The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [58]
The same capacity for pretend play we instinctively developed as children is exercised every time we pick up a novel or sit down to watch vi sion drama: we then enter into an imaginative set of coherent, related ideas, including ontologies and rules of inference, that make their own world. The imagined world may be as gritty as that portrayed by a Scorsese movie, as remote as the wine-dark seas of Odysseus, as comically surreal as a Road Runner cartoon. But overt resemblance the world of mundane experience is not the issue: many compelling examples of that most adult of art forms, grand opera, present scenes events that are no more “real” than a tea party with teddy bears.
Pretend play predictably occurs among children of all cultures at around eighteen months to two years—about the time that they begin talk and engage socially. This fact, along with the high sophistication decoupling mechanisms that isolate real from pretend worlds, stands evidence that pretend play and fiction-making are isolable, evolved adaptations, forms of specialized intellectual machinery.
The evolutionary basis for these mechanisms is also supported by another fact: The evolutionary basis for these mechanisms is also supported by fact: the universal human fascination with imagined fictions is what we should predict as a properly evolved function for the human mind. Suppose for a moment that human beings only and exclusively took plea sure in what they took to be true narratives, factual reports describe the real world. Evolutionary theory would then have no difficulty in attributing adaptive utility to the plea sure: the human love of true, we would say, had survival value in the Pleistocene. We might argue that just as early Homo sapiens needed to hew sharp adzes know the ways of game animals, so they needed to employ language to describe themselves and their environment and to communicate facts to each other. If humans loved only true stories, there would philosophical “problem of fiction,” because there would be no intentionally constructed fiction in human life: the only alternatives to universally desired truth would be unintentional mistakes or intentional Such Pleistocene Gradgrinds, as evolution might have developed them, would have been about as eager to waste their narrative efforts creating fables and fictions as they would have been to waste their manual labor producing dull adzes. If this strict devotion to the truth, and with it for fantasy and fiction, had developed and had shown clear adaptive to known-to-be-untrue stories and made-up fantasy much as we to uselessly dull knives or, worse, the smell of rotting meat.
Clearly, such Gradgrinds could not possibly have been our most tically contributing ancestors, given the present makeup of the human personality. Human beings across the globe expend staggering amounts time and resources on creating and experiencing fantasies and The human fascination with fiction is so intense that it can amount virtual addiction. A government study in Britain—likely typical industrialized world—showed not long ago that, counting spent going to plays and movies and watching televi sion drama, the Briton spends roughly 6 percent of all waking life attending to dramatic perperformances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours are spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fiction, old and new. Stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are inde pendently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Where writing arrives, used to record fictions. When printing shows up, it is used to reproduce fictions more efficiently. Wherever television appears in the world, soap