The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [122]
Or so it can certainly seem. Yet not everyone is convinced by this cohesion” explanation for the arts. Steven Pinker associates it with theory of group selection in evolution: the idea that strong groups evolved through systems of mutual reciprocity and that traits of group—its size, structure, division of labor, and so forth—are selected at a level above that of the individual. Leaving aside the technical objections to group selection theory as an evolutionary principle ( I find the idea of group selection attractive), the case for it providing an evolved function for the arts seems to me weak. To begin with, working communally to create an object of beauty does not always build social ties. Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? provides a hilarious eyewitness of an opera rehearsal. Tolstoy starts by describing dirty, tired stagehands scolding one another. Their ill-humor does not come close, however, to that of the conductor for the performance. As the tenor to sing, “Home I bring the briide,” the French horn misses a The conductor angrily raps his music stand and denounces the horn what? Cows that you are? You’re corpses!” So they begin again, and stop again, and begin again, for six hours. “Home I bring the briide,” repeated twenty times followed by raps with the stick, scolding, and corrections, the conductor shouting “asses,” “fools,” “idiots,” “swine.” Tolstoy, course, has a larger intention: to argue that elite Eu ropean arts such opera are literally demoralizing, and are therefore not true arts, which definition must tie together the human community. He may wrong in holding that opera is not a proper art, but he is surely right that arts do not always create warm communities.
Music-making spans a spectrum from one extreme of Tolstoy’s opera rehearsal to the other extreme of a choral singer submerging herself glories of the Missa Solemnis or to the intimacy that can come from cooperative satisfactions of making chamber music. I was once discussing Beethoven chamber works with a colleague, a violin professor had played extensively in Europe. I showed him an old LP recording of the Razumovsky quartets that had given me much delight. It photograph of the performing ensemble on the cover, four rather serious-looking gentlemen who together had made a successful career themselves as a string quartet in the 1950s and ’60s. Ah! My friend acquainted with them, and he told me that this particular quartet notorious. These four artists so despised each other that except business, they avoided speaking, and where possible always stayed four different hotels when traveling. Why should this have surprised After all, it is not just music: the worlds of painting and literature equally riven with intense competition, feuds, jealousies for the success of others, and gnawing resentments of every kind.
Pinker objects in general to group selection because he thinks that order for it to work as a valid evolutionary process, the actual structural characteristic of the group—its size, for instance—must be specifically selected for repeatedly across generations in the way that genes are. instead what group selection theory offers is “gluey meta phors”: bonding, social cohesion, cementing relationships, and so forth. This account, Pinker argues, cannot “do justice to the ambivalent mixture of selfish, nepotistic,