Buried in the Endnotes, part 6: Cosmic Jealousy as a Status Issue

Because readers of a scholarly paper often do not study the endnotes, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes of my latest published essay. This is the sixth post in this series.

In my recent paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, (2020), I slipped in an idea which is related to evolutionary literary criticism in an endnote. There, I argue that Enid Welsford's concept of cosmic jealousy might actually be the jealousy of those lower in the status hierarchy toward those higher in the status hierarchy.

I wrote in the main text, "Welsford investigates the motivation for supporting fools. In many cultures, to praise oneself or to be praised by others risks attracting cosmic jealousy, an evil eye, and the surest way to evade this misfortune is to be mocked by others."

Here is the buried endnote:

One could argue that the real source of supposed cosmic jealousy is in fact the spiteful envy of lower status individuals within the social group.

An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 2: Language as Foundation of Human Relations

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a series of posts reframing the ideas of Kenneth Burke within the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism. This series has little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my 2 followers.

I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas. I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter himself admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. Carter himself complained that Burke's theories were not systematic, but a bit scattered. Notwithstanding, I press on.

Chapter one of Carter's book starts off by saying that Burke believes that rhetoric is the basis of human relations and that language is a system of moral negatives. On page three, Carter writes, "Burke once suggested that the study of rhetoric might provide the basis for the study of human relations. Assuming that the dynamics of language were integral to the dynamics of human personality and human society, he sought to isolate the recurring patterns."

Personally, I believe that Burke is fundamentally incorrect in his foundations. Humans have evolved from animals that lived in groups and did not possess language. Sharif and others found that if you put two humans in a room together and give them a task, they immediately sort into a hierarchy with a leader and a follower. The phrase "pecking order" was coined to describe dominance hierarchies among chickens. Therefore, major aspects of human relations precede language.

Human social behavior is much different than many other social animals, especially social mammals, in part because we exhibit a great deal of altruistic behavior. There are not many mammals where one individual will choose to die for the benefit of the group. Sober and Wilson articulated the theory of Multilevel Selection to explain this class of phenomena. Groups have to have ways of enforcing group-level selection benefits.

Burke's identification of language as a means of transmitting moral negatives works well with this theory of group selection. The moral negative often punishes selfish behavior that would put the individual above the group. Language allows for the coordination of pro-social behaviors that counter-action the pressure of selection for individual benefit.

My point is that Burke saw something important, but he inflated it. Language and rhetoric is not the basis of human relations, as he hypothesized, but it is the crucial medium through which mechanisms that promote altruistic behavior can operate. Language itself is not the basis for human relations, but it is an important component of the system that allows humans a range of behavior not found among other social animals.

Once again, my point is that Burke's language-centered philosophy can be reframed in terms of evolutionary psychology and multilevel selection theory.

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Open Access copy of Dialectic of American Humanism

In the middle of 2021, I noticed that EBSCO had removed my Renascence article called "The Dialectic of American Humanism," from their library database called Academic Search Premier.

A while ago, I contacted the editors of Renascence, asking them if I could post a copy of my article in a repository such as ResearchGate. They said that I could post a version of it so long as it did not display their exact formating and layout. I could post a version with the exact text including indications of page breaks, but I could not scan the article and post the exact image of it as it was published in the journal.

After I learned this fact, I still did not post my own copy of the article out of respect for the journal. They do sell a copy for $20 on the Philosophy Documentation Center. I did not want to eliminate their ability to generate revenue on intellectual property. I disagree with the business model of the Internet in which companies give away intellectual property and make money by selling user data to third parties. (Yes, I realize that having this statement on Google's Blogger platform makes me a hypocrite.) Part of the reason Facebook needs to provoke people into hating each other is because they need to generate revenue when their business model does not allow them to charge a fair price for their software, such as What's App.

When EBSCO took down my article, however, colleagues on my own campus could not access a version of it. Therefore, I have decided to post a word processor output of the article on ResearchGate. You can now download the article The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar Kristeller.

An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 1: Introduction, Mentalese

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD, published in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. This post starts another series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.

In 2020, I was reading Barbara Foley's Wrestling with the Left, which investigates the leftist origins of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In that book, Foley discusses and then uses Kenneth Burke's theory of the dual nature of the scapegoat in ritual, myth, and literature. I thought about writing a single blog entry reinterpreting Burke's theory of the scapegoat in terms of ELC, but as I study Burke more, I believe that I can write a series of entries reframing several of Burke's ideas within the ELC context. This entry begins the series.

NOTE: In the discussion below, I use the convention that the brain is the physical hardware (okay, wetware), and the mind is, roughly, the operating system running in the brain. Steven Pinker wrote a book called How the Mind Works, not How the Brain Works. But the mind cannot do things that the brain does not allow.

Burke's writings are voluminous enough and complex enough to devote a lifetime to teasing out every aspect of his theories and reframing them. I will not devote that much time to the effort, so this series will necessarily lack the scholarly rigor and thoroughness to which I would like to give it. I am heavily relying on C. Allen Carter's book about Burke for this series (below). Hopefully, Carter's interpretation of Burke is a fair one. One aspect of Burke that Foley explores and which Carter does not is his early involvement with communism.

For this first entry, I focus on what I consider to be Burke's position on language in the human mind, which I consider to be foundational to his philosophical outlook. Kenneth Burke is part of a philosophical school that says that all human thoughts worth discussing are handled and stored in the medium of a human language. He acknowledges non-human animals can think and behave, but that the human mind is fundamentally different because we have adopted narrative as a framework for our thinking, and it is a narrative in a human language inside of the mind. Further, that language begins with a moral negative. As C. Allen Carter explains, "According to Burke, the language system evolved as a system of moral negatives that gives rise to guilt. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word said, 'Thou Shalt Not!'" (Carter, 3).

Steven Pinker is one of the major theorists of Evolutionary Psychology (EP), upon which ELC is built. It is not necessary for every advocate of EP to embrace all of the ideas of Steven Pinker, but his approach to how the mind works is an important voice in the field. In that way, I consider any theory of Pinker's to be practically a tenet of EP.

Pinker has argued persuasively that the thoughts within the human brain are not in a human language. Pinker calls the native medium of thought within the brain mentalese. Language is a encryption technique for communicating information between two human minds, not the medium within the brain for handling thoughts. The brain has structures for translating internal thoughts into statements in language. It is literally possible to be at a loss for words.

Pinker is an expert on how the brain processes and constructs linguistic utterances; it is not wise to pick a fight with Pinker over the neurology of linguistic processing. In his most famous book, The Language Instinct, he showed how the abstract universal grammar of Noam Chomsky is implemented within the living mind. He further argues that our ability to adopt a language with a Chomskian structure is instinctual and is built into the human brain. It evolved.

Burke is your typical philosopher, which I mean in a negative way. He takes an interesting idea and universalizes it. Instead of saying that moral reasoning is important, he says that moral reasoning and language are the same thing, and that they are the basis of all human thought. Give him an inch, and he takes the universe. Burke has many valuable ideas, but he supersizes them until they form almost a cult religion. Pinker, by contrast, is well-grounded to evidence coming from neuroscience labs, and in a fair debate, Pinker would tear Burke to pieces.

The reason I have dedicated a series to Burke, though, is because Burke does have many good ideas, and they can be productively reframed within the context of evolutionary literary criticism. Until next time ...

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Foley, Barbara. Wrestling with the left: the making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

ELC Saunders #4, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number four regarding this book.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Chapter Five: Maladaptive Behavior and Auctorial Design: Huck Finn's Pap

Saunders persuasively makes the argument that Twain helps demonize the institution of slavery in the novel Huck Finn by associating it with the evil character of Huck's father. The story shows that Pap is a bad person in part by showing that he acts contrary to natural parental instincts.

For all animals, including humans, it is in an animal's evolutionary self-interest to invest in its children. Parental caring (especially maternal caring) is hardwired into the brain. The human heart usually quickens at the proverbial story of the mother bear who is willing to risk her own life to guard her cubs. Exploiting your own children and lessening their chances of their own reproductive success is therefore unnatural.

Saunders shows that Twain portrays Pap, the only character deeply committed to slavery and the systematic oppression of blacks, as an unnatural father. Pap tries to steal from Huck, he beats him, and he kidnaps and threatens to kill him. Pap seems to want Huck's money to drink and gamble it away. Saunders makes a strong case that Twain's subtext is that slavery is just as unnatural as Pap's dysfunctional fatherhood.

However, the psychological situation of Pap could be more complicated than Twain lets on. A similar situation is occurring in the politics of the United States today. Poor whites seem to be voting against their economic interests by voting for conservative politicians who implement policies hostile to the immediate interests of the poor. I suspect that those working class whites know their long-term interests better than pundits think they do.

To illustrate the issue, we can modify the story of Huck and Pap. If Pap had many children, and he ran a small business, and if Huck was about to take his money and education and join the interests of larger economic players in the society who threaten to crush Pap's business, say by working for the town bank, then it might be in Pap's evolutionary interests to keep Huck down. Although this scenario is very different from the novel, my point is to show that a parent lowering the potential reproductive success of one child might not be unnatural. Likewise, a group of people on welfare do not necessarily vote against their long-term interests by voting for a politician who cuts funding for welfare. The immediate action may be part of a larger pattern that is in their self-interest.

Saunders's observation is accurate: Twain does seem to portray Pap as unnatural and to link that unnatural behavior to his racism. My point above is that Twain may have been simplifying the portrayal of Pap, both with regard to his parental behavior and with regard to his social and political values.

ELC Saunders #3, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number three.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Chapter Two: Nepotism in Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux'

This chapter is a solid contribution to the scholarship on this story. When I first read the story, I did not understand it, and this paper allowed me to grasp the story's meaning better. That having been said, I did not find this discussion as eye-opening as the chapters on Wharton and Franklin (discussed in previous blog entries). Further, I do not think that Hawthorne's protagonist's behavior was plausible in an evolutionary sense, which was part of the reason I could not understand the story when I read it years ago.

The basic plot of the story is that a man arrives in a New England village looking for his relative. The relative is a British military officer who controls the political establishment of the town. The protagonist is repeatedly surprised and offended because the townspeople treat him rudely and are not helpful. Because he is related to a powerful person, he expects them to be deferential. At the end of the story, he discovers that, just that night, the revolutionaries had attacked the Major and overthrown his government. The story ends with the sight of the Major tarred and feathered and paraded out of town. Years ago, I was confused by the fact that the protagonist explodes in laughter at the end of the story. Now that I know more about humor, it makes at least a little more sense.

A humorous event is often structured in a way that there are two interpretations of the beginning of the event. The initially dominant interpretation is revealed to be incorrect, and the secondary interpretation quickly reveals itself to be the correct one. A joke often leads by offering an interpretation of a situation; then the punchline reveals the misinterpretation. So, for the statement, "I've had the most wonderful evening, but this wasn't it," the listener is led to believe that the statement is a compliment, only to have the last four words reverse the interpretation. And humor often has an element of social tension that is released in the resolution.

This Hawthorne story is structured like a humorous event: the protagonist cannot understand the behavior of the townspeople until he discovers the overthrow of his relative's power. In a rush, their behavior all makes sense. And there is an aspect of social tension released. Had the Major continued to be in power, the rudeness of the townspeople would not have made sense politically. Because he is gone, their rudeness makes perfect sense. Saunders argues that this political calculation would follow evolutionary logic.

Personally, I think that the protagonist would not have laughed; rather, he should have been fearful for his life. Had the townspeople thought that the protagonist could have reversed his kinsman's fortunes, they might have killed him. The leaders of the French Revolution did not kill the aristocracy en masse until they feared that other monarchies, sending armies to France, might restore the king and the nobility to power. The Hutus did not genocide the Tutsis in Rwanda until they thought that Paul Kigame's army would win the war. The Turks genocided the Armenians in part because they perceived the Armenians as allies of their enemies, the Russians.

In this story, the protagonist seems to join the revolutionaries, so for now, he is safe. In the immediate resolution of the incongruity, laughter is appropriate. While a person such as the protagonist actually might have been in danger, Hawthorne was writing a patriotic story with a positive overtone. If he had added a more realistic hint of murder or genocide, he would have ruined the subtext he was attempting. Nevertheless, in an actual situation like this, the protagonist might have been in as much danger as a child with an evil stepmother.

Digital John Kennedy Toole Papers, Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

I recently learned that the Louisiana Research Center at Tulane University began digitizing the John Kennedy Toole papers back in 2016. Why, back in 2009, I spent an entire week digging through the Toole Papers in person and compiled 42 handwritten pages of notes on its contents (Naturally, in a blizzard, and it was uphill both ways).

When I first heard the news of the digitization, I thought, hey, now no one has to camp out in the Tulane archives. But after some searching, I have decided that the digital project does not make the papers as findable as one might suppose. If you find something online through the digital collection, great, use it. But if you do not find something by searching the digital collection, do not conclude that it is not there. You might just have been unable to find it.

I would give you the URL to the digital collection, but if you go to it, the search engine for the collection is not that good, and you will not find much. I went to the website and conducted several searchs including: a) Lumiansky, b) Coleridge, and c) Theseus. The website's search engine failed to find anything for those three searches. And they are important terms to understanding Toole.

A better way is just to use Google. If you search Google, use this template: tulane john kennedy toole digital [keyword]. By plugging in to the keyword slot a) Lumiansky, you get one good hit. You also get one good hit with b) Coleridge. You get no hits for c) Theseus, even though Toole wrote in an assignment in Prof. Lumiansky's class: "Egens’ [Egeus’s] philosophy is notably Boethian and is not out of context in The Knight’s Tale. After the lists have resulted in almost double tragedy he, as Theseus’ father, attempts to make some ‘consolation’ by suggesting that these events must be accepted. The thread of Boethian runs throughout this tale."

So the new digital collection is better than nothing, but it is no substitute for spending a week at the archives looking through the boxes (so there!).