informative. 66
~
So has Harris solved the mystery of the Third Law, the unique environment that comes neither from the genes nor from the family? Not exactly. I am convinced that children are socialized -- that they acquire the values and skills of the culture -- in their peer groups, not their families. But I am not convinced, at least not yet, that peer groups explain how children develop their personalities: why they turn out shy or bold, anxious or confident, open-minded or old-school. Socialization and the development of personality are not the same thing, and peers may explain the first without necessarily explaining the second.
One way that peers could explain personality is that children in the same family may join different peer groups -- the jocks, the brains, the preppies, the punks, the Goths -- and assimilate their values. But then how do children get sorted into peer groups? If it is by their inborn traits -- smart kids join the brains, aggressive kids join the punks, and so on -- then effects of the peer group would show up as indirect effects of the genes, not as effects of the unique environment. If it is their parents' choice of neighborhoods, it would turn up as effects of the shared environment, because siblings growing up together share a neighborhood as well as a set of parents. In some cases, as with delinquency and smoking, the missing variance might be explained as an interaction between genes and peers: violence-prone adolescents become violent only in dangerous neighborhoods, addiction-prone children become smokers only in the company of peers who think smoking is cool. But those {396} interactions are unlikely to explain most of the differences among children. Let's return to our touchstone: identical twins growing up together. They share their genes, they share their family environments, and they share their peer groups, at least on average. But the correlations between them are only around 50 percent. Ergo, neither genes nor families nor peer groups can explain what makes them different.
Harris is forthcoming about this limitation, and suggests that children differentiate themselves within a peer group, not by their choice of a peer group. Within each group, some become leaders, others foot soldiers, still others jesters, loose cannons, punching bags, or peacemakers, depending on what niche is available, how suited a child is to filling it, and chance. Once a child acquires a role, it is hard to shake it off, both because other children force the child to stay in the niche and because the child specializes in the skills necessary to prosper in it. This part of the theory, Harris notes, is untested, and difficult to test, because the crucial first step -- which child fills which niche in which group -- is so capricious.
The filling of niches in peer groups, then, is largely a matter of chance. But once we allow Lady Luck into the picture, she can act at other stages in life. When reminiscing on how we got to where we are, we all can think of forks in the road where we could have gone on very different life paths. If I hadn't gone to that party, I wouldn't have met my spouse. If I hadn't picked up that brochure, I wouldn't have known about the field that would become my life's
? ? ? ? ? ? ? calling. If I hadn't answered the phone, if I hadn't missed that flight, if only I had caught that ball. Life is a pinball game in which we bounce and graze through a gantlet of chutes and bumpers. Perhaps our history of collisions and near misses explains what made us what we are. One twin was once beaten up by a bully, the other was home sick that day. One inhaled a virus, the other didn't. One twin got the top bunk bed, the other got the bottom bunk bed.
We still don't know whether these unique experiences leave their fingerprints on our intellects and personalities. But an even earlier pinball game certainly could do so, the one that wires up our brain in the womb and early childhood. As I have mentioned, the human genome cannot possibly specify every last connection among neurons. But the "environment," in the sense of information encoded by the sense organs, isn't the only other option. Chance is another. One twin lies one way in the womb and stakes out her share of the placenta, the other has to squeeze around her. A cosmic ray mutates a stretch of DNA, a neurotransmitter zigs instead of zags, the growth cone of an axon goes left instead of right, and one identical twin's brain might gel into a slightly different configuration from the other's. 67 We know this happens in the development of other organisms. Even genetically homogeneous strains of flies, mice, and worms, raised in monotonously controlled laboratories, can differ from one another. A fruit fly may {397} have more or fewer bristles under one wing than its bottlemates. One mouse may have three times as many oocytes (cells destined to become eggs) as her genetically identical sister reared in the same lab. One roundworm may live three times as long as its virtual clone in the next dish. The biologist Steven Austad commented on the roundworms' lifespans: "Astonishingly, the degree of variability they exhibit in longevity is not much less than that of a genetically mixed population of humans, who eat a variety of diets, attend to or abuse their health, and are subject to all the vagaries of circumstance -- car crashes, tainted beef, enraged postal workers -- of modern industrialized life. "68 And a roundworm is composed of only 959 cells! A human brain, with its hundred billion neurons, has even more opportunities to be buffeted by the outcomes of molecular coin flips.
If chance in development is to explain the less-than-perfect similarity of identical twins, it says something interesting about development in general. One can imagine a developmental process in which millions of small chance events cancel one another out, leaving no difference in the end product. One can imagine a different process in which a chance event could derail development entirely, or send it on a chaotic developmental path resulting in a freak or a monster. Neither of these happens to identical twins. They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being. The development of organisms must use complex feedback loops rather than prespecified blueprints. Random events can divert the trajectory of growth, but the trajectories are confined within an envelope of functioning designs for the species. Biologists refer to such developmental dynamics as robustness, buffering, or canalization. 69
If the nongenetic component of personality is the outcome of neurodevelopmental roulette, it would present us with two surprises. One is that just as the "genetic" term in the behavioral geneticist's equation is not necessarily genetic, the "environmental" term is not necessarily environmental. If the unexplained variance is a product of chance events in brain assembly, yet another chunk of our personalities would be "biologically determined" (though not genetic) and beyond the scope of the best-laid plans of parents and society.
The other surprise is that we may have to make room for a pre-scientific explanatory concept in our view of human nature -- not free will, as many people have suggested to me, but fate. It is not free will because among the traits that may differ between identical twins reared together are ones that are stubbornly involuntary. No one chooses to become schizophrenic, homosexual, musically gifted, or, for that matter, anxious or self-confident or open to experience.
But the old idea of fate -- in the sense of uncontrollable fortune, not strict predestination -- can be reconciled with modern biology once we remember the many openings for chance to operate in development. Harris,
{398} noting how recent and parochial is the belief that we can shape our children, quotes a woman living in a remote village of India in the 1950s. When asked what kind of man she hoped her child would grow into, she shrugged and replied, "It is in his fate, no matter what I want. "70
~
Not everyone is so accepting of fate, or of the other forces beyond a parent's control, like genes and peers. "I hope to God this isn't true," one mother said to the Chicago Tribune. "The thought that all this love that I'm pouring into him counts for nothing is too terrible to contemplate. "71 As with other discoveries about human nature, people hope to God it isn't true. But the truth doesn't care about our hopes, and sometimes it can force us to revisit those hopes in a liberating way.
Yes, it is disappointing that there is no algorithm for growing a happy and successful child. But would we really want to specify the traits of our children in advance, and never be delighted by the unpredictable gifts and quirks that every child brings into the world? People are appalled by human cloning and its dubious promise that parents can design their children by genetic engineering. But how different is that from the fantasy that parents can design their children by how they bring them up? Realistic parents would be less anxious parents. They could enjoy their time with their
? ? ? ? ? ? ? children rather than constantly trying to stimulate them, socialize them, and improve their characters. They could read stories to their children for the pleasure of it, not because it's good for their neurons.
Many critics accuse Harris of trying to absolve parents of responsibility for their children's lives: if the kids turn out badly, parents can say it's not their fault. But by the same token she is assigning adults responsibility for their own lives: if your life is not going well, stop moaning that it's all your parents' fault. She is rescuing mothers from fatuous theories that blame them for every misfortune that befalls their children, and from the censorious know-it-alls who make them feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to work or skip a reading of Goodnight Moon. And the theory assigns us all a collective responsibility for the health of the neighborhoods and culture in which peer groups are embedded.
Finally: "So you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my children? " What a question! Yes, of course it matters. Harris reminds her readers of the reasons.
First, parents wield enormous power over their children, and their actions can make a big difference to their happiness. Childrearing is above all an ethical responsibility. It is not OK for parents to beat, humiliate, deprive, or neglect their children, because those are awful things for a big strong person to do to a small helpless one. As Harris writes, "We may not hold their tomorrows in our hands but we surely hold their todays, and we have the power to make their todays very miserable. "72. {399}
Second, a parent and a child have a human relationship. No one ever asks, "So you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my husband or wife? " even though no one but a newlywed believes that one can change the personality of one's spouse. Husbands and wives are nice to each other (or should be) not to pound the other's personality into a desired shape but to build a deep and satisfying relationship. Imagine being told that one cannot revamp the personality of a husband or wife and replying, "The thought that all this love I'm pouring into him (or her) counts for nothing is too terrible to contemplate. " So it is with parents and children: one person's behavior toward another has consequences for the quality of the relationship between them. Over the course of a lifetime the balance of power shifts, and children, complete with memories of how they were treated, have a growing say in their dealings with their parents. As Harris puts it, "If you don't think the moral imperative is a good enough reason to be nice to your kid, try this one: Be nice to your kid when he's young so that he will be nice to you when you're old. "73 There are well-functioning adults who still shake with rage when recounting the cruelties their parents inflicted on them as children. There are others who moisten up in private moments when recalling a kindness or sacrifice made for their happiness, perhaps one that the mother or father has long forgotten. If for no other reason, parents should treat their children well to allow them to grow up with such memories.
I have found that when people hear these explanations they lower their eyes and say, somewhat embarrassedly, "Yes. I knew that. " The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship. Even the theory that children adapt to their peer group becomes less surprising when we think of them as human beings like ourselves. "Peer group" is a patronizing term we use in connection with children for what we call "friends and colleagues and associates" when we talk about ourselves. We groan when children obsess over wearing the right kind of cargo pants, but we would be just as mortified if a very large person forced us to wear pink overalls to a corporate board meeting or a polyester disco suit to an academic conference. "Being socialized by a peer group" is another way of saying "living successfully within a society," which for a social organism means "living. " It is children, above all, who are alleged to be blank slates, and that can make us forget they are people.
<< {400} >> Chapter 20
The Arts
The arts are in trouble. I didn't say it; they did: the critics, scholars, and (as we now say) content providers who make their living in the arts and humanities. According to the theater director and critic Robert Brustein:
The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasingly problematical. Serious book stores are losing their franchise; small publishing houses are closing shop; little magazines are going out of business; nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory; symphony orchestras are diluting their programs; public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of British sitcoms; classical radio stations are dwindling; museums are resorting to blockbuster shows; dance is dying. 1
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? In recent years the higher-brow magazines and presses have been filled with similar laments. Here is a sample of titles:
The Death of Literature2 ? The Decline and Fall of Literature3 ? The Decline of High Culture4 ? Have the Humanities Disciplines Collapsed? 5 ? The Humanities -- At Twilight? 6 ? Humanities in the Age of Money7 ? The Humanities' Plight8 ? Literature: An Embattled Profession9 ? Literature Lost10 ? Music's Dying Fall11 ? The Rise and Fall of English12 ? What's Happened to the Humanities? 13 ? Who Killed Culture? 14
If we are to believe the pessimists, the decline has been going on for some time. In 1948 T. S. Eliot wrote, "We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity. "15
{401}
Some of the vital signs of the arts and humanities are indeed poor. In 1997 the U. S. House of Representatives voted to kill the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Senate was able to save it only by cutting its budget nearly in half. Universities have disinvested in the humanities: since 1960, the proportion of faculty in liberal arts has fallen by half, salaries and working conditions have stagnated, and more and more teaching is done by graduate students and part-time faculty. 16 New Ph. D. s are often unemployed or resigned to a life of one-year appointments. In many liberal arts colleges, humanities departments have been downsized, merged, or eliminated altogether.
One cause of the decline in academia is competition from the efflorescence of science and engineering. Another may be a surfeit of Ph. D. s pumped out by graduate programs that failed to practice academic birth control. But the problem is as much a reduction in the demand by students as an increase in the supply of professors. While the total number of bachelor's degrees rose by almost 40 percent between 1970 and 1994, the number of degrees in English declined by 40 percent. It may get worse: only 9 percent of high school students today indicate an interest in majoring in the humanities. 17 One university was so desperate to restore enrollment in its College of Arts and Sciences that it hired an advertising firm to come up with a "Think for a Living" campaign. Here are some of the slogans they came up with:
Do what you want when you graduate or wait 20 years for your mid-life crisis. Insurance for when the robots take over all the boring jobs.
Okay then. Follow your dreams in your next life.
Yeah, like your parents are so happy.
Careerism may explain the disenchantment some students feel with liberal arts, but not all of it. The economy is in better shape today than it was in periods in which the humanities were more popular, and many young people still do not shoot themselves from cannons into their careers but use their college years to enrich themselves in various ways. There is no good reason that the arts and humanities should not be able to compete for students' attention during this interlude. A knowledge of culture, history, and ideas is still an asset in most professions, as it is in everyday life. But students stay away from the humanities anyway.
In this chapter I will diagnose the malaise of the arts and humanities and offer some suggestions for revitalizing them. They didn't ask me, but by their own accounts they need all the help they can get, and I believe that part of the answer lies within the theme of this book. I will begin by circumscribing the problem. {402}
~
As a matter of fact, the arts and humanities are not in trouble. According to recent assessments based on data from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Statistical Abstract of the United States, they have never been in better shape. 18 In the past two decades, symphony orchestras, booksellers, libraries, and new independent films have all increased in number. Attendance is up, in some cases at record levels, at classical music concerts, live theater, opera performances, and art museums, as we see in blockbuster shows with long lines and scarce tickets. The number of books in print (including books of art, poetry, and drama) has exploded, as have book sales. Nor have people become passive consumers of art. The year 1997 broke records for the proportion of adults drawing, taking art photographs, buying art, and doing creative writing.
Advances in technology have made art more accessible than ever before. A couple of hours of minimum-wage income can buy any of tens of thousands of audiophile-quality musical recordings, including many versions of any classical work performed by the world's great orchestras. Video stores allow people in the boondocks to arrange cheap private screenings of the great classics of cinema. Instead of the three television networks with their sitcoms, variety shows, and soaps, most Americans can now choose from a menu of fifty to a hundred stations, including ones
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? that specialize in history, science, politics, and the arts. Inexpensive video equipment and streaming video on the World Wide Web are allowing independent filmmaking to flourish. Virtually any book in print is available within days to anyone with a credit card and a modem. On the Web one can find the text of all the major novels, poems, plays, and works of philosophy and scholarship that have fallen out of copyright, as well as virtual tours of the world's great art museums. New intellectual e-zines and web sites have proliferated, and back issues are instantly available.
We are swimming in culture, drowning in it. So why all the lamentations about its plight, decline, fall, collapse, twilight, and death?
One response from the doomsayers is that the current frenzy of consumption involves past classics and current mediocrities but that few new works of quality are coming into the world. That is doubtful. 19 As historians of the arts repeatedly tell us, all the supposed sins of contemporary culture -- mass appeal, the profit motive, themes of sex and violence, and adaptations to popular formats (such as serialization in newspapers) -- may be found in the great artists of past centuries. Even in recent decades, many artists were seen in their time as commercial hacks and only later attained artistic respectability. Examples include the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and, if we are to judge by recent museum shows and critical appreciations, even Norman Rockwell. There are dozens of excellent novelists from countries all over the world, and though most television and cinema is dreadful, the best can be very good {403} indeed: Carla on Cheers was wittier than Dorothy Parker, and the plot of Tootsie is cleverer than the plots of any of Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedies.
As for music, though it may be hard for anyone to compete against the best composers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the past century has been anything but barren. Jazz, Broadway, country, blues, folk, rock, soul, samba, reggae, world music, and contemporary composition have blossomed. Each has produced gifted artists and has introduced new complexities of rhythm, instrumentation, vocal style, and studio production into our total musical experience. Then there are genres that are flourishing as never before, such as animation and industrial design, and still others that have only recently come into existence but have already achieved moments of high accomplishment, such as computer graphics and rock videos (for instance, Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer).
In every era for thousands of years critics have bemoaned the decline of culture, and the economist Tyler Cowen suggests they are the victims of a cognitive illusion. The best works of art are more likely to appear in a past decade than in the present decade for the same reason that another line in the supermarket always moves faster than the one you are in: there are more of them. We get to enjoy the greatest hits winnowed from all those decades, listening to the Mozarts and forgetting the Salieris. Also, genres of art (opera, Impressionist painting, Broadway musicals, film noir) usually blossom and fade in a finite span of time. It's hard to recognize nascent art forms when they are on the rise, and by the time they are widely appreciated their best days are behind them. Cowen also notes, citing Hobbes, that putting down the present is a backhanded way of putting down one's rivals: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead. "20
But in three circumscribed areas the arts really do have something to be depressed about. One is the traditions of elite art that descended from prestigious European genres, such as the music performed by symphony orchestras, the art shown in major galleries and museums, and the ballet performed by major companies. Here there really may be a drought of compelling new material. For example, 90 percent of "classical music" was composed before 1900, and the most influential composers in the twentieth century were active before 1940. 21
The second is the guild of critics and cultural gatekeepers, who have seen their influence dwindle. The 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner is about a literary critic who achieved such celebrity that we can believe that the burghers of a small Ohio town would coo and fawn over him. It is hard to think of a contemporary critic who could plausibly inspire such a character.
And the third, of course, is the groves of academe, where the foibles of the humanities departments have been fodder for satirical novels and the subject of endless fretting and analyzing.
After nineteen chapters, you can probably guess where I will seek a {404} diagnosis for these three ailing endeavors. The giveaway lies in a statement (attributed to Virginia Woolf) that can be found in countless English course outlines: "On or about December, 1910, human nature changed. " She was referring to the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades. The point of this chapter is that the elite arts, criticism, and scholarship are in trouble because the statement is wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter. 22
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Art is in our nature -- in the blood and in the bone, as people used to say; in the brain and in the genes, as we might say today. In all societies people dance, sing, decorate surfaces, and tell and act out stories. Children begin to take
? ? ? ? ? ? part in these activities in their twos and threes, and the arts may even be reflected in the organization of the adult brain: neurological damage may leave a person able to hear and see but unable to appreciate music or visual beauty. 23
Paintings, jewelry, sculpture, and musical instruments go back at least 35,000 years in Europe, and probably far longer in other parts of the world where the archaeological record is scanty. The Australian aborigines have been painting on rocks for 50,000 years, and red ochre has been used as body makeup for at least twice that long. 24 Though the exact forms of art vary widely across cultures, the activities of making and appreciating art are recognizable everywhere. The philosopher Denis Dutton has identified seven universal signatures:25
1. Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.
2.