Lecture: Flesch: Fiction and Evolutionary Biology

NCTU Graduate Practical Philosophy

Comeuppance

Billy Flesch

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This book is the most complex and ambitious attempt I know of to try to reconcile contemporary claims of evolutionary theory with the often august claims for literature (and art in general, and by implication culture in general, although Flesch remains focused on literature in its narrative aspect).



Classically, the greatest account of the existence of literature, narrative, and art in general is Aristotle’s Poetics, from which nearly all thinking about literature and art derived for several centuries (up through Freud and Stephen Pinker). In that account Aristotle simply takes as a natural given that human beings take pleasure in the representation of reality—any reality, even terrible reality like cadavers—because it is by imitating that we humans learn anything at all, and learning for Aristotle is always pleasant. Tragedy, especially the tragedy of Oedipus which is Aristotle’s supreme exemplar, is no different. We enjoy the play because it is, firstly, a representation, and the particular intensity of our enjoyment for tragedy revolves around two specific emotions: pity and terror. In some notoriously dense passages, Aristotle specifies the tragic effect on the audience as the “purgation” of these two emotions. But he does not clarify this, and there is an enormous body of literary criticism devoted to trying to understand what Aristotle meant. I will only note this: the two emotions move in contrary directions, but each produces the same pragmatic effect. In terror we tend toward stiffening and freezing; in pity we tend to weaken and melt. It may be implied that for Aristotle all our emotions tend toward one of these two poles which appear opposed to each other but which have something in common. In each case our will to do or perform some act (including rational thought) is temporarily incapacitated; we are impotent. The “purgation” of these emotions would then be salubrious; we would be purified of our natural tendency toward becoming incapacitated in cases of strong emotion, thus reuniting our mental life with our natural faculties to do and to think. It is a sort of intellectual ritual. This would be one possible explanation of what Aristotle was thinking.



In light of modern evolutionary theory, the ultimate claims of Aristotle seem to have been abandoned or would need to be greatly modified. It remains to be explained in contemporary terms why we take such intense pleasure in narratives, in representations, in non-actualities like fictions. In the Introduction Flesch rejects two possible evolutionary theories as not fully explicatory of literary experience and adopts a third. He rejects what he calls (following S.J. Gould) “Darwinian fundamentalism” in which the leading character is the gene (2-5) which whishes to reproduce its form, or its information. The thinking which underlies this view is Hobbesian: at the genetic level there is a “genetic war of gene against gene”. We ourselves (as individuals or as groups) are minor characters who remain servants of our genes and act, in the last instance, on their behalf. Within this line of thinking there can be no genuine altruism; what may seem to be self-sacrifice at one level (of the person for his or her kin) is actually selfishness at the level of the gene (or of its information). This view has been attractive for some time since there seemed to be no evolutionary account for the existence of genuine altruism. Darwin himself, however, tried to account for survival at the level of the group and tried to show that groups who include altruists tend to survive better (again, as a group) than groups that do not. But this line of thinking could not be sustained since the group would be too porous and vulnerable to non-altruists to insure that the group would survive over and above either the individual or the gene. The third theoretical approach—provided in this book by combining the works of Frank, Sober and Wilson, Fehr, Miller, and the Zahavis—does bear out the possibility of genuine altruism, cooperation, and costly signaling which for Flesch are “central to our understanding of the human capacity for and delight in narrative” (5). This last group of biologists does not specify the basic unit of survival—the gene, the individual, the group, or whatever—because the focus is on cooperation among the units. Flesch does not deny that a capacity may be adaptively useful (a capacity for altruism, for example), but he says that this does not necessarily explain why it evolved in the first place (2). Flesch’s account of literature in general departs from the Aristotelian view; for Flesch: “An innate capacity for and tendency toward altruistic punishment seems to me the central human psychological phenomenon in one aspect of our interest in narrative: our desire to see the good rewarded and the evil punished, whether they exist or not.” Oedipus the King would then be a test case for Flesch, which he does not explicitly take up. How might the Flesh model explain the play by Sophocles since Oedipus is both good (he saves the city) and evil (he has killed his father and married his mother); both innocent (he killed and married in ignorance of his true identity) and guilty (he in fact did kill a relative and commit incest); and both punisher and punished on one individual (he gouges out his own eyes)?



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Beginning at Chapter 1, Flesch again rejects what I will call the “strong utilitarian” view which I think characterizes Dan’s presentation last week: that we are attentive to fictional narrations in order to “practice for the game of life” (8) as is argued both by Samuel Johnson and A.D. Nuttall. In each case, the literary experience is practice for how we would or could respond if we were in similar circumstances. We learn from our attentiveness to fictions. Flesch works at the level of the actual: why do we actually feel anxiety, grief, rage, embarrassment, etc. on behalf of or in response to what happens to characters which we know to be fictional, which we know very well could not actually be happening (because we are staring at a piece of paper, or at a screen)? And he reverses the logic: We are able to learn at all because of the dramatic illusion and our capacity to be impressed by—delighted by—the non-actual. Johnson, Nuttall, and also Sugiyama explain how literature instructs, but not how it enthralls (8-9). For Flesch the delight precedes, explains and is indispensable for the learning. While Flesch accepts that fiction may function as pedagogical, he objects that this does not fully explain the demand readers may have for solutions to anxious narrated problems that are improbable or magical and thus counterproductive to what we would, could, or should do in a similar situation. Flesch is arguing that there is an evolution of anxious attentiveness that cannot be reduced to sheer pedagogy (but that is necessary for any pedagogy to occur).



Flesch then considers the possibility that we attend so closely to narratives as part of an innate need to known whom to trust and so exercise our ability to sort out trustworthy information from untrustworthy information. But he again claims that this cannot explain the specificity of fictional enthrallment: “It may be beneficial to know whether we can trust someone, but it doesn’t help to know whether we can trust Roger Thornton or Eve Kendall (or Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint)” (11). Further, why would the exercise, if it were purely pedagogical, be so passionate—as is literary passion? Would we not be better learners if we were to learn dispassionately? He goes on to consider the question of Freudian identification, as Dan dealt with last week. This too cannot adequately explain literary passion.



All these possible explanations rest on the Aristotelian notion that we are innately interested in representations per se through an emotional economy that hinges on pleasure/pedagogy. But this only gets us back to the original question: why should we care about the representations themselves (and not what or who—not the reality—they more or less refer to, or may possibly, in the future, refer to)? From Plato to Aristotle to Freud to Stephen Pinker the pleasure the audience (the end-user, the consumer) takes in the imitation of reality is the key. But this is too broad a conceptualization—it explains all imitations of reality. Flesch wants to shift to a different framework to get at especially fictional or narrated representations. The framework is the evolution of cooperation (13 ff). He is going to pursue his argument at a level that conceptually precedes imitation/identification: “tracking or monitoring the agent or thing to be imitated […] We humans are so good at learning because we’re so good at imitating others and we’re so good at imitating because we’re good at tracking” (17). Flesch is aiming to show that tracking (or monitoring or simply following, as we following a plot unfold) is weaker than but may explain more than the stronger notions of imitation (including its strongest form, identification). Tracking is immediate; imitation, identification, and pleasure derive from it. The capacity for tracking leads to “attitudes towards fictional as well as real people” which is part of a process by which we, in Strawson’s words “recover from the facts as we know them a sense of what they mean, i.e. of what we all mean, when, speaking the language of morals, we speak of desert, responsibility, guilt, condemnation, and justice” (21). This leads Flesch into altruistic punishment which forms the core of his non-Aristotelian views on fiction. He argues specifically “that we have explicitly evolved the ability and desire to track others and to learn their stories precisely in order to punish the guilty (and somewhat secondarily to reward the virtuous); we have specifically evolved an innate tendency toward what evolutionary theorists call ‘strong reciprocity’ [which means] that the strong reciprocator punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any members of the social group and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator. Strong reciprocators mind everybody’s business, and in doing so […] they insure social cohesion” (21-22) [latter italics mine].



The capacity for tracking to the innate capacity for being “strong reciprocators” is still speculative evolutionary biology; there is no general and systematic account, Flesch admits (22) but such an account would explain the native capacity to become involved with business that is of no direct concern to us—which would include even business that cannot possibly be of any concern to us: fictional characters and their fates. This account will depend on the existence of true altruism, that is, altruism that would be irrational since the outcome of an agent’s act would not be what is optimally beneficial for that agent. Altruistic punishment (also irrational), Flesch says, “is the form of altruism most necessary for the maintenance of cooperation with a society made up largely of non-kin, that is, most human societies” (22). How does nature select for irrational altruism?



Flesch begins with the famous ‘Prisoner’s dilemma’ which begins what we might call a cultivation of irrationality such that long-term gain may be led to for a group. The prisoner’s dilemma game depends on the fact that others’ do have a disposition to act irrationally and that I know or believe that they can and may act irrationally and that others may count on me to act irrationally. The Prisoner’s dilemma raises the question of (irrational) social cooperation vs. genetic survival. From the gene’s point of view, defection in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game is the most advantageous. However, nature has made it pleasurable to cooperate, to be genuinely altruistic. Why has this pleasure evolved as it has for eating and reproduction (which fortify the survival of the genetic information)? Self-sacrifice on behalf of kin has been observed in social insects and can be inferred in humans where it would be genetically rational of me to sacrifice my own life (and genes) for two or more siblings, or eight or more first cousins, and so on. Apparent self-sacrifice on behalf of kin is not altruism at all, from the point of view of the genes. “In fact, so deeply ingrained is our tendency to make sacrifices on behalf of kin that we don’t need the incentive to do so. [It is] more of a reflex than a pleasure” (30). Kin altruism is thus deeply ingrained and does not require the “bait” of pleasure. However, this leads to the question as to where the “bait” of pleasure in non-kin altruistic behavior does arise from in forms of behavior that are more recent and harder to sustain. Flesch then moves on to another theory than accounts for apparently altruistic behavior which sees it a dual reciprocity (each side, when acting reciprocally, benefit) and then says that this explain a lot of human behavior but not all, and he appends a long footnote (214 n.45) in which he criticizes literary/philosophical critics of Pinker and Dawkins and the like for reducing human behavior strictly to maximized gene survivalism. The last quarter century has shown that genuine altruism (as counter to the individual’s (or gene’s) optimal strategy) indeed exists. He then discusses two cases (31 ff) in which a generalized sense of fairness, rather “trumps” an individual’s optimizing of personal success. Thus there is an expectation of the irrational which is direct, immediate, and not calculated. It is a form of vicariousness, or an irreducible sociality that precedes any calculation. We can go through these pages in detail if you wish (32-33).



If I understand these pages correctly, the games show that there is a deeply ingrained expectation of vicariousness for which I am willing even to deprive myself of rewards in order to signal to another that he or she is in violation of. I communicate my displeasure in a violator by spurning an offer I consider unfair (35). (An interesting point Flesch follows up on is that altruists like Gates, Buffett, Turner pay a lot in order to get the reputation for being altruists, and for taking pleasure in altruistic (35), since the cost of being known as altruistic is not rewarded with increased wealth.) Flesch then turns to the possible argument that altruistic punishment is actually a form of spite—that I intend to eliminate rivals as a way to increase my (or the genes in me) chances of survival, and hence is ultimately a selfish (or selfish gene) strategy. But the statistics don’t bear it out; altruistic behavior is differently motivated.



At this point we enter into the most tricky part of Flesch’s argument in which he will defend the view that we ourselves (a sociality not limited to kinship) and our genes enter into cooperation which is good for both “in the long run” (a phrase Flesch repeats several times through this lengthy and complex chapter). The underlying thinking derives from, not Hobbes, but David Hume on the issue of the co-compatibility of free will and selfish motivation. The point of the pages that end this section is that human behavior cannot be fully explained as a simple instantiation of genetic drive anymore than behavior can be fully explained by Freudian drive theory. Flesch goes so far as to say that those genes that cooperate with “us” stand, in the long run, to survive better than purely selfish genes—in short, even at the genetic level Flesch finds altruism: “We and our genes are partners in a Prisoner’s dilemma too” (42). Our genes provide us with the pleasures of vengeance, spite, and vanity, we like these behaviors even to the point of taking pleasure in anxiously anticipating them, a pleasure that literature recruits. This pleasure then becomes relatively independent and shows that we are not purely selfish (42-43).



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The argument then moves to the evolution of non-kinship cooperation. In these pages (45-52), based on the recursive models of Henrich and Boyd humans evolve n-orders of punishers not only of defectors (non-altruists) but of “second order defectors” or “second order free riders”: those who could altruistically punish but who do not (because of course it is costly to punish). Thus a society can be stabilized through n orders of trackers tracking other trackers tracking free riders and so on and so on. It is a kind of generalized policing. We have developed an incentive to monitor in the intensity of our emotional responses to non-actual wrongs, because punishment is always punishment for a past event in the present, and anticipation of vengeance is a present emotional state that looks forward to a future. We have evolved an extreme attentiveness to what has happened and what might happen later (i.e. whether what will happen is what should happen). A strong part of this emotional involvement is our tendency to have strong feelings of admiration for altruistic punishers and strong feelings of sympathy for victims.

This leads Flesch into the discussion of costly signaling which Dan covered very well last week and which further supports the theory of an evolution of cooperation. Relying on the work of the Zahavi’s and Grafen, the cooperation thesis is able to contradict Dawkins selfish gene thesis. Dawkins wanted to show the possibility of faking, lying, and cheating in signaling which would inevitably infiltrate any social system including kinship, destabilizing it and reasserting the primacy of purely genetic selection. One of his examples were the nestlings who signal their hunger with (ideally) proportional cries. Dawkins has to insist that some of them are cheating their siblings, but Grafen instead sees them as cooperating with their mothers by signally their surplus strength, not their hunger. (In a note (224-25 n.78) Dawkins has since acknowledged his error and has praised the work of the Zahavi’s in light of which his assumption that signalers will be inclined to manipulate signaling in order to cheat is being reassessed.) Much of the remainder of the chapter is a continual reminder of the genuineness of altruism as opposed to disguised hypocritical selfishness.



“To summarize this argument briefly: We admire altruists because they can afford to be altruists. We might admire any embodiment of genetic privilege and wealth, but we have survived because we have admired those embodiments of genetic fitness who have signaled their capacity through altruism rather than selfishness. Therefore an admiration for altruism has been selected for—an admiration that also has an altruistic component. But altruism could not sustain an evolutionarily stable system without the contribution of altruistic punishers to punish the free-riders who would flourish in a society of purely benevolent altruists. We therefore admire a certain kind of altruist—the altruistic punisher” (66).







Lastly, returning to the question of literary passion, Flesch rejects the identification/utilitarian model by which we develop and hone our emotional life so as to be ready for various contingencies of life. Instead Flesch adopts the arguments of Adam Smith and Hume of the later Enquiries. On this model we “volunteer” an affect for someone who cannot feel that affect. He returns to this in a later chapter (117 ff). The classic cases are the anxiety we feel for a man napping in a meadow while a cart is about to trample him. The anxiety we feel is not for what he is himself feeling—he is asleep—but for what he will feel if someone, or we ourselves, do not intervene. We may even volunteer an affect for another audience member who may seem emotionally dense. Or there is the poignant case cited by Smith of the mother who volunteers anxiety on behalf of her young child who is suffering from an ailment but who is yet incapable of the emotion of fear. The child merely responds to the present discomfort; the mother offers anxiety for the child’s future; what is more we ourselves, in reading this account, “volunteer sympathy for the mother, first because we are like her, whereas she is not like her child. The child doesn’t know how to be afraid, but we do, and we pity her grief for the child because we too pity the child. We also pity her, feel for her something like the way she feels—although not the way she feels for herself. Still we feel for her what she is not explicitly aware of feeling for herself: her helplessness and terror and misery and distress” (122).These are instances of vicarious—volunteered affect—in which all the principles participate naturally, cooperatively. The instance that clinches the case for Adam Smith is when we mourn the dead, that is, when we volunteer for another what it is impossible one should ever feel for oneself.

On the whole, the book is an argument for a non-restrictive, or generalized tracking and monitoring, generalized passionate volunteering of affect, and a generalized sense of fairness.