Wow, the internet has been agreeing with me recently. First we have at n+1 (whose guiding lights I don’t much admire, but which does produce some good stuff) a review of Neil Gross’s sociological account of Richard Rorty’s career, which splendidly questions the supposed omniscience of sociologies of art and intellect:
Bourdieu and Rorty thus agreed that appeals to something more enduring than certain arrangements of contingent social practices are simply the boasts of the arrogant and the future historiography of the victors. But where Rorty saw his own task as clearing away all the junk of disciplinary arrogance to show that there is nothing that everything else is really about, Bourdieu thought that the understanding of all knowledge as social entails the revelation that everything is really about jockeying for status.
Bourdieu thus saw to it that one professorial cohort emerged from the whole thing with fancier vestments: the sociologists. Bourdieu preached a “reflexive sociology” in which sociology’s instruments were to be directed back upon itself in at attempt to show that its own techniques were so powerful that even its own techniques could not resist its own techniques. Bourdieu redrew the lines of the reality/appearance distinction such that now only the sociologists, with their knowledge of status, stood in the unfiltered light of the really real. It was an invincible status grab. It is in this context, I think, that Gross’s decision to try out his new theory on Rorty is best understood: Rorty makes it difficult to take Bourdieu quite as seriously as Bourdieu took himself.
Then, some evolutionary psychologists come out of the woodwork with a discourse on literature so extraordinarily seventh-grade that it hardly bears commentary:
Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals’ hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker’s nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.
The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.
They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.
The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, the researchers claim in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. “By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling ‘free riders’ or ‘cheaters’ and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group,” they write.
Jonathan Gottschall, a co-author at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, told New Scientist magazine that in Victorian novels, dominant behaviour is stigmatised. “Bad guys and girls are just dominance machines, they are obsessed with getting ahead, they rarely have pro-social behaviours,” he said. But the more cooperative a group became, the more likely it was to survive and spread its values.
A few characters were judged to have both good and bad traits, such as Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy. The conflicts they demonstrate reflect the strains of maintaining such a cooperative social order, Carroll said.
It would be tedious to take this apart (let me direct you to Louis Menand’s immortal essay on Steven Pinker), but I’ll say that I detect one continuity between the radical demystifiers of literature who follow Bourdieu or Foucault and these plainly reactionary illiterates: both regard form, that is, literary language, as at best window dressing and at worst disguise. When you peel it away, what you find is a moral tale: it doesn’t matter that, as people point out in the comments section to the above article, George Eliot’s narrator so complicates the motivations and behaviors and thought processes of Middlemarch’s characters that it’s impossible not to see Dorothea’s idealism as naive and self-involved, or Casaubon’s arrogance and frigidity as the tragic wager against life that the would-be genius makes, or indeed the narrator’s own omniscience as fraught and uncertain in a world of ceaseless change and complication; and all this is a million miles away from something like Dracula. And Middlemarch is still at least a little bit of a moral tale…what would these people do with Bleak House or The Kreutzer Sonata or Amerika or To the Lighthouse or Sula or The Hour of the Star or Underworld or Elizabeth Costello? Language in these books doesn’t hide some “real” natural process, whether evolution or the attempt to win status. Rather, language produces sensations, induces reflection, comments upon and overrides these processes.
Scienctism will fail in the end because it refuses to recognize the autonomy of human values. I learned from Homer, not Darwin, that nature is not moral but that humans are. Our morality is a second-order process, to be sure, parasitic upon its material host, but it is not wholly determined by that host. This is what consciousness means. Scientism denies consciousness, only to bring it in through the back door of the scientist’s ability to understand it all. This is precisely what literary language, activated by consciousness and excessive of consciousness, puts in question. It doesn’t resolve the tension between the first- and second-order in our lives, but limns it.
Anyway, the headline is “Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists.” We’re better people? “Our” client state’s hugely powerful army just spent the last two weeks racking up a body count of 1000 in a starved, captive population made up either of non-combatants or of combatants so profoundly outnumbered and outgunned as essentially to be prisoners of war already; the political, business and intellectual class of “our” Dracula-enlightened countries mostly justified or paid for this. Hard to say that we’ve improved all that much from the time of the suppression of the Indian or Morant Bay rebellions.
