At first glance our two authors could hardly be more unlike. Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a pleasing view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750 — a scene like that on his website banner, with perhaps some red-coated riders, left, and a fox, courant, hurrying into a copse. Turning next to Denis Dutton’s Darwinian The Art Instinct, and in sharp contrast, a congenially paintable vista for that author might be Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, circa 1,000,000 BC, with Stone Age hunters chasing antelope over Africa’s green hills.

Yet for all this I expect that across a wide range of cultural artefacts and activities their tastes would chime. They each believe in the best that has been written, painted, or composed, and they know what it is. Both of them grieve to see entire traditions of thought and work being dishonored and trashed. “A determination to shock or puzzle has sent much recent art down a wrong path,” Dutton writes in his Introduction. “A Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” High artistic values are exactly what Scruton would also like to see restored and it’s encouraging to see two such thoughtful books about art appear within weeks of each other.

Though perhaps this conjunction is not so surprising after all, because the place of the arts in society, and the general condition of the arts, have long been seen as a gauge of civilised morale. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy pioneered this critical tradition in the 19th century — but we’ve come a long way since then. Once confined to the bohemian margins, artists and their adversarial values have in the last century moved steadily closer to the center, while increasing their political clout, a development that drew the worried attention of such distinguished commentators as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Jacques Barzun.

In The Use and Abuse of Art Barzun observed that the “invidious, resentful relation of art to life has become general and unremitting.” Characterizing “the sensibility of the sixties” and its typical creative works Daniel Bell wrote of its “violence and cruelty” and of “an anti-cognitive and anti-intellectual mood” that has hardly diminished since, something that also concerns Scruton and Dutton today. When Irving Kristol wrote that abandoning the constraints of the Protestant ethic caused “virtue to lose her loveliness”, who would have thought that “loveliness” (by which we mean the entire ethically ambiguous realm of the aesthetic) would soon assume the virtue that virtue itself had lost? Sceptics wondered whether the triumph of the aesthetic represented the moral defeat of the bourgeoisie.

That is doubtless an exaggeration — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Both the books in question have more positive and elevating themes and purposes. About our ideas on beauty, and why we like what we like, they are primarily philosophical, and seek to explain and defend the place of cultural refinement in a life well lived — and Dutton might say in any life worth living. His Darwinian argument is that music and literature and much else are deeply rooted in human nature itself. This in turn raises questions about sources and origins. Where do we find the earliest signs of aesthetic sensibility? Is it in a primordial appreciation of nature? Can Africa’s Omo Valley be really where it all began?

Landscape and universals

Yorkshire Dales, photo: Geoff Lund

You don’t travel far with either author before the question is raised whether trees and rivers and hills are universally appealing. For most ordinary men and women (though varying with levels of articulacy) this could range from a hushed “look at that!” to my own excited reaction not long ago. Driving one morning around a curve in a country road I saw a sunlit view — rolling hills, low light, willows by a stream — and “God that’s beautiful!” burst unbidden from my lips. There may have been sheep and cows too. Not a very original expostulation you will say, but the question is this: was it as spontaneously unmeditated as it seemed to me at the time? While the words “instant” and “instinct” sound similar, do they here mean much the same thing?

Dutton would unequivocally answer “yes” and give his reasons. Evolutionary psychology (or EP) suggests that landscape preferences are deeply ancient and originated in Palaeolithic times, and that critical judgements about suitable real estate started way back then. However “disinterested” the appreciation of beauty either is or should be, according to Immanuel Kant, a beautiful Pleistocene landscape was always a matter of lively ancestral concern, and it was valued for straightforward down-to-earth reasons: available water, fertility, and abundant game. According to The Art Instinct the deep source of my excitement as those sunlit hills came into view was a primordial pattern of instinctive response. What’s surprising, however, is that with rather more equivocation Roger Scruton seems to agree.

According to the author of Beauty, Immanuel Kant also thought our response to nature was spontaneous and unstudied, and it’s not hard to see what he meant. Standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon you are at once struck dumb with wonder. Views of nature please us immediately and without concepts said Kant — and speaking for myself I’d have to say that’s how I felt on that morning drive. Unaware what was coming, and attending to nothing but a winding road, I was immediately riveted by the view, and my reaction was as unconceptualized as only passive visual sensation on the threshold of attention can be. Kant also maintained that “the primary exercise of judgement is in the appreciation of nature”, a statement glossed by Scruton when he adds that “a faculty that is directed towards natural beauty therefore has a real chance of being common to all human beings, issuing judgements with a universal force.”

Now unless I’m mistaken this tells us that a sense of “natural beauty” is “universal” and shared by “all human beings” — pretty much a matter of human nature you’d think, or what Kant himself called a sensus communis. In the course of his discussion Scruton twice refers to “our species”, and when mankind as a species is invoked can the universalities of origins, sources, evolution, genes, homo sapiens, Darwin, the lot, be far behind? Our mastery over nature converted the primaeval world “into a safe and common home for our species” Scruton writes on page 61. Then on page 65, elaborating on the contrast between the ‘free’ beauties of nature and the ‘dependent’ beauties of art, he tells us that “there is something plausible in the idea that the contemplation of nature is both distinctive of our species and common to its members…”

If the contemplative appreciation of nature is distinctive of our species perhaps it is also instinctive in our species: doesn’t this take us close to the evolutionary view? Dutton and Scruton start out from very different premises, to be sure, yet aren’t they talking about much the same thing?

The failings of EP

But no — Scruton won’t have any of that. Agreeing with an Australian philosopher, the late David Stove, he dismisses evolutionary psychology as “Darwinian fairytales”. As for The Art Instinct, although it receives bibliographical mention at the back of Scruton’s book, neither the work nor its argument is engaged directly (both titles appeared in 2009, The Art Instinct a little before Beauty). Instead, two other proponents of evolutionary psychology, Ellen Dissanayake and Geoffrey Miller (whose contributions are described in Dutton’s book) are made to represent evolutionary aesthetics overall.

Both thinkers however are too idiosyncratic to fill this role, and might be seen as easy game. In Homo Aestheticus and elsewhere Dissanayake had proposed that art arises from the human need to decoratively “make special” our ceremonies and religious rites. Making special by means of ornamental art supposedly encourages group cohesion, thereby conferring a collective advantage. Scruton allows that the theory has something to be said for it, but says it “falls critically short of explaining what is distinctive of the aesthetic”. Again, in The Mating Mind Geoffrey Miller pushes Darwinian fitness theory further perhaps than is entirely safe: like the peacock’s tail, both beauty and art itself are lumped in with all the other phenomena of sexual selection and reproduction. Not unreasonably, Scruton comments that “Even if the peacock’s tail and the Art of Fugue have a common ancestry, the appreciation elicited by the one is of a completely different kind from the appreciation directed at the other.”(p37)

Whatever evolutionary psychology may say, or evolutionists like Denis Dutton might think (so Roger Scruton argues), it is man’s good fortune to have been divinely touched with rationality, for “it is the very capacity for reasoning that distinguishes us from the rest of nature.” Reasoning about things we know and have experienced enables us to make the fine discriminations required in aesthetic judgement; reasoning allows us to enter into the mind of the artist and understand his intentions — what the poet was driving at, what the painter meant. After which on page 38 Scruton sweeps the whole Darwinian argument aside:

“As things stand, the evolutionary psychology of beauty offers a picture of the human being and human society with the aesthetic element deprived of its specific intentionality, and dissolved in vague generalities that overlook the peculiar place of aesthetic judgement in the life of the rational agent.”

The evolutionist’s response

So that’s that. But is it also “how things stand” with Denis Dutton? Within his Darwinian scheme of explanation, does a painter or poet know what he’s doing, mean what he says, and can we understand his intentions ourselves? The Art Instinct has in fact a lot to say about intention and intentionality, and it is neither vaporous nor vague.

Bison, Chauvet Cave

Fitness theory — the signs of vigor and male prowess that brilliant tail feathers and menacing antlers and fighting ability show — is important in Dutton’s argument, and it places conscious intention and visibly displayed individual achievement at the center of evolutionary aesthetics. Whoever drew the highly distinctive images of bears, bison, rhinoceros and lions at Chauvet Cave about 32,000 years ago knew exactly what he was doing, and must have been greatly admired for his skill. Moreover, Dutton’s thinking about Palaeolithic origins in the past is informed by research among tribes-people in the present. Evidence of self-conscious artistic intention is something he encountered doing fieldwork in New Guinea villages, where “the work of individual dancers, poets, and carvers is a focus of fascinated attention”.

From Scruton’s comment above you might think that evolutionary psychology had as one of its aims (or anyway one of its effects) an anthropological “abandonment of the author function”, a denial of individual agency, a view of abstract historical process without individual influence or meaning, of predetermining forces that supervene and displace the writer’s mind. Not so says Dutton — quite the reverse. It is in novels, poetry, and drama that individual demonstrations of superior skill, style, and imaginative intelligence provide some of evolution’s most persuasive indicators:

We admire clarity, accuracy, and relevance in realistic, descriptive uses of language and regard these qualities as showing that a speaker possesses desirable intellectual qualities. Fictional creations — stories, jokes, and ornamented speech, such as poetry — are similarly judged.

Behind every act of speaking, descriptive or artistic, looms the idea of the fitness test. Human beings are continuously judging their fellows in terms of the cleverness or banality of their language use.

Skilled employment of a large vocabulary, complicated grammatical constructions, wit, surprise, stylishness, coherence, and lucidity all have bearing on how we assess other human beings. Intentionally artistic uses of language are particularly liable to assessment in terms of what they reveal about the character of a speaker or writer.

Listing twelve “signal characteristics of art considered as a universal, cross-cultural category,” Dutton emphasizes the universal admiration for individual skill and virtuosity; the way relatively static traditional styles are the measure against which individual innovations are tested, registered, and adopted for mainstream performance; the role of novelty and creativity as “the locus of individuality or genius in art, referring to that aspect of art that is not governed by rules or routines”; and the potential for “expressive individuality” wherever tired conventions produce boring work for weary audiences.

Rhinos, Chauvet Cave

As for the common argument that artistic individuality is a “Western construct” (a post-modern claim, and certainly not Scruton’s), drawing again on his field experience Dutton declares this to be false: “individual talent and expressive personality is respected in New Guinea as elsewhere.” So standing back a little we can see that the supposedly contradictory propositions about universality and individuality are not so incompatible after all. Yes: on the one hand a universal “art instinct” is the biological foundation of music, painting, and literature. Yes: on the other hand, the particularity of individual genius is indispensable for climbing art’s highest peaks. What’s not to like?

Sex and beauty according to Scruton

No account of beauty would be complete without the effect of sexual attraction upon our judgement of personal appearance, and since Roger Scruton has already written much on this matter it was to be expected that he would also have something to say in his latest book. Kantian ethics demand that individuals be treated as ends, not means: in his discussion of feminine beauty it becomes important for Scruton to explain how a disinterested aesthetic admiration for the nude can be distinguished from mere lubricity.

One view of sex suggests that the machinery of reproduction is a divine joke, sent by God to perplex us when we should be just getting on with our lives. This is the comic view. Another and more tragic understanding is that the theatre of sexual desire exists for the enactment of spiritually uplifting moral drama — a serious matter that should be discussed by philosophers (some of them bachelors like Kant) suffering all the pains of restraint. Sometimes they are trying to restrain homosexual impulses, like Socrates. Sometimes their impulses are heterosexual, like Saint Augustine’s. One way or the other it’s no laughing matter.

Venus of Urbino, Uffizi Gallery

In Sexual Desire Roger Scruton devotes over 400 pages to this topic. In Beauty it receives 41 pages out of 197, over a fifth of the whole, where he tells us how to adopt a suitably contemplative attitude toward naked women in art and life. It is not clear to me how useful this is. He tells us that the Venus of Urbino — “that most provocative of Titian’s female nudes” — is to be sharply distinguished from Manet’s Olympia, the author’s judgement being that “the hand on the thigh of Manet’s Olympia is not the hand that Titian paints, schooled in innocent caresses and resting with a fairy touch: it is a raw, tough hand that deals in money, that grips far more readily than it strokes…”  As Scruton strains to distinguish the kind of work he approves as reflecting “conjugal passion” (Titian) from what he disapproves as incipiently pornographic (Manet), drawing on the bachelor sage of 18th century Königsberg to adjudicate (Immanuel Kant), we enter the philosophical zone of subjects that are not objects, objects that would prefer to be subjects, and subjects that are not really objects despite being treated as if they were — like Manet’s model for Olympia. But this is more for adepts and cognoscenti.

Scruton also regards the historic distinction between “fantasy” and “imagination” as important. “True art appeals to the imagination,” he writes, “whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities; but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment.” This is all very well — and not unpersuasive — until one looks at the author’s humorless discussion of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In contrast to Botticelli’s Venus, Scruton observes, with Titian’s Venus we are no longer in heaven but in a down-to-earth realm of

“domestic safety and conjugal passion… She reclines among her drapes in full confidence of her personal right to them, immersed in a life that is larger, deeper, more inscrutable than the moment alone. Her body is revealed to us, but she does not show it to us — she is not as a rule conscious of being watched, save perhaps by a dog or a cupid whose calm unembarrassability merely emphasizes the fact that voyeurs cannot trouble her peace of mind, which is also a peace of body. She is not in a state of excitement…

Myrina Aphrodite, Pergamon Museum

What is this? Fantasy or imagination? Who knows? Though it does bring to mind Mrs Patrick Campbell’s thrust at her unmanageably loquacious vegetarian friend Bernard Shaw: “some day you’ll eat a pork chop Georgie, and then God help all women.”

No doubt some useful distinction between the healthily erotic and a sick lubricity can be made, as Scruton tries to do — the contemporary curse of pornography is real enough. And no doubt Kant’s distinction between means and ends helps us understand what has happened. I do feel however that if all this is of such grave moral concern to Scruton, then one would like to see him turn his attention away from the temptations of reclining nudes. The serene dignity of partially draped standing figures, exemplified by the Hellenistic Venus de Milo and the Myrina Aphrodite, remind us that antiquity did some things rather better.

Sex and beauty, the evolutionary view

The ordinary reader might easily feel there is little to be said here. Whatever the humorist James Thurber may have been thinking of when he asked plaintively “Is Sex Necessary?”, sex is certainly needed for evolution. After all, evolution is about reproduction, reproduction is about sex, and Darwin’s thoughts about sexual selection by mate choice are the starting point for any consideration of why some features of human anatomy and some shapes are preferred to others. Here the peacock’s tail returns in all its glory: any specimen strong enough to provide the walking squawking platform for such an extravagant display proclaims its biological fitness to peahens for miles around. And it has been confirmed experimentally that the better peacocks with the better tails have the better genes.

Natural selection is slow, passive, and excludes the unfit. Sexual selection is by comparison fast, active, and both includes and unites the fit. For anyone interested in what human fitness looks like there are well-known studies of waist-to-hip ratios showing what is required for female attractiveness. “Healthy premenopausal women will have a ratio of .67 to .80” writes Dutton, “hardly an hourglass, but possibly a Coke bottle; this body shape is regarded as “feminine’ and attractive by men.” We are told that there are sound statistical reasons for regarding this ratio as biologically adaptive, “as women who display a waist-to-hip ratio on the .7 or .8 range are significantly more fertile than women closer to the healthy male ratio of around .9.”

Yet the curious thing about modern evolutionary aesthetics is that this attention to physique is only the start. One could almost argue that it takes off from the point where Roger Scruton falters — perplexed by moral issues, and whether he should allow Olympia, clothed or unclothed, into his living room. Instead, evolutionary aesthetics concentrates on the remarkable creative attributes of artists and the dazzling achievements of conscious artistry. Not Olympia, but Manet the artist, is the focus of concern; and not the real-life Victorine Meurent, who modelled for Manet’s painting, but the innovative skills of painters who have historically portrayed at least as many women with their clothes on as off. That, I feel fairly sure, is true of Manet.

While anatomical excellence is fundamental, human mental development and the emergence of language brought a whole new range of attractive intellectual features, all convertible into art. Minds were expanding, and artistic virtuosity not only gave access to our minds, it enhanced our attractiveness too. Gorgeous paintings gradually came to supplement gorgeous anatomy; sharp wit and sharp dialog supplemented physical prowess. Muscly warrior castes may have thought such developments effete, distracting, and incomprehensible, but in evolutionary terms they were no less effective in determining mate choice.

Dutton writes: “Grammar, syntax, word choice, appropriateness, coherence, relevance, speed of response, wit, rhythm, ability to toy with words, and originality all play a part. Taken together, these skills and qualities of mind constitute eloquence, and the admiration of eloquence is solidly on the list of human universals.” So it is that from a foundation of words, and intelligence, and with the operation of sexual selection, the manifold glories of story telling and literary enchantment eventually grew — from tribal tales about hunting bears to the Odyssey, to Shakespeare, to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.

Minimal beauty and the sense of order

A photograph in Beauty shows a place setting at a dinner table. A folded napkin, tied neatly with a bow, sits on a plate alongside a knife and fork, with wine glasses ready nearby and lighted candles in the background. A suspicion that this heralds a chapter on etiquette soon proves mistaken (though I look forward to neat little bows on our domestic napkins in future). The accompanying discussion is among the more interesting features of Scruton’s book, and it underlines two things. First, that an elementary sense of visual order lies at the foundation of the pictorial arts; second, that when the author writes of civilization providing “a safe and common home for our species”, this is the sort of home he has in mind. His species is cultural rather than zoological, and much of it can be found within a leisurely day’s ride of what Englishmen call the Home Counties, not too far from London.

“There is an aesthetic minimalism exemplified by laying the table, tidying your room, designing a web-site” Scruton writes, and however remote in scale and significance these are from the maximalism of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Beethoven’s Ninth, in each case we want things to “look right”. Perhaps it is unnecessary to be reminded of this amidst the welter of magazines dealing with house and home and the plethora of newspaper supplements about “design”, especially when more and more people call themselves “designers”. But because he feels that the more mundane features of modern life also belong in a general theory of beauty, Scruton usefully reminds us that “a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper” are more important to many people’s daily lives than the great works of art that may, if we are lucky, fill our leisure hours. They both confirm and express “our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility.” (p12)

His ability to say helpful things about shoes and wrapping paper shows the practical turn of mind that is one of Scruton’s assets. His chapter on “Everyday Beauty” also treats gardens, distinguishing their aesthetic enjoyment from the open spaces of landscape. Kant had argued that unlike works of art landscapes “owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity, and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.” In contrast, writes Scruton, gardens are extensions of the human world that mediate “between the built environment and the world of nature.” Gardens have been made and enjoyed for human purposes in every civilization. Does this make them also aesthetic universals?  Perhaps there’s a case for such a view:

This attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal. And it suggests that the judgement of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgements, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs. (p82)

But what is true of politics and economics is also true of aesthetics. A tension exists between the claims of the collective and the claims of the individual; between the communal requirements of cultural tradition and the personal ambitions of artists. A small town with an established architectural style that has grown and matured over centuries may not appreciate the egoistic audacities of Frank Gehry or Sir Norman Foster. The residential community may want something that fits in, that does not stand out; something where age-old patterns are honoured, not violated; a design in which the humble harmonies that make a house a home should be preserved. In brief, it may not want a big glass-walled egg in the town square.

The aesthetics of everyday life lead ineluctably to the place of consensus and tradition. Scruton places a high value on collective agreement whenever settled understandings of hearth and home are threatened by a spirit of “tear down and start again” — regardless of whose hearths and homes are pulverised. He argues the conservative case for a civilized life that consists, fundamentally, in providing congenial homes for people of taste in a social order “that does nothing to disturb our perceptions but which radiates a simple message of calm sociability.”(p92) His eloquence on behalf of this ideal is moving, but seems perhaps a mite too bland. It needs a dash of bitters — the sort of thing provided by Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Whatever it does for the modern economy, and it plainly does a great deal, conspicuous consumption also “disturbs our perceptions” and does nothing at all for “calm sociability”. Some awareness of this is perhaps implied by the following contrast:

Our discussion implies that aesthetic judgement can be exercised in two contrasting ways: to fit in and to stand out.

Fitting in or standing out (and in the arts is there now a more popular way of standing out than being outrageous?), passively conforming or seeking attention, unconsciously accepting conventions or actively “making special”, these psychological alternatives have all sorts of implications — or they do for a Darwinian approach to art. Although he might be loath to admit it, Scruton’s thoughts on such matters as novelty vs. tradition relate to cognitive evolution, and to our organized understanding of the world around us. This begins with the perception of patterns, and their interpretation, and the way living organisms respond to regularity and order.

Cognitive evolution

It is over thirty years since E. H. Gombrich’s book The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, where he advocated “an evolutionist view of the mind”. Such a view, he wrote, “has become inescapable since the days of Darwin”, adding that it is “thanks to the researches of ethologists during the last few decades that more is known about inborn reactions for which animals are undoubtedly ‘programmed’ than even Darwin could have surmised.” His particular interest was how perceived regularities in the natural world (of light, sound, heat and cold, pressure, physical resistance) enable ‘cognitive maps’ to be built up — systems of “coordinates on which meaningful objects can be plotted.” Such maps were essential to survival; they enabled living things to orient themselves in space; and he set out to connect the resulting “sense of order” with a theory of decorative design.

What did this order consist of? Amidst the blooming buzzing confusion of the sensory flux organisms detect patterns — patterns in time and intensity, in duration and force. The simple association of mere pleasure and pain might lead to valuing one pattern over another — but how did primitive organisms think? You might say the amoeba “developed a hypothesis” about the danger of approaching too close to something hot. Or you might say it “told itself a story” about the danger of hot things. Anyway the neurological rudiments of thought have been there, along with elementary representations, for millions of years. As James Hurford writes in his 2007 The Origins of Meaning, a natural evolutionary approach means “that mental representations of things and events in the world came before any corresponding expressions in language; the mental representations were phylogenetically prior to words and sentences.”

When referential language eventually came along, words and concepts multiplied to manage the patterns (Gombrich drew on information theory to explicate avian behavior: the signal to noise ratio of the peacock’s tail enabled it to cut through the surrounding redundancy). With pattern recognition came an embryonic aesthetic sense: “In both space and time, in sight and sound,” writes Brian Boyd, “we sense beauty in ‘the rule of order over randomness, of pattern over chaos’.” Before long Homo sapiens got the idea that playfully imaginative story-telling was even more fun than description, and you could have horses with wings (Greece), serpents with feathery plumes (Mexico), or priapic heroes that travelled underground (Australia). After that the arts really took off. On page fifteen of Boyd’s 2009 On the Origin of Stories he writes that “We can define art as cognitive play with pattern.” This is universal among the higher mammals, he says, adding that play itself

evolved through the advantages of flexibility; the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of action. Behaviors like escape and pursuit, attack and defense, and social give-and-take can make life-or death differences.

But it is “attention” and the incessant demand for attention by art and artists that Boyd emphasizes perhaps most of all. “Art dies without attention”, he writes, adding twenty pages later that “attention provides the selective mechanism of art. If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies.” All of us seek attention, we are told, as a mark of acceptance, respect, and status; primatological studies show that “the more dominant a primate, the more attention others direct toward him or her”; and he then pursues this topic through an analysis of one of the most famous epic narratives of all time, the Odyssey. Asking rhetorically what Homer’s work can offer us after two thousand five hundred years, he answers that “it can stress the importance of attention itself… a sine qua non of all art. Art can affect minds over time because it so compulsively engages out attention.”

Art’s importunity appears to Boyd unproblematic, perhaps because he sees it in such heartily positive terms. Something else he approves are communal benefits both at human and pre-human levels. We learn that chimpanzees celebrate community through excited cries or matching movements and “derive a rich emotional response from harmonizing attention among themselves through pattern and rhythm, chant and dance,” while historian William McNeill “recalls the ‘sense of pervasive well-being’ that he experienced in the army drill yard in 1941 — ‘a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.’” The implication being that a thorough-going incorporation into collective life is essential for everyone, that attention-getting is a social necessity in life as in art, and that ever-expanding creativity of every kind is desirable. As he writes on page 123, “For us, artistic creativity offers a good in itself.”

From making special to making vile

While walking today I saw a sticker saying “Art makes me feel unsafe.” I wonder who wrote it and why? Can it be that some art today is indeed unsafe and has a genuinely menacing purpose and character? In which case does evolutionary aesthetics throw light on the matter? As we saw at the beginning, although they differ in various ways both Roger Scruton and Denis Dutton are equally dismayed by the contemporary trashing of high culture. In his Introduction Dutton complains that “a determination to shock or puzzle has sent much art down a wrong path”, and he plainly feels uncomfortable with some modern trends. Scruton’s misgivings go deeper, and as an example of what he fears he describes a Berlin production by Calixto Bieito of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) set in a Berlin brothel…

with Selim as pimp, and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, the stage was littered with couples copulating, and every excuse for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. At one point a prostitute is gratuitously tortured, and her nipples bloodily and realistically severed before she is killed. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the loudly orchestrated scenes of murder and narcissistic sex that litter the stage.

As Scruton adds, this “flight from beauty” into sordid sadistic ugliness can be found in many aspects of contemporary culture. There is a self-conscious “desire to spoil beauty in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm.” Desecration is his word for it, and he argues that for a certain kind of nihilistic mind “desecration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things our lives are judged and in order to escape that judgement we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.”

While I am not religious I tend to agree. And I regret to say that evolutionary aesthetics appears to offer little defence against such nihilism. As the inquiries of critics like Irving Kristol and Jacques Barzun suggested years ago, the purely egoistic activities of attention seeking and making special, and the hyper-individualistic drive for supreme distinction, increasingly take place in a moral void. Ellen Dissanayake writes (Homo Aestheticus, page 59) that “specialness may be strangeness, outrageousness, or extravagance” (my emphasis). So it seems that however outrageous it is, it’s still art, and the sacralizing of making special is fully compatible with the desecration of making vile. Having implied that attention-getting creativity is a good in itself (virtually the summum bonum) Brian Boyd adds correctly that “Evolution does not aim at creativity. It aims at nothing.”

For his part Denis Dutton looks critically at modernism and says its assumption that “culture can give us a taste for just anything at all” is false. In other words, we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. I am very glad to hear this, and I hope it is true, because if it’s not, then Calixto Bieito and the film director Lars Von Trier represent the future — the Showbiz incarnation of that sick outrageousness that infects the entertainment industry today. And if that happens I suspect art will make us feel unsafer still. It needn’t, and it shouldn’t, but it may.

Note: Although the argument remains the same, the text presented here is slightly longer than that appearing in The American last October.

The journal Social Science and Modern Society published a symposium on The Culture Cult in its May/June 2008 issue. Below is the discussion paper that was circulated summarising the book’s argument. This was followed by commentaries from Robin Fox, George Crowder, Peter Wood, Daniel Chirot, Brian Turner, David Stoll, and Joseph E. Davis. Fox’s essay can be found here: Open Societies and Closed Minds

Introduction

The claim that “open societies” are now increasingly threatened would probably meet with little argument. But what is the nature of the threat, and what are its roots? Here less agreement might be found. Some would say an essentially religious clash of civilizations is the main cause, and point to the growing struggle between Islam and the West.

Others might point to Russia under President Putin, finding evidence of a long-standing political tradition that owes relatively little to the Russian Orthodox Church, but has always found liberty odious.

And then there’s a third and troubling possibility — that from an evolutionary perspective, taking a long view of our historic and prehistoric origins, open societies where voluntaristic principles prevail are new forms of human association only recently arrived from the distant tribal past, and in the more violent trouble spots around the world they never arrived at all.

The Open Society

That third possibility is pretty much how Karl Popper saw the matter. His 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies started out from the contrast between closed autarkic Sparta and free-trading protean Athens, and used it to illuminate the conflict between Fascism and Communism on the one hand, and Western democracy on the other. With this in mind he concluded that the enemies of the open society comprise a bunch of awkward atavisms that humanity has never managed to transcend.

The revolt against civilization in both Germany and Russia could be locally explained in a number of ways — Prussian nationalism; the old communal obshchina tradition in Muscovy — but a general nostalgia for the tribal past was ultimately reducible to the strain of trying to adapt to the constant changes of modern life. “I suppose what I call the ‘strain of civilization’”, Popper wrote in one of the footnotes to The Open Society, “is similar to the phenomenon which Freud had in mind when writing Civilization and its Discontents.” Thinking about the intellectual attraction of Nazism and Communism he asked:

Why do these social philosophies support the revolt against civilization? And what is the secret of their popularity? Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals? I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deep-felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection… the revolt against civilization may be… a reaction against the strain of our civilization and its demand for personal responsibility.

We live in an age of semantic high anxiety, when words like “atavism” and “tribe” are thought unsuitable for tender ears. It is therefore interesting that in the key chapter of a book that is arguably the most significant 20th century contribution to political thought in our time — Chapter Ten, presenting Popper’s main argument and bearing the same title as his book itself — the noun “tribe” and its adjectival derivatives “tribal” and “tribalistic” occur over forty times, while his discussion of related matters using identical terminology continues in voluminous footnotes at the end of the book.

In Popper’s view, what Hitler, Stalin & Co represented were forms of “arrested tribalism”, and the more he considered the matter the more he saw a yearning for the past—closed, pre-rational, taboo-ridden, undemocratic, militaristic, and fearful of liberty—as equally ubiquitous and malign.

Neo-Primitivism

In general terms that is also the argument of The Culture Cult, a humble footnote to The Open Society that appeared in 2001. But the problem I saw and tried to write about was rather different. Where Popper was looking at political structures and the struggle between those that were “open” and those that were “closed”, I was more interested in questions of moral psychology.

The explanation Popper offered for the movements of the 1920s and 1930s was understandable in the political terms he proposed: both Fascism and Communism could be seen as violent reactions against individualism, gathering force through the late 19th century, in which dynamic enterprises and free men would be forcibly fixed and frozen by the state.

But in the year 2000, with Fascism and Communism both discredited, why, I wondered, were so many turning back toward Rousseau? What was the attraction of romantic primitivism? How had ethnic culture become a beau ideal? Cities certainly have their problems, but why did New Yorkers see tribal societies as exemplary and tribespeople as paragons of social virtue? Especially — and inexplicably — tribal societies whose hardships and bloody cruelties no pampered urbanite could possibly endure.

A 1935 book by Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas suggested where to look for answers, or where to begin. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity was about “the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization”, and contained a chapter almost one hundred pages long on “The Noble Savage in Antiquity”.

Scores of names both of peoples and classical sources are described, the authors reporting that from the fourth century BC onwards “the Scythians apparently were to the ancients what the North Americans were to the primitivists of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in modern Europe”, and going on to note that “in an ironic form the theme (of primitive wholesomeness and virtue, RS) appears in the comic writers, e.g. in Antiphanes, a poet of the Middle Comedy:

Are not the Scythians very wise, who give to new-born babes the milk of horses and cows to drink, but admit among them no evil-minded wet-nurses or schoolmasters?

Primitivism and the Human Comedy

Antiphanes, alas, points to a literary problem for anyone dealing with this potentially risible subject: it’s difficult for an author to keep a straight face. And if a writer of comedy in the 4th century BC felt that the tendency of his fellow Athenians to romanticise the milk-drinking Scythians was faintly ridiculous, and if an occasional grin peeps through Arthur Lovejoy’s prose, how should the rest of us respond to this sort of thing? Fascism and Communism are no laughing matter, and Karl Popper’s treatment of political atavism is appropriately grave. But what is one to say about the sentimental atavism of the Culture Cult—its compulsion to admire and imitate primitivity in every form?

Is it possible to write about the Oneida Community and John Humphrey Noyes, whose polygynous gerontocracy unknowingly mimicked the Australian Aborigines of Arnhem Land, without a smile? Even Noyes’s final expulsion from the community by the frustrated younger males who rebelled against his sexual monopoly has close Australian parallels.

Must one regard the exciting adventures of Lawrence of Arabia, all dressed up riding camels and blowing up trains with a bunch of Arab cut-throats, without a boyish grin? And what is one to say about the American actor/model Ms Lauren Hutton, who in 1996 enlightened her children by visiting the Maasai in Africa and forcing them to witness the sacrifice of a cow, and whose little boys were deeply shocked by the grisly spectacle? One of them burst into tears.

Plainly, something odd had been going on. And at the center of the confusion was a word that had been turned on its head—the word “culture”. In England the generic term employed in the comparative study of human social forms and sociability was for many years the neutral word “society”. Societies had different forms and structures, and comparing them, especially from an evolutionary standpoint, could tell you a lot.

But what was this new term “culture”? How had it come to be used sociologically? Wasn’t it more than a little tendentious, trailing mystical Germanic clouds and dangerously nationalistic sentiments, right from the start? Yet before long, first in America and then all over the English-speaking world, both word and thing became sacralized and placed beyond criticism on a pedestal in a political shrine.

The Two Cultures

The earlier Arnoldian sense of culture in English — a sense that would have been understood one hundred years ago by Bergson and Berdyaev, by Henry and William James, by Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells, and indeed any educated person you care to name — was in many ways synonymous with “civilization”. Matthew Arnold’s ideal of “the best that had been thought and said and written” was singular, universal, prescriptive, exclusive, hierarchic, and deeply concerned with judging both aesthetic and moral values on a scale of better and worse.

The singularity of Mozart was established by deeply considered and highly evolved aesthetic norms showing how clearly he stood head and shoulders above Salieri, while the exclusiveness of western music as a whole could be seen by exploring the rationalistic foundations of polyphony and counterpoint that Max Weber discussed and explained.

Then something happened: the English word “culture” in the sense employed by Matthew Arnold in his 1869 Culture and Anarchy got both anthropologized and Germanised — and anthropological culture was the opposite of all that. It meant little more in fact than a social system. As such, a “culture” (singular) included manners, customs, values, institutions — everything any organized human group might consist of, good, bad, or indifferent. It had nothing to do with aesthetics or higher thought, or indeed “higher” and “lower” in any form at all. Instead it was pluralistic, parochial, descriptive, and generously inclusive. Instead of being hierarchic it was promiscuously horizontal, while its aesthetic understanding both began and ended with the statement that all cultures were equally beautiful and true.

Ethnic Authority — Culture is King

Arnoldian culture, as the British Marxist Raymond Williams complained, had been hurtfully snobbish: it made people upset and resentful, especially sensitive men like himself, whereas anthropological culture was reassuringly democratic, was bravely indifferent to all questions of quality, and cheerfully subsumed manners, customs, habits, cuisine, ablution, handkerchiefs, nose-picking, and the shape and use of chamber pots (in which, as many of us would soon discover and as I hope I shall be forgiven for saying in these pages, most “cultural studies” may well belong).

Once this meaning took hold in America in the 1950s no evaluative ordering of humanity’s highly unequal social and artistic achievements was allowed. For the value of anthropological culture was not contingent upon knowledge, skill, beauty, or excellence: it was good by definition. No culture was better than another. No culture was worse. All were equal.

And this sprawling conception soon carried a philosophical rider that made the significance of the word altogether momentous: anthropological culture was no mere collection of traits free men might pick or choose among, accept or reject, approve or dismiss, love or hate. The rules imposed on its human membership were both collective and binding. It had a transcendent authority. Culture was king.

Berlin and Herder

How did this change come about? In America it was initially a curricular phenomenon. Built around an educational admiration for books like Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, it was propagated in high schools and departments of anthropology throughout the land.

But at a higher philosophical level, and starting out in England, it owed more to the energetic publicising of Herder’s ideas by the Oxford celebrity Sir Isaiah Berlin — ideas of irresistible appeal to the post-Marxist and post-religious liberal mind. From what Berlin tells us, the social thought of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), an 18th century Prussian enemy of the Enlightenment, enshrined some very Germanic dogmas.

These were that each national culture draws its inspiration from the spirit of the Volk and is a quasi-sacred thing; that the traditions of the Volk are unique, incomparable, incommunicable, and incommensurable; and that trying to assimilate ethnic or national particularity to the higher ecumenical world of universal civilization is wicked and should be stopped.

Herder also thought that each Völkisch political unit had a right to freely grow and fulfill itself without interference from anyone else. Rather oddly, and perhaps indicating an unfamiliarity with political thought, he doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility that the glorious self-fulfilment of Culture X might logically lead it to annihilate Cultures Y and Z: cultural autonomy and cultural assertiveness were felt to be straightforwardly good things in themselves, and quite unproblematic.

Culture versus Human Rights

This chauvinistic Germanic component was disturbing enough. But in Berlin’s exposition of Herder there was also an eastern collectivistic feel about everything wholly inimical to individual liberty and modern citizenship. For example, it was clear that you belonged to your culture more than it belonged to you: your relation to it was subordinate, and its relation to you was proprietorial. Your culture owned you, as a Russian serf was ultimately owned by the Czar. The rights of the collectivity trumped all individual rights.

It followed from this that an individual and his culture were expected to form an indivisible organic whole. Just as ominous was the conclusion that for an individual to be separated from his culture was spiritual death. By the beginning of the 21st century, “culture” in its anthropological acceptation was the existential source of individual identity, and without it—so devotees of the Culture Cult would reason—you barely existed at all.

Now I don’t want to be misunderstood. The Culture Cult as a book stands opposed to this organic and proprietorial concept of culture. I regard the influence of the Latterday Church of Multicultural Saints and its 18th century prophet as extremely unfortunate — in the context of modern civil society Herder’s message is divisive, backward-looking, disruptive, and malign. But the value of various contributory national streams to the civilization of the Western world is abundantly clear, and nobody privileged to have lived in the USA can doubt that America’s ethnic mix has made it much richer than it might be otherwise — more intellectually dynamic, more open to human talent and aspiration, more sensibly humane, and generally more politically balanced, than any civilization hitherto.

The world has seen nothing like the passage from Ben Franklin to the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs. It may indeed never see another Abe Lincoln — something like Divine Grace is needed for that. All this, however, required that countless immigrants accept the secure and permanent foundation of American laws, customs, and civil and civilized behavior, making their own traditions a secondary concern. In other words it required assimilation — the very thing both Herder and Isaiah Berlin argued against.

Multiculturalism and Ressentiment

Here the twists and perplexities of moral psychology must be examined. Multiculturalism presents itself as the very embodiment of political virtue — sensitive, compassionate, and humane. But what is the ill-concealed underlying motive of the intellectuals who promote it? One immediately notices that anthropologizing the term “culture” meant first of all pulling down high standards, destroying distinction, demeaning excellence and anything else the aggrieved Welshman Raymond Williams felt to be hurtfully snobbish, and replacing all this with a flat educational plain where chamber music and chamber pots enjoy equal prestige.

Now, resentment of qualitative distinction is central to the Culture Cult (its main emotional dynamic being the exaltation of ethnic “culture” above “civilization”), a fact strikingly illustrated by the 18th century father of the doctrine, Johann Gottfried Herder himself. What follows must alas bring ressentiment into the equation — but without this ugly motive it is impossible to understand either Herder or the neo-primitivist demiurge.

Herder’s ethnic nationalism was the obverse of his resentment of civilization: that is why civilization had to be demeaned and denounced. And Isaiah Berlin obligingly provides the evidence. He reports that Herder was agitated and unbalanced, “by all accounts a deeply divided, touchy, resentful, bitter, unhappy man, in constant need of support and praise, neurotic, pedantic, difficult, suspicious, and often insupportable… Goethe said that he had in him something compulsively vicious — like a vicious horse — a desire to bite and hurt.”

But what made him like this? What galled his self-esteem? It appears that at the age of 25 this gauche and touchy provincial went to France, and then to Paris, the acknowledged center of civilization. But he failed to make an impression on the philosophes, and consequently — these are Berlin’s words — “suffered that mixture of envy, humiliation, admiration, resentment and defiant pride which backward peoples feel towards advanced ones, (and) members of one social class feel towards those who belong to a higher rung in the hierarchy.”

Here all too clearly we see the underlying animus that many people bring to multiculturalism today. For (if I may paraphrase page 96 of The Culture Cult), the modern attack on the achievements of Western civilization by Herder’s romantic heirs, on academic standards, on parliamentary government with its tiresome uncertainties and delays, on judicial impartiality, and along with this the claim that all cultures are “incommensurable” and must never be compared — all this flows naturally from a neurotic need to pull down whatever impairs one’s self-esteem.

It grows precisely from ressentiment and defiant pride, and as a social philosophy it most strongly appeals to those gripped by such emotions. Resentment is the natural by-product of the strain of trying to meet high standards (one of the strains of civilized life pointed to by Popper, Hayek, and Freud), while as any reader of Mein Kampf will quickly find, wounded pride compounded with populist rage is what ressentiment politics are all about.

The Open Society and its Vulnerabilities

Since 2001 at least some western intellectuals have had second thoughts about the intrinsic virtue of tribalistic culture and the intrinsic wickedness of civilization. As a state of mind romantic primitivism has usually preferred people who are remote, poor, and ill-organised; but when well-organised and very well-funded Middle Eastern ressentiment crashed planes into skyscrapers and blew up trains, turning the very openness of western civilization against itself and killing thousands of ordinary men and women, it was time for a reality check.

Such events disclosed a serious weakness in Karl Popper’s thinking. Is an ‘open society’ also supposed to be an ‘open polity’ with open borders? Médecins sans Frontières is all very well: but states cannot be run on such lines. Popper’s is a theory of society, not a theory of the state—and it seems to me that his book offers no clear account of the wider political preconditions that enable ‘open societies’ to both flourish and defend themselves. A minimal state of the kind Hayek advocated is steadily implied, but never adumbrated. Is there a Coast Guard? Are the borders secure? What role should the army play? Without these no open society can survive.

Popper more than once appeals to the stirring oration in which the Athenian leader Pericles proudly boasted that “Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner…” But what happens when you throw your city open to the world, only to find that the foreigners you have proudly refused to expel not only decline to assimilate, but defiantly form subversive cells in order to destroy it? When these same people have been given all the rights of law-abiding citizens—including the privilege of being hostile to their host? When the relation of a number of sinister enclaves to the open society around them is a conspiratorial blend of dissimulation and treachery?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Curiously, there seems to be no mention of Islam in The Open Society, and no indication whatever that Islamic resentment might emerge as one of the enemies of open societies in the years ahead. But that was before oil suddenly made small backward Arab chieftains into big international players. The Somali-Dutch-American Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, says she is planning to discuss this and other matters in a study that will bring The Open Society and Its Enemies up to date.

That sounds a very good idea. She is uniquely qualified to do so. As Robin Fox says in his own symposium contribution, her book Infidel documents her own journey “from the inside of the most closed of tribal societies — clan-dominated Somalia — to the openness of almost painfully super-open Holland. It is a personal journey that recapitulates the whole development that Popper (and most other sociologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) has traced for society as a whole.”

It is a pity Karl Popper and Ayaan Hirsi Ali did not meet. They would have found much to talk about. The Viennese philosopher might have expanded on his vision of the world of Pericles. While Ms Hirsi Ali could usefully have deepened Popper’s understanding of the conflict between individual, tribe, and nation, by offering vivid personal impressions of modern East Africa.

Anyway I think there can be little doubt that Popper would have recognized what is now happening in several places around the world. Metastasizing cells of stubbornly unassimilable jihadis, often united by language and nationality, many belonging to close-knit clans, galled by western modernity and feeling the strain of civilization in their bones, driven by a fanaticism more concerned to kill than convert — this surely represents arrested tribalism today.

Culture Matters :: Culture Counts

In recent years two books have appeared with very similar titles: Culture Matters, and Culture Counts. They deal however with very different subjects. The collection of essays edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington in 2000, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Processes, automatically assumes that its readers will take the anthropological sense of the term culture to be meant. (Had its title been Anthropology Matters it would have conveyed much the same thing.)

A discussion of the problems of economic development and social change, it starts from the broadly Weberian proposition that beliefs and values, if not paramount, are causally important in economic affairs. Huntington recollects how Ghana and South Korea began from comparable levels of per capita GNP in 1960, but because each social system was driven by contrasting values and attitudes (affecting work, thrift, education, etc) only South Korea advanced. Essays from a range of distinguished authors develop this observation in different ways drawing on their own experiences—among them David Landes, Francis Fukuyama, and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Roger Scruton’s Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, is something else. Anyone in a bookshop moving casually along the shelf from one title to the other might imagine that it too dealt primarily with social systems, and that was the sense of culture the title implied. Scruton’s book does have a sociological side; but its main purpose is redemptive and ultimately religious, concerned to reinforce western and Christian self-belief in the face of the external physical challenge of radical Islam, and the internal moral solvent of multiculturalism.

One might easily have said that it was also designed to reinforce the morale of a besieged Western Civilization; but the case is more complicated, since Scruton broadly accepts the vision of Oswald Spengler, who himself accepted Herder’s understanding: namely, that naturally vital things called “cultures” and an unnatural devitalized thing called “civilization” stand permanently opposed.

According to Herder, Spengler, and to a surprising degree Roger Scruton himself, it is the invariable fate of intrinsically virtuous “cultures” to be destroyed by the morally ambiguous principles of “civilization”— the latter emphasizing quantity over quality, and reason, science, and secularisation over the realm of feeling and intuition. (If this intellectual debt to the Great Doomsayer seems implausible, readers should consult the essay on Spengler in Scruton’s book The Philosopher on Dover Beach where it is fully set forth.)

High Culture

On the positive side, Scruton’s defence of what he distinguishes as “high culture” is admirable, his assertion that this involves “issues of judgment” is unassailably true, and the following statement is one I fully endorse. He writes that high culture “is supplied with its monuments and its durable styles by unceasing comparisons and choices, from which a canon of masterpieces emerges not as the object of a single collective choice, not even a choice that must be made anew by each generation, but as the by-product of myriad choices over centuries.”

Whether he is discussing humor as a form of judgment, the distinction between leisure and distraction, the moral paradox that highly cultivated people may also be worthless citizens (“aesthetes in jackboots”), or the need for sound educational principles, he always has something interesting to say. It is nice to see his recommendation that “Memorizing the classics of lyric poetry, reading aloud from the epics, performing the plays of Shakespeare: such ought to be the first steps in a literary education.” Not reading Harry Potter or the collected works of Maya Angelou.

Scruton and Spengler

Difficulties arise, however, precisely where one would least expect them in such a writer — namely, where logical rigor and scrupulous terminology are most required. This being in the use of the terms “culture” and “civilization” themselves. Time and again Scruton shifts uneasily between the concept of culture as social system, on the one hand, and the contrasting achievements of cultivation on the other — of the unique products of refined traditions of art, literature, and thought.

With all due respect, it seems to me that throughout his book there is a decided unwillingness to face up to the radical incompatibility of the horizontal/descriptive/value-neutral anthropological sense of “culture”, and the hierarchical/ prescriptive/aesthetic sense of the term. That this confusion comes from the Spenglerian assumptions underlying Scruton’s argument is likely — indeed, that alone can explain the statement that “there are as many cultures as there are civilizations”. By my estimate there have been only about a dozen major world civilizations, whereas the annals of anthropology contain thousands of cultures.

As for the oxymoron on page two that the art to be seen at Lascaux represents a “stone-age civilization”, one feels bound to say that efforts to assimilate the Upper Paleolithic to anything even notionally connected with civilization must fail. The entire etymological constellation involving civility, civilians, civilized conduct and civil society itself is meaningless in the context of even the most appealing stone-age paintings on the wall of a cave.

The cow bawled all night long. Well, from 1.00am to be exact, and since the distance from her yard to my bedroom window was less than 50 meters I didn’t get much sleep. In between the vigorous tromboning of the cow you could hear the piccolo woe of a calf half a kilometre away. First the cow, then the calf, over and over.

With a pillow on your head you hoped each bellow from the cow would be the last, but as soon as the calf answered, their dialog began again: the distant cry of distress far off in the night; the cow’s reassuring “I’m here” closer at hand. Eventually, at dawn, farmhand Hugh got on a quad-bike and brought the calf in and the noise and misery stopped.

A spontaneous feeling for the misery of others—a feeling of sympathy and concern—was the foundation of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, and by 6.00am I’d spent five hours listening to its bovine equivalent. Of course ruminants are more inclined to chew the cud than ponder moral rules. But if sympathetic emotions underlie moral sentiments, and maternal attachment is the basic social bond, then here was audible proof of Smith’s “sympathy”.

Normally the calf would have come skipping back through the fields to its mother as soon as she called. But it was four months old, and growing adventurous, and had wriggled its way through a fence and got stuck on the far side.

I suppose if the cow had been a bad mother it would have just yawned and gone on chewing its cud. But it was obviously a good mother—if it hadn’t been a good mother the calf would never have survived. How sensible though is it to use moral language about animals? Driven by the need for its mother the calf sung out. Driven by the need for its calf the cow responded. They did what they did because cows and calves can’t do anything else, and some would describe their world is simply amoral. In contrast, we say that human mothers “ought” to look after their children because they enjoy the freedom to think, and reason, and act—responsibly or irresponsibly as the case may be.

Primates and Philosophers

How we got from being supposedly amoral animals to moral beings with rights, duties, and responsibilities, is the subject of Frans de Waal’s new book Primates and Philosophers, How Morality Evolved. It irks him to be told that human morality is special, superior, and quite different from the rest of the animal kingdom—a cultural “veneer” laid over irredeemable selfishness. In de Waal’s view men like Hobbes, T. H. Huxley and Freud presented morality as

A thin crust underneath which boil antisocial, amoral, and egoistic passions. This view of morality as a veneer was best summarized by Ghiselin’s famous quip: “Scratch an ‘altruist’, and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed.”

Hobbes’ vision of Pre-Contract Man as permanently at “Warre”, Huxley’s view of amoral nature red in tooth and claw, Freud’s image of the superego as a citadel of order dominating a violent and unruly human psyche—all of these portray animal nature and moral man as deeply and unalterably opposed. For Robert Wright, author of the award-winning 1994 book The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, man is at best a hypocrite cultivating a self-flattering moral illusion:

The pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence. We dress ourselves up in tony moral language, denying base motives and stressing our at least minimal consideration for the greater good; and we fiercely and self-righteously decry selfishness in others.

Wright’s disdainful view of the matter in this passage reminds me a little of an anthropology seminar I attended in 2007 where the speaker had the temerity to describe the moral principles of old-time Aboriginal society. The first member of the audience to respond could barely contain his exasperation. Morality! In grinding tones evidently haunted by an early and unsatisfactory encounter with the Irish Church, this senior academic made the very notion of any kind of morality—Aboriginal, western, or whatever—seem abhorrent. To speak of morality was not merely hypocritical; it was in some way evil itself.

The moral continuum

Frans de Waal, by contrast, “views morality as a direct outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other animals… Morality is neither unique to us nor a conscious decision taken at a specific point in time: it is the product of evolution.” Mankind along with many other mammals is anatomically, neurologically, and ethically continuous with the rest of creation—more evolved, but evolved from the same stuff. As for the primates, when we climbed up from the apes certain moral sentiments came with us, and these provided a foundation for social life. In arguing this case de Waal aligns himself firmly with Adam Smith, David Hume, and Charles Darwin.

Smith’s observations on animal behavior in his treatise are few, but at one point he remarks that resentment in animals prompts justifiable retaliation. (We might express this by adapting the French witticism as follows: “Cet animal n’est pas méchant, quand on l’attaque, il se défend.”) For his part Hume was consistently uniformitarian—we’re all animals together. Though our four-legged friends may not alas speak English, from external resemblances we deduce internal similarities: “When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both,” adding that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.”

As for Charles Darwin, de Waal strongly argues—in this agreeing with Ernst Mayr—that T. H. Huxley wholly misrepresented Darwin’s view of the evolution of morality and its relation to animal behavior. Darwin allowed for the development of both altruistic and sympathetic tendencies, explaining them by a form of group selection, and emphasized continuity with animals in the moral as well as the anatomical domain. He wrote in The Descent of Man (1871):

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

Edward Westermarck

But in de Waal’s view, even more important to understanding the role of sentiment in matters moral was the Swedish Finn Edward Westermarck (1862-1939), author of The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908) who provides an epigraph at the start of Chapter One:

We approve and we disapprove because we cannot do otherwise. Can we help feeling pain when the fire burns us? Can we help sympathizing with our friends?

Though Westermarck’s thoughts on the origins of the family are well-known in social anthropology, de Waal believes that he was under-appreciated during his lifetime, and this because his ideas “flew in the face of the Western dualistic tradition that pits body against mind and culture against instinct.” Emotion and sentiment had a central place in Westermarck’s ethical thinking, where he distinguished moral from non-moral emotions. Gratitude and resentment, for example, directly concern one’s own interests and how one wants to be treated, and in themselves are too egocentric to be more than a starting point in moral evolution.

The moral sentiments of the more evolved ethical systems of human society, in Westermarck’s words, “differ from kindred non-moral emotions by their disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavour of generality.” They embody Adam Smith’s idea of the “impartial spectator” who represents and endorses principles of fairness and justice that can be applied to all. One might say they aspire to the detached condition of universally applicable golden rules.

Nevertheless emotions of gratitude and resentment, prompted by deep intuitions of what is an appropriate reward for help or an appropriate retaliation for injury, are at the foundation of much moral psychology—as any reader of Adam Smith will quickly find. Whole chapters of The Theory of Moral Sentiments discuss resentment in various ways, and though he regards it as “the most odious, perhaps, of all the passions” (V.II.I) he considers that for anyone not to respond with justifiable anger to abuse and injury is a fault in itself. If God himself could be justifiably enraged, why shouldn’t Man?

We sometimes complain that a particular person shows too little spirit, and has too little sense of the injuries that have been done to him; and we are as ready to despise him for the defect, as to hate him for the excess of this passion.

The inspired writers would not surely have talked so frequently or so strongly of the wrath and anger of God, if they had regarded every degree of those passions as vicious and evil, even in so weak and imperfect a creature as man. (V.II.I)

Forgiveness, dogs, and Roger Scruton

In the December 14 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement Roger Scruton reviewed Forgiveness—A Philosophical Exploration by Charles Griswold. In the course of discussing resentment Scruton takes a stick to the evolutionary biologists who “are producing one phoney account (of human nature) after another, designed to show that human societies are constructed from the same ingredients as the tribes of apes”, a view he disapproves. Unlike dogs, he writes, man can forgive because he is a “free and accountable being.”

Dogs don’t forgive, because dogs don’t resent. Forgiveness is unique to rational beings, and is a gift of metaphysical freedom.

I admire Roger Scruton as a cultural sage but I wonder if he isn’t overstating the case? And while he knows all about metaphysics does he know about cats and dogs? Only this morning I aroused in our cat the strong expectation of being promptly fed—an expectation frustrated as I absent-mindedly made myself a cup of tea—and received a sharp nip on the heel. That is how he regularly reminds me of my duty.

Deepening my research into these matters over coffee at a Bondi latté bar, I asked a friend if dogs feel both anger and the lingering memory of injury resentment implies. He mentioned an amiable pooch of his acquaintance named Cosmo that was struck by a misdirected skateboard some months ago. The dog’s disposition had once been entirely sunny, but this changed his life. Cosmo has fiercely attacked skateboarders ever since.

Resentment is described in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “a strong feeling of ill-will or anger against the author or authors of a wrong or affront; the manifestation of such feeling against the cause of it.” It seems to me that corresponds pretty well to Cosmo’s feeling about skateboards, and de Waal’s discussion of similar matters reinforces this view. He writes that there are numerous stories regarding “delayed retaliation” in the zoo world, especially about apes and elephants, and goes on to relate Westermarck’s tale about a fourteen-year-old who viciously beat his camel whenever it loitered or turned the wrong way.

The camel passively took its punishment; but some days later “seized the unlucky boy’s head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground.”

Camels normally show remarkable forbearance: events of this kind are probably rare. It seems they are not rare however among chimpanzees, whose “revenge systems” for punishing those who inflict injury de Waal has written about elsewhere. Scruton’s dogmatic assertion about forgiveness is also a bit suspect. According to de Waal, Westermarck describes “turning the other cheek” as a universally appreciated gesture. Chimpanzees kiss and embrace after fights, says de Waal,

And these so-called reconciliations serve to preserve peace within the community. A growing literature exists on conflict resolution in primates and other mammals. Reconciliation may not be the same as forgiveness, but the two are obviously related.

David Hume and Adam Smith

Philosophers are over-inclined to take the meanings of words as a starting point, rather than reality itself, and it would be a mistake to get etymologically hung up on the mere words resentment and forgiveness. Neurologically, the reality is that the memory of injury persists somewhere in the brain as a disposition, an inclination to retaliate if and when opportunity offers. It may be just a niggle. It may be more. It may in the true paranoid become an all-consuming obsession.

Roger Scruton has a valid point about the uniquely detached ratiocination of the free intellect, but when David Hume tells us that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men”, he has a point too.

It is also worth bearing in mind that although moral reasoning of the more advanced kind may be the exclusive prerogative of homo sapiens, and of moral teachers from Christ to Kant who were able to put their thoughts into words, the neurological pattern of injury, anger, and retaliation (and reconciliation too) must long antedate any human reasoning about the matter.

The brains of many social animals would have been hardwired to act in this way defensively, instinctively, spontaneously, long before language was ever heard of—let alone the language of philosophers. The following passage, written in 1759, concentrates Adam Smith’s thoughts on instinct, the animal need for self-preservation, and the limited role of reason in the earliest formation of moral rules and behavior:

Self-preservation, and the propagation of the species, are the great ends which nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals. Mankind are endowed with a desire of those ends, and an aversion to the contrary; with a love of life, and a dread of dissolution; with a desire of the continuance and perpetuity of the species, and with an aversion to the thoughts of its entire extinction.

But though we are in this manner endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has not been entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason, to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts.

Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, V.II.I)