Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature (Frontiers of Narrative)

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Useful Fictions

Frontiers of Narrative seri es edi tor David Herman, Ohio State University

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Useful Fictions Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

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m ic hael aus t i n

© 2010 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Austin, Michael, 1966– Useful fictions : evolution, anxiety, and the origins of literature / Michael Austin. p. cm. — (Frontiers of narrative) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-3026-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Fiction—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Fiction—Psychological aspects. 3. Fiction— Appreciation. 4. Evolution in literature. 5. Literature—Philosophy. I. Title. pn3352.p7a87 2010 809.3—dc22 2010001424 Set in Linotype Electra. Designed by A. Shahan.

contents

Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Big Question

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1 Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 2 Stories for Thinking

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3 The Influence of Anxiety 4 Information Anxiety

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5 The Problem of Other People 6 Sex, Lies, and Phenotypes

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7 Deceiving Ourselves and Others Conclusion

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Notes 139 Works Cited Index 165

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1 Architectural spandrels at the Library of Congress Building in Washington dc 14 2 Office used by Brewer & Treyens in 1981 schema experiment 32

acknowledgments

To write at all is to exploit both the patience and the intelligence of one’s friends. A book like this one—which forced its author to acquire familiarity with several disciplines not his own—required even more exploitation than usual. The first inklings of an idea for this book came in 2005, during an honors seminar on human nature that I taught in collaboration with two other Shepherd University professors: Larry Daily from the Department of Psychology and Tom Patterson from the Department of Sociology. Throughout this course, Larry introduced me to the basics of evolutionary psychology, and Tom made sure that I understood why everything about it was totally wrong. Both improved my own thinking immeasurably. During the 2006–2007 school year, Larry continued to mentor me and many other faculty members in a monthly discussion group entitled “Evolution, Cognition, and Culture.” Other members of this group included Laura Renninger, Peter Vila, Don Patchel, Heidi Dobish, Ruth Conley, John Sheridan, Laura Robertson, and Mike Raubertas. The year that we spent reading and discussing work from across the disciplines provided the background information that was necessary for me even to think about writing this book. My thanks go to each of them and to one other colleague from Shepherd—Dr. Burt Lidgerding, Dean of Math and Science and Professor of Biology—who answered a daily stream of “Darwin questions” during the entire time that I was writing Useful Fictions. When I first ventured into the somewhat murky waters of cognitive literary studies, I found several extremely welcoming hands already extended. The first of these belonged to Lisa Zunshine, who has not only written several major books in the field, but who also provided me with constant encouragement, support, and, perhaps most importantly, reading lists as I was beginning work on this project. Lisa read and helped me vii

revise several of the early chapters of Useful Fictions and introduced me to other people whose support has been invaluable. Nancy Easterlin also read several chapters and invited me to be on an “Evolution and Literature” panel that she organized at a joint conference of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association. Kathryn Duncan, another participant in that panel, has over the years stimulated my thinking about evolution and literature through her thoughtful writing and intelligent conversation on topics that we were both exploring. Dennis Dutton published my first attempt at evolutionary criticism in Philosophy and Literature, and his kind words about that article pushed me ever so gently past a psychological tipping point and encouraged me to expand my argument into a book. I am grateful to him and to Philosophy and Literature for permission to reprint material from that article throughout this book. Joseph Carroll and Brian Boyd, who evaluated Useful Fictions for the University of Nebraska Press, provided just the right balance of encouragement and advice necessary to keep the project moving in the right direction. David Herman, editor of the Frontiers of Narrative series, read the entire manuscript twice, both times with extraordinary care and attention, and made suggestions both general and specific that improved the final product significantly. His keen eye and good advice also saved me from more embarrassing mistakes than I deserved to be saved from. Two other people read the entire manuscript in various stages of completion: Tiffany Cunningham, my student assistant at Shepherd University, proofread the first draft ably before submission; her careful work made the entire publication process smoother than it would otherwise have been. Karen Austin, my wife and partner, read and edited two versions of the manuscript; even more importantly, she served as a touchstone and sounding board for nearly every idea in the book. I could never have undertaken this project without her love and support. My children, Porter and Clarissa, have not read the book yet, but I hope that they will some day—and that they will forgive the too many hours that it took their daddy away from his most important job of spending time with them.

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introduction:

The Big Question

Almost all of the phenomena that are central to the humanities are puzzling anomalies from an evolutionary perspective. Chief among these are the human attraction to fictional experience (in all media and genres) and other products of the imagination.

—John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?” The Big Question Here are some of the questions that this book will try to answer: Why do stories with sad endings make us cry? Why do we like scary movies but not scary situations in real life? How is it that we can think of a fictional character as a “friend” whose triumphs thrill us and whose misfortunes cause us pain? Why will we continue to watch a movie or television show that we don’t really like just to see how it turns out? Why can a single summer blockbuster movie earn more than a billion dollars in worldwide box-office receipts and licensing fees? Why, in other words, do we like stories so much—especially fictional ones? That is the big question. On one level, of course, the big question has an easy answer: we like stories because they give us pleasure. But this doesn’t really settle the matter; it just pushes it back to another level. Pleasure is a bribe for us to engage in activities likely to enhance our chances for survival and reproduction. Most of the things that give us pleasure—food, sex, playing with our children, the feeling of satisfaction that comes with solving a difficult problem—are so clearly related to our genetic fitness that there is no need to analyze them further. Some kinds of stories, too, have a clear evolutionary value, such as the narratives that we use to communicate accurate information. As Brian Boyd explains in On the Origins of Stories, it is easy to understand the evolutionary advantage ix

of true stories, since human beings depend on reliable information for almost everything that they do. “But the more we gain from sharing the information in true stories, the less need we would seem to have for the false information of fiction.”1 This is not a trivial problem. Some form of literature or oral storytelling plays an important role in every human culture. We devote enormous resources to the pursuit of fictional information—books, movies, television programs, interactive video games, and just sitting on the front porch bragging about things we have never done—that have no obvious impact on our survival or reproduction. Daniel Dennett writes in Freedom Evolves that “any phenomenon that apparently exceeds the functional cries out for explanation. We don’t marvel at a creature doggedly grubbing in the earth with its nose for we figure it is seeking its food; if, however, it regularly interrupts its rooting with somersaults, we want to know why.”2 Given the enormous effort required to compose something like Remembrance of Things Past—whose author died young without contributing a single gene to the pool—evolutionists might be forgiven for seeing literature as the cognitive equivalent of a pig doing backflips. Over the last few years, scholars in both literature and cognitive psychology have proposed a number of ingenious answers to the big question. I will summarize a number of these answers in Chapter One and will draw heavily on several of them for the remainder of the book. But since it is a big question it has room for many answers. My own answer to the question relies on the concept of “useful fictions”—a fairly common concept in philosophical discussions whose meaning must be tweaked just a bit before we can use it in a discussion of the evolutionary origins of literature. The word “useful” will require only modest tweaking. We are used to defining usefulness in reference to ourselves. Something is useful to the extent that it helps us achieve our goals, which usually involve being wealthy, happy, healthy, popular, or the like. In evolutionary terms, however, something is useful only to the extent that it helps an organism pass its genes on to other organisms. Nothing else matters. Natural selection did not design us to be happy, and it doesn’t care whether or not we are emotionally fulfilled. It operates through a strict, methodical, and very simple set of rules: 1) organisms that survive and reproduce x Introduction

leave copies of their genes behind—including copies of whatever genes constructed the physical or mental characteristics that helped them survive and reproduce; 2) organisms that do not survive long enough to reproduce leave no copies of their genes behind; so 3) over long periods of time, genes that help organisms to survive and reproduce will tend to dominate within a population. These are the terms upon which I will base my judgments about what makes a fiction useful. The word “fiction” is more problematic, as it has several distinct connotations that are relevant to this study. Literary critics often try to limit the definition of the term to something like, in Dorrit Cohn’s words, “a literary nonreferential narrative text.” As Cohn notes, however, at least four other uses of the word have crept into literary discussions: “fiction as untruth, fiction as conceptual abstraction, fiction as in (all) literature, and fiction as (all) narrative.”3 For Cohn, these are all distractions that divert our attention away from the kinds of fictional texts that literary critics ought to be criticizing. For the most part, I agree with this sentiment. I am not interested in contributing to what Marie-Laure Ryan characterizes as the postmodern “destabilization of the borderline between fiction and nonfiction.”4 I have no desire to show that what we call “fact” is just another species of fiction, nor do I believe that we can only have access to factual discourse through the narrative tools of the fabulist. Truth with a capital “T” can rest safely for the remainder of this book. In attempting to trace the possible evolutionary basis of our attraction to literary fictions, however, I do not limit my discussion of “fiction” to the self-consciously made-up stories that Cohn sees as the most legitimate object of literary study. This kind of fiction developed too recently to be the subject of the kind of evolutionary analysis that I am proposing. In my attempt to understand how such fictions became attractive to human beings, I will need to consider at least two of Cohn’s alternate and competing definitions of the term: 1) fiction as untruth, and 2) fiction as conceptual abstraction. I incorporate these other definitions, not to advance a specific understanding of what fiction should mean in a literary sense, but to address issues of counterfactuality and adaptation that are crucial to the evolutionary argument that I am making. Some of the most elemental fictions that I will examine are examples of Cohn’s first definition, fiction as untruth—or to revise slightly, fiction Introduction

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as non-fact. This definition, which still retains great semantic force in set phrases such as “pure fiction” or “fact verses fiction,” bears directly on a central question of this book: “why did natural selection—with its well-documented tendency to reward the use of factual information— design creatures who are universally attracted to non-facts?” All kinds of non-facts are relevant to this line of inquiry—mistaken beliefs, deliberate deceptions, convenient generalizations, counterfactual propositions, and, of course, novels and plays. But before we can understand the evolutionary function of literature, we must first grapple with the adaptive value of non-factual information generally. And it is from this perspective only that I consider examples from this very broad definition of “fiction.” My discussion also owes much to Cohn’s second definition of the word, fiction as conceptual abstraction. These are the fictions created by philosophers and mathematicians as thought experiments or theoretical placeholders—things like negative numbers and pre-societal states of nature. One of the best-known discussions of conceptual fictions is Hans Vaihinger’s 1925 classic The Philosophy of “As If.” The consummate pragmatist, Vaihinger believed that human inquiry—especially scientific inquiry—was forever in the position of trying to know and describe the unknowable and indescribable. For Vaihinger, we all resort to conceptual abstractions of one sort or another—and then proceed as if they were true—because the alternative is complete cognitive paralysis. Jeremy Campbell aptly sums up both Vaihinger’s definition of “fiction” and its relationship to Darwinian natural selection in his book The Liar’s Tale: Given [the] impossible aspirations of the intellect, Vaihinger suggested it would be better not to chase after absolute truth, but rather to acquire knowledge by means of ideas we know to be false, but nevertheless are of great practical usefulness in accessing reality. These ideas he called “fictions”. . . . Vaihinger saw an intimate connection between these serviceable untruths and “what Darwinism calls useful illusions formed by natural selection”. . . . The world of such figments is just as important as the world of the so-called real or actual, he stressed, and far more consequential when it comes to ethics and aesthetics.5 xii Introduction

These “serviceable untruths” stand between non-facts and invented stories. They are generally not narrative in content, and they are often not even communicated to other people. Rather, they are propositions that we use when accessing, storing, and processing the information that we need to survive. We employ them as if they were true, even though we know that they are not—which distinguishes them from mistaken beliefs, deliberate deceptions, and other things that are fictions only under the first definition of the word. For my purposes in this book, then, I shall define a “useful fiction,” as “any statement, proposition, narrative, or piece of information whose adaptive function does not require it to be true.” Useful fictions contribute to our chances of surviving and reproducing whether or not they are accurate because their purpose is to do something other than convey accurate information. It is precisely this phenomenon that the well-known evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson remarks upon in Darwin’s Cathedral. “Clearly, I need to accurately perceive the location of a rabbit to hit it with my throwing stick,” he acknowledges. “However, there are many, many other situations in which it can be adaptive to distort reality. . . . Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world.”6

What Hath Thag Wrought Useful fictions, I will argue, have been a basic component of hominid cognition for millions of years and provided the cognitive scaffolding upon which our well-documented love of fictional stories might well have been built. To explore this concept further, I must now invoke a (hopefully useful) fiction of my own: an intrepid Pleistocene huntergatherer named Thag, who lived some one hundred thousand years ago on the African Savannah.7 Three stories from Thag’s life will illustrate the concept of the useful fiction: Scenario One: One morning some of the members of Thag’s group inform him of an impending disaster: a sick hippopotamus has died in the spring and is decomposing slowly in their only source of fresh water. The water is undrinkable, and many of the children are showing early signs of dehydration. What can they do? Thag pauses for a moment and tells them a story: a week or so ago, he Introduction

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was hunting over the far hill and saw several animals drinking at a large watering hole. He tells the members of the tribe exactly how to get to this watering hole, and everyone picks up their belongings and moves immediately. When they get there, they see a fresh spring with more than enough water for everybody, and the group is saved. Scenario Two: That same night, Thag is lying in his cave, unable to sleep. For several days he has been hearing a strange “caw, caw” sound outside, and he remembers his mother telling him that the spirit of death always comes with the sound of “caw, caw” to take people in their sleep. Thag is terrified that death will come for him in the night if he allows himself to go to sleep, so he has been forcing himself to stay awake. He knows that this is starting to affect him during the day. He is running slower and hunting less, and yesterday he almost fell off of a cliff while trying to walk back to camp. In order to keep himself awake, Thag decides to take a walk outside, and, as he is walking, he sees an unfamiliar black bird flying out of a nearby cave. With enormous relief, Thag decides that the noises have been coming from this bird all along. He goes back into his cave and, within seconds, is enjoying the best sleep he has had in weeks. Scenario Three: Two days later, Thag is out hunting by himself again in an unfamiliar part of the savannah. As he is passing a large bush, he hears an ominous rustling of leaves. He immediately concludes that it is a dangerous animal and sprints back to camp as fast as he can move. He never finds out what the noise was, but he is glad to be back home safe and sound. In the first scenario, Thag’s narrative has survival value only if it is true. If the water is where he says it is, then he and all of the members of his group will survive to hunt and gather another day. If it is not, they will all die, along with their children, removing their genes from the human pool forever. In the second scenario, the truth of the proposition is incidental to its survival value. Thag needs to sleep so he can have the strength to hunt, gather, and evade predators in the morning. Any proposition that xiv Introduction

allows him to sleep has value, whether or not it is true. It could well be the black bird making the “caw, caw” noise. But it could just as easily be something else. It simply doesn’t matter what is making the noise (unless it really is the spirit of death); the only thing that matters is that Thag find a way to get some sleep. In the third scenario, there might actually be a negative correlation between the probable truth of the proposition and its adaptive value. The noise could be coming from a dangerous predator, or it could be coming from a harmless animal. But Thag must choose immediately whether or not to flee. Stopping to ascertain the truth could be fatal. Even if the odds overwhelmingly favor a harmless animal, it is still a good idea to run away. Let’s suppose that, in Thag’s world, ninety-nine percent of strange noises come from harmless animals like squirrels and rabbits, while only one percent come from dangerous predators like lions and tigers. This means that Thag will be wrong ninety-nine out of every one hundred times that he assumes danger and runs away. If he were to make the statistically defensible assumption that every noise he hears is a harmless animal, he would have the intellectual satisfaction of being right ninety-nine percent of the time; however, he would also be dead one percent of the time—which would be far worse for his Darwinian fitness than running away from cute, harmless creatures every day of his life. A proposition that has a ninety-nine percent chance of being true is, in this instance, far less useful to Thag than one that is only a rounding error away from being one hundred percent false. The second and third scenarios present clear examples of useful fictions in action. They also introduce another important topic of this book: the propositions and narratives that we generate in response to anxiety. Anxiety is one of our deepest and oldest responses to the environment; its evolutionary roots precede the arrival of hominids by hundreds of millions of years. In most organisms, anxiety most often takes the form of a fight-or-flight response to potential predators. However, humans think largely in narratives—even when faced with mortal danger—so our anxiety always has a narrative component. Therefore, so must its resolution. In this book, I will pursue the following chain of reasoning in an attempt to illustrate the role of anxiety in the evolution of literature: 1) human cognition is inextricably bound up with the creation of narratives that frame our sensory perceptions; 2) when Introduction

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we experience anxiety we feel compelled to resolve it, and this resolution often involves the creation of a narrative; 3) the narratives that we generate do not always have to be true in order to respond successfully to anxiety— in many cases counterfactual narratives work better than the truth; 4) the “useful fictions” humans evolved to create in response to anxiety were available to form part of the cognitive design space in which fiction, storytelling, and other narratives we call “literature” developed. The first two chapters will set out the foundational assumptions of this study. Chapter One surveys different theories of the adaptive value of literature and situates them within a discussion of evolutionary spandrels, or tools created in the cognitive design space of other adaptations. Chapter Two examines the role of narrative in cognitive functioning, setting up the argument that storytelling and literary fictions evolved in the design space provided by these more basic internal narratives. The next three chapters explore the role of fictional narratives in resolving various kinds of anxiety: Chapter Three discusses the physiological experience of anxiety and its core connection to narrative processing; Chapter Four discusses anxieties over information deficits; and Chapter Five discusses anxieties caused by other people. The final chapters of the book deal with the fiction (in the “non-fact” sense of the word) of deception—a primary cause of anxiety in our interactions with others. Chapter Six looks, not only at why we deceive others, but at why we often derive some kind of benefit from believing, or at least accepting, communications intended to deceive us. Chapter Seven continues this argument by examining the phenomenon of self-deception as an evolutionary useful strategy. Most chapters also contain at least one extended analysis of a literary text, usually in the form of a case study related to the central argument of the chapter. These analyses form a crucial part of my study for two reasons. First, they demonstrate the connections between the kinds of small, locally generated narratives that I am discussing in the chapter and at least one cultural narrative that has come to be considered important. Since my purpose is to argue for the usefulness of fictions, some demonstration of how a clearly acknowledged fiction can form a useful case study strikes me as an imperative. But I also hope to show with these analyses that an evolutionary approach to the origins of ficxvi Introduction

tions in general can open up interesting avenues for studying specific fictions and specific authors. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize the highly speculative nature of trying to say anything about either human cognition or human evolution. We know very little about how the brain works today, and even less about how it worked five hundred thousand years ago. The scholarly literature on evolution and literature, though still very young, is already crowded with books and articles attempting to explain the cognitive basis of all storytelling and literature. I have no such expectations for the simple chain of assumptions in this book. Evolution has been going on for a very long time, balancing an unimaginably large number of interrelated factors with each new generation. I would be very surprised to discover that the human love of stories could be attributed to a single evolutionary cause. And even if it could, I would be utterly astonished if this cause could be rooted out once and for all by a literary critic whose formal scientific training consists of a single gen-ed chemistry course taken in 1984. I fully acknowledge that criticism is a consummate fiction—and rarely a useful one at that. Nothing in this book will help you hunt, gather, build shelters, find mates, produce offspring, or raise children to adulthood. I do believe, however, that the current work being done on evolution and human cognition in a dozen different disciplines is both exciting and important—exciting because it has the potential to provide real answers to questions that have always been considered unanswerable, and important because the answers to these questions may someday help us solve problems that have always been considered unsolvable. Before this can happen, several enormously complicated puzzles have to be solved. My great ambition for Useful Fictions is simply that it will contribute in some way—either by being right or by being wrong—to that effort.

Introduction

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Useful Fictions

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4 Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose And Scheherazade perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say. Then quoth Dunyazad, “O my sister, how pleasant is thy tale, and how tasteful; how sweet and how grateful!” She replied, “And what is this compared with that I could tell thee, the night to come, if I live and the King spare me?” Then thought the King, “By Allah, I will not slay her until I hear the rest of her tale, for truly it is wondrous.”

—Richard Frances Burton’s translation of The Book of One Thousand Nights and A Night

Scheherazade’s Gambit We begin this study—as so many previous studies of storytelling have begun—with perhaps the most impressive collection of stories in human history: The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, often called, simply, The Arabian Nights. Though this collection contains hundreds of individual stories, all of the stories are placed within the context of a single frame tale: the story of Scheherazade and Shahryar. This famous tale begins three years after the great Sultan Shahryar vowed to avenge his wife’s infidelity by marrying a new woman each night and executing her the following morning. Determined to put a stop to this barbaric practice, Scheherazade forces her father, the royal vizier, to allow her to marry the sultan, assuring her father that she has a plan to end the bloody practice. Her plan is simple: every night Scheherazade tells Shahryar a story, or a fragment of a story, that ends somewhere in the middle of the action. Many of these stories are didactic, and some 1

are even thinly veiled allegories of Shahryar’s own situation, but Scheherazade aims to do more than simply rehabilitate the sultan with pedagogically sound morality tales. She weaves her stories together, often using multiple frames and levels of embedded narrative, to make sure that the night always ends in the middle of at least one story, and each morning, the sultan postpones his death sentence for one day so that he can hear the story’s conclusion. Over many centuries the story of Scheherazade became a platform for introducing other stories that had filtered into the Muslim world from Arabia, China, Western Europe, Africa, India, the Byzantine Empire, and anywhere else that touched or was touched by the Muslim world. At the height of Islam’s golden age, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca brought together devoted Muslims from Samarkand to Spain to worship but also to trade goods and stories—many of which found their way back to Baghdad and into the rapidly expanding text of The Arabian Nights. Unlike other famous Medieval frame narratives such as The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron, The Arabian Nights has no single author, no fixed table of contents, no date of composition, and no standard version that can be considered authoritative. While many of the earliest stories in the collection are clearly related to the story of Scheherazade and Shahryar, as the collection grew the frame became a platform to introduce stories gathered from all over the world and place them into a somewhat coherent whole.1 In the current critical environment, The Arabian Nights has once again become a platform, not for new stories, but for new interpretations of the role of literature in society. The book itself offers contemporary literary critics a nearly inexhaustible trove of narrative treasures that, with amazing precision, incorporates most of the major concerns of modern criticism: colonialism, Orientalism, patriarchal oppression, ambiguous gender roles, intertextuality, disputed authorship, complex narrative patterns, and so on. In this critical environment Scheherazade— the woman who saves her people with stories—offers critics of all kinds a way to explore the function and value of literature. For example, a prominent Freudian introduces Scheherazade as a classic example of a “superego-dominated ego which has become so cut off from selfish id that it is ready to risk the person’s very existence to obey a moral obligation.” A well-known feminist critic sees her as “a sexual being, 2

Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose

who manipulates discourse (and men) through her body.” One of the world’s best known Marxist-historicist scholars of fairy tales sees Scheherazade’s stories as conveying “the aspirations and wishes of a strong middle class . . . who, like Sinbad and Junar, continually take risks to make their fortune.”2 From any perspective that we choose to view it, the story of Scheherazade speaks to a deep human need for stories. Scheherazade’s gambit succeeds—with the Sultan and with readers everywhere—because it taps into this need. Stories have been a source of pleasure for human beings for a long time—much longer than there have been writing systems to record them. During all this time, as Paul Hernadi writes, “the pleasure of succumbing to literary seduction has long served as a psychological reward for what was once and perhaps still is a biologically advantageous thing to do.”3 Scheherazade’s stories give Shahryar pleasure—more pleasure, arguably, than the sexual encounters that precede them. In more than a thousand marriages (assuming Shahryar executed his plan for three full years before Scheherazade), sexual pleasure never entices the sultan to suspend his vow. With a vast empire full of potential wives he need never fear an end to such pleasures. However, the pool of wives who can tell stories and bring another kind of pleasure to the marriage bed is much smaller. The pleasure of narrative alone cannot explain Scheherazade’s success; if it could, she would not have to end each night in the middle of a story. Unlike the three characters in her first tale, “Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” each of whom trades the pleasure of a good story for a portion of the trader’s life, Scheherazade would be unable to trade a single day’s life for the pleasure that her stories afford the sultan. Her plan depends on a different emotion produced by narrative: anxiety. Scheherazade’s cliffhangers work on Shahryar for the same reason that cliffhangers work on us today: we expect to find out what happens in a story, and we experience tremendous anxiety when this expectation is frustrated. Anxiety is as deeply rooted in our biology as pleasure. Most of the things that produce anxiety in people—like snakes, spiders, fire, high places, parental separation, contaminated surfaces, and unknown social situations—constitute real threats to our survival. Though knowing the end of one of his wife’s stories will not help Shahryar survive or reproduce (except possibly with Scheherazade), the anxiety that he Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 3

feels when confronted with an incomplete narrative is similar to what he might feel were a snake in his bed. Shahryar is not unique in the way he responds to fictional stories, of course. Almost everyone has at one time or another felt deep anxiety and emotional distress over the plight of a fictional character. A growing body of psychological research suggests that both our minds and our bodies respond to factual and fictional information in strikingly similar ways. In one study, for example, Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock examined how labeling a story either “fiction” or “nonfiction” affects the reader’s engagement with the narrative. Subjects were asked to read a graphic story entitled “Murder in the Mall,” which was adapted from a bestselling work of nonfiction. Some of the subjects were told that the story was true; others were told that it was fiction. With a survey instrument designed to measure reader engagement (or, in the author’s words, “transportation” into a narrative), Green and Brock found that the two different labels “did not affect transportation, critical scrutiny, or attitude change.” “Perceived verisimilitude,” they conclude, “appeared to override the fiction label.”4 In a later study, Green, Brock, and two other collaborators found that, even though labeling a narrative as “factual” did cause heightened scrutiny among readers, the “fact” and “fiction” labels had no effect on a narrative’s persuasiveness.5 These and other experimental results simply confirm what Shahryar and most other consumers of fiction have always known: human beings respond to fiction in a way that is remarkably similar to the way they respond to facts. Not knowing how a fictional story ends can fill us with anxiety, and seeing a beloved character die can cause us real grief and pain. In more ways than we can count, fictional characters and invented situations—in books, movies, television programs, and wherever else they may appear—can engage our interests, move our emotions, and challenge our intellects every bit as much as their counterparts in the real world.

Literature as Adaptation The sociobiology of the 1970s—once on the ropes for its supposed racist and sexist tendencies—has rebounded and served as an inspiration for diverse and important areas of inquiry, such as evolutionary psychology, Darwinian medicine, population demographics, cognitive neuroscience, 4

Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose

and evolutionary anthropology. The early research by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Robert Trivers, William Hamilton, and Robert M. Axelrod has now been explained and expanded in bestselling books by some of this generation’s most gifted writers such as Stephen Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared M. Diamond, Matt Ridley, and Edward O. Wilson. Though literary critics and other humanists have not yet embraced the new evolutionary synthesis wholeheartedly, increasing numbers have succumbed to the siren song of the truth of scientific answers in a field long governed by perpetual questions. They have begun to use this enormous body of evolutionary theory to try to answer some of our deepest questions: “Why do we respond to beauty?” “Why do we enjoy fictional narratives?” “Why do feel compelled to make up stories?”6 To the chagrin of those who practice cognitive literary criticism, some of the brightest lights in the field of evolutionary psychology have labeled the creative arts as “byproducts” of other evolutionary adaptations. Steven Pinker, for example, famously argues that artistic pursuits in music, art, and many forms of literature are “pleasure technologies” (like drugs, pornography, and cheesecake) that are “designed to defeat the locks that safeguard our pleasure buttons and to press the buttons in various combinations.” Pinker has often been taken to task by scholars in these fields for callously devaluing their cherished subjects.7 He responds unequivocally: “It is wrong to invent functions for activities that lack . . . design merely because we want to ennoble them with the imprimatur of biological adaptiveness.”8 At least partly in response to Pinker, evolutionary-minded literary critics have proposed a number of different functions for literary narratives that justify the classification of literature as a specific evolutionary adaptation. The logic behind these assertions is compelling: any behavior that diverts resources away from food production and mate selection must have an adaptive function or it would have been eliminated by the ruthless efficiency of natural selection. The fact that literature exists and appears to be universal would therefore seem to prove that it must somehow enhance genetic fitness inherently rather than as an accidental byproduct of something else. As Dennis Dutton reminds us, however, simply pointing to the continued existence of literature and storytelling does not constitute an argument about their adaptive function. “A thoroughScheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 5

going Darwinism makes a specific demand,” he explains. “Nothing can be proposed as an adaptive function of fiction unless it explains how the human appetite for fictional narratives acted to increase, however marginally, the chances of our Pleistocene forbearers surviving and procreating.”9 Some of the most common adaptive functions proposed in response to this challenge are as follows: knowledge transfer

One of the most obvious advantages to stories is that they help to preserve and convey information. Human beings inhabit an evolutionary niche in which their success depends on their ability to gather and interpret information. However, as Michelle Scalise Sugiyama points out, “acquiring information firsthand can be costly, inefficient, and downright risky. . . . Moreover, it is extremely improbable that a single individual could acquire through experience all information necessary or potentially useful to the multitude of fitness-related tasks encountered over a lifetime.”10 Scalise Sugiyama proposes a number of ways that stories might have contributed to the transfer of adaptively useful information among early humans: they encourage the sharing of information within groups, they can preserve crucial information across multiple generations, they are “strikingly memorable” and make the information they contain easy to recall, and they create a rough simulation of reality from which people can derive useful content. Oral narratives can preserve for posterity a store of communal knowledge—the records of how previous generations solved problems relating to such vital areas as gathering food, avoiding predators, curing illnesses, and dealing with “environmental fluctuations that occur at intervals longer than the average human lifespan.”11 Along with preserving information vital to survival, stories and narratives can also transmit a community’s expectations and values. Stories can teach us that our culture expects men to be virtuous, like Odysseus or Rama, and women to be virtuous and submissive, like Penelope or Sita. Stories can tell us that sons must avenge their fathers at all costs, as Orestes did or an entire community could end up suffering the fate of Hamlet’s Denmark. Stories can explain the value that a community places on ceasing to strive after worldly ambitions, of treating wounded travelers kindly, or of submitting absolutely to a divine power. Stories 6

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can even illustrate—as Scheherazade’s do—the value and importance of telling stories. The values conveyed through stories might have real survival value (When walking through the woods alone, don’t stray from the path) or they may reflect arbitrary cultural values (If your brother dies while attacking the city, bury him, no matter what your uncle the king thinks). Stories of either kind are valuable, the former for obvious reasons and the latter because those who understand the values and expectations of their communities have a greater chance of surviving, and a much greater chance of reproducing, than those who do not. making special

In her books, What Is Art For? (1990) and Homo Aestheticus (1992), Ellen Dissanayake advances the theory that the purpose of art—including the literary art of poetry, narrative, and drama—is to make certain objects, ideas, and spaces “special” or to attach them to a conceptual realm set off and elevated from normal day-to-day experience. “At some point in their evolution,” Dissanayake argues, “humans begin deliberately to set out to make things special or extra-ordinary, perhaps for the purpose of influencing the outcome of important events that were seen as uncertain or troubling.” Art is one way that we create the extraordinary; two others are play, through which we exercise our imaginations and engage in counterfactual pretense, and ritual, through which we create communal responses to our deepest fears and anxieties. “In play, ritual, and art,” she concludes, “things [are] less real or more real than everyday reality.”12 The evolutionary payoff of the ability to make things special is social cohesion. Ritual and art both “unit[e] their participants and their audiences in one mood”; consequently, “everyone shares in the same occasion of patterned emotion” and “the hard-edges of their customary isolation from each other are softened or melted together or their everyday taken-for-granted comradeship is reinforced.” Though Dissanayake does not make the claim that art and literature facilitate cohesion through some kind of group selection, she does argue that the ability to mark certain phenomenon as beyond the ordinary constitutes “a behavioral tendency that helped individuals who possessed it (and by extension a social group whose members had it) to survive better than individuals and groups who lacked the tendency.”13 Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 7

proposition testing

Many scholars—including Pinker himself—have proposed that literature might have evolved as a way to test potentially useful propositions that do not represent a current reality. Pinker proposes that the two Horatian functions of literature—to delight and to instruct—must be considered separately: “It is helpful,” he writes, “to distinguish the delight, perhaps the product of a useless technology for pressing our pleasure buttons, from the instruction, perhaps a product of a cognitive adaptation.” For Pinker, then, the “poetic” functions of literature—rhyme, meter, pleasant images, and the like—are evolutionarily unimportant, but the scenarios that literature creates may be adaptive because they allow us to create a store of potential solutions to problems that we may someday face. “Life is like chess,” Pinker argues, “and plots are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.”14 Because stories can create worlds that in many respects look like our own, they allow us to posit and manipulate different counterfactual problems to see how various solutions might work out. Modern computer simulations are just sophisticated “narrative builders” designed for this purpose; their essential function has been carried out by stories for thousands of years. I can still recall, for example, the elaborate plans I made for bird-proofing my house after seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds on television for the first time during my junior year of high school. The narrative in the film provoked my response and allowed me to “see,” by following them through to their logical conclusions, which of my plans might actually prevent my family from being killed by armies of avian kamikazes. Though the exact scenario portrayed in Hitchcock’s film may never be encountered in the real world, the security plans it inspired might be useful in any number of situations—from fending off predators to saving money on my heating bill. cognitive play

In his magisterial book On the Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd asserts that art, and specifically fiction, should be viewed as “a kind of cognitive play . . . designed to engage human attention through [its] appeal to our attention and to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information.”15 This definition, though simple, is remarkably 8

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suggestive. It helps explain why stories are so pleasurable and may be valuable. Physical play, which is common among adolescents in many cultures, often helps the young exercise important adaptive skills such as predator avoidance (“hide-and-seek,” “tag”) or intraspecies combat (“cowboys-and-Indians,” “war”). In the same way, the cognitive “game” of fiction reading might help humans exercise critical mental functions—especially those that facilitate interactions with others. As Boyd argues, “the high intensity of pretend play and fiction and their rapid switches of place, time, and perspective must make social cognition, like any other well-learned and much practiced skill, faster, more efficient, and more accurate, and speed up the capacity to guide and redirect social attention.”16 This notion of fiction as a cognitive workout is central to Lisa Zunshine’s argument in the crucial book Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Zunshine argues that literature trains us to use verbal and nonverbal cues to infer another person’s thoughts and feelings. To prosper in any social environment we must be able to understand other minds and use this understanding to predict behavior. Like most human endeavors, however, reading other minds takes practice. Literature allows us to practice interpersonal skills in an environment that minimizes the consequences of mistakes. Misreading the intentions of a powerful multimillionaire in real life could have disastrous results; misreading Mr. Darcy’s intentions in Pride and Prejudice allows us to learn from our mistakes without suffering any real consequences. Zunshine argues that fictional representations of reality allow us to encounter fictional minds so that we can get what Zunshine refers to as a “pleasurable and intensive work out for [our] Theory of Mind.”17 sexual advertisement

In his 2000 book, The Mating Mind, psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that sexual selection had a larger role in the development of human culture than what is commonly assumed. The creative arts, he suggests, function in the same way as the peacock’s tail or the bowerbird’s nest: they advertise sexual fitness. “The great challenge facing artists,” Miller argues, “is to demonstrate their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive.”18 Miller’s argument does not require Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 9

that artistic creations contribute to survival (though it certainly does not preclude the possibility either). According to the peculiar, frustratingly circular logic of sexual selection, a trait can be sexually attractive simply because it is considered sexually attractive. In fact, cumbersome ornaments such as an elaborate tail actually slow a peacock down and increase its chances of being caught by a predator. However, once members of one gender within a population consider an attribute of the opposite gender to be attractive—even if they do so for reasons that are random or based on erroneous perceptions—selection pressure to pass that trait on to offspring will tend to distribute that attribute throughout the entire population, thus increasing their sexual attractiveness.19 However, Miller makes more claims about storytelling’s ability to increases sexual attractiveness than he does about the other creative arts. He argues—using Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac as an example—that a male’s ability to craft a good story demonstrates intelligence and, therefore, the ability to acquire resources. Intriguingly, Miller also argues that storytelling forms part of a female mating approach that he calls “The Scheherazade Strategy” after the ubiquitous heroine of The Arabian Nights. The Scheherazade Strategy arises in women as a response to the male tendency to lose interest in a mate after she has born children. Such roguery makes eminent biological sense: after a man has had several children with a woman and she is nearing the end of her childbearing years, the man has a strong genetic incentive to find a younger mate who can continue to bear children. Women, on the other hand, have a similarly strong incentive to keep men around to provide resources for them and their children. This requires that women find ways to “keep men sexually attracted to them over the long term.” Miller sees the story of Scheherazade and Shahryar as an extreme example of this conflict of interests, with storytelling becoming tactic to keep a man sexually interested in a woman: The pressures on Scheherazade were intense. Given a sexually jaded despot obsessed with his paternity uncertainty and caught in a pathologically short-term mating strategy, how could she elicit the long-term investment in herself and her offspring? Her verbal courtship ability proved her salvation. She invented stories that kept him entertained, and which persuaded him of her intelligence, creativity, and fitness.20 10

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mental organization

Finally, this proposed adaptive function of literature and storytelling is one that has been advanced by some of the most well-known figures in both evolutionary psychology and literary criticism, including John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. Tooby and Cosmides, whose work has formed much of the foundation of the discipline, argue that “the kind of truth conveyed in art . . . consists of the increased mental organization that our minds extract from experiencing art.” Though they are skeptical of the proposal that narrative is itself a cognitive adaptation, they suggest that our minds might be hard wired to sequence the information that we receive from others “in a form that resembles individual experience.”21 Because our experience of reality is sequential and (to our minds) purposeful, narrative structures provide a comfortable way to structure information that we receive from multiple sources. Deriving pleasure from narrative, therefore, is a way to train humans to sequence information in ways that allow the information to be used to enhance fitness. Literary critics have expanded this argument to create stronger arguments for literature as an adaptation designed to help integrate radically dissimilar aspects of our cognitive architecture. The human mind evolved over hundreds of millions of years and contains some of the same instincts and reflexes as the minds of early primates, small mammals, reptiles, and other early living things. These instincts exist uncomfortably with some of the more complex cognitive traits that are unique to humans. Joseph Carroll, an early pioneer of evolutionary criticism, argues that an essential evolutionary function of literature is to reconcile the “old” and the “new” parts of the human mind: Works of literature thus form a point of intersection between the most emotional, subjective parts of the mind and the most abstract and cerebral. This feature of literature is not incidental to its adaptive function. Literature provides imaginative structures within which people can integrate the ancient, conserved elements of their nature—elements conserved from pre-mammalian systems of approach/avoidance, mammalian affectional systems, and systems of primate sociality—with the conceptual, thematic structures through which they make abstract, theoretical sense of the world in which they live.22 Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 11

None of these proposed evolutionary functions of literature exclude any of the others. Natural selection almost always works on multiple factors and in multiple directions at the same time, and all of these functions contribute to an evolutionary explanation of literature that I find extremely compelling. That said, it does not follow from any of these proposed functions that literature and storytelling be seen as specific adaptations for literature and storytelling. As I argued in the introduction, the universal presence of literature in human cultures requires an evolutionary explanation, but that is not the same as saying that storytelling itself must be an evolutionary adaptation. There is, I believe, enough room between “specific adaptation” and “mere byproduct” to carve out a meaningful evolutionary rationale for the human love of stories.

Dr. Pangloss’s Nose The tendency to see storytelling as a specific adaptation flows from a compelling, though ultimately flawed, argument about the way evolution works: that any behavior that diverts resources away from food production and mate selection must be an adaptation or it would have been eliminated by the ruthless efficiency of natural selection. Literary endeavors, therefore, must enhance genetic fitness in some way, so all we need to do is figure out how. One of the greatest satires of this kind of logic, Voltaire’s Candide, was published in 1759, exactly one hundred years before Darwin’s The Origin of Species. In Candide the hero’s tutor, Dr. Pangloss, argues consistently that despite unimaginable suffering the world we live in must logically be “the best of all possible worlds”: Since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose. Observe, our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Legs were clearly intended for breeches, and we wear them. Stones were meant for carving and for building houses, and that is why my lord has a most beautiful house. . . . And since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all the year round. It follows that those who maintain that all is right talk nonsense; they ought to say that all is for the best.23 In a 1979 article, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin became the first to apply Voltaire’s satire—originally intended as a critique of 12

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism—to contemporary debates in evolutionary biology. They criticize the “Panglossian paradigm” of contemporary adaptationist thinking which “regards natural selection as so powerful and the constraints upon it so few that direct production of adaptation through its operation becomes the primary cause of nearly all organic form, function, and behaviour.”24 To combat what they see as the Panglossian excesses of some evolutionary biologists, Gould and Lewontin offer a metaphor from the world of architecture: a “spandrel,” or a triangular space created between an arch and another arch or between an arch and a rectangular enclosure. In the great Cathedral of San Marco in Venice, the spandrels are elaborately designed, “so harmonious and purposeful that we are tempted to view it as the starting point of any analysis, as the cause in some sense of the surrounding architecture.”25 Nonetheless, the space these elaborate designs inhabit is simply the consequence of putting a round arch in a rectangular frame. Though Gould and Lewonton have never presented it as such, the evolutionary spandrel has often been considered something inferior, or at least less functional, than a full-fledged adaptation. This, in turn, has forced discussions of literature onto an unnecessary dichotomy, which John Tooby and Leda Cosmides articulate in “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?” They insist that there can only be two evolutionary explanations for the creative arts: they must either be 1) “the functional products of adaptations that are designed to produce this engagement”; or 2) “an accidental and functionless byproduct . . . of adaptations that evolved to serve functions that have nothing to do with the arts per se.”26 With this dichotomy governing the debate, it is no wonder that literary critics have felt compelled to posit specific adaptive functions for their craft. But let’s go back to the original spandrels of San Marco. The mosaics that Gould and Lewontin describe are not themselves “spandrels”; they are beautiful works of art created in the space produced by an architectural design. The design space, not the design, is the “spandrel,” and, therefore, the byproduct of something else. We can get a better understanding of this concept by applying evolutionary logic to Dr. Pangloss’s naïve optimism about noses and spectacles. Noses have been designed to perform a function that has obvious survival value—just think how many of our ancestors were saved from Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 13

1. Spandrels at the Library of Congress Building in Washington dc. Photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran. Use authorized under the gnu Free Documentation License.

rancid food by their ability to smell. Spectacles enhance our ability to see, thereby giving us important information about our environment. For those who need corrective lenses, spectacles have a much greater survival value than the noses they rest on. It does not follow, as Pangloss believes, that noses were designed to hold spectacles; but spectacles are not a “functionless side-effect of nasal design” or “tactile cheesecake” that somehow tickle pleasure sensors on our faces. Spectacles were designed to exploit part of our facial architecture to serve a valuable function that, while not part of the face’s original design, is no less adaptive in the current environment than the nasal cartilage that holds them up. Once invented, spectacles spread quickly by cultural diffusion to become, within just a few hundred years, an important tool available to nearly all humans. So it is with the tools used by the mind. Humans did not evolve specific cognitive mechanisms for reading newspapers, computing quadratic equations, or programming computers. The processes that allow us to 14

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do these things evolved to handle other tasks and solve other problems. These activities are clearly adaptive in our current environment; they are not byproducts of something else, even though the cognitive spaces they inhabit are. Storytelling and imaginative literature should be placed into the same category as these activities. It is unlikely that our propensity to tell and respond to stories evolved because of any adaptive value that these activities held for our ancestors. These propensities simply developed too recently to be full-fledged adaptations. However, it is highly probable that, once the capacity for simple forms of storytelling evolved, stories became useful tools for transferring knowledge, building communities, attracting mates, and all the rest. Tools—both material and cognitive—can be remarkably useful and have tremendous survival value without being specific adaptations. By most accounts, the cognitive architecture of human beings had developed in its modern form by the Upper Paleolithic period—which led to the cognitive revolution that produced such inventions as improved stone tools, bone tools, hunting weapons, cave art, funeral ceremonies, and probably storytelling. Like the other Upper Paleolithic inventions, storytelling would have constituted what Dennett refers to as a “good trick,” or an idea that clearly improves an organism’s chance for survival and therefore spreads rapidly through imitation and cultural diffusion. Both imitation and cultural diffusion are Lamarckian processes that work much faster than the geological time span required for natural selection to work.27 Once natural selection had created minds with the cognitive horsepower necessary to tell and respond to narrative, storytelling (like stone tools and wheels) only had to be invented once to become universal. Useful tools spread like fire (also a useful tool). Like most other tools, storytelling was constructed in a design space made possible by other adaptations. What might these other adaptations be? What Panglossian nose might have supported the spectacles of literature? Almost anything could work; a clever engineer could design a pair of spectacles to fit over any bit of bone or cartilage that natural selection could place in the vicinity of a face. I suspect—as do many who study cognitive narratology—the answer lies somewhere in the rudimentary temporal and spatial sequences that the mind generates to process and structure sensory and perceptual information. However, stating that complex stories have been built Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 15

on simple narrative sequences simply states the obvious, or at least the very easy to deduce. It doesn’t really answer the question of what narrative might be built upon. To know where narrative comes from we must look further into our evolutionary history, past even the emergence of the human species, into areas of cognitive design space that may not have been originally designed for the production of narratives. Natural selection builds upon features and functions that already exist. Though only human beings wear spectacles, many species have noses; similarly, while only human beings tell stories, many species must have bits and pieces of the cognitive architecture that makes storytelling possible. In the following pages I will propose several evolved cognitive operations that might have served as the design space for storytelling and literature. In doing so, I do not intend to diminish the power and beauty of stories. Whatever evolutionary forces may have been behind the human love of narrative, stories are an integral part of what humans have become. This, I believe, is the most basic lesson that we can learn from Scheherazade. Though the obligatory happy resolution has been tacked onto most published versions of the Arabian Nights, the original frame presents stories themselves as both an urgent and an infinite element of the human experience. To be human is to tell stories, to experience pleasure in their construction, and to feel anxiety at their interruption; and, like Scheherazade, we will cease to exist as a species the moment that we have no more stories to tell. Any theory that presents itself as an account of human nature must come to grips with the immense power and urgency of stories.

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2

4 Stories for Thinking Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them.

—Matthew 13: 31–34 (King James Version) Fiction, particularly narrative fiction, is an irreducible dimension of the understanding of the self. If it is true that fiction cannot be completed other than in life, and that life cannot be understood other than through stories we tell about it, then we are led to say that a life examined, in the sense borrowed from Socrates, is a life narrated.

—Paul Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator” Describing Heaven In the Book of Matthew, nine of the seventeen parables told by Jesus begin with the words: “the kingdom of heaven is like. . . .” As it turns out, the kingdom of heaven is like a number of very different things, including people (a sower, a king, a merchant, and two different household17

ers), food (a mustard seed and leaven), and several inanimate objects (a fishing net and a buried treasure). None of these comparisons gives a clear picture of the kingdom of heaven, but how on earth could they? For those of us stuck on earth, heaven is an ineffable concept. There is no reference point—no point of common understanding—that Jesus could use to explain heaven. Using a series of conceptual comparisons to describe aspects of the whole is the best way for Jesus to explain heaven. Like a mustard seed, it begins as something small and grows to immense size; like leaven, it exists among other things but changes their natures; like a fishing net, it will draw in many that have to be sorted out and thrown back; and so on. None of these similes gives a complete picture of the Kingdom of Heaven, but their author hopes that they will inspire a mental picture when taken collectively—albeit a fragmented and imperfect picture. When talking about heaven, necessity forces Jesus to speak only in parables. But this is not always the case. Many of the parables in the New Testament could be converted into simple declarative statements such as “God loves everybody and His happiness when one person is converted does not mean that He loves others less” (the Parable of the Lost Sheep) or “in a significant theological context, a ‘neighbor’ consists of anybody who cares enough to help people in need” (the Parable of the Good Samaritan). These statements have approximately the same meaning as the parables, but they have nowhere near the effect. Jesus knows that stories almost always resonate more deeply with human beings than complicated arguments or simple declarations do. The reason for this resonance, I suggest, is that stories present information in a way that closely resembles how the mind works. In The Literary Mind Mark Turner argues that parable—which he defines as “the projection of story”—is a mental device that is “basic to human thinking.” The human mind is “always at work constructing small stories and projecting them,” he writes, which gives humans the ability to generate new concepts from the combination of familiar ones. The Literary Mind begins with an analysis of Arabian Nights. Turner focuses on one of the two stories that Scheherazade’s father tells her before she marries the king: the cautionary tale of the “Ox and the Donkey.” In this tale the farmer overhears the donkey telling the ox to feign sickness in order to avoid work. As a consequence, the donkey is forced to 18

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pull the plough in place of the ox. The moral of the story—which the vizier clearly expects his daughter to understand—is that good intentions usually backfire. Turner argues that the way this story functions in the larger narrative captures the essence of parable by combining two of our most basic mental operations: “story and projection.” The Vizier creates a compelling narrative and expects his daughter (and the reader) to “understand the possible future of [Scheherazade] by projecting it onto the story of the ox and the donkey.” The literary genre of the parable, in other words, “follows inevitably from the nature of our conceptual systems.”1 The parable is just one example of this phenomenon—albeit a very important example for Turner’s argument. The larger argument of Turner’s book is that the human mind is governed by many of the same strategies for packaging and manipulating information that structure literary texts. “We imagine realities and construct meaning,” Turner writes. “The everyday mind performs these feats by means of mental processes that are literary and that have always been judged to be literary.”2 What we now call literature—broadly defined to include myths, folktales, oral histories, epics, plays, poems, novels, scriptures, histories, memoirs, movies, television shows, interactive video games, and anything else that foregrounds a story as an intentional act—is of fairly recent invention. People have been telling stories for a hundred thousand years at most, but like so much of our current cognitive makeup, the ability to construct these narratives depends upon older and more basic mental traits that have been shaped by evolution. The conventions that govern the narratives we call “literature”—the parables of Jesus, the stories of Scheherazade, the plays of Shakespeare, the songs of African griots, and all the rest—originate in our evolved structures for processing and sequencing information necessary to our survival and reproduction. Certainly, cultures and societies shape narrative conventions to meet their own needs, but there are some universals. Nearly all narratives from all cultures have a recognizable beginning and conclude with a deliberate attempt at narrative resolution and closure. Most narratives also follow clearly defined temporal sequences that, while often interrupted by clearly labeled flashbacks, progress in order from the beginning to the end. In all cultures, storytellers have the responsibility to explain casual relationships within a narrative, and, Stories for Thinking 19

often, between the narrative and the outside world. Nearly every narrative attempts to compress its story by presenting important facts and omitting superfluous details. While there certainly have been daring experimentalists willing to create narratives without these elements, their experiments are considered “daring” precisely because they flout nearly every assumption about the way that narratives behave. The fragmented stories of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf do not disprove the claim that human narratives are temporally sequenced any more than the paintings of Picasso disprove the claim that human noses are located somewhere near the center of the face.3

Cognition and Narrative One of the most important common grounds for cognitive scientists and literary critics has been the proposition that human beings use stories as the basis for much of their conscious thought. In 1991 the well-known psychologist Jerome Bruner offered humanists an introductory handshake by publishing “The Narrative Construction of Reality” in Critical Inquiry, one of the leading journals of literary theory and criticism. In this article Bruner asserted that “we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative—stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on.”4 The linguist Leonard Talmy also devotes the last chapter of his two-volume Toward a Cognitive Semantics to this same connection between narrative and cognition. He writes that the mental faculty for the generation and experiencing of broadly construed narrative constitutes a specific cognitive system in its own right. This narrative cognition system would generally function to connect and integrate certain components of conscious content over time into a coherent ideational structure. More specifically . . . this is a system that ascribes entityhood to some sequential portion of experienced phenomena, that imputes continuity of identity to that entity, that integrates contents associated with that continuing identity into an ideational whole, and that fixes a feeling of attachment to that complex.5 Talmy’s description of the narrative-building function as a “specific cognitive system in its own right” comes very close to the definition of 20

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a “module” in evolutionary psychology. According to the modular theory of mental operation, the mind is not the “blank slate” envisioned by Locke and accepted by several generations of behavioral psychologists. Rather it comes preloaded with content-rich subroutines designed to perform specific tasks—much like computers often come loaded with specific software, like a word processor, designed to handle basic computing needs. A word processor imposes some constraints on the content of a document: it must use a known character set, specified fonts, margins that correspond to the size of the paper in the printer tray, and so on. Within these constraints, the word processor can display just about anything. Indeed, when the word processor is first opened, it looks exactly like a blank slate, even though it contains thousands of lines of computer code working in the background. Mental functions commonly described as “modules” include the mechanisms for acquiring language, imputing causality, and understanding the thoughts and motivations of other people (the so-called “theory-of-mind” module).6 These modules dictate content only up to a point; nobody is born with the capability to speak Portuguese, but almost everybody is born with the facility to learn whatever language they are exposed to during childhood. Of course, the phrase “mental module” is a parable itself. It compresses an extremely complex relationship among millions of neurons and neural pathways into the same spatial narrative that I use to describe the furniture in my living room. In suggesting the possibility of a “narrative-building module,” I do not mean to argue that narratives are constructed and processed in a certain brain region that we could take out and replace with a module for, say, curing bacon. This is the point at which the analogy with computer software breaks down. What I do suggest, however, is that the human ability to construct narratives relies on a series of interrelated cognitive predispositions that evolved to allow us to use information more effectively. Porter H. Abbott has argued that, if narrative theory is going to be useful to the overall project of evolutionary psychology, “the first order of business is to cut through an array of extensively theorized, yet at bottom culturally learned, embellishments of narrative . . . to get to those basic components parts without which narrative shrinks or disappears entirely.”7 These basic, pre-narrative tools do not require tangible stories that we write down or tell other people. These tools do not even Stories for Thinking 21

require language—or other people. Defined very broadly, a narrative is “a pattern-forming cognitive system that organizes all sequentially experienced structure.”8 The tools that allow us to create narratives are the same tools that allow us to structure, process, evaluate, and act upon the massive amounts of information we collect with our senses. Perhaps the most basic of these narrative-forming tools is the ability to sequence events in time and space. Turner proposes that “the basic stories we know best are small stories of events in space. The wind blows a cloud through the sky, a child throws a rock, a mother pours milk into a glass, a whale swims through the water. These stories constitute our world, and they are completely absorbing—we cannot resist watching the volley of the tennis ball.”9 David Herman insists with some justification that Turner’s proposed paradigm “overextends and to some extent trivializes the concept of ‘story’” and “sometimes conflates sequence with story.” Herman is undoubtedly correct that a simple event sequence cannot be considered a story unless we stretch the definition of the word “story” beyond the point that it makes an analytically useful distinction.10 But Turner’s analysis makes perfect sense from the evolutionary perspective. Though it may be too much of a stretch to call a brief temporal sequence a story, it is much more plausible to argue that the human propensity to form spatial sequences, and the pleasure humans receive from doing so, are keys to the evolution of the narrativebuilding mind. Spatial sequencing is adaptive (and therefore likely to produce pleasure) because it allows us to orient ourselves in our immediate environment by perceiving or inferring spatial and temporal connections; it also allows us to make predictions about where things will be in the future. It may seem obvious that an item falling out of a tree will very quickly reach the ground, or that an arrow shot directly south will land somewhere along its current trajectory, but as the Swedish psychologist Dirk Kerzel has written, “despite how effortless it seems, visually tracking such objects is actually a complex task because their future trajectories must be predicted.” Cognitive scientists refer to the mental facilities that we use to calculate trajectories and object motions as “naïve physics” and have designed a number of experiments to show how these facilities can be tricked (in a famous example that Kerzel cites, people tend to predict that a ball coming out of a spiral tube will have 22

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a curved trajectory). But spiral tubes do not grow in the wild. With our innate, if naïve, physical intuition, we can build “good enough” sequential models that, in most cases, allow us to make functional predictions about “what comes next.”11 To go further along these lines, Steven Pinker makes the intriguing (if qualified and tentative) suggestion that we take the logic of spatial relationships with us as we create more abstract conceptual categories. When we say that “a meeting went from 3:00 to 4:00,” that “the inheritance finally went to Fred,” or that a “light went from red to green,” we are taking the spatial concept of motion and using it to describe other kinds of relationships. We do this, Pinker argues, “not just to co-opt words but to co-opt their inferential machinery.” He goes on to suggest that much of our “language of thought” was originally copied from primate spatial reasoning and co-opted for more abstract reasoning tasks. “Suppose ancestral circuits for reasoning about space and force were copied,” he proposes, and “the copy’s connections to the eyes and muscles were severed, and references to the physical world were bleached out. The circuits could serve as a scaffolding whose slots are filled with symbols for more abstract concerns like states, possessions, ideas, and desires.”12 Though an understanding of spatial sequences is not itself sufficient to produce conscious thought, such an understanding is absolutely necessary for its execution. Without understanding connections between objects in space, we cannot understand connections in time or relationships in character. Over one hundred years ago, Edwin A. Kirkpatrick, one of the first American psychologists to advocate an adaptationist approach to his discipline, emphasized the evolutionary necessity of spatial sequencing: “the ability to perceive space relations,” he wrote, “gives animals possessing it an advantage over those without it in the struggle for existence, for it is evident that any organism that is to survive must have a tendency to so move in response to stimuli as to secure those that are advantageous and avoid those that are destructive.”13 The ability to sequence events in space closely relates to the ability to sequence them in time. Temporal sequencing forms the foundation of what Merlin Donald has labeled “episodic culture,” which he describes in his analysis of the temporal cognition of non-human primates: Stories for Thinking

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If apes are taken as the starting point, how might their overriding representational strategy be described? Despite their formidable skills, they lack language, and they also lack much of the nonverbal knowledge evident in humans who have been stripped of language. Their behavior, complex as it is, seems unreflective, concrete, and situation bound. Even their uses of signing and their social behavior are immediate, short-term responses to the environment. In fact, the word that seems best to epitomize the cognitive culture of apes (and probably of many other mammals as well, although this is tangential to the argument) is the term episodic. Their lives are lived entirely in the present, as a series of concrete episodes, and the highest element in their system of memory representation seems to be at the level of event representation.14 Many animals seem to form and remember these “concrete episodes.” Many also have the ability to learn sequential narratives through operant conditioning: a rat learns that if it presses a lever food comes out of a shoot, and a dog learns that if it does its business on the carpet it gets a whack on the nose. However, these animals do not appear to understand the passage of time; they have simply learned that a specific action elicits a certain response. Human narratives, on the other hand, traverse comfortably through the temporal realms of past and future. In a provocative and much-quoted article, Thomas Suddendorf and Michael C. Corballis argue that the cognitive ability that “lies at the heart of human consciousness” is “mental time travel.” Unlike apes and other mammals, they reason, humans “make persistent reference to events that are not limited to the present.” “Events as remote as the crucifixion of Christ exert a profound influence on large numbers of people,” they argue, and “we even tackle questions about the extent of time itself by developing religious or scientific concepts such as genesis, Judgment Day, or the big bang.”15 The ultimate payoff of sequential narratives is that they allow us to reason about cause and effect. “There is nothing more basic in human life than cause and effect,” Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner write in The Way We Think. A great deal of our cognitive architecture appears designed to facilitate causal reasoning. Such reasoning has a clear adaptive value, as “our ancestors have typically been in situations where they 24

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needed to be able to recognize, in a flash, the potential integrated event. . . . In short, it is evolutionarily advantageous to be able to unite cause and effect in our understanding. It’s good to see potential effects in a cause, and it’s good to see potential causes in an effect.”16 If anything, this is an understatement. Reasoning about causality is vitally important to everything from finding food and avoiding predators to attracting mates and raising children—not to mention creating cities, roads, novels, poems, and plays. Causal reasoning also plays a vital role in the cognitive process of neutralizing anxiety. Very simply, we experience anxiety whenever we encounter effects that don’t appear to have causes. If I were to walk into my house one day and see a ham sandwich spinning in the air, I would get very little sleep until I could explain why something I normally eat for lunch appeared to be moving on its own. I would be unable to focus on anything else until I could discover the truth or could generate some kind of plausible narrative to explain the phenomenon. University of Pennsylvania brain scientists Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene G. d’Aquili argue that the mind possesses a “casual operator” that compels us to generate a narrative whenever we are presented with an anxietyproducing situation: Imagine . . . a prehistoric hunter making his way home through unfamiliar woods. His mind wanders as he travels, and he is only absently aware of the ambient noises of the forest, but when a twig snaps in the underbrush, his mind is instantly, involuntarily focused. This intense mental alertness results from the sudden activation of the amygdale, the ancient limbic watchdog that monitors all incoming sensory information for signs of danger and opportunity. When the amygdale detects the unaccounted-for auditory impulses caused by the sudden noise, it rivets the hunter’s mind upon it. . . . In the same split second the hunter first hears the suspicious sound, the cognitive imperative is driving the casual operator to discover what it might mean. The hunter in this scenario shares something of Shahryar’s anxiety: he has heard the first part of a “story” (the snapping of a twig) and is in a state of heightened anxiety until he discovers how it ends. If a resoluStories for Thinking

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tion does not appear, or if he cannot safely determine a cause, the hunter will create one from previous experiences and plausible speculation. Newberg and d’Aquili frame this reasoning process in terms that draw a straight line connecting anxiety and narrative. “This process is automatic,” they conclude, “uncertainty causes anxiety, and anxiety must be resolved. Sometimes resolutions are obvious and causes are easy to spot. When they are not, the cognitive imperative compels us to find plausible resolutions in the form of a story.”17

The Blind Men and the Elephant In his nineteenth century verse rendering of an ancient Eastern tale, John Godfrey Saxe writes of “six men of Indostan / To learning much inclined / Who went to see the elephant / (Though all of them were blind).” Each blind man puts a hand on a different part of the elephant and, in turn, declares the whole animal to be very like whatever he happens to feel: a rope, a spear, a wall, a fan, a snake, or a tree. Each man gets a part of the story right, but none of them can fathom the whole elephant. The purpose of this particular version of the story is to criticize the various disputants in religious conflicts who assail each other with their versions of a god they have never seen. But the basic cognitive mechanism that the men employ is roughly the same one that Jesus uses in the “kingdom of heaven” parables, with the major difference that Jesus presumably had some experience of the entire indescribable thing he was attempting to describe. Nonetheless, since Jesus had no way to communicate this vision in its entirety, he had to resort to fragmented similes with the hope that they could collectively communicate a more coherent vision. Jesus relies on useful fictions in order to make the kingdom of heaven accessible to his listeners; in the same way, the blind men of Indostan rely on useful fictions to understand the concept of an elephant. Both the blind men and Jesus require some kind of definition in order to proceed—to talk about elephants or to work toward a heavenly reward. Yet an accurate and complete definition lies beyond their reach and always will. Blind men will never be able to picture an elephant, and Jesus will never be able to explain heaven to mortals completely. Rather than simply give up, however, both do the best they can with the resources they have. According to Hans Vaihinger, human beings find themselves in 26

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similar circumstances every day; we are compelled by a logical imperative to comprehend things in their totality, but this logical imperative is at odds with the fundamental incomprehensibility of most things we encounter. As Vaihinger writes, with an instinctive, almost cunning ingenuity, the logical function succeeds in overcoming these difficulties with the aid of its accessory structures. The special methods, the by-paths, of which thought makes use when it can no longer advance directly along the main road, are of many different kinds, and their explanation is our problem. They often lead through thorny undergrowth, but logical thought is not deterred thereby, even though it may lose something of its clearness and purity. It is relevant also to remark here that the logical function, in its purposeful instinctive ingenuity, can carry this fictive activity from the most innocent and unpretentious beginnings on through ever finer and subtler developments right up to the most difficult and complicated methods. The mental constructs that Vaihinger describes can be extremely useful, even if they are incomplete or downright inaccurate representations of reality, because, as Vaihinger concludes, “the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality . . . but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in the world.”18 Below I will examine several of Vaihinger’s important “accessory structures”—adapting them, when necessary, to the requirements of my own argument and supplementing them with more recent findings from disciplines important to this study. Each of these constructs is a highly adaptive reasoning strategy that might have formed the cognitive scaffolding for the human love of fiction. classification

In his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Jorge Luis Borges describes an ancient Chinese encyclopedia—whose existence has never been documented—called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. One passage in this otherwise-unknown essay has attracted the attention of such luminaries as Michel Foucault and George Lakoff and has become a standard starting point for arguments about Stories for Thinking 27

the nature of classification schemes. In this passage, Borges describes a classification system for animals that consists of fourteen categories: “(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”19 Like Jesus, Borges chooses parable over straightforward argument to make his point. Had he chosen the latter strategy, however, the result would have sounded much like Vaihinger’s own argument about the fictional nature of classifications systems: As a substitute for actual reality, in this case for a group of objects with a common constitutive complex of characters, we find one arbitrarily selected character. This selected character cannot, of course, be anything but unreal. . . . Thus, in place of the highly complicated reality, we obtain a simplification which is substituted for it. Phenomena in all their variety are then arranged according to this character as though it were the real and adequate principle. . . . The botanical system of Linnaeus is the most famous example of this method.”20 Vaihinger, like Borges, uses biological taxonomy as a prime example of a classificatory “fiction.” He does not argue against Linnaean taxonomy being based on real, experimentally verifiable phenomena. Rather, he insists, “our error consists in regarding such logical instruments as ends in themselves and in ascribing to them an independent value for knowledge, whereas they are . . . only logical devices for the attainment of purposes which we have already frequently enumerated.” Who among us has not occasionally thought that whales and dolphins share at least as many qualities with fish as they do with cows? How many people today still consider Pluto a planet? The selection and exclusion of traits to form the basis of a classification system constitutes a fiction, but a necessary one if we are to use the information in any meaningful way. “The same,” Vaihinger argues, “is true for all other categories 28

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by means of which discursive thought is conducted; the whole and its parts, cause and effect, the general and the particular. These are all only conceptual logical fictions which give rise to no knowledge whatever in the strict sense of the term.”21 information compression

In much the same way that we create classification systems in order to make information manageable, we often compress complicated information into manageable pieces by ignoring less important pieces of information and then pretending that we are dealing with something in its totality. Vaihinger refers to such mental structures as “abstractive” or “negative fictions,” which are necessary when “material is too complicated and confused for thought to be able to break it up into its component elements, and since the casual factors sought are probably of a too complicated nature for them to be determined directly, thought makes use of an artifice by means of which it provisionally and temporarily neglects a number of characters and selects from them the more important phenomena.”22 We can make a useful comparison between this kind of mental fiction and the way that digital information is handled by computers. The information revolution that we are currently experiencing was made possible, not just by the ability to digitize text, pictures, audio, and video, but by the ability to compress these digital packages into much smaller files that can be distributed through the Internet and stored on relatively inexpensive devices. Without compression formats such as jpeg (photographs), mp3 (audio), or mpeg (video) the Internet would still be an almost exclusively text-based phenomenon. Processing and storage devices can only handle large amounts of information once it has been compressed. Our minds have the same kinds of limitations on processing speed and storage capacity that our computers do, and every scene we encounter presents us with more raw information than we can process. As I write this paragraph, I am looking out the window at a mid-sized apple tree in my backyard. I am close enough to count all of the leaves and branches, determine how many of its apples are ripe, take a rough measurement of its height and width, and catalog the songs of the birds that are nestled in its leaves. After only a few hours of mental labor, I Stories for Thinking

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could file all of these facts away in my memory and go on to the apple trees in my neighbors’ yards. Of course, if I were to do this, I would use much of my time and almost all of my long-term memory cataloging unimportant details about apples. If I tried to increase my focus to take in plum or pear trees, I would soon find myself overloaded with information and beset by information anxiety. Fortunately, narrative can act as a kind of information-compression algorithm. By their very nature, narratives cut out unnecessary information and focus on the details necessary to their objectives. In order to pick edible apples from my backyard tree, all I really need to store in my memory is a brief spatial sequence (the apple tree lies in between the deck and the fence), a simple temporal sequence (the apples get ripe in October), and perhaps a cautionary causal story (the last time I ate an apple from this tree in September I got a horrible stomachache). Through the process of generalization (also a compression device), similar stories can merge into each other in all but their differentiating elements. I do not need to remember the precise location of the apple tree that produced the apple that, when eaten in September, gave me a stomachache. In my memory—and in my decision-making functions— this one apple tree acts as a stand-in for all apple trees.23 A great deal of content is lost in such a generalization. It is not true that all apples are ripe in October. I know that I can eat apples bought at the grocery store during any time of the year, and, if I think about it, I also know that some of the grocery store’s apples had to be picked in September. September must be the perfect time for picking apples somewhere. However, I will probably never go to a location where apples should be picked in September. If I do, it probably won’t be in September, and even if it is, I probably won’t pick apples. Therefore, my proposition that apples picked and eaten in September will give me a stomachache does just fine for all of my apple-picking needs. Of course, if I were an apple grower or a grocer, I would need to store more details about apples; however, I would probably have to compress other information not useful to growers and grocers—such as, perhaps, theoretical speculation about the potential adaptive advantages of generalization. schematization

Humans build generic temporal and spatial templates to store large amounts of information in relatively small spaces. These templates are 30 Stories for Thinking

sometimes called “schemas” or “scripts” and provide much of the background information that we need to process and store new perceptions. When I go into a grocery store I have been in before—or even one that looks a great deal like one I have been in before—I already have a good sense of what it looks like: the fresh produce is usually on one side of the store, the milk is on another, and in between are various assortments of canned and packaged goods whose order rarely changes. I also have a script of what to do if I want to go into the store and buy a can of tuna: I walk to the aisle, select the tuna, take it to the cashier aisle, pay for the tuna, and so on. I do not need to devote time or cognitive space to remembering the rules or processing the results of any single trip to the grocery store. As one pair of cognitive psychologists puts it, “some episodes are reminiscent of others. As an economy measure in the storage of episodes, when enough of them are alike they are remembered in terms of a standardized general episode.”24 Vaihinger links “schematic fictions” to abstract fictions but argues that they represent a separate category, because “in the case of the abstractive fictions a certain portion of reality is cut off and set aside, and only the remainder taken into consideration, in the case of schematic fictions a scaffolding . . . is erected and thought proceeds in relation to this bare picture which is devoid of many of the features of reality.”25 Scripts, according to Roger C. Schank and Tamara R. Berman, “lessen the burden of understanding new events” and therefore “help us to use our minds more efficiently.”26 However, some very compelling research has shown that the use of schemas can lead to false or misleading memories. In William F. Brewer and James C. Treyens’s famous 1981 “Office Study,” the researchers brought subjects into the office pictured below for periods of less than a minute. Subjects were told that this was a graduate student office and were allowed to remain inside for about thirty-five seconds. Afterward they were tested to see what they recalled about the office. Almost all subjects remembered seeing things such as desks and chairs, which are standard in office schemas. However, a third of the subjects remembered seeing books, also part of the standard schema but absent in this instance, and only about 25 percent of the subjects remembered seeing a bulletin board or a skull. Other research has shown even greater failures to process phenomena that are not part of an expected schema, including one study in which 65 perStories for Thinking 31

2. The office used in Brewer & Treyens’s 1981 schema experiment. Reprinted from William F. Brewer and James C. Treyens, “Role of Schemata in Memory for Place,” Cognitive Psychology 13.2 (April 1981), with permission from Elsevier.

cent of subjects did not register the image of a woman plunging to her death in the center of a picture of an urban hotel, and another study in which half of the participants did not notice the presence of a person wearing a gorilla suit in a video in which they were asked to keep track of other things.27 Schemas and scripts are pre-constructed narratives into which we place much of our perceptual experience so that we do not have to keep track of a lot of repetitive detail. In effect, schemas say to us, in the words of Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novella, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” These experiments in spatial memory and inattentional blindness demonstrate that much of what we call “memory” is itself a fiction and can be horribly unreliable. We must keep in mind, however, that these experiments were designed by very smart people devoting their intellect and their university’s resources to the task of tricking people’s cognitive mechanisms into giving false information. All they really tell us is that the value of compressing information outweighs the value of getting all of the information right. In most cases, our schema-driven memories do what we need them to do. Schematic memories are fictions, but they are useful fictions that give us a functional level of recall while allowing our brains to preserve processing power and storage space for other necessary tasks. concept integration

A final type of fiction that Vaihinger discusses in relation to the human thought process is the “symbolic” or “analogical” fiction. Such fictions occur when we attempt to process the properties of a thing by attributing to it the properties of another thing with which we are familiar, as in “ostrich meat is a lot like very lean beef” or “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” Such comparisons are fictive in that one thing is never completely like another thing, but they are useful in that they give our minds a way to grasp an unfamiliar concept through a familiar comparison. Vaihinger anticipates some of the most significant arguments of contemporary cognitive theorists when he writes that “all cognition is the apperception of one thing through another. . . . The only ideational constructs by means of which existing things can be apperceived are either corresponding general perceptions or other concrete objects. But since these are in their turn inconceivable, all these analogies only give rise to apparent understanding.”28 Stories for Thinking 33

Work on analogy by Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, and other scholars has done much to flesh out Vaihinger’s point. At the center of their work lies the vital cognitive mechanism that they label “conceptual blending,” the process by which two or more mental images—they can be people, places, physical phenomena, words, phrases, or anything else that the mind can represent as a discrete something—are combined to produce new concepts. Conceptual blending allows us to understand something as alien as the talking mule in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights because we take the familiar concept of a talking creature (a human being) and combine it with the equally familiar concept of a non-talking mule to produce an original concept that, despite not existing anywhere in the world, can be easily understood by almost every reader.29 Conceptual blending lies at the heart of literary devices such as metaphor, simile, analogy, symbolism, and irony, but it also facilitates thousands of basic cognitive operations only tangentially related to imaginative storytelling. For example, blending makes causal reasoning possible by allowing us to connect causes with effects, and it facilitates language by integrating certain sounds and grammatical structures with denotative and connotative meanings.30 Vaihinger explicitly recognizes the importance of this cognitive operation to the development of literature. “A new intuition,” he explains, “is apperceived by an ideational construct in which there is a similar relationship, an analogous proportion to that existing in the observed series of perceptions. In such cases relationships constitute the apperceiving power. This is also the formal origin of poetry.”31 The connection between conceptual integration and poetry that Vaihinger refers to is only the tip of the iceberg. All of the information organization and compression strategies that he examines as facilitators of human cognition are crucial to the creation of formal literature. A poet’s livelihood depends on his or her ability to create innovative blends of apparently unrelated concepts; writers of fiction rely regularly on schemas and scripts in the forms of stock characters, stereotypes, and familiar settings; and storytellers of all stripes must regularly compress all of the possible information their stories could contain into a manageable number of relatable details. This should not surprise us at all; creating information packets for storage and retrieval is essentially 34

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the same activity as creating stories for external consumption. They are simply different types of narrative construction. Cognitive psychologists generally agree that we store some information in our memories in narrative form, though there are disagreements about how much. Early researchers, led by Canadian neuroscientist Endel Tulving, theorized that the human brain has two different systems for processing fact-based information: semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory includes facts that we know without reference to any specific event—that apples and bananas are food, that snowy days are cold, or that the letters c-a-t refer to a type of furry animal. Episodic memory, on the other hand, is indexed to specific events, such as the time that a friend slipped on a banana or the time that we saw a three-legged cat next door.32 According to these early theories, episodic memories are stored in narrative form, while semantic memories are stored simply as facts. More recent work, though, suggests that even the general facts we store in our memory banks contain a large narrative content. “This is not surprising,” writes Catherine Emmott, “since semantic knowledge is formed from an accumulation of specific occasions. If, for example, an individual has only flown in an aeroplane once, his/her script for air flights will be colored by this one experience. Even when he/she has flown dozens of times, with many of the details having become condensed together, salient deviations from the standard script are likely to be retained distinctly.”33 In a 1995 article Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson advance the thesis that “virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around experiences.”34 Nearly all information in human memory, the authors argue, is stored in narrative form. These story-memories are not stable. When humans tell stories—to themselves or to others—they shape them in their minds; they add or subtract details to facilitate the immediate needs of the telling. When humans shape these stories, they argue, they alter the information that is stored in their memories—similar to the way that a word processor saves edits to a document over the previous version. What we store inevitably becomes what we retrieve: In our desire to tell a story in the first place, we resort to certain standard story telling devices. Those devices are part of our cultural norms for storytelling and they reflect what is considered to be a Stories for Thinking 35

coherent story in a culture. Since, in telling one’s story to others, one wants to be coherent, one has to structure one’s story according to these norms. This means, in effect, that one has to lie. Nothing in life naturally occurs as a culturally coherent story. In order to construct such a story we must leave out the details that don’t fit, and invent some that make things work better. . . . The danger here is that we may come to believe our own stories. When our stories become memories, and substitute for the actual events, this danger is quite real. We remember our stories and begin to believe them. In this way, stories shape memory profoundly.35 The operation described here demonstrates the deep connections between the various definitions of “fiction” presented in the introduction. On one hand, the “standard story devices” that Schank and Abelson refer to are the strategies of the intentional literary narratives that Cohn privileges in her discussion. They are also devices found in all kinds of literature and in all formal narratives (Cohn’s third and fourth definitions). The memory-structuring process described is an example Vaihinger’s conceptual shortcuts for processing information (Cohn’s second definition), and while Vaihinger may be correct that we initially employ such strategies as if they were true while retaining some awareness of their fictional nature, evidence now suggests that we often lose this awareness and introduce patent untruths (the first definition) into our memories. In every relevant sense, then, the conversion of experiences into stored memories involves the creation of fictional narratives.

From Darwin to Derrida Some literary critics have embraced Darwinist theory as a force capable of wresting the study of literature out of the hands of obscurantist French critical theory and placing it on the firm ground of scientific truth. The often contradictory coalition of literary theories known as “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” and “deconstruction” have been the flashpoint for much of the debate between empiricists and humanists. One of the few unifying ideas of these theories (which, for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to as “postmodernism,” fully aware that this is a fictional conflation of terms and concepts) is that traditional categories of absolute truth—be they religious, philosophical, political, or scientific—are 36 Stories for Thinking

actually relative, historically conditioned, and dependent upon individual and cultural perspectives. Scientists have been especially hard on postmodern critiques of knowledge (especially scientific knowledge), labeling them with such colorful epithets as “unalloyed twaddle,” “pseudophilosophical posturing,” and “hermeneutic hootchy-koo.”36 Some literary critics, upon adopting more empirical approaches to their subject, are nearly as damning. Robert F. Storey takes literary studies to task for its “misguided models of the human being,” while Frederick Turner castigates “the simplifications of [Jacques] Derrida and all the sad reductions of contemporary political reading.”37 Nobody has been harder on postmodernism than the literary critic Joseph Carroll. In his 1995 book Evolution and Literary Theory, often seen as the first real manifesto of Darwinian literary criticism, Carroll makes clear his desire to reconfigure literary scholarship as an experimental science: If criticism can undertake disciplined investigation of testable general hypotheses, and if it is hypothetically capable even of predicting literary events—and I think it is—there is no reason to suppose that literary study cannot be a form of systematic knowledge that is consistent with the broader body of established knowledge, that is grounded in empirical evidence, that is susceptible to rational evaluation, and that is capable of development in a way that increases our positive knowledge about the subject of study.38 In many ways Carroll’s dream has already come true. Many scholars— from both the sciences and the humanities—have been able to replace the contingent, relative, fragmented, and incomplete narratives used to study literature with rigorous and testable scientific approaches. We have learned much more about the cognitive aspects of narrative than we knew in 1995. The main thing we have learned, however, is that narratives are contingent, relative, fragmented, and incomplete. It turns out that the radical distrust that postmodernists feel toward totalizing narratives is not entirely inconsistent with the scientific reasoning that has been proposed as its replacement. As early as 1993, Ellen Spolsky argued that postmodernism and cognitive science were not incompatible, and, in a 2002 article entitled “DarStories for Thinking 37

win and Derrida,” she refers to a “single moment of epiphany” when she realized that “Darwin’s theory of evolution is significantly homologous to the post-structuralist critique of representation.” Skepticism, in Spolsky’s view, is what unites the two theories. Both postmodernism and cognitive science are skeptical of the idea that narratives can convey coherent truth. Postmodernists locate their distrust in the nature of language, which they see as imprecise, self-referential, and subject to inevitable gaps between the signifier and the signified. Cognitivists, on the other hand, distrust the ability of consciousness to form a coherent whole. As Daniel C. Dennett famously writes, human consciousness is not the coherent stream of thought we imagine it to be; it is “gappy and sparse and doesn’t contain half of what people think is there.”39 Dennett also devotes much of Consciousness Explained to making a conspicuously postmodern argument about totalizing narratives. He argues that, while most philosophers have rejected Cartesian dualism, they retain an implicit belief in what he calls the “Cartesian Theater,” or a single region of the brain where all sensory input is edited and correlated into a single narrative that our conscious minds then experience. Instead of a central theater, he insists, we process the same information through several channels at once, updating and revising as necessary, producing “multiple drafts” of narratives but never a finished product. “Since these narratives are under continual revision,” he argues, “there is no single narrative that counts as the canonical version, the ‘first edition’ in which are laid down, for all time, the events that happened in the stream of consciousness of the subject.”40 Postmodernists often use the terms “transcendental signifier” and “metanarrative” to describe the same thing—more or less—that Dennett calls the “single narrative that counts as the canonical version” of a story. The arch postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard defines “postmodernism” simply as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” which in turn precipitates “the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on [them].”41 For most of human history, Lyotard argues, human beings have depended on grand totalizing narratives to make sense of their world. Metanarratives have included God, democracy, the scientific method, historical dialectic, “the will of the people,” and psychoanalysis, to name only a few. The “postmodern condition” of radical skepticism toward these meta38

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narratives makes it impossible to fix any absolute standard for arbitrating competing truth claims. The postmodern position that “there is no truth,” however, should not be confused with the popular caricature of that position, “there is no reality.” As Richard Rorty forcefully argues in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, we need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.42 The great orthodoxies of postmodernism are 1) the rejection of absolute narratives; and 2) the insistence that, without such narratives, we do not have access to a “truth” that can be separated from human language and human consciousness. We do have what Lyotard calls petits récits (“little stories” according to most translations, but also “white lies”). These small narratives may not be absolutely true, but they don’t need to be. According to these key postmodern thinkers, utility—not truth—is the criteria by which we should measure the value of a narrative. Absolute truth is not possible within the linguistic and narrative structures that constrain our existence. Our narratives are messy, gappy, biased, and highly subjective. But these messy, gappy, biased, and highly subjective stories are still our stories, and they do everything that we need narratives to do. These stories do not operate perfectly, but they are good enough to get the job done, which is all that natural selection ever asked. “A belief can still regulate action,” Rorty insists, “can still be thought to be worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance.”43 We must not, of course, overstate the case. Postmodern theory and cognitive science are only compatible up to a certain point. Postmodernism cannot, by its own terms, grant a privileged epistemological position to scientifically tested hypotheses. Scientists cannot concede the Stories for Thinking 39

postmodern view of science as just one of many metanarratives with no special claim to the truth. Spolsky acknowledges this and reasons that “the evolutionary argument . . . compromises the absoluteness of the deconstructive claim but also, crucially, affirms the gradience of the claim.”44 But we fall into the same error that we attribute to postmodernism when we reject all of the gradients of a position because we cannot accept it as an absolute. Postmodern theorists have developed ways to read narratives skeptically, and the more we learn about the way that humans build narratives, the more defensible their skepticism becomes. According to postmodernists, the stories upon which we build our lives and base our decisions are fragmented, incomplete, unreliable, perspectival, and contradictory. They are, in other words, useful fictions—which is very close to the way that cognitive scientists describe them as well.

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3

4 The Influence of Anxiety One thing is certain, that the problem of anxiety is a nodal point, linking up all kinds of most important questions; a riddle, of which the solution must cast a flood light upon our whole mental life.

—Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis These things may seem ridiculous to others, even as ridiculous as they were in themselves, but to me they were most tormenting cogitations. . . . Besides, I thought, as I have already hinted, that my sin was not within the bounds of that pardon, that was wrapped up in a promise; and if not, then I knew assuredly, that it was more easy for heaven and earth to pass away, than for me to have eternal life.

—John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners Anxiety and Cognition In the twenty-fifth of Sigmund Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, first delivered in 1917, Freud acknowledges that anxiety is “a riddle.” Though he offers no real definition of the term anxiety, he does flatly reject the value of examining it physiologically. “I know of nothing less important for the psychological comprehension of anxiety,” he writes, “than a knowledge of the nerve paths by which the excitations travel.”1 In Freud’s updated “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” he still rejects the value of biochemical inquiry, but feels that he is in a much better position to explain the origins of anxiety—at least in males. Freud begins with the proposition that anxiety must always be 41

based on a concrete, external fear. Yet his clinical observations showed that anxiety in male patients was connected to their oedipal feelings for their mothers, making the root cause of anxiety moral and, therefore, internal. Freud resolved this apparent contradiction by deducing the real threat that lay beneath the Oedipus complex: We have, however, not yet said what the real danger is that the child fears as a result of his being in love with his mother. It is the punishment of castration, the loss of his penis. . . . It is not primarily a matter of whether castration is really performed; what is important is that the danger is one that threatens from without, and that the boy believes in it. There you have it! The root cause of anxiety can be reduced to a basic and universal human narrative: a boy feels sexual desires for his mother and fears that, as a consequence of this desire, his father will cut off his penis. These thoughts are so terrible, the boy represses them deep into his subconscious and, later in life, begins to project them onto other things that cannot rationally cause the anxiety he feels. This anxiety continues, shifting from one putative cause to another, until he seeks psychoanalysis and confronts his real fears. This theory is not a perfect fit, Freud acknowledges, as it does not account for anxiety in women (and, presumably, in orphans or in children of single mothers). Yet Freud feels entirely justified in labeling fear of castration “one of the most frequent and one of the strongest motive forces of repression, and therefore of the formation of neuroses.”2 Contemporary literary critics generally speak of anxiety from a Freudian perspective, one that sees anxiety as the result of either repressed fear of castration or repressed oedipal guilt. Some critics acknowledge this influence directly, as Harold Bloom does in his 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence. In Bloom’s text, poets take the role of sons locked in an oedipal struggle with their poetic fathers. The poetic fathers are the great poets whose works have nurtured and sustained the poet sons, but whose influence threatens to overwhelm (that is castrate) the sons and keep them from maturing into their fathers’ poetic equals.3 Many other critics have simply absorbed Freudian ideas about anxiety from the larger culture: that it has roots in the unconscious mind, that sur42

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face effects usually hide deeply repressed causes, or that everything is motivated by sex. I have no objection to critics who use the concept of anxiety in this way; we are all entitled to define our terms. However, my use of the term will rely on characterizations generally accepted by those currently researching and treating anxiety. For better or worse, these characterizations have little to do with castration or oedipal guilt and much to do with the maligned “nerve paths by which the excitations travel.” Current psychological literature describes anxiety in human beings as an unpleasant state of uneasiness or apprehension involving at least three different response systems: the cognitive (what people think), the physiological (what people feel), and the behavioral (what people do). Anxiety can begin in any of these systems and involve the others almost immediately. Anxiety-producing thoughts, for example, can trigger the same chemical response in the brain as real physical danger. These biochemical processes can misfire and produce anxiety for no apparent reason, causing the cognitive facilities to create a reason. Simply engaging in behaviors that normally produce anxiety—such as pacing up and down a hallway while looking at a watch—can trigger the physiological and cognitive response systems even if no other stimuli are present.4 Researchers believe that all three anxiety-response systems are coordinated by a part of the limbic system known as the amygdala. Sometimes referred to as “the hub in the wheel of fear,” the amygdala receives sensory and perceptual information from other areas of the brain and combines it with contextual information and long-term memories. After collecting this information, the amygdala triggers the physiological and behavioral responses typically associated with anxiety, such as elevation of heart rate and blood pressure, release of adrenaline, perspiration, and either aggression or flight. In both humans and other animals, “damage to the amygdala interferes with the ability to be conditioned to learn a fear response.”5 The amygdala, in combination with the hippocampus, also appears to have a vital role in the construction and retention of narrative; patients who have sustained damage to this region of their brain manifest difficulty creating new narratives or recalling old ones. In their article “The Neurology of Narrative,” Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver identify two different kinds of dysnarrativia (inability to produce and structure narrative) in patients with damage to the amygdalo-hippocampal region. The Influence of Anxiety 43

All the patients surveyed for the article suffer from amnesia. Patients with one kind of dysnarrativia also suffer from “arrested narration,” and are “able to frame coherently their life leading up to the injury but not beyond.” Patients with the other kind of dysnarrativia exhibit “unbounded narration,” which the authors define as “relentlessly fabricating narratives that purport to describe recent events in their lives but actually have no relationship to genuine occurrences.”6 Along with inhibiting the fear response, damage to the amygdalo-hippocampal region of the brain can either shut down the mechanisms that humans use to generate narratives, or it can throw them into permanent overdrive. Anxiety can cause us profound discomfort, to be sure, but at least some of the time it makes us uncomfortable with things that should make us uncomfortable, and it activates behavioral responses that can save our lives. In an article titled “What Good Is Feeling Bad? The Evolutionary Benefits of Psychic Pain,” evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse sums up the generally accepted evolutionary rationales for fight-or-flight anxiety: The strong, rapid heartbeat that accompanies panic anxiety brings extra nutrition and oxygen to muscles and speeds the removal of wastes. Muscle tension prepares for flight or physical defense. Shortness of breath induces rapid breathing, hyperoxygenating the blood. Sweating cools the body in anticipation of flight. Greater production of blood glucose also helps bring more nutrition to the muscles. Secretion of adrenaline into the blood makes it clot faster, should injury occur. Blood circulation shifts from the digestive system to the muscles, leaving a cold, empty feeling in the pit of the stomach and a tense readiness in the muscles. To these physical advantages, Nesse adds several psychological advantages. For example, according to Nesse, anxiety helps us focus on the danger at hand and keeps us in a constant mental state of readiness for action.7 The most salient characteristic of anxiety—as anybody who suffers from it can confirm—is that it causes so much discomfort that we will do almost anything to make it go away. The extreme discomfort that anxiety produces becomes a powerful motivation to neutralize its cause. 44

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The drive to neutralize anxiety is just as adaptive as anxiety itself. If we did not experience anxiety, we would be in great danger from predators, snakes, spiders, water, high places, and many other dangers that anxiety motivates us to pay special attention to. However, if we could not neutralize anxiety after we began experiencing it, we would suffer an emotional paralysis that would prevent us from doing anything other than worrying about things that have ceased to be dangerous. Throughout most, if not all of human history, functioning effectively in our environment has required a daily, delicate dance with anxiety.

Bunyan’s White Bear Despite its lofty title, grace does very little abounding in John Bunyan’s classic spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Anxiety, on the other hand, abounds everywhere as Bunyan expounds on and explains his deep and painful anxieties about the salvation of his soul. He describes several different versions of this anxiety in rapid succession: that he does not have faith adequate to salvation, that he is not among the elect, that “the day of grace should be past and gone,” that he is a great sinner, and that the Bible is wrong and some other religion is correct.8 Each of these incidents follows the same four-part pattern: 1) A thought enters his head; 2) he obsesses over the thought, falling deeper and deeper into despair and hopelessness; 3) he compulsively scrutinizes the Bible for a verse or passage that allows him to construct a narrative that relieves his anxiety; and 4) he feels relieved and happy again until another thought enters his mind unbidden. Though he successfully neutralizes each of these anxieties and assures himself that he is among the elect, the ironclad assurances of Calvinist theology give him only brief periods of comfort. Reflecting on a passage in Matthew, Bunyan concludes that, having secured his position in the company of the elect, he can forfeit his heavenly status only by committing the “unpardonable sin” of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.9 Bunyan recounts his struggle to avoid this one unforgivable transgression, which, in his mind, he would commit if he allowed the phrase “I sell Christ” (or words to that effect) to pass through his mind in an unguarded moment. Despite heroic efforts to suppress such a thought, it inevitably crosses his mind, causing him—in his judgment—to commit the only sin that cannot be forgiven: The Influence of Anxiety 45

But to be brief, one morning, as I did lie in my bed, I was, at other times, most fiercely assaulted with this temptation, to sell and part with Christ; the wicked suggestion still running in my mind, sell him, sell him, sell him, sell him, sell him, as fast as a man could speak; against which also, in my mind, as at other times, I answered, no, no, not for thousands, thousands, thousands, at least twenty times together. But at last, after much striving, even until I was almost out of breath, I felt this thought pass through my heart, Let Him go, if He will! and I thought also, that I felt my heart freely consent thereto. Oh, the diligence of Satan! Oh, the desperateness of man’s heart!10 We can now say with some confidence that Bunyan could not have avoided having this “blasphemous” thought once he had identified the possibility of thinking it. Psychologists call this the “White Bear Phenomenon” after a passage in Dostoyevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions that reads: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”11 In 1987 Daniel M. Wegner and his collaborators took up Dostoyevsky’s challenge. The researchers placed subjects in an isolated room with a microphone and instructed them to say everything that came into their minds during a five-minute period. Then they instructed the same participants to repeat the experiment but to make sure to avoid thinking about a white bear. In case the participants could not follow the instructions, they were given a bell to ring each time they did think of a white bear. The subjects rang the bell an average of six times in five minutes and mentioned white bears on other occasions without ringing the bell. Some subjects became obsessed with white bears and rang the bell fourteen or fifteen times. Thought suppression, the researchers concluded, is impossible, and attempting suppression greatly increases the chance that a stray thought will turn into an obsession.12 Bunyan, lacking the resources of modern psychology, continued to believe he had lost his soul. He recounts that he spent the next two and a half years of his life trying to come to grips with his status as a selfconfessed Holy Ghost denier. He considers his sin to be far worse than David’s adultery and murder or than Peter’s thrice-repeated denial of Christ (39). As he puts it, “O! methoughts, this sin was bigger than the 46

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sins of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole world, no one pardonable, nor all of them together, was able to equal mine, mine outwent every one of them” (43). With almost diabolical precision, Bunyan lays a “white bear” trap for himself and comes away holding his prey. As crazy as all of this may sound to modern readers, literary critics have long resisted assertions by the likes of Josiah Royce and William James that seem to reduce the events recounted in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners to an episode of insanity on the part of the author. Consider, for example, Michael Davies’s attack on psychological interpretations in his recent, excellent book on Bunyan, Graceful Reading: Such an approach ultimately culminates, of course, in a psychological analysis of Grace Abounding which . . . effectively cripples any humane and imaginative (not to mention doctrinal) response to the text. . . . At a most basic level, such a response reflects a fundamentally poor interpretive practice, a lack of sensitivity to the words on the page. . . . At the same time, such readings do not further our understanding of the text in any real or effective way.13 In rejecting psychological readings, Davies presents psychology as something wholly incompatible with religion and incapable of taking Bunyan’s religious claims seriously. Those who insist on pathologizing Bunyan’s experiences do so because their “hidden cultural agenda” considers religious conversion to be “synonymous with mental and nervous disorder.”14 One may certainly argue, as Davies does, about the ability of psychological criticism to produce valuable insights into a text; however, it is simply incorrect to attribute all psychological interpretations of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners to secular academics hostile to religion. Many of them are, but some of the richest and most useful psychological interpretations of the text and its author have come, not from the ranks of academic Freudians trying to psychoanalyze Bunyan’s religious impulses, but from pastoral counselors trying to help people who suffer from a well-known form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd) called “scrupulosity.”15 Like Bunyan, those suffering from scrupulosity become obsessed with thoughts of blasphemy and other grave moral offenses that they imagine themselves to have committed. These indiThe Influence of Anxiety 47

viduals attempt to relieve their anxiety through confession, prayer, reading sacred texts, or other religious-themed rituals. Religious counseling materials have long presented scrupulosity as a spiritually destructive state of mind rather than as a genuine concern for one’s salvation. This is especially true in the Catholic Church, where experience with confession has resulted in a large body of literature about parishioners with a “scrupulous conscience.”16 During the twentieth century, this traditional Catholic understanding of scrupulosity merged with the clinical definition of obsessive-compulsive disorder as clinicians began to discern the same pattern of irrational fear of contamination, combined with compulsive rituals, in both the obsessive hand washer and the compulsive confesser. Further research has demonstrated a high degree of correlation between religious scrupulosity and other ocd behaviors such as checking and hoarding.17 Counselors and clergy members who work with scrupulosity ocd are often struck by how closely Bunyan’s experiences in Grace Abounding mirror those of their patients and parishioners. Joseph W. Ciarrocchi’s 1995 book, The Doubting Disease, the first book-length treatment of scrupulosity as a form of ocd, devotes an entire chapter to Grace Abounding as a way to introduce scrupulosity’s symptoms. Ciarrocchi, a professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola University, explains that Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography “touches every aspect of scruples. We see all the major issues displayed: scrupulous obsessions with undoing compulsions (thoughts, acts), the need to resist, the pervasive nature of the obsessions, the resultant anxiety and depression, the notion that some thoughts are dangerous, the limited relief from sharing with fellowsufferers, and the insidious nature of the obsessions which defy logic or the person’s value system.”18 Similar conclusions about Bunyan have been drawn by, among others, Judith L. Rapoport, in her groundbreaking study of ocd, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing; by Ian Osborn, in Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals; and by John Sneep and Arlette Zinck, in “Spiritual and Psychic Transformation,” their recent study of Bunyan for the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.19 These recent psychological interpretations of Grace Abounding confirm Davies’s assertion that we should not label Bunyan “insane.” Scrupulosity is not insanity. While those suffering from schizophrenia and related disorders cannot distinguish between their irrational beliefs and 48

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external reality, those with scrupulosity and other forms of ocd know how irrational their fears are. As Ciarrocchi puts it, “they know their ideas are senseless, yet feel enormously controlled by them.”20 Bunyan expresses this clearly when he acknowledges that his fears “may seem ridiculous to others, even as ridiculous as they were in themselves, but to me they were most tormenting cogitations” (47). On one level Bunyan completely understands the irrationality of his own thought process. On another level he must believe that his fears are true or that there is a chance his fears are true, thereby giving a reason for him to act as though they are. Bunyan seeks to be absolutely certain of his own salvation, which may be what attracted him to a strict predestinarian theology in the first place. The successive resolutions described in Grace Abounding attempt to repair potential fissures in the salvation narrative that he has accepted. This search for absolute certainty is a common feature of ocd, and it provides a compelling window into the way that the human mind translates anxiety into narrative.

Anxiety Disorders and Narrative Dysfunction Freud speculates that the condition he calls “obsessional neurosis” can actually turn people into criminals by compelling them to commit crimes to which they attach their irrational anxiety, “as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.”21 Psychologists now know much more than Freud did about the cognitive experience of obsessions and compulsions. Rather than blaming irrational anxiety on an unresolved oedipal complex, as Freud does, brain scientists today are more likely to attribute irrational anxiety to a neural short circuit that prevents the normal anxiety response from shutting down. However, Freud’s central insight in this case was remarkably prescient: in many cases of ocd, feelings of anxiety do precede obsessive thoughts. People with ocd do not have irrational thoughts because they are irrational people; rather, because they are rational people they require good reasons for anxious thoughts when they have them. As irrational as it might seem to believe that one’s hands are dirty after an hour of washing, or that one must recheck a door over and over again to prevent burglary, it is even more irrational to think that intense feelings of anxiety—exactly the same feelings that have accompanied real threats The Influence of Anxiety 49

and dangers in the past—occur for no reason at all. If I were to see lights turning on and off in the empty house next door to me, it would be very difficult to accept that this was happening for no reason, since, in my experience, lights don’t turn on and off by themselves. Because what happens next door has an immediate impact on my well being, I would begin creating and testing alternative narratives of causality, beginning with the most probable: realtors have been showing the house, the owners installed time switches to give the illusion of occupancy, or neighborhood kids have been using the house for their secret club meetings. If I could definitely eliminate all of the rational narratives and the lights kept turning on and off, I would probably start to consider irrational narratives involving satanic cults, ghosts, or aliens. I would certainly appreciate the irrationality of such narratives, but would also be faced with the equally irrational prospect of lights turning on and off for no reason at all. When the neural mechanisms that produce anxiety activate for no apparent reason—as often happens in those with ocd and other anxiety disorders—perfectly rational people can be driven to entertain patently irrational beliefs. In his book Brain Lock, ucla brain scientist Jeffrey M. Schwartz examines the neural mechanisms that produce anxiety in ocd patients. Normal anxiety, which helps to protect us from danger, produces both extra energy and intense discomfort. When the danger is neutralized, something akin to an “all clear” alarm sounds in the brain, and the anxiety dissipates. Schwartz’s brain-scan research shows that in people suffering from ocd this “all clear” mechanism fails to sound correctly, and “the brain gets stuck in gear and can’t shift to the next thought.”22 They continue to feel that they must wash their hands, check their doors, hoard resources, confess their sins, or engage in some other compulsive behavior to ward off the disaster that their anxiety tells them must be imminent. Since ocd anxiety is generated by a chemical release inside the brain, it cannot be neutralized by rational actions the way that normal anxiety can. When one narrative is made untenable (that is, “my hands are dirty and I must wash them”), an alternative narrative must be found to justify the persistence of anxiety (that is, “I must wash them again because I might have missed a spot under my fingernails where germs are likely to hide”). When anxiety persists despite repeated attempts to neutralize it, the mind must generate increasingly 50 The Influence of Anxiety

complicated narratives to, in the words of two other researchers, “[dismiss] actual evidence on the grounds of going beyond surface reality to a deeper reality, and finally inferring that a completely fictional narrative is a remote probability.”23 Clinicians and researchers have recently begun using ocd treatments that specifically acknowledge the narrative component of obsessive thoughts. In an important 2002 article, Richard S. Hallam and Kieron P. O’Connor argue that ocd does not stem from a defect in logical reasoning but from overidentification with internally constructed narratives. Hallam and O’Connor suggest that therapists should stop simply confronting ocd patients with the irrationality of their beliefs; rather, they should teach them how to undermine the authority of the narratives supporting those beliefs. Drawing explicitly on Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems with Dostoyevsky’s Poetics—a book whose influence has largely been confined to literary studies—Hallam and O’Connor label this the “dialogical approach”: If obsessions are a persuasive engaging one-sided conversation or dialogue, obsessional neutralization behaviour would be dictated by the power of the narrative, rather than from abnormal bias or misinterpretation of the exaggeration of danger. A strong enactment built up by an imaginary narrative that hands are dirty would necessarily impose hand-washing as a response. This would not be a case of mistaken perception but rather of irresistible involvement in a script. Hence, dialogical therapy would not be concerned with confronting the rationality of discrete appraisals or beliefs, but with exposing and identifying with the person the processes by which narratives are constructed.24 In Beyond Reasonable Doubt, O’Connor, Frederick Aardema, and Marie-Claude Pélissier expand this view of ocd by blending clinical observation with the narrative theories of Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, Kenneth Burke, and others. In the process they create models of how narrative functions in cognition generally and in the minds of those who suffer from ocd specifically. Starting with Ricoeur’s insistence that “human existence is storied because of the way we need to understand actions organized in time,” O’Connor et al. assert that human existence is acThe Influence of Anxiety 51

tually composed of numerous, potentially contradictory stories so that humans can understand and analyze possible explanations that may or may not be true. Even the act of rejecting a narrative requires the mind to consider it conditionally true long enough to evaluate its likelihood. “Living in reality is a matter of degree,” they conclude, and normal cognitive functioning requires us to “exist in a gradient of awareness where the plausibility of different possibilities is associated with distinct senses of reality.”25 One of the most important insights in Beyond Reasonable Doubt is that ocd sufferers do not usually believe irrational narratives as facts; rather they perceive them as possibilities, which are by nature immune to factual rebuttal. Facts come from the outside world, while possibilities come from the imagination, which constantly generates counterfactual possibilities in order to assess their probability. When all of the cognitive processes function correctly, the mind creates multiple, potentially contradictory narratives that can exist in a sort of dialogue with each other. This leads to at least a tentative resolution that produces rational, fitness-enhancing behavior. Resorting once again to the work of Bakhtin, O’Connor et al. theorize that obsessions represent “unresolved dialogue” between these different narratives. Clinically, this view of ocd translates into “narrative therapy”—a form of counseling that has much in common with postmodern literary criticism: Narrative therapy then largely involves increasing insight into the role of narrative and language in creating emotion. In particular, the dialogical nature of language can explain how different monologues drawn from different sources may conflict or overlap, and that such polyphonic events are normal. People can learn that creating or continuing their own stories using narrative devices to modify terms of reference, can accommodate apparently conflicting beliefs or identities. Thinking and inferring, then, are always a product of “joint action” in relation to another person or activity: thinking does not speak for an inner self but for a social self.26 Treating contradictory beliefs as part of an unresolved dialogue may allow practitioners to get around one of the biggest challenges of irrational obsessions: that they are often almost impossible to distinguish from 52 The Influence of Anxiety

rational beliefs. We often act as if a low-probability scenario were true, invoking the maxim that it is “better to be safe than sorry.” For example, people often get shots for rabies when bitten by unknown dogs, even though the percentage of dogs with rabies is vanishingly small. There is nothing irrational about this, since even a small chance of contracting a fatal disease justifies the relatively minimal investment of a vaccination. It is not rational, however, for a person to get a rabies shot after simply touching a dog or a tetanus shot after touching a door. Similarly, it is completely rational to wash one’s hands for fifteen seconds before eating a meal; it is completely irrational to do so for fifteen minutes. But where is the line between cleanliness and obsession? Thirty seconds? A minute? Rational people may come to different conclusions even though almost everybody would agree that, at some point, continued hand washing indicates a mental disorder. Drawing the line becomes even more difficult in an evolutionary context. Each of the major ocd symptom groups—washing, checking, hoarding, and even worrying about social behavior and moral issues— could be considered a rational response to normal anxiety. Dirty hands really will spread contamination and disease, burglars and wild animals really do come in through unlocked doors, saving food really can make the difference between life and death, and behavior that a community considers “immoral” really does impact social relations and mating opportunities. The line between “normal” and “obsessive” anxiety has changed dramatically as humans have gained more control over their environments. Just a few hundred years ago, a man who checked his yard a few dozen times a day for signs of bears might very well save the lives of his entire family; today, such a man would almost certainly be diagnosed with ocd and instructed by therapists to confront the irrationality of his bear-checking obsession. Yet nothing in the basic human cognitive makeup has changed in the last four hundred—or even the last forty thousand—years. With these thoughts in mind, we now turn to the work of the evolutionary psychologist Randolph M. Nesse, whose famous “Smoke Detector Principle” suggests that modern anxiety disorders—such as ocd—may simply be the far end of a spectrum of adaptive behavior intensified by living in a relatively safe world with cognitive mechanisms designed for much more dangerous environments.27

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Smoke without Fire The maxim “where there’s smoke there’s fire” is false. Many of the things that produce smoke—cigarettes, exhaust pipes, barbecued chicken—do not signal fires, though they often set off fire alarms. Small amounts of otherwise harmless smoke can lead to large-scale evacuations of schools, office buildings, or sporting events, often resulting in inconvenience, lost instruction time, and thousands of dollars wasted on false alarms. Yet schools, colleges, and places of business still install more and more sophisticated smoke detection equipment and still act as though every alarm signaled a raging inferno—as they should. Even though we know that most smoke alarms do not signal dangerous fires and that most building evacuations end with everybody trudging impatiently back into the building, we would still be foolish not to respond to a smoke alarm because the consequences of not responding when there is a real fire are much greater than the consequences of responding when there is not a fire. In a key 2001 article entitled “The Smoke Detector Principle,” Nesse uses the logic of the smoke alarm to explain the evolutionary basis for anxiety. He begins with one of the most basic choices that an organism faces: whether or not to run away from a potential predator. “When an animal hears a rustle behind a bush,” he writes, “it cannot tell for sure whether this is a predator or not, yet it must instantly decide whether or not to flee.” In such cases, the logic of the smoke detector (assuming the worst) becomes much more compelling than the logic of probability (calculating the most likely scenario). Consider a prehistoric hunter who hears a baby squirrel in the bushes, imagines it to be a hungry tiger, and sprints back to camp as fast as his prehistoric legs will carry him. The hunter will incur minimal charges to his Darwinian fitness account: the calories burned during the long sprint, the lost opportunity to kill and eat a baby squirrel, and, if anybody else finds out, whatever social ostracism attaches to people who run away from harmless baby rodents. These costs are negligible when compared to the cost of being eaten by a tiger, which, in terms of Darwinian fitness, is so enormous that the benefits of escaping a single tiger outweigh the cost of running away from a thousand squirrels. If a hunter encounters rustling in the bushes multiple times over the course of his life, the chances are very good that one of the encounters will be with 54

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a predator. Therefore, as Nesse concludes, “a relatively inexpensive defense, like flight, should be expressed if there is even a small chance of catastrophic harm.”28 In most cases, assuming the existence of a predator based on flimsy evidence is a better survival strategy than attempting to ascertain the truth. It takes much more time to ascertain the facts about a situation than it does to create imaginary scenarios. If the thing behind the bushes is a predator, taking the time to discover the truth may give the predator the edge, so organisms are not likely to experience selection pressure in favor of discovering “the truth.” Rather, evolution will favor organisms with a tendency to assume a danger and engage in a defense. In their book, Why We Get Sick, Nesse and George C. Williams report the results of a 1992 experiment by the biologist Lee Dugatkin that confirm this assumption. In the experiment Dugatkin was attempting to ascertain the potential costs of “predator inspection,” a behavior common in some fish species in which one member of a school attempts to gather information about a potential threat and communicate that information to its shoalmates, who remain at a safe distance. For such a behavior to occur, some members of the species in question must be “bold” (willing to approach and inspect a potential predator), while others can be “timid” (disposed to flee at any sign of danger). Dugatkin separated guppies into three equal groups, based on their willingness to confront a smallmouth bass. Nesse and Williams report that “after sixty hours, 40 percent of the timid guppies and 15 percent of the ordinary guppies were still there, but none of the bold guppies survived.”29 Anxiety causes organisms to act as if every wisp of smoke signaled a fire and every faint rustle signaled a predator. Even if these things turn out to be untrue most of the time, natural selection will favor creatures that express a flight defense all of the time. For nearly all animals, this anxiety is an automatic response to a stimulus: “rustle” equals “run.” However, in human cognition, which is inextricably connected to narrative construction, reactions to potential threats necessarily include an additional step: “rustle” equals “tiger” and “tiger” equals “run.” Converting the sound that we hear into a very simple sequence—“a tiger who wants to eat me is over there”—engages our cognitive capacity for creating narratives, in this case, what-if scenarios expanded by our storytelling capacity. The Influence of Anxiety 55

In a tense situation the amygdala receives input from several different sources. The sensory cortices feed it visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory information directly from the environment. But the hippocampus also helps to transfer stored memories that allow the sensory information to be placed in a context—this is the key to the development of a narrative.30 Imagine the mental process of our prehistoric hunter when he hears the snapping of a twig behind a tree (the fact that we can imagine the mental processes of an imaginary prehistoric hunter is quite remarkable in itself). The hunter’s auditory cortex sends a message to the amygdala registering the snapping of the twig, the cry of birds, and something that sounded like a growl. His visual cortex adds that the tree is fifty feet away and that there is nothing else in the area that could provide shelter, and his olfactory cortex signals the smell of a rotting carcass nearby. While this is enough information for a simple narrative, the most exciting parts come from long-term memories which remind the hunter’s amygdala that another hunter was killed by a tiger near the hunter’s current location last week, that all of the other hunters in the tribe had been avoiding this location ever since, and that the last tiger’s lair he visited also smelled of rotting carcasses. With all of this information at the amygdala’s disposal, it can direct a response that is deeply influenced by a fully embodied narrative. When we face a potentially threatening situation, our entire limbic system conspires to create a narrative that can guide our response. It is not important that this story be true; in fact, fictional narratives are in many ways more adaptive than true ones. This does not mean that any story will do. Nesse’s smoke detector principle formula predicts that natural selection will favor some specific strategies for building narratives in the face of possible dangers: 1. Exaggeration will prevail over understatement—because the cost of underestimating a danger far outweighs the cost of exaggerating it. 2. Exciting narratives will prevail over unexciting ones—because one of the purposes of a narrative response is to produce adrenaline and prepare the body for either fight or flight. 3. Speculation will prevail over truth seeking—because seeking accurate information takes time, which often exposes the organism to unnecessary danger. 56 The Influence of Anxiety

Of course, exaggeration, excitement, and speculation are universal elements of fiction and storytelling. Exaggeration is a hallmark of storytellers the world over, fiction is speculative by definition, and unexciting stories tend not to be repeated or remembered. These qualities have been built into our idea of what a story is supposed to be and are therefore very difficult to historicize, but this idea came from somewhere. Our narrative-building mechanisms evolved to accomplish adaptive tasks, such as staying alive. Many of our narrative expectations come from these ancestral predispositions, and once the mechanisms were in place they were available as a cognitive design space for the narrative tools that have shaped our cultures.

Baby’s First Fictions As Shahryar discovered so long ago, narrative and anxiety are joined together at the core of our psyches. Mounting evidence suggests that the cognitive connection between predation anxiety and narrative—specifically with fiction—begins at a very young age. Most parents, in fact, know this very well. When parents get down on all fours, roar, and say “I’m going to get you and eat you up,” a child will squeal with delight and crawl away giggling. At some point, the child will probably assume the role of the pursuer and expect the parent to pretend to be frightened. The child, in other words, is able to understand at a very young age—about eighteen months according to a seminal article by Alan M. Leslie—the difference between the fictional proposition (“mommy is a dangerous animal who is chasing me across the floor”) and the true proposition (“mommy is just playing a game with me; as soon as she is done she is going to feed me and change my diaper like she always does”).31 Parental chase play puts children in an inherently anxietyproducing situation (being hunted down and devoured by a trusted adult), but the use of a deliberate fiction overrides the emotional defense system while still eliciting the physical response. Not only is chase play a human universal; it appears to be a mammalian trait common in both predator species and prey species. The wide distribution of this kind of play strongly suggests an adaptive function; the three most obvious candidates, as explained by Michael J. Boulton and Peter K. Smith, are to train children how to 1) hunt actual prey, 2) avoid actual predators, and 3) fight actual competitors in their own speThe Influence of Anxiety 57

cies for resources and mating opportunities.32 Of these three, predator avoidance seems to be the most likely adaptive function for the earliest chase games that parents play with their children. Most young children do not need to know how to hunt or to fight over mates; such knowledge is important mainly to post-adolescent males. However, in the ancestral environment, everyone—young and old, male and female alike—needed to know something about avoiding predators. This adaptive function of chase play forms the basis of a 2001 article by Francis F. Steen and Stephanie A. Owens, in which they argue that young animals of all species are favorite targets for predation, precisely because they lack the advanced motor skills and defensive behaviors that allow adults to escape. While repeated encounters with the predators may improve the relevant skills, each encounter, even as it has pedagogical value, carries the highest possible risk, that of death. . . . The continuing pressure of predation combined with leisure “sets up a unique adaptive problem and opportunity.” The evolutionary solution, as Aldis (1975) was first to note, “has been play in which peers become substitute predators, prey, etc.” (158). Such pretense appears designed to lower the cost of training by allowing it to take place in the absence of a real threat.33 It would be difficult to explain this level of complexity without at least considering Steen and Owens’s argument that “in our evolutionary past, the ability to engage in pretense was reliably correlated with improved chances of survival.”34 The phenomenon of chase play shows us how to connect basic biological function and the enjoyment of literature. The connection begins at the fight-or-flight reflex, an automatic behavioral subroutine common throughout the animal kingdom. Practice can improve the effectiveness of this defense—especially at an early age when automatic cognitive processes are still being formed. Therefore many mammals, including early hominids, evolved training strategies for their children that did not involve encountering real predators. As it often does, nature used pleasure as a reward for those who adopted the training regime; “I’mgoing-to-get-you-and-eat-you-up” became a game enjoyed by parents and children alike. As children grow older, they continue to engage in 58

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chase play; later they engage in what psychologists call “rough-and-tumble play” with their parents; later still they engage in adolescent games that simulate dangerous, fight-or-flight situations.35 The dramatic narratives involved in these games are often carried over directly into the more elaborate narratives that children consume, such as books with characters who must evade and outwit dangerous opponents, movies with elaborate car chase scenes, and interactive video games that simulate predation or combat. Chase play also provides us with a good example of a useful fiction. Children who believe that their parents really do want to capture and eat them will derive little benefit, and no pleasure, from chase-play games. Children who do understand the fiction of the game can practice crucial predator-avoidance strategies with very little risk to their lives or well being. At the same time, the children can practice people-reading skills by learning what verbal and contextual cues signal the presence of irony. In this way natural selection supports the predisposition to derive pleasure from narratives that are designed to do something very different than communicate the truth, or at least a straightforward account of the truth. Our first fictions, it seems, have the same evolutionary purpose as our deepest anxieties—they keep us from being eaten. There should be no great surprise here; one can hardly imagine a more fundamental evolutionary function than staying alive. And the connections between anxiety and literature go much deeper than the first fictions of infants; they are fundamental to the fight-or-flight reflex that we share with most other animals.

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4

4 Information Anxiety Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.

—E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel A Strange Footprint The turning point of Robinson Crusoe occurs precisely halfway into the narrative when Crusoe, after fifteen years of presuming himself the only inhabitant of his island, discovers a single footprint on a sandy beach.1 Before this incident, Robinson Crusoe tells the story of a solitary individual and his relationship with nature, God, and himself. Afterward, it becomes a political novel full of battles, colonial aspirations, social contracts, and an expanding cast of characters—including cannibals, excannibals, mutineers, Spaniards, and English sailors. For the two years after Crusoe discovers the footprint—an interval of time that requires a mere ten pages of text to describe—he remains alone on his island, accompanied only by his anxieties and the narratives that he creates to try to resolve them: After innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feel61

ing, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrify’d to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man; nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes my affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange, unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way.2 Crusoe initially responds to the crisis of the footprint with the perfectly sound strategy of running away as fast as he can. He even acknowledges that he acts like a fleeing animal, saying, “never frightened hare fled to cover, or fox to earth, with more terror of mind than I to this retreat.”3 But once he reaches safety he begins to act less like a rabbit escaping a predator and more like Bunyan agonizing over his salvation. His sense of well-being has been destroyed by something he does not recognize, so he develops several possible scenarios in his mind, each one producing more anxiety than the one before. He first believes that the footprint belongs to Satan, but decides that the devil could devise better torments for him than a single footprint. He then reasons that it must have been “savages of the main land . . . who had wandered out to sea in their canoes.”4 This thought consumes him until he develops yet another possible narrative—reasoning that it was his own footprint left at an earlier date. Yet when he returns to the beach to measure the footprint, he discovers that it cannot be his own, which, he reports, “filled my head with new imaginations, and gave me the vapors again to the highest degree.”5 Crusoe’s anxiety, like Bunyan’s, persists for more than two years. Also like Bunyan, he reads the Bible compulsively looking for reassurances that God will protect him. But Crusoe’s principal strategy for neutralizing his anxiety is to build fortifications. Every time that he feels anxious about who else might be on the island, he builds another wall or plants more thick trees until he constructs a nearly impassible fortress. Crusoe does all of this “purely from [his] apprehensions on the account of a print of a man’s foot.”6 Everett Zimmerman has pointed out that Crusoe responds to nearly every threat he experiences by building fortifications, yet he never actually uses these fortresses defensively, despite many opportunities to do so. Crusoe builds walls, not to create usable defenses, but “to restore his psychic equilibrium.”7 62

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Restoring psychic equilibrium is precisely the same reason that people with ocd wash their hands and check their doors. However, Crusoe’s actions do not stem from imaginary threats; the danger of cannibals—as Crusoe soon discovers—is quite real. It does not follow, however, that the actions he takes in response to this threat are rational. Most people presented with a situation that requires them to act, but presents no obvious course of action, will experience an anxiety that closely mirrors the symptoms of ocd.8 In such situations, people often engage in ineffective actions that create what psychologist Ellen Langer, in a famous set of experiments in the 1970s, labeled “the illusion of control.”9 A well-known example of this is the redundant pushing of a lit button while waiting for an elevator. Most people, if asked, will say that it does no good to push the button more than once. Under experimental observation, however, a significant portion of subjects will still push the lit button repeatedly while waiting for the elevator.10 We know that it does no good, but we push the button anyway because we are spurred on by our anxiety to do something, and redundant button pushing seems better than complete inaction. Researchers acknowledge that the illusion of control can be adaptive “when it protects people from detecting that important outcomes are uncontrollable, which, in turn, may protect them from depression.”11 Crusoe’s anxiety ultimately stems from a failure of narrative imagination—he cannot conceive of a narrative capable of explaining a single footprint in the sand. Visiting cannibals might account for dozens or even hundreds of footprints, but leaving a single footprint with no other traces of human presence whatsoever would be a pretty neat trick even with twenty-first century technology; “how it came thither,” Crusoe admits, “I knew not, nor could in the least imagine.”12 In other words, Crusoe cannot fit the footprint into any plausible narrative, and this causes him more anxiety than he would feel with any scenario that he fully understood. The inability to account for a key element of a narrative—such as the agency by which an act is accomplished—creates more anxiety than any scenario one could construct to worry about. Crusoe suggests something like this himself when he reflects that “we find the burthen of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about.”13 The footprint is the first trace of other people that Crusoe finds on the island. The second occurs two years later when he stumbles into Information Anxiety

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an area littered with “skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of humane bodies.” This sight would appear to confirm one of his worst fears about the footprint: that cannibals have been visiting his island for some time. However, rather than making Crusoe even more anxious, as we might imagine, this site fills him with relief and unqualified joy. “I looked up with the utmost affection of my soul,” he reports, “and with a flood of tears in my eyes, gave God thanks that had cast my first lot in a part of the world where I was distinguished from such dreadful creatures as these.”14 He goes on to construct a new narrative that completely relieves his former anxiety: I observed that these wretches never came to this island in search of what they could get; perhaps not seeking, not wanting, or not expecting any thing here; and having often, no doubt, been up in the covered woody part of it, without finding any thing to their purpose, I knew I had been here now almost eighteen years, and never saw the foot-steps of humane creature there before; and I might be here eighteen more, as entirely concealed as I was now, if I did not discover myself to them.15 Crusoe’s argument to himself here is extraordinarily weak. Nothing that he has seen proves the negative premise with which he begins (that cannibals never came to the island looking for anything), and he proceeds to speculate about motives that he cannot possibly know. He can, however, imagine them, and this is the crucial difference between the bones and the footprint. In terms of informational content, most people would be more disturbed by a pile of half-eaten human body parts than by a stray footprint (poll your friends to see which one they would rather find in their backyard). However, while the footprint fills him with fear and anxiety, the cannibal site fills him with relief precisely because he can generate a plausible narrative to explain everything that he sees— he can infer an agent (cannibals), an act (feasting on human flesh), a scene (the island), an agency (boats to bring them to the island), and a purpose (eating captives after a battle).16 With all of this information sequenced into a narrative, Crusoe can assign a motive and determine his next course of action, bringing closure to the scene and eliminating the uncertainty that causes him anxiety. 64

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In a sense—and I acknowledge that it is a very limited one—Robinson Crusoe inhabits the same cognitive space in this passage that Shahryar does the first time that Scheherazade interrupts a story to go to bed—both men experience anxiety brought on by the shape of a narrative. By “shape,” I mean the formal elements of a narrative that are unconnected to the content. The shape of a narrative includes its length, its organization, and its level of detail—all of which can cause anxiety that has nothing to do with content. Nothing about the actual content of Scheherazade’s first story—“The Tale of the Merchant and the Jinni”—causes Shahryar any discomfort. Instead, his anxiety stems from its shape—a sequence of embedded narratives presented once a day in unfinished installments. While we initially assume that Crusoe’s anxiety upon reading “The Story of the Footprint” stems from his fear of the content of that narrative (the possibility of cannibals on the island), his joy upon finding incontrovertible proof of that content demonstrates that his initial fear had to do with its shape (the trace of an action that cannot be explained by any rational narrative). Because we inhabit a cognitive niche, our survival depends on our access to information. Information deficits—such as the location of the bear that went in the cave an hour ago—can be fatal, but so can information patterns that obscure relevant facts and contradictory information that impedes our ability to make decisions. Even correct information presented in an unusable shape can be dangerous. This chapter will make three overall assertions: 1) that problems in the shape of a narrative can threaten our survival and, therefore, produce anxiety; 2) that the best way to neutralize the anxiety caused by the shape of a narrative is to construct another narrative; and 3) that narrative does not need to be true in order to neutralize information anxiety.

The Sense of an Ending Human beings want stories to end; this is true in life as well as in fiction. As long as we consider a narrative to be “open” it will always command a part of our attention and, therefore, a portion of our resources. Writers and storytellers—who have an interest in keeping our attention— understand this principle very well. By perpetually denying closure to Shahryar, Scheherazade forces him to treat their marriage as an open narrative—one that cannot be brought to a conclusion because too Information Anxiety

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many of its elements remain unresolved. This is also why Dickens ended each installment of his serialized novels with characters in precarious positions, why early movie moguls began every show with a brief “cliffhanger” serial such as The Perils of Pauline, and why an entire generation of television fans spent eight months on pins and needles wondering “Who shot J.R.?” “We are all like Scheherazade’s husband,” writes E. M. Forster, “we want to know what happens next.”17 It is not difficult to imagine an evolutionary rationale for anxiety in the face of an incomplete narrative. If I saw two bears going into a cave near my house an hour ago, I am going to want to see the story “end” with both of them coming out again, and I am probably going to feel very anxious until they do. Similarly, if my daughter has had a high fever, I will feel extremely anxious about her health until the event comes to some kind of resolution, hopefully by her temperature returning to normal. In cases such as these, anxiety has an important adaptive purpose: to ensure that we keep paying attention to unresolved problems. A cognitive predisposition to feel tension about incomplete or missing information makes sense in an environment full of predators and natural perils, where learning “the rest of the story” could make the difference between finding a good meal and becoming one. When one considers the evolutionary value of completing tasks, the anxiety produced by incompleteness may have an even deeper value. Starting projects and not finishing them wastes resources; furthermore, many of the things that we choose to start doing have survival benefits that can only be realized upon their completion. A fishing pole is a good thing to have in survival situations, but half a fishing pole—say a bamboo stick without a line or a hook—is worse than useless, since the time required to make it could have been used for other things. This creates pressure to finish what one has started and creates nervousness about leaving projects incomplete. Some cognitive psychologists see the failure to complete any activity as a major cause of anxiety. For example, Isaac M. Marks and Randolph M. Nesse argue that “many behavioral sequences are best completed to their functional end; if left unfinished, time and energy are likely to be wasted. Tension motivates persistence until closure is effected.”18 The desire for closure is the subject of a well-known psychological principle known as the Zeigarnik effect, named for the Soviet psycholo66

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gist Bluma Zeigarnik, who demonstrated in a series of papers between 1927 and 1938 that people have a better memory for unfinished tasks than they do for finished ones. She and her mentor, the well-known psychologist Kurt Lewin, noticed that waiters could frequently remember everything that a customer had before a bill was paid, but could recall very little about a customer’s order after the meal was paid for. Zeigarnik’s research demonstrated that “unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones” because of what she calls “an unsatisfied quasi need” to bring the tasks to completion. This quasineed, she argues, “corresponds to a state of tension whose expression may be seen not only in desire to finish the interrupted work but also in memorial prominence as regards that work.”19 From its initial home in the annals of Gestalt psychology, this research has become important to the study of marketing strategies. Advertising executives define the Zeigarnik effect as “a psychological device that creates dissonance and uneasiness in the target audience.” Because of this, advertisers reason, it “has proven to be consistently more successful than any other method in generating ad headlines and copy that produce the desired response in readers—namely recall and sales.”20 The Zeigarnik effect also has an impact on the way that content is packaged in ad-supported media. Television producers know that we are more likely to continue watching a channel through the commercials if each segment of the television program ends with a mini cliffhanger. Similarly, radio station programmers know that we are more likely to listen to advertisements and songs we don’t like if they are part of a “countdown” to a “#1” that we don’t want to miss. The cognitive principle that underlies the Zeigarnik effect is both simple and powerful: we have been designed to pay attention to things until we enter them into our minds as “complete,” after which we give ourselves permission to stop thinking about them and move on to other things. The cognitive craving for closure provides one of the most obvious meeting places between the simple narratives that we use to process information and their more elaborate narrative descendents. There is no particular reason that a novel, play, or story should come to a decisive conclusion that resolves the major issues addressed by the plot. Theoretically, a narrative can conclude at any point by saying “the end” whenever the writer or storyteller chooses to stop. But the overwhelming Information Anxiety

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majority of stories in all cultures close with a dramatic resolution that produces a sense of finality, even if it does leave open the possibility of a future installment. One might have a difficult time even imagining a Hamlet that ended right when Hamlet fails to kill Claudius in the confessional, or a Star Wars in which Luke Skywalker escapes from his first encounter with the Death Star and then flies off into the galaxy to see what he can see. These stories drive toward end points that have been emplotted in the narratives from the very beginning. Even The Arabian Nights, a narrative which avoids closure throughout, ends in almost all extant versions with Shahryar formally pardoning Scheherazade, now the mother of his three children, and proclaiming her his wife for as long as they both shall live. Literary critics have long been interested in the way stories end. A number of well-known scholars have addressed this issue, several in book-length studies such as David H. Richter’s Fable’s End, Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure, William M. Thickstun’s Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel, Marianna Torgovnick’s Closure in the Novel, and D. A. Miller’s Narrative and Its Discontents.21 In The Sense of an Ending, perhaps the most influential of these studies, Kermode insists that the drive toward closure has exercised a tremendous influence on the way that fictional narratives have evolved. “Men,” he writes, “rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res, when they are born; they also die in medias rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.”22 For Kermode, then, fictional narratives are part of an existential project that also includes poetry, art, religion, and philosophy—to give meaning and structure to the collection of random facts that constitute our lives. Kermode’s insights correspond nicely with what we have learned in the last forty years about how the human mind processes information. The human need to understand origins proceeds from a cognitive imperative to understand causes, while the need for endings grows out of an equally strong imperative to stop devoting resources such as time and attention to issues that have ceased to be relevant to survival. Other critics have noted that endings are crucial to the way that we process information. Torgovnick, for example, argues that we need stories to end so that we can analyze them and absorb the information that 68

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they contain. “We value endings,” she explains, “because the retrospective patterning used to make sense of texts corresponds to one process used to make sense of life: the process of looking back over events and interpreting them in light of ‘how things turned out.’”23 In other words, we cannot make stable inferences about an event or a story while important questions are still open. This is the reason that Robinson Crusoe spends two years in a state of heightened anxiety after coming across a single footprint whose presence he cannot explain. Until Crusoe can bring some closure to the incident—as he does when he discovers the human remains—he cannot draw inferences from it that help him decide how to act in the future. David Herman, a recent narrative theorist with a more self-consciously cognitive inclination, argues that narrative endings serve another important psychological function—one closely related to the neutralization of anxiety. Closure, he argues, appears to be built into the way that narrative works, owing such a connection to the role of stories in our processing of grief and pain. “In coming to a conclusion,” Herman explains, “tellings mark even the most painful or disturbing experiences as endurable because finite. In such contexts, narrative is a tool for representing events not as over and done with, but as reaching a terminus that imposes a limit on the trauma-inducing (and cognition-disrupting) power of the events at issue.”24 Being finished, in other words, is one of the primary things that stories are supposed to do because we need reassurance that our own stories—especially the tragic ones—will also come to an end. Like other cognitive adaptations, this anxiety about incompleteness can become maladaptive—especially in an environment that is very different from the one in which it evolved. In addition to washing, checking, hoarding, and other concerns broadly related to safety, ocd patients often report feeling an overwhelming sense of incompleteness or a nagging feeling that something is just not right. Some ocd patients become obsessive about organizing things in just the right way or achieving symmetry or balance in their sensory perceptions. For example, an ocd patient trying to achieve symmetry might, after inadvertently blinking the left eye, feel a tremendous urge to blink the right eye in order to bring a sense of completeness to his or her kinesthetic awareness. AdditionInformation Anxiety

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ally, a person who has developed an elaborate ritual before leaving the house every morning (knocking three times, whistling once, and clapping twice, for example) might become irrationally fixated on completing this ritual if interrupted by a neighbor. Psychologists have adopted the acronym njre (Not Just Right Experience) to describe this phenomenon in ocd patients.25 Laura J. Summerfeldt has proposed the overall phenomenon of “incompleteness” as one of two “core dimensions” of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, distinct from the more commonly cited (and previously discussed) “harm-avoidance” dimension. The distinguishing characteristic of this incompleteness is not avoidance of harm but rather the drive to correct profound feelings of imperfection regarding the need for experiences to conform to exact, yet often inexpressible criteria. This subjective experience of condition’s being “not just right” can be manifested through any sensory modality, including the visual (e.g., appearance of belongings or documents), auditory (e.g., preference for sameness in ambient noise), tactile (e.g., checking of textures by touching or tapping), and proprioceptive (e.g., needing to “even up” actions). It may also apply to more complex experiences that do not readily fall into the sensory category, such as cognition (e.g., expressing one’s thoughts unambiguously, in the best words).26 Like other anxiety disorders, however, ocd based on completeness represents an extreme case of an adaptive cognitive bias—a bias in this case, toward narrative closure. I believe a cognitive approach to narrative must take into account the way that human beings have evolved to process information. As humans make decisions, we benefit greatly by paying attention to crucial narratives kept “open”; however, once the narratives have been resolved we benefit more by considering them “closed” and moving on to other, more relevant issues. Because human capacity to create internal narratives evolved, at least partially, to facilitate the perception of closure and resolution, these characteristics became part of the narrative templates that human brains responded to, making it a good bet that any external narratives humans eventually developed would evolve along the same lines. 70

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The 59.6 Million Faces of Anxiety At the time that I was writing this chapter, a basic Google search for information on “anxiety” yielded approximately 59.6 million pages. Assuming that I only take one minute to evaluate each page, and that I never stopped to eat or sleep, it would take me about 111 years just to glance at all of this data. A more focused search for “anxiety” and “narrative” yielded a mere 1.8 million pages of information—a much more manageable amount that I should be able to examine relatively thoroughly (as long as I do nothing else but eat and sleep) by about the time I retire. As many composition students in the Internet age have already discovered, too much information is precisely the same as no information at all. Too much information about anything can produce anxiety. This is partly because of natural limitations on the brain’s storage space, processing power, and switching speed. We can only handle so much information, and the world that we live in produces more than we could ever hope to process. Richard Saul Wurman coined the term “information anxiety” in his 1989 bestseller of the same name. He uses the term to describe the “ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand. . . . It happens when information doesn’t tell us what we want or need to know.”27 In his book, Wurman is primarily concerned with information written down and transmitted in print or electronic formats. His claim that “a weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England” is true only when “information” is defined as something printed and stored.28 When we define “information,” as I do here, to include every bit of data conveyed to the brain through the senses, we see a more even comparison. Every human being is exposed to immense amounts of visual, oral, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory data every day—much more than we could ever process. When seen in this light, “information anxiety” is part of the human, not merely the modern, condition. But anxiety—information or otherwise—has an important role to play in creating more focused narratives. One of the primary purposes of anxiety is to help us focus our entire attention on the things that pose the greatest threats to our well-being. People suffering from anxiety freInformation Anxiety

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quently say that they cannot concentrate on anything. Strictly speaking, this is not true; what they really mean is that they cannot concentrate on anything other than the thing they feel anxious about. Writing centuries before the cognitive revolution, the English philosopher Edmund Burke theorized that the fight-or-flight mechanism—and the almost total concentration it requires of an organism in danger—accounts for the aesthetic pleasure that humans derive from experiencing danger at a safe remove: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.29 Burke’s definition of “astonishment”—a feeling that suspends other emotions and fills the mind so entirely with its object that “it cannot entertain any other”—is very close to Randolph Nesse’s explanation of anxiety as a force that suppresses “concerns about paying debts and fantasies about having sex to focus all mental energy on assessing the danger and determining the best means of escape.”30 In times of genuine mortal danger, anxiety acts as a filtering agent to help us direct our attention to what matters the most. We have also developed mechanisms to filter information less intensively in situations less likely to lead to our early demise. One such strategy is the phenomenon that psychologists refer to as “habituation,” the process by which we process familiar information automatically and focus only on what is different. Every time I walk out into my back yard, I see roughly the same thing: a deck, a grill, our golden retriever (who won’t retrieve) named Pacha, several children’s toys, and a row of black walnut trees and wild raspberry bushes. Most of these things are so familiar to me that they no longer register in my conscious mind. However, if something new appeared the next time I went outside—a new swing set, for example, or a ravenous 72

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grizzly bear—I would begin to process it immediately, with no need to reprocess the enormous amount of information about my backyard already stored in my memory. “Without habituation,” explains the well-known psychologist Robert J. Sternberg, “our attentional system would be much more greatly taxed. . . . Imagine trying to listen to a lecture if you could not habituate to the sounds of your own breathing, the rustling of papers and books, or the faint buzzing of fluorescent lights.”31 Another cognitive strategy we use to filter information is what I refer to as the “good enough” rule. (In some circles this is called the “good enough for government work” rule.) The general contours of this rule are given by Ellen Spolsky: Precisely because the human species and its ways of knowing are evolved by the accumulation of random mutations in interactions with changing environments rather than genetically engineered for the task of knowing, it is not at all surprising that they are unstable. They are not purpose designed and are always vulnerable to further environmental change. It is just this instability, however, that provides the possibility for advantageous flexibility. . . . The only “goal” we can speak of with reference to adaptation is species survival, and the only thing required for that is the survival of a certain number of individuals long enough to breed and rear offspring to the age when those offspring can breed. This does not mean that everyone has to understand everything or that understanding is a logically watertight, foolproof system. All it has to be is good enough.32 The “good enough” rule says we derive more benefit from basing decisions on reasonable approximations of reality than from waiting for more precise information. Much of the information available to us simply adds more levels of detail to information that we already have— and much of this has no practical survival implications. For example, I know it takes about twenty minutes to drive to my doctor’s office, and this knowledge has always allowed me to make appointments at times that do not conflict with my schedule. Sometimes I am a few minutes late, and sometimes I am a few minutes early, but I have never been turned away for arriving at the wrong time. If I were really interested in Information Anxiety

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precision, though, I could purchase an expensive stopwatch and time my trip to a fraction of a second, during both high and low traffic, repeating the experiment often enough to calculate credible averages for different times of day. I could then take into account the relativistic effect of my traveling toward the doctor’s office at an average speed of thirty-five miles per hour, and, just to be on the safe side, I could use quantum mechanics to calculate the likelihood that either my car or my doctor’s office might spontaneously relocate to one of the moons of Jupiter. But whatever marginal benefit I might derive from this added accuracy would surely not outweigh the cost in lost opportunities for hunting, foraging, mating, childrearing, and engaging in other fitnessenhancing activities. Sometimes the “good enough” rule means we accept completely nonfactual information as the basis for decisions. For hundreds of thousands of years, nearly everybody believed that the sun rotated around a stationary, flat earth. These views were not simply imprecise; they were wrong. These now discredited “paradigms” provided all the information people needed to conduct their daily lives. As Thomas S. Kuhn famously notes, however, Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system, though incorrect, “was admirably successful at predicting the changing positions of both stars and planets.” In some areas, the Ptolemaic system provided better predictions than the Copernican system that had the advantage of being correct.33 Somebody who understood more about the universe than Ptolemy would not have had any survival advantage over anyone else; in fact, someone in 10,000 bc who claimed that the world was round or that it rotated around the sun would have probably been considered crazy and died childless. Even today, there is very little evolutionary value in possessing sophisticated scientific narratives about the way the universe works. The average high-school graduate who believes that God created the world in its present form six thousand years ago will probably have more children—and contribute more genes to the pool—than the last five Nobel Prize winners in physics combined.

Too Many Watches An old proverb says that a man with a watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two watches never does. Beneath this bit of conventional wisdom lies an important evolutionary truth: if we believe enough 74

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things, some of them will inevitably come into conflict with each other. The number of things that we can believe at the same time without conflict is actually remarkably small. In his compulsively fascinating book Labyrinths of Reason, William Poundstone, invoking a thought experiment designed by computer scientists Larry J. Stockmeyer and Albert R. Meyer, tries to illustrate the inevitability of contradiction among any series of beliefs. Stockmeyer and Meyer’s thought experiment proposed to determine the number of separate beliefs or truth claims could theoretically be checked for contradictions in the best conceivable computation device. To do this they imagined a computer the size of the known universe, with components the size of individual protons (the smallest known particle at the time), and switching speeds equal to the speed of light (the fastest obtainable speed). If such a computer were programmed to cross-check a set of beliefs for internal conflicts, how many contradiction-free beliefs could it calculate, and how long would it take? The answers are: surprisingly few and a long time. “In the first second,” Poundstone reports, “the computer could do all the necessary comparisons to build the list up to 225 beliefs.” But after that, the computations would be exponentially more difficult with every new belief: “It would take a second to add the 226th belief; two seconds to approve the 227th belief; about a minute to check the 232nd. The computer would be working as fast as ever, but the number of tests doubles as each belief is added to the list. It would take over a month to approve the 250th belief. Expanding the list to 300 would take—gulp!—38 million years.”34 A computer the size of the universe, then, could accurately “believe” fewer propositions in millions of years than an average seven-year-old needs to understand an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Most of the time we never have to come face to face with the contradictory propositions that we accept. When we do, however, the resulting paralysis can prevent us from acting at all. Fortunately, we have evolved several cognitive strategies for resolving contradictions when we encounter them. Foremost among these is the strategy known as “metarepresentation” by which we subordinate some propositions to others and store them “under advisement” so that they do not conflict with other propositions that we consider more important or factual. In 1987 cognitive scientist Alan M. Leslie theorized that even very young infants develop Information Anxiety

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the ability to “mark off” or “quarantine” representations of reality that contradict other representations and threaten to create anxiety.35 This quarantine procedure makes the pretend play and chase play discussed in Chapter Three possible. Subsequent arguments by evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have refined our understanding of “quarantined” representations substantially. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby draw a distinction between propositions that we consider to be absolutely true and therefore allow to migrate unrestricted through our cognitive architecture—which they call “architectural truth”—and other propositions to which we attach contingency operators such as “somebody believes this to be true,” or “this might be true if certain conditions are met first,” or even “this is an intentional fiction meant to be entertaining.” Cosmides and Tooby use the term “source tagging” to refer to the process by which we attach some kind of contingency “tag” to a proposition that we then store in our memories in ways that restrict its circulation within our cognitive architecture. The ability to tag propositions as contingent serves as a kind of “representational immune system” that allows us to hold contradictory propositions in our mind at the same time.36 We take it for granted that people can recognize the difference between “the sun moves around the earth” and “Ptolemy believed that the sun moved around the earth,” but holding both ideas in our mind at once requires a reliable way to prevent the two statements from coming into conflict with each other and producing anxiety. Source tagging allows us to consider counterfactual propositions such as “What would happen if I went fishing in the river instead of the lake?” or “What would happen if I asked Mary to the prom instead of Martha?” or even abstract thought experiments such as “What would happen if I built a computer the size of the known universe?” By manipulating contingent propositions, humans can draw inferences about things that are not currently true but could be in the future. As Tooby and Cosmides explain, “an architecture that only processes true information is highly limited in what it can infer, and most forms of human discovery by reasoning involve supposition.”37 It would be counterfactual for a giraffe hunter to think of creating a stable food supply by planting crops or domesticating animals. But in order for any human society to move to an agricultural environment, some hunter— and probably a whole lot of hunters—had to create and store proposi76

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tions that were not strictly true but, at the same time, not exactly false. In order for such propositions to circulate within the mind without producing anxiety, they must be stored, not as representations (which are stored as true or discounted as false), but as metarepresentations, also known as representations of representations (which can be stored with a variety of tags indicating different degrees of counterfactuality or contingency). As counterfactual propositions become more abstract and elaborate— as with novels and epic poems—their utility shifts. Rather than testing propositions about the immediate future, they allow us to make inferences that we can store for long-term use. We will probably never need to know the answer to the question, “What would happen if I were shipwrecked for twenty-seven years on a deserted island where cannibals came frequently to eat their victims?” However, Robinson Crusoe could still lead to valuable inferences; it could, for example, show people that it is best not to change a comfortable situation, an inference that can be made because Crusoe is shipwrecked while seeking more wealth. The cognitive ability to generalize from specific instances ensures that we can make useful inferences from other people’s experiences—even if those people are the subjects of stories that we know to be fictional. Lisa Zunshine has argued persuasively that “works of fiction . . . seem to be metarepresentations par excellence, perennially stored with either variously implicit source tags, such as ‘folk’ in the case of Little Red Riding Hood and ‘Anglo-Saxon bard(s)’ in the case of Beowulf, or explicit source tags, such as ‘Jane Austen’ in the case of Pride and Prejudice.” Zunshine further argues that literature of any kind exercises “our ability to store representations under advisement and to reevaluate their truthvalue once more information comes in.”38 This way of tagging sources allows us to derive many of the same benefits from acknowledged fictions that we do from counterfactual propositions. Tagging sources accomplishes this by storing acknowledged fictions in a way that allows us to analyze and draw conclusions from them without confusing them for things we have tagged as “true.” In this way, many potentially contradictory propositions can be reconciled to each other through the creative use of metarepresentational tags. In literature, as in life, we must constantly negotiate through a maze of contradictory assumptions, alternate viewpoints, and complex narratives. Information Anxiety

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Nancy Easterlin, in a discussion of how evolution can inform literary studies, suggests that the cognitive ability necessary to negotiate through a work of literature has much in common with the early humans’ ability to find their way through the landscapes in which they hunted and gathered. Like many of the cognitive processes discussed in this chapter, wayfinding—simply defined as one’s ability to navigate through landscapes—requires skill in acquiring and evaluating information. Lack of success in wayfinding (which equates to getting lost) produces anxiety that can only be resolved through the production of a compelling spatial narrative (figuring out how to navigate the wilderness). Because wayfinding often requires both complex spatial reasoning and special attention to places that may conceal either dangers or opportunities, Easterlin argues, “the wayfinding mind is stimulated by complexity and mystery.”39 Elsewhere, Easterlin makes an explicit connection between wayfinding cognition and fiction when she argues that “our typical cognitive patterns are coextensive with evolved bodily experience, and those patterns not only establish rudimentary features of literature but also emerge in the dynamic action of many literary works.”40 We are an information-dependent species, and both the content and the shape of the information we process have serious implications for our survival. Information in the wrong shape—whether insufficiently detailed, insufficiently focused, incorrectly organized (without a sense of closure), or inherently contradictory—threatens our survival and has the potential to cause anxiety. Though anxiety has many adaptive functions, it can, if it persists, be both counterproductive and paralyzing. Therefore, the ability to neutralize anxiety is itself adaptive—even if it involves constructing fictional narratives. When Robinson Crusoe encounters a horrifying sight—the cannibal picnic ground on the island he calls home—he relieves his anxiety by constructing a comforting narrative about the cannibals and their intention to leave him alone. It does not matter whether or not this narrative is “true.” Its function is not to give him accurate information about the world; rather, its job is to relieve the anxiety that, for two years, has diverted his attention away from activities that are important to his survival. I have discussed a number of neutralizing strategies in this chapter. When a narrative lacks detail, we augment it. When a narrative over78

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burdens us with detail, we edit it down to a manageable story line. And when a narrative that we consider true conflicts with another narrative that we consider true, we create a third narrative capable of resolving the contradiction. These acts of narrative creation are not governed by any selection pressure in favor of accuracy or truth. All that matters is that they neutralize anxiety effectively. Usually a neat, simplistic fiction will do a better job resolving tension than the truth, which is often messy, complicated, and devoid of closure. Like Robinson Crusoe, we commonly gravitate toward narratives that we can understand, that have a definite linear structure, that resolve all of the issues they raise, and that make us feel better when we are through. This often describes our fictional narratives, but it rarely describes the world we live in.

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5

4 The Problem of Other People The real challenge in the human environment throughout history that affected the evolution of the intellect was not climate, weather, food shortages, or parasites—not even predators. Rather, it was the necessity of dealing continually with our fellow humans in social circumstances that became ever more complex and unpredictable as the human line evolved.

—Richard D. Alexander, How Did Humans Evolve?

So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot-pokers. Hell is—other people!

—Garcin, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit The Evolution of Big Brains

The human brain is adapted—of that much we can be sure. However, nobody is quite sure what it is adapted to. The usual evolutionary explanation—that the brain adapted to the natural environment in which humans developed—doesn’t account for all of the facts that need to be explained. For one thing, humans and other hominids have developed and flourished in nearly every habitable environment on the earth. Even more perplexing, however, is the fact that human cognition seems to be so much more complex than it needs to be. There can be no question that some advanced cognitive abilities help considerably in finding food, securing mates, and avoiding predators. Yet nothing about the life of an ancestral human would seem to require the ability to play chess, 81

compose symphonies, write books, or compute differential equations. Not only do such activities lack a clear adaptive purpose, the sheer computational power necessary to perform them is beyond that required by any reasonable program of hunting and gathering, making the human brain seem, in the words of psychologist Geoffrey Miller, “like computational overkill.”1 The cognitive differences between humans and other animals are not trivial. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who has written widely on brain size and social evolution, explains that the human brain is significantly larger—as a proportion of total body weight—than that the brains of any other species. Dunbar reports that the human brain is nine times larger than that of the average mammal, and twelve times larger than those of the mammal species generally considered the closest relatives to the ancestral mammals of the early Paleocene epoch. Since the human brain uses more energy than any other part of the body—brain tissue accounts for only 2 percent of the human body’s weight but 20 percent of its energy use—large brains come with a very high price tag. Moreover, to accommodate their big brains, human infants must be born while their proportionally massive heads can still fit through the birth canal—meaning that human infants are born dangerously underdeveloped and completely vulnerable. Even so, an infant’s head presents greater risks to its mother during childbirth than those faced by the females of almost all other mammalian species. “The fact that an organism has a large brain,” Dunbar writes, “means that it really must need it very badly, otherwise the forces of natural selection will inexorably favour individuals with smaller brains simply because they are cheaper to produce.”2 What value do huge brains add to the struggle for survival? Scientists are still debating this question. Miller, early in his career, argued that big brains were the result of runaway sexual selection for intelligence, though in his more recent book, The Mating Mind, he acknowledges some problems with the stronger interpretation of this hypothesis.3 Other theories propose the need for solving adaptive problems involving such things as tool use, hunting, food processing, and the like.4 None of these potential explanations for big brains has become widely accepted as a complete explanation; however, in 1990, University of Michigan biologist Richard D. Alexander, synthesizing the work of several other 82

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researchers, proposed an answer that has gained steady support ever since and is now the most widely accepted of all the various hypotheses. Invoking the work of Nicholas K. Humphrey, Alexander proposes that early humans had in some unique fashion become so ecologically dominant that they in effect became their own principal hostile force of nature, explicitly in regard to evolutionary changes in the human psyche and social behavior. At some point in their evolution humans obviously began to cooperate to compete, specifically against like groups of conspecifics, this intergroup competition becoming increasingly elaborate, direct, and continuous until it achieved the ubiquity with which it has been exhibited in modern humans throughout recorded history across the entire face of the earth.5 According to Alexander’s hypothesis, then, the environmental factor most responsible for the evolutionary expansion of the human brain was the presence of other human beings. Humans, in other words, are primarily adapted to each other. In books such as Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language and The Human Story, Dunbar expands substantially upon Alexander’s thesis. His research suggests that human evolution occurred largely within groups of about 150 members (which remains the ideal size for many social organizations today). In order to interact successfully in such a group, a person would have had to keep track of 149 other minds. He or she would need to understand each person’s motives, history, and temperament, and would also have to show some understanding of each person’s relationships with each of the other members of the group. In this way, a person could attract mates, form alliances, reciprocate both slights and favors, and acquire status within the group. Keeping track of 149 minds and the millions of possible relationships among those minds requires much more computational power than playing a game of chess or composing “Claire de Lune.” In The Art Instinct, Dennis Dutton points out that, while thirty-two chess pieces on sixty-four squares of a chessboard can produce trillions of possible moves, these possibilities “would be dwarfed in range by the contingencies served up by daily experience in a human lifetime.”6 This is true largely because the The Problem of Other People 83

pieces we must keep track of—other people and their relationships to each other—are so much more complex in even the simplest human community. Small cognitive disparities in such an environment would set off what evolutionary biologists call an “arms race”—a situation in which evolution occurs rapidly because small advantages possessed by some members of a population place intense selection pressure on the rest of the population to match and exceed those advantages.7 If this hypothesis is correct, then we would expect that the most interesting thing to human beings would be other human beings—specifically, the intimate details of their lives and relationships. We might expect people to devote an inordinate amount of time to gossiping about their acquaintances, reading tabloid reports of the private lives of high-status people, and, perhaps most importantly for the present study, reading certain kinds of fiction. Dunbar himself recognizes the potential of evolved social intelligence to respond to fictional accounts of other minds: Of all the books published each year, it is fiction that tops the list in terms of volume of sales. Take a glance around your local bookshop: university campus bookshops aside, two-thirds of the shelf space will contain fiction. Even then, it is not the rip-roaring adventure yarns that attract us, but the unfolding intimacies of the main characters. It is the way they handle their experiences that fascinates us, their reactions to the vagaries of life. . . . And out of all this fiction, it is not the writing of the acclaimed masters that tops the publishers’ sales-lists, but romantic fiction.8 With only a few exceptions, fiction is about other people’s minds, and other minds are inherently interesting to us for the same reason that trees are inherently interesting to woodpeckers: other people are the environmental backdrop against which we evolved. Other minds were the chief adaptive problem—and therefore the most significant source of anxiety—that early humans had to face.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Paradox When the three principal characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit are escorted to their final destination, they are surprised by the relative timidity of hell. Each of them—Garcin the Brazilian deserter, Inez the 84

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lesbian manipulator, and Estelle the society seductress—expects to find the hell of mythology—a gaping pit full of fire, brimstone, and horned demons with implements of torture. Instead, they are led, one at a time, into a reasonably comfortable drawing room in what appears to be a Victorian-style hotel. However, before they can take comfort in their good fortune, the cleverest of them, Inez, figures out the game. “Each of us,” she tells the other two, “will be the torturer of the other two.” Understanding the truth of Inez’s statement, Garcin immediately makes what he thinks is a perfectly sound proposal: No, I shall never be your torturer. I wish neither of you any harm, and I’ve no concern with you. None at all. So the solution’s easy enough; each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others. You here, you here, and I there. Like soldiers at our posts. Also, we mustn’t speak. Not one word. That won’t be difficult; each of us has plenty of material for self-communings. I think I could stay ten thousand years with only my thoughts for company.9 All three agree, but their agreement ends in a matter of seconds. The characters cannot mind their own business because they have no business of their own to mind. Each of them has lived a life of passive reflection, depending on their lovers, their organizations, and even their enemies to reflect them back to themselves. They have never created authentic existences for themselves—never, in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase, “cast themselves into the world.”10 Even in hell they must depend upon each other for any hope of self-definition. At first they each visit their former acquaintances in the vain hope that they will hear something about themselves. (Had he written today, I am quite sure that Sartre would have provided them with a computer and had them Google their own names.) As these impressions fade, they turn to the others for validation of their existence, first through sexual affirmation and then through sheer provocation. Inez sums up the dynamic that they all face when she says, “I can’t get on without making people suffer. Like a live coal. A live coal in others’ hearts. When I’m alone I flicker out.”11 On this point, Sartre’s Hell actually corresponds quite closely to Dante’s. Most of the sinners in the first five levels of Inferno either punish themselves or punish each The Problem of Other People 85

other with no need of either divine or demonic intervention, culminating in the torment of the wrathful on the banks of the River Styx who, with no compulsion beyond their inner passions, “thumped at one another in that slime / with hands and feet, and they butted, and they bit / as if each would tear the other limb from limb.”12 In No Exit (as in Inferno) the characters are involved in versions of a famous game-theory scenario known as the “prisoner’s dilemma,” which evolutionary psychologists often use to explain the prevalence of altruistic behavior among organisms in direct evolutionary competition with each other. The classic prisoner’s dilemma game features two players who must choose either to “cooperate” or “defect.” Mutual cooperation gives both players a modest reward; mutual defection gives each a modest penalty. When one player cooperates and one defects, the defector is richly rewarded and the cooperator is severely punished. In The Prisoner’s Dilemma, William Poundstone describes the imaginary scenario upon which the exercise is based: Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don’t have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch. . . . If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to three years in jail.13 A prisoner’s dilemma is created whenever two (or in some variants more) people are in a situation with the following attributes: 1) the result of mutual cooperation is better than the result of mutual defection; 2) the worst ending position results from unilateral cooperation; and 3) the best ending position results from unilateral defection.14 The prisoner’s dilemma is, in the words of political scientist Robert M. Axelrod, “an abstract formulation of some very common and very interesting situations in which what is best for each person individually leads to mutual defection, whereas everyone would have been better off with mutual cooperation.”15 86

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In Sartre’s version of the game—let’s call it the “sinner’s dilemma”— the sinners can cooperate by simply leaving each other alone to enjoy whatever comforts hell has to offer. This is precisely the agreement that Garcin proposes and the others in No Exit pretend to accept. However, for some of the players—such as Inez, who “can’t get on without making people suffer”—the temptation to defect is too great, and, as in any prisoner’s dilemma, if one person defects, the other(s) must defect as well to avoid the worst of the outcomes. The actual payoff matrix, assuming a two-person game, looks something like this: you cooperate

you defect

i cooperate

Nobody bothers anybody else and we both live in peace and quiet for all of eternity, bored but uninjured.

I sit passively, not doing anything to you as you torture me with glee forever.

i defect

I get to have all the fun of torturing you for eternity and don’t even have to worry about you doing anything to me.

We spend eternity torturing each other. I suffer pain, but at least I have the fun of making you suffer, too.

If I can be assured that you will cooperate, then it makes sense for me to cooperate too. However, the whole point of the prisoner’s dilemma is that I cannot know what you will do. Therefore, the only rational solution is for me to defect under the assumption that you will defect as well. That way, no matter what happens, I will not end up a chump. In a single round of the prisoner’s dilemma, the only equilibrium point— the point at which each player has achieved the best possible result given the other player’s strategy—occurs when both players defect. Though they can technically stop any time they want, Garcin, Inez, and Estelle are compelled by the logic of their situation to go on tormenting each other for all of eternity. The prisoner’s dilemma has become the most famous of all gametheory scenarios because it reveals a crucial tension at the core of the The Problem of Other People 87

human experience: we need other people, but we can’t trust them. The guiding logic of the prisoner’s dilemma, when projected on an entire society, takes us perilously close to Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all” where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Any individual has a motive to cooperate only when everybody else cooperates too; when cooperation breaks down, it is in everybody’s best interest to get what they can before somebody else gets it first. Yet many societies have managed to stay together long enough to create pyramids, highways, great cities, poetry, art, music, and even space stations. Until Robert M. Axelrod conducted his now famous computer tournaments in the 1970s, many people simply dismissed cooperative human societies as either irrational or bad at math. What Axelrod discovered, however, is that something remarkable happens when the prisoner’s dilemma is played multiple times against the same opponent. In the game of “iterated prisoner’s dilemma,” players have a chance to remember what other players have done and to respond reciprocally to both cooperation and defection—and to anticipate how others will reciprocate in the future. The iterated prisoner’s dilemma changes everything we know about the logic of the game. In 1979 Axelrod, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, invited prominent game theorists from around the world to submit, in the form of simple computer programs, decision rules for a tournament of iterated prisoner’s dilemma. He describes the ground rules for the tournament in his book, The Evolution of Cooperation: It was structured as a round robin, meaning that each entry was paired with each other entry. As announced in the rules of the tournament, each entry was also paired with its own twin and with random, a program that randomly cooperates and defects with equal probability. Each game consisted of exactly two hundred moves. The payoff matrix for each move . . . awarded players 3 points for mutual cooperation, and 1 point for mutual defection. If one player defected while the other player cooperated, the defecting player received 5 points and the cooperating player received 0 points.16 Axelrod’s experiments have been summarized and analyzed in wellknown books by Poundstone, Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, and 88

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others—as well as in Axelrod’s own book-length treatment of the subject.17 In two separate tournaments guided by these rules, well-known theorists submitted programs with names such as tester (defects on the first round but cooperates as soon as another program defects), and tranquilizer (cooperates at first and then tries to “get away” with defections later in the round). The winning strategy, submitted by Professor Antanol Rapoport of the University of Toronto, was called tit for tat and required only four lines of computer code. tit for tat always cooperated on the first move and thereafter did whatever its opponent did on the previous move. tit for tat cooperated with friendly programs, punished defectors, and immediately assumed a cooperative stance when defectors attempted to cooperate. When Axelrod created a natural-selection simulation—an environment in which each program was given representation in future “generations” according to its success in previous ones—tit for tat and other programs that cooperated initially and never defected first (and were therefore indistinguishable from tit for tat when they played each other) eventually drove out programs that defected initially or attempted to secure advantages through occasional defections during play. tit for tat was so successful because it combined five different factors: 1) it was unselfish (Axelrod uses the phrase “not envious”), meaning it never tried to win more than its opponent in any single game, but was successful only to the extent that it enabled the other program to be just as successful; 2) it was nice, meaning it was never the first to defect; 3) it was reciprocal in both rewarding cooperation and punishing defection; 4) it was forgiving, meaning it only punished defections once and then reassumed cooperation as soon as the other program did; and 5) it was simple, meaning it followed clear, easy-to-understand rules that allowed other programs to respond to its logic. These five points correspond with many of the principles upon which the world’s great religions are based: Christianity emphasizes forgiveness, Buddhism stresses simplicity, Jewish law (“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”) encodes reciprocity, and Islamic law (through obligatory alms known as the zakat) mandates unselfishness. This should not be surprising; according to Axelrod’s interpretation of his experiments, these are the rules that enable essentially selfish beings to form cooperative communities. The Problem of Other People 89

It would be shocking if religions—among the most important historical facilitators of community—had not discovered them.18 The real danger in cooperative environments—and therefore one of the primary adaptive problems for our human ancestors—comes from those who attempt to secure the advantages of cooperation without incurring any of the costs. In game theory, as in life, these people are called “freeloaders,” “parasites,” and, most often, “cheaters.” As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby explain, “a cheater is an individual who illicitly benefits himself or herself by taking a benefit without having satisfied the requirement that the other party to the contract made the provision of that benefit contingent on.” The more complicated the network, the easier it is to cheat. In a group of cooperators, therefore, the potential genetic benefits of deceptive non-cooperation are enormous, and the ability to detect non-cooperators appears to be hard-wired into human nature. Cosmides and Tooby argue that we have developed “cognitive adaptations that are specialized for reasoning about social contracts,” and, specifically, “inference procedures specialized for cheater detection.”19 One of the more striking pieces of evidence for such a cognitive module involves a logical task that psychologists call the “Wason Selection Task,” which involves selecting pieces of information that are important in proving or disproving a proposition. As science writer Matt Ridley explains, “people are surprisingly bad at the Wason test in some circumstances—for instance, if presented with it as an abstract piece of logic—but surprisingly good at it in others. In general, the more the puzzle is presented as a social contract to be policed, the easier people find it, even if the contract is deeply foreign and the social context unfamiliar.”20

Theories of Mind and Theories of Fiction The great French satirist John-Baptiste Poquelin, best known by the stage name Molière, captures the problem of other people admirably in his 1664 satire, Tartuffe. The title character of Tartuffe is a predatory religious hypocrite—a pious con man who has insinuated himself into the household of the wealthy-but-naïve Orgon. We join the characters in media res, after Tartuffe has moved in and become the de facto master of the house. Orgon’s wife, Elmire, and his brother in law, Cléante, have not been deceived by Tartuffe’s hypocrisy, but Orgon will not listen to their warnings. He becomes more and more enamored with his hypocritical 90

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friend and contracts a marriage between Tartuffe and his daughter Mariane—even though she is already in love with, and legally engaged to, an honorable young man named Valère. Not content with taking almost everything from Orgon, Tartuffe makes a clumsy attempt to seduce Elmire, who rebuffs him and tries to report the incident to Orgon. Orgon, however, will have none of it. In a stunningly short-sighted display of loyalty, he signs over house and property to Tartuffe, giving him, as part of the bargain, a chest of potentially treasonous documents (written by an exiled friend). Not long afterward, Elmire forces her husband to confront the truth by pretending to give in to Tartuffe’s advances while Orgon hides underneath a table. By the time that Orgon finally does obtain incontrovertible evidence of his false friend’s treachery, Tartuffe owns his house, his estate, and a chest of documents that could send Orgon to prison. Unable to reflect critically on his own errors, Orgon simply moves from extreme credulity to extreme skepticism. “Enough, by God! I’m through with pious men,” he tells his brother-inlaw. “Henceforth I’ll hate the whole false brotherhood / And persecute them worse than Satan could.” At this point Cléante steps in and gives what many consider the moral of the story: Ah, there you go—extravagant as ever! Why can you not be rational? You never Manage to take the middle course, it seems, But jump, instead, between absurd extremes. You’ve recognized your recent grave mistake In falling victim to a pious fake;— Now, to correct that error, must you embrace An even greater error in its place, And judge our worthy neighbors as a whole By what you’ve learned of one corrupted soul? Come, just because one rascal made you swallow A show of zeal which turned out to be hollow, Shall you conclude that all men are deceivers, And that there are today no true believers?21 Orgon’s reversal is often taken as the defining satirical moment of the play. David F. Maas, for example, presents Cléante’s speech as a The Problem of Other People 91

culminating moment in the author’s goal to “assist individuals to make rational adjustments, and therefore to find a wider choice of strategies than those available from either-or evaluations.”22 In Mimesis and the Human Animal, one of the early pioneering works of adaptionist literary criticism, Robert F. Storey uses this same scene to reject overly theorized explanations of human behavior in favor of relatively simple ones: The example of Orgon should give us pause. He’s obsessed, it is true, but his obsession is a symptom, not a cause, of his absurdity. When his eyes are finally opened to Tartuffe’s hypocrisy, his reaction is not to throw off his shackles, but to chain himself blindly to another illusion. . . . Because he seems such a vital creature, modern readers have been eager to account for his weaknesses in psychologically determinate ways: he a repressed . . . homosexual, he’s a “narcissist” . . . he’s a tyrant who is punishing his family. . . . All of this may be true, but the most plausible explanation is that he is a fool, and that fools are incorrigibly stupid.23 Orgon is certainly stupid, but his stupidity is part of an overall satirical strategy. Any argument for Tartuffe as a corrective satire must focus on Orgon, as Tartuffe simply lacks the good qualities that might make it worthwhile to correct his bad ones. Molière is not telling us to avoid being predatory hypocrites; rather, he is telling us to avoid 1) being taken in by hypocrites, and 2) to avoid using the existence of hypocrites as an excuse to discount genuine virtue. Phrased this way, Orgon’s central problem in Tartuffe bears a striking similarity to the central problem in the prisoner’s dilemma, and to the much more important problem of living in a world made up of both cooperators and defectors: how can we tell them apart? The rational “middle course” that Cléante advocates—to avoid hypocrites and trust those whose virtue is genuine—is much more difficult than Molière makes it seem. Most hypocrites aren’t as easy to detect as Tartuffe, and most of the people deceived aren’t as credulous as Orgon. In the real world, people’s motives are usually a convoluted mix of altruism and self-interest, and detecting non-cooperators requires enormous skill. Symptoms of anxiety caused by interactions with other people have 92

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been observed in all human cultures as well as in some of our nearest primate relatives.24 Significant anxiety disorders lie at both horns of the social version of the prisoner’s dilemma. Those who cannot trust other people at all often develop paranoia and persecutory delusions, which have both been linked to the need to keep track of and respond to legitimate social threats.25 Those who do not feel competent to engage other people and build cooperative relationships are often diagnosed with social anxiety disorder (sad), or social phobia—the most commonly diagnosed of all anxiety disorders.26 When it comes to social interaction, the stakes are high and the consequences for failure are great. Many psychologists now believe that human beings have evolved a specialized cognitive mechanism for inferring the mental and emotional states of others. According to this hypothesis, selection pressures faced by early hominids led to an increase in the size of social groups, which also required an increase in cognitive abilities. Larger groups meant more potential allies, sexual partners, rivals, and enemies to keep track of, plus more reciprocal relationships to process. (Keep in mind that every new person added to a social group increases the possible relationships among group members exponentially, so even a small growth in average group size required a massive increase in cognitive power.)27 At some point it became advantageous to evolve a cognitive process for inferring the thoughts of others by combining what we know about them with what we gather from their tone of voice, hand movements, facial gestures, and other contextual cues that signal one’s frame of mind. However, as we got better at detecting the thoughts of others, we also got better at concealing our own thoughts, setting off an evolutionary arms race between detection and concealment that lead to the extremely sophisticated cognitive mechanism that psychologists now call the “theory of mind.” Most people today exercise their theory of mind automatically without realizing that it is an extremely complicated process that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. For most of us it is second nature to infer other people’s intentions through contextual clues such as their mannerisms, their tone of voice, or their “body language.” Most people cannot even remember a time when they did not understand that other people’s beliefs could be different than their own. It is not until we encounter people with difficulties forming a theory of mind that we realize what a complicated cognitive mechanism it really is. In the late The Problem of Other People 93

1980s, autism researchers Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith theorized that individuals with autism spectrum disorders have difficulty “reading minds,” or correctly attributing to other people states of mind that differ from their own. Together, Baron-Cohen and Frith developed the “Sally/Anne” test, which they used to diagnose autism in children. In Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, Baron-Cohen describes the Sally/Anne test as follows: The test involves seeing that Sally puts a marble in one place and that later, while Sally is away, Anne puts the marble somewhere else. The child needs to appreciate that, since Sally was absent when her marble was moved from its original position, she won’t know it was moved, and therefore must still believe it is in the original location. . . . On the test question “Where will Sally look for her marble?” the vast majority of normal children and children with Down’s syndrome passed the test, indicating the original location. But only a small minority of the children with autism did so. Instead, most of them indicated where the marble really was. Since the children with autism were older and had a higher “mental age” than the children in either of the two control groups, this study supports the notion that, in autism, the mental state of belief is poorly understood.28 Reading minds requires us to use the same kinds of metarepresentational tags that we use to process contradictory propositions. For example, most people would have no trouble processing the sentence “John believes that Mary is in Jamaica” even if they knew that Mary was sitting right next to them at a restaurant in Duluth. The brain stores knowledge of Mary’s actual location as a representation about the world we live in, while it stores knowledge of John’s state of mind as a metarepresentation. We can use this same strategy to keep track of much more complicated propositions, such as: “John believes that Mary wrote a book about Pam’s belief that Jerry was kidnapped by pirates.” Such a statement requires us to keep track of four propositions—what John believes, what Mary wrote, what Pam believes, and who kidnapped Jerry—three of which may be recognizably false without altering the truth value of the overall statement. 94

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The process of creating source tags for information contained in other people’s minds is inextricably connected to the process of generating narratives about other people’s motives. In many cases we cannot create a tag without first creating a narrative to accompany it. If, for example, John tells me that Mary has been in Jamaica for three days, while I am sure that I had dinner with Mary two nights ago, I must construct a narrative into which I can set both propositions before I can assign one of them a source tag. Such narratives include, but are certainly not limited to: I have been extremely stressed at work and forgot that my dinner with Mary was four nights ago. John is lying to me because he is in love with Mary and doesn’t want me spending time with her. Mary’s twin sister, Terri, was secretly impersonating Mary at dinner so that she could pump me for information about their brother, Berry. Malevolent space aliens kidnapped Mary and cloned her, sending the real Mary to Jamaica and the phony Mary to dinner with me in order to infect me with a retrovirus that would reorganize my genome and help them produce their wretched young. While these stories vary widely in probability, they each contain the basic components of any narrative. They also contain elements that most readers of fiction will immediately recognize: romance, intrigue, suspense, and secret plots. Without at least some of these elements, the narrative does not contain enough information to tell me how to deal with John. Simply determining that “John is lying” will not suffice. Without understanding the motive for the lie, I will not know how I should treat John, which is the reason that I need a theory of mind in the first place. Once the theory of mind mechanism evolved, it became one of the principal reasons that we now are able to process, and even enjoy, fictional representations. People with a healthy theory of mind are capable of feeling like they “know” a literary character—whether it is a favorite friend like Elizabeth Bennett or an amoral scoundrel like Iago. We enThe Problem of Other People 95

counter and interpret these characters much in the same way that we encounter and interpret real people. This connection between theory of mind and fiction has recently been made clear in Lisa Zunshine’s book, Why We Read Fiction. Zunshine argues that fiction, much like chase play, allows us to exercise and hone skills that are crucial to our survival. Dunbar similarly presents fictional narrative as a logical outgrowth of a theory of mind. As we become increasingly good at nesting thoughts in different minds, he argues, we become able “to imagine how someone who does not actually exist might respond to particular situations. In other words, we can begin to create literature.”29 When we encounter fictional minds, then, we get what Zunshine describes as a “work out” of “our ability to store representations under advisement and to reevaluate their truth-value once more information comes in.”30 Zunshine’s “literature-as-theory-of-mind-workout” proposition can account for a good deal of what we very broadly label “realistic fiction”— literature designed to reproduce the complex psychology of human interaction. I can almost feel my cognitive muscles flexing when I try to determine whether Estella really loves Pip or whether Mr. Darcy still wants to marry Elizabeth Bennett. It is more difficult, however, to see how something like Tartuffe might have the same effect. Molière does not present Tartuffe as a complex character whose intentions and motivations must be painstakingly deciphered. While it is true that Orgon makes tremendous mistakes because he misreads another mind, viewers are never encouraged to see Tartuffe through Orgon’s eyes or to make a difficult judgment about the title character’s true intentions. We know exactly what Tartuffe is from the play’s full title, Tartuffe, or the Hypocrite (in French, Tartuffe, ou l’Imposteur), so our enjoyment of the play can hardly stem from the challenge of deciphering his state of mind. Clearly, something else must be going on. William Flesch’s Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction—an interesting recent extension of Zunshine’s “workout” argument—offers several good candidates for this something else. Flesch argues that fiction gives us practice, not just in deciphering the minds of other people, but also in responding to them with the appropriate approbation or outrage. After an extensive discussion of the prisoner’s dilemma game, he argues that “humans cooperate, and continue cooperating, because we monitor 96

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one another’s cooperation vigilantly. To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage at defection and a concomitant sympathy for the victims of deception.” The pleasure we derive from sympathizing with victims and feeling outraged at defectors transfers easily to fictional narratives: We are fitted to track one another and to track as well how others monitor one another and what they do when they monitor one another. What we wish to track is past behavior, including past tracking of past behavior, in order to respond in the present to that behavior. Fiction recruits this central capacity in human social cognition for taking pleasure in responding to the nonfactual. It gratifies the proximal or psychological aim of our interest in what some have done and how others have responded. That aim is the pleasure we take in strong reciprocation, especially punishment, a pleasure useful in nonliterary contexts as an incentive to altruistic punishment and presumably evolved for that reason.31 The importance of punishing defectors can, for Flesch, be illustrated by another game-theory exercise called the ultimatum game. In this game, two people are collectively offered a sum of money. “The person who receives the money,” Flesch explains, “has to propose a split with the person who doesn’t receive the money. . . . The other person can accept the split or veto it. If he or she accepts it, the money is divided as proposed. If the person vetoes it, neither of the players gets anything.”32 A rational proposer should propose the most uneven split allowed in the rules, and the rational responder should accept any proposed division. Even a ninety-nine-to-one split leaves both players better off than a veto. However, when the game is played under experimental conditions, most proposers offer a fifty-to-fifty split, and most responders reject any proposal that gives them less than 25 to 30 percent of the money.33 Both proposers and responders, in other words, respond to a nonrational, altruistic view of fairness. Flesch’s argument focuses specifically on the responders—those who give up what is essentially free money in order to punish those they perceive as unfair. The same cognitive predisposition that causes us to engage in altruistic punishment causes us to admire others who engage in altruistic punishment, including ficThe Problem of Other People 97

tional characters, which goes a long way toward explaining why good guys usually triumph over bad guys in fiction. We are wired to derive pleasure when we see defectors punished. The end of Tartuffe—like the ends of the Odyssey, “Hansel and Gretel,” and Die Hard—gives us exactly the comeuppance that Flesch describes. When Orgon discovers Tartuffe’s treachery and tries to force him to leave, Tartuffe takes control of the house (that Orgon signed over to him) and demands that his former host leave. He attempts to enforce his eviction order by summoning a police officer and accusing Orgon of treason—a charged leveled on the strength of the documents that Tartuffe possesses. The officer comes to the house, appearing to have instructions to arrest Orgon; at the last minute, however, he arrests Tartuffe instead, with the explanation that the king has detected Tartuffe’s treachery: His royal soul, though generous and human, Views all things with discernment and acumen; His sovereign reason is not lightly swayed, And all his judgments are discreetly weighed. He honors righteous men of every kind, And yet his zeal for virtue is not blind, Nor does his love of piety numb his wits And make him tolerant of hypocrites. ’Twas hardly likely that this man could cozen A King who’s foiled such liars by the dozen.34 By the end of the final scene, Tartuffe has been exposed, humiliated, and condemned to prison—all by the actions of the wise king (King Louis XIV later intervened on Molière’s behalf when the French Church denounced Tartuffe as heretical) who saves the day as both the detector and the punisher of Tartuffe’s decidedly non-altruistic behavior. Taken together, however, Zunshine’s characterization of fiction as a workout of our mindreading abilities and Flesch’s theory of fiction as an exercise in altruistic outrage offer a compelling way to understand the intense pleasure that we derive from the experiences of imaginary people. While it makes intuitive sense that fictional experiences would provide less pleasure than real experiences, the opposite may well be 98

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true. Fictional minds give us more pleasure than real minds for the same reason that tigers in a zoo are fun while tigers in backyards are terrifying. Natural selection designed us to pay special attention to tigers. The captive tiger allows us to enjoy this extra focus on a purely aesthetic level, knowing that we are in no actual danger. Similarly, encountering a fictional mind, as Brian Boyd emphasizes, “removes the dangers of deceit or manipulation and offers the promise of interest . . . [and] therefore offers a win-win situation, a non-zero-sum game, an advantage for teller (benefit in attention and status, at a cost in imaginative effort), and for the listener (maximum cognitive interest at little cost except time).”35 This is not to say, of course, that the theory of mind evolved to make stories possible—any more than the visual cortex evolved to help us appreciate fine paintings. These adaptations were designed to help us process information, avoid predators, locate food, find mates, and otherwise increase our evolutionary fitness. One of nature’s greatest motivators is pleasure—pleasure from the sight of bright, contrastive colors or from the experience of encountering and deciphering another person’s motives—and one of art’s functions is to provide these pleasures without the corresponding threats to our lives or well being.

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6

4 Sex, Lies, and Phenotypes My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!

—Jack Worthing, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest One of the most important things to realize about systems of animal communication is that they are not systems for the dissemination of the truth.

—Robert Trivers, Social Evolution

Lies, Damned Lies, and Butterflies Though lying is not the same as storytelling, the two are not entirely unrelated. Both involve the construction and communication of counterfactual propositions and narratives. The difference between the two is in both the intent of the speaker and the understanding of the audience. Liars know the truth and attempt to conceal it, usually to advantage themselves at the expense of their auditors. On the other hand, both storytellers and story hearers (or story readers) usually understand that a fictional story is something other than literal truth—rather than working against each other, they collaborate in a mutually beneficial form of make believe. This is by no means an absolute division. Polite lies told in tense social situations are very often fictive narratives, known to be so by both teller and hearer and yet perpetuated as the truth in the name of social harmony. Similarly, patently counterfactual propositions can be asserted as “the truth” (think of stage magicians or reality 101

television programs), which auditors at least pretend to believe for the sake of heightening the entertainment value of the story. We can profitably study the evolutionary value of counterfactual information by looking at deceptive signaling in non-human species, where questions of intent and understanding do not come into play. Deliberate deception requires a sufficiently advanced theory of mind to understand the difference between the truth and the beliefs of another person. Most species lack the cognitive capacity to engage in such behavior. On the other hand, deceptive signaling—communication of inaccurate information—is considerably older than lying, storytelling, narrative sequencing, and human cognition in any form. Such communication pervades the animal kingdom (and is not unknown among plants) and provides numerous examples of the principle that information can be useful—to both signalers and to receivers of signals—without being true. In Why We Lie, evolutionary psychologist David Livingston Smith notes that “the tendency to deceive has an ancient pedigree. We find it in many forms, at all levels, throughout the natural kingdom. . . . Nature is awash with deceit.”1 For the sheer audacity of this deceit, it is hard to beat butterflies and moths. Short life spans, constant predation, and relatively high reproduction rates have made it possible for lepidoptera of all sorts to evolve a number of innovative strategies to deceive predators, while at the same time developing the bright colors and exotic patterns necessary to attract mates. Consider the case of the Ash Borer moth of the Eastern United States, whose body and wing patterns resemble those of the common wasp, or the Pierid butterfly of the Amazon rain forest— preferred by avian predators—which evolved to look almost exactly like Heliconid butterflies, which are unpalatable to birds.2 Butterflies of the caligo genus develop large spots on their wings that resemble the eyes of an owl or other large predator. Even babies get into the act: the cocoon of the Dynastor darius butterfly found in Panama looks, even to experts, like the head of a snake. Like most species, of course, moths and butterflies do not intend to deceive; the tendency to provide unreliable information is simply part of their genetic inheritance. But this kind of deception can be found throughout the natural world and can become extremely elaborate. Consider Trivers’s often-quoted example of the pygosteus pungitius, a species of stickleback fish found off the coast of Northern Europe. The 102

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males of this species create “nests shaped like small pipes into which females swim to lay their eggs.” Males use the nests (a sign of parental investment) to attract mates, who lay their eggs in the nest where they are fertilized by the male. Sometimes, Trivers reports, this arrangement leads to a stunning example of deception, intrigue, female impersonation, and dirty double crossing—a plot worthy of the cleverest Restoration wits: It sometimes happens that while one female is spawning in his nest, another one appears at the edge of his territory. Thinking (so to speak) to double his reproductive success, the male swims to her and invites her in. After courtship, she swims into his nest and deposits her own clutch of eggs. The male then swims in and fertilizes both clutches—or so he supposes. The second female is, in fact, a male; far from laying a clutch of eggs, “she” actually fertilizes the first clutch! The male has been cuckolded; his eagerness for reproductive gain has betrayed him.3 Human behavior often follows the same patterns—especially where sex is concerned. Many of the most prominent deceptions of our species have to do with sexual attraction and are not considered deceptions because they have been built into the fabric of human courtship rituals to which people are socialized. Lipstick and high heel-shoes often create false impressions of youth or strength in women, while fancy cars and trendy clothing can exaggerate the wealth of men. These enhancements sometimes emphasize traits that already exist, but all too often, they become outright deceptions—as with the woman who spends two hours applying makeup before leaving the house or the man who spends half of his monthly income paying for a sports car. Sexual dynamics also include a fair share of intentional, direct lies. Simply put, most people lie about sex. For example, a 1993 study reported that 92 percent of university students had lied to a current or potential sexual partner about such things as their number of former partners, their current feelings about their partner, or their satisfaction with current sexual experiences.4 When the lies of courtship are combined with the various lies and deceptions of infidelities in supposedly monogamous relationships, the amount of lying about sex that our speSex, Lies, and Phenotypes

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cies does becomes truly staggering—but not at all difficult to explain. Indeed, it is the occasional truths that people tell about sex that would seem to require an evolutionary explanation, because, as Oscar Wilde’s Jack Worthing so presciently observed in The Importance of Being Earnest, “the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl”—especially if, like Jack, he is interested in sex. It requires no great effort to explain the evolutionary advantages of deceiving others; if you can get away with it, lying is a great way to acquire resources, secure mating opportunities, and avoid unpleasant consequences. But this observation does nothing to explain why organisms might evolve an appetite for consuming counterfactual propositions. To count as a useful fiction—using the broadest definition of “fiction” as “non-fact”—a deception has to convey some advantage to the one deceived. To make this case we must explore the much less intuitive proposition that, in a non-trivial number of situations, people derive an evolutionary advantage from being lied to and believing—or at least pretending to believe—the deceptions. We can get a sense of how this beneficial deception might work by looking closer at The Importance of Being Earnest. In this play, Jack lies to the lovely Gwendolyn—telling her that his name is Earnest, because she has vowed to only marry a man of that name. Jack lies for the same reasons that most men lie to women; however, the intended effect of his deception (marriage) would benefit Gwendolyn as much as it would Jack—at least from the evolutionary perspective. Gwendolyn’s vow to marry a man named Earnest makes no adaptive sense at all. Jack is a wealthy, well-educated man who is genuinely in love with Gwendolyn. He is responsible, serious, and shows every sign that he will stick around and provide for her and her offspring. Gwendolyn’s insistence on marrying the first Earnest who comes along, on the other hand, is a silly romantic notion that would almost certainly lead to a Darwinian disaster. Indeed, the whole point of Wilde’s play—if it can be said, against the author’s objections, to have a point—is that his society has placed more emphasis on superficial descriptors (being named Earnest) than on real character traits (actually being earnest). Though Jack is not Earnest, he is earnest, and though he is not honest in the detail of his name, he is honest in everything else. Gwendolyn stands to gain much by believing Jack’s deception and marrying him—and indeed, when faced with the 104

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prospect of really losing Jack as a suitor because of his name, she shows a willingness to believe any pretense that will preserve the match. In The Evolution of Animal Communication, William A. Searcy and Stephen Nowicki present convincing evidence for the argument that all kinds of organisms—not just wealthy young girls with silly romantic notions—can derive certain survival benefits from being deceived. Searcy and Nowicki survey examples of accuracy and deception in three broad categories of interaction between organisms: relationships in which interests converge, relationships in which interests diverge, and relationships in which interests oppose. Each category abounds with examples of deceptive communication that benefits the deceptive communicator. However, each also contains at least one example of deception that benefits the receiver of the deceptive communication—situations in which, in effect, it pays to believe the lie. It is to these telling examples from our deep evolutionary past that we now turn. overlapping interests: why crying “ wolf ” works two-thirds of the time

Children learn at a very early age that “crying wolf”—sounding a false alarm in order to get attention from others—can have disastrous consequences. In Aesop’s famous tale—with variants found all over the world—a young boy is guarding a flock of sheep and decides to cry “wolf” just to see what will happen. His family and neighbors drop everything that they are doing and rush to his aid, only to find out that they have been duped by a false alarm. The boy repeats this action, and the townspeople come running again, with the same result. When the boy finally does see a wolf, he tries to sound an alarm, only to be disbelieved by townspeople tired of his antics. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is that the deception works twice in a row. One would think that, after being fooled by the boy the first time, the people of the village would write him off as a phony and refuse to come again. However, readers of the story implicitly understand that most people would give the boy the benefit of the doubt the second time. Why do the villagers give the boy a second chance, even though they know he is a liar? This problem actually exists in many species where cries of “wolf” are a common way to warn of imminent dangers. In many of these reSex, Lies, and Phenotypes

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lationships, single organisms—just like the bored shepherd boy—can derive some benefit through deceptive communication. Consider Searcy and Nowicki’s example of a bird who falsely signals the presence of a predator: One way in which a signaler can benefit from a false alarm is for the alarm to move receivers away from some resource, thus allowing the signaler access. This benefit may apply to false alarming in the great tits. . . . Great tits give alarms in the absence of predators when other birds, either of the same or different species, are feeding at a concentrated food source. As the other birds rush to cover, the alarmer flies in and takes food before the others return.5 It is easy to see how this deceptive behavior benefits the signaler—and how natural selection would favor those great tits disposed to make deceptive alarm calls. But why on earth would any other bird be selected to respond to such calls? One would think that selection would favor birds that ignored the alarm calls and went on eating. The answer to this question lies in a fairly straightforward application of the smoke detector principle discussed in Chapter Three. Organisms stand to lose far more from failing to respond to a true alarm than from responding to a false alarm; therefore, a tendency to respond positively to alarms can be evolutionarily sound even when false alarms far outnumber true ones. Anders P. Møller’s observation of great tits recorded a false-alarm rate of more than 60 percent, and Searcy and Nowicki theorize that even this high number may be “well below the critical ratio that would push the system into instability.”6 As with other examples of the smoke detector principle, the survival value lies not specifically in believing the deception, but in believing the alarm call, whether it is true or false—on the grounds that the odds will nearly always favor low-risk credulity over skepticism that may be fatal. Though “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is usually told to discourage children from lying, it could just as easily be a parable about how foolish it is to disbelieve an alarm without overwhelming proof of its falseness. We may assume that the poor young boy perishes in the wolf’s attack, but so do the sheep, other livestock near the village, and perhaps even another child or two. In reality the villagers probably should have given 106

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the boy one more chance, since the effort that they were expending to respond to the alarm was minimal, while their potential loss was enormous. As long as there is a reasonable probability that such a communication is true, natural selection will tend to favor the credulous—who occasionally waste time and resources responding to false alarms—over the skeptical—who never waste energy on false alarms and, just once, fail to respond to a true one. divergent interests: the special case of sexual selection

The interests of organisms diverge when they do not overlap but do not directly conflict with each other. When discussing this subject in The Evolution of Animal Communication, Searcy and Nowicki focus entirely on signals that members of a species send to prospective mates, such as a canary’s song and a peacock’s tail. The overwhelming majority of these communications feature the male as the sender and the female as the receiver. While both the male and the female have an interest in reproducing, their reproductive strategies—as so many evolutionary biologists and psychologists have pointed out—diverge. Because sperm is cheap and easy to produce, it is in the best interest of males to mate as often as possible. Since reproduction often involves an enormous investment of time and energy on the part of the female, she benefits most by carefully selecting the best mate available. The problem here lies in defining “best mate.” In traditional evolutionary theory, there are two ways to define this phrase. The first is in terms of pair bonding, where the best mate is the one who has access to the most resources, such as food; has the best status; and has a willingness to raise offspring. The second is in terms of actual copulation, where the best mate is the one who has the best genes. Obviously, the possessor of the best resources is unlikely to possess the best genes; this is responsible for much of the extra-pair coupling in the natural world, from the female indigo bunting—North American birds previously considered monogamous but now known to produce 40 percent of their offspring through adulterous liaisons—to the heroines of the world’s greatest works of literature—Helen of Troy, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Molly Bloom, Lady Chatterley, and Daisy Buchanan, to name only a few. The qualities that attract a woman to a husband are often not the same as those that attract a woman to a sexual partner.7 Sex, Lies, and Phenotypes

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But what qualities attract women to specific packages of genes? Perhaps the most common answer to this question is the completely circular assertion that women are attracted to men who are attractive to women. Any physical or behavioral attribute that is considered attractive in a male will lead to more mating opportunities and, therefore, more opportunities to distribute his genes into the next generation— including the genes for his attractive traits. This theory of sexual selection—often associated with the pioneering work of English biologist Sir Ronald Fisher (1890–1962)—holds that traits acted upon by sexual selection do not need to enhance fitness in any other way. Perhaps the most iconic example of this phenomenon is the peacock’s tail, a huge, clumsy appendage whose attractiveness to females seems to be its only selection advantage. As Matt Ridley writes of the peacock’s tail in The Red Queen, “it hardly matters whether the male chosen is the ‘best’ male; what counts is that he is the most fashionable, as his sons will be. . . . If the goal is to have the sexiest son in the next generation, then one way of doing that is to mate with the sexiest male.”8 If the Fisher hypothesis is correct, sexual selection provides an excellent example of a different kind of useful fiction—one that becomes true simply by being believed. For example, if a man with a sixth toe on his left foot were a good enough seducer to convince large numbers of women that sixth toes were sexy, then all six-toed men in the population would enjoy increased reproductive success. Women who believed this fiction would tend to have 1) more six-toed sons and 2) more daughters who would be attracted to men with a sixth toe. In the next generation, then, six-toed men would enjoy even more reproductive success and so on into the generations, until boys with five toes were considered ugly and deformed. In this way, after many thousands of generations, a sixth toe could become standard equipment for a species, even though it would provide no independent adaptive advantage and could even decrease the organism’s chance for survival. If females within a population, for whatever reason, begin to believe that a certain trait is desirable—be it a large and colorful tail, an Italian last name, a hairy chest, or a bone stuck through the nose—this trait will then become more and more desirable as the males who possess it continue to pass it on through their increased opportunities to mate. As 108

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the entire population begins to develop the trait, it may become more and more exaggerated—as in the case of the peacock’s tail—as males must go to new extremes to compete for females. The result of such runaway sexual selection may be a trait that is maladaptive in every way other than mate choice. What may have started as a signal of fitness (good color in tail feathers giving an indication of overall health) becomes exactly the opposite. Yet sexual selection continues to favor the trait simply because it plays a role in mate choice. The great utility of the fiction is that it creates its own fact. opposing interests: the size of the fight in the shrimp

Few interests oppose as clearly and absolutely as the interests of a predator and its prey. It might seem incredible to claim that I could find common cause with an organism that wants to eat me for dinner, but, according to a number of evolutionary biologists, I very well might. The key lies in the price of the meal. Most organisms need to eat, but some food comes with a higher cost—in energy expended, time wasted, and risks incurred—than its caloric value justifies. Personally, I feel this way about eating the small, fleshy morsel at the bottom of an artichoke leaf or the meat inside of an uncracked walnut. Whatever pleasure or nutritional value I might gain from these foods is more than offset by the trouble it takes to actually get to the food. Therefore, in their natural state, artichokes and walnuts are perfectly safe from me. The same principle applies to food that requires a long chase or a hard fight. The much-discussed stotting action of Thomson gazelles, while deceptive, has the potential to benefit both predator and prey. For years scientists have puzzled at the fact that some members of this species literally jump up and down in the presence of lions and other predators— as if daring them to attack. This action has often been interpreted as a signal to predators designed to communicate a message such as, “I am a superior, fast gazelle! You’ll never succeed in catching me, so don’t waste your time and energy on trying.”9 If the signal is true—if the gazelle really is faster than the predator—then the communication serves the interest of both predator and prey; the lion can choose another gazelle for its meal, and the gazelle can avoid a costly high-speed chase. Even if the gazelle is not faster than the lion—but only faster than another Sex, Lies, and Phenotypes

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gazelle that happens to be nearby—it still pays for the lion to “believe” the communication and chase a gazelle that will require less expenditure of energy. A much higher cost can be imposed on an organism when a potential meal—or, more likely, a competitor for resources—is inclined to fight back. “A great deal of animal communication occurs in aggressive contexts,” write Searcy and Nowicki. An organism that incurs a higher cost than its opponent is often victorious, thus “both animals will benefit if they honestly signal their level of aggressiveness at the start of the encounter.”10 Clearly, however, signals of aggressive intent provide a huge temptation to cheat—to overstate one’s aggression in order to achieve the desired resources without a fight. For this reason, there are dogs whose bark is worse than their bite, small frogs whose croaks mimic their much larger cousins, and tenured faculty members who regularly threaten to quit their jobs if they are not given their way. However, no species yet encountered (except possibly the tenured faculty member) can duplicate the moxie of the mantis shrimp, as described by Trivers in Social Evolution: A mantis shrimp that has just molted is soft-shelled; it can neither attack nor defend itself and, when cornered, is easily killed. But it can threaten and this is exactly what it does: it responds to an intruder by greatly increasing the frequency of its claw display, sometimes combining this with a lunge at the opponent. . . . About half of the time this bluff is successful and the intruder retreats, but the other half of the time the intruder keeps coming, at which point the cavity-holder invariably departs. Not a single soft-shelled bluffer persists when its bluff is called.11 The aggressive posture of the soft-shelled shrimp is a complete fiction, and its usefulness to the shrimp cannot be disputed. Yet as we have seen so often, there also appears to be an advantage to the organism that believes the lie. This is not to say that falling for a bluff provides any kind of advantage in the short term. The advantage, rather, is in being inclined to believe honest displays of aggression, which, it turns out, the mantis shrimp make in great abundance when they really are willing to fight. This is especially true, Trivers reports, just prior to their molting, 110

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“as if building up a reputation that threats will be backed up by aggressive actions just before the time when they will not be.”12

The Lies that Bind Anyone who has ever been within earshot of the question “Do I look fat in this?” knows that a polite lie is often better for everybody than an uncomfortable truth. Indeed, as Smith explains, deception underlies the entire structure of social rules and conventions that our society (like most others) depends on to maintain social cohesion. “Children,” he points out, “are instructed, on pain of punishment, to feign respect for their elders, to write heartfelt thank-you notes for disappointing Christmas presents, and to refrain from telling grandma that her breath stinks. . . . The child who fails to master this skill pays a heavy price of disapproval, punishment, and social ostracism.”13 As adults, we generally convert these forms of dishonesty into positive moral principles—sending somebody a thank-you card for a birthday or wedding gift is good manners, no matter how little one appreciates the gift. Offending people unnecessarily is considered very rude, even if the offending comment is completely true. A person who simply told the truth all of the time, who said whatever he or she thought when asked for an opinion, and who refused to observe the social conventions that absolutely require polite deception, would very quickly become a social pariah. Contemporary research into the nature of dishonesty suggests that a large portion of everyday lies fit into the general pattern of promoting and preserving social cohesion. In the mid 1990s, University of Virginia psychologist Bella M. DePaulo and her collaborators conducted a series of experiments aimed at separating lies told for the benefit of the liar from those told for the perceived benefit of the lied to. They had people keep journals and record every deceptive communication made during the course of a week. The lies were coded into various categories and placed into quantitative matrices for further analysis. In one study researchers found that about 25 percent of all deceptive communications—and nearly half of deceptive communications between two women—fall into the category of “other-oriented” lies, or “lies told to protect or enhance other persons psychologically or to advantage or protect the interests of others.”14 When lies to close friends and family are factored into these equations, “altruistic lies”—lies told to save face, Sex, Lies, and Phenotypes

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express support, inspire confidence, preserve harmony, sooth hurt feelings, and otherwise express support for a loved one—occur nearly twice as often as “self-centered lies.” The researchers in this study concluded that “efforts to eliminate totally all everyday lies from close personal relationships would probably be misguided.”15 Other research is even more persuasive on this point. In a 1988 experiment, Paula V. Lippard had seventy-four subjects report all of their lies over a twenty-one-day period. The self-reported lies were coded by two trained judges and assigned to one of eight motivation categories with sixteen subcategories. The two most frequent categories cited were both directed at preserving social cohesion: “Conflict Avoidance” (29.2 percent) and “Protection of Others” (18 percent). Thus “altruistic lies” accounted for nearly half of all intentional falsehoods in the study, followed by “Self-Protection” (16.5 percent), “Obtaining Resources” (13 percent), “Excuses” (9.7 percent), “Avoiding or Increasing Affiliation” (8.3 percent), “Manipulating Others” (3.9 percent), and “Joking” (1.5 percent).16 If this research is correct, somewhere between onefourth and one-half of the lies that people tell us are actually intended for our benefit. While some of this deceptive communication may be misguided and lead to other problems in the future, much of it does spare us psychic pain, prevent bad feelings, and ensure that our social group functions harmoniously. For modern humans, the consequences of instability within our social group (the 150 or so people with whom we interact regularly) are, if not minor, at least survivable. Our pre-modern ancestors, however, lived in much more precarious times. Small groups of hunter-gatherers with convoluted kinship networks and alliances could, at any time, slip into the cycles of recrimination and mimetic violence chronicled so eloquently by René Girard in Violence and the Sacred. As Girard explains, a single insult, slight, or affront in such a society could initiate a series of escalating reprisals that “puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy.”17 This idea of a society teetering on the brink of violent collapse calls to mind Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” Hobbes’s solution was for humans to construct and submit to civil governments. An equally important part of the solution may be to be very careful with unpleasant truths. To understand how lying fits into the picture of Hobbesian nature, we now turn to Hobbes’s contemporary, the seventeenth112

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century playwright William Wycherly, and his most famous play, The Country Wife.18 As a Restoration playwright, Wycherly was in the business of creating small, self-contained societies and peopling them with flat characters who conformed to the dramatic stereotypes of the period (rake, fop, sexually aggressive older woman, and so on). The Country Wife includes such aptly named characters as Mr. Horner, the rake-protagonist who lives his life to cuckold (that is “clap horns on”) other men; Mr. Pinchwife, who is resolved to keep his wife away from men who might try to seduce her (thereby embarrassing him); and a cast of supporting characters with names such as Lady Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, and Mr. Sparkish. Simply knowing that the main plot of The Country Wife involves a conflict between Mr. Horner and Mr. Pinchwife tells us much of what we need to know about both the subject matter and the overall tone of the work—neither of which differ in any significant way from the bulk of comedic plays written during the Restoration. What is different, though, is the central deception that Horner uses to accomplish his goals. Deception is perfectly acceptable in the moral universe of Restoration comedy. Unlike lesser rakes, who find ways to overstate their fortunes or their intentions, Horner convinces a quack doctor to spread the rumor that he is impotent. As counterintuitive as this may seem, Horner realizes that, by making himself the butt of jokes among all of the men in town, he will gain access to their wives, whom they will not bother to “protect” from a rake who is no longer in a position to muddy the waters of their gene pools. Horner’s plan works brilliantly with the town women, who are used to deception and know how to play the game. It runs into trouble, however, when Horner sets his sights on Margery Pinchwife, a naïve country beauty whose husband, obsessed with not becoming a cuckold, keeps his wife locked away and under the watchful care of his sister, Alethea. The problem is not that Pinchwife restricts access to Margery. The challenge of breaking through the defenses is what attracts Horner to her in the first place. However, Margery, the country wife, does not know how to play the game; she does not know when she is supposed to lie. When Margery first experiences London life at a play, she reports back to her husband, quite frankly, that she found the players “finer folks” than he. When Pinchwife tries to scare her by telling her that “one of Sex, Lies, and Phenotypes

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the lewdest fellows in town [Horner] told me he was in love with you,” Margery makes no effort to hide her delight.19 The ensuing convoluted plot twists, clever disguises, mistaken identities, and sustained double entendres come right off the Restoration comedy shelf until the final scene, which departs substantially from the conventions of the day by utterly failing to resolve the play’s central conflict. Unlike almost every other play in the European comedic tradition, both the characters and the dysfunctional society that they inhabit are returned, in the end, to the status quo ante without any real hope of change, growth, or release. The device that effects this non-resolution is an implausible lie that the entire community actively decides to believe. The Country Wife teeters on the edge of Hobbesian violence and collapse more than most comedies do. Horner’s deception works so well that, in the space of only a few days, he collects four new lovers: Lady Fidget; her sister, Dainty Fidget; Mrs. Squeamish; and, at the very end, Margery Pinchwife. In the final scene nearly all of the play’s characters converge on Horner’s apartment, where the deception begins to unravel. The first three women—each of whom believes herself to be the only one privy to Horner’s deception—learn about each other and nearly give the game away before agreeing to keep the secret. Margery, however, refuses to play along and announces that she intends to marry Horner. When Sir Jasper Fidget (Lady Fidget’s husband) and Pinchwife arrive on the scene, the entire community moves to the verge of collapse. Pinchwife draws his sword to kill his wife, whom Horner prepares to defend. However, just as the play threatens to end with the body count of a Shakespearian tragedy, salvation comes in the form of a pair of lies: the quack doctor repeats the original story of Horner’s impotence, and a domestic servant named Lucy concocts a plausible narrative to explain Margery’s presence in Horner’s apartment. Over Margery’s objections— she offers her “certain knowledge” that the slander is false—the rest of the characters all rush forward to assert its absolute truthfulness. Margery falls in line and, on the last page, accepts the collective fiction of Horner’s innocence. It is here we must consider allegorical interpretations of The Country Wife (and, indeed, one would have a very difficult time making the case that characters named Horner, Pinchwife, and Squeamish should not be read allegorically). Wycherly’s final scene draws a compelling 114

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portrait of a civilized society about to revert to a Hobbesian state of nature. The women are jealous of each other, and the men are exhibiting the sexual aggression that, evolutionary psychologists tell us, lies at the heart of many—if not most—acts of human aggression.20 The only way to avoid a devastating cycle of reciprocal violence is for all of the members of the community to agree on a lie that will save face, placate honor, and restore the uneasy social balance that existed before the beginning of the play. Margery Pinchwife, the only character who resists this lie, is coerced by the other characters until she consents and goes along with the fictional narrative capable of preventing the complete collapse of the social group. This final scene of The Country Wife illustrates how certain types of deceptive behavior might have served as a precursor to the human attraction to fiction. Accepting lies, as Margery Pinchwife finally learns, is as much a part of social cohesion as telling them. The same social forces that require children to lie about gifts they don’t like and breath that they think stinks, encourage adults to accept certain lies without asking too many questions. Often this polite acceptance goes beyond pretending to believe an obviously false statement and requires genuine, if unexamined, belief. For example, if a young couple sends me a thank-you note for a wedding gift, I don’t call them up to find out if they really liked the battery-operated apple peeler that I bought them. Nor would I go to their house and rifle through their kitchen drawers trying to make sure that they hadn’t returned it. Similarlym when I apologize to my wife and admit that I was wrong about something, she doesn’t usually cross-examine me to see if I am secretly harboring the suspicion that I was right. When we encounter a lie that has clearly been designed to help us save face or prevent unnecessary contention within our family or social group, it is usually in our best interest not only to believe it passively but to willingly suspend our disbelief—much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge says we must do when reading fiction21—and ignore evidence that conflicts with our credulity.

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7

4 Deceiving Ourselves and Others Deprive the average man of his vital lie, and you’ve robbed him of happiness as well.

—Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck When a person cannot deceive himself, the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

—Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography Jousting with a Madman The first chapter of this study began with literature’s greatest storyteller; the final chapter begins with its greatest madman. The two occupations are not all that different. All that separates Don Quixote and Scheherazade is a thin layer of self-consciousness about the fictional nature of their shared enterprise; Scheherazade understands that the truths she tells her husband are embedded in fictions, while Quixote believes that the fictions he tells himself are derived from the truth. Quixote deceives himself, but this does not mean that his fictions are not useful. In many cases his fantastic stories are more valuable to him, his acquaintances, and his society than the truth. The utility of his fictions depends absolutely on his belief in their truth. The liar will always falter when the game is no longer worth the candle, but the true believer will live by, and die for, his or her beliefs no matter how ludicrous or impossible they seem to others. To be sure, Quixote’s self-delusions are often painful and even life117

threatening. Throughout his adventures he falls from windmills; stumbles over farm animals; and is assaulted by muleteers, convicts, soldiers, and travelers on nearly every stop on his journey. His delusions also do little to help with his reproductive success, as he devotes both body and soul to a woman—the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso—who does not actually exist. How, then, are Don Quixote’s delusions examples of the way that self-deception can enhance fitness? To answer this question, we must look at the places in the text where Quixote, the madman, places himself in competition with those who are sane. If his delusions give him an advantage in these competitions, we can at least propose that there might be some advantage to self-deception in the area of intraspecies competition. We find an example of just such a phenomenon in the beginning of Don Quixote, Part II, Cervantes’s 1615 sequel to the 1605 original. The running joke of Part II is that all of the characters who encounter Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have read Part I and, therefore, know everything that readers know about the pair. Part II also has a somewhat more coherent story arc than the original, including a new antagonist for Quixote: Sampson Carrasco, a bachelor (i.e., university graduate) who lives in Quixote’s village and sets out to use his intelligence to restore the good Don’s sanity. To accomplish his goal, Carrasco enters Quixote’s fantasy world and pretends to be a rival knight, the Knight of the Wood (later rechristened the “Knight of the Looking Glasses” or “Knight of the Mirrors”). Assured of victory by his youth and his intellect, Carrasco plans to “vanquish” Don Quixote—to forbid him, as only a victorious fellow knight can, to give up knight errantry for a period of two years. The distinguished bachelor should have an easy time defeating the less-than-distinguished knight-errant. Carrasco is in top physical shape; he is educated, clever, and well versed in strategy. He is also quite sane. Don Quixote, on the other hand, is nearly sixty years old. He rides a broken-down nag, wears a decrepit suit of armor with a cardboard box for a visor, and fights entirely for the glory of a woman who does not exist. Of course Don Quixote is also mad; he tilts at windmills, steals shaving basins, and wages epic battles against sheep. Quixote honestly believes he is a knight-errant, straight out of one of the sixteenth-century courtly romances that he has spent his life reading. 118

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To his credit, Carrasco is motivated partly by a sincere desire to keep Quixote from harm, but this is mingled with an equally sincere desire to demonstrate his cleverness and have some fun at the expense of a crazy old man. Carrasco approaches his encounter with Quixote without seriousness, treating it as a game that he is certain to win. Don Quixote, on the other hand, has only one motive in the contest: to defend the honor of his lady fair, the lovely (albeit fictional) Dulcinea del Toboso. Quixote approaches the conflict with the high seriousness that, in his mind, it deserves. Quixote never doubts that his skills in battle and the rightness of his cause will bring him victory. And it does! Don Quixote unseats his opponent. Like his biblical namesake, Sampson Carrasco overestimates his abilities, underestimates his opponent, and comes crashing down in defeat. Carrasco is even mocked by the peasant he hires to impersonate his squire, who poignantly asks, “Which is the greater madman, he who is so because he cannot help it, or he who is so on purpose?”1 The jousting match is more than a simple retelling of “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Quixote wins largely because of a lucky break—when he stops to help Sancho climb a tree, Carrasco stops his horse, making him an easy target when Quixote starts again. Quixote also wins because of the way that he frames the task; both he and Sampson Carrasco expect to win, but Carrasco expects to win a trivial game with a crazy old man while Quixote expects to win a duel of honor with a dangerous opponent. In Quixote’s mind the match is serious, the threat of death is real, and the stakes are worth dying for. Carrasco, who does not share Quixote’s delusions, does not bring the same sense of purpose to the match, and when the crucial moment comes, he makes a careless misstep that comes very close to costing him his life.2 In this situation—a battle that really could end in the death of one of the participants—Quixote’s delusion focuses his attention, removes his hesitation, and gives him a critical edge over a stronger opponent. His false beliefs are more adaptive than Carrasco’s true ones because they help him win the fight. Quixote would have lost any chance at victory if he had suddenly become sane and realized that he was an emaciated old man riding a broken-down nag and wearing a cardboard box on his head. He only wins by remaining deluded about his true nature and abilities. One line of recent research suggests that this kind of self-delusion Deceiving Ourselves and Others

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might work just as well in actual modern combat as in fictional jousting matches. The Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham has examined the evolutionary basis of “military incompetence,” which occurs in a battle when “one of the opponents is patently weaker than the other, but still chooses to fight despite nonviolent options.”3 While other primate species often engage in organized raids, these acts of violence are characterized by the ability “to assess accurately the costs of premeditated and unprovoked conflict” (6). Military incompetence, on the other hand, appears to be “evolutionarily novel in the hominid line”—a behavior that evolved after the split from chimpanzees and must therefore have evolved specifically, possibly to fulfill some adaptive purpose.4 After surveying the problem, Wrangham offers two hypotheses to explain the evolution of self-delusion in combat. The “performance-enhancement hypothesis” suggests that “by suppressing conflicting thoughts or feelings, positive illusions enable individuals or groups to be more effective in achieving a goal.” The “opponent-deception hypothesis” proposes that “humans tend to deceive themselves as a way to bluff successfully.” The two hypotheses are mutually inclusive and suggest that, ultimately, “exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning.”5 Overconfidence, delusion, unrealistic expectations, and overall self-deception can therefore be more adaptive—and therefore more useful—than the ability to assess a situation accurately and respond appropriately. Self-deception can be adaptive in non-combat situations as well. Over the past twenty years ucla psychologist Shelly E. Taylor and her collaborators have produced more than two dozen articles examining the mental and physical benefits of “positive illusions,” such as an inflated belief in one’s own abilities, an exaggerated sense of control, or an unjustified optimism in the future. In the first of these articles, Taylor and Jonathon D. Brown take direct aim at the common belief among professionals that “the psychologically healthy person is one who maintains close contact with reality.” They point to solid survey data showing that most people have an unrealistically positive perception of themselves, their abilities, and their ability to control events in their life.6 If mental health is defined as having beliefs that align with reality, then most people would have to be considered mentally ill. However, they assert, 120

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evidence from converging sources suggests that positive illusions about the self, one’s control, and the future may be especially apparent and adaptive under circumstances of adversity, that is, circumstances that might be expected to produce depression or lack of motivation. Under these circumstances, the belief in one’s self as a competent, efficacious actor behaving in a world with a generally positive future may be especially helpful in overcoming setbacks, potential blows to self-esteem, and potential erosions in one’s view of the future.7 In subsequent articles Taylor and others have presented evidence that positive illusions increase people’s ability to recover from life-threatening diseases, combat aids, manage stress, and cope with extreme adversity.8 The effect of a positive illusion need not even be dramatic to be adaptive. Let’s say that a seriously ill person who had only a 1 percent chance of recovery could increase this to a 2 percent chance through unrestrained, completely unjustifiable optimism. Over thousands of generations, this slight survival advantage would cause selection to favor the unrealistic optimists over the somber realists. Clinical studies have repeatedly demonstrated that optimism and positive thinking in the seriously ill can increase chances of survival by far more than a single percentage point.9 Sexual selection, too, benefits from increased self-confidence—even when such confidence is entirely unjustified. Confident people, especially confident men, are often seen as more attractive than unconfident people—even if their confidence is unfounded. Confidence accompanies material success or physical prowess often enough for potential mates to equate one with the other. In a long-term committed relationship, a woman can see through the bluster of an overconfident male. Yet, according to evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss this is not true in casual encounters, where confidence itself often proves inherently valuable. To illustrate how this works, Buss relates the following narrative from an interview with a single woman: I was sitting at a corner table talking to my girlfriend and sipping on a gin and tonic. Then Bob walked in. He walked into the bar like he owned the place, smiling broadly and very confident. He Deceiving Ourselves and Others

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caught my eye, and I smiled. He sat down and started talking about how horses were his hobby. He casually mentioned that he owned a horse farm. When the last call for alcohol came, he was still talking about how expensive his horses were, and said that we should go riding together. He said, “In fact, we could go riding right now.” It was 2:00 a.m., and I left the bar and had sex with him. I never did find out whether he owned horses.10 The evolutionary value of these horses does not depend on their factual existence. It does not matter if the man has them, thinks he has them, or is lying about having them. All that matters to his success in the mating game is that he can talk about them with confidence. This discussion of the value of illusions, delusions, and self-deceptions takes us to the heart of Cervantes’s project in Don Quixote. One of the most tantalizing things about Cervantes’s masterpiece is that it occasionally forces us to come to grips with the superiority of its hero’s delusions—to ask, as Carrasco’s squire asks, which one of us is mad? Quixote’s madness parallels that of the optimists who believe, against all odds, that they will recover from fatal illnesses—and then do so. It is also similar to the general who believes that he can defeat the most powerful army on earth or the civil rights leader who believes that a powerful country or empire can be persuaded to change by nonviolent resistance. Such people are usually considered insane by their cultures, and only a few of them ever prove to be otherwise. As Michael Schermer reminds us, the mere fact that someone is universally considered wrong is not a guarantee that he or she is right.11 Enough supposed delusions turn out to be true, however, to maintain some selection pressure for self deception—to act as a corrective to the inherent limitations of “reality” as perceived by sane and rational minds.

The Vital Lie As discussed in the previous chapter, the final scene of William Wycherly’s The Country Wife is an example of the possible adaptive value of believing a lie. Mr. Pinchwife’s closing words in this play—“For my own sake fain I would all believe / Cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive”—suggest that the real adaptive value of deception might be in the ability to deceive oneself successfully. We have already seen how this 122

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can be true in combat situations and in one’s general sense of well being; research suggests that it may also be true in precisely the case that Mr. Pinchwife describes: the fate of the cuckold. The word cuckold comes from one of the most impressive cons found anywhere in nature: the actions of the cuckoo bird. Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other species, often convincing unsuspecting birds to raise young cuckoos as their own. For the cuckoo parents, this is an evolutionary jackpot: they get their genes firmly entrenched in future generations without having to contribute a single worm or beetle grub to support their offspring. Among humans and many other mammals, the same basic strategy— slipping an extra child or two into the gene pool through affairs with women whose mates will raise the children as their own—offers tremendous genetic benefits to the reproducing males. How often does this deception occur? Until the development of reliable dna testing in the latter part of the twentieth century, human males could rarely be completely sure of the paternity of their children. Reliable statistics on adultery and extra-pair conception are notoriously difficult to come by, since nearly everyone involved has an incentive to lie. Jared M. Diamond reports that a genetic study conducted in America in the 1940s, while not looking specifically for children conceived adulterously, showed conclusively that 10 percent of the children in the sample were not biologically related to the males reported to the hospital as their fathers. Similar studies in England and America have shown adulterine birth rates as high as 30 percent in some sample groups.12 These figures vary among—and within—different cultures, but there are children in every society who are raised by men who have unknowingly agreed to commit resources to benefit somebody else’s child. It is likely (though impossible to prove) that rates of extra-pair conceptions were even higher in prehistoric times when there were fewer social and cultural mechanisms to enforce men’s and women’s fidelity. The genetic incentives for men to cuckold other men are clear and easy to see. But why has natural selection left men so vulnerable to this kind of deception? If the cuckold pays a heavy genetic price for his credulity—and all indications are that he does—why haven’t easy-to-spot genetic markers evolved to remove all doubt about paternity? The lack of such markers is counterintuitive; it would seem to be in a male’s best interest to be able to identify his offspring and withhold resources Deceiving Ourselves and Others

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from other men’s children. However, when extra-pair conceptions are common, males have a genetic interest in concealing paternity so that their own children will not be identified by other males who might be raising them. A formula developed by Mark Pagel predicts that a rate of extra-pair conception above 10 percent will prevent genetic markers from ever evolving.13 Concealed paternity, though, brings its own set of problems—problems for which the optimal solution can be found in yet another kind of useful self-deception. Without a marker to establish genetic relatedness a male cannot be sure that a child belongs to somebody else, but he also cannot be sure that it belongs to him. Therefore, as Paola Bressan points out, “all babies start paying the cost of paternity uncertainty, that is, the reduction in paternal care due to fathers not knowing whether they have truly sired their mate’s offspring.” To minimize this cost, Bressan argues, women have a strong tendency to reassure men of paternity by frequently “remarking on baby’s resemblance to her mate.” More surprisingly, however, fathers have a strong tendency to believe these reassurances—even when they are false—because of their overall genetic interest in not marking their offspring for identification by others. “We should then expect,” he asserts, that “across cultures, mothers should be inclined to claim that babies look just like their daddies.”14 The resemblance of children to their fathers is, therefore, a useful fiction that mothers have an interest in creating and fathers have an interest in believing. This does not mean that women are dishonest and fathers are dupes. Most children really are the offspring of their putative fathers, and most mothers really do perceive a resemblance between their children and their mates. In reality, however, most children do not look very much like their fathers. Studies have shown that people unrelated to a child tend to identify the biological father correctly only slightly more often than random chance would predict.15 The tendency of mothers to make, and of fathers to believe, exaggerated claims of resemblance appears to be a cognitive adaptation built around a counterfactual proposition that everybody has a genetic interest in believing. Henrik Ibsen’s masterful play, The Wild Duck, offers a stark example of what can happen when a useful fiction is punctured with an ugly truth. The play centers around Hjalmar Ekdal, a man of modest means who lives a quiet, reasonably happy life with his wife, Gina, who helps him 124

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run his photography business, and his daughter, Hedvig, who adores him in every way. Hjalmar’s happy life comes crashing down, however, when his childhood friend—the hopeless idealist Gregers Werle— returns to town with a mission: to answer the “demands of the ideal” and set his friend’s life upon the solid path of truth. Through conversations with Gregers, Hjalmer learns that his family was horridly abused by Gregers’s own father, Haakon Werle, who allowed Hjalmer’s father to go to prison for a crime that Haakon committed. Hjalmer also learns that his wife was once the mistress of Haakon Werle, who is actually Hedvig’s father. Unable to handle the truth, Hjalmer rejects his wife and daughter and leaves his house. The play ends with Hedvig committing suicide by shooting herself in the chest. The Wild Duck is often seen as a corrective to the progressive idealism that Ibsen himself had advocated in his earlier play An Enemy of the People. (Ibsen, a true satirist, was an equal opportunity annoyer.) Dr. Relling, one of Hjalmer’s boarders, takes it upon himself to sustain people’s “life lies”—the overriding fiction that people create for themselves to allow them to keep despair at bay. Relling’s view, of course, directly contradicts Greger’s view that truth is the only stable foundation for a happy life. In act 5, the two confront each other as representatives of their opposite world views: relling: Good Lord, I am supposed to be some kind of doctor, I’m ashamed to say. Well, then I ought to look after the poor sick people I live with. gregers: Oh come! Is Hjalmar Ekdal sick, too? relling: Most of the world is sick, I’m afraid. gregers: And what’s your prescription for Hjalmar? relling: My standard one. I try to keep up the life-lie in him. gregers: The life-lie? I don’t think I heard— relling: Oh yes, I said the life-lie. The life-lie, don’t you see—that’s the animating principle of life.16 The logic of concealed paternity can be seen clearly in The Wild Duck. The Ekdal family is ultimately destroyed, not only by an intrusive acquaintance (though Gregers’s meddling certainly doesn’t help) but by an incontrovertible genetic marker: both Hedvig Ekdal and Haakon Deceiving Ourselves and Others

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Werle suffer from weak eyesight brought on by a congenital disorder. This genetic confirmation of paternity hastens Hjalmar’s disastrous decision to abandon his family. While Hedvig’s paternity remains in doubt, everybody has an interest in believing the fiction. When the doubt is removed, the entire family collapses. This is a rough corollary to what happens genetically when markers of paternity become too obvious: everybody involved—mothers, fathers, and children—suffers a decline in their genetic influence.

The Pinocchio Problem There is one final area in which self-deception provides an advantage to the self-deceived: those who believe their own lies are much more effective at lying to others. The human mind is a remarkably effective lie detector. Modern polygraphs are designed to measure the minute physiological changes that accompany intentional deception, such as rapid respiration, elevated heart rate, and increased perspiration. However, most people can detect most liars without the aid of technology. Psychologist David Livingston Smith refers to this as the “Pinocchio problem”: Effective deception is not always easy, especially when the perpetrator has to face a skeptical audience that is prepared to penalize dishonesty. Deception makes us anxious because lying can be dangerous business. At best, being exposed may mean that others will keep the liar at arm’s length. At worst, it may be lethal. Under this kind of pressure, even the most determined con artist is likely to get the jitters. Consequently, human liars tend to follow the example of Pinocchio and rat on themselves by involuntary, nonverbal signs.17 In addition to his expanding nose, Pinocchio has the problem of an overactive conscience—externalized in the original tale, and ever after, as a talking cricket. Thus Pinocchio, like all of us, is doubly constrained in his attempts to deceive others: first by a telltale physiological response and second by a nagging source of anxiety. Nature, however, has developed an elegant solution to the Pinocchio problem, which the legendary biologist Robert Trivers has explored in several impor126

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tant papers. “We are selected,” Trivers insists, “to deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”18 Trivers supports his argument about the biological role of self-deception with important findings in cognitive psychology—and, specifically, with a series of experiments by Ruben C. Gur and Harold A. Sackeim. After establishing that people have identifiable physiological responses to hearing their own voices—which can be measured through galvanic skin response (gsr) readings—Gur and Sakheim tested subjects by playing recordings of different people speaking and asked them to identify their own voices. They found that people’s unconscious responses to their own voice, as measured by gsr reactions, were substantially more accurate than their reported responses. This was true of those who misidentified their own voice as that of someone else as well as for those who misidentified other voices as their own. From this evidence the researchers theorized that people have four cognitive prerequisites for selfdeception: 1) we can believe contradictory things; 2) we can hold these contradictory beliefs simultaneously in different regions of the brain; 3) we tend to be consciously aware of only one of the contradictory beliefs; and 4) in our conscious minds we tend to hold false beliefs about ourselves in relation to others.19 What do we lie to ourselves about in order to successfully lie to others? Almost any lie could be a candidate if we manage to convince ourselves that we are telling the truth. Think of the Manchurian Candidate scenario in which an American soldier during the Korean War, hypnotized by Chinese agents to become an assassin, is activated by posthypnotic commands and kills without ever realizing what he is doing. If self-deception does occur in such dramatic cases, it does so too infrequently for natural selection to pay much attention. But self-deceptive fictions need not be drastic to be useful; Trivers and others have identified a number of more plausible scenarios where internal delusions may operate quite effectively to support external deceptions. competence

We have already seen how Don Quixote’s delusions of grandeur help him in a conflict with a younger and stronger man, demonstrating Richard Wrangham’s “performance-enhancement hypothesis.” Quixote, however, does not actually deceive Carrasaco, as Wrangham’s second hyDeceiving Ourselves and Others

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pothesis—the “opponent-deception hypothesis”—might predict; this is largely because Carrasco already knows Quixote well enough to avoid the deception. Usually we must assess the strength of a potential opponent immediately before deciding between fight and flight. As Wrangham states, “in conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning. Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.”20 The tendency to overestimate one’s own competence in relation to others appears nearly universal among human beings. Researchers refer to this as the “Lake Wobegone Effect,” referring to Garrison Keillor’s radio description of a town “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” In his 1991 book, How We Know What Isn’t So, Thomas Gilovich explores some of the statistical evidence that confirms the existence of this general bias of self-deception: A survey of one million high-school seniors found that 70% thought they were above average in leadership ability, and only 2% thought they were below average. In terms of ability to get along with others, all students thought they were above average, 60% thought they were in the top 10%, and 25% thought they were in the top 1%! Lest one think that such inflated self-assessments occur only in the minds of callow high-school students, it should be pointed out that a survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleague.”21 Ironically, we may also benefit by underestimating our competence at certain tasks. Trivers points out that, by “deceiving down,” an organism can “make itself appear less large, less threatening, and perhaps less attractive, thereby gaining an advantage.”22 In human relations, people who underestimate their own abilities—and successfully convince others to do the same—realize the considerable benefit of low expectations. When underestimation does lead to success, it is often judged more impressive than it really is—as when a political candidate considered inarticulate performs with minimal competence in a debate. An even more important benefit of low expectations may be a decrease in requests to expend resources. I have, for example, managed to convince my wife— 128

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and I fully believe myself—that I am not very handy around the house. When asked to fix an appliance or make even a small home improvement, I generally bungle the job. Consequently, neither my wife nor any of my friends ever ask me to spend time fixing things. Conversely, a good friend of ours has proved himself so handy that, not only does his own wife frequently ask him to spend time doing home repairs, but my wife also calls him to come over whenever something needs fixing in our house. motivations

Trivers suggest that “an individual’s perception of its own motivation may be biased in order to conceal the true motivation from others.”23 Occasionally this occurs as psychotic self-delusion, as when Susan Smith— the South Carolina mother who drowned her two children in a local lake when the man she was dating expressed that he did not want stepchildren—justified her actions with these chilling words: “My children, Michael and Alex, are with our Heavenly Father now, and I know that they will never be hurt again. As a mom, that means more than words could ever say. . . . My children deserve to have the best, and now they will.”24 Though very few other people were deceived about Smith’s motivations, it is likely that she convinced herself—at least for as long as it took to perform the horrible act of filicide that rocked the nation. Self-deception about motives is rarely this easy to spot. Human motivations are a complicated mixture of genuine altruism and cynical selfinterest, both of which often coexist in a single action. We seldom do anything for a single reason, but, when we represent our motivations to others—and to ourselves—we invariably put them in the best light possible, emphasizing the altruistic reasons for our actions and deemphasizing those that are selfish, spiteful, or just plain silly. We can usually make this case quite successfully because it does not involve the overt fabrication of a motive, but rather an exclusive focus on one part of a mixed motive combined with a partial suppression of another. However, as Trivers points out, even when we deceive our conscious selves about our motivations, “it must be advantageous for the truth to be registered somewhere, so that mechanisms of self-deception are expected to reside side-by-side with mechanisms for the correct apprehension of reality.”25 Deceiving Ourselves and Others

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intentions

Closely related to self-deception about motives is self-deception about future intentions. All of us, I suspect, have promised to do something with the full conscious intention of keeping the promise, even though we realize, at some level, that we will probably never follow through. At the moment that we make such a promise, we fully perceive ourselves as telling the truth. Once we obtain whatever present benefits come from the promise of future service, we become much less committed to our promise than we were when we were making it. Many candidates for public office, I’m sure, really do believe the promises they make during an election, and many young couples absolutely mean the things that they promise each other before they are married. Without such promises people would never get married or elected to office; however, they are broken so frequently that few people really expect them to be kept. memories

We deceive ourselves about the present when we conceal our motives, and about the future when we misstate our intentions. But the most active area of self-deception is almost certainly our memory of the past. As we discussed in chapter 2, our memories are, at best, sketchy approximations of actual past events. Natural limits of storage space and processing speed force us to use all kinds of cognitive strategies to compress, redact, select, and eliminate unnecessary details from the images that we store in long-term memory. This natural sketchiness of memory gives us nearly endless opportunities to deceive ourselves about things that happened in the past so that we can more convincingly deceive others. Trivers points out that we frequently rewrite our memories to make them consistent with our present understanding—much as the government in George Orwell’s 1984 rewrites archived news items to make them fit present realities. This is why whenever we learn “personal and derogatory” information about another person, we rarely have any difficulty telling people that we “knew it all along.”26 Most of us also have a strong tendency to overestimate our role in past triumphs and to underestimate our culpability for past failures.

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All of the data on human deception and self-deception makes it tempting to conclude that evolution made human beings exceptionally good liars. However, the research really shows exactly the opposite: we are bad liars who live in an environment where communication is rewarded for many things other than accuracy. Deception is not unique to human beings. As we have seen repeatedly, nearly all organisms can derive an advantage from inaccurate communication. We are unique, however, in feeling guilty about it. A butterfly has never felt guilty that its wing design looked like the eyes of a fierce predator, and a cuckoo bird has never lost sleep over slipping one of its eggs into another bird’s nest. Yet human beings often become very anxious when they lie. Many of us will tell the truth when it is clearly not in our interests to do so. Additionally, almost all of us lie so badly that our bodies give us away even when we are firmly committed to the deception. It is because we are not good liars, and because we often feel compelled to deal truthfully with other people, that natural selection endowed us with the ability to deceive ourselves.

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Conclusion: why

“ just the facts, ma ’ am ” doesn ’ t work

You are to be in all things regulated and governed . . . by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.

—Thomas Gradgrind, in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times

Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Human beings are not fact machines—beings who scan the environment for information and then process it in their extremely large brains to produce pasteurized lumps of truth. Thomas Gradgrind’s vision in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times—a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact—has never been realized.1 Through the course of the novel, Gradgrind comes to understand that human beings are not governed by facts and that they cannot be forced into a world of fact without a substantial amount of violence against their very natures. There are times, of course, when we need accurate information—but such times occur less frequently than we like to imagine, as Edward O. Wilson reminds us in Consilience: All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental process in particular suggests that the brain is a ma-

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chine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth gave them the adaptive edge.2 Wilson speaks to one of humanity’s defining paradoxes. We depend upon, and cannot survive without, a steady flow of information—but much of that information does not have to be accurate. Take, for example, the myths of creation and afterlife that have popped up in almost every known human culture. As Wilson points out, these narratives have been extraordinarily useful to the cultures that have adopted them: they allow people to view the world as the product of a clear cause-and-effect relationship, to feel in control of nature in a way likely to increase their confidence, to ease their anxieties about their own deaths and the deaths of loved ones, and to form cohesive social groups united by shared beliefs and ritual practices. None of these benefits requires that a particular creation or afterlife myth be true. There have been thousands of these narratives in the course of human history; depending on your perspective, either all of them are false or all but one of them is false. Yet many of the concrete benefits derived from such narratives come whether or not they are actually true. In his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut exploits the theme of religion as a useful fiction by introducing a holy book with the words, “all of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”3 The religion that Vonnegut describes in Cat’s Cradle is Bokononism— the eminently useful religion of San Lorenzo that makes no pretense to truth. From Bokononism, the novel’s narrator derives a cosmology, a metaphysical system, a unique religious vocabulary, and a code of ethics—all offered in a huge book of calypso lyrics that begins with a simple caveat: “nothing in this book is true.” The purpose for the shameless lies, however, could not be nobler. Like all of Vonnegut’s novels, Cat’s Cradle presents a world of human beings hopelessly ill-equipped 134

Conclusion

to understand themselves or their place in the universe. Pathologically incapable of accepting randomness, his characters insist on finding meaning by creating shallow divisions among themselves and then doing horrible things to each other in the name of some imaginary or unimportant unifier, such as a nation, a religion, or a race (Bokonon calls these fictional entities “granfaloons”). The character Bokonon creates a completely false religion for the best of reasons: “I wanted all things / To seem to make some sense / So we could all be happy, yes / Instead of tense. / And I made up lies / So that they all fit nice, / And I made this sad world / A par-a-dise.”4 Bokononism seems paradoxical only because Vonnegut calls it a religion, and we are accustomed to religions presenting themselves as true. Had Vonnegut called The Books of Bokonon a novel, we would have had no problem with the notion that it was fictional and useful. Most of us would not even blink if he said that great truths it contained was true. Since Aristotle, critics and casual readers alike have become accustomed to speaking of literary fiction as true in some sense that does not require factual accuracy. Often, this is because literature retains the presumption of higher truth that it received from its mythological forbearers. A great deal of what we call literature—from the Iliad and the Ramayana to the poems of William Butler Yeats and the science fiction novels of L. Ron Hubbard—constitutes religious truth for those who believe it. As myth passes into literature, its perceived literal truthfulness is often reconfigured into some form of moral or allegorical truth. Consider, for example, Alexander Pope’s tribute to Virgil in his “Essay on Criticism”: When first young Maro [Virgil] in his boundless Mind A Work t’ outlast Immortal Rome design’d, Perhaps he seem’d above the Critick’s Law, And but from Nature’s Fountains scorn’d to draw: But when t’examine ev’ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same: Convinc’d, amaz’d, he checks the bold Design, And Rules as strict his labour’d Work confine, As if the Stagyrite o’er looked each Line. Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; To copy Nature is to copy Them.5 Conclusion

135

As a reasonably devout eighteenth-century English Catholic, Pope believed that both Homer and Virgil were pagans. He did not subscribe to the religious beliefs or the cultural values that animated their works. He did not believe that Zeus actually sent a dream to Agamemnon to deceive him into attacking Troy or that Aeneas, the founder of Rome, was really the son of Venus. However, he still held the Iliad and the Aeneid to be true, if not in the historical sense, in the sense that they flowed directly from natural and absolute laws that he believed defined good literature. We can learn a lot from this common insistence that a valuable fiction must somehow also be true. Certainly, those who speak of the “eternal verities” to be found in Shakespeare or Austen are aware that Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice are made-up stories. Yet we insist nonetheless on a “higher truth” or a “moral truth”—anything to keep from having to admit that we derive substantial value from something that is patently false. Why are we so afraid of this proposition? I suspect that it is because we perceive utility and truth to be much closer to each other than they really are. Western civilization’s distrust of the “merely fictional” traces at least back to Plato, who banished the poets from his Republic on the grounds that they imitated reality imperfectly and, therefore, taught the truth unreliably. “All poetical imitations,” he tells Glaucon, are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers.”6 But even Plato used a narrative form—dialogue between Socrates and various interlocutors— whose value as an accurate record of what Socrates said is clearly subordinated to the higher goal of leading people to the truth. Plato offers his dialogues to us as “true,” whether or not they are historically accurate, because their purpose (teaching higher truth) does not depend on their being a factual record of what a man named Socrates may or may not have said. Plato, lover of truth though he was, travelled even further down the slippery slope of fiction. Through the mouths of the characters in his dialogues, he creates some of the ancient world’s most well-known myths: the myth of the cave in the seventh book of Republic, the myth of the androgynous super-beings split in two in Symposium, the myth of Thoth’s invention of writing in the Phaedrus. Plato does not offer any of these stories as historical facts, but as valuable illustrations of his most important arguments. He does not feel the need to include his own allegories 136

Conclusion

in his condemnation of made-up stories. As Plato saw it, Homer, the tragic poets, and all of the other writers of the day led people away from the truth by mingling the pleasure of narrative with blatant falsehoods. Platonic allegory, on the other hand, was designed to lead people toward the truth by using the explaining power of narrative as scaffolding for otherwise incomprehensible ideas. This is the same basic argument that we encountered in our discussion of Jesus’s parables in Chapter Two, and it could just as easily be made about Rabbinical stories, Sufi allegories, and Zen koans. Such stories are created to provide insights, frame arguments, and help people discover the truth. All of these things are useful, but that is not quite the same thing as being true. The pleasure of fiction, like all forms of pleasure, has been built into the human mind over millions of years—during which those who felt this pleasure did a little bit better in the survival-and-reproduction game than those who did not. For less than a hundred of these years, the pleasure of fiction has been delivered through movies and television shows, before that it came primarily through books, stories, tall tales, folklore, and myth. But as we go back further into our ancestral past, we find that narrative served an even deeper purpose. As the human mind increased in its processing ability, the ability to form narrative sequences allowed us to process and analyze information much more efficiently than we could have done otherwise. The ability to construct factually accurate narratives allows human beings to process a staggering amount of information during the course of a single lifetime and to transmit their acquired knowledge to their descendents in the form of stories. Fictional narratives can be just as useful in the evolutionary sense because the “blind watchmaker” of natural selection neither knows nor cares what is true. Given a choice between a useful fiction and a useless fact, natural selection will choose the useful fiction every time. At the deepest level of human cognition, where our values and perceptions have been conditioned by natural selection for millions of generations, it is this utility of fiction—more even than truth or beauty—that must structure and support our universal attraction to literature.

Conclusion

137

notes

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 69. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 18. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 1–2. Ryan, “Postmodernism,” 165–87. Campbell, Liar’s Tale, 155. Campbell’s direct quotation in this passage comes from Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 48. 6. Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral, 41. 7. My fictional hominid, Thag, draws his name from one of Gary Larson’s most recognizable “Far Side” cartoons, in which a lecturer in a caveman classroom points to a picture of a spiked dinosaur tail and calls it “a thagomizer . . . after the late Thag Simmons.” In reference to this cartoon, some museums and scientific publications have adopted the term “thagomizer” to describe the end of a stegosaurus’s tail.

1. Scheherazade’s Stories and Pangloss’s Nose 1. Irwin, Arabian Nights provides an exceptionally useful guide to the complicated textual history of The Book of the One Thousand and One Nights. See especially 42–62. 2. Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, 88; Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, 11; Zipes, When Dreams Came True, 57. 3. Hernadi, “Literature and Evolution,” 56. 4. Green and Brock, “In the Mind’s Eye,” 329. 5. Green, et al, “Fact Versus Fiction Labeling,” 267. 6. The unification of knowledge in general is the topic of Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson deals specifically with art and literature on 229–59. 7. See for example Mithen, Singing Neanderthals, 11–27; Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory, 478–85. 8. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 524–25. 9. Dutton, Art Instinct, 109–10. 10. Sugiyama, “Narrative Theory and Function,” 237. 139

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

Sugiyama, “Food, Foragers, and Folklore,” 227–28. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 51, 49. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 48, 42. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 539, 542. Boyd, Origin of Stories, 85. Boyd, Origin of Stories, 191. Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 164. Miller, Mating Mind, 282. For a detailed, highly readable discussion of the logic of sexual selection, see Ridley, Red Queen, 130–69. Miller, Mating Mind, 378–79, 383–85. Tooby and Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?” 26. Joseph Carroll, “The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature,” 43. Voltaire, Candide, 20. Gould and Lewontin, “Spandrels of San Marco,” 84–85. Gould and Lewontin, “Spandrels of San Marco,” 582. Tooby and Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?” 10–11. Tooby and Cosmides do list a third possibility—that aesthetic experiences evolved through random genetic drift—but they dismiss it immediately, stating, “We consider the cognitive and motivational features related to aesthetic experience and pretense to be too well-organized and reliably developing to be explicable as chance fixation of neutral alleles, and will not consider this hypothesis further.” Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 77–80.

2. Stories for Thinking 1. Turner, The Literary Mind, 12, 7, 5. 2. Turner, The Literary Mind, 11. 3. On this point Dutton, Art Instinct, 50, observes, with the tremendous availability of artworks from nearly every epoch and culture, “how odd that philosophical speculation about art has been inclined toward endless analysis of an infinitesimally small class of cases, prominently featuring Duchamp’s readymades or boundary-testing objects such as Sherrie Levine’s appropriated photographs and John Cage’s 4'33".” 4. Bruner, “Narrative Construction,” 4. 5. Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 419. 6. For a brief introduction to the “modular mind theory” see Pinker, How the Mind Works, 27–31. For a more complete treatment see Spolsky, Gaps in Nature, 19–39. 7. Abbott, “Evolutionary Origins,” 248. 140

Notes to pages 6–21

8. Herman, “Stories as a Tool,” 170–71. Herman does not advocate this definition of narrative himself, but extracts it from some of the more inclusive work on cognitive narratology that he surveys. 9. Turner, Literary Mind, 13. 10. Herman, “Parables of Narrative Imagining,” 23. 11. Kerzel, “Representational Momentum,” 180. See also Levine and Klin, “Tracking of Spatial Information”; Rinck et al., “Spatial Situation Models”; Morrow, Greenspan, and Bower, “Accessibility and Situation Models.” 12. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 355. For more discussion of the role of spatial reasoning in narrative comprehension see Haenggi, Kintsch, and Gernsbacher, “Spatial Situation Models”; Rinck et al., “Spatial Situation Models”; Shin and Ivry, “Concurrent Learning”; Zwaan and van Oosterndorp, “Do Readers Construct?” 13. Kirkpatrick, “Genetic View of Space,” 565. 14. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 149. For an explanation of the difference between episodic and procedural memory, see 150–53. 15. Suddendorf and Corballis, “Mental Time Travel,” 135. 16. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 75–76. 17. Newberg et al., Why God Won’t Go Away, 67, 70. 18. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 12–13, 15. 19. Borges, “John Wilkins’s Analytical Language,” 232. 20. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 179. 21. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 170. 22. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 19. 23. For a description of narrative as a compression device, see Gerrig and Egidi, “Cognitive Psychological Foundations,” 36–43. For a very detailed discussion of how the mind compresses and decompresses information, see Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 115–35. 24. Schank and Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, 249. 25. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 24–25. 26. Schank and Berman, “The Pervasive Role of Stories,” 293. 27. Brewer and Treyens, “Role of Schemata”; Brasel, Slavich, and Zimbardo, “Blind Mind’s Eye”; Simons and Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst.” The videos used in the “Gorillas in our Midst” study can be viewed online at the University of Illinois’ Visual Cognition Lab at http://viscog.beckman .uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html. 28. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 29. 29. Turner, Literary Mind, 11. 30. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 75–87, 171–93. 31. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 27. Notes to pages 22–34

141

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Tulving, “Episodic and Semantic Memory,” 382–402. Emmott, Narrative Comprehension, 25. Schank, Abelson, and Wyer, “Knowledge and Memory,” 1. Schank, Abelson, and Wyer, “Knowledge and Memory,” 34. Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition, 43, 51, 55. Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal, xv; Turner, Literary Mind, 129. Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory, 125–26. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 366. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 136. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 4–5. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 189. Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida,” 51.

3. The Influence of Anxiety 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

Freud, Major Works of Sigmund Freud, 607. Freud, Major Works of Sigmund Freud, 842. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 5–16. Eysenck, Anxiety, 1. Andreasen, Brave New Brain, 291. The term “wheel in the hub of fear” comes from LeDoux, Emotional Brain. Young and Saver, “The Neurology of Narrative,” 75. Nesse, “What Good Is Feeling Bad?” 33. For a contrastive account of anxiety in humans and fear reflexes in animals, see DeGrazia and Rowan, “Pain, Suffering, and Anxiety.” Nesse, “What Good Is Feeling Bad?” 17–29. Matthew 12:32 (King James Version) reads: “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.” Bunyan, “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Simers,” 36–37. Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 49. Wegner et al., “Paradoxical Effects.” Wegner later expanded this discussion into the book White Bears. Davies, Graceful Reading, 87. See also Evans, “Notes on the Conversion of John Bunyan”; and Sharrock, John Bunyan, 57–62. Davies, Graceful Reading, 89. For book-length treatments of scrupulosity as a form of ocd see Baer, Imp of the Mind; Ciarrocchi, Doubting Disease; Santa, Understanding Scrupulosity; and Van Ornum, Thousand Frightening Fantasies. See, for example, the entry on “scruple” in the 1912 edition of The Catho142

Notes to pages 35–48

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

lic Encyclopedia, which defines a “scrupulous conscience” as “an unfounded apprehension and consequently unwarranted fear that something is a sin which, as a matter of fact, is not. It is not considered here so much as an isolated act, but rather as an habitual state of mind. . . . It is a bad habit doing harm, sometimes grievously, to body and soul.” Abramowitz et al., “Association between Protestant Religiosity”; Nelson et al., “Scrupulosity in Patients”; Steketee, Quay, and White, “Religion and Guilt”; Tek and Ulug, “Religiosity and Religious Obsessions”; Weisner and Riffel, “Scrupulosity.” Ciarrocchi, Doubting Disease, 39. Rapoport, Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, 240–41; Osborn, Tormenting Thoughts, 53–55; Sneep and Zinck, “Spiritual and Psychic Transformation.” Ciarrocchi, Doubting Disease, 10. For clinical confirmation of this assertion, see H. D. Brown et al., “Can Patients?” Freud, Ego and the Id, 53–54. See Schwartz and Beyette, Brain Lock, xv. O’Connor and Robillard, “Inference Processes,” 887. Hallam and O’Connor, “Dialogical Approach,” 344. O’Connor, Aardema, and Pélissier, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, 53, 70. O’Connor, Aardema, and Pélissier, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, 108, 110. This evolutionary argument is applied specifically to obsessive-compulsive disorder in Feygin, Swain, and Leckman, “Normalcy of Neurosis.” Nesse, “Smoke Detector Principle,” 78. Martin Brüne, “Evolutionary Psychology” applies this principle specifically to ocd. Nesse and Williams, Why We Get Sick, 213. For the original experiment see Dugatkin, “Tendency to Inspect Predators.” Andreasen, Brave New Brain, 292. See Leslie, “Pretense and Representation.” For book-length discussions of chase play in nonhuman species see Aldis, Play-Fighting, and Fagen, Animal Play Behavior. For a discussion from a perspective of evolutionary psychologists, see Boulton and Smith, “Social Nature of Play Fighting,” 431–35. Steen and Owens, “Evolution’s Pedagogy,” 299. Steen and Owens, “Evolution’s Pedagogy,” 301. Tamis-LeMonda, “Conceptualizing Fathers’ Roles,” 221–22.

4. Information Anxiety 1. A quick computer word count reveals just how closely to the center of the book this incident occurs. The passage begins exactly 60,400 words into the text, whose total word count is 120,806. The exact halfway point Notes to pages 48–61

143

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

would therefore be at 60,403 words. It would be difficult to imagine someone without computer technology coming any closer to the halfway point than Defoe apparently did as the result of a happy accident. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 162. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 109. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 163 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 166. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 165–70. Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel, 36. See Reuven-Magril, Dar, and Liberman, “Illusion of Control”; Skinner, “Guide to Constructs of Control”; and Burger, Desire for Control. Langer, “Illusion of Control.” Fryrear, Lane, and Itzkowitz, “Who Presses the Elevator Button.” Matute et al., “Illusion of Control,” 176. A single footprint on a beach might be explained by a person sticking a foot out of a boat during high tide, leaving a mark that can be seen during low tide. But the fact that Crusoe can go back several days later to measure his own foot against the print demonstrates that it could not have been in an area that is close enough to the water for such an explanation to work. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 167. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 172. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 172–73. This “pentad” of agent, act, scene, agency, and purpose comes from Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives. I introduce it here not to provide a systematic definition of “narrative” for the remainder of the study but simply to support the observation that Crusoe’s narrative can make a reasonable claim to completeness. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 27. Marks and Nesse, “Fear and Fitness,” 252. Zeigarnik, “On Finished and Unfinished Tasks,” 313. Dale, “Writing Effective Ad Headlines,” 33. Kermode, Sense of an Ending; Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents; Richter, Fable’s End; Smith, Poetic Closure; Thickstun, Visionary Closure; Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel. Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 7. Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel, 5. Herman, “Stories as a Tool for Thinking,” 173–74. See, for example, Coles et al. (2005), “‘Not Just Right Experiences.’” Summerfeldt, “Understanding and Treating,” 1156. For further discussion of incompleteness in ocd see Ecker and Gonner, “Feeling of Incom-

144

Notes to pages 62–70

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

pleteness”; Coles et al. (2005), “Not Just Right Experience”; Summerfeldt et al., “Treating Incompleteness.” Wurman, Information Anxiety, 34. Wurman, Information Anxiety, 32. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 57. Nesse, “What Good Is Feeling Bad?” 33–34. Sternberg, Cognitive Psychology, 79. Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida,” 52. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 68. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 183–188. Leslie, “Pretense and Representation,” 415. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 70–71. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 65. Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 66, 124. Easterlin, “Cognitive Ecocriticism.” Easterlin, “What Is Literature For?”

5. The Problem of Other People 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

Miller, “Brain Evolution,” 289. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, 58–59. Miller, Mating Mind, 72–85. Gibson and Ingold, Tools, Language, and Cognition; Hill, “Hunting and Human Evolution”; Wrangham et al., “Raw and the Stolen.” Alexander, How Did Humans Evolve? 4. For a further development of this hypothesis see Flinn, Geary, and Ward, “Ecological Dominance.” Dutton, Art Instinct, 111. Dunbar, Human Story, 71–76; Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, 55–79. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, 5. Sartre, No Exit, 17. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 42. Sartre, No Exit, 26. Dante, Inferno, 75–76. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 118. There are well-defined rules for multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma games but for the purpose of my discussion it makes sense to treat each relationship in No Exit as an independent two-player game. Axelrod, Evolution of Cooperation, 30–31. Axelrod, Evolution of Cooperation, 19. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 202–33; Ridley, Origins of Virtue, 52–66. These and other texts have already treated this subject thoroughly; therefore, I will offer only a brief description of Axelrod’s tournaments and their results. Notes to pages 71–89

145

18. Axelrod, Evolution of Cooperation, 88–105. My five categories correspond to four categories that Axelrod gives in this section, as he discusses “forgiveness” under the general category of “reciprocity.” 19. Cosmides and Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange,” 180. 20. Ridley, Origins of Virtue, 128. 21. Molière (Wilbur), Tartuffe, 139. 22. Maas, “Using Literature,” 31. 23. Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal, 168. 24. Kutsukake, “Assessing Relationship Quality”; Castles, Whitens, and Aureli, “Social Anxiety.” 25. See Green and Phillips, “Social Threat Perception”; and Julia Zolotova and Martin Brüne, “Persecutory Delusions.” 26. See Jessica Rosenthal et al., “Beyond Shy,” 369. 27. Dunbar, “Coevolution of Neocortical Size.” 28. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness, 70–71. 29. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, 102. 30. Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 123–24. 31. Flesch, Comeuppance, 51. 32. Flesch, Comeuppance, 31. 33. See the account of the ultimatum game in Barber, Kindness in a Cruel World, 204–11. 34. Molière (Wilbur), Tartuffe, 161–62. 35. Boyd, “Origin of Stories,” 206. 6. Sex, Lies, and Phenotypes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Smith, Why We Lie, 1. Smith, Why We Lie, 38–39. Trivers, Social Evolution, 406. Knox et al., “Sexual Lies.” Searcy and Nowicki, Evolution of Animal Communication, 65. Searcy and Nowicki, Evolution of Animal Communication, 66. For the study quoted by the authors see Møller, “False Alarm Calls.” 7. The dynamics of mate choice are among the most studied and most frequently discussed topics in all of evolutionary psychology. David and Nanelle Barash have recently provided a highly readable application to these issues as they relate to literature in Madame Bovary’s Ovaries. Other recent book-length treatments of the subject include Barash and Lipton, Myth of Monogamy; Buss, Evolution of Desire; Miller, Mating Mind; Ridley, Red Queen,. 8. Ridley, Red Queen, 146. 9. Diamond, Third Chimpanzee, 196. See also Searcy and Nowicki, Evolution of Animal Communication, 54–55. 146

Notes to pages 90–109

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

Searcy and Nowicki, Evolution of Animal Communication, 134–35. Trivers, Social Evolution, 409–10. Trivers, Social Evolution, 410. Smith, Why We Lie, 18. DePaulo et al., “Lying in Everyday Life,” 983. For other examples of these experiments, see Bell and DePaulo, “Liking and Lying”; DePaulo, “Truth and Distortion”; DePaulo et al., “Sex Differences in Lying”; and Kashy and DePaulo, “Who Lies?” DePaulo and Kashy, “Everyday Lies.” Lippard, “Ask Me No Questions.” Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 15. For an excellent analysis of the Hobbesian fears and anxieties at the heart of Wycherly’s drama see Vance, William Wycherley and the Comedy of Fear. Wycherley, Country Wife, act 2, scene 1, 51–53. The connection between sexual jealousy and male violence is a perennial theme of evolutionary psychology, and has recently been used as a basis for reading the Iliad. See Jonathan Gottschall, Rape of Troy. For a commentary from the psychology side of the disciplinary divide, see Buss, Murderer Next Door, 45–65. The famous phrase occurs in chapter 14 of Coleridge’s autobiography, Biographia Literaria, in which he explains the plan of his collaboration with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads and the purpose of his supernaturalthemed poems such as “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel”: “In this idea originated the plan of the lyrical ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

7. Deceiving Ourselves and Others 1. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 560. The scene discussed in this chapter runs from pages 548 to 558. 2. Quixote is almost persuaded by Sancho to kill Carrasco after the match, but he spares him on the requirement that he confess the peerless beauty of the lady Dulcinea and agree to seek her out and relate the victory of her knight. 3. Wrangham, “Is Military Incompetence Adaptive?” 3–4. Wrangham draws this definition from Dixon, Psychology of Military Incompetence. 4. Wrangham, “Is Military Incompetence Adaptive?” 6–7. Notes to pages 110–120

147

5. 6. 7. 8.

Wrangham, “Is Military Incompetence Adaptive?” 10–11. Taylor and Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being,” 193. Taylor and Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being,” 201. See Taylor, “Positive and Negative Beliefs”; Taylor, “On Healthy Illusions”; Taylor and Armor, “Positive Illusions”; Taylor and Brown, “Positive Illusions Revisited”; Taylor et al., “Psychological Resources.” 9. See Gana and Bailly; MacLeod and Moore, “Positive Thinking Revisited”; Nilsson, Unosson, and Kihlgren, “Experience of Postoperative Recovery”; and Foreman, “The Healing Truth.” 10. Buss, Evolution of Desire, 107–8. 11. Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, 50. 12. Diamond, Third Chimpanzee, 85–87. 13. Pagel, “Desperately Concealing Father.” 14. Bressan, “Why Babies Look Like Their Daddies,” 117. 15. McLain, et al., “Ascription of Resemblance.” 16. Ibsen, Wild Duck, 202. 17. Smith, Why We Lie, 73. 18. Trivers, Natural Selection, 257. The question of whether or not a person can actually commit a “deception” without the intent to do so is important to philosophers and courts of law but it is not important at all to biological fitness. Natural selection does not act on intentions, only on expressed behaviors, so, biologically speaking, deception occurs any time false information is communicated—regardless of the communicator’s intentions. 19. Gur and Sackeim, “Self-Deception”; Trivers, Social Evolution, 416–18. 20. Wrangham, “Is Military Incompetence Adaptive?” 10. 21. Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 77. 22. Trivers, Natural Selection, 260. 23. Trivers, Social Evolution, 416. 24. Susan Smith, “Written confession, dated 11/3/1994,” http://www.getcon fessions.com/page8.html. 25. Trivers, Social Evolution, 416. 26. Trivers, Social Evolution, 419.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 9. Wilson, Consilience, 105. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 14. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 90. Bate, Criticism, 175. Plato, Republic, 427–43. The major discussion of poetry occurs in the 148

Notes to pages 120–136

tenth book of The Republic, and Plato does make some exceptions, though not for the much admired Homer. “We are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and the first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State” (433).

Notes to page 136

149

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index

Page numbers in italics refer to photographs. Aardema, Frederick, 51–52 Abbott, Porter H., 21 Abelson, Robert P., 35–36 advertising, 67; sexual, 9–10 Aeneid (Virgil), 136 Aesop, 105–7 Alexander, Richard D., 81, 82–83 allegory, 137 analogy, 33–34 “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (Borges), 27–28 animals: brains of, 82; and deception, 102–3, 106, 109–11, 123, 131; episodic memory of, 35; fight-or-flight reflex in, 44, 55, 58; and sexual selection, 107; temporal sequencing by, 23–24 anxiety: causal reasoning and, 25–26; cognitive causes of, 43–44; disorders, 47–53, 69–70, 93; evolutionary basis for, xv, 44–45, 54–55, 56, 66; and fight-or-flight reflex, 44, 55, 58, 72; Freud on, 41–42; and human brain, 43–44, 50–51, 56; and information need, 61–65, 71, 78; literary critics on, 42–43; and literary narratives, xi, xv–xvi, 57, 63, 71–72, 78–79; and need for closure, 3–4, 69, 70; “normal” vs. “obsessive,” 53; and pleasure, 3–4; and psychic equilibrium, 62–63; and sexuality, 44; and social interaction, 92–93; and White Bear Phenomenon, 45–47

The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom), 42 The Arabian Nights: about, 1–2; conceptual blending in, 34; and need for closure, 2, 3–4, 65–66, 68; parable in, 18–19; Scheherazade Strategy in, 10; and self-deception, 117; shows human need for narrative, 3, 16 Aristotle, 135 The Art Instinct (Dutton), 83 arts, 7; evolutionary explanations for, 5, 13, 140n26; as sexual advertisement, 9–10. See also literary fiction Austen, Jane, 9, 77, 136 autism, 94 Axelrod, Robert M., 5, 86, 88–89, 146n18 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 51 Barash, David and Nanelle, 146n7 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 94 Beauvoir, Simone de, 85 Beowulf, 77 Berman, Tamara R., 31 Beyond Reasonable Doubt (O’Connor, Aardema, Pélissier), 51–52 The Birds (Hitchcock), 8 Bloom, Harold, 42 The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. See The Arabian Nights Borges, Jorge Luis, 27–28 Boulton, Michael J., 57–58 Boyd, Brian, ix–x, 8, 99 The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing (Rapoport), 48 “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” (Aesop), 105–7

165

brain: and anxiety, 43–44, 50–51, 56; built for survival, 133–34; causal reasoning by, 24–25; cognition modules of, 20–21; evolution of size, 81–84; information compression by, 29–30; literature’s evolutionary function for, 11; processing of information by, 18, 68–69, 70, 137; temporal and spatial sequencing by, 22–24, 30 Brain Lock (Schwartz), 50–51 Bressan, Paola, 124 Brewer, William F., 31–33 Brock, Timothy C., 4 Brown, Jonathan D., 120–21 Bruner, Jerome, 20 Buddhism, 89 Bunyan, John, 41, 45–47 Burke, Edmund, 72 Burke, Kenneth, 51, 144n16 Burton, Richard Frances, 1 Buss, David M., 121–22 Campbell, Jeremy, xii Candide (Voltaire), 12–13 The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 2 Carroll, Joseph, 11, 37 Cartesianism, 38 Cathedral of San Marco, 13, 14 Catholic Church, 48 Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut), 133, 134–35 causal reasoning, 24–26 Cervantes, Miguel de, 117–19, 122, 127–28, 147n2 chase play, 57–58 children, 57–59 Christianity, 48, 89 Ciarrocchi, Joseph W., 48, 49 classification, 27–29 closure: need for, 2, 3–4, 65–67, 68; as neutralization of anxiety, 69, 70 Closure in the Novel (Torgovnick), 68–69 cognition: and anxiety, 43–44; complexity of, 81–84; and human brain, 20–21; 166

Index

literary narrative and, 8–9, 20–27, 51–53; and social interaction, 93 Cohn, Dorrit, xi, 36 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 115, 147n21 Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Flesch), 96–98 conceptual abstraction, xi, xii–xiii conceptual blending, 34 Consciousness Explained (Dennett), 38 Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Wilson), 133–34, 139n5 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty), 39 cooperation, 88–90; defectors from, 89, 91, 92, 97; monitoring, 97; and pleasure, 97–98 Corballis, Michael C., 24 Cosmides, Leda, ix, 5, 11, 76, 90; on evolutionary explanation for creative arts, 13, 140n26 The Country Wife (Wycherly), 113–15, 122 Critical Inquiry, 20 culture: and narrative, x, 19; sexuality and, 9 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 10 Dante Alighieri, 85–86 d’Aquili, Eugene G., 25 Darwin, Charles, and Darwinism, 12, 36, 37, 38. See also evolution “Darwin and Derrida” (Spolsky), 37–38 Darwin’s Cathedral (Wilson), xiii Davies, Michael, 47 Dawkins, Richard, 88 The Decameron (Boccaccio), 2 deception, 117–22; animals and, 102–3, 106, 109–11, 123, 131; as benefiting the receiver, 105, 106; and concealed paternity, 122–26; evolutionary basis of, 102, 104, 105, 131; intent in, 148n18; Pinnochio Problem in, 126–27; and

sex, 103; and social conventions, 111, 113–15. See also lying; self-deception Dennett, Daniel C., x, 5, 15, 38 DePaulo, Bella M., 111–12 Derrida, Jacques, 37 Diamond, Jared M., 5, 123 Dick, Philip K., 33 Dickens, Charles, 66, 133 Dissanayake, Ellen, 7 “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?” (Cosmides and Tooby), ix, 13, 76, 90, 140n26 Donald, Merlin, 23–24 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 117–19, 122, 127–28, 147n2 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 46 The Doubting Disease (Ciarrocchi), 48, 49 Dr. Pangloss’s nose, 12–16 Dugatkin, Lee, 55 Dunbar, Robin, 82, 83, 84, 96 Dutton, Dennis, 5–6, 83, 140n3 Easterlin, Nancy, 78 Emmott, Catherine, 35 An Enemy of the People (Ibsen), 125 “Essay on Criticism” (Pope), 135–36 Evolution and Literary Theory (Carroll), 37 evolutionary adaptation, 13–16; anxiety’s basis in, xv, 44–45, 54–55, 56, 66; creative arts and, 5, 13, 140n26; deception as, 102, 104, 105, 120; and human brain, 81–84; literary narratives as, ix–x, 5–6, 9, 11, 12, 15–16, 137; and processing information, 64–65, 70; usefulness in, x–xi, 12; and wayfinding, 78. See also natural selection The Evolution of Animal Communication (Searcy and Nowicki), 105, 106, 110 The Evolution of Cooperation (Axelrod), 88–89, 146n18 exaggeration, 56, 57

Fable’s End (Richter), 68 Fauconnier, Gilles, 24–25, 34 Faulkner, William, 20 Fisher, Ronald, 108 Flesch, William, 96–98 Forster, E. M., 61, 66 Foucault, Michel, 27 Freedom Evolves (Dennett), x Freud, Sigmund, 41–42, 49 Frith, Uta, 94 generalization, 30 Gestalt psychology, 67 Gilovich, Thomas, 128 Girard, René, 112 Gould, Stephen Jay, 12–13 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Bunyan), 41, 45–47 Graceful Reading (Davies), 47 Green, Melanie C., 4 Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Dunbar), 83, 84 Gur, Ruben C., 127 habituation, 72–73 Hallam, Richard S., 51 Hamilton, William, 5 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 68, 136 Hard Times (Dickens), 133 Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. See “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (Borges) Herman, David, 22, 69, 141n8 Hernadi, Paul, 3 Hitchcock, Alfred, 8 Hobbes, Thomas, 88, 112–13 Homer, 135, 136 Homo Aestheticus (Dissanayake), 7 How We Know What Isn’t So (Gilovich), 128 Hubbard, L. Ron, 135 The Human Story (Dunbar), 83 Humphrey, Nicholas K., 83

Index

167

Ibsen, Henrik, 117, 124–26 the Iliad (Homer), 135 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), 101, 104–5 Inferno (Dante), 85–86 information: and anxiety, 61–65, 71, 78; compression, 29–30, 33; “good enough” rule in, 73–74; human dependency on, 65, 78, 133, 134; human processing of, 18, 68–69, 70, 137; and narrative, 6–7, 18, 19–20, 64–65, 70, 95 Information Anxiety (Wurman), 71 Islam, 2, 89 James, William, 47 Judaism, 89 Keillor, Garrison, 128 Kermode, Frank, 68 Kerzel, Dirk, 22–23 Kirkpatrick, Edwin A., 23 Kuhn, Thomas S., 74 Labyrinths of Reason (Poundstone), 75 Lake Wobegone Effect, 128 Lakoff, George, 27 Langer, Ellen, 63 language: as human creation, 39; learning facility in, 21; postmodernist distrust of, 38 Larson, Gary, 139n7 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 12–13 Leslie, Alan M., 57, 75–76 Lewin, Kurt, 67 Lewontin, Richard, 12–13 The Liar’s Tale (Campbell), xii Linnaeus, 28 Lippard, Paula V., 112 literary fiction: analogical, 33; children and, 57–59; classificatory, 27–28; as cognitive play, 8–9; as conceptual abstraction, xi, xii–xiii; conceptual blending in, 34; and deciphering minds of others, 84, 95, 96–97, 98–99; 168

Index

evolutionary adaptive functions of, xvi–xvii, 5–6, 8, 9, 11–12, 99; in human culture, x; as memory structuring, 36; metarepresentation in, 76–77; and myth, 135–37; and nonfiction, xi, 5; and pleasure, 8, 58, 137; and religion, 134–35; schematic, 31; sequencing of information in, 11–12, 19–20; and sexuality, 10; standard story devices in, 36; and storytelling, 19; as untruth, xi–xii; and usefulness, xiii–xv; and wayfinding, 77–78. See also narrative stories The Literary (Turner), 18, 19 Little Red Riding Hood, 77 Locke, John, 21 lying: and sex, 103–4; and social conventions, 111–12, 115; and storytelling, 101–2. See also deception Lyotard, Jean-François, 38, 39 Maas, David F., 91–92 The Manchurian Candidate, 127 Marks, Isaac M., 66 The Mating Mind (Miller), 9–10, 82 Matthew, Book of, 17–18, 45, 142n9 memory, 33, 35–36; self-deception about, 130–31; semantic and episodic, 35–36 metanarratives, 38–39, 40 metarepresentation, 75–76 Meyer, Albert R., 75 military incompetence, 120 Miller, D. A., 68 Miller, Geoffrey F., 9–10, 82 Mimesis and the Human Animal (Storey), 92 Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen), 94 Molière (John-Baptiste Poquelin), 90–92, 96 Møller, Anders P., 106 myth, 135–37 Narrative and Its Discontents (Miller), 68

“The Narrative Construction of Reality” (Bruner), 20 narrative stories: and anxiety, xv–xvi, 57, 63, 71–72, 78–79; closure in, 2, 3–4, 65–70; cognitive functions of, 20–26, 51–53; evolutionary adaptive functions of, ix–x, 7, 12, 15, 56–57, 137; exaggeration and excitement in, 56, 57; information compression in, 30; information conveyance in, 6–7, 18, 19, 64–65, 70, 95; and lying, 101–2; and memory, 35–36; modules for building, 21–22; and obsession, 51, 52; postmodernist skepticism toward, 37, 40; and projection, 19; source tagging in, 76–77; speculation in, 56–57; temporal and spatial sequencing in, 19–20, 22; and truth, 38, 39, 52. See also literary fiction natural selection: and anxiety, 55, 56; and fictional narrative, xii, 5–6, 12, 15–16, 59, 99, 137; how it operates, x–xi; irrelevance of intent in, 148n18; and sexual selection, 109. See also evolutionary adaptation Nesse, Randolph M.: on anxiety disorders, 53; on evolutionary basis for anxiety, 54; on fight-or-flight anxiety, 44, 55, 72; on incompleteness as anxiety, 66 “The Neurology of Narrative” (Young and Saver), 43–44 Newberg, Andrew B., 25 1984 (Orwell), 130 No Exit (Sartre), 81, 84–85, 86, 87, 145n14 Nowicki, Stephen, 105, 106, 110 obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd), 47–53, 63, 69–70 O’Connor, Kieron P., 51–52 Oedipus complex, 42 “Office Study” (Brewer and Treyens), 31, 32, 33

On the Origins of Stories (Boyd), ix–x, 8 The Origin of Species (Darwin), 12 Orwell, George, 130 Osborn, Ian, 48 Owens, Stephanie A., 58 Pagel, Mark, 124 parables, 17–19, 28, 137 paternity, 122–26 Pélissier, Marie-Claude, 51–52 Phaedrus (Plato), 136 The Philosophy of “As If ” (Vaihinger), xii Picasso, Pablo, 20 Pinker, Steven, 5, 8, 23 Pinnochio Problem, 126–27 Plato, 136–37, 148–49n6 pleasure, ix, 97–98; and anxiety, 3–4; and fictional narratives, 3, 8, 11, 58–59, 98–99, 137; in observing danger from safety, 72 Poetic Closure (Smith), 68 poetry, 7, 35 Pope, Alexander, 135–36 postmodernism, 36–40 Poundstone, William, 75, 88 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 9, 77, 136 prisoner’s dilemma, 86–88, 92, 93 Problems with Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin), 51 Ptolemy, 74 The Ramayana, 135 Rapoport, Antanol, 89 Rapoport, Judith L., 48 rationality: and choice, 91, 92; and irrationality, 49–50 The Red Queen (Ridley), 108 religion: and cooperation, 89; and John Bunyan, 45–49; and myth, 136; as useful fiction, 134–35 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust), x Republic (Plato), 136, 148–49n6 Richter, David H., 68

Index

169

Ricoeur, Paul, 17, 51 Ridley, Matt, 5, 88, 90, 108 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 61–65, 69, 77, 78, 143–44n1, 144n12 Rorty, Richard, 39 Rostand, Edmund, 10 Royce, Josiah, 47 Ryan, Marie-Laure, xi Sackeim, Harold A., 127 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81, 84–85, 86, 87, 145n14 Saver, Jeffrey L., 43–44 Saxe, John Godfrey, 26 Schank, Roger C., 31, 35–36 Scheherazade. See The Arabian Nights schematization, 30–33 Schermer, Michael, 122 Schwartz, Jeffrey M., 50–51 scrupulosity, 47–49, 142–43n16 Searcy, William A., 105, 106, 110 self-deception: by animals, 123; biological role of, 127; in combat, 120; and competence, 127–29; Don Quixote and, 117–19; memory and, 130–31; motivations for, 129–30; and psychological health, 120–21; and sexual selection, 121–22. See also deception The Sense of an Ending (Kermode), 68 sexuality: and anxiety, 44; and lying, 103–4 sexual selection, 82, 146n7; advertising in, 9–10; and evolutionary adaptation, 107–9; and self-delusion, 121–22 Shakespeare, William, 68, 136 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 68 Smith, David Livingston, 126 Smith, Peter K., 57–58 Smith, Susan, 129 “The Smoke Detector Principle” (Nesse), 53, 54, 55 Sneep, John, 48 social anxiety disorder (SAD), 93

170

Index

social cohesion, 7, 89–90, 93; deception and, 115 Social Evolution (Trivers), 101, 110–11 sociobiology, 4–5 source tagging, 76, 77, 95 spatial sequencing, 22–23, 30 speculation, 56–57 “Spiritual and Psychic Transformation” (Sneep and Zinck), 48 Spolsky, Ellen, 37–38, 40, 73 Star Wars, 68 Steen, Francis F., 58 Sternberg, Robert J., 73 Stockmeyer, Larry J., 75 Storey, Robert F., 37, 92 Suddendorf, Thomas, 24 Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise, 6 Summerfeldt, Laura J., 70 Symposium (Plato), 136 Talmy, Leonard, 20 Tartuffe (Molière), 90–92, 96 Taylor, Shelly E., 120–21 temporal sequencing, 23–24, 30 theory of mind, 93–94, 95–96, 99 Thickstun, William M., 68 Tooby, John, ix, 5, 11, 76, 90; on evolutionary explanation for creative arts, 13, 140n26 Torgovnick, Marianna, 68–69 Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals (Osborn), 48 Toward a Cognitive Semantics (Talmy), 20 transcendental signifier, 38 Treyens, James C., 31–33 Trivers, Robert, 5, 101, 110–11; on deception and self-deception, 126–27, 128, 129, 130 Turner, Frederick, 37 Turner, Mark, 22, 34; on causal reasoning, 24–25; on parables, 18, 19 Twain, Mark, 117

ultimatum game, 97 usefulness: in evolutionary terms, x–xi, 12, 137; fiction and, xiii–xv Vaihinger, Hans: on analogy, 33; on classificatory fiction, 28–29; on conceptual abstraction, xii; on memorystructuring process, 36; on mental representations, 26–27; on schematic fiction, 31 Violence and the Sacred (Girard), 112 Virgil, 135–36 Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel (Thickstun), 68 Voltaire, 12–13 Vonnegut, Kurt, 133, 134–35 Wason Selection Task, 90 The Way We Think (Fauconnier and Turner), 24–25 “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (Dick), 33 Wegner, Daniel M., 46 “What Good Is Feeling Bad? The Evolutionary Benefits of Psychic Pain” (Nesse), 44

What Is Art For? (Dissanayake), 7 Why We Get Sick (Nesse and Williams), 55 Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Zunshine), 9, 96, 98 The Wild Duck (Ibsen), 124–26 Wilde, Oscar, 101, 104–5 Williams, George C., 55 Wilson, David Sloan, xiii Wilson, Edward O., 5, 133–34, 139n5 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Dostoyevsky), 46 Woolf, Virginia, 20 Wrangham, Richard, 120 Wurman, Richard Saul, 71 Wycherly, William, 113–15, 122 Yeats, William Butler, 135 Young, Kay, 43–44 Zeigarnik, Bluma, 67 Zeigarnik effect, 66–67 Zimmerman, Everett, 62 Zinck, Arlette, 48 Zunshine, Lisa, 9, 77, 96, 98

Index

171

in the frontiers of narrative series:

Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature by Michael Austin

Talk Fiction Literature and the Talk Explosion by Irene Kacandes

Telling Children’s Stories Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature edited by Mike Cadden

The Imagined Moment Time, Narrative, and Computation by Inderjeet Mani

Coincidence and Counterfactuality Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction by Hilary P. Dannenberg Story Logic Problems and Possibilities of Narrative by David Herman Handbook of Narrative Analysis by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck Spaces of the Mind Narrative and Community in the American West by Elaine A. Jahner

Storying Domestic Violence Constructions and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners by Jarmila Mildorf Fictional Minds by Alan Palmer Narrative Beginnings Theories and Practices edited by Brian Richardson Narrative across Media The Languages of Storytelling edited by Marie-Laure Ryan

To order or obtain more information on these or other University of Nebraska Press titles, visit www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.