Another Timothy Snyder Triumph: Attacking “Literary Darwinist” Anti-Book Neo-Con Jew Jonathan Gottschall
David Shasha
Another Timothy Snyder Triumph: Attacking “Literary Darwinist” Anti-Book Neo-Con Jew Jonathan Gottschall
I quickly understood that his understanding of tyranny was very much applicable to the antinomian nature of the work of Daniel Boyarin, Christine Hayes, and Barry Wimpfheimer, among so many others, that I have called the New Talmudism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
In June of last year, I posted his excellent New York Times Magazine article “The War on History is a War on Democracy”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/3fpwrnUmLVE/m/daLqMUJgBgAJ
When glancing at the new issue of the paper’s Sunday Book Review I espied the title “Is the Impulse to Tell Human Stories Dangerous?” and was very intrigued to see what Anti-Jewish sentiment would lurk there:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/books/review/the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall.html
The complete article follows this note.
I was very pleasantly surprised to see Snyder’s name on the by-line, but was equally fearful that he might disappoint me by taking the Anti-Jewish side of the Book matter!
Not to worry, he once again proves to be a very canny and intelligent cultural arbiter who can sniff out tyranny and its debilitated ways of thinking without much effort.
As you will soon see, the one who presents the Anti-Book, Anti-Jewish position is actually a Jew; someone named Jonathan Gottschall, whose name was new to me.
Gottschall is apparently a Neo-Con Jew with connections to another Neo-Con Jew Steven Pinker, who has his own unique tyrannical views that he has in common with people like Jordan Peterson:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/steven-pinker-jordan-peterson-neoliberalism-radical-right/
Having no previous knowledge of Gottschall, I googled his name, and came up with a piece on what is apparently called “Literary Darwinism”; a movement of sorts that counts him as one of its leading exponents. The pretty scary 2005 New York Times article by D.T. Max helps us understand what this debased Social Science-Literature mash-up is all about:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/magazine/the-literary-darwinists.html
The complete article follows this note.
Applying Darwin to literature is an effective way to bring all the racism and cruelty of Natural Selection to our narrative traditions, with all the mayhem that implies.
In 2014, Gottschall presented his nefarious ideas to a literary festival in Milan, discussing Judaism in the Neo-Con self-hating manner:
The article follows this note as well.
We close this collection of articles with one of Gottschall’s recent pieces – naturally from Quillette! – which further exposes his dangerous understanding of literature and his antagonism to narrative traditions such as the Bible:
https://quillette.com/2021/11/29/the-universal-structure-of-storytelling/
The work of Gottschall presents a very important additional piece to the larger Right Wing puzzle, which has so effectively taken over an institutional Jewish world that aims to destroy some of our most cherished values and replace them with the Tyranny of the Gentile bullies.
I expect him to be publishing in Tikvah Tablet any day now!
And I would like once again to thank the great Timothy Snyder for his very valuable contribution to the preservation of democracy and human values in the face of the New Tyranny, wherever it may come from.
David Shasha
Book Review: Is the Human Impulse to Tell Stories Dangerous?
By: Timothy Snyder
Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down, Basic Books, 2021
It is a “considerable bother,” says Jonathan Gottschall, to write a book; he lightens the task by writing about himself and excusing himself from extensive research. He sets a memorable scene of a morning spent in the lounge of a college psychology department flipping through the indexes of textbooks. He concludes from this that no one has ever undertaken his subject, the “science” of how stories work. Eureka.
Gottschall, a research fellow at Washington & Jefferson College, tells us that “for as long as there have been humans, we’ve been telling the same old stories, in the same old way, for the same old reasons.” We live in “unconscious obedience to the universal grammar” of stories. In other words: We don’t tell stories, they tell us. And everyone is the same kind of storyteller, Jesus and Socrates and all the rest. The universal story hard-wired into our brains is, says Gottschall, one in which everything gets worse until it gets better.
This “universal grammar” doesn’t seem to fit the Book of Genesis, Norse mythology, Greek mythology, the Analects, the Rigveda, “Hamlet,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Madame Bovary,” etc. But that is the least of Gottschall’s problems.
In “The Story Paradox,” he explains that stories filter what we should hear into what we want to hear. What might seem like innocent narrative tension can mean the rallying of one tribe against another. These are perfectly sensible points, made decades ago by Hannah Arendt. Yet in this book Gottschall tells just such a story about himself: a heroic scholar whose original insight challenges our preconceptions, leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics. Defending this version, he ignores others who have made arguments very similar to his own, and dismisses whole disciplines and professions that offer counterarguments to his views. Gottschall demonstrates the power of stories by falling for his own.
Little is original in his analysis. His notion that stories tell us arose out of the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s. Philosophers have been hard at work on story; that goes unacknowledged. Gottschall does mention history and journalism, but only to dismiss them as elements of our culture’s storytelling “machine.” In this bonfire of the humanities, Gottschall frees himself from knowing what novels say, disciplines demand or traditions offer. His portrayal of Jesus and Socrates as tellers of stories is exactly wrong. They spoke in questions, riddles and parables, meant to refresh minds and souls. That spirit of inquiry is absent here.
So is the principle of noncontradiction. When it suits him, Gottschall cites examples taken from the very disciplines that he has dismissed. Right after a pungent section characterizing history as the useless projection of the present upon the past, he cites a book of history, because it says what he wants it to say. Again and again he does what he thinks he is criticizing: treating as evidence what supports his story, and ignoring the rest.
Gottschall dismisses uncomfortable realities by claiming that others do so. Psychology may not have much to say about stories, but it does have a name for that move: “displacement.” The operative literary term would be irony. Gottschall cannot be expected to recognize that. Literary terms such as “irony” do what Gottschall claims that no one before him has done: They allow us to distance ourselves from our stories by cataloging their devices. This is unfamiliar territory for Gottschall. He promises a paradox in his title, but none is forthcoming. He does not know the difference between a metaphor and a simile. When bungling the details of the Holocaust (who needs history?), he treats the reader to grammatical errors.
In the best part of the book, Gottschall cites the work of Jaron Lanier to explain how social media algorithms reinforce our worst tendencies. Wrong though Gottschall might be about a “universal grammar” of stories, he is certainly right that social media encourages narratives where we feel innocent and find others to be inhuman. But he cannot draw the crucial conclusion that a story needs a human storyteller, since he needs all utterances from ancient Bible verses to digital metaverses to be “story” in the same sense. He accepts that novels make us empathetic (an argument pioneered by the historian Lynn Hunt). But he cannot bring himself to say that reading “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is better than falling down a social media rabbit hole.
Gottschall chooses quantity over quality, tabulating surveys about novels rather than reading them himself. He cannot quite see that what the internet creates is an endless psychological experiment and not a story. By allowing the tools of big data and psychology to guide him, Gottschall blinds himself to this essential point about our contemporary reading experience. He is not wrong that social media algorithms draw us into unreflective narcissism. What he misses is that it is precisely psychology and big data, his own allies, that supply the digital commercial and political weapons that trap us in stories where we are always on the good side. Gottschall warns us of such stories and rightly so. But in his analysis of their multiplication and intensification he has confused the villain with the hero. In conflating human storytelling with automated manipulation, he has gone over to the side of the machines, without realizing that he has done so.
Gottschall ignores the basic difference between believing a story and becoming a storyteller. When he tries his hand at fiction, we see the problem. He gives us a short scene that (to many readers, at least) will seem to be about a young woman trying to escape a menacing attacker. “I’m the god of her little world,” Gottschall writes, creepily, before assuring us, more creepily, that he is a benevolent god. The story will be different when not narrated from a place of complacent omnipotence, for example if it is told from the perspective of the woman. It will also be different if told as nonfiction.
Gottschall’s view about our nonfictional world is that “almost everything is getting better and few things are getting worse.” It is hard to see how he can judge the past against the present, given his dismissal of both history and journalism. He relies upon Steven Pinker’s “data” on the issue of violence, though there is no such thing. Pinker cited others; his peculiar choices are usefully examined in “The Darker Angels of Our Nature.” In the fields I know something about, Pinker cherry-picked with red-fingered fervor; his best numbers on modern death tolls come from a source so obviously ideological that I was ashamed to cite it in high school debate. Like Gottschall, Pinker is a friend of contradiction. He supported his story of progress in part by pointing to rising I.Q.s at a time when I.Q.s were in fact in decline. He began his book by noting that the modern welfare states are the most peaceful polities in history, and concluded it by embracing a libertarianism that would lead to their dissolution. Pinker was telling us a story; it is a story Gottschall likes, and thus it is ennobled as “data.”
The most important development in American storytelling, ignored by Gottschall, is the collapse of local news. Most of our country is a news desert. It is very difficult for people, lacking the essential facts about their own lives, to begin to tell their own stories. Investigative reporting is not, contra Gottschall, just a part of some generic narrative of negativity. It provides people with a basis for their civic existence. Millions of little stories defend against one big story. But the millions of little stories need foundations in institutions. Gottschall has nothing to say about what it would take for Americans to become agents in, and tellers of, their own stories. He wants us to listen to one another, no matter how nonsensical our stories might be, but has no idea how to make what we say more reasonable.
Part of Gottschall’s tale of himself is that his views will offend the powerful. Yet his own account of the world does nothing to challenge the status quo. He treats political conflict only as culture war, a view that is more than comfortable for those in power. His most feared enemy, he says, are left-wing colleagues; he portrays their thinking as entirely about culture. One would think, reading him, that left and right had nothing to do with economic equality and inequality, a subject Gottschall ignores.
Though he claims to have read “2,400 years of scholarship on Plato’s ‘Republic,’” Gottschall misses the famous point in Book IV about the city of the rich and the city of the poor. In a country where a few dozen families own as much wealth as half the population, the opportunities for storytelling are unevenly distributed. Gottschall has nothing to say about this. He believes that we live in a “representative democracy” in which the stories told by the powerful simply reflect our own stories. No need, then, to think about the Electoral College, campaign finance, gerrymandering, or the suppression and subversion of votes. Gottschall offers not a challenge to the powerful, but a pat on the back.
Gottschall confesses that he was “confused about this book,” and it is not hard to see why. If everything is story, then all we have is our own; and our own story makes us feel good, until the moment comes when it doesn’t. Gottschall visibly suffers in these pages as psychology becomes his personal tar pit. In the end, he flails in the direction of “facts” and “science,” terms he has already reduced to cliché by confusing them with common-sense nostrums. Even had he told us what he meant by “facts” and “science,” he gives no clue as to how our brains would escape their supposed hard-wiring for story and think in such terms.
In his last gasp, Gottschall invokes the Enlightenment. One of its mottoes was “dare to know.” Kant, who used that phrase, knew that the liberation from others’ stories begins with liberation from one’s own. Gottschall does the opposite: Drowning in his own story, he grabs us by the ankles. Voltaire’s Candide was miles ahead of Gottschall: Understanding stories means knowing when to laugh at them. This book is just sad.
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 2, 2022
The Literary Darwinists
By: D.T. Max
Jane Austen first published "Pride and Prejudice" in 1813. She had misgivings about the book, complaining in a letter to her sister that it was "rather too light, and bright, and sparkling." But these qualities may be what make it the most popular of her novels. It tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet, a young woman from a shabby genteel family, who meets Mr. Darcy, an aristocrat. At first, the two dislike each other. Mr. Darcy is arrogant; Elizabeth, clever and cutting. But through a series of encounters that show one to the other in a more appealing light - as well as Mr. Darcy's intervention when an officer named Wickham runs away with Elizabeth's younger sister Lydia (Darcy bribes the cad to marry Lydia) - Elizabeth and Darcy come to love each other, to marry and, it is strongly suggested at book's end, to live happily ever after.
For the common reader, "Pride and Prejudice" is a romantic comedy. His or her pleasure comes from the vividness of Austen's characters and how familiar they still seem: it's as if we know Elizabeth and Darcy. On a more literary level, we enjoy Austen's pointed dialogue and admire her expert way with humor. For similar reasons, critics have long called "Pride and Prejudice" a classic - their ultimate (if not well defined) expression of approval.
But for an emerging school of literary criticism known as Literary Darwinism, the novel is significant for different reasons. Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.
From the first words of the first chapter ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife") to the first words of the last ("Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters"), the novel is stocked with the sort of life's-passage moments that resonate with meaning for Literary Darwinists. (One calls the novel their "fruit fly.") The women in the book mostly compete to marry high-status men, consistent with the Darwinian idea that females try to find mates whose status will assure the success of their offspring. At the same time, the men are typically competing to marry the most attractive women, consistent with the Darwinian idea that males look for youth and beauty in females as signs of reproductive fitness. Darcy and Elizabeth's flips and flops illustrate the effort mammals put into distinguishing between short-term appeal (a pert step, a handsome coxcomb) and long-term appropriateness (stability, commitment, wealth, underlying good health). Meanwhile, Wickham - the penniless officer who tries to make off first with Darcy's sister and then carries off Lydia - serves as an example of the mating behavior evolutionary biologists call (I'm using a milder euphemism than they do) "the sneaky fornicator theory."
Humans beyond reproductive age also have a part to play in the Literary Darwinist paradigm. Consider Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth's mother. Jane Austen calls her "invariably silly," and most critics over nearly two centuries have agreed. But for Literary Darwinists, her marriage obsession makes sense, because she also has a stake in what is going on. If one of her daughters has a child, Mrs. Bennet will have further passed on her genetic material, fulfilling the ultimate aim of living things according to some evolutionary theorists: the replication of one's genes. (J.B.S. Haldane, a British biologist, was once asked if he would trade his life for his brother's and replied no, but that he would trade it for two brothers or eight cousins.)
It is useful to know a bit about current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.") It often focuses on how the writer's and the reader's identities - straight, gay, female, male, black, white, colonizer or colonized - shape a particular narrative or its interpretation. Theorists sometimes regard science as simply another form of language or suspect that when scientists claim to speak for nature, they are disguising their own assertion of power. Literary Darwinism breaks with these tendencies. First, its goal is to study literature through biology - not politics or semiotics. Second, it takes as a given not that literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from laws of nature.
"The Literary Animal," the first scholarly anthology dedicated to Literary Darwinism, is to be published next month. It draws from the various fields that figure in Darwinian evolutionary studies, including contributions from evolutionary psychologists and biologists as well as literature professors. The essays consider the importance of the male-male bond in epics and romances, the battle of the sexes in Shakespeare and the motif in both Japanese and Western literature of men rejecting children whom their wives have conceived in adultery. "The Literary Animal" spans centuries and individual cultures with bravura, if not bravado. "There is no work of literature written anywhere in the world, at any time, by any author, that is outside the scope of Darwinian analysis," Joseph Carroll, a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, writes in an essay in "The Literary Animal." Why bring literature into what is essentially a social science? Jonathan Gotschall, an editor of "The Literary Animal," offers an answer: "One thing literature offers is data. Fast, inexhaustible, cross-cultural and cheap."
There is a circularity to an argument that uses texts about people to prove that people behave in human ways. (I'm reminded of the Robert Frost line: "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better.") But Literary Darwinism has a second focus too. It also investigates why we read and write fiction. At the core of Literary Darwinism is the idea that we inherit many of the predispositions we deem to be cultural through our genes. How we behave has been subjected to the same fitness test as our bodies: if a bit of behavior has no purpose, then evolution - given enough time - may well dispense with it. So why, Literary Darwinists ask, do we make room for this strange exercise of the imagination? What are reading and writing fiction good for? In her essay "Reverse-Engineering Narrative," Michelle Scalise Sugiyama tries to simplify the question by picking stories apart, breaking them down into characters, settings, causalities and time frames ("the cognitive widgets and sprockets of storytelling") and asking what purpose each serves: how do they make us more adaptive, more capable of passing on our genes?
For the moment, Literary Darwinism is a
club that may grow into a crowd; there are only about 30 or so declared
adherents in all of academia. (The wider field of biopoetics - which relates
music and the visual arts to Darwin as well - can claim another handful.) But
it has captured the imagination of a number of academics who grew up with other
literary critical techniques and became dissatisfied. Brian Boyd, for instance,
a well-known scholar of Vladimir Nabokov and professor at the University of New
Zealand in Auckland, changed his focus in his 40's to Literary Darwinism,
gripped by what he calls its "one very simple and powerful idea."
It may seem strange that English professors in search of inspiration would turn to evolutionary biology, but you should never underestimate the appeal of the worldview Darwin formulated. It has a way of capturing people's attention. While not everyone enjoys being reminded that humans descend from monkeys (or even worse, from prokaryotic bacteria), many of us like the subtle reassurance that Darwinism offers. Despite its theory that unceasing change is the essence of life, it can be perceived as a reassuring philosophy, one that believes there are answers. And a philosophy that implies "survival of the fittest" pays a great compliment to all of us who are here to read about it. So it is little surprise that evolutionary biology has come to be invoked not merely as a theory about changes in the physical makeups of living beings but also as an explanatory tool that appeals to both academics and to everyone's inner pop psychologist. (Jack Nicholson explaining his bad-boy behavior to an interviewer for The New York Times in 2002: "I have a sweet spot for what's attractive to me. It's not just psychological. It's also glandular and has to do with mindlessly continuing the species.")
Literary Darwinism - like many offshoots of Darwinism - tends to find favor with those looking for universal explanations. Like Freudianism and Marxism, it has large-scale ambitions: to explain not just the workings of a particular text or author but of texts and authors over time and across cultures as well. It may also allow English professors to grab back some of the influence - and money - that the sciences, in the Darwinian fight for university resources, have taken from the humanities for the past century. But for now, to march under the Literary Darwinist banner you had better be independent and unafraid. "The most effective and easiest form of repudiation is to ignore us," Carroll says.
Literary Darwinists give off a cultlike vibe. When they talk about like-minded academics who won't acknowledge their beliefs in public, they sometimes call them "closeted." The 56-year-old Carroll's own conversion to the discipline took place when, as a young, tenured but disgruntled professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis in the early 90's, he picked up "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" and had an "intuitive conviction" that he had found the master keys to literature. Carroll had always liked big ideas; he'd had a "big Hegel phase" when he was 21. "The basic conception crystallized for me in a matter of weeks," he remembers, and the notes he began taking "at high intensity" formed themselves into the founding text in the field, "Evolution and Literary Theory," published in 1995.
Jonathan Gottschall, a 33-year-old editor of "The Literary Animal," began his graduate studies in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1994 and was surprised at how little his professors cared about linking literature with "the big, Delphic project of seeking the nature of human nature. They didn't believe in knowledge. In fact they could only render the word in quotes." When he found a copy of the zoologist Desmond Morris's 1967 book, "The Naked Ape," in a used bookstore, Morris's observations on the overlap between primate and human behavior spoke to him. (Animals often play a role in these conversion narratives: Ellen Dissanayake, the author of "What Is Art For?" and a biopoeticist at the University of Washington, was primed for her conversion in part by watching the behavior of wild animals - her husband at the time was a director at the National Zoo in Washington - and comparing them to her young children.)
Soon after reading "The Naked Ape," Gottschall reread the "Iliad," one of his favorite books: "As always," he writes in the introduction to "The Literary Animal," "Homer made my bones flex and ache under the weight of all the terror and beauty of the human condition. But this time around I also experienced the 'Iliad' as a drama of naked apes - strutting, preening, fighting, tattooing their chests and bellowing their power in fierce competition for social dominance, desirable mates and material resources." He brought his ideas to class. "When I would say things like 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary biology' in class," Gottschall remembers, "my classmates would hear things like 'eugenics' and 'Hitler.' It was a measure of how toxic the material was."
His interest in Literary Darwinism does not seem to have helped Gottschall's career - "The Literary Animal" was rejected by more than a dozen publishers before Northwestern University Press agreed to take it on. And Gottschall himself remains unemployed (though that is a condition familiar to many English Ph.D.'s). Literary Darwinists claim that no acknowledged member of their troupe has ever received tenure in this country. "Most of my closest friends ended up at the Ivies or their equivalents," Joseph Carroll says, while he is at "a branch campus in a state university system."
The alpha male of Literary Darwinism is the 76-year-old Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. "There's no one we owe so much," Gottschall says. Wilson contributed a foreword to "The Literary Animal" in which he writes that if Literary Darwinism succeeds and "not only human nature but its outermost literary productions can be solidly connected to biological roots, it will be one of the great events of intellectual history. Science and the humanities united!" Wilson has been working for 30 years to prepare the way for such a moment. In 1975, he began the expansion of modern evolutionary biology to human behavior in his book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis." In the last chapter, he tried to show that evolutionary pressures play a big role not just in animal societies but also in human culture. "Many scientists and others believed it would have been better if I had stopped at chimpanzees," Wilson would remember later, "but the challenge and the excitement I felt were too much to resist."
In "On Human Nature," published three years later, Wilson revisited the question with new energy. The field that emerged in part out of his work, evolutionary psychology, asserts that many of our mental activities and the behaviors that come from them - language, altruism, promiscuity - can be traced to preferences that were encoded in us in prehistoric times when they helped us to survive. According to evolutionary psychologists, everything from seasonal affective disorder to singing to lifesaving is - or at least might be - hard-wired. Evolutionary psychologists also try to demystify the nature of consciousness itself, positing, for example, that the brain is a collection of separate modules evolved to serve mental operations, more like a Swiss Army knife than a soul. A controversial implication of their theories is that evolution may be responsible for some inequalities among groups. One has only to recall the trouble that Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president, brought on himself earlier this year when he speculated that evolution might have left women less capable than men of outstanding performance in engineering and science to see how the notion continues to roil us.
All the same, today we speak casually of innate preferences, adaptive behavior and fitness strategies. Consider how evolutionary psychology has displaced Freud. Who, upon discovering that a remote tribe had an incest taboo, would ascribe it to unconscious repression on the part of the sons of their sexual attraction to their mothers? Instead, we would likely cite an evolutionary biology principle that states that we have evolved an innate repulsion to inbreeding because it creates birth defects and birth defects are a barrier to survival.
In a recent telephone conversation, I asked Wilson to assess the state of the revolution he helped touch off. How far had sociologists and psychologists gone in folding evolutionary principles into their work? Wilson laughed and said silkily, "Not far enough, in my opinion." Nonetheless, he looks forward to seeing sociobiology dust the wings of the arts - especially literature - with its magic. "Confusion is what we have now in the realm of literary criticism," Wilson writes in his foreword to "The Literary Animal." He amplified the point on the phone: "They just go on presenting it, teaching it, explaining it as best they can." He saw in literary criticism, especially the school led by Derrida, a "form of unrooted free association and an attempt to build rules of analysis on just idiosyncratic perceptions of how the world works, how the mind works. I could not see anything that was truly coherent." Predicting my objection, he went on: "We're not talking about reducing, corroding, dehumanizing. We're talking about adding deep history, deep genetic history, to art criticism."
Literary Darwinists use this "deep history" to explain the power of books and poems that might otherwise confuse us, thus hoping to add satisfaction to our reading of them. Take for instance "Hamlet." Through the Literary Darwinist lens, Shakespeare's play becomes the story of a young man's dilemma choosing between his personal self-interest (taking over the kingdom by killing his uncle, his mother's new husband) and his genetic self-interest (if his mother has children with his uncle, he may get new siblings who carry three-eighths of his genes). No wonder the prince of Denmark cannot make up his mind.
Or look at Jonathan Gottschall's study of the "Iliad," which emphasizes how the fighting over women in the epic is not the substitute for the fight over territory, as commentators usually assume, but the central subject of the poem, occasioned by an ancient sex-ratio imbalance, a fact he unearthed in part from studies of the archaeological records of contemporary grave sites.
One of the central beliefs of evolutionary psychology is that pleasure is adaptive, so it is meaningful that Literary Darwinism is enjoyable to practice. But while its observations on individual books can be fun and memorable, they also feel flimsy. As David Sloan Wilson, an editor of "The Literary Animal" and a professor of biology and anthropology at SUNY-Binghamton, puts it, "Tasty slice, but where's the rest of the pie?"
And Literary Darwinism is not equally good at explaining everything. It is best on big social novels, on people behaving in groups. As the British novelist Ian McEwan notes in his contribution to "The Literary Animal," "If one reads accounts of . . . troops of bonobo . . . one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel." But I don't think even by stretching one's imagination primates evoke "The Waste Land" or "Finnegans Wake." Tone, point of view, reliability of the narrator - these are literary tropes that often elude Literary Darwinists, an interpretive limitation that can be traced to Darwin himself; his son once complained that "it often astonished us what trash he would tolerate in the way of novels. The chief requisites were a pretty girl and a good ending." Darwin was drawn to books that were Darwinian. Similarly, Literary Darwinists are better on Émile Zola and John Steinbeck than, say, Henry James or Gustave Flaubert. I would read their take on Shakespeare's histories before the tragedies and the tragedies before the comedies, and in "The Tempest" I'd be curious about their observations on the Prospero, Miranda and Fernando triad but not on Caliban or Ariel. I don't care if there are selection pressures on mooncalfs and sprites.
Ultimately, Literary Darwinism may teach us less about individual books than about the point of literature. But what can the purpose of literature be, assuming it is not just a harmless oddity? At first glance, reading is a waste of time, turning us all into versions of Don Quixote, too befuddled by our imaginations to tell windmills from giants. We would be better off spending the time mating or farming. Darwinists have an answer - or more accurately, many possible answers. (Literary Darwinists like multiple answers, convinced the best idea will win out.) One idea is that literature is a defense reaction to the expansion of our mental life that took place as we began to acquire the basics of higher intelligence around 40,000 years ago. At that time, the world suddenly appeared to homo sapiens in all its frightening complexity. But by taking imaginative but orderly voyages within our minds, we gained the confidence to interpret this new vastly denser reality. Another theory is that reading literature is a form of fitness training, an exercise in "what if" thinking. If you could imagine the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans, then if you ever found yourself in a street fight, you would have a better chance of winning. A third theory sees writing as a sex-display trait. Certainly writers often seem to be preening when they write, with an eye toward attracting a desirable mate. In "The Ghost Writer," Philip Roth's narrator informs another writer that "no one with seven books in New York City settles for" just one woman. "That's what you get for a couplet."
Yet another theory is that the main function of literature is to integrate us all into one culture; evolutionary psychologists believe shared imaginings or myths produce social cohesion, which in turn confers a survival advantage. And a fifth idea is that literature began as religion or wish fulfillment: we ensure our success in the next hunt by recounting the triumph of the last one. Finally, it may be precisely writing's uselessness that makes it attractive to the opposite sex; it could be that, like the male peacock's exuberant tail, literature's very unnecessariness speaks to the underlying good health of its practitioner. He or she has resources to burn.
Generally, Literary Darwinism positions literature not as a luxury or as an add-on but as connected with our deepest selves. There is a grandeur to this view, and also a good deal of conjecture. That is because evolutionary biology is unusual among the sciences in asking not just "how" things work but also "why" - and not the why of local explanations (Why does water freeze at 32 degrees?) but the why of deeper ones, why something exists (Why did we evolve lungs? Why do we feel love?). There is no lab protocol to solve these sorts of mysteries, which the inductive techniques of science are poorly designed to answer, and so in the end, evolutionary biologists' conclusions can far outrun their research.
Take, for example, the human fear of snakes. According to Edward Wilson, this fear had its beginning in prehistoric times, when many of our ancestors were killed by snake bites. Those who feared snakes survived in greater numbers than those who didn't. This was the period when the human brain was becoming hard-wired, so our fear, rooted now in our genetic makeup, outlived its usefulness. Even after snakes stopped killing us very often, we remembered how we felt when they did. Over time, because they had traumatized us when we were most impressionable, snakes took a central role in our imaginative lives, becoming a center of our religion and art - whence the protection of the kings of ancient Egypt by the cobra goddess Wadjet; Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec serpent god of death and resurrection; and the fascination D.H. Lawrence felt when an uninvited guest slithered "his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied" down to his water trough.
It is a nice story backed by some evidence. Children have a readiness to fear snakes that needs only an encounter or two to set it off. Their fear remains even after they outgrow ordinary childhood fears. And many primates, our nearest relatives, also have a readiness - an easily evoked potential - to be afraid of snakes. But we need to know a great deal before asserting that our snake obsession is an example of the sort of "gene-culture co-evolution," in Wilson's words, that evolutionary psychology - and literary Darwinism - depend on. For one thing, if there is a module in the brain that contains the predisposition to fear snakes, it has not yet been found. Nor do we really know how many snake deaths there were in prehistoric times. Nor whether that number was sufficient to create a phobia, which, moreover, for some reason would have had to remain fixed until the present day in the human mind instead of dropping out through further evolutionary selection, as you might expect a useless phobia to do. Today it might be people who love snakes who outreproduce the ophidophobes, since some snakes make good eating and their skins can be sold for money, yet we have no evidence of this pattern. At the same time, we must ask why there are equivalent or greater dangers our ancestors withstood that do not seem to have led to phobias - for instance, fire.
When you try to evaluate the importance of snakes to myths and the arts, you have to make several more assumptions. First, are snakes any more prominent in our imaginations than, say, eagles, which have never preyed on us? And if they are, does it not seem as likely that our fascination with them comes from there being something special (module-activating, if you like) about the snake's motion or its shape - its resemblance to a stick, or pace Freud, to the penis? Or about the fact that it kills with poison rather than through lethal wounding, as most wild animals do? Why trace our fear of them only back to their supposed role as a prehistoric killer of our ancestors?
Sometimes evolutionary psychological
theory feels like a start toward a science rather than a science itself.
Consider, for instance, the larger question of the human imagination's role in
evolution. Let's assume the capacity for imagination is inherited. Then most
evolutionary psychologists would assume that human imagination was favored by
natural selection and that it helps us to survive. But imagination could just
as well not be an adaptation to (imagined) survival pressures but an accidental
byproduct of such an adaptation. Maybe evolutionary pressures favored a related
mental process like, say, curiosity, and because the higher brain, where such
mental activities reside, is a sort of huge pool of neurons, it also produced
the capacity for imagination. And, as Stephen
Kosslyn, a Harvard psychology professor, notes, "Whether any of this was
itself the target of natural selection is anybody's guess."
To be fair, evolutionary psychologists deserve credit for asking whether complex human behavior can be transmitted through a genetic-cultural link even if they cannot yet show that it is. Theirs remains an alluring approach. What they need in order to overcome their problems is the equivalent of the early-20th-century elaboration of the function of genes - or at least more and better hard science to support their conclusions.
A similar focus would help Literary Darwinists. They would benefit from studying writers and readers in the laboratory to see what parts of the brain our taste for literature comes out of and what the implications are. Such experiments could reveal quite remarkable things. For instance, we know that a structure in the brain called the hippocampus has a key role in long-term memory formulation. Scanning readers using functional M.R.I.'s - M.R.I.'s set to track blood flow to different areas of the brain - we can also see how different works activate their readers' hippocampuses. Those words that light up the hippocampus the most are the ones people wind up remembering best. So functional M.R.I.'s of the hippocampus could provide the beginning of a biological basis for the hoary assumption that "Pride and Prejudice" is a classic and maybe even a justification for the rest of the literary canon.
Even more interesting, brain scanning might one day help to explain the act of reading itself. "Reading is a funny kind of brain state," says Norman Holland, a professor who teaches a course on brain science and literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "If you're engrossed in a story, you're no longer aware of your body; you're no longer aware of your environment. You feel real emotions toward the characters." What is going on in our heads? Are we in a dream? A heightened reality? A trance?
Edward Wilson told me that he is confident neurobiology can help confirm many of evolutionary psychology's insights about the humanities, commending the work to "any ambitious young neurobiologist, psychologist or scholar in the humanities." They could be the "Columbus of neurobiology," he said, adding that if "you gave me a million dollars to do it, I would get immediately into brain imaging." In fact, you won't always need a million dollars for the work, as the cost of M.R.I. technology goes down. "Five years from now, every psychology department will have a scanner in the basement," says Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist. With the help of those scanners, Wilson says that science and the study of literature will join in "a mutualistic symbiosis," with science providing literary criticism with the "foundational principles" for analysis it lacks.
David Sloan Wilson, the co-editor of "The Literary Animal" (and the son of the novelist Sloan Wilson), sees the potential of that embrace differently. "Literature," he says, "is the natural history of our species," and its diversity proves us diverse. No one in "Pride and Prejudice" takes exception when, at the book's opening, Elizabeth Bennet's father's cousin comes to propose to her. In Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders," the title character can, at the same time, consider her incest with her brother "the most nauseous thing to me in the world" and say she "had not great concern about it in point of conscience" because she had not known they were related. Humans are complex, and the best books about them are too. So rather than narrowing literature, David Wilson says that Literary Darwinism may broaden evolutionary psychology.
It may, in fact, have already done so. Think about evolutionary psychology. It is seductive and metaphoric, alluring and imagistic. It is fun to riff on. It takes bits of information and from them builds a worldview. It convinces us that we understand why things happen the way they happen. When it succeeds, evolutionary psychology impresses us with the elegance and economy of that vision and, when it fails, gives us a sense of waste and unthriftiness on the author's part. It may be true or it may just have some truth in it, and once you have encountered it, you can never see things quite the same way again: it works a kind of conversion in you. Isn't it, then, already a lot like literature?
D.T. Max, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is working on "The Dark Eye," a cultural and scientific history of mad cow and other prion diseases.
From The New York Times, November 6, 2005
We Are What We Tell
By: Jonathan Gottschall
During last Friday’s lecture in Mantua, at the Festivaletteratura, probably the best known literary festival in Italy, Jonathan Gottschall has explained how fiction is the most “ancient and powerful virtual reality technology, and it simulates the great dilemmas of human life.” Professor of English, literary exponent of Darwinism, prolific author, Gottschall writes with equal ease for the New York Times and for scientific journals. Today he will be in Milan, at the Sormani public library, where he will introduce the presentation of “Jewish and the City”, the international Jewish culture festival, this year at its second edition. Gottschall has given to the portal of Italian Jewry www.moked.it
a text that gives an idea of what he’ll be explaining at the lecture for Jewish and the City, titled “We are what we tell”. A second speech, taking place at the Fondazione Feltrinelli in the late afternoon, is titled “The Storytelling Animal. How Stories Make us Human”, like his last book, that has been translated in Italian by Bollati Boringhieri, as “L’istinto di narrare. Come le storie ci hanno reso umani”.
Humans are the storytelling animal. We spin fantasies. We
thrill to an astonishing multitude of fictions on pages, on stages, and on
screens: murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true
stories and false. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and
criminal trials unfold as narratives. We are, as a species, addicted to story.
But the addiction runs deeper than we think. We can walk away from our books
and our screens, but not from story. We dream, fantasize, and socialize in
stories. Story infiltrates every aspect of how we live and think. Yet the world
of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’ s easy to
say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?
In this book, I argue that stories help us navigate life’s
complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult
situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our
survival.
Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology,
and evolutionary biology, I tell what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did
you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior?
That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a
slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?
Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us
vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about
ourselves that are more “truthy” than true. National myths can also be terribly
dangerous: Hitler’s ambitions were partly fueled by a story.
But, as I show in this book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral—they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story.
The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape
us, how the stories we tell shape our identities as individuals and groups.
In my talk for Jewish and the City I will also discuss how my recent discovery of my own Jewish ancestry has modified and enriched my own personal story.
Jonathan Gottschall is a Professor of English, literary exponent of Darwinism, prolific author.
From Pagine Ebraiche, September 7, 2014
The Universal Structure of Storytelling
By: Jonathan Gottschall
Editor's note: what follows is a lightly edited excerpt of The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down, by Jonathan Gotschall, published by Basic Books (November 2021).
In the mid-2000s I set out, along with my colleagues Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, and Dan Kruger, on a large-scale study of classic Victorian novels by such authors as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens, among many others. We distributed a survey to hundreds of knowledgeable people—professors, graduate students taking courses on Victorian literature, and authors who had published articles or books in the field. The respondents rated the attributes of characters in the novels exactly as if these fictional people were actual people.
We wrote up the results in our book, Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning. The main finding had to do with something we called agonistic structure, which we took to be a fundamental structural element of storytelling in much the same way that roofs are fundamental to houses. For all the variety in these novels, for all the differences in personality and gender and background of authors stretching over a century, they made strikingly similar choices regarding characterization. As a whole, Victorian novels reflect a sharply polarized fictional universe of good people (the protagonists and their allies) and bad people (the antagonists and their allies) locked in conflict. Overwhelmingly, protagonists looked to cooperate and work toward the common good while antagonists sought to dominate for selfish ends.
When we published Graphing Jane Austen, many readers were thunderstruck. Only not by the results themselves—but by the fact that a team of PhD scientists and scholars would dare to publish such obvious findings. After all, Victorian novels have a reputation for priggishness. But we were thrilled with the results because they actually do portray something anomalous. We’re all just so desensitized to the anomaly that it hides in plain sight.
From one point of view, it’s obvious that, despite exceptions, most stories portray “goody-baddy” dynamics—from nursery rhymes to juicy gossip, from ancient folktales to Holy Scripture, from lowbrow reality shows to award-winning documentaries.
The question is, why?
The Graphing Jane Austen team was inspired by the work of the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who gained renown in the early 2000s for demonstrating that the lives of hunter-gatherers were typified not by the every-man-for-himself behavior that most associate with Darwinism but by a much gentler ethic of communalism and egalitarianism.
The golden rule of hunter-gather life is pretty simple: Do everything to bring the band together; do nothing to split it apart. Don’t sow division. Don’t hog up more than your share (of food, sex partners, attention). If you happen to be blessed with muscle, don’t throw it around. If you happen to be a great hunter or a dazzling beauty, don’t flaunt it over others. Be one of the good guys, in other words. Of course, if there’s an instinct in humans to get along with each other in groups, there’s also an instinct to get ahead. We proposed that agonistic structure in stories generally, not just in Victorian novels, reflects the ancient morality of hunter-gatherer life. Living in groups, as humans must, means constantly balancing our selfish impulses with group needs. Protagonists of stories properly balance individual self-interest with the needs of the group. In general, protagonists sacrifice their self-interest for the common good when the two are in conflict. Not antagonists. Pretty much the definition of a bad person among hunter-gatherers is the bad team player who reliably puts his or her own interests above the group’s.
Drawing partly on our work in Graphing Jane Austen, the communications scholar Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen builds an instruction manual for creating powerful antagonists: “Evolutionary psychology supplies a basic blueprint for impactful villains: they are selfish, exploitative, and sadistic. They contravene the prosocial ethos of society.” Giving a little creative writing advice, he continues, “Antagonists should be hyper-individualistic bullies. They should threaten the social order and induce righteous indignation in protagonists, incentivizing them and their peers to band together, fight back, and finally affirm their prosocial values.”
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen is describing the archetypal villain, the one who has been haunting stories in different guises since the origins of humanity. The villain is always the same deep down: he’s the guy who wants to split us apart. She’s the selfish one at work. The ball hog at the pickup game. The jerk who steals your parking spot. The murderer hiding in the bushes. The selfish bastard who’s going to subvert the egalitarian ethos that holds the community together. And who’s the hero? The term hero evokes ancient associations with physical muscle and physical courage. But with much greater predictability, protagonists embody moral virtues, not physical ones. The protagonist is rarely a saint and not just because saints are boring. An interesting protagonist must have room for improvement. Creative writing teachers sometimes call the main protagonist of a story “the transformational character.” Main antagonists usually don’t evolve. Main protagonists do. In most cases, the transformation is moral. Protagonists go from being takers to givers. From blindness to sight. From confusion to understanding.
Storytelling is then—in every era and every culture—a dramatization of the everlasting war between the princesses and the tigers. Protagonists struggle to lay down the stitching that binds families, friends, and communities together. Antagonists seek to find those seams and rip them apart. Stories unfold as races: Who can do their work better and faster, the princesses or the tigers? The weavers or the cleavers?
In most tales, the protagonists struggle hard and eventually win out. But the larger war between the human animal’s best and worst angels is ultimately unwinnable. And so the archetypal heroes and villains must be resurrected again and again to do battle until the end of time.
Stories make tribes
In Graphing Jane Austen, we argued that storytelling—like other forms of human art-making—has deep roots in the well-being of tribes as well as individuals. Story is one key solution to the problem of maintaining cooperation and cohesion within human communities. The moralism we see in our tales doesn’t just reflect our evolved morality—it strongly reinforces it.
My colleagues and I aren’t alone in these views. In his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, the primatologist Robin Dunbar argues that human language first evolved for the purpose of telling stories—namely, gossip tales about who was playing by tribal rules and who wasn’t. Dunbar and other scientists stress that gossip, although it has a bad reputation, helps a community function by policing moral infractions. If Dunbar is right, this goes a long way toward explaining humanity’s ongoing and probably incurable addiction to moralistic stories that are so like the gossip tales we’ve been sharing since our species first learned to talk.
Dunbar has since studied story’s capacity to weave groups together with biochemical thread. He has shown, for example, that when we watch an emotionally arousing dramatic film our nervous system releases the endogenous opioids known as endorphins— this is the same neurobiological mechanism known to underpin bonding in humans and other primates. After viewing an emotionally intense drama, viewers have higher endorphin levels and report feeling a stronger sense of connection and belonging with the people around them.
Dunbar proposes that storytelling is just like other art forms, such as singing and dancing, that pull us together in groups, trigger a similar release of bonding chemicals in the brain, and enhance a sense of group solidarity. Nowadays, we mainly consume stories alone or with our immediate families. But recall that up until the invention of the printing press around 600 years ago most formal storytelling was oral and often festive and it was performed for groups of people by tellers or actors. In other words, story was an overwhelmingly communal activity, where people were transported together into storyland to experience the same simulations of morally charged scenarios and the same floods of ideas and emotions.
While Dunbar studies the neurobiology of stories in the lab, the anthropologist Daniel Smith and his colleagues have begun studying its effects in the field. In the study of Agta hunter-gatherers, researchers tested the idea that story evolved to promote cooperative norms in groups. They found not only that the Agta put a premium on good storytelling but also that the prosocial messages in the tales actually sink in and modify group behavior. Agta bands that boasted strong storytellers also functioned better as cohesive and harmonious teams.
In the spirit of a picture being worth a thousand words, this whole hypothesis is neatly encapsulated in a famous Life magazine portrait of a Khoisan storyteller.
Marvel at the tribal unity the teller has generated. He’s brought his people together, skin up against skin, mind up against mind, as he spins a tale pregnant with lessons that will promote the band’s flourishing. I don’t linger on this image because it represents “primitive” people involved in a primitive behavior (the Khoisan aren’t primitive). I linger on this image because it’s an utterly timeless expression of story’s ongoing role in weaving individual people into functional collectives.
Not moral, moralistic
Tellers and critics who reflexively bristle at the very mention of a “moral of the story” are, I think, actually objecting to two different things. First, they’re objecting to the hokey way “morals of the story” are presumably delivered. But a morality tale need not be hokey, nor must it suggest that our ethical dilemmas are easy. For example, HBO’s The Wire seems to be the leading candidate among critics for the greatest television show of all time. But it’s also a deeply moralistic cry of sorrow and rage about the way America’s drug war has corrupted the fighters on both sides.
And while antihero shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are praised for their sophisticated storytelling, the ethical messages are as stark and clear as any morality play’s. Thanks to the painful ambiguity of the final episode of The Sopranos, we will never know what happened to Tony Soprano. But one thing’s pretty clear: Tony is a bad man who will not live happily ever after. He may well survive his supper, but he will live out the time left to him in a condition of dread. Similarly, Breaking Bad ended with the drug lord née school teacher Walter White lying gut shot on a concrete floor as Badfinger’s 1971 hit “Baby Blue” plays in the background. The first line of the song: “Guess I got what I deserved.”
The second reason many tellers and critics think they are against “morals of the story” is itself deeply moralistic. When it comes to the ethical character of stories, history’s tetchiest scolds have mainly been conservative types (Plato in The Republic, the Elizabethan critic Thomas Rymer, Anthony Comstock at the turn of the 20th century, and so on) who’ve advocated for a harsh, narrow, and old-fashioned morality. Liberal storytellers may decry this closed-off morality, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t themselves fiery moralists. They’re just, as with the writers of The Wire, promoting complex, multilayered moral views, not stodgy conservative ones. They mistake what they object to: they think they’re against “morals of the story,” whereas they are really opposed to conservative morality.
But if most stories are supposed to be either explicit or implicit morality tales, then what about Hitler’s highly dramatized life story, Mein Kampf? Was that moral? What about Thomas Dixon’s 19th-century novel The Clansman, which did so much to popularize and spread the mythology of the Ku Klux Klan and inspired The Birth of a Nation? Was that a moral story? In both cases, of course, the answer is a resounding no!
And yes.
The tireless moralism of storytelling has a very dark, dark side. For now, the claim I’m making isn’t that it’s impossible to write wicked stories or that all stories contain a moral message that everyone can agree on. For example, a story about the depravity of abortion would split modern American audiences down the middle.
My claim is narrower: the moral structure of prosocial protagonists holding the group together against antisocial antagonists applies as an overwhelming statistical reality. So Mein Kampf is that story (Jews and other undesirables are the archvillains of civilization and must therefore be eradicated). The Clansman is that story (black people are an existential threat to the dominant culture and must therefore be ruthlessly suppressed).
To sum up, I’m saying that stories are generally less moral—in the sense of capturing universal principles—than they are moralistic. In the same way that it’s hard to write a compelling story that lacks a thorny problem, it’s very hard for tellers to escape the deep moral gravity of stories. Problem structure and moralistic structure are the twin stars that tale-tellers helplessly orbit around. It’s possible, with exertion, to bust free of this orbit, and some tellers have tried. But they’ve mostly found that few people want to follow them as they break out of the comforting groove of the universal grammar and float off into the cold, black void.
The deeply moralistic, judgy character of stories is embedded in the very word story, which is derived from the ancient Greek historía. This is obviously where we get our word history, but it’s also where we get our word story. The oldest meaning of the root word hístōr, going back to how it’s used in Homeric-era Greek, indicates a referee, wise man, or judge. This suggests that stories, including historical stories, aren’t just neutral accounts of events but renderings of judgment upon them.
The judgy connotations of the word story have died away along with knowledge of ancient Greek. But the judginess of our stories is nonetheless as pronounced as ever. A story, as the media psychologist Dolf Zillmann puts it, turns its consumer into a “moral monitor who applauds or condemns the intentions and actions of the characters.” And we play our monitoring role with gusto. We love the sensation of righteous indignation and the satisfying payoff of justice delivered. As the literary scholar Northrop Frye points out in The Anatomy of Criticism, “In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it’s normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.” And studies back this up: people get more satisfaction out of stories in which offenders are punished rather than forgiven.
The unstoppable moralism of stories has a big upside for within-group bonding. But the universal grammar of stories can also be paranoid and vindictive. Stories show us problem-drenched worlds and encourage us to turn on the people who are lousing things up. In other words, to proliferate narratives is to proliferate villains. To proliferate villains is also to proliferate rage, judgment, and division.
Jonathan Gotschall is a Distinguished Fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. His past books include The Storytelling Animal and The Professor in the Cage.
From Quilette, November 29, 2021