ELC Theory, Part 4: Evolutionary Psychology and Multilevel Selection Theory

I am currently studying Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC). ELC takes the findings of Evolutionary Psychology and applies them to the study of literature.

I have been a student of evolutionary psychology for most of its history. I first read Steven Pinker's Language Instinct in 1995. I studied Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997) and other EP texts. I bought both David Buss's textbook Evolutionary Psychology (first edition, 1999) and Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson's Unto Others (1998) when they first came out.

After studying Unto Others, I have fully embraced its argument that evolutionary theorists had been unnecessarily dismissive of group selection. Sober and Wilson show that theories that have been put forward as alternatives to group selection--such as inclusive fitness theory, evolutionary game theory, and the selfish gene theory--do not at all disprove group selection. The alternative theories simply use different methods to compute what amounts to special cases of group selection within a context of multilevel selection. Group selection is there, but researchers use techniques such as the averaging fallacy which hide it from view. The main conceptual models for evolutionary theory can be reframed into examples of group selection without changing any of the facts but simply reinterpreting them. Leaders of evolutionary theory therefore dismiss group selection even as they actually employ it.

When I accepted this argument, I fully expected evolutionary theorists to embrace multilevel selection theory. That did not happen. I also expected theorists of evolutionary psychology to embrace it. Buss's 1999 textbook had even mentioned Sober and Wilson's 1998 book in passing. However, I recently decided to review the current state of theory for evolutionary psychology by studying the sixth edition (2019) of Buss's textbook. Much to my surprise, Buss continues to maintain a skeptical distance from group selection by name (page 379). Buss seems to take his cue from Steven Pinker, who has used his megaphone to reject group selection loudly. (I even looked through the fourth edition of another evolutionary psychology textbook by Workman and Reader (2021), and it is also on the surface cool toward group selection.)

Even in his first edition, Buss had employed inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism, so his textbook has always used aspects of group selection without admitting it or possibly understanding that he was using it. By the sixth edition of the textbook, Buss has added a discussion of "cooperative coalitions" (pages 267-271) without admitting that they are fundamentally examples of group selection. He discusses two theories for explaining them without realizing that those theories do not work unless there is a fitness advantage in the biological genes for group cooperation. One of the theories is even called "cultural group selection" (Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, 1985).

Likewise in later editions, Buss's discussion of social hierarchies goes beyond simple violence-based dominance hierarchies and introduces more sophisticated models called prestige hierarchies. Prestige hierarchies rely heavily on the pro-social behavioral mechanisms that promote group-level fitness, but Buss still does not seem to understand that he is employing group selection.

In Part 20 of my Theory of Humor series, I wrote about a distinction I personally make between different types of social hierarchies. I called the first a "hard dominance" hierarchy. I called the second a "softer social status" hierarchy. Buss's prestige hierarchy is similar to (but not entirely congruent with) my "softer social status" hierarchy. Like my "softer status" concept, the prestige is freely given by others in the group. Here is a quote from Buss, 6/e (page 339):

In modern social groups, individuals acquire prestige by displaying high levels of competence on tasks that groups value, displaying generosity by giving more than taking, and making personal sacrifices that signal commitment to the group (Anderson and Kilduff, 2009). In the path to prestige, it is better to give than to receive.

Buss claims that presitge is generated by reciprocal altruism. I consider it mind-boggling that he does not understand that reciprocal altruism is a subset of the range of possible group selection behaviors within multilevel selection theory. The above quote is a perfect example of this point, but Buss continues explicitly to remain agnostic toward "group selection." Buss claims the above is reciprocal altruism, but it is a reciprocity that is not one-to-one but indirect, or many-to-many, among large groups. This sort of many-to-many reciprocity is group selection. I am still waiting for him to fully embrace group selection. I may have to wait a long time.

My point is that my framework for ELC depends on the acceptance of group selection within multilevel selection theory to explain many aspects of literature. If you truly used a version of evolutionary psychology without any group selection, you will be left with an impoverished tool for evolutionary literary criticism. However, it might not be too bad if you take Buss's approach. Buss's approach is to decline to embrace group selection explicitly but then call it indirect reciprocity and use it anyway. It is not logically rigorous, but that is what the evolutionary psychologists seem to do.

Why do current evolutionary psychologists avoid group selection by name? Perhaps because early group selection theorists hypothesized that organisms could treat "their entire species as a whole" as a group or "the local multi-species ecosystem as a whole" as a group. That sort of universal group selection is not part of Multilevel Selection Theory. Perhaps the label "group selection" is avoided to steer clear of theories that argue that universal altruism can arise by natural selection. But by any other name, much of what evolutionary psychologists theorize about is still group selection.

My advice: Spend time on a close reading of Sober and Wilson's Unto Others. That text shows the evolutionary logic that drives concepts like cooperative coalitions and prestige hierarchies. Group selection may still be "he who must not be named," but it is critical to ELC because it is critical to the human social order.

An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 3: Entelechy

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 (citation below). 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.

As I mentioned in a previous post (December 2021), Burke saw the language system as a system of moral negatives. I reframed that as the use of language to enact mechanisms within the group to reward pro-social behavior and punish selfish behavior.

According to Carter, Burke saw a language system as striving toward its own perfection, through a dialectic of working through contradictions. To describe this completion, Burke dusted off a term used by Aristotle, entelechy. In English, that word was most commonly used in the seventeenth century, referring to the perfection of anything, but most especially the perfection of the soul. For Burke, it is a perfection of a system of moral rules within a society. "In order to ensure the cooperation of the tribe, a system of commandments develops and is promulgated; it is expanded to cover extensive areas of experience and, eventually, assumes a life of its own" (Carter, 5).

As one can see from this quote, Burke associates a moral system with cooperation within a human social group, which in multilevel selection theory is translated into group selection mechanisms. As Sober and Wilson have pointed out (citation below), any social system that has the effect of rewarding cooperation can be the basis of group selection, so human cultures can vary widely in their belief systems and how they operate.

Burke makes the good point that once a moral system is adopted by the group, it assumes a life of its own. Members of the status hierarchy within the group compete to see who can more thoroughly create a consistent system of rules. The rules originally start as group selection mechanisms, but because the group adopts a culture of belief, leaders of the group compete with each other to add to the rules to build a consistent system.

My point is that Burke sees the language system and its moral rules as a thing in and of itself, out of the control of the people who enforce it. From the point of view of the psychology of multilevel selection, it is the factions within the group that are competing to implement ever more elaborate and complete versions of the cultural system that was originally implemented to promote group cooperation and suppress individual natural selection.

To give an example of entelechy, free market capitalism has been generally very successful in driving the expansion of the global economy, but in its pure form, its entelechy, it creates pathological situations of massive poverty at the bottom of the society and a small circle of people who control vast wealth at the top. A capitalist economic order works well when it is balanced with countervailing policies, such as the New Deal's tax and spend policies, but it becomes dysfunctional when it achieves its perfection, its entelechy. An ideology that supports a social order may have originally succeeded because it fostered group cooperation but then becomes unstable when it reaches its logical conclusion.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution might be seen as another example of within-group entelechy. Around 1900, there was a strong desire among many Chinese to throw off the military and economic hegemony of the western nations. The Communist Party gained what might be called its mandate from heaven when it sent the western powers packing. One can argue that after the dominance of the Communist Party was secure, Mao started the Cultural Revolution to keep power for himself personally and for his faction within the Communist Party. The Cultural Revolution was the ideological perfection of the Communist Party, but continual revolution was dysfunctional and unstable.

This competition among the leaders of a social group toward the logical completion of one cultural system should be contrasted with actions taken when groups represented by two different cultural value systems compete against each other. Each cultural system can become intolerant of cultural diversity within its own sphere as it fights for dominance against its rival.

For example, the Thirty Years War was in part a fight between adherents of Catholicism and Protestantism. Both Galileo's heliocentricism and the mathematics of infinitesimals were attacked by Catholic authorities because they challenged the ideological discipline of the Catholic side. Likewise, the Red Scare of the 1950s in the United States was part of an effort to enforce ideological discipline in the fight between Capitalism and Communism. This competition between cultural systems is different from the competition within a cultural system that can drive entelechy.

Burke may have been blending these two phenomena: within-group competition for ideological dominance and between-group competition between two different ideological systems. I consider the second, between-group competition, to be the basis for what Burke calls dialectical change (see later blog entries). Burke (according to Carter) seemed to think that within-group entelechy advanced through dialectical progression, which suggests that he did not differentiate between the two.

Burke seems to have been heavily influenced by the history of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition when he was developing his theories. One of the common motifs of the Christian New Testament is that the Jewish priestly caste at the time of Christ had purportedly set up so many rules for religious observance, they had lost sight of what God would have considered most important. There is a common Christian argument that the community should follow the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. If you follow complicated rules about observing the sabbath but you do not love your neighbor as yourself, you have failed. In this way, Christianity can be seen as a critical framework for breaking down status hierarchies based on complex rules for religious observance, a critical stance against pathological entelechy.

To bring this back to Multilevel Selection Theory, a set of cultural norms helps form a group for mutual aid and benefit, but status hierarchies will form within the group. Those hierarchies elaborate on the mechanisms the group uses for punishing selfish behavior. At some point, the complex rules can cease to serve the well-being of the group and its members. I disagree with Burke that the perfection of the rules is built into the nature of language itself. Instead, I think it is built into the social psychology of group dynamics. We humans just happen to use language to create complex social groups, so it appears that it is in the nature of language. Instead, it goes deeper.

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

Sober, Elliott and David Sloan Wilson. Unto others: the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Harvard University Press, 1998.

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.