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STRAIGHT_PINKER
November 27, 2013
I've been puzzling over some Steven Pinker
material that was published as an article:
"How Much Art Can the Brain Take?". [ref]
It was originally from the book "How the Mind [ref]
Works" (Penguin paperback, 1999).
Pinker's aproach to art is pretty straight-forward:
anything over his head must be empty snobbery,
intended to make him feel stupid; anything under
his head is merely nasty pandering to our
baser-instincts, and right in the middle is the
real stuff that we must begin with if we are to
have any hope achieving a True Theory of art.
LOST_CONTACT
Pinker apparently has a bit of a complex going
about art mavens looking down on him as a
philistine, and (though it repeatedly protests
this is not so) this is largely a hit piece (Pinker objects to
aimed at the academic art establishment. status-seeking and
one-upsmanship in art,
This is largely an exercise in tone, but evidentally not in
where he may say something that's the essay form...)
not particularly outrageous, but his
style repeatedly makes it sound like
he's trying to denigrate the whole
idea of art. There's a lot of
implicit moralism where few of the Overall, it reminds me about
buried premises would stand examination. that great conundrum people
used to stress out about, "if
we're just phyiscal beings,
then is Free Will just an
There is something-or-other going on illusion?"
here about the biological purpose
served by art, if any, there's some FREEWILL
question about whether art might have
played some role in our genetic (Now, people's
evolution. What this has to do with attitudes seem
anything isn't really spelled out-- closer to
"'Freedom?'
Pinker makes some assertions about How quaint.")
how we need to focus on art-he-likes
if we're going to understand art on
this biological level.
So I gather that Pinker is another
guy who wants to believe that his ADAPTIVE_ART
tastes are biologically hardwired.
DOWN_THE_SCALE
Pinker seems undecided about
whether art is unambiguously
a "spandrel" (without genetic Questions like this tend to become
advantage), or whether it may complicated fairly quickly:
be some mixture of adaptive
and non-adaptive. Activity without apparent purpose
often has a hidden potential
He leads off painting a portrait justification (Pinker gets to this).
of art as a useless activity
that doesn't contribute to And any visual art has to work with
survival, but later backs off the biological characteristics of
from that and talks about how vision such as the range of
stories may function as a kind visible light, and any music must
of exercise (the "rehersal for be constrained by the range of
living" theory). sound we can hear, the kinds of
rhythms we can percieve, and so on.
(So yeah, Marcuse had a point:
"The body gives height to the
eye.")
I don't think Pinker quite Even if art were a spandrel,
gets the "we are not our it's boundaries would be tightly
genes" principle: we care specified by biological need.
about many things besides
the transmission of our genes.
As Dawkins put it Conservatives struggle
"Anyone capable of using with this notion, for
a condom is capable of some reason.
going against the will
of their genes." I'm on the other side
of that fence, myself.
NATURE_OF_THE_WALLS
(Check the original for
Anyway, here goes, lets go through the essay Pinker's paragraphing...
in some detail (until I get sick of it): I insert breaks at will.
And overuse close quotes.)
"Man does not live by bread alone, nor by
know-how, safety, children, or sex. People
everywhere spend as much time as they can Precisely.
afford on activities that, in the struggle
to survive and reproduce, seem pointless." LIFE
"As if that weren't enough of a puzzle, the
more biologically frivolous and vain the
activity, the more people exalt it."
This is only a puzzle if you're stuck
on the idea that your genes are you,
and that the well-springs of culture
are rooted in biology.
"Art, literature, and music are thought to be
not just pleasurable but noble. They are the
mind's best work, what makes life worth
living. Why do we pursue the biologically
trivial and futile and experience them as
sublime?"
One might ask why people persist in
worshipping our biological origins
like some diety of scientism... SCIENTISM
"To many educated people the question seems
horribly philistine, even immoral. But it is
unavoidable for anyone interested in the makeup
of [Homo sapiens]."
The answer just isn't that difficult...
"How might we understand the psychology of the arts
within the modern understanding of the brain as a
biological organ shaped by the forces of evolution?"
Well, see, we are not our genes.
It's spandrels all the way down, jack.
Then he goes into an extended riff
about the confusion of snob appeal You know, real art, the stuff
and real artistic appeal: that speaks to your DNA. Or
your soul. Or something.
"Most people would lose their taste
for a musical recording if they
learned it was being sold at It is true, snobs
supermarket checkout counters or on like myself have
late-night television ..." no use for popular
trash.
Pinker continues with a cartoon version of AKB48
elite snobs in the academy, that I think
bears little resemblence to reality.
Actual academic snobs tend to make jokes
about their snobbery, and often confess to But then, Pinker hangs out
an interest in low art to prove they're at Harvard, which seems to
not mere snobs. be a fine place to look
for cartoons.
After some twists and turns where he
insults art and the art-obsessed and
then backs off and denies that's what
he was doing, he insists that this is
the program:
"But to understand the psychology of the
arts that remains when we subtract out the
psychology of status,"
"It means asking a simple question: What
is it about the mind that lets people take
pleasure in shapes and colors and sounds
and stories and myths?"
"We need to begin with folk songs, pulp
fiction, and paintings on black velvet, not
Mahler, Eliot, and Kandinsky."
There are a few things to be said here:
I've got nothing against taking popular art
seriously-- though I think Pinker is
confused about it's simplicity, and
elsewhere he excludes from consideration
other things such as pornography, which
seems to me like an arbitrary boundary.
I don't understand at all why you would
assume "the psychology of status" has
nothing to do with the issue, particularly
if you're interested in rooting art in
biological evolution: art might be a
peacock tail, rather then a spandrel.
It might be inherently a group identifier,
irrespective of whether it's a high or low
art, or whether the group is large or small.
I sincerely hope Pinker's
"Better Angels of our
Nature" isn't as
There are so many problems in this essay, intellectually sloppy as
it's difficult to know where to begin. this, I have some hopes
It's a mixture of unexamined assumptions-- for that one.
truly novice-level intellectual errors--
and arrogant assertions that the experts
are all fools, ungrounded in reality.
MANIFESTO
Look at this passage:
"... Theories of Art carry the seeds of their HONEST_JOHN
own destruction. In an age when any Joe can buy
CDs, paintings, and novels, artists make their
careers by finding ways to avoid the hackneyed,
to challenge jaded tastes, to differentiate the
cognoscenti from the dilettantes, and to flout
the current wisdom about what art is (hence the
fruitless attempts over the decades to define
art). Any discussion that fails to recognize
that dynamic is doomed to sterility. It can
never explain why music pleases the ear,
because 'music' will be defined to encompass
atonal jazz, chromatic compositions, and other
intellectual exercises."
You see, that weird-ass
highbrow stuff isn't Not to mention
*real* art. Real art is splatter horror movies.
nice. Stuff regular
folks like. Like heavy Horror stories are a
metal guitars with lots really old form of
of distortion and popular art. They've
feedback. Or like been confounding simple-
gangster rap music. minded attempts at
theories of esthetics
If we can't understand throughout recorded
the esthetic appeal of history.
simple cases like that,
then what's the point
of going all Duchamp?
"It will never understand the bawdy laughs
and convivial banter that are so important
in people's lives because it will define I wonder what it is about
humor as the arch wit of an Oscar Wilde." conservative-types that they
insist on elevating the
tastes of The People like
this. You'd think it would
be the domain of lefties...
RUSSIAN_PLOT
This is where Pinker takes the
"art is a spandrel" side:
"Another reason the psychology of the arts is
obscure is that they are not adaptive in the
biologist's sense of the word. I believe
there is much insight to be gained in
studying the adaptive design of the major
components of the mind, but that does not
mean that everything the mind does is He makes assumptions
biologically adaptive. The mind is a neural about what art is about,
computer, fitted by natural selection with which he then uses to
algorithms for reasoning about plants, prove something about
animals, objects, and people. It is driven what art is about. (ever
by goal states that served biological heard of "begging the
fitness in ancestral environments, such as question"?)...
food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship,
status, and knowledge. That toolbox,
however, can be used to assemble Sunday
afternoon projects of dubious biological
value."
Right, "dubious biological value".
And biological value is what counts, right?
And then he goes for one of my favorite
metaphors, arguing that art is hi-jacking the
machinery of biology, it's a cheat, like
wire-heading, like narcotics, like... cheescake?
"Some parts of the mind register the attainment of
increments of fitness by giving us a sensation of DRUGS
pleasure. Other parts use a knowledge of cause and
effect to bring about goals. Put them together and
you get a mind that rises to a biologically
pointless challenge: figuring out how to get at the
pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little
jolts of enjoyment without the inconvenience of
wringing bona fide fitness increments from the
harsh world."
"An obvious example is recreational drugs, which
seep into the chemical junctions of the pleasure
circuits."
"Another route to the pleasure circuits is via the
senses, which stimulate the circuits when they are
in environments that would have led to fitness in
past generations. ... if the intellectual faculties
could identify the pleasure-giving patterns, purify
them, and concentrate them, the brain could
stimulate itself without the messiness of electrodes
or drugs. It could give itself intense artificial
doses of the sights and sounds and smells that
ordinarily are given off by healthful environments."
"We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, ... "
But that example deserves a
page all it's own...
PINK_CHEESECAKE
"Pornography is another pleasure technology.
At least to some extent, art may be a third."
This is one of the more "Pleasure Technology"...
peculiar taxonomies isn't that a place on
I've seen in some time: Telegraph?
pornography is not art?
(It's funny he doesn't
And this is from someone talk about vibrators.
defending the tastes of Prudish, East Coast
the people. intellectuals...)
First they came for your
cheescake, then they came
for your
CHEESECAKE
"The visual arts are one example of a
technology designed to defeat the locks
that safeguard our pleasure buttons and
to press the buttons in various
combinations."
This flat assertion immediately made
me wonder about categories like play,
and exercise; games and sports. Maybe East Coast academic
Men of The People don't like
If you're after some sort of to think about sports, either.
metaphor of art, wouldn't
you try considering it as a Excercise is even more unthinkable
form of exercise? than cheesecake.
But then, further ahead in
the essay, he does get there:
"Literature, of course, not only delights but
instructs. Fictional narratives might work a
bit like experiments. The author places a
fictitious character in a hypothetical
situation in an otherwise real world, and
allows the reader to explore the
consequences. Once the fictitious world is set
up, the protagonist is given a goal and we
watch as he or she pursues it in the face of
obstacles. We watch what happens to them and
mentally take notes on the outcomes of the
strategies and tactics they use in pursuing
their goals."
"What are those goals? A Darwinian would
say that ultimately organisms have only
two: to survive and to reproduce."
It's not that hard to find
tales of heroic sacrifice
for people outside of ones
immediate gene pool.
Because we are not out genes,
It's often suggested that fiction is a kind and we are not just "organism",
of rehersal for living. A waking dream? and are you or are you not
a Darwinian yourself?
Dreams are another odd case: unused
mental capacity, engaged in a peculiar (And was Darwin
activity which clearly has some purpose, a Darwinian?)
but it's a purpose that is not at all
obvious.
Dreams are also a
complicating factor for
stuffy, Serious People
(like myself) that want to
argue that drugs are all a
snare and a delusion.
We're built to hallucinate
"Everyday photographs and paintings (the every night, why object to
ones that most people hang in their living an induced one every now
rooms, though not necessarily the ones you and then?
would see in a museum) depict plants,
animals, landscapes, and people." DRUGS
"Many biologists believe that the
geometry of beauty is the visible Many biologists who
signal of adaptively valuable aren't worth naming
objects: safe, food-rich, explorable, here.
learnable habitats, and fertile,
healthy dates, mates, and offspring.
BURNING_LADY
"Fiction and drama may be a mixture of the
non-adaptive and the adaptive."
Or it might not.
As painting might be, or it might not.
"John Dryden defined a play as 'a just and
lively image of human nature, representing
its passions and humours, and the changes Check it out, a quotation.
of fortune to which it is subject; for the I was getting the feeling
delight and instruction of mankind.' " Pinker thought he was the
first one out the gate...
"It's helpful to distinguish the
delight, perhaps the product of a
useless technology for pressing
our pleasure buttons, from the
instruction, perhaps a product of The puritanical assumption that
a cognitive adaptation." there's a rigid distinction
between the two is hilarious.
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