ELC Theory, part 1: Freudian Repression versus Multi-Level Selection

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 upcoming book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. Here I begin a series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you for your patience, my two followers.

Recently I had enjoyed the novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and I wanted to try my hand at a study of the novel through the framework of evolutionary literary criticism. Toward that end, I read an enlightening essay by Lawrence Wolfley ("Repression's Rainbow," PMLA, 1977, 873, JSTOR doi: 10.2307/461843) on the influence of the Freudian philosopher Norman O. Brown on the novelist and novel. Then in trying to tackle my own project, I discovered that the Freudian concept of repression as articulated by Brown is very much at odds with evolutionary biology's multilevel selection theory, promoted over decades by David Sloan Wilson, which informs some of my own thinking. Here I put down some of my own musings regarding these two, one might dare to say, incommensurate paradigms.

Brown's Freudian repression

According to Brown, in books such as Life against Death and Love's Body, Freud saw the Oedipal conflict as the basis of human culture. Our natural id is driven by urges related to the life instinct, or Eros. In order to live in social groups, we have to repress our id, and that repression is related to the death instinct, or Thanatos. So expressing our sexual urges is represented as healthy and life-affirming, and repressing those urges is seen as unhealthy. The paradox is that we have to repress the urges in order to live in groups, so we have to embrace the death instinct at least a bit, even though it is unhealthy to do so. And the more we veer toward larger groups, the more we embrace the death instinct and the eventual destruction of the human species.

It should be pointed out that many do not consider Brown (or Freud for that matter) scientific. Frederick Crews, who disparages all things Freudian, writes that Brown "never once deviates into petty considerations of evidence" (cited in footnote 7 of Wolfley). While I concede that some Freudian ideas can map to ideas that have a more scientific psychological and neurological basis (amygdala as id, pre-frontal cortex as super-ego), I agree with Crews that much of Freud suffers from the problem of being a belief system without much scientific validity. So it is noteworthy that a number of the best works of twentieth-century English literature, such as Joyce's Ulysses and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, rely on an unscientific basis for human behavior.

Multilevel Selection of D. S. Wilson

Evolutionary theory in general posits that the brains of animals have evolved in order for those animals to reproduce, so we humans have drives for our own preservation, such as for safety and nourishment, and for our reproduction, such as the sex drive and the impulse to nurture our children. Traditional group-level selection theory, which was strongly rejected by evolutionary biologists during the 1960s, posited drives toward taking actions for the good of the social group, including altruism.

Wilson's multilevel selection theory brings group-level selection back to the table in combination with individual selection. For social species, there are competing and opposing selection pressures: on the one hand, there is selection pressure to maximize the continuation of individual organisms and their genotypes, and, on the other hand, there is selection pressure to support the group, a group which collectively may have a genetic advantage if it outcompetes other groups. Group-level selection pressure requires certain environmental circumstances which do not always hold. What makes Wilson's work important is that he clearly argues the theory that pro-social selection pressure can influence the frequency of genotypes in a species, thereby saving group-level selection from being scientifically invalid.

Clash of the Paradigms

For Brown and Freud, the individual psychological urges of the id are to be promoted whenever possible to struggle against the suffocation of the death instinct. We begin life polymorphically perverse, and we should narrow our sexual nature as little as possible for purposes of living together in groups. Freud's theory does not dwell on the structure of status and dominance in a group and how that power dynamic effects which members of a social group can act on their sexual urges. The #MeToo movement centers on the observable fact that some individuals (usually men) try to exercise their sexual urges without the freely given consent of their potential sex partners, which is part of the reason why some versions of Freudian philosophy are currently under assault within our culture.

For the Freudian, the urge to conform to the group and to control our individual sexual urges is evil, but a necessary evil. Pynchon's novel lays the blame for the repression that leads to the technical marvels of rocketry and nuclear weapons at the feet of Calvinism. Too much repression leads to the technology which can then be used to wipe out humanity, the ultimate victory of the death instinct. Pynchon wages war against all forms of order, including the narrative structure of the novel, as a way to promote life, chaotic and diverse, against the death grip of social control.

In evolutionary multilevel selection, the individual drive to maximize reproduction is natural, but it is not necessarily good, and it certainly creates competition that would either rip groups apart or make them cauldrons of dominance and oppression, such as is found in a troop of baboons. Group-level selection instincts promote cooperation and actions that support altruism in the biological sense rather than in the psychological sense. But they are not necessarily good either: they promote within-group cooperation, but they necessarily also promote between-group competition and discrimination.

Wilson considers religions to be one category of idea-systems that support cooperative communities. In his book Darwin's Cathedral, he gives an in-depth examination of the Republic of Geneva, the original theocratic state overseen by John Calvin. Wilson examines some of the social mechanisms that Calvinism used support group cooperation and coherence. So just as Pynchon was laying at the feet of Calvinism all the ills of the modern world, Wilson was holding it up as an exemplar of the human group as a superorganism.

There are many phenomena which Brown's Freudianism fails to explain. For example, humans have lower stress levels when we are in a group with harmonious group interrelations, even though those groups function well because some members repress instincts that would promote individual advantage. The #MeToo movement is a valid critique of Freudian polymorous perversion. One of the few scientifically valid differences between the sexes is that men have a drive to have more indiscriminate sex with more partners than women do. That is easily explained within an evolutionary framework, but not within a Freudian worldview. The death instinct simply does not make biological sense, but the fact that males tend to have a stronger drive toward risk and violence does make sense in terms of reproductive success. For example, Genghis Khan's Y-chromosome, initially propelled by violence, has been hugely successful.

The social drive is best seen in social insects. Humans are unusual among mammals in having behavioral mechanisms that allow for group-level functional organization. As Wilson has pointed out, a wide variety of social behaviors and beliefs can serve as mechanisms for promoting the solidarity of the group over the interests of the individual, so the fact that pro-social behavior has an evolutionary basis does not strictly entail a given set of social behaviors. This fact allows for a wide diversity of human social customs and beliefs. Wilson in his book Does Altruism Exist? even shows that the atheistic philosophy of Ayn Rand has features similar to a fundamentalist religion, which might explain why Americans who are otherwise religiously conservative might embrace Ayn Rand.

Despite the diversity of pro-social behavioral mechanisms, there will always be a conflict between instinctual drives that promote the reproductive interests of the individual and drives that promote group-level functional organization. So deep within the human breast there really are conflicting impulses. They are just not Eros and Thanatos. Do I attempt a sexual liaison with a desirable partner even at the risk of ripping open the fabric of the social group? On the battlefield, do I stay and fight and die, or do I run and hope I survive and flourish later? Let's not forget that Cesare Borgia was the son of a man who had taken a vow of celibacy.

So the multi-level selection theory of evolutionary biology does give creative writers tools to spin their tales. Those tools may be too utilitarian to quicken the hearts of literary audiences or to pull raptures from discerning literary critics, but they are a sounder basis for chronicling the human condition than the likes of Norman O. Brown's version of Freudian philosophy.