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.