In last month's blog entry, I discussed and criticized the arguments of Jonathan Kramnick in his book Criticism and Truth. I asked, do they hold up to scrutiny? My position is that the narrow claims do stand up, but the broader claims do not. Here, I want to examine that same book within the framework of cultural evolution as argued in Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of our Success.
Henrich argues that a community of humans possesses a collective knowledge that no one person within the community individually possesses, the community's collective brain. Each human community has multiple prestige hierarchies that preserve and maintain and expand different domains of the group's collective knowledge. This collective knowledge includes craft knowledge, such as how to fashion tools, but also beliefs and values. Those values include aesthetic values. The umbrella term to describe a community's collective pool of knowledge is to say that it is their culture.
One aspect of Henrich's theory of cultural evolution is that collective pools of knowledge grow, shrink, evolve, and come into and go out of existence all the time. Cultures change, hence the name cultural evolution. For example, he argues the bigger the human community, the larger its possible collective brain. He recounts the history of how some human groups, such as the indigenous people of Tasmania, have in the past been cut off from a larger network of human communities and then began to lose knowledge, such as how to fish.
In Criticism and Truth, Kramnick argues that knowing how to study literature using close reading is a craft knowledge. He bemoans the loss of faculty positions for literary criticism because fewer positions threaten the loss of that craft knowledge. As a faculty member, you need a safe place to conduct your own research and to mentor the up-and-coming new researchers who will carry on the tradition.
This loss of institutional knowledge due to a contraction in the size of the community is very much in keeping with Henrich's cultural evolution. If you wipe out literature departments, you lose both the collective knowledge of how to research literature and the prestige hierarchy that renews that knowledge.
Henrich further argues that different human communities will face intergroup competition from other groups. This competition can be violent in the case of war, but it doesn't have to be violent. If a second cultural group is more successful at, say, interacting with a harsh environment, the first cultural group might adopt the second's practices and in the process evolve its collective knowledge by abandoning some practices or beliefs and adopting others.
To give the example of the spread of agriculture, the evidence suggests that agriculture spread both by demographic shifts (farmers moving into a region) and by cultural adoption from one group to the next (neighboring cultures picking up the knowledge).
The loss of status for literary studies represents a broader trend within our overall culture. Political forces within the broader culture seem to have decided that the prestige hierarchy that is the English department at a university is not as worthy of institutional support as formerly. Some colleges are consolidating all of their humanities into one department. That department would have a much smaller program for practicing skills unique to the study of literature.
For an analogous situation, I think of the political transformation that occurred in the British government and society in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, the Anglican Church was culturally and politically powerful. Getting a position as a curate was called "obtaining a living." To get that living, you had to support, at least nominally, the cultural belief system enshrined in the church doctrines.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglican Church had lost power, and the tax dollars flowing to it to pay for clergy shrank dramatically. The government shifted funding toward scientific institutions, encouraged by advocates such as T. H. Huxley. I know vanishingly little about this history, but from what I understand, the cultural advocates for the study of science and technology had allies both among the capital investing class and among the working class. One prestige hierarchy was severely diminished as another was bolstered by the larger community.
It is useful here to compare Kramnick's favored approach to that approach that he claims is the position of Stanley Fish. (Because it is Fish as characterized by Kramnick, and I haven't read any Fish, I will refer to him as Kramnick's Fish. BTW, I checked Wikipedia on August 1, 2026, and at that time, it indicated that Stanley Fish is still alive, so I will refrain from the past tense.) Kramnick's Fish argues that an interpretation is right if it is accepted by the academic literary establishment. Period. Little or no connection is necessary between the interpretation and the literary text it interprets. If you can get your interpretation published in a peer-review journal and go on to get tenure, then the interpretation is valid.
Kramnick rejects this path (which might be a strawman for his thesis). For Kramnick, because the critic has to weave the original literary text into his own critical text skillfully, his interpretation cannot be divorced from the world outside the critic's mind and social group. Apt criticism makes a claim to truth about something in the world. Kramnick claims that skillful and apt prose makes a beautiful artifact, which is a fine claim. However, he then goes on to claim that this elegance, this beauty, is truth-bearing. The knowledge is a know-how as much as a know-that.
As I wrote in my earlier blog entry, the problem is that many different compelling interpretations can be woven from the original text. Kramnick claims that if your interpretation is not true, then your critical prose is not apt or elegant. Keeping in mind the Innocence Project, my response is: try telling that to all the former prisoners who were falsely convicted of rape based on compelling presentations before the jury who were then freed when the DNA evidence refuted those elegant arguments.
Still, the Fish-y argument of Kramnick's Fish relates to the concept of a prestige hierarchy. An interpretation is valid if the inner circle of experts agrees that it is. The college students in literature courses then follow the social rules about what constitutes a valid interpretation. Kramnick's point is that, at some point, the proposed interpretations of the inner circle of scholars have to provide effective ways to understand the canon of literary works. Their interpretations cannot become entirely unmoored from the texts they are discussing.
Elsewhere I have discussed my own framework of recognizing two competing types of truth, for which I have used the German words Treu and Wahr. The first kind, Treu, is a socially agreed upon truth, which is related to the concept of loyalty to a social group (be true to your school). The second kind, Wahr, which is related to the Latin word veritas, relates to factual accuracy and a correspondence with the observable world.
One can think of the two in relation to a criminal trial. The verdict of the judge or jury is Treu, the truth arrived at as a social decision. The evidence presented by the competing counsels is truth as Wahr, statements that are hopefully accurate to past occurrences in the observable world. One can strive toward making the two kinds of truth consistent, but the gap between the two is exemplified by controversies with jury selection and problems with witness intimidation and destruction of evidence. We love to hate lawyers because they can persuade juries that something that is not Wahr is Treu.
Kramnick argues that good criticism relates to both kinds of truth. Apt prose ties criticism to the observable literary text, but the academy judges the aptness of the criticism, which is a social evaluation of truth. The position of Kramnick's Fish is entirely within the domain of Treu with no Wahr necessary.
Within Kramnick's system, the observable world of his Wahr is not a reproducible world measured by scientific instruments; rather, it is the universe of written texts.
Kramnick argues, on the one hand, that the critic's text cannot be apt unless it skillfully weaves the original literary text with the critic's arguments, but on the other hand, that the judgment about what is apt is arrived at socially by a group of scholars. To circle back to the beginning and place Kramnick's academy within Henrich's theory of cultural evolution, the group of scholars that judge aptness is the inner circle at the top of a prestige hierarchy which maintains part of the community's collective knowledge. In this way, one can situate Kramnick's ideas within the theory of cultural evolution.
Bibliography
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.
Kramnick, Jonathan B. Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. U. of Chicago Press, 2023.
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