It’s all sex and survival to me

I couldn’t help myself. The more I read of Denis Dutton’s book, The Art Instinct: Art, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury Press, 2009), the more I kept thinking of two jokes.

The first treats of a guy who is obsessed with golf. It’s all he talks about, all he ever wants to watch on TV. Every moment he’s not at work he’s either thinking about golf or golfing. His obsession was destroying his marriage, so his wife convinced him to go to a psychiatrist. Early in his treatment the psychiatrist took him through a round of Rorschach tests, to every one of which he would reply with something golf-related: “That’s the dogleg on the 9th hole at the club.” “That looks like a pitching wedge in a mirror.” And so forth.

At last the doctor replied, “Sir, I’m afraid your wife is right; you have a serious and dangerous obsession with golf.” To which the man replied, “Hey, I don’t know why you’re picking on me. You’re the one showing me the golf stuff!”

Denis Dutton is an excellent and well-informed writer. He is vastly more familiar with his topic – the arts – than I am, and he offers some valuable insights into how the arts work and why they matter.

But Mr. Dutton is a committed evolutionist, which means that, no matter where he looks in an attempt to make sense of art and beauty, it comes out sex and survival. According to Mr. Dutton, the human propensity to create things beautiful must be explained in terms of “the Pleistocene itself – the evolutionary theater in which we acquired the tastes, intellectual features, emotional dispositions, and personality traits that distinguish us from our hominid ancestors and make us what we are…” Art is a response to those places and spaces most likely to have provided food and safety, or those acts of creativity likely to have impressed potential mates. Repeated gestures of an artistic nature, prompted by innate drives for sex or survival, in time became ingrained in the gene pool. All of the history, variety, wonder, ubiquity, and multiplicity of the arts can be traced back to this. Really.

Part of human nature
Mr. Dutton is correct in seeing the inclination to art as part of human nature itself (he even slips and uses the word, “soul” to refer to this). But his explanation is strictly materialistic, rooted in primitive behaviors supposedly inherited and refined through the transmission of genes. All this is driven by sex and survival; but why survival should be a preferred outcome of genetic development is not explored here. Nor do evolutionists in general question the reasonableness of preferring survival over extinction. Why creatures should struggle to pass on their genes and survive as a species is accepted as an assumption that needs no explanation. Everybody knows it’s better to survive than to perish. But why? And what does “better” mean, since, in the end, everyone dies anyway?

As should be expected, Mr. Dutton’s evolutionary framework is set forth with sweeping assertions and complete confidence. Events of the Pleistocene, subsequent development in brain function and species adaptation, and the outflow of the arts from this mix – generously seasoned with time and chance – are presented as proven planks in a theory of the arts free of faith convictions.

The most helpful chapter in Mr. Dutton’s book is chapter 3, “What is Art?” His explanation of what constitutes true art and what are the distinguishing attributes by which we may both identify and begin to assess the arts is quite useful. No effort is made to connect this framework to evolutionary necessity, unless we count ubiquity and durability as indicators of evolutionary progress and development. These factors reveal the nature of the human inclination to the arts, and help us to define a kind of consensus on what constitutes art as societies of various places and times have determined.

Making the connection
According to the Darwinian view, the arts developed strictly out of a need for survival or reproduction. Quality of life, simple delight, or an unexplainable inner urge to create simply for creativity’s sake have no place at all in understanding the nature and function of art. Mr. Dutton insists, “a Darwinian aesthetics will achieve explanatory power neither by proving that art forms are adaptations nor by dismissing them as by-products but by showing how their existence and character are connected to Pleistocene interests, preferences, and capacities.” It is difficult to see, however, how such a connection can be infallibly achieved.

But Mr. Dutton would say, Of course, that connection cannot be infallibly achieved, nor is it necessary to do so. He would say that such connections depend “on historical accidents we shall never fully know and prehistoric conditions about which we can only speculate imperfectly”. For something we can “never fully know” and about which “we can only speculate imperfectly” Mr. Dutton has written some rather confident words. He presents his view of the arts, not as a theory but as a fact, as the best and perhaps only explanation for human aesthetic ability. But he fails to highlight the faith dimension to his position to which he refers in passing; he mentions it only as a kind of insignificant inevitability.

Room for faith
But since we are operating in the realm of faith here – as, indeed, all science, to some extent, must operate (cf. Nicholas Wolsterstorff and Michael Polanyi, among others) – perhaps there would be room for another “faith” position to offer its own explanation for the arts. The Christian view of the arts agrees with Mr. Dutton about humankind’s inherent bent toward aesthetics, but explains this not by a repertoire of behaviors deriving from a need to reproduce and survive, but from the image of God in which all humans are created, and the gift of God of artistic ability and appreciation. This is a position Christians accept by faith; but it is one which, accepted by generations of Christian artists, has produced some of the greatest art that history has known. Mr. Dutton dismisses all “religious” views and faith perspectives as of no consequence – except, of course, his own “faith” position.

A little tightening-up
I cannot imagine the late Andrew Wyeth, for example, nodding assent to so sweeping an assertion as this statement of Mr. Dutton’s, made concerning fiction, but applied, in context, to the arts in general: “A thoroughgoing Darwinism makes a specific demand: nothing can proposed as an adaptive function of fiction unless it explains how the human appetite for fictional narratives acted to increase, however marginally, the chances of our Pleistocene forebears surviving and procreating.”

The Art Instinct is not without value for understanding and growing in our appreciation of the arts. Later chapters deal with specific examples of the arts and seek to explain how certain forms and expressions achieve higher degrees of artistic success than others. But I find Mr. Dutton’s evolutionary explanation for the arts smug, simplistic, unconvincing, and requiring rather more faith than that incentive which has guided Christian artists from the unknown catacomb artists of the early Church through the iconographers, cross-carvers, chant composers, and manuscript illuminators of the Middle Ages, to Dürer, Rembrandt, Bach, Milton, Cowper, Mendelssohn, Hopkins, Milosz, Wilbur, and more: made in God’s image, gifted by God’s grace, and grateful for God’s abundant goodness, Christian artists created in order to praise Him and bless their fellow men.

The other joke is a cartoon I saw in The New Yorker (I think) some years ago. Two scientists are standing in front of a large black board. One side of the board is filled with numbers, signs, functions in parentheses, and mathematical symbols – row upon row in a single equation. The other side is filled with the same sort of thing. Separating them is an equal sign, under which the scientist holding the chalk has written, “Here, a miracle occurs.” To which his colleague responds, “I think you’ll need to tighten things up a bit here.”

Before Denis Dutton convinces this lover of the arts that a Darwinian explanation is anything other than a best guess based on shaky presuppositions and blindly-held assumptions, he’s going to have to tighten the argument up a bit.

T. M. Moore is Principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe (www.myparuchia.com) and Dean of the BreakPoint Centurions (colsoncenter.org). Sign up to receive his daily devotionals, Crosfigell, at MyParuchia.com, ViewPoint at colsoncenter.org, and Pastor to Pastor, at worldviewchurch.org.