On the whole environmental criticism is defined more by its issues and challenges than by any particular method. There is,
however, a small but striking body of work that attempts to offer an approach to literature from the viewpoint of
Darwinian evolutionary science.
1 This means to confront directly the enormous, fraught meta-contextual issues that others sometimes evade: can literature
be understood in terms of human evolution?
What
is human nature? Are there biological bases for morality, or even for aesthetic judgement? Such questions knowingly transgress
deep boundaries between the
humanities, social
sciences and natural sciences, finding such boundaries often anachronistic and misleading.
It is not just a matter of particular arguments or issues in one discipline seeming dubious when viewed from the perspective
of another, but of alleged falsities in the ways the
disciplines are constituted.
Glen Love sees thinkers in the humanities and social sciences as working ‘for the most part, as if the monumental discoveries
of
Darwin and his followers had never taken place, as if we are “above nature”’.
2 For Love this aligns ‘many humanists with creationists, backwoods school boards, and others whose efforts are devoted to
not wanting to know what is true’.
3
Evolutionary critics would argue against almost all contemporary literary criticism, seeing it as an offshoot of the now suspect
assumptions still used to differentiate the social sciences and humanities from the natural sciences. These assumptions form
the so-called
‘Standard Social Science Model’. According to this, human beings are uniquely and essentially social beings whose behaviour
and thinking are overwhelmingly determined by their cultures. The human
mind at birth is held to be a ‘blank slate’ or a general-purpose hardware awaiting the software of language and culture. This
means that cultural factors, not evolutionary ones, are what are crucial for an understanding of human behaviour. In other
words, the study of human cultures can form an autonomous discipline, independent of but not inferior to the natural sciences.
This argument seemed bolstered in the 1950s and 1960s by the success of the structural anthropology of
Claude Lévi-Strauss, with its use of the model of linguistics to study human cultures as self-contained signifying systems,
each with its rules of kinship, taboos, rituals and identity rites: ‘anthropologists saw the developing theory of structural
linguistics as providing a non-biological yet equally scientific basis for the study of culture’ (Dylan
Evans).
4 In effect, the SSSM meant that the social sciences and natural sciences could function separately and with seemingly equal
authority. The blank slate model of the human mind – the original sense, in fact, of
‘environmentalism’ – was also motivated by the felt need to reject discredited social
Darwinism, eugenics or bigoted theories of race.
Jonathan Gottschall argues that the SSSM was ‘sustained for a period of more than thirty years…as much for ideological expedience
as for its success in bringing coherence to information’.
5The debt of literary criticism to the
SSM is now usually forgotten and its basic premises or assumptions overlooked. To assume the autonomy of culture as an object
of study has become a given for almost all cultural studies and literary criticism from the 1980s till the present day, whether
mediated by work in the
Marxist tradition, the influence of
Michel Foucault on the nature of social power, or in various studies of the cultural politics of texts that map out competing
claims to ‘identity’. The assumptions of the SSSM also
legitimate current disciplinary boundaries. This is also, perhaps, why it is so hard to shift – it is built into the very
dividing walls of academic and research institutions. It remains far easier for a cultural critic to describe competing views
of some natural entity as
‘constructions’ referable exclusively to cultural and social factors, than to engage issues outside his or her expertise,
such as the evolution of the brain. Critics will happily refer to changing concepts of what they call ‘the self’ in relation
to speculations in
psychoanalysis or in ‘new
historicism’ but show no knowledge of or interest in empirical research in developmental psychology. Dylan Evans even writes
that, by erecting a huge wall between the social and the natural sciences, the SSSM creates ‘the last refuge for the shaky
creationist notion of a radical gap between
humans and other animals’.
6
It seems incontrovertible that the SSSM often works in literary criticism as a fragile and discredited
strategy of intellectual containment, and that its doctrine of human exceptionalism may have environmentally destructive consequences.
It is still very unclear, however, how to break it down. Nevertheless, rejecting the
SSSM underlies one controversial feature of such Darwinian literary criticism. This is, its need to offer, in a context in
which
culturalist arguments are widespread, some defensible account of what a universal human nature might actually be.
Joseph Carroll offers: ‘all cultures have marriage, rites of passage, social roles defined by age and sex, religious beliefs,
public ceremonies, kin relations, sex taboos, medical practices, criminal codes, storytelling, jokes, and so on’.
7 Marcus Nordlund represents the kind of broad points Darwinian critics make of the dominant assumptions of cultural and literary
criticism:
The otherwise eminent Shakespearean critic
Richard Levin gives voice to a broad consensus among literary critics with his assertion that ‘what is called romantic love
cannot be universal, natural, or essential because it is
socially constructed, and we know this because it is constructed differently in different societies’. To someone who is versed
in modern evolutionary theory, this position is bound to appear misguided since it revives an obsolete dichotomy between nature
and culture and assumes that cultural variation in a trait or behavior is sufficient evidence that it is
‘cultural’ rather than ‘natural’.
8
Evolutionary thinking has repeatedly had to rebut misreadings that its arguments involve the claim that people are totally
determined by their genetic inheritance.
9 The consensus now is rather that what distinguishes human beings among the animals is ‘the emergence of a flexible general
intelligence’, an ability ‘to adapt to variations within an environment that is itself complex and unstable’ (Joseph Carroll).
10 To recognise variability and adaptability as the distinctive human trait is already to refute the possibility of a crude
genetic determinism. As
Alison Jolley observes, ‘It no longer seems obvious that proposing biological bases for understanding human behavior leads
straight to justifying the gas chambers.’
11How have such evolutionary overviews been deployed? Joseph Carroll challenges the idea that Darwinian criticism need mean
only to identify in texts seeming universal or archetypal forms of human behaviour, thus using literature to verify the claims
of evolutionary psychology. Nevertheless, such a description does fit a lot of the work in this area.
Tony Jackson, for instance,
considers
Robert Storey's ‘evolutionary’ reading of the force of Sophocles’ drama
Antigone and the tragic conflict at work in the heroine Antigone's decision to bury her brothers in defiance of King Creon, against
whom they had rebelled. He concludes:
What Storey says seems true enough, but except for the fact that it is now backed up by evolutionary psychology, it hardly
needs to be argued for. Who would deny that Antigone's dilemma involves ‘a conflict between immediate family obligations and
obligations to civil authority’?
12
Perhaps Jackson's scepticism is inevitable. If evolutionary critics see their Darwinian constants of human nature as features of ourselves that should be immediately recognisable and (mostly) uncontentious, then any literary
reading based on observing them may be in danger of seeming to state the obvious.
In another ‘evolutionary’ reading
Marcus Nordlund writes of the sexual tension between Troilus and Cressida in
Shakespeare's play:
From the perspective of parental investment theory, it is only to be expected that the average man will be slightly more prone
to ‘idealize’ a prospective sexual partner, at least in the sexual short term, while the average woman will have a greater
incentive to prolong the courtship (which means more time for assessment and choice).
13
A difficulty many critics have with this kind of approach is legible here. If such work tests finally inadmissible barriers
between the humanities and sciences, it also suggests possible dangers in doing so too dogmatically. It is a small step from saying that male idealisation
and haste in courtship are ‘only to be expected’ in a neutral sense to morally condoning it. How far should an understanding
of biological differences inform the making of moral and critical judgements? Alternatively, are references to ‘evolution’
really functioning often as a covert moral code?
A difficulty latent here is that by setting up evolutionary science as an umpire of ultimate truth to which the readings should
ultimately refer, critics also risk denying the extent to which the science itself is split by even fundamental debates. For
instance, the presumption that all human behaviour, including art, serves some kind of evolutionary adaptive function is challenged
by arguments that some aspects of an animal's anatomy or behaviour may actually serve no purpose at all in evolutionary terms.
Steven Pinker, for instance, argues that such is the case with human art and literature themselves.
14Because the science is already in itself so contentious, evolutionary criticism can become vulnerable to claims that its use
of Darwinism as a source of intellectual authority could with more justice be called an appropriation of
selected scientific arguments for cultural/political ends. For instance, when evolutionary critics attack ‘post-structuralists’
and other alleged relativists the views they offer in response can read as effectively restatements, in superficially scientific
vocabulary, of traditional and conservative
liberal humanist defences of literature as broadening the mind by exposing it to universal values shared across the centuries,
as supposedly uniting us in a sense of shared humanity. Thus
Carroll writes that ‘the elemental dispositions of
human nature provide a common basis for understanding what is intelligible in these novels and…also what is confusing and
unsatisfactory’.
15The fragility of this critical method is also suggested by the fact that Darwinism is just as easily appropriated by critics
in the left-liberal progressive tradition, often the alleged deniers of human nature whom Carroll and others claim to refute.
Considered on the broadest scale, the theory of evolution by natural selection can also be affirmed as proving the provisional,
makeshift nature of all identities and species. The fluidity of all boundaries in biology can seem to refute at a stroke all
assertions of essence.
Timothy Morton stresses the deconstructive implications of Darwinism in proposing a
‘queer ecology’ that mocks the domination of
masculinist, heterosexual norms in modern culture. He writes:
In a sense, molecular biology confronts issues of authenticity similar to those in textual studies. Just as deconstruction
showed that, at a certain level at any rate, no text is totally authentic; biology shows us that there is no authentic life
form…All life forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’
at every level…evolution theory is anti-essentialist in that it abolishes rigid boundaries between and within species…Life
forms are liquid: positing them as separate is like putting a stick in a river and saying ‘This is river stage x’ (Quine).
16
Morton draws on Darwin's anti-essentialism to attack dogmatic claims that human nature is essentially x or y, meaning in this case especially
attitudes that inform homophobia as well as the masculinist sexual politics of some conceptions of ‘the outdoors’, or prejudices
against people with disabilities. At the same time, the intellectual jumps made in Morton's work here, from molecular biology
to a familiar social ethic, are huge ones, most defensible perhaps as answering the cultural politics of conservative Darwinists
by copying their own method of deducing ethical stances from evolutionary arguments, but to different effect.
In sum, the interest of evolutionary literary theories still lies mainly in the very perplexity of the issues they raise,
underlining the difficulty of the
space between the disciplinary lines that they attempt to cross. Overall, things seems currently to be at an impasse, a variant
of the antinomy described at the end of
Chapter 10 (‘the antinomy of environmentalist criticism’). On the one hand, the destructive narrowness of the
SSSM now seems unanswerable and its dismantling an urgent task for environmental thought. On the other hand, ecocritics who
draw on Darwinism to transcend the SSSM, whether this is
Carroll’s use of it to endorse a familiar cultural conservatism or
Morton’s to endorse an equally familiar ethos of social inclusion, are still making themselves vulnerable to the criticism
that they are using a selective interpretation of evolutionary science to bolster ethical or political positions already held
for other reasons.