Since World War 11, the Academy Has Been the Site of More Than a Few Heated Intellectual Debates

Since World War 11, the academy has been the site of more than a few heated intellectual debates. None has been more passionate than the one set off by efforts to apply the bio-evolutionary perspective to human behavior. Even while provoking vicious criticism, the new applications of Darwinian principles-whether called sociobiology, biosociology, or evolutionary psychology -have shed valuable, and appreciated, light on everything from violence to sexist practices. The debate, however, is far from over. The very notion of an underlying human nature flies in the face of contemporary postmodernist theories held dear by many intellectuals and artists. Here we offer a history of the modern human nature debate, as seen by two participants.

14 Lionel Tiger on his struggles in the /wman nature wars 26 Frederick Turner on the new natural classicism in the arts

Human Nature 13 by Lionel Tiger

or venturing to explore science itself, particularly the role of biology in our within the social sciences. social lives, I have had more The evolving "biosocial" than my share of interesting view that I have helped pio- moments. I11 addition to slan- neer poses a direct challenge der and calumny -depress- to some of the premises of ingly standard fare in the 20th-century social science- academy today-1 have re- and by extension, the cl~er- ceived bomb threats at lec- isl~eclbeliefs of many intellec- tures in Vancouver and Mon- tuals and reformers. Foremost treal and the pronlise of a among these is the assump- "kneecapping" at the New tion that human beings and

School for Social Research in their institutions have largely-. New York. I have been the object of a transcended the biological- constraints that demonstration of angry male transvestites govern the animal world, and, according- at the Royal Institution in London, and I ly, that humans are all but free to make the have seen one of the books I co-authored, worlds they choose. The Imperial Animal, con~paredto Mein I had not originally set out for such con- Kampfi All in a day's work, you might say, tentious territory. In fact, I took only the though some 35 years' is closer to the most conventional (that is, biology-free) truth. courses toward my first two degrees at If the toll exacted by my career has McGill University in Montreal, where I occasionally been steep, it has been well had been born and raised in the Jewish worth the price to be able to participate quarter immortalized by Mordecai in the most consequential intellectual Richler's novels. Perhaps the closest I debate of our time, a debate that goes came to biology in my childhood were the back at least to Charles Darwin and the featured herring in ny father's small gro- micl-19th-century publication of his mag- cery. Their immodest aroma joined with nificent and scandal-provoking theory of the waxing and waning of items in the pro- natural selection. duce section to alert me to the facts of sea- The main antagonists then were scien- sonality and the reality of genuine physical tists and clerics. The former thought decay. The one biology course McGill Darwin's theory explained a great deal demanded I take, complete with ritual dis- about nature and possibly even human section of frog limbs and organs, con- nature. The latter considered it a rebuke firmed my lack of interest in nonl~~iman to stories of divine creation as well as a life forms. At the time (the late 1950s), my potential threat to their power to define energies were far more strongly directed reality. But in recent years, the argument toward student journalism and the local over the influence of biology on human literary and political scenes, which includ- society has been far more raucous within ed such figures of later fame as Leonard

14 WQ Winter 1996 Cohen and Pierre Trudeau. ation to generation. After con~pletingmy master's degree at Natural science seemed to be throwing McGill with a thesis 011 the links between up other teasing clues. Emergent long- scientists and administrators in a research term research in East Africa on primates in institute, I enrolled at the London School the wild revealed the complexity of their of Economics and turned to doctoral work social systems. Just as William Foote on decolonization in Africa, a process I Whyte in his extraordinary Street Comer had witnessed earlier on a summer fellow- Society (1943) had shown the previously ship to Ghana and Nigeria. The focus of overlooked intricacy of social life in an my research in 1960-the colonial service American working-class neighborhood, so of Ghana as it became the newly indepen- prin-iatologists such as Jolin Crook and dent nation's civil service-came with a Jean and Stuart Altmann now identified bonus: it allowed me to study the colorful rules ancl patterns behind primate hierar- Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president chies, matrilineal groups, socialization, and a seminal figure in postcolonial and sexuality. And as primatologists African history. became more sophisticated in their What I specifically wanted to determine research techniques, they became increas- was whether Max Weber's theory of the ingly aware of the importance of individ- "ro~itinization of charisma"-the process ual differences among- animals of the same by which the almost magical power of the species. Suddenly, almost as if in a great leader is subtly but decisively trans- thrilling conspiracy, science was offering formed into the mechanisms of b~ireau- us an unexpected insight into nonhuman cratic authority-applied to the political social complexity and the existence of realities of newly independent Ghana. My "personality differences" among individ- research led me to a phrase in Weber's ual animals. work that presumably reflected his desire to see sociology become an authoritative ere was a fundamental challenge to science. It is at the same time a surprising the accepted wisdom of social sci- comment given the rest of his scholarship, entists. The don~inantorthodoxy of the and remains almost wholly ignored by time was that only humans displayed those who mine his work. Weber wrote ongoing and intelligent agency as opposed that charisma was especially difficult to to the reflexive "instinctive" behavior of understand and that "within the narrow animals. Humans could fashion immense- limits of sociology" was comprehensible ly variable and sophisticated social sys- only "in its imperceptible transition to the ten~s,but other species could sustain only biology." relatively automatic patterns of group Why, I wondered, was one of the found- behavior. This remarkably rigid system of ing fathers of sociology conceding so intellectual apartheid went almost com- much ground to biology? I was intrigued pletely ~inexaininecl. No major doctoral for two reasons. First, the differences program in social science required or even between Canadians and Ghanaians struck encouraged its me as far less interesting and important students to be- than their similarities. Second, in West come familiar Africa in 1960-61, I became aware of the with the lives and work of such figures as Raymond Dart and systems of other Louis Leakey then underway in southern species. To the Africa concerning horninid fossils ancl contrary, the for- what they implied about our longevity as a mal distinction species. It appeared we were a much older between natural species than we had thought. Not only and social sci- that, the breaking of the DNA codes in the ence was seen as early 1950s provided a way of ~inderstand- self-evidently cor- ing how very complex information about rect. And the living systems could be passed from gener- implication was

Human Nature 15 that somehow social behavior was not nat- some "offensive7' pages dealing with ural and could not be analyzed with the Weber7s "lapse" about charisma and a few same lens used to inspect other animals. others in which I discussed primate politi- But new questions threatened the old cal systems and the potential role of biolo- boundaries. Was there a common human gy in social science. Though it was an nature? Could we return to the concerns of unexpected irritation, the committee's the 19th century about that nature? What censorship was a clue to something rotten did it mean that there appeared to be a nat- in the state of scholarship. ural substrate, rooted in genetics, of com- What I had come up against, I later real- plex animal social behavior? Did this sub- ized, was the hegemony of behaviorism. A strate also extend to humans? Or did our doctrine with deep and varied roots, it goes kind of DNA, combined with the rich back at least as far as John Locke's notion tapestry of our culture, secure us a fully dis- that human beings begin their mental lives tinct and privileged exemption from the as blank slates and are formed, morally and rules governing the rest of nature? socially as well as intellectually, by the sum of all subsequent sense impressions. book that pulled much of this By this logic, environment, and environ- Ainquiry together in a lively but hon- ment alone, makes the human. est way was Robert Ardrey's African The doctrine acquired formal scholarly Genesis (1961), which I devoured when I shape in the early 20th century, notably in laid ands on it in London in 1962. the work of the French sociologist mile rey was a Chicago-born playwright and Durkheim. His Rules of Sociological AuT'7 reenwriter who, after a Broadway failure, Method (published in English in 1938) sought solace in a Life magazine assign- established the unacceptability of using a ment that took him to southern Africa to biological or even a psychological explana- learn about the archaeology and biology tion for social behavior when a sociologi- that was beginning to attract the attention cal one would do. To violate this principle of a few alert scientists. His path-breaking was to succumb to "reductionism," the book influenced many people looking for supreme sin in Durkheim's catechism. new directions in biology and social sci- In the United States, the most forceful ence, and in their relationship. Ardrey's advocates of the doctrine were the social accomplishment, unique at the time, was scientists Franz Boas and John T. Watson. to integrate findings in studies of human Emphasizing the principle of cultural rel- evolution, animal behavior, and the long ativism, they pointed to the enormous vari- archaeological and historical record. Not ety of existing social patterns as proof that all readers were thrilled by the resulting nearly any other social arrangement was synthesis. Some social scientists strongly possible as well. From his base at objected to its emphasis on the role of Columbia University, Franz Boas intro- aggression in evolution and its challenge duced a generation of anthropologists, to the then-orthodoxy that Homo sapiens including Ruth Benedict and Margaret originated in Asia. "Not in innocence, and Mead, to the orthodox view. not in Asia, was Man born" was Ardrey's But the triumph of behaviorism was defiant opening line. more than an intellectual matter. After Inspired by Ardrey7s boldness and Nazism tainted all efforts to bring genetics cogency, I finished my thesis on bureau- and other biological considerations into cracy and charisma in Ghana and includ- the study of human beings and their col- ed Weber's note about charisma and biol- lective lives, the behaviorist position occu- ogy in the concluding chapter. The mem- pied the moral high ground as well. The bers of my thesis committee, distinguished ambient liberal progressivism of the acade- social scientists all, approved my thesis for my in the early postwar period all but publication on the condition that I remove assured the dominance of the doctrine.

> LIONELTIGER is Darwin Professor ofAnthropology at Rutgers University. He is author, co-author,or editor of 10 books dealing with biosociology, the most recent ofwhich is The Pursuit of Pleasure (1992). Copyright @ 1996 by Lionel Tiger.

16 WQ Winter 1996 Despite my thesis committee's best my own field, I found the reigning theories efforts to keep me on the straight and nar- on discrimination and antifemale bias row, my interest in the potential uses of the only partly convincing. biological perspective did not wane when Far more promising, I thought, was the I took my first job, teaching political soci- work of such scientists as Jane Goodall, ology at the University of British Desmond Morris, and Irven DeVore, who Colun~bia,in 1963. I was still eager to were learning that other animals, inclucl- connect with that invisible college of ing primates, had social and political sys- scholars - Konracl Lorenz, Raymond Dart, tems marked by equally sharp distinctions and Sherwood Washburn, among 0th- between males and females. We knew, ers-to whose work Ardrey's book had too, that primates sustained these divisions alerted me. without benefit of the cultural condition- In 1965, I had the opportunity to work ing consiclerecl the overwhelming cause of directly with some of this college, including one of the brighter young lights, the anthropologist Robin Fox, who would become a close friend, colleague, and collaborator. The occasion was a sympo- sium organized by Julian Huxley at the Zoological Society of London. I had been invited to be social scientist in residence by Desmoncl Morris, then still curator of mammals. Shortly after being intro- duced, Fox and I with- drew to his office at the London School of Economics ancl, after a the human pattern. Primates had no mag- few clays' discussion, penned a brief and azines, no Father Knows Best on television, impudent paper on the deadness of most no cultural stereotypes, no patriarchal social science and the vitality of contem- legal and religious systems. Furthermore, porary biology. Our proposed solution to the human cross-cultural record was this state of affairs was to bring the disci- impressively consistent on the subject of plines together. "The Zoological Per- male-female differences in political as well spective in Social Science" appeared a few as other behavior. This was in fact precise- months later in Man: Journal of the Royal ly one of the major grievances expressed by Anthropological Institute. But a paper early feminist writers. Did the primate data seemed inadequate to the severity and and the consistent human record suggest scope of the problem. We resolved one day we had to look again for deeper causes of to take up the subject in a book. sexual politics? By then I had some interest in the rela- ack in British Columbia, I returned tively simple matter of how human males to a question that had earlier cap- related to each other in basic ways. tured my attention: sex and politics. As a Virtually 110 research had been clone with graduate student, I had read Simone de humans on the subject, even though we Beauvoir's Second Sex (1953) and been already knew that other primates engaged completely convinced by its argument that in what I called "male bonding" ancl that inequalities between men and women the coalitions between males were as were thoroughly entrenched thro~igho~it important for politics and defense as male- Western society. Turning to research in female bonds were for reproduction.

Human Nature 17 Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees helped to illuminate the complexity of primate societies-and to show that chimp behavior, both aggressive and cooperative, was not entirely different from that of humans.

(Later we would learn from Jane Goodall, biological element in human behavior to Jean Altmann, and others how important the early Greeks' enthusiasm for that ubiq- female-female bonds were for social inte- uitous all-purpose substance, phlogiston. gration and stability.) Other reactions were more directly hostile. A near-riot broke out when I appeared on n Men in Groups (1969), I put forth my The David Frost Show in 1969 in New hypothesis. - about the evolutionary basis York, and angry feminists staged a noisy of the cross-cultural regularity of male den~onstration outside Maclean's Maga- bonds and groups. At first, the work met zine in Toronto when an article about with an open and even receptive Men in Groups appeared as the cover story response-and with sales that astonished of the June 1969 issue. no one more than its author. Having Despite the hue and cry, the phrase intended it to be an academic book, I had "male bonding" quickly passed into the signed a contract to write a popular version popular discourse, possibly because it for a series edited by Alex Comfort in accounted for clearly observable patterns England. That proved unnecessary. The in male behavior, from weekly gatherings book took off, first in Canada and then in for bowling to Pall Mall clubs in London the United States. It made the New York to the secret societies of Sierra Leone. Times best-seller list for a brief moment, Now it is hardly possible to read a review of was translated into seven languages, and a movie for the 18-to-24-year-old set with- was hailed by Robert Ardrey in Life as "the out seeing the phrase, and I am told most creative contribution to the social sci- women use it to categorize irritating ences since David Reisinan's The Lonely behavior of the men they know. Crowd." The anger left me troubled, though. I But there were on~inousdevelopments had been stunned by the sharp political as well. An anthropologist reviewing the reactions to the book, some delivered with book for Science compared my search for a almost lethal fury. Embracing a liberal

18 WQ Winter political stance very common among male bonding works could be used very Canadian academics, I regarded myself as profitably by women who wanted not only a feminist. It seemed to me that the firin- to understand men's organizational behav- ness and pervasiveness of obstacles women ior but also to build networks to promote faced in human communities were serious their own political and economic advan- indeed. I thought I had identified the tage. And many women have clone so. depth of the issue, even its possible basis in My early failure to anticipate the errors an elemental primate struggle for domi- ancl enormities that would be imputed to nance. It seemed clear to me that LI~LISLI- my work placed me in somewhat the same ally fundamental social changes such as position E. 0.Wilson found himself after quota systems ancl remedial legislation his masterful Sociobiology (1975) ap- would be necessary to achieve sexual equi- pearecl. Attacked by the Marxist Science ty in what was obviously a rapidly chang- for People group, whose ranks included ing industrial system. Robin Fox thought his Harvard University colleagues Richard the main resistance to the book would Lewontin and Stephen Jay Goulcl, Wilson come from men because I had revealed saw his work pilloried as "a genetic justifi- one hitherto concealed source of their cation of the status quo of existing privi- hegemony, one of their precious trade leges for certain groups according to class, secrets. race, or sex." His and my situations were no doubt ut the resistance was two-headed and made more difficult by the passions stirred different. Women thought I was up by the Vietnam War, passions that had advertising a version of the Freudian view largely driven civil discourse from that biology was destiny and that therefore American public life, especially from uni- they shoulcl accept a barefoot-and-preg- versity campuses. Virtually all controver- nant image of female behavior. Social sci- sies in those years-particularly those entists had been burned before by the related in any way to science, technology, crude connection of biology to social poli- and the despised technocracy-partook of cy. Now they saw any effort to introduce the almost demonic fury that had been biology into social science as a perilous unleashed by a s~irrealisticallyawful war. echo of Nazism and a goad to potentially One's ow11 personal political convic- genocidal racism. And the work of such tions made no difference. In 1971 Warren towering anthropological figures as Farrell, who then worked for the National Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, Organization for Women, asked me to and Margaret Mead was a substantial con- debate Kate Millett, author of Sexual tribution to our knowledge of human vari- Politics (1970). I declined on the grounds ety and a stin~ulusto a wholesome kind of that I agreed with much of Millett's agen- cultural relativism that did not equate da, but I proposed instead that we partici- social value with economic might. pate in a discussion. She refused. Clearly a These were reasonably cautious civil intellectual exchange was not what responses to a rather large hypothesis with she wanted or even thought possible with wide ramifications. They came from a far someone so far beyond the culturalist pale higher level of intellectual and scientific as was I. integrity than did the subsequent broad and vicious ideological attacks of assorted f the largely political responses to my barons of politically correct and "progres- biosocial assertions were shortsighted sive" science. The reasoned responses ancl even narrow-minded, they were never- were the ones to which I tried to respond theless understandable as the heartfelt carefully and fairly. Above all, I tried to response of certain agitated citizens. What make clear in my teaching and writing that was not forgivable- or even comprehensible a diagnosis is not a recommendation and was the view expressed by social and nat- that because something "is," and is natur- ural scientists that the introduction of hiol- al, is no reason that "ought" should fol- ogy into human social scicnce was, a11 ini- low. After all, my demonstration of how tio, wrong. Evidently the law We called our of parsimony had behavioral grammar been repealed. Fincl- the "biogramn~ar." ing ever more basic Before publication, explanations of caus- we sent a description ality in nature is, of of the use of his con- course, the glory of cept to Chomsky, science. But not in who remarked in a social science, appar- warm return letter ently. Anyone who that while we had tried to obey the law misused his minor was clearly suspect, point about deep especially when it structure, he was in came to sexual is- accord with our sues. Detail from Atavism (1 9941,by Suzanne approach. Further- Even before we Scherer and Pave1 Ouporov more, he allowed that became colleagues he viewed that at Rutgers University in 1969, Robin Fox approach as "the only possible non-trivial and I had agreed that this was a dangerous approach to social science." And if lan- state of affairs, politically and scientifically. guage, again a relatively recent human Working together in the newly created characteristic, was linked to a biosocial anthropology department that he chaired, substrate, it seemed all the more likely that we decided to start work on the book we earlier behaviors such as politics, sexuality, had earlier contemplated. Fox would con- n~irturance, and grooming were also tribute his expertise on kinship, having anchored in a phylogenetic history to written one of the classic books on the sub- which the discovery of DNA had given a ject, Kinship and Marriage (1967), and I technical foundation. would bring in what I knew about state structures, bureaucracy, and the like. he book was well reviewed, sold While I can't speak for Fox, I think it is briskly, and found its way into eight fair to characterize our approach in The other languages. (Konrad Lorenz's gratify- Imperial Animal (197 1) as aggressively syn- ingly supportive introduction to the thetic and radical with respect to our own German edition was added to all subse- academic traditions. Essentially, we want- quent editions.) Partly on its merits, Fox ed to draw a plausible picture of human and I were asked by the H. F. Guggen- nature that accorded with materials from heim Foundation to direct research sup- the study of evolution, other animals, port to people studying causes of violence human physiology and cognition, and the and inequality. Because G~iggenheimwas cross-cultural record. almost unique among foundations in Searching for an organizing framework, thinking such were biologi- we came across Noam Chomsky's hypoth- cally grounded, we were able to under- esis of a "universal grammar" for language. write the efforts of a disparate but com- Choinsky claimed that the necessary neur- monly driven group of scientists and schol- al equipment for language and some of the ars who otherwise would have gone want- core operating "harcl-wiring" was part of ing for support. It was a rewarding 12-year the human genetic make-up. People experience. might learn different languages, but they As exhilarating in another way was the would do so using a common program for nastiness the book occasioned. A rump language with which all children are born. assembly of radical anthropologists at its How else could inexperienced children annual meeting debated the proposal of acquire such phenon~enalskill at such a one of its constituent groups, the all- demanding task? They could because they female Ruth Beneclict Collective, that (1) were born with the rules, a "universal there be no Stalinism in the women's gran~mar,"in their heads. movement and (2) that Fox and Tiger be

20 WQ Winter 1996 forbidden to speak at any American cam- ter. I would treat it directly in a later book, pus. In the New Statesman in London, Optimism: The Biology of Hope (1979). Maureen Duffy made the famous compar- But I have long had a fascination with ison of our book to Mein Kampf. The utopian schemes - a fascination tempered American Anthropologist, having received equally by sympathy and skepticism. a positive review, sought another from a known opponent of our position and ran ack in my high school years in both of them-the last review of any of my BMontreal, I briefly belonged to a publications in that journal of anthropo- Labor Zionist organization- that offered dis- logical record. Sir Edmund Leach of cussions of socialism and the building of Cambridge University produced a charac- new worlds. The group's ultimate goal was teristically inept assessment for the British to recruit young people for collective set- journal New Society in which, among tlements in Israel, where we would join in other things, he accused us not only of creating little socialist utopias far superior ignoring the work of someone who had to our petit-bourgeois worlds. In my case, been in our department for two years but though, the proselytizing didn't take. I also of overlooking a relevant thesis on kib- soon left the organization with neither butz incest written (the ever-solipsistic Sir drama nor regret. Edmund failed to register) by our first Nevertheless, the kibbutz movement as Rutgers doctoral student. a human experiment continued to Understandably, Fox and I were largely intrigue me-so much so that I jumped at unimpressed by the quality and balance of the chance to undertake a large-scale study the response we had from many social sci- of kibbutz women with Joseph Shepher of entists. We became more convinced than the University of Haifa, a former Rutgers ever that the issue was not the book itself doctoral student. Predicting that mam- but its challenge to the jurisdictional malian imperatives such as mother-infant boundaries of the academy-a new ver- bonding would overwhelm ideological sion of arguments about the soul and the purity, we studied three generations of body. men and women in two of the three feder- For all the attacks, however, the book ations of the kibbutz system- 34,040 peo- and the science it reflected were now part ple in all. We possessed detailed census of the international game. The intellectu- data on these subjects, and conducted al discourse was changing. Opponents of interviews in four kibbutzim and detailed our view were moving ever more firmly ethnography in two. away from empirical natural science and I couldn't imagine why someone had toward the chilling nihilism of poststruc- not taken on the subject before. It was the turalism and deconstruction, where all perfect venue for testing assumptions descriptions of reality are held to be sub- about human nature held dear by a range jective, culturally biased, and politically of ideologues. What would happen when motivated. men and women received the same The opposition was determined not income-that is, none at all? When every- only to banish the notion of objectivity but one worked? When all decisions were to further isolate humankind from its con- taken by all men and women in public? nections with the natural order. As When all children were raised in "chil- Alexander Argyros of the University of dren's houses" from six weeks on? When Texas shrewdly observed, such scholars all food, laundry, and purchasing were were creationists of a special kind: they handled by the community at large? In a had no God, but they had an unshakable word, what would happen when nearly all faith in radical human exceptionalism in the fundamental conditions against which the scheme of nature. That faith in turn much contemporary feminist and political supported much of their fuzzy utopian thought were struggling were absent? thinking. The book that we published in 1975, The impulse behind utopianism and Women in the Kibbutz, showed the divi- other forms of idealism is not a trivial mat- sion of labor by sex to be greater in the kib-

Human Nature 21 something close to a kiss of death, the New York Times Book Review gave it to Juliet Mitchell, whose peculiarly convoluted psy- chofeminism we had criticized in the book. The only feminist journal that reviewed the book dismissed it on the grounds that the kibbutz experiment was itself impure because it was conducted by Jews who-don't forget- car- ried the patriarchal spirit in their blood. No matter that all the kibbutzim we studied were at least agnostic and some were aggressively atheistic. The pettiness aside, Shepher and I were far more surprised that the crucial finding of the book- that deep, very long-range, and substantial social engineering had failed to change certain fundamental sex roles-had so little impact. That revelation, so salient to what was going on at the time, ' was almost swept away by a tide of controversial Sociobiology: The ~ewSynthesis (1975) studies of attitudes, scales of self- esteem, and gaseous- seminars butz than in the rest of Israel. We found about expressing human potential. sharp differences in what men and women Possibly the most depressing part of the cared about in public life and in their adventure was the unwillingness- of critics choices of political and managerial behav- to accept that kibbutz women made con- ior. Amusingly, we found a negative rela- scious choices in a dignified and skillful tionship between attitudes about sexual manner. It was more comforting to similar& and actual behavior. Each gen- attribute their behavior to patriarchal eration was more divided than the last-a brainwashing. clear rebuke to the role-model theory of behavior. And most important, we could hroughout the 1970s and early '80s, see the beginnings of what has now Tthe opposition to the biosocial-or become an almost total shift to family sociobiological - enterprise grew more housing. Children began to live with their heated. I felt a sense of almost physical parents, a move overwhelmingly support- apprehension, knowing how easily I could ed by women and their mothers who rou- become the object of censure. At meetings tinely outvoted the men of the communi- of the American Anthropological Assoc- ties. The men considered this move a iation, conversation would stop and people reversion to bourgeois pathology and an would stare when I entered an elevator expensive violation of the founding and they saw my name tag. I wasn't alone. dream. At times, indeed, it seemed as There was an unseemly ruckus over E. 0. though we had been studying two differ- Wilson's further elaborations of his socio- ent communities, men and women. biological insights, opponents going so far There were some positive reviews of the as to dump water on him when he made book-by the respected Zionist writer an appearance at the 1979 meeting of the Marie Syrkin in the New Republic and by American Association for the Advance- many commentators in Israel itself. But in ment of Science in Washington. The

22 WQ Winter 1996 American Anthropological Association an opinion I offered in Men in Groups to tried to censure Napoleon Chagnon of the the effect that contraceptive pills would University of California for chronicling likely influence the sexual enthusiasms of aggression among the Yanomani of men. Nature, being economical, surely Venezuela, as though he had caused it by would see to it that pregnant females describing it. The same association voted would have less appeal to males seeking unanimously to support the "Seville reproductive success. Since females taking Declaration," a sanctimonious assertion by the pill were chemically pregnant, we a number of otherwise sensible scientists wondered whether nature's design would that any effort to explore human nature apply to them as well. factors in human aggression was ethically wrong and scientifically inappropriate. As ith a small amount of money from part of a series of seminars at the University wthe Gugeenheim-- Foundation and of Chicago in the mid-1970s, a few of us working with colleagues at Rutgers who shared the biological perspective tried Medical School and other parts of the uni- to invite Wilson and his colleague Richard versity, we administered the contraceptive Lewontin to discuss their differences over drug Depo-Provera (the basis of Norplant) sociobiology. But Lewontin refused to be in injections effective for three months to in the same room with the man who had monkeys in a colony we were able to estab- been among those responsible for lish on an island off Bermuda. The medi- Harvard's hiring him in the first place. For cine completely extinguished hitherto their part, many radical feminists were robust sexual relations. When its effects convinced that anyone who disagreed with had worn off, the original dating game them was politically reactionary, patholog- resumed. We tried to publish the report in ical, or an agent of a devious male con- Science but were told we had no control spiracy. group. We protested that we had produced Such ideological zealotry drew suste- an ethological record of a community over nance from major social changes that were a year, under carefully controlled and eval- already under way in the United States uated conditions. But to no avail. And so and Europe, stimulated in large measure subsequent publications appeared in more by the "pill" and other birth control specialized journals. devices that had become widely available Were the findings too controversial in in the mid-1960s. There was surprisingly the light of then-current sexual practices rapid abandonment of the conventional and beliefs? It appeared as though no one certainty that it was man's role to work and wanted to challenge a widely appreciated provide and woman's to bear children, medical innovation-or even to see raise them, and keep house. While we did whether the primate pattern also applied not think that modifications of gender- to human communities where the pill was roles were impossible or undesirable, we widely used. did believe that they raised profound bio- It seemed to me then and does still that logical questions. But biological analysis there had to be some discernible effect was still largely kept out of the conven- when a large percentage of women in a tional national dialogue. One reason, no community were chemically pregnant. No doubt, was that proponents of biological other drug, until Prozac perhaps, had been approaches, who confronted such issues as given on a daily basis to healthy people. aggression, hierarchy, sexual differences, And the contraceptive pill affected noth- and xenophobia, were seen as bearers of ing less than sexual selection, the core bad news. relationship at the heart of biological Nevertheless, Fox and I continued process and evolution itself. together and separately to play active roles It had no behavioral effect at all? Please. in academic life, and in such practical Here was a case in which biosociology precincts of government and business had direct policy relevance. Most tests of where biosocial perspectives and informa- drugs by the Food and Drug Admin- tion were wanted. One project grew out of istration and equivalent agencies deal first

Human Nature 23 with clear physiological and systemic Human beings had surely evolved the effects-your liver clogs, your eyebrows capacity to plan ahead, to hope, to create, turn orange, there are carcinogens, and so and to believe in the value of life itself. on. Behavioral impacts are far less Perhaps that evolved knack was even the thoughtfully and substantially evaluated, basis of religious behavior, which is virtu- even with drugs such as contraceptives or ally ubiquitous in human communities. psychoactives explicitly designed to affect Was it not reassuring to think that human behavior. For example, it took the FDA idealism and hopefulness had their roots years to realize what any biosocial scientist in brain physiology and other mechanisms could have seen right away: that Valium that supported our evolution? and Librium (the widest-selling drugs in the world for a while) were not harmless ot until 1992, however, when I pub- social lubricants but powerful drugs with Nlished The Pursuit of Pleasure, with substantial addictive and cultural effects. its argument that pleasure was an evolu- Unfortunately, the bias of the industrial tionary entitlement as important to our system is to look for easily quantifiable species as discipline and the goad of pain, technical factors and deal primarily with did the formal recalcitrance change to a them. It does not emphasize the kind of suspension of disbelief and distaste. Per- sensitive full-life-cycle assessment that haps it was the failure of various utopian even mediocre zookeepers currently schemes, including industrial-strength demand when they manage the routines Marxism, that made it easier to argue that and housing of their charges. human behaviors were related to human The prejudice against biological anal- evolution and constrained by the particu- ysis did not immediately abate when I pub- lar pattern of species. But this need not be lished Optimism: The Biology of a gloomy conclusion, I argued. Hope, but it was around that time To change a system, one must that we began to witness some first understand it, and a knowl- turning of the tide. In Optimism, edge of human biology can be as I suggested that idealism and much a basis for idealism and social vision, to say nothing of action as for paralysis and despair. love affairs and feelings we have In fact, in an earlier book, The on the first day of school, are as Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, much part of our nature as tribal Evolution, and the Industrial antipathy and sexual ruckus. System (1987), I had argued that "Hope springs internal," I announced, our species was still trying to make do with because it seemed obvious to me that if skills that it had slowly acquired for dealing neurophysical substances (about which with the social and ethical dilemmas of a more and more was being learned) were hunter-gatherer existence in communities associated with depression and hence of between 25 and 200 souls. I pointed out treatable with other substances, then there the obvious: that such skills, products of must be a comparable material basis of lengthy evolutionary change, are ill-suited happiness and optimism. About halfway to the social and economic realities of mod- through my research on the subject, in the ern mass industrial societies; and, further- mid-1970s, endorphins were discovered. If more, that our prevailing ethical systems, not the elusive substance themselves, these which arose during the adoption of agricul- were certainly signs of the the material ture and pastoralism, do little to address the neural basis of feelings of well-being. incompatibilities. I went further to speculate that any Take for example the vexed issue of the species with as large and fertile a thought growing chasm between the leaders and factory as ours had somehow to discipline the led, the elite and the common folk, the what it produced. There had to be a neu- winners and the losers in what is called our rophysiological basis for our getting up in ''winner-take-all7' system. One of the bonds the morning and deciding it was a great that used to tie leaders to their constituen- day to trap an elephant or court a partner. cies was kinship, a deeply biological tie.

24 WQ Winter 1996 Yet for the sake of justice, a noble ethos, crowd has created a world of solipsistic rel- modern legal strictures against nepotism ativism founded on a commitment to the discourage the exercise of such primal notion that positive, objective science is an connections. One biologically predictable impossibility. Though they may have as result is that our leaders feel less and less much impact on international science as responsible for those beneath them. It is an phrenologists, their impenetrable obfusca- unhappy biological reality, but our refusal tion of behavioral matters may cause phys- to face it, and others like it, may actually ical anthropologists to drift away from the aggravate social inequalities and tensions. main association. They will continue to The biosocial perspective I urged in this produce a barrier between the worlds their book clearly offers little easy reassurance to readers experience and the one the profes- idealogues of either the right or left per- sors describe. As Robin Fox says, "If it walks suasions. But as anthropologist Melvin like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks Konner noted in a review in Science mag- like a duck, it is a social construct of a azine, the book's argument is "probably a duck." The most dispiriting feature of the far more radical critique of modern indus- delta of pressure toward political correct- trial capitalism than was Marx's and ness is not its apparatchik banality but its Engels's." scientific ludicrousness and its utter Today it is clear that the biological impracticality. account has left its mark on the intellectual landscape. Even daily newspapers s I started these reflections on my ser- purvey information about behavior Avice in the human nature wars, I involving definitive brain images of sex recalled the quotation that I was required to differences in human cortical function. supply for my college yearbook. The words More importantly, there is now a were supposed to be self-epitomiz- sophisticated body of work that ing, and so I had chosen William knits together the biological and Blake's "I must create a system or social sciences. And there is be enslaved by another man's." For every reason to expect that the a moment, I shivered at the thought expansion of the explanatory that my whole career amounted to power of biosociology will con- a petulant and antisocial act of tinue. Developments in intellectual defiance. Darwinian medicine, neuro- But then I realized: no, I am physiology, paleoanthropology, firmly in Mr. Darwin's system. I economics, and political science, and a love his commitment to the elegance of host of other disciplines will continue to life's flow and the vast importance of indi- help sketch a picture of Homo sapiens vidual decisions about whom to love, to rooted in nature, in history, and-criti- hate, to play with, to avoid, to feed. I admire cally-in prehistory. It is no longer heart- and applaud his precise awareness of the stopping to discuss human biology in the meld of physical form and behavior and his academic community, while among fern- tutored bystander's appreciation of the art- inists there is at last a potentially produc- fulness, the color, and the intimate drama tive dialogue between those who still of animal life. This scientific community in regard all sex differences as social con- which I found myself so unexpectedly has structs and those prepared to see them as been no cruel master, no impediment to embedded in the nature of humanity. exploration. To the contrary, it has provided However satisfied one might be with me passage to a world in which the mar- such developments, large areas of darkness riage of precise perception and broad remain in the intellectual community. In thought is celebrated, where open and my own discipline, anthropology, the inquiring minds are free to stride, wander, majority social-construction-of-reality and wonder.

Human Nature 25 The ~irthof Natura1 Classicism

by Frederick Turner

he artists, poets, composers, and Tdramatists now reaching their matu- rity have lived through a time of crisis for the arts. Some of us are questioning the whole 200-year-old tradition of the avant- garde and rethinking our aesthetics from the ground up. The moment we realized we had crossed the invisible boundary from one cultural era to another was surely different in each case; it was, especially at the beginning when we did not know that others were going through the same thing, an intensely individual and sometimes lonely experience. For some of us, it came when we first began asking the awkward questions; for others, it was when we saw with a shock that we had already been asking them for some time; for others, it was when we first recognized an alternative view of the world; and for yet others, it was when wi met somebody else who shared the same heterodox opinions. The late modernist inheritance we came into in the 1950s and '60s, despite its seductive surface of countercultural life- style and apocalyptic rhetoric, was even then hoary and stereotyped in its intellectual and spiritual provenance. There was little in its armory that did not derive ulti- mately from Romantic egoism, 19th-century political radicalism, and early-20th- century modernist movements such as Dada. Such indebtedness to the past would be harmless, indeed laudable, in an artistic movement whose theory and dynamic was one of the incorporation of the past into the present; but it was incon-

The central figure in Audrey Flack's Sky Gateway Introducing Diana (1990)

26 WQWinter 1996 sistent in one that claimed the cachet of the very statement of something, such as a innovation, courageous nonconformity, promise or the stipulation of a rule in an and revolution. agreed context, could create a new reality without need for empirical verification. n poetry, what we inherited was confes- This, of course, meant that a world was Isional free verse; in visual art, abstract something that could be made up, a point expressionism and pop art; in music, 12- not lost on political interpreters, who, con- tone composition; in drama, the theater of stitutionally suspicious, immediately the absurd, the theater of cruelty, and hap- began to ask: who gets to make up the penings. Avant-garde novels and films world? were plotless and autobiographical. The But the political correctness that result- arts showed all the signs of decadence and ed from asking this question was not the exhaustion: the abandonment of technical only problem that came out of the defini- discipline, the harking after unrealistic tion of art as freedom from nature. and potentially bloody schemes of social Another was the problem of critical judg- revolution, the extreme subjectivism, the ment. How could one distinguish good studied ignorance of and hostility to scien- from bad art? If nature was abandoned as a tific fact, the moral cynicism. constraint, craftsmanship-which is a It seemed for a brief time that the emer- working with natural constraints-must gence of postmodernism meant an end to disappear, and with it the virtuosity that is the long, deadening twilight in the avant- the excellence of craft. garde arts. But in many ways it was a fur- Social construction became the perfect ther descent. "Language poetry," visual excuse for artistic incompetence. Any flaw and musical deconstructivism, political could be pointed to in triumph as a subtle theater, and minimalist fiction seemed to tour de force of deconstruction, a perfor- have added little except a further element mative enactment of subversive delegiti- of self-congratulatory self-regard, while los- mation, or similar jabberwocky. Finally, ing the late modernist emotionality that the idea of artistic freedom as freedom gave the avant-garde a semblance of life. from natural constraint had begun to Instead of political utopianism, we got come up against a tragically opposed prin- political correctness; instead of radical ciple: the desperate need, in this ecologi- subjectivism, the deconstruction of the cally threatened world, to find ways of life self. Instead of the subjective construction for human beings that are not lethal to the of reality, we ended up with the social con- ecosystem around us and to our own ani- struction of reality. Instead of scientific mal bodies. The heroic transcendence of ignorance, we were given a wholesale nature can result in inhuman Bauhaus attack on the possibility of any kind of architecture, designer-drug addiction, knowledge at all. The cynicism remained. AIDS suicide performance art, and bloat- The artistic origin of social construction ed nuclear arsenals. can be found in modernism, in what at first was a glorious and defiant assertion of countermovement of artists and artistic freedom. The artist is free only if he Apoets, of whom I was one, began to (and "he" it usually was, for this was an seek ways to repair the damage we saw in intensely young male view of the world) our culture as the Cold War drew to an can make up his own world and kick him- end and the great socialist ideals were self loose from nature. Painters broke the shown either to be empty and destructive shackles of representation, fiction writers or disappointingly achieved and incorpo- broke the shackles of naturalistic narrative, rated into the status quo. The problems composers broke the shackles of melody bequeathed to us, as we saw them, were and harmony, poets broke the shackles of these: meter. By fiat, they made up their own worlds. Artists were supported in this view The human person had been dena- by the philosopher J. L. Austin's theory of tured; we had been taught to reject our ani- speech acts and "performatives," whereby mal nature, our sex, our genetic lineage.

Human Nature 27 5 As artists we were expected to dismiss It is hard, perhaps, for people who did the constraints of nature itself-this at a not grow up within the milieu of the acad- time when the planet urgently required emic and artistic intelligentsia, to under- human beings to accept their ecological stand what an iron grip the tenets of avant- responsibilities as part of a larger ecosys- garde modernism (and later, postmod- tem not created by social fiat. ernism) could have on the mind of an 5 We had lost the great forms and disci- artist or writer. My own moment of revela- plines of the arts, the biopsychic technolo- tion was more painless than most. It was gies of meter, representation, and melody, less a revulsion against the shoddiness and and were thus alienated from our own intellectual bankruptcy of the avant-garde shamanic tradition. than a blessed and amazing gift of happi- 5 The political separatism and cultural ness, an outpouring of creative energy, a fragmentation that had been encouraged sudden remembering of the whole human had dangerously attenuated that sense of heritage, that made much of what I had human fellowship that is the womb of been taught seem to be a dark dream from artistic creativity. which I had awoken. 5 In a time of staggering and marvelous scientific discovery, when nonlinear t was 1977, the year I became a citizen dynamics and chaos theory were suggest- Iof the United States. My wife was preg- ing a vital rapprochement between the two nant with our second child, and I was cultures, avant-garde art and criticism building an energy-efficient house in rural were assailing science with a remarkable central Ohio. I had decided to renounce combination of malice and ignorance. any ambitions I might have had as a pub- 3 Hope, and all the other positive emo- lic literary figure and to devote myself to tions that inspire the arts, were sneered at my teaching at Kenyon College, to the and dismissed; snideness and rage were happiness of those around me, and to a the dominant signs of the artist. deeper and deeper meditation upon nature, science, philosophy, and the spiri- Not surprisingly, the contemporary arts tual dimension of life. The critic George had lost contact with the general public; in Steiner, whom I came to know later, won- some fields, such as poetry, publishers dered why I had, as he said, buried myself would no longer take the risk of producing there. I didn't feel buried, except occa- collections of poems-and for good reason. sionally when I toiled in the garden- that I The general reader, thrice burnt by boring, had designed. incomprehensible, and graceless verbal Out of these conditions of self-imposed assaults, wisely avoided such collections. exile, poems suddenly began to pour Worst of all, we found that as artists we forth-poems of praise and love and cele- were virtually expected to violate all stan- bration, mingled with aphorisms and little dards of personal morality, as a sort of discourses that contained in embryo much backhanded proof of our political morality. of my subsequent thinking. The verse was It was not that all art and cultural criti- increasingly shaped to the demands of cism had succumbed to these tendencies; rhyme and meter, until it sprouted a wild science fiction, for instance, and the plumage of formal invention. Lyrics were biopsychological and sociobiological sci- superseded by a series of narrative poems, ences, had continued to hold out visions of two of them of epic length, The New the human role in the world that might World (1985) and Genesis (1988). Without form the basis for true art. But these were intending to, I had completely violated all enclaves of genuine nonconformity, mar- the then-current rules of poetry, which ginalized by the official avant-garde. stipulated the short free verse non-narra-

'FREDERICK TURNER is Founders Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. In addition to eight books of poetry, he is the author of Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science (1985; paperback 1992), The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit (1995), and other books on literary and cultural themes. Copyright 6Z 1996 by Frederick Turner.

28 WQ Winter 1996 Disparity Among the Children-1 (1975) by Ruth Weisberg five existentialist confessional lyric in con- of the scales falling from one's eyes, that I temporary vocabulary as the paradigm for had. Among these various and talented the publishable poem. voices were Robert McDowell, Richard It was just as well that I had renounced Moore, Dick Allen, Jack Butler, John my desire for fame and publication. The Gery, R. S. Gwynn, Charles Martin, periodicals and publishers of record would Frederick Feirstein, Dana Gioia, Jane have turned down my new poetry, even Greer, Timothy Steele, and Annie Finch. though I knew it was my best work. Julia Budenz7s enormous poem, The Though I had published several books of Gardens of Flora Baum, a meditation on poetry earlier, including one in the presti- the great cultural tree of Rome, exempli- gious Wesleyan Poetry Series, I was not fies the scope of the new poetry. sending my poems out anymore. The peo- I became convinced of the civic duty of ple I was writing for were no longer the the artist to society, and with my colleague official avant-garde literary/poetic estab- Ronald Sharp revived the Kenyon Review lishment. I circulated my poems in type- as a voice for the new movement. script, though, and a growing circle of peo- Miraculously I found presses, mostly mav- ple began to make copies of them and ericks that were not afraid to defy the con- send them to others. sensus, that would print my own new One of these was a small press publish- work. er, a classicist, who insisted on meeting me, and after months of argument by cor- s soon as the "New Formalism" and respondence, persuaded me to start pub- Athe "New Narrative," as they were lishing again. He printed The Garden dubbed by their opponents, emerged into (1985) in a small edition. Meanwhile a public view, they were attacked by some of few writers and publishers here and there the major publications of the avant-garde, who were prepared to go out on a limb including Contemporary Literature Studies were beginning to publish the poetry of and the American Poetry Review. Then, others who had had the same experience, when it was realized that even negative

Human Nature 29 A Vision of the Virgin and Child ('1972,) by Peter Rogers critical attention was drawing new con- able school of Los Angeles realist verts to the movement, there was a studied painters and sculptors has emerged, and icy silence. But we survived. By now including Wes Christensen, John the Expansive Movement, as it has been Frame, Jim Doolin, and Ruth Weisberg, called, is a large and vital force in and the old art of landscape painting is American poetry, though still a distinctly being put to new use by artists such as minority one, and still disapproved of by Cynthia Krieble. Religious and civic the avant-garde establishment. sculpture is showing new vitality in the work of Frederick Hart, whose Creation similar transformation has been tak- group graces the facade of the National A ing place in the other arts. The Cathedral and whose Three Soldiers openings made in the modernist ortho- adds resonance to the Vietnam Veterans doxy by such composers as George Crumb Memorial on the Mall. Figurative alle- and Philip Glass have been exploited by gorical sculpture has been revived by the "holy minimalists" Arvo Part and Audrey Flack, and the bronze bas-relief Henryk Gorecki; more radically classi- by Athos Ongaro. And the power of cist still are less known composers such myth and psychospiritual symbolism as Stefania de Kenessey and Claudia still runs strong in the paintings of Peter Annis. Visual artists have formed artists' Rogers, Lani Irwin, and Alan Feltus, and groups, galleries, and periodicals to defy in the sculpture of Michael Osbal- the party line. Classical realist painters deston. such as David Ligare and Bruno As these and other questioners have Civitico illuminate a contemporary con- come together, often in the virtual world sciousness with ancient light. A remark- of the Internet, a sort of manifesto for

30 WQ Winter 1996 the new art of the 21st century has high art grows. Theory describes art; art emerged. This program calls for an art does not illustrate theory. Art is how a that recognizes the infrangible bonds whole culture speaks to itself, and how cul- between human beings and the rest of tures communicate with and marry each nature, bonds that become evident in other. the creative capacities of our own bodies $4 High standards of craftsmanship and and nervous systems that we inherited mastery of the instrument should be from our evolutionary past as animals. restored, hostility to virtuosity abandoned. Exponents of what I call natural classi- Certain forms, genres, and techniques of cism informally support the following art are culturally universal, natural, and broad principles: classical. They are innate but require a cultural tradition to awaken them. They $4 Art should direct itself to the general include such skills as visual representation, public, and should grow from and speak to melody, storytelling, poetic meter, and the common roots and universal principles dramatic mimesis. These forms, genres, of human nature in all cultures. Those and techniques are not limitations or con- members of the public who do not have straints but enfranchising instruments and the time, training, or inclination to craft infinitely generative feedback systems. and express their higher yearnings and The long enmity between emotion intuitions rightly demand an artistic elite and intellectual depth needs to be ended. to be the culture's prophetic mouthpiece We do not need to abandon reason in the and mirror. pursuit of artistic power; insanity is not a $4 Art should deny the simplifications of qualification for artistic validity. Art should the political Left and Right, and should come from and speak to what is whole in refine and deepen the radical Center. human beings. It is the product of passion- 5 The use of art, and of cheap praise, to ate imaginative intelligence, not of psy- create self-esteem is a cynical betrayal of chological sickness and damage. Even all human cultures. Excellence and stan- when it deals, as it often should and must, dards are as real and universal in the arts as with the terrifying, tragic, and grotesque, in competitive sports, even if they take art should help heal the lesions within the more time and refined judgment to appre- self and the rifts in the selfs relation to the ciate. world. The symbols of art are connected to $4 The function of art is to create beauty, the embodiment of the human person in a and beauty is incomplete without moral physical and social environment-thus, beauty. True beauty is the condition of civ- the human figure should not be avoided ilized society. We should restore reverence by visual artists, and the grand stories of for the grace and beauty of human beings birth, marriage, and death should not be and of the rest of nature. There should be avoided in literature or drama. a renewal of the moral foundations of art $4 Art must be reunited with science. As as an instrument to civilize, ennoble, and the natural ally, interpreter, and guide of inspire. Art recognizes the tragic and terri- the sciences, art extends the creative evolu- ble costs of human civilization but does tion of nature on this planet and in the uni- not abandon hope and faith in the civiliz- verse. The experience of truth is beautiful; ing process. Art must recover its connec- thus, the artist's experience and the scien- tion with religion and ethics without tist's are at bottom profoundly akin. The becoming the propagandist of any dogmat- recent deepening of our ecological under- ic system. Beauty is the opposite of coer- standing, which shows that radical change cive political power: thus art should lead is just as natural as harmony and homeosta- but not follow political morality. sis, and that the human place in nature is as $4 High and low art, the avant-garde and one of several species that accelerate natur- the popular and commercial imagination, al change, suggests that art is the missing have been alienated from each other too element in environmentalism. If aesthetics long. In a healthy culture, popular and is recognized for what it is, an essential ele- commercial art forms are the soil in which ment of scientific understanding, we will be

Human Nature 3 1 able to redefine our environmental goals for Enlightenment and modernism are exam- a healthier planet. ples of the former; the Renaissance, and 8 Art can be reunited with physical sci- perhaps our time, are examples of the lat- ence through such ideas as evolution and ter. But in either case, no artist has com- chaos theory; the reflectiveness of art can pleted his or her artistic journey until he or be partly understood through the study of she has sojourned with and learned the nonlinear dynamical systems and their wisdom of the dead artists who came strange attractors in nature and mathemat- before. The future will be more, not less, ics. The human species itself emerged aware of and indebted to the past than we from the dynamical system generated by are, just as we are more aware of and the mutual interaction of biological and indebted to the past than were our ances- cultural evolution: thus, our bodies and tors. The immortality of art goes both ways brains are adapted to and demand artistic in time; it is only if we renew the lives of performance and creation. Cultural evolu- former artists and poets in our own lives tion was partly driven by inventive play in that we will be renewed and remembered artistic handicrafts and performance. We when we are dead. have a nature; that nature is cultural; that culture is classical, in the sense of the nat- hese ideas, and others like them, ural excellence striven after by all human Thave inspired a new generation of cultures past and present. artists. We believe that we are the succes- The order of the universe is neither sors to postmodernism, and we can point deterministic nor on the road to irre- to a growing body of exciting new artistic versible decay; instead, the universe is self- work. This work is not widely known, for renewing, self-ordering, unpredictable, cre- the existing postmodern paradigm still ative, and free. Thus, human beings do not dominates most venues of publication, need to labor miserably to despoil the performance, and exhibition. But it world of its diminishing stockpile of order, includes a renewal of the great tradition of and struggle with one another for posses- landscape painting; science fiction com- sion of it, only to find that they have bound posed in strict classical epic form; a new themselves into a mechanical and deter- genre of heroic religious statuary; an out- ministic way of life. Instead, they can coop- pouring of richly musical poetry in strict erate with nature's own artistic process and form; a new awakening in choral, operatic, with each other in a free and open-ended and symphonic music; CD-ROM and play of value creation. Art looks with hope Internet art and literature; a rebirth of mys- to the future: it seeks a closer union with tical and allegorical painting; and remark- the true progress of technology. able collaborations among artists, poets, 5 Art evokes the shared past of all composers, and natural scientists. human beings, that past which is the The tradition of Homer, Dante, Leo- moral foundation of civilization. Some- nard~, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and times the present creates the future by Goethe is not dead. It is growing up in the breaking the shackles of the past, but cracks of the postmodern concrete. Though sometimes the past creates the future by it does not dominate the cultural landscape, breaking the shackles of the present. The it is there for the general public to find.

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