WSM: What you’re echoing is Darwin’s belief that groups
can develop adaptations.
ED: I don’t know that Darwin believed that. Most
evolutionary theorists today certainly don’t. But I’m not one of
them. Here’s another example of music and the brain. When we move
together with other people, just like the mother-infant
interaction, we are bonding together. This historian at Harvard
named William McNeill, when he retired, wrote a book about keeping
together in time. He said ever since he’d been a recruit in World
War II, he noticed how . . . marching together in drill just gave
this wonderfully exhilarating feeling. He wanted to study that, so
he wrote this book Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in
Human History. He calls that muscular bonding.
I don’t think Pinker is considering that when he talks about art
as cheesecake. He’s talking about art as looking at cave paintings
on the wall or maybe painting one. He said you have to include the
black velvet paintings. You shouldn’t just include high art, which
I agree with.
I don’t think he’s considering these people who denigrate the
effects of religion as just being cognitive. I think they have to
do with emotional bonding, that people who sing together, who
listen to the same things together really do, for that moment, feel
united. They reduce their stress, and they get more done.
That seems to be real and not just an artifact. I think it’s
true of human societies . . . that members of those groups [that
have rituals], individuals in those groups, and the individuals
themselves, will do better adaptively than individuals and groups
that don’t have rituals.
When I talk about the arts as adaptive, I’m talking about this
kind of participatory art, where all the senses are involved and
take place on a timeline. Their expectations can be manipulated,
the repetition, the exaggeration, the elaboration, the
formalization, all attracting their attention and their interests,
molding their emotion, and I think that has been very adaptive to
humans throughout their history.
WSM:
It’s probably the case that I know just enough not to be able to
critique intelligently, but your work makes so much sense.
ED: Well, it does. I think it really hasn’t been examined
enough by evolutionary psychologists. I’ve sort of been pioneering
this, at least in all the arts. There are a lot of people in
literature.
But there are only a handful of people doing this art stuff. I
think there are a number of reasons for it. One, it wasn’t very
sexy. A man who wants to make a career in the sciences will
probably not study the arts. I met a psychologist at UC Davis who
early on, in the early ’70s, wrote a thing about ethology and art.
I met him at a conference much later, and he said, oh he was
advised by his advisor, you know you can’t make a career of this
kind of stuff.
So I think that’s one reason. Another one is if you’re studying
the sciences all the time and you are a scientist, you tend to have
a scientific kind of mind, and you’ve had to spend a lot of time
mastering all of that, and you may not have time to devote to the
arts. And the same thing with people in the arts. They often are
uneasy with science, they don’t care that much about it. It’s hard
to learn enough about either field to bring them together.
I was able to do that because I didn’t have an academic job.
I was in Sri Lanka . . . , and my children weren’t there, they
were here in the states, so I had time to read and think. When I
was in New York, there was just me. It’s taken a lot of sacrifice .
. . but it’s sort of once I embarked on it I couldn’t stop.
It’s taken a long time. It’s only now that I’ve been able to
pull it together from enough points of view so that . . . I don’t
know if an evolutionary psychologist who was reading What is Art
For, for example, will think, well she just doesn’t know that
much about evolution. It’s 20 years ago now. And Homo
Aestheticus may be a little bit . . . Art and Intimacy,
I don’t think most scientists, or most men, are very interested in
mothers and babies. So they just go, “Art and intimacy?”
So I think my real synthesis still has to get out there. But
when you say it makes a lot of sense, it does make a lot of sense
to people who are artists, in every field.
My biggest audiences have been in arts education and art therapy
and craft. All three of those are peripheral to mainstream art
departments that have a lot of contemporary theory or else people
[who] have ambitions to make it as artists in the mainstream elite
art world.
I’m talking about art from the time of the Pleistocene and art
that anyone can do to make things special.
All three of those groups find that I give them theoretical
justification for what they know works and what they know is
true—art teachers, drama teachers. My daughter says all these kids
can do drama and be transformed by it. She sees that every day.
I can explain it to scientists too, but at a conference you have
15 minutes to give a paper.
WSM:
You seem to have caught E.O. Wilson’s attention.
ED: Yes, I sent him What Is Art For years ago, and he
wrote to thank me. Then two or three years later, he wrote to tell
me he had just read it, and he had learned a lot. So I sent him
Homo Aestheticus. He’s a different kind of person than the
average scientist who’s toiling away in his fieldwork or
laboratory.
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