tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18806777458232287742024-03-06T01:45:22.182-06:00John Kennedy Toole Research by Vernon LeightonA place for comments from readers, reviewers, critics of Vernon Leighton's attempts at scholarly writing relating to the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole.H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.comBlogger182125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-6031590011323916302024-03-01T06:01:00.010-06:002024-03-01T06:09:14.203-06:00Ignatius and Jay Gatsby: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 32In <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, the narrator, Nick, has a low opinion of Jay Gatsby until he discovers that Gatsby is not amassing wealth and status for its own sake; rather, he is doing it in the quixotic pursuit of a woman. Suddenly, Nick finds Gatsby intriguing: "He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor."
<p>
Judith Saunders foregrounds this aspect of the novel in her essay on the evolutionary aspects of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> (citation below). Gatsby's wealth is a courtship display, much like the feathers of a peacock. Its purpose is to attract Daisy. For my earlier blog entry on Saunders' investigation, <a href="https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-great-gatsby-elc-saunders-8-notes.html">click here</a>.
<P>
Naturally, when someone uses the word <i>womb</i> in a literary context, I think of the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i>, by John Kennedy Toole. That novel has more than one symbolic womb: Gus Levy is trapped in a womb from which he escapes, and, at the beginning of the novel, Ignatius Reilly enjoys occupying the womb of his mother's house and fights to stay there as she tries to eject him. <i>Confederacy</i> also features a relationship between Ignatius Reilly and Myrna Mynkoff that can be read as a carnivalesque parody of a stereotypical romance. Despite its ridiculous quality, could Ignatius's behavior in the novel be a courtship display, much as Gatsby's display of wealth?
<P>
In <i>Confederacy</i>, both Ignatius's Crusade for Moorish Dignity and his efforts to lead a political revolution of gays are undertaken because of the provocation of Myrna's letters. He wants to impress her. In the end of the novel, Myrna comes to New Orleans and rescues Ignatius. He would never admit to courting her, but he was trying to get her attention. In a backwards sort of way, his courtship has succeeded.
<p>
Saunders, Judith P. "The Great Gatsby: An Unusual Case of Mate Poaching," <i>American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives</i> (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018): 138-174.
<P>
<i>Thesis: Compare Ignatius Reilly to Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is undertaking a courtship, but is Ignatius doing so as well? Gatsby's efforts end tragically. Ignatius's efforts end comically.</i>
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-15449401398892314002024-02-01T05:41:00.000-06:002024-02-01T05:41:38.686-06:00Ignatius and Cosmo Kramer: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 31Many of the entries in this series focus on some character who is similar to Ignatius Reilly or to the plot of <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i>. This is not one of those entries. Well, not entirely.
<P>
Ignatius Reilly is a slapstick hero. He conforms to all nine of the "Personality Traits of the Hero in a Physical Comedy" as detailed in the documentary "Laughing Matters" (see <a href="https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2015/07/personality-traits-of-hero-in-physical.html" target="_blank">my blog entry from July of 2015</a>). However, Ignatius is psychologically repressed. He defends his virginity. Despite being a physical comedian, he is learned, with intellectual pomposity.
<P>
Cosmo Kramer, a character on the 1990s sitcom "Seinfeld," is also a physical comedian. He falls, he crashes. He is an innocent fool who acts on his desires without worrying what others might think. He is not overly intellectual, and he is not pompous. On the show, many women are attracted to his honest expression of emotion (at least for brief relationships), much to the frustration of the other male characters. In season five, episode eleven, this sexual charisma is called "the kavorka."
<p>
Ignatius and Kramer can function in similar ways in a farcical plot. Both of them generate chaos in the social group which can reorder relationships. As I have stated in detail before, comedies often feature a small group where some members are lower in the status hierarchy than they should be, held down by a blocking character. The comic chaos reorders the relationships with the blocking character losing status and the deserving oppressed rising in status.
<P>
To give an example from <i>Seinfeld</i>, in season three, episode seven, called "The Cafe," George is trying to impress the woman he is dating, who is an educational psychologist, even though he does badly on intelligence tests. He agrees to take an IQ test, but then he passes the test out the window to Elaine, who is good at taking such tests. Elaine goes to the cafe to take the test. Kramer comes into the cafe, interacts with Elaine, and spills food on the test. George cannot pretend that he took the test. His false presentation as a smart person is undone by the chaos generated by the slapstick hero. His status is comically lowered in the estimation of a potential mate, thanks to the slapstick hero.
<P>
<i>Thesis: Compare Ignatius Reilly to Cosmo Kramer. They are very different but can function in similar ways within the plot of a comic narrative.</i>
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-7803314496541221502024-01-01T07:22:00.000-06:002024-01-01T07:22:16.284-06:00Commedia dell'arte and Confederacy of Dunces ... Not!: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 30A few years ago, a scholarly journal (which will remain nameless for confidentiality) asked me to review a submission related to the novel <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i>. I dutifully read the paper and critiqued it. The submitted paper explored the relationship between the Renaissance theatrical tradition of Commedia dell'arte and <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i>.
<p>
I am no expert on commedia dell'arte, but I have studied the subject a little, and I have contemplated writing a paper on <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i> and commedia dell'arte myself. The author(s) of the paper I reviewed described commedia dell'arte well. They then tried to argue that <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i> was an example of commedia dell'arte. What struck me was that, based on their own articulation of the genre, <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i> <i>is not</i> an example of commedia dell'arte. In my critique, I praised their attempt, but argued that they should reverse their conclusion, and I detailed why.
<P>
I realize that negative results are less likely to be reported, whether they are in the physical sciences, the social sciences, or elsewhere, but they are important to the scholarly endeavor. They are not glamorous, but they are important. The paper I reviewed has not, to my knowledge, been published, nor has any other paper on the topic. Still, such a study is worth doing.
<P>
<i>Thesis: Describe commedia dell'arte and show why Confederacy of Dunces is not best described through the framework of that theatrical genre. This thesis cannot be handled in a run-of-the-mill term paper, but at least a master's thesis.</i>
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-14608469874663785512023-12-01T05:57:00.000-06:002023-12-01T05:57:14.685-06:00Yes, Those Bloody Monkeys Again; de Waal's *Different*, Part 2This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (<i>Confederacy</i>), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to evolutionary psychology.
<P>
I have been enjoying the recent book by Frans de Waal called <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1252848474">Different: Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist</a> (Norton, 2022). In my previous blog entry about de Waal, I discussed de Waal's perspective on status hierarchies and egalitarianism. Here I will tackle the main topic of his book: gender and sex.
<P>
de Waal threads a tricky path through a topic that is politically charged. de Waal strongly distances himself from those thinkers who would argue, first, that men are, in some fundamental sense, superior to women and, second, that our legal structures should reflect that fact. He uses as a negative example the influential study published in the 1930s by the primatologist Solly Zuckerman called Monkey Hill. The Monkey Hill study seemed to imply that humans, if left to their primate nature, would create a society where life is brutish, nasty, and short. de Waal shows that primates do not generally behave that way, and that the observations from primatology do not limit human nature to the Monkey Hill stereotype. He is inclined toward a more liberal interpretation of the data from primatology. Despite this liberal leaning, de Waal insists that there really are biologically-derived sex differences among us. The title of his book is, after all, <i>Different</i>.
<P>
Some thinkers who are opposed to the ideological position of male superiority go so far as to deny that biology has anything to do with human gender. de Waal argues that this position is also extreme and flat out wrong. An example that de Waal uses is Judith Butler's claim from the 1980s that gender is not a (biological) fact but a social construct. de Waal gives many examples from both humans and other primates to show that, in fact, biology matters a great deal. Most of the book probes the relationship of biological nature and cultural nurture. He argues that primates mature so slowly so that their young can learn a complex culture. Our biological nature is to be culturally nurtured. One thesis he puts forward is that among primates the young are attracted to imitate adults of their own sex, and they take on gender roles through self-socialization, not through explicit instruction.
<P>
de Waal contrasts humans with those primates to which humans are most closely related: the chimpanzees and the bonobos. [Note: de Waal uses the term <i>hominid</i> to refer to humans, chimps, and bonobos. I think paleontologists would have an issue with that label.] Chimps have a patriarchal and sometimes violent society, while bonobos have a more peaceful, matriarchal society. Even within the more male-dominated chimp social groups, females exert political power and show leadership.
<P>
For example, within the group of chimpanzees at the Burgers' Zoo, the alpha female Mama was looked to by the others as the actor who had the interests of the group as a whole most at heart, a group function which de Waal calls the "control role." Warring males within that group would seek Mama out to effect reconciliation.
<P>
de Waal agrees (at least in part) with the fundamental conceptual division that is the basis of modern gender studies; namely, that one can differentiate biological sex from socially-defined gender roles. "Gender refers to the learned overlays that turn a biological female into a woman and a biological male into a man" (12). He acknowledges the diversity of sex and gender, such as those persons who are intersex or transsexual, but he maintains, "Nevertheless, for the majority of people, gender and sex are congruent. Despite their different meanings, these two terms remain joined at the hip" (13). In this way, he diverges from gender theorists who believe that gender is completely divorced from sex. Because gender in most cases is intimately linked to the biological fact of sex, de Waal argues that gender is not entirely socially constructed. Margaret Mead is often seen as the originator of the 'gender is cultural' concept, so de Waal quotes from Mead's writings to show her support for his position.
<P>
One of de Waal's novel arguments in this debate comes from the study of transsexuals: "The existence of transgender people challenges the notion of gender as an arbitrary social construct. Gender roles may be cultural products, but gender identity itself seems to arise from within" (56). He argues that gender identity is strongly formed early in a person's development and that the existence of transsexuals refutes Butler's social construct theory.
<P>
de Waal is sympathetic to the concern about gender inequality, but he rejects the idea that the way to achieve gender equality is to claim that gender is a choice. The focus of efforts toward equality need to be on the second word in the phrase: inequality. "Whether the push for gender equality will succeed doesn't hinge on the outcome of the eternal debate about real or imagined sex differences. Equality doesn't require similarity" (14).
<P>
de Waal's perspective is important for evolutionary psychologists and therefore evolutionary literary critics because gender and sexuality are important components of those fields, and he critiques their treatment with deep observational experience. He directly criticizes naive versions of the theory of sexual strategies, which he refers to as the Bateman's Principle. He strongly criticizes the Thornhill and Palmer theory about of rape as a natural phenomenon. While he insists that biology, including in-born tendencies shaped by evolution, is important, he also emphasizes that behavior is highly flexible and dependent on context, especially cultural context.
<P>
In the last chapter, (pages 310-311) de Waal lists human psychological patterns that do seem to be strongly governed by our evolutionary biology and those that do not seem to be. For those behaviors that are strongly biologically based, he argues that they are not stereotypical but archetypical. In this category, females are more nurturing of young, and males are more status-oriented and violent. Behaviors that other theorists have attributed to biology, but which do not seem to be, include: leadership skills, tendencies to form status hierarchies, tendencies toward sexual promiscuity, and competitiveness.
<P>
de Waal argues that humans do have unique aspects of our evolutionary psychology that are not shared by even our closest primate cousins. First, he argues that pair-bonded male-female relationships are part of our biology. "I believe it is this pair-bond that sets us apart from the apes more than anything else" (275). Second, he points out that it is not rare among many species of primates for females to cooperate with one another, but it is rare for males to do so. "Male teamwork is a hallmark of human society" (231).
<P>
de Waal discusses the fact that there are deep and subconscious differences in how all people treat women and men. The people who know this fact best are transsexuals who have experienced interpersonal behavior first as one gender and then as the other. He describes some of their observations but then emphasizes that this discussion is not an endorsement of the biased behavior they describe. "Instead, it highlights how deeply primate sexual dimorphism sticks in our subconscious" (252). One example de Waal offers of this deep inequality is a trolley problem experiment in which the subject can imagine pushing a man or a woman onto the trolley tracks to save five other people. Ninety percent of both sexes would prefer to push the man rather than the woman (180). Women may suffer indignities such as not be taken seriously in a debate in part because of their high-pitched voices, but men are the preferred sex for cannon fodder.
<P>
One of the book's theses is that a diversity of sexual orientations and sexual identities are natural. de Waal devotes one entire chapter to the bonobos, whose social groups feature a high degree of female-female sex, and he has a later chapter on same-sex sex throughout the natural world. He rejects the claim that this is unnatural. With regard to sexual identity, he cites research that suggests that, in some transsexuals, brain development leads to brain structures similar to the other sex, thereby indicating a biological basis for a transsexual's early and strongly held perception that he or she has a gender other than their sex.
<P>
The final chapter of the book discusses philosophical dualism, the idea that the mind and body are fundamentally separate. de Waal rejects this philosophical position. He believes that it comes from male orientation toward the world. "This dualism is quintessentially masculine, concerned less with the human mind than with the male mind" (313). He finds it ironic that second-wave feminists, by arguing that gender is a social construct, have adopted a form of masculine dualism. Gina Rippon once protested against arguments from biology by saying "Not those bloody monkeys again!" de Waal's response is, yes, those bloody monkeys again.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-71703313959826307672023-11-01T05:42:00.001-05:002023-11-01T05:42:28.730-05:00The Egalitarian Delusion, de Waal's Different, Part 1This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (<i>Confederacy</i>), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to social psychology and therefore evolutionary psychology.
<P>
I have been enjoying the recent book by Frans de Waal called <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1252848474">Different: Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist</a> (Norton, 2022). I find that de Waal has many wise observations about the subject of sexuality and gender. After finishing the book, I am inclined to think that you should only listen to someone's opinion on the nature of human gender if that person <i>is</i> a primatologist. This blog entry, possibly the first of several, is not about gender per se.
<P>
In the third chapter of the book, de Waal anchors the chapter on the fact that he was one of six brothers who had no sisters. He discusses some of the physiological differences between males and females. Most of the way through the chapter, however, he suddenly gets on the topic of his student days, when he was part of revolutionary student organizations that protested against authority and hierarchy. The student leaders claimed that they could overthrow the power structure and found an egalitarian society.
<P>
Meanwhile, de Waal was studying a colony of chimpanzees in the Burger's Zoo. There, he observed dominance hierarchies. As he writes, "In the evenings, I'd listen to bohemian-looking ideologues holding forth on the evil of hierarchies, while during the days, I'd observe power plays in the chimpanzee colony. This alternation induced a serious dilemma due to the contradictory messages. ... In the end, I found behavior to be so much more convincing than words that I placed my trust in the chimps." (76).
<P>
As for the revolutionaries, "Despite all their talk of equality, my fellow revolutionaries exhibited a distinct hierarchy, with a few driven young men at the top." (77) de Waal concludes, "We collectively suffered an egalitarian delusion. We engaged in fiercely democratic rhetoric, yet our actual behavior told a different story." (78)
<P>
de Waal then recounts that he was later hired into the Psychology Department at Emory University. He describes a fundamental problem faced by psychologists: they belong to the very group of organisms they are trying to study. "This explains why psychology textbooks read almost like ideological tracts. Between the lines, we gather that racism is deplorable, sexism is wrong, aggression is / to be eliminated, and hierarchies are archaic." (78-79)
<P>
He quickly adds, "For me, this was a shock, not because I necessarily believe the opposite, but because such opinions interfere with science. ... Every time I received a psychology textbook from a publisher, I made a point of checking the index for entries on power and dominance. Most of the time, these terms were not even listed, as if they didn’t apply to the social behavior of Homo sapiens." (79)
<P>
de Waal found Machiavelli's <i>The Prince</i> very informative of the behavior he was observing among the chimpanzees. He concludes, "The egalitarian delusion of the social sciences is all the more astounding since we all work at a university, which is one huge power structure." (79)
<P>
This studious act of ignoring the status hierarchy we are part of can be seen in texts on evolutionary psychology. The textbook by David Buss strongly features status and dominance hierarchies, while the textbook by Workman and Reader ignores them, as I wrote in June of 2022. I like de Waal's treatment of this topic, because he is keenly aware of the limits of social dominance. Still, it is easy to see why one might want to ignore status hierarchies, despite their centrality to human behavior. de Waal himself admits that conservative politicians mischaracterized the nature of the Alpha Male in his book <i>Chimpanzee Politics</i>. He became famous in the 1990s precisely because his discussion on dominance was distorted.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-54403691549577406292023-10-01T06:00:00.000-05:002023-10-01T06:00:25.859-05:00Explication versus Interpretation, a Lesson in Literary TheoryThis series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (<i>Confederacy</i>), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include the theory of humor and evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry is strictly about literary theory, but it uses one of my studies of <i>Confederacy</i> as an example.
<P>
I have been reading an old textbook on literary theory, to discipline my mind while thinking about evolutionary literary criticism. The textbook is Jeremy Hawthorn. <I>Unlocking the Text: Fundamental Problems in Literary Theory</I>. London: Edward Arnold, 1987. I like this text. It is clear and incisive, IMHO. It promotes an understanding of literary theory that studies the entire process of literary production and use, not just the text itself.
<p>
In the text, Hawthorn makes a distinction between explication and interpretation. "In English, 'explication' normally denotes the uncovering of what we may refer to as a literary work's 'primary meaning', as distinct from those deeper levels of meaning and signficance produced by interpretation" (23). The primary meaning relates more to what the words mean, the sentences mean, what direct references the text holds, etc. The interpretation is more abstract, and it also might be more creative, such as when an actor interprets the words in a screenplay.
<P>
I tried to think of an example of the distinction, and one immediately came to me. In my 2012 article <a href="http://course1.winona.edu/vleighton/toole/default.html#DIALECTIC">"The Dialectic of American Humanism"</a>, I begin by showing that <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> can be viewed as a detailed parody of the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. Then I argue that at a deeper level, the novel can be seen as offering up two versions of humanism, and engaging them in a dialectic, hence my article's title.
<P>
My claim "that <i>Confederacy</i> is a parody of Ficino" is established by a detailed mapping of particulars in the novel to points in Ficino's philosophy. Therefore, such a claim is an explication. My claim "that <i>Confederacy</i> is a dialectic among competing versions of humanism" is more of an interpretation. It is less tied to the words on the page and is more abstract.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-38803374237552087542023-09-01T06:32:00.000-05:002023-09-01T06:32:24.889-05:00Simler and Hanson on Laughter, Theory of Humor Series, Part 27This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (<i>Confederacy</i>), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include the theory of humor and evolutionary literary criticism.
<p>
Last month, I posted <a HREF="https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2023/08/self-deception-freud-versus.html">a discussion</a> of the book <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/982092901">The Elephant in the Brain</a>, by Simler and Hanson, comparing its treatment of self-deception to Freud's theory of self-deception. The book has a chapter applying their ideas about self-deception to laughter and humor. Because I have been posting a series on the theory of humor, I offer here an in-depth look at their humor chapter. All unattributed page references below are to this text.
<P>
Like other books in evolutionary psychology--such as those by Trivers and Kurzban--<i>The Elephant in the Brain</i> focuses on self-deception. The basic point made by these books is that we humans may have some motives for our behavior that are concealed from our conscious minds. Because human societies have behavioral norms against taking actions for selfish reasons, our brains may hide selfish motives our conscious minds, so that we do not involuntarily betray those motives to people around us. As I explained last month, Simler and Hanson borrow a concept from earlier theorists that the conscious mind is less like the Commander-in-Chief of the brain and more like the brain's Press Secretary, offering socially acceptable rationalizations for the brain's behavior.
<P>
One aspect of <i>The Elephant</i> that I appreciate is the open acknowledgement that humans naturally form social status hierarchies. If you put two people in a room and ask them to cooperate on a task, they will almost immediately sort themselves into a leader and a follower. Because status hierarchies are fraught with social tension, much of the negotiation over status takes place outside of the realm of conscious awareness. Assertive body language will signal status, for example. For those of you who have followed my blog entries on the theory of humor, you will know that I consider humor to be an important form of social communication which can adjust a group's social hierarchy. For an extreme example, if most of the group laughs at one member in derision, that member is likely to be humiliated and lowered in social standing within the group. Conversely, when a comedian attempts a joke and the audience is dead silent, the jokster is said to "die" on-stage.
<P>
<i>The Elephant</i> has a chapter on humor. The authors' point is that laughter is an involuntary social behavior which can act as an honest signal. That signal is often not consciously received and processed. The authors take their history of the theory of humor from John Morreall, reviewing theories of humor such as the superiority theory, the release theory, and the incongruity theory. They cite Gregory Bateson and emphasize that laughter is a signal that the person laughing is in a non-serious mode of play. They then dive into Robert Provine's findings about the social nature of laughter. They quote Provine that "Laughter is a powerful probe into social relationships." In short, they have a command of the topic. Thumbs up.
<p>
Simler and Hanson argue that there are two important factors in how humor is used socially: first, humor explores the boundaries of social norms; second, humor signals psychological distance. With social norms, what counts as a norm and what counts as a violation are regularly renegotiated and revised, often without explicit discussion. With psychological distance, the group regularly revises who has high status and great respect in the group and who has low status and less respect.
<P>
All human societies adopt some set of cultural norms as guidelines for the behavior of members of the social group. When we violate a norm, we have to worry about getting caught and punished. Using the play mode, we can feint across the boundary of a norm and then retreat with the claim that we were "just kidding." If we are across a perceived border and realize it is safe, we may be able to redraw the border defining where the norm is enforced. Those who police social norms may discourage certain topics of humor because laughing at norm violations may weaken the norm in question.
<P>
Social groups also establish and reinforce psychological distance. Some members of society, such as inmates in a prison, are often considered fair game for ridicule (don't drop the soap). One nation may be in competition with another nation, and the people in that other nation may be targets of stereotype humor. Joking about someone else gives an honest signal of how we feel about the target of the humor. When a comedian fails to get a laugh and asks, "Too soon?" the comedian is asking if an event is still so psychologically close that laughing about it is disrespectful. Again, there are edge cases in which psychological distance is changing, and humor can probe that border.
<P>
Simler and Hanson argue that laughter has two properties that make it a good tool for exploring sensitive topics. First, because it is involuntary, it is a relatively honest signal. They quote James Joyce's Latin bon mot: <i>In risu veritas</i>, or, In laughter, there is truth. Second, laughter is deniable. "We can deliver these denials with great conviction because [our conscious minds] really don't have a clear understanding of what our laughter means ..." (147).
<P>
They give the example of comedian Bill Burr. On the one hand, he has defended his boundary-pushing humor by claiming that he wasn't being serious. On the other hand, his fans say that they embrace his humor because he is honest. Which is it? Is he joking, or is he honest? As Simler and Hanson argue, the beauty of laughter is that a jokster can be both.
<P>
I consider this investigation of humor through evolutionary psychology to be an excellent approach to humor, and it is consistent with my own ideas about the nature of humor ... even if I do say that with conscious intent.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-37668213915260149052023-08-01T06:28:00.000-05:002023-08-01T06:28:26.821-05:00Self-Deception: Freud versus Evolutionary Psychology, Theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Part 7 In August of 2019, I posted <a HREF="https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2019/08/elc-theory-part-1-freudian-repression.html">a blog entry</a> comparing the Freudian theory of psychological repression with the concept of competing selection pressures from evolutionary psychology, as integrated with multilevel selection theory. Freud, as interpreted by Norman O. Brown, argued that there was a life instinct that battled a death instinct. Multilevel selection theory, on the other hand, posits a competition between two forms of selection pressure: selection pressure for the individual and selection pressure for the group.
<P>
I have come across another example of a phenomenon that has a Freudian interpretation and an interpretion courtesy of evolutionary psychology: self-deception. I just finished the book, <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/982092901">The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life</a>, by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson (Oxford UP, 2018).
<P>
Simler and Hanson review for the general reader the theories first advanced in the 1960s by the game theorist Thomas Schelling that self-deception can have a tactical advantage. Those theories were then brought into evolutionary psychology by Robert Trivers, in such books as his <i>The Folly of Fools</i>, 2011. They have also been promoted by Robert Kurzban, in such books as <i>Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite</i>, 2013.
<P>
According to Simler and Hanson, the Freudian interpretation of self-deception, as articulated by Anna Freud in her book <i>The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence</i>, 1992, is that the ego deceives itself to reduce its psychic pain. The ego cannot handle the truth, so it lies for self-preservation. Simler and Hanson point out that this makes no sense from a survival point of view. Lying to yourself in critical situations could only make those situations worse through bad decisions. Natural selection would have evolved brains with more robust self-esteem.
<p>
The empirical evidence is that we are likely to deceive ourselves only when it is outward-facing and self-serving. The best way to convince others of something is to genuinely believe it ourselves. "By this line of reasoning, it's never useful ... to adopt false beliefs that you keep entirely to yourself" (Simler, 79). Because the human mind is modular, some of our motives--the deep-seated, selfish ones--can be hidden from the conscious part of the mind. The conscious mind is the part which interacts with other people socially. Simler and Hanson borrow a concept from Daniel Dennett, Jonathan Haidt, and Robert Kurzban that the conscious mind is less like the Commander-in-Chief of the brain and more like the brain's Press Secretary, offering socially acceptable rationalizations for the brain's behavior.
<P>
Human societies use norms to control selfish behavior. These norms often deal with our intentions. For example, all cultures have norms encouraging sexual modesty as a way to keep the peace within social groups. If our subconscious mind can hide the selfish motives for our actions (such as flirting with a high-status individual) from our conscious minds, we can convince others that our motives are pure. "In this sense, the Freuds were right: the conscious ego needs to be protected. But not because we are fragile, but rather to keep damaging information from leaking out ..." (Simler, 89). Sexual symbolism in art and literature is not an example of the id trying to get around the superego but an example of individuals being able to violate the social norm against advertising sex while offering plausible deniability.
<P>
Self-deception is another point where Freudian psychology clashes with evolutionary psychology. Self-deception offers another way in which ELC (evolutionary literary criticism) can differ from Freudian literary interpretation. The evolutionary explanation has the benefit of more solid evidence in its favor. The evolutionary explanation can explain patterns of behavior the elude the Freudian theory.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-7435601146004067132023-07-01T06:36:00.002-05:002023-07-01T06:37:51.640-05:00Comparison Study of AI Systems for Library Research and Scholarship (and Confederacy of Dunces)Back on April 1, I posted a blog entry called <a HREF="https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-wisdom-of-chatgpt-confederacy-and.html">The Wisdom of ChatGPT</a>. I prompted ChatGPT with a question about John Kennedy Toole's novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, and then I shared the resulting essay. It was obvious that ChatGPT could write flowing English prose, and it made valid but vague points and seemed to be able to express ideas, not just produce text. Still, ChatGPT did not "know" information that could be found in my paper on the topic published in the journal <i>Renascence</i>, information that was readily available on the Internet. My own papers may not have been in the universe of documents from which ChatGPT learned English. Either that, or it lacks the capacity to actually store knowledge.
<P>
Since then, I read an article about several AI-assisted systems that either write text or conduct library research on a user's behalf. On June 20, I decided to run my query about <i>Confederacy</i> and Ficino in several of these systems. Below are my assessments of the results. I will begin with the systems that were easy to evaluate.
<P>
<b>Query: In his novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i>, did John Kennedy Toole use the ideas of Marsilio Ficino?</b>
<P>
<i>System: SciSpace</i>; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:10 p.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: <a HREF="https://typeset.io/">https://typeset.io/</a>
<P>
<i>Review</i>: SciSpace did not write an essay but returned citations to articles, as a search engine would. It returned my own article on <i>Confederacy</i> and Ficino as the number one result, and another text I had written which mentioned my ideas as the number two result. For doing library research, it performed well with this prompt. If this system does as well in other domains, it could genuinely help scholars.
<P>
<i>System: Elicit</i>; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 11 a.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: <a HREF="https://elicit.org/">https://elicit.org/</a>
<P>
<i>Review</i>: Elicit wrote a summary paragraph and returned search results. The paragraph was not bad but saw no connection between <i>Confederacy</i> and Ficino. Unless a system has digested my own articles, it is likely to say that there is no connection, so I don’t fault this system's algorithm, just its knowledgebase. The citations were a mix of articles about <i>Confederacy</i> and articles about Ficino. The articles were not the best, but they were real academic articles and not completely off topic. Okay, but not great.
<P>
<i>System: Bing AI</i>; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:26 p.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: <a HREF="https://www.bing.com/?/ai">https://www.bing.com/?/ai</a>
<P>
<i>Review</i>: Bing returned search results. The results were not good. The first result was the Confederacy of Dunces Wikipedia page, then an article from the New Yorker on the novel, then the Goodreads page for the novel. Bing does not claim to be a search system for scholarship, but it is a comprehensive search engine. This was very weak. Still, it knew who John Kennedy Toole was.
<P>
<i>System: Consensus</i>; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:05 p.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: <a HREF="https://consensus.app/">https://consensus.app/</a>
<P>
<i>Review</i>: Consensus returned search results without writing an essay or summary. The results were terrible. Results included articles on George Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy, and an essay about the letters of Marsilio Ficino. Yikes.
<P>
<i>System: Scite.AI</i>; URL: <a HREF="https://scite.ai/assistant">https://scite.ai/assistant</a>
<P>
<i>Review</i>: This system would not give me a free trial unless I put in my credit card information. No thanks.
<P>
<b>Here is the hard one</b>
<P>
<i>System: Google Bard</i>; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:22 p.m. US Central time; URL: <a HREF="https://bard.google.com/">https://bard.google.com/</a>
<P>
<i>Review</i>: Bard did the best job of writing an essay. It wrote a short essay on the topic with no citations. I struggle to assess its performance because it might be genuinely good, or it might not. It might know more about Ficino than I do, or it might just be an excellent deep fake. I wrestle with whether Bard came up short or I came up short.
<P>
<b>Here is the Bard essay</b>
<blockquote>
Yes, there is some evidence to suggest that John Kennedy Toole used the ideas of Marsilio Ficino in his novel A Confederacy of Dunces. In particular, the character of Ignatius J. Reilly has been interpreted as a representation of the melancholic genius, a figure that was theorized by Ficino.
<P>
Ficino was an Italian Renaissance philosopher who believed that there were three types of souls: the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul. He associated the rational soul with the planet Mercury, the spirited soul with the planet Mars, and the appetitive soul with the planet Saturn.
<P>
Ficino also believed that each person was born with a dominant soul, and that this soul determined their personality and temperament. People with a dominant rational soul were rational and intellectual, while people with a dominant spirited soul were passionate and energetic. People with a dominant appetitive soul were materialistic and sensual.
<P>
The character of Ignatius J. Reilly can be seen as a representation of the melancholic genius. Ignatius is intelligent and perceptive, but he is also deeply pessimistic and withdrawn. He is constantly complaining about the world around him, and he seems to have little interest in engaging with it.
<P>
Ignatius's melancholy can be seen as a manifestation of his dominant saturnine soul. Saturn was associated with melancholy in ancient astrology, and Ficino believed that the melancholic genius was a child of Saturn. Melancholic geniuses were seen as being highly creative and intelligent, but they were also often troubled and isolated.
<P>
Of course, it is impossible to say for sure whether Toole was consciously drawing on Ficino's ideas when he created the character of Ignatius J. Reilly. However, the similarities between Ignatius and the melancholic genius are striking, and it seems likely that Toole was at least familiar with Ficino's work.
</blockquote>
<b>Discussion</b>
<P>
In my own scholarship, I argue that Ignatius was a parody of Ficino's melancholic genius. I also argue that Ficino sees the genius as a child of Saturn. However, I was unaware that the three souls were important to Ficino and that the appetitive soul is necessarily associated with Saturn. The question is: who knows his Ficino better, me or Bard?
<P>
Most of what I know about Ficino comes from the book <i>The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino</i> by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Reading this essay by Bard made me go back to Kristeller and see if he discussed the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul, as Bard claims. Although Plato discussed those three parts of the soul, and Ficino was a thorough translator of Plato, Kristeller dismisses the three souls as an aspect of Ficino's philosophical system. Kristeller states, "Though Ficino occasionally quotes Plato's distinction between the rational, the courageous, and the appetitive parts of the Soul, he does not assign any systematic significance to it" (367).
<P>
The question remains, is Kristeller right, or does Bard know more about Ficino than Kristeller does? If Bard is wrong, then did Bard just grab the facts about the Platonic division of the soul and mash them together with Ficino's melancholic genius and astrological theories?
<P>
I am inclined to trust Kristeller, especially since he devoted years to Ficino and was the first scholar to turn Ficino's writings into a systematic philosophy. I come back to the fact that Ficino saw two possible types of children of Saturn, one who was beastly and one who was divine. To me, Toole's joke is that Ignatius thinks he is a divine child of Saturn but is in reality a beastly child of Saturn. In the end, I think that Bard took several ideas about Ficino and Platonic philosophy and glued them together, a very good deep fake of genuine scholarship.
<P>
Nevertheless, Bard seems to know things. It seems to possess an internal set of ideas. ChatGPT seemed to know a bit, but it was otherwise vague and non-committal. Bard, by contrast, had definite ideas, some of which it may have gotten by digesting my own writings, but maybe not. Not only did Bard know who John Kennedy Toole was, and what Confederacy of Dunces was, but it also knew who Ficino was. Even if Ficino did not assign systematic significance to Plato's three souls, he really did talk about them. It is even possible that Bard knows enough about Ficino that it could challenge Kristeller's interpretation of Ficino's work (and therefore my interpretation of Toole).
<P>
In short, Bard is so good, it made an expert on a topic go back to his books to reassess the issue. No other AI system in this line-up did THAT.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-5555691805667457612023-06-01T07:27:00.006-05:002023-06-01T07:42:59.022-05:00Life History Theory, ... is it Bogus? Thoughts on the Theory of Evolutionary Literary CriticismThis blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (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 recently published book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a new 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 2 followers.
<P>
Recently, I contacted Joseph Carroll about the theory of evolutionary literary criticism. Carroll sent me several of his papers that explore his own version of the theory. I have read a couple of his essays in the past, and I thought I ought to examine his theory more carefully, since he was kind enough to share his publications with me. In my recent book chapter, I mentioned that I support the ideas of William Flesch regarding evolutionary literary criticism, and Flesch is a critic of Carroll.
<P>
In the Carroll's essay entitled "Minds and Meaning in Fictional Narratives: An Evolutionary Perspective," I was immediately struck by the centrality of Life History Theory to Carroll's version of evolutionary literary criticism, or as he calls it, Literary Darwinism. I am not well versed in life history theory. Previously, I had obtained recent editions of the two major evolutionary psychology textbooks on the market: the better known textbook by David Buss and the British one by Workman and Reader. In a previous blog entry, I discussed the fact that, for Buss, status and dominance hierarchies are important to his framework for evolutionary psychology. He has an entire chapter on the topic, while Workman and Reader do not even have dominance in the index to their book. I prefer the framework presented by David Buss regarding status hierarchies.
<P>
I searched the two textbooks for life history theory. Workman and Reader have a significant section of their book devoted to it, while Buss only has a cursory discussion. Therefore, I studied the Workman and Reader treatment of life history theory, in order to prepare myself for my analysis of Carroll's version of evolutionary literary theory.
<p>
What I read there made me seriously question the life history theory. The basic idea behind life history theory is that organisms can change their behavior over the course of their lives depending on what is age-appropriate. Do I focus on feeding and growth, or do I focus on reproduction at this stage in my life? Life history can explain the fact that juvenile animals play, while adults do not. The theory is that juveniles are practicing skills in a safe environment which they will use later when they are adults and are playing for keeps.
<P>
Workman and Reader move from this foundation to discuss the fact that some species of animal, such as fish who spawn multitudes of small fry, follow a high-quantity and low-investment strategy of reproduction, while others, such as orcas, polar bears, and humans, follow a low-quantity and high-parental-investment strategy.
<P>
This distinction is combined with the Attachment Theory of John Bowlby. In the 1950s, Bowlby had developed a theory that some children are raised in an environment in which they are emotionally attached to their parents in a strong, healthy bond, while other children grow up poorly attached, which may lead them to become insecure. Personally, I detect some moral judgment in attachment theory, blaming the supposedly detached mother, or the lack of an at-home father, for the child's emotional problems.
<P>
Attachment theory has been combined with life history theory by Jay Belsky. Belsky hypothesizes that children who are emotionally well-connected to their parents are more trusting and are more likely to follow a low-quantity, high-parental-investment strategy when they begin raising their own children. Children who are raised in an insecure environment, such as with a "harsh" mother or an absent father, are more likely to follow a high-quantity, low-investment strategy of bearing children. Again, this feels very judgmental, providing scientific cover for a lack of broader social support for poor children in large families.
<P>
According to Workman and Reader, one hypothesis generated by this theory is that girls from homes with absent fathers reach puberty more quickly than girls from two-parent homes.
<P>
Now, here is the part that is causing me to seriously question the Life History Theory, though it is perhaps unfair to reject a larger theory because of short-comings with a smaller hypothesis. Workman and Reader say, on the one hand, that "the weight of the evidence currently supports the [early puberty] hypothesis" (148), but then they immediately present a study that seems to invalidate the hypothesis.
<P>
Workman and Reader admit that a major weakness in Belsky's theory of early puberty is to suppose that the phenomenon is caused by the environmental factors. Both the low parental investment and the earlier puberty by girls could be produced by an underlying genetic cause. Then they report on a study, by Mendle et al. (2006), where the daughters of identical twins were studied. The family of the one twin was disrupted while the family of the other twin was not. The data ... drum roll please ... show that "there was no difference in pubertal timing between the two groups" (149). This result strongly suggests that the simplistic model of Belsky's environmental causation is wrong.
<P>
In a subsequent study, Tither and Ellis (2008) tried to salvage Belsky's hypothesis by comparing daughters of different ages within the same disrupted families. They found that younger daughters, who may have had more time to internalize the stress of the disruption, reached puberty earlier than older sisters. The differences were significant but the effect sizes were very small (an average shift of only a few months).
<P>
To me, this research agenda looks weak, and it casts a shadow over the whole linkage of the attachment environment to reproductive strategy. From what I have read so far, I am unimpressed by life history theory. Based on a citation analysis in Google Scholar, it seems that life history theory is not main stream among psychologists in general or even among evolutionary psychologists in particular. Again, I prefer the approach found in David Buss's textbook. We will see where my investigation leads me next.
<P>
<b>Citations:</b>
<P>
Buss, David M. (2019). <i>Evolutionary Psychology: the new science of the mind</i>. 6/e. New York: Routledge.
<P>
Carroll, Joseph. (2018). "Minds and Meaning in Fictional Narratives: An Evolutionary Perspective." <i>Review of General Psychology</i>, 22 (2): 135–146.
<P>
Mendle, J., Turkheimer, E., et al. (2006). "Family Structure and Age at Menarche: A Children-of-twins Approach." <i>Developmental Psychology</i>, 42: 533-542.
<P>
Tither, J. M. and B. J. Ellis. (2008). "Impact of fathers on daughters' age of menarche: A genetically and environmentally controlled sibling study." <i>Developmental Psychology</i>, 44: 1409-1420.
<P>
Workman and Reader. <i>Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction</i>. 4/e. Cambridge, 2021.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-86613389220933961182023-05-01T06:05:00.002-05:002023-05-01T06:05:54.689-05:00The Great Gatsby, ELC Saunders #8, Notes on American Classics (2018)Although this blog is primarily about the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> 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 eight regarding this book.
<blockquote>
Saunders, Judith P. <i>American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives</i>. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.
</blockquote>
This month's discussion: Chapter Eight: "The Great Gatsby: An Unusual Case of Mate Poaching," pp. 138-174.
<P>
This essay is much longer than many of the others in Saunder's book, and it makes a much more complex argument. I give this essay high marks. I have to confess that I did not appreciate <em>The Great Gatsby</em> when I was assigned to read it in my youth. The evolutionary perspective is useful to more fully appreciating the point of the narrative.
<P>
Saunders' basic theme centers on the observed psychological phenomenon of self-deception. Humans can deceive themselves about their physical and social world, and this deception can cause them to work toward goals that are unrealistic. This self-deception can have adaptive value, as theorized by Robert Trivers, whom Saunders cites. For example, a high-risk strategy is easier to undertake if the actor is deluded into thinking success is likely.
<P>
In this novel, Gatsby is deluded about his relationship with Daisy. Prior to the time frame of the novel, Gatsby was a young man from the lower-middle class. Daisy was a beautiful young woman from a wealthy and respectable family. Entering the military in World War I, he hid his modest social position with his military rank, and he courted her. While he was serving in Europe, she dropped him and married the socially dominant Tom Buchanan. Saunders walks us through the reproductive logic, showing that Daisy's decision to drop Gatsby for Tom was rational. She also points out that the novel's readers would not find this story of Daisy's rational self-interest particularly interesting.
<P>
Saunders also uses the sexual strategy logic promoted by David Buss in his book <i>Evolution of Desire</i> to show that Tom's sexual infidelities are rational, as are Daisy's reactions to Tom's infidelities. Both Myrtle's sexual relationship with Tom and Daisy's sexual affair with Gatsby follow the logic of sexual strategy theory.
<P>
Gatsby, by contrast, is consumed by an irrational commitment to courting Daisy. He does this even though he has already lost her. He has deluded himself into thinking that Daisy is still a virginal girl who can become his faithful bride, even though she has been married for years and already has a child by Tom. Daisy has a sexual affair with Gatsby, but when she has to choose between Tom and Gatsby, she chooses to remain with Tom. Tom points out that Gatsby's wealth was not gained in a socially respectable way. She would still take a step downward socially if she exchanged Tom for Gatsby. Daisy continues to follow sexual strategy logic and behave rationally.
<P>
Saunders shows that, as detailed again by David Buss, Gatsby's behavior would be rational if Daisy really were a young woman looking for a committed marriage partner. He displays great wealth to attract her. He demonstrates persistence in courtship, combining loyalty and riches. Because his efforts are pointless, he takes on the quality of a tragic character. Like Don Quixote, he is chasing a fantasy. Saunders' point is that Gatsby's obsessive fidelity to Daisy seems idealistic, but it is based on evolutionary logic. Because his reasoning has become pathological, his behavior becomes tragic.
<P>
Saunders innumerates several misconceptions by Gatsby. One is that wealth equals social status. Another is that his ambition is not related to his reproductive fitness. As Saunders writes, "Men frequently speak of wives and offspring as if they were obstacles to success rather than proof of it" (162). She criticizes much of the scholarly criticism of Gatsby for missing this point in their discussions of the corruption of wealth. Fitzgerald links Daisy to the sirens of the Odyssey. Saunders points out "It comforts men to think that Helen's beauty or Circe's magic, rather than masculine ardor and male-male competition, caused the Trojan War or turned men into swine" (164).
<P>
Fitzgerald, at the end of the novel, draws a political and cultural analogy between Gatsby's self-delusion and the aspirations of European settlers to find a virgin and fertile land in America. Both will fall short of their ideal aspirations. Saunders points out that Gatsby's fantasies and the dreams of settlers were both motivated by reproductive fitness.
<P>
In Gottschall's book <em>The Storytelling Animal</em>, he describes the fact that we humans occupy a reality that is in part constructed from our mental projections. He says that we live in Neverland. Many successful leaders have created an aspirational world which their followers then have succeeded in bringing into actual existence through their collective effort. Steve Jobs was described as having a "reality distortion field" that convinced the employees of Apple to realize his plans. In <i>Gatsby</i>, this mentally and socially constructed Neverland is irreconcilably at odds with the physical world; in this instance, this mentally constructed world is on full display.
<P>
At the end of the novel, Daisy unintentionally but successfully rids herself of her rival, Myrtle, and Tom rids himself of his rival, Gatsby. The cynically rational actors triumph reproductively. The dead body of the dreamer Gatsby is floating in a swimming pool.
<P>
Saunders ends by arguing that, as other evolutionary literary critics such as Joseph Carroll have argued, this self-delusional myth-making is related to the human capacity to create stories and literature.
<P>
I have elsewhere argued that evolutionary literary criticism should include considerations of multilevel selection theory, such as the theory of the altruistic punisher. As is the case for many of her essays, Saunders only focuses on the evolutionary psychology related to individual fitness and not group fitness as hypothesized by multilevel selection theory. Nick is the cynical witness to tragically misplaced individual yearning.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-75097603865853596992023-04-01T07:20:00.001-05:002023-04-01T07:20:47.449-05:00The Wisdom of ChatGPT: Confederacy and FicinoA couple of months ago, a version of GPT3, called ChatGPT, was rolled out as a free service to the general public. (And if you don't know that, you are living under a rock.) GPT3 is designed to craft written texts in English. ChatGPT lets the average individual with an internet connection see the results of its work for free. The popular press has been making extravagant predictions about the threat posed to the jobs of all white collar workers, who might be replaced by these AI systems. While the threat is non-trivial, the leap from ChatGPT to the end of human managerial employment assumes that ChatGPT is actually coming up with innovative ideas, rather than just putting non-innovative truisms into readable texts.
<P>
I was aware that AI had made large strides in recent years. In 2015, the system AlphaGo, developed by the company Deep Mind, defeated a professional Go player for the first time in a five game match, and in 2016, an updated version dominated the human world champion of Go four games to one. Commentators were struck not only by the victories but by the computer's playing style. Earlier game-playing AI systems, such as Deep Blue in chess, simply out-computed the human opponent. AlphaGo's style showed creativity and flair. It didn't just beat humans, it played like a human, only better. I was not shocked by this development, but I was shocked in December of 2017 when Deep Mind released AlphaZero. AlphaZero was given the rules of chess, was not given any human games as models to learn from, and within a short span of playing games against itself, was able to defeat the computer program that at that time held the title of world chess champion. That speed of learning by the new algorithm was truly astonishing.
<P>
I am not an AI expert, but I do have a masters degree in computer science and in 1991, I had studied precursors to the current systems, then called Expert Systems, in a graduate course. Around the year 2000, I was aware that computer scientists had made breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms, which accelerated AI development. With the rise of massive data warehouses generated by traffic on the Internet, these more powerful AI systems had tasks to perform which could generate revenue for the developers, specifically tasks involving language.
<P>
With the release of ChatGPT this year, there has been active discussion about the ability of AI systems to write papers for college students. The assumption is that ChatGPT is not only writing flowing prose, it is also formulating ideas and arguing in their favor. The journal Nature has had articles discussing whether it is ethical for scientific researchers to use AI systems to help them write their papers. In this case, the scientist would provide the hypothesis, the data, and the conclusions, and the AI would provide the English prose. Such a development would no doubt help non-English-speaking researchers.
<P>
As for myself, I was slow to try ChatGPT, because I wasn't sure how to evaluate it. Enter John Kennedy Toole and his novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i>. I have spent years studying this novel and have read nearly all of the scholarly work published on it. I could ask ChatGPT about <i>Confederacy</i>. On this topic more than any other, I would know how well the system was generating ideas. If it was borrowing ideas from others, I would know where those ideas were coming from.
<P>
Thinking along these lines, it also occurred to me that ChatGPT and other systems have a major problem with intellectual property. If the test set of documents contain ideas (which they mostly do), then the output of the AI might also parrot those ideas in the texts it generates. If the documents in the learning set have been copyrighted, the parroted ideas may violate copyright. To test this, I specifically prompted ChatGPT to talk about a subject I have researched in depth. I asked it about the influence of Marsilio Ficino on the novel. Here are the results.
<P>
Prompt submitted at 6:25 a.m. (Central time), Thursday, March 30, 2023: In his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, did John Kennedy Toole use the ideas of Marsilio Ficino?
<blockquote>
<strong>Answer</strong>: There is no clear evidence to suggest that John Kennedy Toole used the ideas of Marsilio Ficino in his novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Ficino was a prominent Renaissance philosopher and scholar who wrote extensively on a wide range of subjects, including Platonic philosophy, astrology, and magic.
<P>
While A Confederacy of Dunces does contain philosophical and intellectual themes, there is no direct reference to Ficino or his ideas in the novel. The main focus of the book is on the eccentric and dysfunctional characters who populate the city of New Orleans.
<p>
It is possible that Toole was indirectly influenced by Ficino's ideas through the broader intellectual and cultural milieu of the time, which was characterized by a revival of interest in classical philosophy and literature. However, without specific evidence from Toole's own writings or statements, it is difficult to say for certain whether Ficino had any direct influence on the novel.
</blockquote>
As you can see, the prose is well-crafted. There are even ideas behind the prose. ChatGPT argues that there is no obvious, demonstrable connection. The answer is technically correct, and the computer wisely declines to speculate on something that is not explicitly provable. My arguments about Ficino having influenced Toole are out there in cyberspace, so it could have put forward my ideas and cited my paper. Still, ChatGPT did not violate my copyright by presenting my ideas about Ficino and Toole as its own. I am both comforted and relieved. The system gave a good answer that an articulate human who was not a scholar in the field could give, and it did not steal my ideas or my role as an investigator. It did settle on a thesis, though, so you can argue that it wasn't just handling English words, it was formulating ideas and articulating them.
<P>
With all the discussion of how well ChatGPT crafts prose, it has occurred to me that, just as with chess and go, computers may soon be much better than most humans at writing texts. If that becomes the common expectation, then the phrase "passing the Turing test" could flip from being a compliment to the programmers of the computer system to being an insult toward a text. "This essay is so poorly written, it passes the Turing test. It's so bad, a human could have written it."
<P>
I will end this blog entry with my second query to ChatGPT and its response. Again, it argues for a thesis, and it does it well.
<P>
Prompt submitted at 6:30 a.m. (Central time), Thursday, March 30, 2023: Could chimps at typewriters eventually write the works of William Shakespeare?
<blockquote>
<strong>Answer</strong>: It is theoretically possible for chimpanzees at typewriters to produce the works of William Shakespeare, but it is incredibly unlikely to the point of being practically impossible.
<P>
The famous thought experiment of the infinite monkey theorem states that given an infinite amount of time and an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare by chance. However, in reality, the amount of time required for this to occur is so vast that it is effectively impossible.
<p>
Even if we consider a more realistic scenario, such as a finite number of monkeys typing for a finite amount of time, the probability of producing even a single coherent sentence is extremely low. This is because the number of possible combinations of letters is astronomically large, and the vast majority of them would be meaningless or nonsensical.
<p>
Furthermore, writing is not simply a matter of randomly arranging letters. It requires a level of skill, creativity, and linguistic knowledge that is beyond the capacity of chimpanzees, who do not possess the complex cognitive abilities necessary for language and literary expression.
<p>
In short, while the idea of chimpanzees writing Shakespeare may make for an interesting thought experiment, in reality, it is highly unlikely to occur.
</blockquote>
This answer shows that ChatGPT does possess "a level of skill, creativity, and linguistic knowledge that is beyond the capacity of chimpanzees." It can also formulate and defend ideas.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-33767206545587276412023-03-01T06:09:00.002-06:002023-03-01T06:10:38.858-06:00Theology and Geometry is out in paperbackBack in the spring of 2020, I announced that the book <i>Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces</i> was being published by Lexington Books. Leslie Marsh edited it, and I have a chapter in the book. This spring, I have learned that the book is coming out in paperback, at the low, low price of $39.99. I am surprised about the paperback. I didn't expect it to make the transition, because I didn't think the likely sales would warrent it. This is a sign of confidence on the part of Lexington. Thank you.
<P>
So if you were sitting on the sidelines because of the high price of the hardback ($90), now is your chance to own your own copy. What about you, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana? Berkeley has a copy. Princeton has a copy. What about someone in Spain? Researchers in Catalonia study Toole, I know you do. I can't offer any ginsu knives, though, or bamboo steamers.
<P>
The Amazon link: <a HREF="https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Geometry-Confederacy-Politics-Literature/dp/1498585493/ref=sr_1_1?Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=0&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=0&keywords=marsh&qid=1675345601&refinements=p_28%3A%22theology+and+geometry%22&s=books&sr=1-1&unfiltered=1">Theology and Geometry</a>. The paperback ISBN is: 978-1498585491.
<P>
The Barnes and Noble link is:
<a HREF="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/theology-and-geometry-leslie-marsh/1135302295?ean=9781498585491">Theology and Geometry</a>, if you do not want to help pay for Jeff Bezos's space program.H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-26698897855234275422023-02-01T06:57:00.004-06:002023-02-01T07:08:27.231-06:00ELC Saunders #7, Notes on American Classics (2018)Although this blog is primarily about the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> 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 seven regarding this book.
<P>
<blockquote>
Saunders, Judith P. <i>American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives</i>. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.
</blockquote>
This month's discussion: Chapter Eleven: "Paternal Confidence in Hurston's 'The Gilded Six-Bits'", pp. 226-245.
<P>
Any subjects that connect genetics and human behavior, such as behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, can evoke opposition because of their potential use by defenders of racism or sexism.
<P>
Race may be a social construct, but it is a construct built out of ideas about biological inheritance. Natural selection is by definition the selection of inherited biological characteristics by natural processes. Because of the possible misuse of natural selection by racists, those vigilent against racism may be quick to accuse anyone discussing genetics and behavior of being a racist. One must therefore discuss human genetic and evolutionary issues with great care to avoid either actual racism or even the appearance of racism. Stephen Jay Gould was a popular writer about evolution in part because of the clarity of his reasoning about these issues.
<P>
Likewise, sexuality and gender are highly contested topics in our society. On the one hand, Texas has declared gender-affirming medical treatment on minors to be child abuse. On the other hand, some gender progressives advocate that persons with fully functional SRY genes (the gene on the Y chromosome that triggers the body to develop into a male) should be allowed to compete in women's sports. Some commentators have judged Frans de Waal to be brave for writing on this topic with his recent book: <em>Different: Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist</em>. Considering that natural selection is about reproductive fitness, reproduction, and with it sexuality, are critical to subjects that deal with biological evolution.
<P>
Because evolutionary literary criticism is the application of evolutionary psychology to the study of literary texts, practitioners of ELC would do well to trend carefully when dealing with issues that relate to race and sexuality.
<P>
Judith Saunders, in earlier essays in this collection, has dealt with a number of aspects of what is sometimes called Sexual Stratgies Theory. For example, in her essay on Edith Wharton, Saunders shows that Wharton's female characters demonstrate mate-guarding tactics, tactics for keeping other women away from their men. In her essay on Walt Whitman, Saunders details the ways in which "Song of Myself" demonstrates a fantasy male sexual strategy, minus competition from other men and the attitudes of potential partners.
<P>
The book most cited by Saunders in this volume is David Buss's <em>The Evolution of Desire</em>, which discusses this theory of sexual strategies.
<P>
Until this essay, chapter eleven in the book, Saunders did not cover the topic of male fears about paternity, which one can associate with behavior that might be labelled patriarchal, nor did she deal with racial issues. I congratulate her that she has dealt with both topics skillfully in her discussion of Zora Neale Hurston's short story "The Gilded Six-Bits." She shows that the evolutionary analysis reveals important aspects of the story that have been missed by previous discussions.
<P>
The basic sexual situation relevant to this story is that, when a child is born, the female can be certain that the child is her genetic offspring, because it literally grew within and sprang out of her body. Conversely, any given male, prior to modern genetic testing, had less confidence that a given child was his genetic offspring. One could argue that much of the motivation behind cultural norms such as female virginity before marriage and female sexual fidelity were constructed in order to give the male partner more confidence in his genetic paternity.
<P>
The story "The Gilded Six-Bits" is a story about a young wife, Missie May, who was sexually unfaithful to her husband, Joe. He then behaves in a way that signals his lack of trust in her. She becomes pregnant. Throughout her pregnancy, she signals her feelings of repentance for having violated his trust.
<P>
Joe's cold treatment of her continues until the baby is born and his mother declares that the baby looks like him. Saunders points out that it is important that it is his mother who says this. His mother has every bit as much of an evolutionary interest in being certain that the child is his as he does. Once his mother judges that he will be investing in his own genetic offspring, he returns to being a loving and supportive husband.
<P>
Other critics, such as Hildegard Hoeller, have dismissed the issue of paternity. As Saunders points out, "Storyline and plot development lose their meaning if readers interpret Joe's parental pride at the story's conclusion as altruism rather than as fitness-enhancing behavior" (Saunders, 239-240).
<P>
Evolutionary psychologists focus on behavioral patterns that are universal throughout the human species. Explicit racists typically argue that there are essential differences between people assigned to different racial groups, differences which justify differential treatment. As Saunders shows, at the end of the story, the white storekeeper judges Joe's behavior to be particular to blacks and inferior to his own behavior. That behavior, however, is motivated by a universal male concern over paternity. Hurston quietly underlines the protagonist's common humanity while highlighting the storekeeper's ignorant interpretation of that behavior. As Saunders says, "Adaptationist analysis of the story supports Hurston's point fully, as the characters' behavior is shown to be consistent with 'universal psychological mechanisms.'" (Saunders, 242).
<P>
Saunders ends her essay with this observation: "Zora Neale Hurston's narrative accepts genetic self-interest as an inevitable component of our common human nature, a sine qua non that, with luck and a modicum of good will, need not be incompatible with tender and lasting relationships" (Saunders, 245). Well done.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-63861905155635491622023-01-01T05:43:00.007-06:002023-01-01T05:48:42.700-06:00Dominant White Culture and Ignatius Reilly: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 29Since the rise of Black Lives Matter there has been an increase in discussions around race within American cultural discourse. I am no expert on these issues, but I have increased my own reading and thinking about racial issues. I recently spotted within one of the books I have been studying a chapter that triggered a mental connection to <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i>.
<p>
In 2021, the city of Winona, MN, had as its "Community Read" Debby Irving's <i>Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race</i> (Cambridge, MA: Elephant Room Press, 2014). Although I did not participate in community discussions, I decided to study that book. In chapter thirty-six of the book, Irving discusses what she calls "The Dominant White Culture." She claims that, as she has herself studied race, she has heard in many workshops and meetings the same list of traits that are attributed to the Dominant White Culture. Let's call it the DWC.
<p>
Here are the traits listed in her book that are behaviors of the DWC: 1) avoiding conflict, 2) valuing formal education over life experience, 3) feeling a right to comfort and entitlement, 4) feeling a sense of urgency, 5) being competitive, 6) practicing emotional restraint, 7) being prone to judgment, 8) engaging in "either / or" thinking, 9) believing in one right way to do things, 10) acting defensively, 11) being status-oriented. According to Irving, researchers from the Harvard Business School found that these cultural traits made it difficult to recruit and retain non-white employees.
<p>
This sort of characterization easily becomes a stereotype. Irving, to her credit, admits that people who culturally identify as white may come from one of a variety of cultures, not just this one, and that many people who are not white have adopted this culture. However, I still find her characterization bends one's thinking toward stereotyping. To me, the qualities in this list are not necessarily white nor necessarily dominant. I am not endorsing this summary of the DWC as an accurate description of American culture. Still, whether or not this DWC has sociological veritas, it is a way to interpret our society.
<P>
When I read the above list, it struck me that it is similar to the sort of list that Ignatius Reilly decries in <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i>. When I initally got to the end of the list, I mentally said, "Someone with these traits would tell Ingatius to GO TO WORK!" Ignatius also characterizes Black culture as being different from this DWC. Confederacy's culture critique is not as simple as this dichotomy: the novel satirizes the corruption of money, but Ignatius is himself satirized by the author, forming a reverse satire and dialectic.
<P>
<i>Thesis: Compare Debby Irving's characterization of the Dominant White Culture in her writings with Ignatius Reilly's characterization of the same. Make sure to situate this comparison by showing how the novel criticizes Ignatius's own attitudes (and possibly Irving's as well).</i>
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-49317147387739016852022-12-01T17:29:00.000-06:002022-12-01T17:29:33.039-06:00WorldCat Reviews ReduxAs I mentioned in October, for fifteen years, I had posted book reviews on WorldCat through their worldcat.org interface. This past year, OCLC discontinued hosting reviews of items found in WorldCat.
<P>
I have started a new webpage on my university-associated website. I will be reposting my reviews, with links to the items within the WorldCat database. I will try to update the reviews as appropriate.
<P>
Here is the link: <a HREF="http://course1.winona.edu/vleighton/Leighton_Reviews_Formerly_WorldCat.html">A Collection of Book Reviews Originally Written for WorldCat</a>. Enjoy.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-84579161895981868182022-11-01T05:00:00.002-05:002022-11-01T05:08:32.381-05:00An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 7: Literature and Real LifeThis blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (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.
<P>
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 mentions at the beginning of his book that he has mixed with Burke's ideas the ideas of William Rueckert, Rene Girard, and others. Carter also 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. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."
<P>
According to Carter, Burke argues that criticism sometimes can and should include facts about the author's life and how the text relates to political and social issues. Literature worthy of discussion are those texts that speak to all of us, can be related to by all humanity. As Carter writes, "While discussing the poem qua poem, he reserves the right to make observations 'concerning its relation to nonpoetic elements such as author or background' (Counter-Statement, 41)." (Carter, 91).
<P>
Burke's statements before 1940 come out of a Communist philosophical framework, but they can sound like they come from evolutionary literary criticism. As Carter writes, ''[Burke] views the poetic dimension as one that arises 'out of the relationship between the organism and its environment' (Counter-Statement, 150)" (Carter, 91). To see how this relates to dialectical materialism, Carter quotes a letter from Burke to Cowley in the 1920s, "Art ... is the building up of a superstructure to encompass and provide for contemporary material facts" (Carter, 92). "Burke adds a caveat: 'the encompassing superstructure is erected according to principles inherent to humanity as a whole'" (Carter, 93). Similarly, evolutionary psychology puts a premium on behaviors that are universal to the human species as a whole.
<P>
I have discovered that many evolutionary psychologists do not take the issue of group selection pressure seriously. I advocate for an evolutionary psychology which includes Multilevel Selection Theory, a type of group selection theory that has been supported for years by David Sloan Wilson. In the context of Multilevel Selection Theory, I view one of the fundamental conflicts facing a human individual to be between the values of individual fitness, what benefit the individual directly, and the values of group fitness, which benefit the group directly and the individual indirectly.
<P>
Carter, interpreting Burke, says, "Life's problems shape an artist's concerns, and these concerns shape the art." He quotes Burke's <i>Philosophy of Literary Form</i>, "The poet 'will naturally tend to write about that which most deeply engrosses him--and nothing more deeply engrosses a man than his burdens' (17)" (Carter, 94). A fundamental burden that engrosses the human is the tension betwee between loyalty to the group's values and the needs of the individual. Again, Burke, or Carter/Burke, can be reframed within evolutionary literary criticism which includes multilevel selection theory.
<P>
Carter, C. Allen. <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/33208004">Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process</a>. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-51250101382698498362022-10-01T06:51:00.000-05:002022-10-01T06:51:48.203-05:00WorldCat Has Eliminated Book ReviewsFor over fifteen years, I have been posting book reviews on WorldCat through their worldcat.org interface. I had over 250 reviews on the site.
<P>
For the last several years, OCLC has been redesigning their WorldCat system, especially the free web interface, worldcat.org. Even though I am a librarian, I did not offer them feedback in the process, because, for my library, we primarily use the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat. Had I realized that they were going to discontinue the book review function, I would have participated. They could fault me for not participating; I could fault them for not contacting people who were actively posting reviews to ask us for our input. (It may be the case that there were very few of us. The service was not well-advertised and in fact worked poorly.)
<P>
From the beginning of worldcat.org, OCLC has ported in reviews from the company Goodreads. That importing of reviews from Goodreads is continuing. When I contacted OCLC to file my complaint, they recommended that I write my reviews on Goodreads. I have noticed that there is now a link in Goodreads to worldcat.org. OCLC may have cut a deal with Goodreads in order to get the WorldCat link in the Goodreads system, which may facilitate Goodreads users finding the books in their local library rather than being pressured to buy the book. Whether or not that was the price for dropping reviews in WorldCat, the new arrangement may prove to be a benefit to both readers and local libraries.
<P>
For me, there are two strong reasons why I posted most of my reviews on WorldCat. First, Goodreads is owned by Amazon. Amazon is already a gigantic corporation which has an outsized influence on the realm of books. WorldCat was an independent, non-commercial space in which individuals could express their opinions and ideas about books. While I occasionally post an Amazon review, I prefer not to supply free intellectual labor to the Bezos empire. I do not consider him a charity to which I should donate my intellectual property.
<P>
The second, more important reason is that Goodreads only has books that are available on Amazon. I had written reviews for many items in Worldcat that are not currently in print and are not on Goodreads. I would venture to guess that a majority of the items cataloged in WorldCat are not available on Goodreads. Many of the master's theses and doctoral dissertations that are in Worldcat have no Goodreads records. There are many archival items cataloged in WorldCat that have never been for sale commercially.
<P>
For example, many of the texts that discuss the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> are graduate school theses which are not in Goodreads. Carolyn Gardner's <i>Comedy of Redemption</i> (OCLC #:31977194), Helga Beste's <i>What's That Crazy?</i> (OCLC #: 54375485), and Jessica Gatewood's <i>Decoding the Body</i> (OCLC #: 173660454) are three examples. I had reviews on WorldCat for all of them.
<P>
Worldcat provides discovery to a billion texts (and other items such as DVDs that are available or licensed through libraries), but it just eliminated the ability of users to communicate with each other about those texts on its own platform. Instead, OCLC is now relying on one of the world's largest and most aggressive corporations to provide reviews for the subset of items in WorldCat which are commercially available. Sad. Fortunately, I saved copies of all my reviews on my own computer, so I have not lost the work I did. It is just no longer public.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-25322252040286717982022-09-01T06:44:00.005-05:002022-09-01T06:58:28.632-05:00ELC Saunders #6, Notes on American Classics (2018)Although this blog is primarily about the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> 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 five.
<P>
<blockquote>
Saunders, Judith P. <i>American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives</i>. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.
</blockquote>
This month's discussion is on the chapter: "Bateman's Principle in 'Song of Myself': Whitman Celebrates Male Ardency," pp. 61-77.
<P>
Saunders shows that Walt Whitman's main theme in "Song of Myself" is an "ebullient celebration of key male sexual strategies," which he then expands into philosophical, political, and even spiritual dimensions. According to Saunders, the speaker in the poem "inhabits a wish-fulfilling environment that favors the expression of reproductive strategies evolutionarily advantageous to men" (61).
<P>
For evolutionary sexual strategies, Saunders draws from David Buss's <em>The Evolution of Desire</em>. The basic observation (made years earlier by Trivers) is that male mammals have an evolutionary advantage in producing as many offspring by as many females as possible. Females on the other hand, because they have at the very least to gestate the fetus, realize an evolutionary advantage if they chose the male with whom they reproduce carefully, whether to mate with physically superior males or to partner with males that are more likely to help them and their children. Saunders refers to this as the Bateman's Principle, with ardent males and choosy females.
<P>
If you are wondering how Whitman was able to publish his poem dripping with sexual references in socially conservative 19th century America, he merged his sexuality with spirituality. Saunders quotes James Miller: "Like many writers before him, notably St. Theresa and John Donne, Whitman repeatedly borrows the language of physical passion to communicate the non-corporeal ecstasy of transcendent experience" (Saunders, 61). Saunders points out that Whitman "exploits the Transcendentalists' often reiterated metaphor of seeing or piercing through material phenomena in order to appreciate their spiritual essence" (Saunders, 65); however, Whitman uses that metaphor to give the poem's speaker license to see nude bodies beneath clothes, becoming, as Saunders says, "a Transcendentalist Peeping Tom."
<P>
Whitman unites his sexuality with both democratic political ideals and aesthetics. Saunders quotes Jimmie Killingsworth, "Determined to join with even the lowiest, he infuses the notion of egalitarian belonging with erotic fervor; he becomes the spokesman for a 'democratic sexual politics'" (Saunders, 61). Further, Whitman links artistic creativity with the erotic spreading of the male seed.
<P>
Saunders emphasizes that the sexual strategy of the poem is one of wish-fulfillment, unmoored from actual practical reproduction. "No demand for long-term investment is anticipated, no curtailment of sexual liberty." Far from being faced with demands for child-support, he has multitudes of clamoring suitors. "Even elemental forces desire the poem's speaker. The 'crooked inviting fingers' of the incoming tide 'refuse to go back without feeling' him (lines 449,450)" (Saunders, 68). The speaker also has no male competition for these eager mates. He even displaces a bridegroom on the wedding night without a struggle (Saunders, 69). Likewise, impotence and rejection are absent.
<P>
Saunders points out that the poem is primarily focused on male bodies and desires, with little reference to women. "The absence of any prurient interest in women's bodies may contribute, in fact, to readers' willingness to interpret the poet-speaker's ardor in spiritual and / political terms" (Saunders, 70-71). Some critics argue that his focus on men signals that his erotic spirituality is specifically homosexual. Saunders disagrees with that exclusivity in her essay's conclusion, "'Song of Myself' reassures men of any sexual orientation that their desires are wholesome and even admirable. Their erotic make-up is fully in tune with natural process and cosmic design: within the framework of Whitman's poem, male ardency enjoys political, aesthetic, and transcendent validation" (77).
<P>
I have nothing to add to Saunders' observations. In this case (and unlike the case of her work on Sherwood Anderson) the evolutionary interpretation by Saunders adds a valuable perspective to the understanding of Whitman's poem.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-17868281024440083752022-08-01T06:23:00.007-05:002022-08-01T06:36:02.127-05:00An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 6: Rod, Ladder, SkullThis blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (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.
<P>
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 mentions at the beginning of his book that he has mixed with Burke's ideas the ideas of William Rueckert, Rene Girard, and others. Carter also 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. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."
<P>
In his book on Burke, Carter argues that Burke has three domains from which we humans receive anxiety and produce guilt: the Rod, the Ladder, and the Skull. The Rod seems to relate to physical violence; the Ladder seems to relate to social hierarchies; and the Skull is the fear of death.
<P>
I have written before about the structure of human groups. In my Theory of Humor series, the blog entry regarding <a href="https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2019/03/theory-of-humor-series-part-20-status.html">Status Hierarchies</A> discusses my own observation that group hierarchies can either be either dominance hierarchies, which are enforced through threats of violence, or statue hierarchies, which can be driven from the bottom-up. Burke's Rod seems to refer to dominance hierarchies, though according to Carter, they also seem to be tied up in the moral system that forms the basis of language.
<P>
One thing I like about Carter / Burke is that they recognize the necessity of social hierarchies. "Like the ethical negative, hierarchy is an unavoidable feature of human life. As Burke has demonstrated, order, including social order, is 'impossible without hierarchy' (Attitudes 374)" (Carter, 8). Burke even acknowledges that non-human animals have hierarchies similar to human hierarchies; however, human hierarchies are qualitatively different because of the moral negative. To recast this in terms of evolutionary psychology, all social animals have hierarchies within their cooperating groups, but humans have evolved a level of strong reciprocity that allows group selection that goes far beyond the cooperation of most other social hierarchies.
<P>
Carter / Burke's symbol of the ladder seems to refer largely to status hierarchies rather than dominance hierarchies. Burke sees the human status hierarchy emanating from language. "Use of language creates social stratifications, each consisting of individuals anxious to consolidate their seemingly shaky position by asserting themselves over those beneath them, and, as a result, abuse of power is endemic." (Carter 10). "By the operation of linguistic rigidification (or reification), the hierarchy is perpetuated over time." The fact that dominance and status hierarchies are present in animals without language suggests that Burke is wrong to conflate language with social relations. Humans might use language to enforce hierarchies, but hierarchies do not come from language.
<P>
A nice aspect of Carter / Burke is that the lower classes police the upper classes as much as the other way around. "Workers have their own local hierarchies of knowledge, skill, and power, in the terms of which any newcomer is a lowly beginner who must earn respect" (Carter, 11).
<P>
I disagree with Carter / Burke that status hierarchies come from language, but I do appreciate Burke's identification of guilt and moral commandments as being part of human social organizations. "Even one's relationship with one's own self has an ingredient of hierarchical rhetoric, with 'conscience' defined as the effort to address one's conduct to the spirit of an ideal community in whose esteem one wishes to be raised." (Carter 12). I concur with Carter: the guilty look on your dog's face after he has stolen your dessert is a sign of submission by a group member lower in status for an act that may trigger violence by a dominant member of the group.
<P>
I view hierarchies as within-group orders. Dominance hierarchies in particular benefit the individual fitness of the group members at the top. (How many wives did King Solomon have?) However, I view many of the aspects of moral systems as efforts to improve group fitness by suppressing individual fitness. As Bowles and Gintis would say, moral systems allow for "reproductive leveling" (Bowles and Gintis, 112). The moral condemnation of polygamy, for example, is beneficial to lower status males who thereby have a better chance at finding a mate.
<P>
The symbol of the skull relates to the fact that we humans are smart enough to realize that we will all die and to fear that death. The guilt from the fear of death drives the sort of human sacrifices that James Frazer incorporated into his magnum opus, <i>The Golden Bough</i>. Curiously, Carter talks about an historian of religion named Eliade, but he never cites or refers to Frazer, who dealt with similar patterns. Perhaps by 1996, it was taboo to mention Frazer, part of the moral negative of post-modern literary theory. These fears of death relate to scapegoats: "Indeed, for Burke, it is the anxiety resulting from the fear of death, in addition to anxieties resulting from ethical guilt and hierarchical insecurity, that cry for 'cathartic discharge.' Our stories do not just symbolize the death we fear but often argue for the deaths of others" (Carter, 51).
<P>
Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/681536381">A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution.</A> Princeton UP, 2011.
<P>
Carter, C. Allen. <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/33208004">Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process</a>. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-89644910962438478502022-07-01T08:01:00.005-05:002022-07-01T11:04:04.595-05:00ELC Saunders #5, Notes on American Classics (2018) Although this blog is primarily about the novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> 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 five regarding this book.
<P>
<blockquote>
Saunders, Judith P. <i>American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives</i>. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.
</blockquote>
This month's discussion: Chapter Seven: Sherwood Anderson, "The Untold Lie"
<P>
To me, this chapter is not as illuminating of literature as others. The evolutionary interpretation of "The Untold Lie" seems to be a straightforward application of the theories of the male sexual strategies developed by Robert Trivers and Donald Symons and popularized by David Buss in his book <i>The Evolution of Desire</i>. These strategies are part of Buss and Schmitt's Sexual Strategies Theory (Buss, D. M., and Schmitt, D. P. (1993). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.100.2.204">"Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating."</a> Psychological Review, 100, 204–232.)
<P>
The two primary male characters in the story are Ray and Hal. Ray is an older man who has many children. He has worked hard to provide for his large family, and he is exhausted by the effort. He questions the wisdom of the path he has taken.
<P>
Hal is a young man whose dashing looks and fearless behavior has attracted women. His father had also had a reputation as a man who pursued high-risk behavior. He is not yet committed to one woman, and he has apparently had sex with many. Hal is now in a relationship with a young woman with whom he is contemplating settling down and raise children. He comes to Ray for advice. Should he propose marriage to her?
<P>
Ray, thinking about his own life, is jealous of Hal. He wishes he had been able to pursue a life of sexual adventures with many women in which he did not accept responsibility for the subsequent children. He is strongly tempted to urge Hal not to settle down with this woman.
<P>
Evolutionary psychology predicts that males should have different sexual strategies from females. Because it is possible for males to invest very little and still achieve reproductive success, while it is not possible for females who gestate a fetus and nurse the resulting offspring to do the same, males might achieve more reproductive success by mating with many females.
<P>
Symons and David Buss fleshed out a theory that men might pursue two different sexual strategies, summed by the sound bite, "Dad or cad." The male might invest a great deal in the offspring in a committed relationship with one female, or the male might attempt to reproduce with many females and not invest much in their offspring. Because of the biologically required female investment, females have biological tendency to be more selective in mate choices and may have different sexual strategies.
<P>
In this story, Ray has pursued the first sexual strategy. He is committed to one woman and has invested heavily in their children. Hal has up until now pursued the second sexual strategy, having sex with many women and not committing to their possible children. Hal is now considering changing strategies.
<P>
When Hal poses the question of his future to Ray, Ray comes to the realization that he might have wanted to pursue a different course of action than he did. He does not consciously think of it as an example of biological evolution, but he has devoted his life to his family because of psychological tendencies that had evolved not for his own happiness but for the continuation of his genes. As Saunders says, "For one luminous moment, he recognizes himself for the 'gene machine' he is and longs to detach himself from its designs" (Saunders, 136).
<P>
This is a competently written essay, but the conclusion is not as unexpected as was the essay on Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, which I discussed in the March, 2021, blog post.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-9103116562509147312022-06-01T06:21:00.000-05:002022-06-01T06:21:18.235-05:00ELC Theory, Part 5: Evolutionary Psychology and Social HierarchyI am currently studying Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC). ELC takes the findings of Evolutionary Psychology and applies them to the study of literature.
<P>
I have been a student of evolutionary psychology (EP) for most of its history. I first read Steven Pinker's <i>Language Instinct</i> in 1995. I studied both Pinker's <i>How the Mind Works</i> (1997) and David Buss's textbook <i>Evolutionary Psychology</i> (first edition, 1999) when they first came out. For EP social psychology, I read David Berreby's <i>Us and Them</i> (2005).
<P>
To be systematic in my studies, I decided to go back and review exactly what EP is. What is the current state of understanding in the field? To that end, I obtained the most recent edition of Buss's <i>Evolutionary Psychology</i> (sixth edition, 2019). I also obtained a British textbook by Lance Workman and Will Reader called <i>Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction</i> (fourth edition, 2021).
<P>
One major difference between the two textbooks is in the area of human social psychology. Buss has lengthy discussions of dominance and status hierarchies within human groups. Workman and Reader do not. Buss has an entire chapter on the subject; in Workman and Reader, the words Dominance and Status are not listed in their index.
<P>
As for my own perspective, I follow Buss and Berreby and place a high priority on dominance and status hierarchies. I differ from Buss in that I view the formation of status hierarchies as a complex interplay between those higher in the rankings and those lower in the rankings. Sometimes status is determined collectively by the lower-ranked members of the group: through a bottom-up decision process they confer higher status on some members of the group. Dominance rankings might be determined by violence and threats of violence, but not all forms of status are generated from the top down.
<P>
For example, I do not believe that one can arrive at a rich understanding of how humor and comedy work in human beings without recognizing the centrality of status hierarchies within human groups. Someone who asserts a position higher than the group consensus will be ridiculed and laughed at.
<P>
People who know me might find it ironic that I subscribe to the importance of hierarchies. I am a Quaker, and one of the defining features of the Religious Society of Friends is a commitment to not having formal status hierarchies. Early Quakers were jailed for not taking off their hats to their betters; they defiantly rejected the formal hierarchies of their day. In a Quaker Meeting for Worship, anyone can speak up to a point. Decisions are made by a process related to group consensus.
<P>
What I have observed from Quaker process is that informal status hierarchies form in any human group, even ones that explicitly reject formal hierarchies. The Quaker process prevents top-down hierarchies from forming, especially dominance hierarchies based on violence, but bottom-up, informal hierarchies characterize the organization. A person upon whom status is conveyed by the group is called a Weighty Friend. A person who has been expelled from the group has been "read out of meeting," or explicitly rejected.
<P>
Back to evolutionary psychology. My point is that the field of evolutionary psychology is not crisply defined. There can be multiple ways of characterizing it. Some include status and dominance hierarchies, and some do not. Because some versions of evolutionary psychology see status hierarchies as fundamental, and other versions do not even broach the topic, this can result in widely divergent schools of evolutionary psychology and, from them, different toolboxes which can be employed in evolutionary literary criticism.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-80818047819649029172022-05-01T07:20:00.000-05:002022-05-01T07:20:06.107-05:00An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 5: BicameralityThis blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (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 two followers.
<P>
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. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."
<P>
This month: According to Carter, Burke is part of a tradition that sees the human mind as having two modes of thinking: logical and temporal. The word <i>bicameral</i> indicates that there are two houses of reason within the mind.
<P>
An example of the two modes can be seen in the Christian Bible. On the one hand, the Christian set of moral rules about behavior forms a logical framework within which we should be able to live our lives. On the other hand, the moral system is presented as a set of episodes in time: first, there was Adam and Eve, then there was Noah, then there was Moses, and eventually there was Christ and his disciples. The moral system builds up as a narrative of history.
<P>
Evolutionary psychology does not have a position on bicamerality per se. Neuroscience performs experiments to show how the mind works. That having been said, there is a line of argument within evolutionary literary criticism that argues that our use of narrative is an evolutionary adaptation. That is why we respond to narratives so strongly and seem to need them. That position is best argued by Jonathan Gottschall in his book <i>The Storytelling Animal</i>.
<P>
One can wade ankle-deep into brain science to see some results that might relate to bicamerality. From the little I have read, our brain's hippocampus has cells that form grids that allow us to remember the location of objects in space. For a review of this field, see Moser, et al. (2008). Experiments have shown that we use that grid to map out logical arguments as well. Even though this is a wetware data structure designed for spatial reasoning, we can nevertheless follow arguments by mentally traveling through our map of the landscape of abstract concepts.
<P>
People who excel at remembering lists of items often use a technique that illustrates the point. They will first memorize the layout of a large house with many rooms and articles of furniture. They then assign each item in a new list to each piece of furniture in that house. To recall the list, they imagine walking through the house, noting each piece of furniture in a temporal sequence and thereby retrieving each item in the list.
<P>
I am not saying that bicamerality itself is necessarily an accurate description of how the mind works, but there are scientific results that suggest that it is not completely wrong. It also does not seem to be an issue critical to evolutionary psychology. Nevertheless, Gottschall's theory of the importance of storytelling as an adaptation can be a reframing of the theory of bicamerality which Burke endorsed.
<P>
Carter, C. Allen. <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/33208004">Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process</a>. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
<P>
Gottschall, Jonathan. <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/744293659">The Storytelling Animal</a>. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
<P>
Moser, E. I., Kropff, E., & Moser, M. B. (2008). <a HREF="http://amygdala.psychdept.arizona.edu/Jclub/Moser-Annreview+2008.pdf">Place cells, grid cells, and the brain's spatial representation system.</a> <i>Annual Review of Neuroscience</i>, 31, 69-89.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-70399478644905145262022-04-01T08:24:00.002-05:002022-04-01T17:43:23.269-05:00An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 4: ComedyThis blog post could also be Theory of Humor, part 26.
<P>
This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> (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 two followers.
<P>
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. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."
<P>
There will be several more entries in this series of blog posts regarding Burke, but for April Fool's Day, I thought I would discuss Carter and Burke's theory of humor. Burke has many categories of language. Carter infers from Burke's writings that there are two categories of language which he did not specifically label as such. One is religion and the other is humor.
<P>
Religion sets some things apart as having absolute dignity, the sacred and holy. Religion instills followers with the ability to take action for a cause by instilling commitment through persuasion. To Carter and Burke, humor is the opposite of religion, and specifically the opposite of commitment through persuasion. "Humor often fosters a sense of detachment, as several theorists of comedy have noted, that is very different from, even perhaps the opposite of, commitment through successful persuasion. Even the least cynical kinds of humor are hard to rally behind" (Carter 122).
<P>
While I agree that religion often focuses on holding up something as high status, I disagree with the view that humor discourages commitment. Carter and Burke's claim is that humor does not generate action in the world but acts as a critical stance toward action in the world. I will admit that commitment is the act of raising up a cause to high status within a group, a cause the group must follow, while humor lowers the status of group members or their ideas and weakens the status of its targets, making them not worthy of high dignity. It is a pulling down of some elements of a group rather than a postive programme of raising status. However, humor builds in-group belonging and prepares a group for the forward action of commitment by eliminating or ridiculing alternatives.
<P>
An example of "humor fostering action" is the work of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the comedy series "Servant of the People," which made him famous, the running joke is the plight of an honest man in the corrupt Ukrainian state. It mocks and ridicules the former president Yanukovych and his ostriches. When the show aired, the outrage which it encouraged translated into the action of the Ukrainian people: they actually elected Zelenskyy as their president. He has gone on to inspire them to willingly sacrifice their lives and property to fight an apparently unwinnable war. Critical stance indeed.
<P>
My own theory of humor has two fundamental parts, a social aspect and a cognitive incongruity aspect. Burke sees language as a symbol system that rests on the congruity between words and the things in the world to which they refer. In this framework, he sees humor coming from the incongruity that can occur between language and its references. This idea is part of Burke's belief that human cognition is mediated by language, which Steven Pinker debunks (see my earlier blog entries). To Carter and Burke, because our world is mediated by language, all humor passes through language. In the case of humor, Steve Martin demonstrated that you do not need language for humorous incongruity when he unzipped his fly and smoke came out.
<P>
Carter and Burke value commitments and do not want humor to discourage their formation, but they support using humor to pull us back from political absolutism. They also want comedy to be used charitably (Carter, 126). However, humor is a tool, and you cannot pick and choose when and how humor will be employed. That having been said, when a would-be authoritarian imposes absolutism, one of the first things to happen is the suppression of comedy.
<P>
Burke is a philosopher who universalizes things, and in humor as with other topics, he goes too far with his theories. As Carter says, "The largest incongruity of all is the mismatch between our expectation to live indefinitely--and our foreknowledge of death. All humor is based on some variation of this fundamental existential incongruity, and in every laugh is the rattle of this absurdity. Comedy is a defense mechanism of the spirit, the expression of a need to distance the self from death" (127). I say, give Carter and Burke an inch, and they take it more than a mile; they take it to the abyss. Most humor is not hanging over the abyss. Monty Python did end the movie "The Life of Brian" with the song, "Always look on the Bright Side of Life," which is an example of Burke's gallows humor; however, most humor does not point to death but to chickens crossing roads.
<P>
To bring this discussion back to evolutionary literary criticism, my theory of humor posits that humor is a non-violent social mechanism for managing status hierarchies. Comics such as Zelenskyy rally group support against those who place themselves high in the group when they do not deserve it. As such, it can function to further group selection, both as a challenge to group dominance and as a secondary support for policing free-loaders in favor of altruistic punishers. It can be an antidote to pathological entelechy or a weapon to disparage out-groups. Carter and Burke do not see that function, except in the extreme case of pulling us back from suicidally absolutist dominance.
<P>
Carter, C. Allen. <a HREF="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/33208004">Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process</a>. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1880677745823228774.post-70011549351589279362022-03-01T06:50:00.006-06:002022-03-01T08:50:51.354-06:00ELC Theory, Part 4: Evolutionary Psychology and Multilevel Selection TheoryI am currently studying Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC). ELC takes the findings of Evolutionary Psychology and applies them to the study of literature.
<P>
I have been a student of evolutionary psychology for most of its history. I first read Steven Pinker's <i>Language Instinct</i> in 1995. I studied Pinker's <i>How the Mind Works</i> (1997) and other EP texts. I bought both David Buss's textbook <i>Evolutionary Psychology</i> (first edition, 1999) and Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson's <i>Unto Others</i> (1998) when they first came out.
<P>
After studying <i>Unto Others</i>, 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.
<P>
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.)
<P>
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, <i>Culture and the Evolutionary Process</i>, 1985).
<P>
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.
<P>
In <a href="https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2019/03/">Part 20</a> 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):
<blockquote>
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.
</blockquote>
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 <i>is</i> group selection. I am still waiting for him to fully embrace group selection. I may have to wait a long time.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
My advice: Spend time on a close reading of Sober and Wilson's <i>Unto Others</i>. 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.
H. Vernon Leightonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12856897880011158505noreply@blogger.com0