Mind games

You say this book is necessary, but after reading your review I come away with just the opposite impression, that it doesn’t add anything that significantly affects our understanding of literature, at least any more than browsing Wikipedia’s neuroscience articles would. That doesn’t sound like a book that’s likely to accomplish the task of convincing humanists that evolution and neurobiology matter for the general types of human experience the humanities focus on. (But do people really need that much convincing? Are there really that many constructionists who hold to such a caricature of social constructionism as you say Boyd does? I thought that was just what ungenerous critics in the Sokal tradition thought constructionists think.)

Berube:

If it’s an allegory for Japanese democracy, which would be a fascinating choice given Suess’s really racist anti-Japanese cartoons during the war (I mean, noticeably racist even for the genre), then I suppose the who-skeptics would probably be isolationists, no?

Last year an advocate of evolutionary lit crit (Joseph Caroll) came to our university to give a talk. The very first slide of his talk was all I needed to see to know I was in store for a cringe-inducing night. The slide depicted “the unity of science” with a set of concentric circles. The outermost circle was labeled “physics” because physics explains everything. Inside Physics was “Chemistry” because chemistry explains everything except physics. Inside that was biology, then psychology, then sociology. The idea being that the sciences attached to inner circles are special cases of sciences in relatively outward circles. A very pre-1970 depiction of the unity of science.

The new twist to this particular slide was that the very innermost circle, even inside “sociology,” was labeled “the humanities.” Prof Caroll assured us that it was time to recognize that the humanities were simply the most specialized of the special sciences and that they therefore did not escape the explanatory whirlpool of physics-chemistry-biology-psychology-sociology. The idea that explanations in the humanities are simply nothing like, not the same thing as explanations in the sciences seemed not to be worth considering to him. Nevertheless, that strikes as me as the default position, that would have to be refuted before this rather alarmingly block-headed-seeming assimilation of the humanities to the special sciences could even get off the ground.

Also, although a lot of the stuff about the conventions associated with courtly love, and Bridezilla/$25,000, are clearly culturally situated and invented, it sounds like Boyd might reasonably be using the phrase “romantic love” to refer to a somewhat thinner aspect of these phenomena than you are. It would be a bit surprising to claim that the emotion associated with “romantic love” was invented, even though I’m sure that many (if not most) of the practices surrounding it weren’t. By comparison, the way that individuals sneeze is quite different – some basically hold it in and make a cute little squeaking noise, others are much louder, some release more pressure through the mouth and others through the nose. It’s plausible that any particular way of sneezing is at least in part culturally constructed (though probably more is individually constructed) but this doesn’t mean that the very act of sneezing is culturally specific.

Sooner or later we will all have to come to terms with the fact that consciousness, and therefore everything that follows from it, is just electricity and chemicals. “Coming to terms”, however, doesn’t mean acting like a dick.

If anyone gives a toss here’s a list of books that put a slightly different perspective on the book by Boyd (which sounds terrible).

#12: the ‘New Phrenology’….er…try The New Phrenology

#5 ‘the evolution of brains….’.

But why should we look at brains (and only brains) when we talk about consciousness?

#10 You’re right: that view of science is so old fashioned nowadays, and ignores the writings of Nancy Cartwright and numerous others.

But the funny thing about all this is we have been here before. It is widely forgotten now, but the initial impetus towards ‘structuralism’ (and, for that matter, Althusserian Marxism) was to make a ‘science’ out of the ‘humanities’ (or at least to make the humanities more ‘scientific’). Structuralism, which grew out of linguistics, yes, but also out of Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, was an attempt to discover the invariant ‘structures’ that were ‘programmed’ into the human brain and which existed across all times and across all cultures….does this start to sound a bit familiar to anyone? Similarly Lacan’s work in psychoanalysis (whose early work at least, in the 1950s, is greatly misunderstood in the English speaking world) was again an attempt to make psychoanalysis more rigorous, mathematical and scientific.

The ‘woo woo’ aspect of French thought that Sokal et al rage against is very much a post 1967 phenomenon, specifically deriving from Derrida and the Tel Quel group generally. And, whatever one thinks of Derrida, (I’m no deconstructionist) it must be pointed out that when he pointed out some fairly obvious flaws with the project of introducing (in a literal, clunky fashion) the methodologies of the ‘hard sciences’ into the humanities, he may well have had a point.

Now, romantic love. Yes, there is Helen Fisher’s interesting and curious neural evidence—other’s are mining that vein as well. And then we have those cross-cultural studies showing that romantic love exists in all cultures. I’ve read some of those studies but it’s not clear to me just what they establish.

The problem is that, to conduct a cross cultural study, you have to come up with a definition of romantic love that’s applicable across cultures. So they come up with something like this: Romantic love is an intense long-term sexual relationship between adults of the opposite sex. And they find that, yes, something like that seems to exist pretty much everywhere. Therefore, romantic love isn’t something that got invented in medieval Europe, etc.

But, is that definition of romantic love adequate, for example, to the case of courtly love in medieval Europe. That depends. Courtly love was adulterous, that is to say, it was understood in relationship to the institution of marriage. That institution is not mentioned in the cross-cultural definition. So, is adultery an important feature of courtly love or merely incidental? Courtly love was also thought of as being ennobling? Is that incidental or essential. Now, by Jane Austen’s time the adultery clause had been dropped and romantic love had become, at least in the ideal case, the basic foundation of marriage. Is that a deep change, or a superficial one? Is it a mere matter of institutional change, or is marriage such a fundamental institution that nothing about it is “mere”? We’re dealing with questions that are matters both of mere definition and of underlying causal processes. But I don’t know how to separate them out.

Now consider an article by Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland, evocritics both: Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006. They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales to see whether or not romantic love was, well, everywhere. They define romantic love as (p. 454) “a feeling expressed in a romantic context between two people; it has a dimension of sexual attraction, even lust, but it is not limited to that; it is an emotion that is typically reserved for only one person (though romantic love is not necessarily inconsistent with sexual promiscuity); it carries the expectation of lasting duration; it involves intense attraction to the beloved’s whole person and is not just about attraction to the body” (their italics). They then assembled 79 collections of folk tales and had a team of coders identify references to romantic love in all those tales (they don’t say how many tales in total).

Some results, briefly stated (p. 457):

In the 79 collections coders identified 263 references that met our shared definition of romantic love: 55 collections had at least one reference to romantic love; 39 of the collections included multiple references. On average, there were 3.32 references to romantic love per collection. Two-thirds of the accepted references enjoyed unanimous coder agreement; for the other third there was one dissenter. References to romantic love were not limited to European tales but were found across highly diverse and isolated culture areas.

This, however, is just preliminary to my main point. I just wanted to give you a feel for what kind of work is involved here. Let’s just say that considerable labor is involved in gathering and preparing the collections, coding them, and analyzing the results.

In the course of discussing their results Gottschall and Nordlund offer this (p. 459): “According to William Jankowiak, cultural attitudes towards romantic love are indeed highly diverse, with some cultures simply rejecting romantic love ‘as an evil and frighteningly emotional experience. In others it is tolerated but not celebrated or asserted, and, in still others, romantic passion is praised as an important and cherished cultural ideal.’” It seems to me that that is an assertion about the institutionalization of romantic love, about how a given society treats a human experience that may well occur in any society whatsoever (and is, by that account, a biological universal). Which is to say that the institutionalization of romantic love is culturally specific.

Does constructivism really need any more than that?

Let me conclude with an observation by John Wilkins, a philosopher of biology:

Of his ideas, the single paper that has most affected my thinking was his observation on the Lakatos and Musgrave book, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge in 1970, in which he noted of the Uniformitarian/Catastrophist conflict in nineteenth century geology that the uniformities became more episodic and the catastrophes less dramatic, until they met in the middle and that all they were arguing over were the terms used. This, it seems, is routinely the case in scientific disputes, as one side concedes in different terms what their opponents had claimed, but never really admits it.

Well I’ll be cranky and say that the “romantic love” thing is based in a failure on Boyd’s part to understand the meaning of the term as applied by the literary criticism crowd. He seems to take it simply to signify something different from mere mating – and read that way it’s true other animal species engage in it, too. But that’s not how literary critics or cultural theorists (or to be clear most people) use the term. Slagging them off for pointing out that “romantic love” the historically specific human mode of interaction is, well, historically specific is like criticising a historian of mathematics for claiming that “groups” were introduced by Galois in the early 18 hundreds. It misses the point.

Novakant @17 is right, I think. Michael B. says it’s

necessary for humanists to hear how the evolution of brains—and, eventually, our brains—has managed to endow us with the capacity to create and play and interpret and tell stories about things that never happened.

The problem is that, necessary or not, it isn’t possible. Present-day science tells us next to nothing about the biology of those capacities, and nothing about their genetic basis — and so less than nothing about how, or if, they evolved. There’s no a priori reason to think that just because we have given a name to some set of human qualities, they have any distinct biological existence.

Look at your chin. No other primate has a protruding chin, so we could make up just-so stories about what it evolved for in humans — facial expressions, sexual selection, what have you. But apparently what paleontology tell us is the chin is just an artifact of the faster reduction of the dentary than the mandibular bone as the human jaw has shrunk compared to our ancestors. it doesn’t have ay discrete biological existence at all, let alone function.

Or look at blind cavefish. You might assume there is an evolutionary explanation for their blindness, maybe to save the resources that would go into eyes. but no, it seems like blindness is just a side effect for selection for more sensitive jaws and tastebuds. These are developed by a greater expression of the regulator genes associated with the midline of the fish’s head, which have the incidental effect of suppressing features normally found laterally, like eyes. So a question like “what is the fitness advantage of blindness” just doesn’t have an answer; it’s the wrong question.

We can answer these questions because we can observe how the traits develop over time — both evolutionary time within species or populations, and developmental time within organisms. It’s only because we can trace the specific pathway leading to the qualities we observe that we can say something about which were the actual traits under selection. But with things like Michael is talking about, we have no observation either of the evolution of intermediate forms or of developmental pathways. (This is true even for much simpler cognitive traits than storytelling.) So there’s no scientific basis for talking about their evolution at all.