War on evol psych: Steven Pinker and style

Why do I hate Steven Pinker so? Because once I loved him and he broke my heart. Yes, I too fell for the fraud that is evol(utionary) psych(ology) with its elegant reduction of complex human activities like politics, art, morality to reproductive fitness. Everything is about sex. Now that's one hell of an attractive message.

And then I read The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. I'm no scientist--and sexy science fogs the mind--so at first Pinker's case seemed at least plausible. Ok, the idea that we are an empty skin sac waiting to be filled doesn't really make sense. Ok, studies that emphasize the parental environment in socialization fail to account for the genetic contribution. Ok, ok, ok...

Everything at least made sense, even if it seemed a little oversimplified, until I got to the chapter on 'The Arts.' And then howler followed howler. Here the reductionist thesis became absurd.

Yes, Pinker has some good points even in this silly chapter. Artists and critics always proclaim the death of art and culture. It's what they do. And there is good evidence that lots of people are still being really creative. Contra Pinker, he could have pointed to issues with the funding of the arts in North America, specifically education, community, etc. which are at alarmingly low levels. And yes, human beings are imaginary creatures. We all know that, especially in the imaginary community that is global Goth.

But from reasonable beginnings comes this: 'In The Mating Mind, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to create art is a mating tactic: a way to impress prospective sexual and marriage partners with the quality of one's brain and thus, indirectly, one's genes. Artistic virtuousity, he notes, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake, and widely prized. Artists, in other words, are sexy (Pinker, 407).' Well, yuh. Artists are sexy. Art is sexy. And then Pinker goes from the obvious to the downright silly when he compares the human artistic impulse with the nest-making creativity of the satin bowerbirds of New Guinea and Australia: 'The males construct elaborate nests and fastidiously decorate them with colorful objects such as orchids, snail shells, berries, and bark. Some of them literally paint their bowers with regurgitated fruit residue using leaves or bark as a brush. The females appraise the bowers and mate with the creators of the most symmetrical and well-ornamented ones (Pinker, 407).' And that's just what artists do too, in'it? Ok, maybe Picasso, maybe Augustust John, maybe...

'Aren't you just the cutest little Modigliani?'
Source: blog.nus.edu.sg

Granted, art may have originated as some sort of Australopithecine pick-up line. And yes, Pinker takes a weaker approach to the connection between art and reproductive fitness than his mate Miller. But it's still all about sex. Sex sex sex sex sex sex sex...And you thought I was obsessed with sex. And I thought I could never get sick of hearing about sex.

It's just such a vapid thesis. It explains everything and nothing. So it's about sex. Well, that's just pointless banality. We know that and yet it's only partially true and tells us almost nothing. Does sex really explain why we do art? Why we love art? Why we sacrifice things, including sex, for art? No, of course not. But scientists are clearly sex mad and having none of our prudish abstinence-only aesthetics.

And if Pinker is ridiculous about art, he's downright stupid about style. Here's where the science really hits the fan!

Pinker is a naturalist, so he basically only values naturalistic art. With some exceptions, he has nothing but disdain for modernism and postmodernism. In his view, contemporary aesthetics is where theory eclipses art. And that is just a cover for bad art.

And Pinker loathes the theory: in 'postmodernism...the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for "linguistic transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world more radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity...This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles (Pinker, 415)."' Har har har! The great scientist has a good laugh at the poor postmodern fools

Gender theorist Judith Butler won the prize in 1998 and Pinker provides the winning quotation on the same page quoted above. Yes, Butler can write some excruciating prose but three points here. Scientists calling social scientists bad stylists is like the boiling pot calling the steaming kettle hot. You folks know bad writing when you see it because you are the experts!

And two, anybody can cherrypick quotations. Here's the first paragraph from the conclusion to Butler's Gender Trouble:

'I began with the speculative question of whether feminist politics could do without a "subject" in the category of women. At stake is not whether it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make representational claims in their behalf. The feminist "we" is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. The tenuous or phantasmatic status of the "we," however, is not cause for despair or, at least, it is not only cause for despair. The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself (Gender Trouble, 194)."

Was that garbled? Was that hard to understand? Was that bad writing? Phah! See, I can cherry pick too. And for every nightmare passage I can find an equally clear and concise one.

Finally, what about this problem with 'linguistic transparency'? What really is the issue here? Culture theorist Homi K. Bhabha once complained about the double standard of scientists who reserved the right to the most arcane techno-jargon in their archly sophisticated and esoteric fields but then expected everyone else to write simple, banal, straightforward prose about supposedly more mundane things like art, literature, politics, race, etc. As Bhabha asks, why do scientists think that subjects other than science are somehow less complex and difficult? Well, because they're both ignorant and arrogant. They don't know nothing about history or philosophy or art but they knows it when they sees it. And they don't want to be all befuddled and bemused by them big long ambiguous words and phrases in such common disciplines of human knowledge. The kind like Judith Butler writes when she makes a simple word like 'woman' into an issue. Doesn't everybody know what a 'woman' is? What is the problem here?

Scientists (and I most definitely do not mean all scientists here) can be such philistines. And I don't mean this in an elitist sort of way. But in the sense that compartmentalized jerks make authoritative pronouncements well outside of their field of expertise without bothering to learn anything about the subject they're pontificating on. Really, Pinker's whole book is an example of one-sided philistinism. He knows nothing about art or politics or style or women and yet he lectures loud and long on each topic. If only he'd done a little research and troubled himself to actually learn something about Foucault or Butler.