In a fascinating parable, "A Story In Two Parts, With An Ending Yet To Be Written," posted on the National Humanities Center's On the Human Web site, Paula Moya tells the tale of a researcher named Kitayama who travels from the land of Interdependence to the land of Independence, conducts research into the way that culture shapes perception, and finds his results grossly misinterpreted by journalists (as reinforcing racist narratives of essential ethnic differences). Kitayama's basic finding is that those of an Independent cultural disposition tend to commit the "fundamental attribution error" when judging actions, overvaluing the importance of personality as an explanation of action, whereas Interdependent folk are likely to consider situational factors when judging human action and agency. [1]
The mistranslation of Kitayama's work from culture to race in Moya's story is a not-so-disguised allegory of the journalistic framing of forthcoming research by Jinkyung Na and Shinobu Kitayama, specifically their article "Spontaneous Trait Inference is Culture Specific: Behavioral and Neural Evidence." This mistranslation (from culture to race; from Those Reared in an "Asian" Cultural Context to simply Asians) is presented as an example of what Moya and her collaborator Hazel Markus call "doing race," "creating ethnic groups based on perceived physical and behavioral characteristics, associating differential power and privilege with these characteristics, and then justifying the resulting inequalities." The comments following Moya's article are well worth reading in their entirety, as is Andrew Goldstone's great Arcade reply, "Race, Ethnicity, Brains: Some Marginalia."
There is much to say about Moya's post, but I want to point to a reference she makes to the pop science journalism of Steven Pinker. In Moya's allegory, Kitayama achieves a measure of success, getting together with Recognition (Connie), only to come home to the following scene:
All was going well, that is, until one day Kitayama came home in the middle of the afternoon and found Connie in the bedroom, looking flushed and breathing heavily as she shoved a book under the pillow. “What are you doing?” demanded Kitayama. “Since when do you hide your reading material from me?” Connie avoided his gaze as she handed him the book she’d been reading. Kitayama felt an arrow pierce his heart as he gazed at the title: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. “How could you?” he cried, “Don’t you know that Pinker believes that human behavior is generated by the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that may be universal and innate? He claims that culture is epiphenomenal to more basic psychological processes! It’s everything I’ve worked so hard to overturn!”
“I’m sorry, dear,” replied Connie, looking genuinely apologetic. “It’s just so scientific,” she offered. “There’s something so wonderfully hard about cognitive neuroscience,” she added with an appreciative shiver.
I am no fan of Steven Pinker, least of all his attempts to write about the arts, but I would not characterize his views on culture in the way the fictional Kitayama does. In The Blank Slate, Pinker does not argue that culture is epiphenomenal so much as claim that there are a list of human universals that transcend cultural difference. He writes, "My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing--no one believes that--but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme." That is, in his view certain aspects of human existence are culturally variable--though no less biological for their variation--and other aspects of humanity can be found among all cultures. The fictional nature of Moya's story might suggest that delving into "Kitayama's" error is beside the point, but I think looking at what Pinker is really arguing will yield some interesting insights into the significance of Na and Kitayama's real research.
At this level of abstraction, it seems to me that Pinker's claim is hard to dispute, but the problem is that it is also hardly very interesting from the perspective of the human sciences. What Pinker fails to tell us with any level of precision is where we can find the boundary between difference and identity and what the significance of that boundary is. Pinker's appendix listing human universals is so free of relevant discussion and context as to leave the reader scratching his head--though it seems perfectly plausible that human universals, like the language faculty, exist and might tell us something about the arts. His discussion of evolutionary psychology, for this head-scratching reader at least, fails to convince, though this is more the fault of contemporary evolutionary psychology than Pinker, whose own area of expertise is linguistics.
As many reviewers have pointed out, The Blank Slate's discussion artistic production (in genetic or evolutionary or biological terms) borders on the ridiculous, quickly and problematically moving from fact to norm, abandoning science very quickly for poorly thought through moralizing. From arguments about universal human capacities to appreciate symmetry or tonality Pinker claims priority for artworks that make use of symmetry and tonality.
After embarassingly misquoting Virginia Woolf, and fundamentally misunderstanding her views on human nature, Pinker disparages "the [then] new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades." Modernism's problem is that it allegedly denies human nature, which is a mistake because "[a]rt is in our nature--in the blood and in the bone… in the brain and in the genes… In all societies people dance, sing, decorate surfaces, and tell and act out stories."
Of course, Pinker is aware enough of how problematic his argument is to feel the need to explain the prestige of artworks (elite artworks, as I'm sure Sarah Palin would not hesitate to note) that fail to meet his Fact-Backed-Norm, and so he whips out his shopworn Bourdieu. "The conviction that artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry for status…" We are also informed that the avant-guard tendency to "sneer[] at the bourgeoisie" is
a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political value. The fact is that the values of the middle class--personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy--are good things, not bad things [as presumably postmodernists thing]. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most arrests are members in good standing who adopt a few bohemian affectations.
Humans who appreciate modernist or avant-garde artworks only pretend to do so because of an ultimately (in an evolutionarily psychological sense) cynical desire to gain acclaim and prestige (and fitter sexual partners, which is what the game often boils down to) or because we are "cross-wired" in weird ways:
As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
We can all be grateful that Pinker doesn't have his moral-circuitry cross-wired with his status-circuitry. Certainly, none of us could imagine that there is any advantage Pinker might gain (in either a proximate or ultimate sense) in condemning the menace of Sneering Sophmoric Status-Grabbing Bohemian Modernist/Postmodernist Beauty-Haters in these terms, especially since those of us who enjoy ugly artworks (how can I deny that I am a hater of schmos?) are so powerfully dominant.
It goes without much saying, especially for anyone with even a remote understanding of the history of the arts, that there is reason to be skeptical of Pinker's account of how and why we appreciate difficult and avant-garde artworks--let's break out the brain scanners, people, and prove him wrong!--but even more troubling is Pinker's not-so-tacit claim that we should appreciate art along lines he approves of.
Even for the sake of argument granting his claims, who is to say that our evolutionarily psychological status-seeking response to art is invalid or a complicated form of cynicism? As I noted in my previous post, where I discuss the attempt of neuromarketers to use brain scanners as a means of breaking through social dissemblance to understand what we really want from our advertisements, our films, and (I'm sure some day soon) our literature, Pinker's invocation of alleged aesthetic universals assumes what it needs to argue for: the superiority or desirability of the universals he celebrates.
After all, rage is a human universal, as is sickness, as is the genetic programming that leads us all inexorably toward death [2], but the fact of their universality is in no way an argument for their desirability. Indeed, given that we're all biology all the way down--our universals and our differences, our aesthetic sense and our social sense, our fated deaths and our desire to transcend death are all by Pinker's account proximately or ultimately expressions of or bound by biology [3]--we are very quickly back to square one even if we grant the validity of his argument. Pinker's rhetoric honors a certain element of our biology (universals) as authentic while granting other aspects (cultural differences, social motivations, a distaste for the popular) an almost unnatural or diabolical power, but why should we?
I would tenatively contribute to the discussion Moya has provocatively begun by suggesting that, in a sense, humans are cultural all the way down precisely because we're biological all the way down, as Pinker's errors help us see more clearly. Returning to the research that prompted Moya's parable, Kitayama argues that cultural differences are "deep," that they go "much deeper" than we previously thought, engaging in a move that might be viewed as the reverse of Pinker's (biological difference or variability seems now to be the authentic or valorized term). But what if these differences turned out to be "shallow"? What if cultural differences were actually "skin deep"? What, if anything, would follow? After all, our shallowness too would be no less biological than our depths.
(Note: This post has been slightly modified.)
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[1] I will blithely ignore the degree to which the "fundamental attribution error" should be considered an error, though I should note that Kitayama doesn't use the term.
[2] Mysteriously, in the appendix of The Blank Slate, which reproduces Donald E. Brown's list of human universals, death is not listed as a human universal, though there is an entry for "death rituals."
[3] Also, chemistry and physics and many other physical processes.
Great post, Lee. It is smart and very informative about Pinker's work, in particular the limitations of trying to talk about something as complex as artistic production in genetic, evolutionary, or biological terms. But I want to make one quick clarification to protect the innocent. The first part of the "Kitayama" quote you pull from my fairytale is a rewording of a quote by Pinker that is included in a paper by Shinobu Kitayama and Jiyoung Park. That quote is as follows:
But the bit about culture being "epiphenomenal" is my own characterization, included for dramatic effect. It may not be a completely accurate characterization. Nevertheless, I think your post does a good job of explaining how Pinker's apparent failure to adequately explore the boundary between what is universal and what is cultural (if, indeed, such a boundary can be found), or to argue for the superiority or desirability of the universals he celebrates, gives the impression that he believes culture to be, at the least, not very important as a source of human motivation, behavior, and emotion.
Finally, I am intrigued by your suggestion that "humans are cultural all the way down precisely because we're biological all the way down." I want to think about it more, but my first response is to say, yes, absolutely.
And fwiw I totally agree with Lee's take on Pinker and with your comment on it.
What Pinker fails to tell us with any level of precision is where we can find the boundary between difference and identity and what the significance of that boundary is.
And I fear that the notion of a boundary is not very helpful. That is, it is very difficult to draw a line, even a virtual one, through human behavior and practice such that culture is on one side of the line and biology on the other. But we keep talking as though something like that might be possible, as though, perhaps, human behavior was constituted by atomic particles, some being cultural and other being biological. If that were the case, then we could, at least in principle, put the cultural particles in one place, and the biological particles in another, with a clear boundary between the two piles. Behavior, alas, is not like that. As you say at the end, “humans are cultural all the way down precisely because we're biological all the way down.” So how do you draw a boundary between the one and the other?
Let me put some flesh on that by quoting from an essay review I published a few years ago, “Signposts for a Naturalist Criticism.”
What we have in these cases – color terms, romantic love, and love magic – is variation between cultures. But we have no way of drawing a boundary such that we can say, this aspect of the behavior is culture, and that aspect is biology. They’re all both biological and cultural at the same time, top to bottom.
Here’s another example:
Here there seems to be some sort of ‘boundary’. I conclude the example with this sentence: “That is to say, while the pattern of male-female difference is the same from one culture to another, the general level of aggressive behavior is strongly determined by culture.” But that’s a peculiar sort of ‘boundary.’ Similarity and difference emerge only in the cross-cultural comparison. If you take the societies one at a time, there’s nothing to tease apart.
Unfortunately I cannot offer a useful moral to these stories. It is easy to see culture everywhere, and appropriate to do so, because culture IS everywhere. Similarly, it is easy to see biology everywhere, and appropriate to do so, because biology IS everywhere. What I think is that, when we talk about the relationship between biology and culture in human life, we don’t know what we’re talking about.
I wholeheartedly agree with the gist of the comments here: that Pinker in effect bases his cultural arguments on the existence of boundaries that are, as the commentators seem to agree, either extremely hard to define or nonexistent, the culture-biology or nurture-nature boundaries being most relevant. I am of the opinion that there is a very high burden of proof upon those who claim such scientific inquiries have some specific relevance to, say, how we should talk about narrative or culture or other areas of humanistic interest. There may be significant connections--it would be quite exciting if there were--but it must be demonstrated, not asserted, and it mostly hasn't been (in my view) with much specificity.
On a tangential note, reflecting on this stimulating discussion, I am reminded of the culturalist claims of Samuel P. Huntington, who famously justified some of his chauvinistic claims not in terms of race but in terms of "civilizational identity," a concept which served as a warrant for concern in Who We Are? The Challenges to America's National Identity, a book unashamed to suggest the superiority of Christian Anglo-centrism. One response to Huntington might be to say that he is really "doing race," but I think the more disturbing possibility is that he is quite sincerely "doing culture," and that so doing can be just as problematic and chauvanistic and exclusionary and damaging to human dignity as doing race.
Terrific, and very entertaining, post, Lee. Yet reading this account of The Blank Slate—which, unlike most of Pinker's earlier popular books, I haven't read—has gotten we wondering about a basic tension in his popular writings. One of the most enchanting things about The Language Instinct, when I read it as a high-schooler, was its polemic against prescriptivist "language mavens" who attempted to impose their particular, often completely factitious norms on the variety of language use. The book also gives an inspiring sense of the variety of human language even as it gives an account of the Universal Grammar approach; in other words, Pinker's evolutionary and universalist and (as Paula's character says) "hard" scientific perspective was by no means incompatible with an even-handed enthusiasm for all varieties of language. That made me, for a while, a big Pinker-enthusiast and an avid reader of his subsequent books about cognitive science and linguistics. So it's striking that the same premises become, in his attempts to discuss the arts and culture in How the Mind Works and, it seems, in The Blank Slate, the basis for an astonishing display of parochialism. In other words, Pinker the scourge of language mavens himself turned into, or always was, a "culture maven." For him, the nature-nurture problem doesn't play out the same way in what would seem to be overlapping domains, language and culture. Though I can think of reasons why this might be, I still find it perplexing.
On the anti-prescriptivist stance, that, of course, follows from the nature of linguistics as a discipline. And, as a discipline, linguistics was second-tier until Chomsky put it on the map. That visibility pretty much 'forced' Chomsky and other linguists into anti-prescriptivist duty before the public. So, on that score, Pinker is just following the, shall we say, tradition.
On your other point, linguistics has tended to focus on syntax, rather than semantics. One can glory in syntactic multitudes without that threatening meaning. But it's pretty hard to ignore meaning in the arts.
Hi Lee, You refer in the quote below to a previous post, which I remember seeing, and which seems now to have disappeared.
I think you said something in that post about a turn toward empiricism that I wanted to look at again. Am I wrong? Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciate. Thanks, Paula
The link was supposed to refer to my previous Arcade post, "The End of Ideology (Critique)?" The link is fixed now. I wrote another post a while ago more specifically on the "empirical" turn in literary study called, "Am I Turning Empirical?"
Oh, maybe that's the one I want. Thanks!
From my perspective, the sins of whoever wrote the Kitayama/Na press release are vastly less egregious than those of Satoshi Kanazawa, whose recent blog article on Psychology Today I would like to draw your attention toward:
Quoting from the Guardian article by Nanjala Nyabola, whom I wholeheartedly agree with:
Gabriele Contessa has posted a letter she wrote to the LSE here and has suggestions for action to take regarding Kanazawa's outrageous article.
"I hope you'll join me in expressing your outrage at open racism being passed as science by e-mailing Professor Rees's PA at v.mizgailo@lse.ac.uk. (You'll receive a silly stock e-mail in return)."
David, thanks for all your recent comments, and welcome to Arcade. While I believe we all share your disgust with Kanazawa's racism and misogyny and disdain for his shoddy scholarship, discussion of his "work" seems to me to depart from discussion of the post above. Let's try and keep the threads on topic--thanks!
From my perspective, I found it incredibly relevant to the post, if anything boosting much of what Lee said. Just to quote a few bits from Lee's piece that I find perfectly reflected in Kanazawa's work:
Kanazawa clearly is ""doing race," "creating ethnic groups based on perceived physical and behavioral characteristics, associating differential power and privilege with these characteristics, and then justifying the resulting inequalities."
and "reinforcing racist narratives of essential ethnic differences."
Kanazawa's focus on beauty links to Pinker's presumption that, in Lee's words, "Humans who appreciate modernist or avant-garde artworks only pretend to do so because of an ultimately (in an evolutionarily psychological sense) cynical desire to gain acclaim and prestige (and fitter sexual partners, which is what the game often boils down to) or because we are "cross-wired" in weird ways."
And this seems *eerily* analogous to Kanazawa's prejudicial claims about beauty: "Even more troubling is Pinker's not-so-tacit claim that we should appreciate art along lines he approves of."
And so Kanazawa's focus on physical traits, and the dangers inherent in the study there, is not so different from the focus on cognitive traits and dispositions, for as Lee says, "What if cultural differences were actually "skin deep"? What, if anything, would follow? After all, our shallowness too would be no less biological than our depths."
I apologize if none of this was on topic, and I did comment on Andrew's post because I thought it was perhaps even more relevant there, but if this is not a strong example of "doing race," I confess I don't know what is. If my link to Gabriele Contessa's post was off-topic in its more explicit call to action, I apologize; it was merely my strong desire to get like-minded people involved in the fight against such work appearing in a big-name publication like Psychology Today.
I wrote to Natalia to follow-up on the issue of being "off-topic." Natalia's response to me regarding what she terms my "egregious digression" gives a number of shifting and dubious justifications.
The serious allegation of "link bombing" is utterly spurious and offensive. To accuse me of trying to raise the Guardian's and Gabriele Contessa's search engine rank is not only completely ungrounded by appearance or fact, it borders on nonsensical. It also has nothing to do with being on or off-topic. To base objections to posts on the "appearance" of their "motivations," as though such things could be easily divined in universal agreement, is the sort of hegemonic "logic" used to exclude people from discussion. Having a criterion of "complexity" for posts and comments, as though such matters could be objectively gauged, also has nothing to do with being on or off-topic. Criticisms of insufficient complexity are a cudgel of condescension, and I absolutely do not consider the Kanazawa matter (or, yes, "outrage") to be insufficiently complex to merit discussion. I do not know the reason why I am being excluded from the discussion, but I can take a hint. I will no longer be posting to Arcade.
Don't leave! Or, leave a year later. Or, two years later.
Don't leave, not just yet??!
David, I deleted Natalia's e-mail because it was clearly situated contextually as a private correspondence between the two of you, and I don't think it was fair to her for you to make it public.
From my vantage point, the off-topic-ness of your original comment was an issue of context rather than a fixed notion of what it means to be on- or off-topic. I agree that the Kanazawa article and responses to it have general relevance in terms of the issues at hand, but I do think that it would have aided the conversation if you could have talked from the very beginning about what you saw as relationships between the Kanazawa issue and Lee's post, because I don't think those relationships become apparent just by reading the Guardian article. Doing that is much more in keeping with what generally happens at Arcade.
So I for one would definitely welcome your continued presence here, and being familiar with your work in other contexts, I'm certain that you have a lot to offer the community. I certainly have no desire to exclude you, but just make you aware of some of the established conventions within the Arcade commenting community, because you're relatively new here.
I can see how the Kanazawa controversy is related to the debate about "doing race" and my commentary on Pinker's attitude toward biological universals, but I agree that posting extremely long block quotes or entire articles verbatim in comments is probably not a productive contribution to a conversation. Because of the unbounded nature of Web sites, norms in online comments sections are always decided upon through a process of negotiation, often lively and contentious negotiation; I don't see that process of negotiation as inherently exclusionary or at least not exclusionary in a bad way, but of course others might disagree.