Human beings are born
with big brains which grow bigger. The internal structure of those brains is
amazingly complex. But there are long traditions in philosophy and social
science which suggest that from the perspective of trying to understand how human societies and cultures are possible and why they are as they are, human beings might just as well have sawdust
between their ears. Most often, it is simply assumed that human brains are so
made as to be plastic to whatever impressions other humans try to implant there
- that is at the heart of Locke’s understanding of how humans relate to their
world. Children are blank slates onto which anything may be written. That is a
position which is also to be found in Wittgenstein.
At a slightly higher level
of sophistication or stupidity, according to taste, the twentieth century
produced leading psychologists - B F Skinner in the USA and Pavlov in the USSR
- who thought that the way to make psychology into a science was to eliminate
from its vocabulary the human mind
and to study exclusively correlations between visible inputs and visible
outputs: the visible reactions of pigeons and rats to the provision of electric
shocks or food pellets. The idiocy of this approach culminated in B F Skinner’s
Verbal Behavior (1957) which Noam
Chomsky savaged in 1959 in one of the great scientific book reviews of the
twentieth century: I was surprised to find no mention of it or of Chomsky in
Pascal Boyer’s book.
Chomsky can claim to be
a main source of inspiration for the kind of approach to culture and
society which Boyer introduces and elaborates in this excellent book. But not
the only source and the other sources Boyer explains as he goes along.
There has been the inspiration of that neo-Darwinism
which makes extensive use of game theory as a powerful theory to think with.
This approach dates back at least to John Maynard Smith’s Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982). (Maynard Smith was Professor in the university where I taught, which explains why I made some use of his work in my own 1980s doctorate on Chomskyan linguistics).
Next comes the
contribution of what we now call cognitive science which is very happy to study
human minds and to do so in close
collaboration with those more interested in artificial
minds, sharing not just vocabulary but significant theoretical assumptions
(about modularity, for example). So no one is now fazed when a theorist writes
of human minds computing results.
Then
- and perhaps not yet as well known or obvious - there is the contribution
of those theorists who have developed
sophisticated models of communication starting from the idea of intentions and
recognition of intentions rather than
from the idea of communication codes.
Finally, benefitting from these theoretical advances, observational
developmental psychology has been able to take giant steps in understanding
what young children bring to the world in which they find themselves. Wittgenstein once called the babble of the baby “nonsense”; developmental psychologists have
called him out, showing how it develops and what it is doing. Likewise, the
drawings of young children develop in reconstructible stages which have a high
degree of cross cultural universality and which - importantly - proceed independently of
surrounding visual cultures. Young children may look at adult pictures but they
do not copy them; they have their own ideas about what a picture should look like.
Boyer introduces us to
a number of old topics to which (for want of a better shorthand) cognitive
anthropology has contributed fresh understanding: tribalism, the madness of
crowds, the origins and persistence of religious belief, the family, social
justice, and - very interestingly and originally in chapter Six - limits to our own capacity
to understand our own cultures and societies. At time, Boyer is able to quote extensive research support for his arguments; at others, and as he
acknowledges, we are still at the hand waving stage - knowing roughly the
direction in which we must travel but not yet having undertaken the journey.
He makes no use of the
term meme, though he discusses its
limitations towards the end of the book, nor does he use the term learnability which I have found useful:
the things which cultures/societies present to new members as things to be
learnt can connect more or less well to unlearnt dispositions, intuitions,
computational capacities. Thus, there is quite a lot of support for the idea (for
example) that atonal music is not
learnable as a first music and that, in contrast, we are born adapted to
tonal music. Boyer adds to this an interesting
claim that there is an unlearnt ability to improve on a corrupt version of a piece of tonal music - a piece with wrong
notes etc.
At the end of his book
(pages 272-76) Boyer tries to find a way to exit us from the endless debates
about Nature and Culture by claiming that his new paradigm transcends that folk psychology / folk sociology opposition. I
am not convinced his argument succeeds though I can see why it would be
politically helpful for it to do so. All of Boyer’s arguments depend on the
idea that as a result of very long term neo-Darwinian evolution human beings
are born quite well equipped or adapted in specific manners to make sense of
and be able to operate in the worlds in which they are most likely to find
themselves - there is an unpleasant duty upon researchers to paint the picture
of those terrible worlds in which this will not be true. That adaptation helps explain how and why our social and cultural worlds are as they are.
But that idea of
pre-adaptation just is a theory of human
nature, even though it is primarily a theory about the human mind as something which shows trans-historical and
cross-cultural uniformities and has little or nothing to do with blood or bodies or IQ. But
the idea, even made that clear, is anathema to the Wittgensteinian cultural
apologists, the social constructionists, and the politically correct. They may
not (probably will not) understand that the theory is one which is interested
in what humans have in common, not what differentiates them. They will just
hear the word “Nature” and reach for their guns. Maybe it’s time to face up to
the challenge rather than try to make it go away.
