They have just enough truth in them to pique the imagination and produce ... one another, and indeed, romantic love between the sexes has always been a ...
Biocultural Literary Theory and Criticism Joseph Carroll August 2017 This essay will be translated into Danish in a volume titled Det biokulturelle menneske (The Biocultural Human). The volume will contain contributions by researchers connected to Aarhus University within the humanities and social sciences. The editors are Trine Kellberg Nielsen, Alexandra Regina Kratschmer, Casper Andersen, and Mathias Clasen. The volume is meant to appeal to generally educated Danish readers—not a specialist academic audience.
A Rationale for Biocultural Literary Study I teach courses in literary theory and have often been impressed, or dismayed, by seeing this or that theoretical notion become luminously real in a student’s mind. “Language creates reality, and different languages create different realities.” I’ve watched as that idea took hold in a young man’s mind and became for him a transformative experience, altering his way of looking at the world. “All social relationships are relationships of power, and power is always inherently oppressive and exploitative.” In a class session devoted to Michel Foucault (1926-1984), I saw a group of mildmannered, well-behaved young adults converge in a facile but firm conviction on the validity of that proposition. Nothing I could say would shake them. “Gender is an artificial social construct. Socially imposed gender roles consist chiefly in patriarchal oppression and heroic feminist defiance.” I have heard those propositions enunciated often enough to be able to recognize the steely glint of the eye and hard set of the mouth that accompany them. “All interpretations of literary works are equally valid. Literary meaning is entirely subjective and infinitely diverse.” At the beginning of a course on literary theory, I ask students to write down answers to questions about their basic theoretical beliefs. When I have them read their answers aloud, I’ve sometimes watched as a group of students, beginning to recognize their shared conviction about the infinite diversity of literary response, come to feel a warm and cozy sensation of intellectual unanimity. Ideas such as these, which to students can seem like revelations, have long been commonplaces for professors of literature. In the current academic study of literature, they are default beliefs. Such beliefs constitute an unofficial orthodoxy that shapes interpretations of specific literary works and organizes historical narratives. For university students who specialize in literature, becoming educated largely means learning always to view literary works from the perspective governed by this unofficial orthodoxy. From my own perspective—a biocultural perspective—this whole set of beliefs is profoundly misleading. They have just enough truth in them to pique the imagination and produce an illusion of deep explanatory insight, but the insights are partial, distorted, and ungenerous. They do not capture the rich and subtle realities of human behavior and experience. They make no appeal to current empirical research in biology, psychology, anthropology, or linguistics. Instead, they depend on rhetorical strategies that intermingle truisms with false reductions. Different languages have somewhat different nuances, but all languages can be translated into all other languages; they all use categories that capture the phenomenal reality of people, humans as biological organisms, interacting with a real physical world. In the social world, power is an ever-present fact, but not all relationships of power are oppressive and exploitative. Some power relationships are equal and reciprocal; some, like those of parents and children, are asymmetrical but nurturing or beneficent. More often than not, the social, economic, and political machinery rattles along tolerably well
because people for the most part manage to cooperate willingly in collective tasks and mutually beneficial forms of exchange. Gender roles are culturally variable, but every culture recognizes a basic sexual binary grounded in the anatomical and hormonal differences between men and women. Those differences derive from the biological mechanisms for reproduction, and they have consequences that affect temperament and behavior. All cultures heretofore have been male dominated. Any asymmetrical power relation invites abuse and oppression, but male and female relations throughout history cannot plausibly be reduced to oppression on the one side and servitude or heroic resistance on the other. Men and women have shared interests in raising children, maintaining households, and sustaining community. They often feel deep affection for one another, and indeed, romantic love between the sexes has always been a major theme in literature. We can make verifiable claims about the prevalence of themes in literature because literary meaning is not, in fact, infinitely diverse. Even among professors who would argue that point in the abstract, there is massive unanimity that certain stories are romantic—that they are about love; that other stories are tragic, sad; that some stories are mostly about family conflicts, and others about war, or about the problems children face while growing up. In contrast to the beliefs that dominate most current academic literary study, biocultural literary theory provides a scientifically valid framework that captures the whole scope of human behavior and experience; it assimilates research findings from current empirical social science; and it formulates its propositions in unequivocal terms that submit themselves to criteria of rational, scientific judgment. Within the biocultural framework, we can assess theoretical propositions about literature from any other school of thought, evaluate their cogency, identify their limitations, and either correct them or supplant them with more adequate ideas. Because it operates in sync with evolutionary biology and the evolutionary social sciences, biocultural literary theory is capable of progressive, cumulative development, steadily expanding its scope, correcting its mistakes, and refining its concepts. Evolutionary research in the social sciences and humanities presupposes that human behavior and experience are causally continuous with the physical and biological world in which humans evolved and to which they have adapted. For much of the twentieth century, the social sciences tried to separate themselves from the life sciences, seeking causal explanations only within specifically human forms of social organization (Pinker, 2002). But for half a century now, the evolutionary social sciences have been making rapid progress, giving robust empirical confirmation that humans, like all other species, have a species-typical set of characteristics: anatomical, physiological, neurological, and behavioral (Buss, 2016). For several decades, evolutionary theorists have been illuminating the ways genes and culture have coevolved in hominins since before the advent of the genus Homo (Henrich, 2016). During that same period, evolutionists have gradually developed a comprehensive understanding of specifically human forms of evolved sociality (Carroll, 2015). For some three decades, evolutionists in the humanities have been illuminating the ways in which ‘imaginative culture’—the arts, religions, mythologies, and ideologies—interact with evolved and genetically transmitted features of human biology (Boyd, Carroll, & Gottschall, 2010). All these developments feed into biocultural literary theory and criticism. In what follows, I describe five main components in a biocultural theory of literature: geneculture coevolution, human life history, evolved human sociality, imagination and the arts, and literature. Gene-culture coevolution—the reciprocal causal interaction of genes and culture throughout human evolution—is the explanatory matrix for biocultural literary theory. Human life history theory identifies a comprehensive set of basic human motives. Those motives are main
themes in literature. Evolved human sociality can be reduced to a few fundamental principles that provide categories for the analysis of social themes in literature. As a result of gene-culture coevolution, humans are a singularly imaginative species. I argue that the imagination has an adaptive function and that literature fulfills that function in ways specific to its linguistic medium. Gene-Culture Coevolution The theory of gene-culture coevolution consists in a linked series of hypotheses. Humans have a genetically transmitted set of characteristics—anatomical, physiological, and neurological. Those characteristics include uniquely human powers of social learning and shared attention. Those unique powers have produced a unique human capacity for culture: the cumulative development of skills, technologies, internalized behavioral norms, social institutions, and imaginative forms. Over evolutionary time scales, genes and culture have shaped each other. Genetic changes have enabled cultural developments, and cultural developments have altered the human genome. The feedback loops between biological evolution and cultural practices began, on the biological side, with an upright gait, bipedal locomotion, and hands adapted to the fine manipulation of objects. These early developments in human evolution enabled humans to use tools and ultimately also fire. The use of tools and fire enabled the acquisition of a high-protein diet and cooking. Over evolutionary time scales, a diet of cooked foods rich in protein has diminished the size of the human gut and freed up metabolic resources for a larger brain. Specifically human forms of provisioning coevolved with specifically human social and reproductive behaviors: pair bonding, dual parenting, cooperative hunting and inter-group aggression among males, cooperative gathering and childcare among females, the organization of humans in families and lineage groups, and cooperative interaction with non-kin in band-sized social groups. All expansions in evolved cognitive and social power enabled more complex forms of culture, and more complex forms of culture gave a selective advantage to individuals and groups best capable of benefiting from cumulative cultural development. In human evolutionary history, gene-culture coevolution has been a self-perpetuating evolutionary spiral. Watershed developments in more recent human evolutionary history include the emergence of anatomically modern humans some 200,000 years ago, the gradual emergence of complex multi-part tools and symbolic culture (markings, art, ornaments, ceremonial burial), and the advent of agriculture and pastoralism some 12,000 years ago. With agriculture, humans entered into a new phase in which the accumulation of resources enabled social structures with complex hierarchies and specialized socioeconomic tasks—hence the development of cities, states, and empires. Humans continue to evolve, and human evolution, unlike the evolution of any other species, is biocultural in character (Cochran & Harpending, 2009). Among all extant species on earth, only Homo sapiens is evolving along a trajectory defined by feedback loops between genetic evolution and cumulative cultural acquisition. Human Life History Theory Every species has a life history: a species-typical organization of the life cycle, from birth through death. The life cycle for each species is a reproductive cycle. Differences in reproductive success are the central mechanism in natural selection. Life has evolved to reproduce. Forms of life that mutated in ways not leading toward successful reproduction would not last longer than a single life cycle. Every organism on earth at the present time, including all human organisms, owe their existence to an unbroken line of successful reproduction leading back to the first life on earth some 3.8 billion years ago.
Life histories vary enormously among species. Some species, including most insects, fish, and reptiles, lay eggs and leave them, providing no parental care. Mammals all require maternal care, hence also bonding between mother and offspring, but most mammals do not display care by fathers. Humans and most bird species require so much care for offspring that dual parenting is indispensable for successful reproduction. Dual parenting in turn typically involves pair bonding between adult males and females. Offspring in many species must defend and provision themselves, independently, from the moment of birth. Humans are exceptional in the degree to which offspring are helpless at birth and dependent for years afterward. Only humans and a few other social species display post-menopausal longevity, enabling grandparents to provide care to descendants. In the course of human evolution, while the gut was shrinking, the brain expanding, and culture becoming more complex, human childhood and adolescence have lengthened, giving children a longer period for the brain to develop and acquire the social and technical skills necessary for adult competence. Life history shapes species-typical behavioral dispositions. Human behavioral dispositions include the approach and avoidance mechanisms common to all nervous systems, dispositions for maternal care and filial bonding common to all mammals, and dispositions for adult sexual pairbonding and paternal care. Humans have evolved to live in complex multi-generational kin networks that include siblings, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws. Helping kin who share one’s genes helps those genes pass into the next generation. But family life is also fraught with potential conflicts over sexual fidelity and the distribution of resources. No person other than an identical twin shares all one’s genes; so humans have evolved both to favor kin over non-kin and also to compete with kin. Since humans are an ultra-social species, all basic biological impulses for survival and reproduction—avoiding danger, acquiring food and sex, caring for offspring, favoring kin—are interwoven with impulses for making friends, forming coalitions, negotiating dominance hierarchies, and internalizing the identity of the social group. Living in cooperative social groups has coevolved with dispositions to favor one’s own group over members of other, alien groups. Specifically Human Forms of Evolved Sociality The last common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees—before the Australopiths separated into a distinct lineage some 5-7 million years ago—almost certainly displayed a form of social organization more like that of modern chimpanzees than that of modern humans (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Apart from mother-offspring bonding, social organization in chimpanzee bands consists exclusively of dominance hierarchies. The dominant male, or in some cases a small and temporary coalition of dominant males, gains first access to food and sexually receptive females. Sex is promiscuous, and males do not recognize or favor their own offspring. Cooperative male behavior consists chiefly in coalitional aggression against isolated individual chimpanzees in neighboring bands. Human adult males also engage in coalitional aggression, but their scope of cooperative, constructive activity within the group is much broader. Survival on the savannahs of Africa necessitated cooperative effort among adult males, but the helplessness and long-continued dependence of human offspring required pair-bonded dual parenting. Humans are the only species in which pair-bonded dual parenting takes place in cooperative groups that contain multiple adult males (Geary & Flinn, 2001). Pair bonding within a social group requires that other members of the group recognize and respect exclusive rights of sexual access to a spouse. The specifically human form of reproduction within a social group thus had to coevolve with expanded powers for self-restraint.
Hunter-gatherer bands, who serve anthropologists as proxies for the social organization of ancestral humans, are universally egalitarian. Groups of adult males cooperate in suppressing dominance behavior in individual males (Boehm, 2016). Since the advent of agriculture and pastoralism, dominance hierarchies have been necessary to the organization of complex social systems extending beyond the band to state-level societies. In both pre- and post-agricultural societies, the tension between dominance hierarchies and egalitarian cooperation is a central regulating force. Over the course of hominin evolution, the need to repress impulses for sexual promiscuity and social dominance has selected for the ability to internalize social norms. That ability manifests itself in what social theorists call ‘third-party enforcement of norms’: the willingness to expend effort or incur risks in order to punish people who deviate from group norms, or conversely, to reward people who behave in accordance with group norms. In state-level societies, with institutions that embody social norms in laws—third-party enforcement is delegated to the police and judiciary. Cooperative group endeavor requires leadership—the coordination of group efforts toward a common goal. Humans accept leadership as ‘legitimate’ when they believe that a leader is effectively directing group efforts toward a collective goal in accordance with group norms. In post-agricultural societies, the exercise of power is vested in institutions of government and usually stipulated in a code of laws. Perceptions of legitimacy or illegitimacy in the exercise of power affect the degree to which individuals willingly cooperate with legally constituted forms of authority. When legitimacy fails, societies either become tyrannies in which the mass of the population is held in thrall through violence or the threat of violence, or they disintegrate and revert to more primitive forms of social organization based on kinship and reciprocity (equality in exchange value). Imagination and the Arts Internalizing the identity of a social group means that an individual identifies himself or herself in relation to a group. One might for instance identify oneself as a member of a family, kin group, clan, or tribe; as the subject of a monarch or citizen of a republic; as an adherent to a religious community, political party, or ideology; as a member of a specific race or ethnic group; or even as a participant in hobby groups, sports clubs, fan clubs, or some demographic group characterized by shared styles, values, beliefs, and interests (for instance, bikers, foodies, gang members, or hipsters). Internalizing the identity of any social group engages the imagination and most often also recruits externalized media of imagination: images, icons, statuary, and flags; songs, hymns, and anthems; uniforms or distinctive modes of dress; sacred texts and distinctive idioms, accents, or other forms of speech; holy places, shrines, and monuments; and ritual gestures, ceremonies, and dance. The arts are universal components of religious and political community, but imaginative life is not limited to manifestations of group identity. Humans almost always live in social groups, but every individual is also a biologically discrete organism. Emotionally charged motives are lodged in individual human nervous systems, and social life always involves some tension between individual interests and the interests of social groups. Growing up means growing into multiple social groups, but it also means developing a distinct individual identity. Contemporary neuroscience has discovered a ‘default mode network’ in the brain, sometimes called ‘the imagination network’, that is active whenever a mind is not focused on some specific task. The default network engages autobiographical memory, projects into the future, and entertains
alternative scenarios and multiple perspectives. It is at work both in maintaining an imaginative sense of individual identity and also in constructing and reading fictional narratives. The imagination is a crucial adaptive component of the peculiarly human cognitive system. Unlike animals of other species, humans are not guided only by instinct and conditioning. They create world views and locate themselves imaginatively within the physical world, the social world, and any supernatural world they might suppose to exist. Their behavior is regulated in good part by reference to the values and goals active in these imaginative virtual worlds. Such worlds include memories of a personal past and also images of the historic or mythic past of one or more social groups. They are imbued both with internalized cultural norms and with passions and values peculiar to individual identities. The human imagination is capable of vast complexity in figuration, but it is also infused with emotions shaped by evolved biological and social needs: survival, growing up, mating, parenting, developing a sense of individual and social identity, interacting socially with members of one’s group, confronting alien groups, and organizing an imaginative virtual world. The imagination manifests itself in multiple ways, for instance, in daydreaming, fantasies, jokes, myths, religions, ideologies, painting, sculpture, cartoons, dance, music, film, poems, plays, and stories. The literary arts—poems, plays, and stories—exert a powerful influence on the imaginative virtual worlds inhabited by readers. A Biocultural Conception of Literature Literature is a written verbal art that has evolutionary antecedents in oral forms of poetry, narrative, and dramatic enactment. Literature shares with other arts the functions of depiction, evocation, and expression. It is singular among arts in the degree to which it engages specifically linguistic aptitudes for semantic organization. It links concrete depictions with general ideas and overt reflections on depicted subjects and evoked or expressed emotions. To capture the scope of literary works, theorists often analyze them by examining relations among three structural categories: thematic, tonal, and aesthetic or formal. Thematic structure consists in depicted subjects and concepts about the subject. The most prominent themes in world literature are the motives and emotions identified in human life history theory, evolutionary social theory, and a biocultural concept of imagination: survival, growing up, developing and maintaining an identity, social life, mating (sex, romance, marriage), parenting and family life, and the life of the mind. Tonal structure refers to the organization of emotions and attitudes in a literary work. Emotions are vital parts of meaning in all the arts. In literature, three sets of emotions enter into meaning: the emotions experienced by characters or speakers in poems, stories, and plays; the emotions authors express toward depicted scenes and characters; and the emotions readers feel in response to both characters and authors. Meaning in literary works is what occurs in the minds of authors and readers (Carroll, 2017). Aesthetic or formal structure in any art consists in the organization of the materials that form the medium for that art. For music, the material is sound tonally and/or rhythmically modulated. For the plastic arts, it is color, shape, and texture. For literary art, the medium is language, and formal organization includes both its phonological and semantic features. Physical properties such as sound and rhythm are most prominent in poetry but present also in prose. Smaller semantic units include word choice, syntax, and the organization of units of composition into stanzas, paragraphs, or scenes. Larger semantic units include literal reference and metaphoric imagery, realistic depiction and allegory or symbolic fantasy.
Literature is a form of communicative speech—a message sent and received. The most allencompassing semantic unit is the point of view from which a literary work is delivered. Possible forms of delivery include a first-person speaker, as in a lyric poem; a participant narrator in a story, as of someone recounting an actual episode he or she has witnessed; an omniscient third-person narrator, assuming God-like knowledge of all fictive events; free indirect discourse, a form of narrative in which the narrator paraphrases the perceptions and thoughts of a character; epistolary narrative, a story told through an exchange of letters; and dramatic enactment, which has no overt narrator but in which each character speaks for himself or herself. These alternatives are different ways authors can engage with their subjects and their readers. Behind every form of delivery, even epistolary narrative and dramatic enactment, there is always an implied source of the message— an implied author. Every work of literature is shaped and colored by the temperament and understanding—the total world view—of its author. Literature integrates formal, tonal, and thematic structures into a unified artistic construct. Sensitivity to literary art combines sensory perception, emotional response, and rational understanding. By responding to the formal, tonal, and thematic structures in a literary work, readers can participate vicariously in the imaginative virtual world created by the author. It is in the nature of authorship—part of the job description—to have a rich imagination and also to have exceptional powers of verbal articulation. Vicariously participating in the imaginative virtual worlds created by authors often gives readers deep pleasure. It also widens their scope of experience, informs the quality of their judgments, and thus influences their behavior. Articulating imaginative virtual worlds and participating vicariously in them are adaptive behaviors peculiar to the human species. References Boehm, C. (2016). Bullies: Redefining the human free-rider problem. In J. Carroll, D. P. McAdams, & E. O. Wilson (Eds.), Darwin's bridge: Uniting the humanities and sciences (pp. 11-27). New York: Oxford University Press. Boyd, B., Carroll, J., & Gottschall, J. (Eds.). (2010). Evolution, literature, and film: A reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Buss, D. M. (2016). The handbook of evolutionary psychology (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Carroll, J. (2015). Evolutionary social theory: The current state of knowledge. Style, 49(4), 512541. doi:10.5325/style.49.4.0512 Carroll, J. (2017). Minds and meaning in fictional narratives: An evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology. doi:10.1037/gpr000010 Cochran, G., & Harpending, H. (2009). The 10,000 year explosion: How civilization accelerated human evolution. New York: Basic Books. Geary, D. C., & Flinn, M. V. (2001). Evolution of human parental behavior and the human family. Parenting: Science and Practice, 1(1/2), 5-61. doi:10.1080/15295192.2001.9681209 Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking. Wrangham, R. W., & Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic males: Apes and the origins of human violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
