An Open Letter to
Jonathan Kramnick
Hi Jonathan,
We’ve never met. A friend sent me a copy of your article “Against
Literary Darwinism.” I’ll copy this note to some folks with whom I discussed
your article and to some others who might be interested in the issues raised by
it. For the benefit of those who haven’t yet read it, I’ll attach a copy of
your piece.
Naturally, I disagree with you on many of the details of your piece,
but here I would draw your attention to only one important point. I think you
make a large factual error in your core argument. You lump all the “literary
Darwinists” together and associate them all with an early and fairly narrow
form of evolutionary psychology. You argue that the central error in literary
Darwinism is in identifying literature as an adaptation, and you seem half
consciously to assume that “adaptive” must mean “modular.” That’s a mistake.
Ernst Mayr long ago made a basic distinction between “closed” (=
modular) adaptive systems and “open” (= flexible) adaptive systems. A
relatively early form of evolutionary psychology came down hard in favor of
“massive modularity,” but that issue has been controversial from the beginning.
(Mithen’s Prehistory of the Mind [1996] offered a strong alternative model.)
The autonomic nervous system is a closed system; so is sight; and there is good
evidence for language. Sterelny in Thought in a Hostile World acknowledges
that language is probably modular but makes a compelling case against taking
language as the prototype for human mental architecture. Among evolutionists in
the social sciences, the more commonly accepted understanding of adaptation
affiliates itself with Mayr’s idea of a sliding scale, running from the ANS at
one end to only lightly constrained behavioral variations at the other end. For
a more recent formulation of such ideas, you might consult D. S. Wilson’s essay
“Evolutionary Social Constructivism,” included in both The Literary Animal and
Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader.
In common with a good many other theorists, I often describe early
evolutionary psychology—the set of ideas formulated by Tooby and Cosmides in
“The Psychological Foundations of Culture” and by Pinker in How the Mind
Works—as “orthodox” or “narrow-school” EP. The two literary Darwinists who
are most closely affiliated with early EP are Michelle Scalise Sugiyama and the
late Denis Dutton. But neither Michelle nor Denis would argue that dispositions
for proto-literary forms of behavior are “modular” in character—that is,
encapsulated, relatively automatic, swift, and efficient.
My own central line of thinking for the past dozen years or so has been
aimed at producing an account of mental architecture different from that in
orthodox EP. In tandem with that different concept of cognitive architecture,
I’ve been developing a concept of the adaptive function of literature and the
other arts that is described nowhere in your article. In a footnote, you say I
mention “in passing” that I’ve “become” skeptical of modularity; that’s
disingenuous. You cite an article from 2008, then mention that I make a
similar point in the review of Consilience. That review was published
first in 1999. And indeed, I’ve been explicitly criticizing the EP conception
of the mind since the review of Pinker that was first published in 1998.
The theory of adaptive function that appears in the review of Consilience
was worked out in greater detail in half a dozen essays before it was
recapitulated in “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study,” the essay you
link with the Consilience review. In all those essays, in company with
Wilson and others, I argue that literature is adaptive precisely because it is
a medium for cognitive flexibility—the exact opposite of modularity. No one
reading your piece would have a clue about that.
I think probably what happened was that in your own mind you formulated
a plausible general concept of the relations between “modularity,”
“adaptations,” and “literature,” falsely attributed that concept to the writers
on whom you were commenting, and then, without a great deal of conscious
dishonesty, filtered the quotations and references from the pieces you
referenced so that they seemed to fit reasonably enough within the model you
had created. You seem to have presupposed that when we spoke of “adaptation,”
we could only mean “modularity.” That was a false notion that reflects a weak
understanding of the theoretical background to the field you undertook to
criticize.
Here, for instance, is a passage in which your own faulty construct
leads you to mischaracterize the theorists you are criticizing:
Literary Darwinism presupposes the functional specialization of the
mind and argues for a special process devoted to art and literature. The case
for such a process seems quite thin on the ground. When we consider the
plausibility of a literature module or literary competence alongside the
properties assumed to belong to other innate faculties of the mind, we seem
moved in one of two directions: either a disposition to create and attend to
literature just isn’t the sort of thing that can be innately specified but is
rather subject to more local and historical causes and constraints, or other
bits of the mind feed into and have some sort of regular relation with creating
and attending to literary texts. It may be then that the interdisciplinary
project between literary studies and the sciences of mind is just to sketch out
all these relations. (343)
This is a fairly common form of polemical sophistry: straw-manning the
opposition while delineating a blandly unobjectionable alternative against
which the opposition itself could not reasonably protest. “Functional
specialization” gets reduced to “literature module,” and that is set in
supposed opposition to two ideas: historical causes and constraints, and other
bits of the mind feeding into literary competence. I know of no literary
Darwinists who would use a term like “literature module.” No literary
Darwinists would disagree that historical causes and constraints enter into
literary constructs, and none would disagree that other bits of the mind feed
into literary competence. You are boxing at shadows of your own fabrication.
The sophistical strategy in passages like the one I’ve quoted here
provides cover for a false dichotomy: biology vs. history. You would evidently
limit biology to forms of cognition that you yourself recognize as modular
(sight, speech), associate them with the analysis of literary form, and leave
everything else to “local and historical causes and constraints.” That false
and half-articulated dichotomy provides the framework within which you give a
wrong account of Darwinist conceptions of literature. It also provides the
basis for the “beginnings of a research project” only gestured toward in your
final paragraph, as your particular contribution to some actual, substantive
theory.
Contrast the straw man you construct in the passage I just quoted with
this passage from my review of Consilience:
One of the most serious deficiencies in standard versions of evolutionary
psychology is the commitment to a model of the brain consisting exclusively of
domain-specific modules—the “Swiss army knife” model of the brain. . . .
By building models of reality, the arts link all contingent and particular
circumstances to the deep structure of elemental motives. They make
psychologically meaningful connections between elemental motives and the
peculiarities in specific configurations of culture and of individual
experience.
The idea here is that “human nature” consists in conserved dispositions
working in tandem with more recent, specifically human adaptations enabling
cognitive and behavioral flexibility. You say that while I’ve “become”
skeptical of modularity I’ve done “little to suggest an alternative
architecture that would support the idea that literature is itself an
adaptation” (322 fn 18). I certainly have done little, and indeed nothing
at all, to suggest that literature itself is modular. Your formulation,
buried in a footnote, begs the question as to whether all “adaptations” are
necessarily “modules.”
“Does little to suggest” is a safe kind of criticism, sufficiently
indistinct to avoid being called to account. A critic challenged on the
accuracy of such formulations could always ask, “how much is a little”?
In the essay you mention, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study,” the
section on the adaptive function of literature runs for ten pages (119-28). In
the “Rejoinder to the Responses” to this essay, in the same volume, the section
on the adaptive function of literature and the other arts runs for nineteen
pages (349-68). And of course similar ideas are discussed at great length in
other public fora, including this discussion at the National Humanities Center:
http://onthehuman.org/2009/06/the-adaptive-function-of-literature-and-the-other-arts/
You’ll observe that the first section in the article on the NHC site is
titled “Massive Modularity vs. Cognitive Flexibility.” The second section is
titled “Gene-Culture Co-Evolution.”
As it seems to me, you haven’t been willing or able to listen to the
actual arguments you are criticizing. A misleadingly worded footnote—falsely
suggesting a recent and not fully articulated reservation about massive
modularity—is no substitute for honest reporting and serious theoretical
engagement.
You glancingly mention gene-culture co-evolution (323-24) and brandish
it as if it were a refutation of various adaptationist theories about
literature. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ll attach a forthcoming
essay review that summarizes some recent work on gene-culture co-evolution and
locates it in the context of developments in the evolutionary social sciences
over a period of about thirty years. If you’re serious about understanding what
the literary Darwinists are up to, it would behoove you to get a better grasp
of this historical and theoretical context. I can’t fancy you will ever be
sympathetic to the general structure of ideas among the Darwinists, but it
would be useful for us and for other readers if you were to gain a more precise
and accurate knowledge of your target. Knocking down straw men makes it
possible to affirm one’s own core beliefs without having to reassess them. That
can be psychologically gratifying, but it isn’t useful to the people you are
criticizing, or to any readers who are genuinely interested in advancing their
own understanding. Useful criticism is criticism that gets a clear, accurate
understanding of its subject, probes real weaknesses and limitations in that
subject, and thus offer stimulus to further thinking. I’ll be curious to see
whether you ever achieve that kind of utility.
Joseph Carroll
Curators' Professor
English Department
University of Missouri, St. Louis
St. Louis, MO 63121
home phone 314 432 5583
http://www.umsl.edu/~carrolljc/