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WSM: And does neuroscience come in with ritualized
behaviors?
ED: Yes, neurobiology is part of all of that. We pay
attention to things because our brains, our perceptual system—our
senses--are prepared to pay attention to the things that are
important to us. Baby fowl pay attention to their mothers’
pecks on the ground. Babies prefer humans faces and voices to any
other sight or sound. Our emotions, also in our brains, tell us
what’s important, what to pay attention to. Formalizing,
repeating, exaggerating, and elaborating already important signals
catch our attention even more effectively.
The arts take things we’re already prepared to pay attention
to—colors and forms we like, subject matter that attracts us or
scares us, like beautiful faces or terrifying masks, or themes like
love, death, adventure. And they use
these—formalize, repeat, exaggerate, and elaborate—and
attract our attention, sustain our interest, manipulate our
emotion. And then when people are doing it together,
participating, they are emotionally as well as temporally bound
together—as in mother-infant interaction.
Another important effect of the arts is, I think, helping to
relieve stress and anxiety. I say this because work done by
anthropologists such as Victor Turner or Arnold van Gennep points
out that rituals always occur at times of transition between one
state and another—for example, between childhood and puberty,
between unmarried and married, between death and life, between
nonexistence and birth, between want and plenty, between illness
and health. At such uncertain times, things can either get
better or worse. People are concerned, they want good
outcomes to their battles, their hunts, and have anxiety about
these vital matters. I think that these ceremonies are
adaptive not only because they join people together in common cause
but because they relieve anxiety. Even though they may or may
not make the game come or make the rain fall or assure that the ill
person lives, they give people something to do in times of
anxiety. It is better for individuals to have something to do
in times of trouble rather than just freak out by oneself or do
nothing at all.
Neuroscientists have shown the debilitating effects of stress
hormones, which are of course chemicals in the brain that are
secreted when we are anxious, enabling us to react quickly and
energetically. Engaging in social and physical activities,
like sports or dancing, reduces cortisol and similar deleterious
chemicals. Again, this is another illustration of what
neuroscience can tell us about the brain. No one but me has
specifically said that the arts or ritual ceremonies relieve
anxiety, but I noticed that after the September 11, 2001 attacks,
most people spontaneously went to churches or other public places
to be with others in ceremonies that were filled with arts.
Even people who weren’t religious seemed to need to mark this
unprecedented and terrifying event. We needed well-wrought
liturgy or poetry, not just the descriptions and suppositions of
television reporters. We left our living rooms to be in an
altered setting like a church or park. We were with others
and even participated ourselves by singing, walking slowly holding
candles, offering flowers or flags or votives. Some people
wrote poetry for the first time in their lives. We did this
spontaneously at a time when nobody knew what else to do. You
couldn’t just watch TV forever all by yourself.
WSM: Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist at
Harvard, has famously said that the arts are like cheesecake.
During human evolution, sources of high-calories like sugar and fat
were scarce so we developed a liking for them in order to be sure
to have that nutrition. Today we still like them although in
a world of fast food that liking is no longer adaptive.
Similarly, he says, the arts piggy-back on appetites for attractive
features but in themselves are not adaptive. We simply press
our “pleasure buttons” as when we eat cheesecake.
ED: Steven Pinker also says that if you’re going to
join people together, if you’re going to get them to work together,
why would ritual evolve, or music? Why these rather than some
other behavior? They seem too complex.
But if, as I describe, the predecessors of the behavior are
already there and serve to unite a mother and infant along a
temporal continuum and if mother-infant interaction uses the
features that other animals use in ritualized behaviors that draw
their attention and create interest and emotion—repetition,
formalization, exaggeration, etc.—then there is a biological
precedent for ceremonial ritual and the arts. All humans were
babies and we know that babies come into the world receptive to
signals in visual, vocal, and kinesic modalities and, like other
animals, to the manipulations of these by their mothers.
Young children continue to be receptive to the arts: they easily
sing, move to music, dance, like to dress up and play with words,
to make believe, and they practice these things in play. In
many other societies, adults are making or engaging in the arts all
around them and children naturally learn to develop their innate
proclivities. Today, in our society, children’s artistic
proclivities usually wither from lack of use.
I find it easy to imagine that at some point in our evolutionary
past, our ancestors deliberately began to use manipulations of
visual, vocal, and kinesic behaviors in ceremonies, thereby
creating what we now call arts, and it had a similar coordinating
or bonding effect on the participants. Art and ritual didn’t
arise from nowhere.
Although Pinker has criticized claims that the arts are
adaptive—including mine—I think that if we were to talk, I could
make good answers to his objections. My ideas have been
developing over a number of years, as I keep adding pieces of the
puzzle, and I have not yet really put it all together in one book
as comprehensively as I’ve tried to tell it to you here.
I think there are other problems with Pinker’s views that are
part of emphases in present-day science. Cognitive scientists
today are mainly concerned with cognition and neuroscientists with
percepts and preferences. But the arts go beyond cognition or
preferences for, say, consonant intervals over dissonant intervals
in music. Emotion and motivation are difficult to study, but
they are surely essential to our experience of the arts. The
arts take place in time and that is also difficult to study—the
unfolding effects.
I also think that cooperation is as important to human evolution
as competition. We have to be concerned with Number One, but
part of that self-interest is a concern for the people around
us. And rituals do help us get along with the people we are
around,
WSM: What you’re echoing is Darwin’s belief that groups can
develop adaptations.
ED: Darwin thought that sympathy was an important
human trait and he mentioned briefly that groups that cooperated
would out-compete groups that did not. But what is called
“group selection” is a contentious topic in today’s evolutionary
psychology. After retiring, William McNeill, an eminent
historian, wrote a fascinating book based on an observation
he made while a military recruit in World War II. He had
noticed the exhilarating feeling he had when marching with other
soldiers in drill. He called it “muscular bonding” and found
many examples of it in animals and throughout human history.
His title describes it all: Keeping Together in Time:
Dance and Drill in Human History. When we are
moving together with other people, just as in mother-infant
interaction, we bond with them: it’s another artifact of our
nervous system and it has deep evolutionary roots.
I don’t think that critics like Pinker are considering the
muscular bonding of ceremonial dances when they talk about art as
superfluous. Ceremonies, the earliest arts, are
participatory. Even onlookers are usually clapping or
stamping or moving. I suspect that the prehistoric cave and
rock paintings were the site of participatory ceremonies.
Although the belief systems of participants are “cognitive,” the
arts appeal to their emotions and reinforce the beliefs through
participation. It is pretty boring just to speak or say
important things but if they are part of a multimedia spectacle, we
are likely to be seduced and persuaded by them and to remember
them. And at the end, the people who sing together, who
listen to the same things together, really do, for that moment,
feel united. Their anxiety or stress is reduced and they are
more cooperative. This unification seems to be real and not
just a side-effect. I think it’s true that in human
societies, both the group as a whole and the individuals themselves
will function more adaptively than individuals and groups that
don’t have unifying rituals.
When I refer to the arts as adaptive, I’m really talking about
this kind of participatory art, where all the senses are involved
and where the experience occurs in time. In such an event,
the participants’ expectations can be manipulated, there is
repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and formalization, all
attracting their attention and holding their interest, molding
their emotions, and I think that has been very adaptive to humans
throughout their history.
WSM: It’s probably the case that I know just enough not to
be able to critique intelligently, but your work makes so much
sense.
ED: Well, thank you. I think that it does. But
it really hasn’t been examined enough by evolutionary
psychologists. I’ve sort of been pioneering this, at least in
treating all of the arts. There are a lot of people looking at the
adaptive uses of literature.
But overall, there are only a handful of people doing this art
stuff. I think there are some reasons for it. One, it
isn’t considered very “sexy.” A man who wants to make a
career in the sciences will probably not study the arts. I
met a psychologist at UC Davis who early on, in the early 70s,
wrote an interesting article about ethology and art. I met
him at a conference much later and told him that I’d always
remembered his article and wondered whether he written anything
more like that. He said that he had been told by his thesis
supervisor that he couldn’t make a career out of such a subject so
he was leaving it until his retirement, like William H.
McNeill!
So I think that’s one reason. Another is that if you are a
scientist, you tend to have an analytic kind of mind, and you’ve
had to spend a lot of time mastering many difficult subjects and
you may just not have had time to devote to the arts, learning
about them or practicing them. They are foreign
territory. And the same thing with people in the arts.
They often are uneasy with science and its statistics and
empiricism—they don’t know or care very much about it because it
seems to go against what they know about their art. It’s hard
to learn enough about either field to bring them together.
I was perhaps able to do that because I didn’t have an academic
career. I was—in Sri Lanka at least—a “kept woman,” so I had
time to read and think. Later, when I was in New York, there
was just me, indulging my own interest. It’s taken a lot of
sacrifice…but when I look back it is almost as if once I embarked
on it I couldn’t stop. It has its own momentum. And it
has taken a long time—over 30 years since my first published
paper. It’s only now that I’ve been able to pull it together
from enough points of view so that I can, I think, make a
carefully-argued case that can counter any objection. Or at
least I think so. No one has challenged me yet.
My first book, What Is Art For?, is now 20 years
old. Specialists in any one of the fields I synthesized there
can quickly see that I didn’t know everything there is to know
about their individual subject. Homo Aestheticus,
written when I was in the U.S. and had access to modern libraries,
is more informed. And as for Art and Intimacy, I
don’t think most scientists, or most men, are very interested in
mothers and babies. I suspect that the title alone puts them
off. Even you said that it is the one book of mine you hadn’t
read—and it is the most recent! I think I have to write one
more book so that my real synthesis gets out there.
But when you say it makes a lot of sense to you, it also makes a
lot of sense to people who are artists, in every art—visual art,
music, dance, theatre. My biggest audiences have been in arts
education and arts therapy and the crafts. All three of those
fields are considered peripheral by mainstream art departments in
which students have ambitions to “make it” as artists in the elite
art world. My work deals with the arts from the time of the
Pleistocene and arts that anyone can do—children, someone who wrote
a poem after 9/11, the person who decorates the house for holidays,
who likes to make things that they care about “special.”
Arts teachers, arts therapists, and crafts workers say that my
work gives them theoretical justification for what they know works
and what they know is true. My daughter, who works in youth
theatre, finds that all kids can do drama and be transformed by
it. She sees that every day.
I can explain it to scientists too, but at a conference you have
15 minutes to give a paper.
WSM: You seem to have caught E.O. Wilson’s attention.
ED: Yes, years ago I sent him What Is Art For?, and
he wrote to thank me. Then two or three years later, he wrote
to tell me he had just read it and had learned a lot. So I
sent him Homo Aestheticus and he subsequently cited some of
my ideas in Consilience. He appreciates attempts to
bring the arts and humanities within the embrace of the sciences,
not to “reduce” them to scientific principles but to show that they
are an inherent, necessary part of human life.
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