Cultural Caviar

Can Evolution Account for Art?

August 01, 2012

Multiple Pages
Can Evolution Account for Art?

In this Darwinian age, it has become popular for thinkers to try to dream up the evolutionary mechanisms behind vast, fuzzy phenomena such as art. I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on whether natural selection can account for the arts (other than for the one field I know best, golf course architecture).

Still, I am struck by the implausible lengths one literary critic had to go to try and debunk the notion that the arts have evolutionary roots. In a recent review in The New Republic (“Art Over Biology”) of three new books each offering their own evolutionary explanations for the appeal of the aesthetic, Adam Kirsch unloads on the entire genre in what reads almost as self-parody.

Kirsch questions how the arts can be explained in terms of survival of the fittest:

In his early story “Tonio Kröger,” Thomas Mann created a parable of one of the central modern beliefs, which is that the artist is unfit for life.…Love and marriage and parenthood are barred to Tonio, because he has an artist’s soul….

You may not have been aware that, on average, artists are relatively lacking in sexual opportunities. But just ask artists and they’ll tell you all about the sacrifices they make for their art. “The artist’s decision to produce spiritual offspring rather than physical ones is thus allied to the monk’s celibacy,” asserts Kirsch, who evidently hasn’t met any of the artists (or monks) I have.

“Do artists have more problems than non-artists, or do they just whine about them more intriguingly?”

As Kirsch explains:

In his great novel Buddenbrooks, Mann tells the story of a family whose fitness to thrive in modern society declines in tandem with the growth of its interest in ideas and art. Its last representative, Hanno, is a musical prodigy who dies an excruciating death before reaching sexual maturity.

I hadn’t been aware that, say, Jimi Hendrix died a virgin, but I may have been misled.

Kirsch has much else to say about art that I found informative. For example:

As Kant famously taught, the very definition of the aesthetic is that it is disinterested.…

This would seem to exclude from the ranks of artists such financially interested—if not downright financially fascinated—individuals as Pablo Picasso and Mick Jagger. Yet Kant can’t be wrong, can he?

Do artists have more problems than non-artists, or do they just whine about them more intriguingly? Everybody has problems, but artists at least have the skills to make theirs interesting. Thus, it’s more edifying to ponder Beethoven grappling heroically with his encroaching deafness than to listen to your Aunt Linda loudly kvetch about how everybody mumbles these days.

In contrast, the simplest theory I can come up with would be that the arts are methods for manipulating other humans’ emotions en masse, and therefore they can be directly useful in acquiring mates and resources to provide for children.

Moreover, the arts demonstrate prowess, which can raise both the artist and the patron’s social status. In the past, artworks frequently served blatantly to polish their rich and powerful sponsors’ reputations: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Even in the more sophisticated modern age, the CIA helped fund the New York school of abstract expressionist painting to boost America’s prestige during the Cold War.

Kirsch, however, doesn’t seem to be acquainted with Wolfe’s status explanations for art’s appeal.

Obviously, unsuccessful artists can have problems getting women, just as unsuccessful warriors often die violently before their reproductive potential is fulfilled. But in the conqueror trade, it’s understood that the genetic losses of the many could be offset by the successes of the few. A 2003 study implied that Genghis Khan was about 800,000 times as successful at passing on his DNA as the average man born in the same era (more than a few of whom Genghis had personally eliminated from the gene pool).

We don’t know if Genghis was actually a frustrated artist or not, but Adolf Hitler was. Mann’s 1938 essay Bruder Hitler brilliantly points out that the Führer possessed an archetypal Romantic artist’s personality:

Must we not, even against our will, recognize in this phenomenon an aspect of the artist’s character?

This suggests that male homosexuality is unlikely to be primarily inherited.

On the other hand, in Mann’s own supremely well-documented family, two of his three sons and one of his three daughters were homosexual like him. (He still wound up with four grandchildren, which is the replacement rate.)

While there is no doubt some correlation between artistic tendencies and male homosexuality, it doesn’t make much sense to argue over art’s biological roots as a proxy for a debate over homosexuality’s biological roots. Mann felt he had to write about his homosexuality indirectly in the guise of his artistry, but unlike Kirsch, we don’t have to blunder down Mann’s misleadingly circuitous path.

 

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