We might then look at the situation more closely at possible moral systems, and assess them for their survival-effectiveness. We can say, for instance, that a certain species has an inclination towards certain things, a disinclination towards other things, it produces a certain amount of offspring per mother, and so on. A successful moral system, then, is taken initially to be one which holds all these inclinations and disinclinations, and a number of other factors, in such a balance that allows the species to survive. An even more successful system is one which allows an even more complete thriving of the species. With this in mind we can very quickly rule out any moral system which contains a universal inclination towards indiscriminate killing, since there is no other inclination or factor which can cancel out the effect of this. If all members of the species only think about killing, we can be certain that, even with some protective instincts to counter this, the balance will always be in favour of the killing, and therefore it is an unsustainable instinct.

Even if we limit the indiscriminate killing to a smaller section of the population, there is no clear way to counter its effects. Let’s say that it is only the males that have the indiscriminate killing instinct. Unless the females are considerably stronger than the males, the killing instinct will clearly triumph. However, if the female is indeed considerably stronger, then it is reasonable to suppose that evolution will weed out the killing instinct soon enough, since it is literally useless (in that it is never used). This last point, I think, is made even more certain when we consider the dimension of sexual selection. It is not absurd, in itself, that the females will choose a male partner that kills indiscriminately (since we are assuming such an instinct is there anyway, so they have no choice), but equally, given that we are assuming that the females have a protective instinct (otherwise their superior strength would not be an issue), it would be unreasonable for them to choose the indiscriminate killer over the doting father (or the slightly less indiscriminate killer). If that last point requires a modicum of intelligence on the part of the female, then we can at least assert that those couples that don’t contain a killer will have a greater rate of survival than otherwise, and so in due course an instinctive aversion in the female towards these killers will develop.

What if only the females are indiscriminate killers? This seems even more unlikely than the previous alternative, since presumably the females will have a level of protectiveness over their offspring. The same arguments apply, however: if the male is considerably stronger than the female, the instinct would be rendered useless and thus be eradicated, and if the female is stronger, then there is nothing to stop it killing its own young.

We can say with some certainty, then, that an instinct for indiscriminate killing, whether in all of the species or only in one sex, would never survive the pressures of natural selection, and thus, in a possible perfect moral system, indiscriminate killing cannot exist. So far, so obvious, as we have only dealt with killing, which has obvious effects on survival. But in coming posts we’ll take a look at other inclinations, like those towards stealing, raping, saving another’s life, believing in God, and so on.

To be continued.

After all, your sense of who you are is so fundamental that it is hard to imagine being challenged on it. If everybody I knew began simultaneously to deny that I was David and insist that I was in fact G. K. Chesterton, my reason would tell me that I have two choices: either they are all right, in which case I am mysteriously mistaken, or there is some strange plot afoot in which everybody is conspiring. It is hard to say which you would be more likely to believe. Probably, most of us are inclined to doubt any sort of conspiracy theory. But when the conspiracy theory is more believable than the idea that your mind is playing such consistent tricks on you, clearly this must give us pause.

The article cites an example, quoted by Voltaire, of a man named Simon Morin who claimed to be Christ. He was introduced to someone else who claimed to be “God the Father”, and was instantly struck by his own folly in calling himself Christ. “Mon dieu!”, he must have thought. “This man is clearly mad, but I am doing the same thing!” This moment of clarity was short-lived, and very soon he returned to his prior conviction—inevitably to be burnt at the stake for blasphemy in 1663. It is clear in such a case that rationality can coexist with such delusion. It entered the fray when he realised he was mistaken, and presumably he merely found some rational basis on which to return to his “comfort zone”.

Perhaps we can extrapolate from such cases some general principles about how identity can conflict with rationality even in one who possesses both. Although I fret to call religious believers delusional, perhaps a similar law of nature is to be found in their case. Pure rationality is highly unlikely to lead to the conclusion that God exists, and still less so to the conviction that he exists. And yet, most religious believers are perfectly rational, and can very easily separate this rationality from their firm belief in whatever it is they are supposed to believe. Religious belief, then, may not really be belief at all, but actually identity. The notion that religious believers are supposed to believe is so closely tied with the religious identity that to lose such a “belief” appears to be inseparable from the loss of identity.

In such a context, then, it may be futile to sway theists away from their beliefs by rational argumentation alone. A more effective strategy (if you’re inclined to such things) is first to acquire a better understanding of what constitutes one’s sense of identity, and then to look into ways that people have been weaned away from their false identity in the past.

The analogy between the three Christs of Ypsilanti and theists is, of course, not wholly precise. Differences abound. If I believed I were G. K. Chesterton, I am hardly likely to look too kindly on those who doubted me, any more than I would if they doubted that I am in fact who I am. But religious believers are, on the whole, perfectly fine with the idea that there are those who don’t believe. Theism is generally taught rather than chanced upon by the individual—again, this isn’t the case with those who believe they are Christ. So if they are both delusions of the same kind, there is a clear difference in degree.

Rokeach acknowledged that some of the methods employed in his research were manipulative, and indeed that even despite taking these liberties, he did not come up with much that was genuinely new. Yet it seems to me that further research in this area is crucial if we are to truly understand the workings of the religious mind. The possible connection between religious belief and delusion, however, would likely be too politically contentious to garner much in the way of financial support. If that’s the case, it would be terrible for science.

I just took a look at Sam Harris’s now-slightly-infamous TED talk (above), and had a little flick through a subsequent piece in the Huffington Post, and was rather interested in what he had to say. Interested, because I had thought it was the cast-iron consensus among educated peoples to speak of morality in relative terms, or at the very most to concede that it is such a difficult subject that we can’t reasonably hope to get to the bottom of it. Even if this were the correct view, I have always thought it a somewhat frustrating one—if you cannot prove you are right, on what basis can you assert that you are right? Clearly, relativists must think this too, but opt for a different route at the fork.

Harris’s thesis is similar to one I very vaguely formulated myself a little while back, and centres around the idea of mental states. He asserts that there are—to put it crudely—good mental states and bad mental states. A good moral action, then, is one that results in a good moral state. Clearly, this is not an assertion that can be made without much qualification, and he goes to great pains to do so. Mapping out all possible states would be a gargantuan, and probably impossible, task. If it is impossible, it will be because there are literally an infinite number of possible distinguishable states. Eating ice cream while at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street on a sunny day produces a different state than doing the same thing at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 33rd on the same day, even if both are pleasurable.

If we imagine a “family tree” of possible mental states, such that each state requires for its achievement some combination of having experienced certain other states and a certain “brain structure”, we might get some idea of the possibilities of experience. Such a family tree can be asserted without any recourse to morality at all: it’s just a scientifically described set of possible experiences. No single one of these mental states could be equated with happiness, but rather there will be a certain set (perhaps infinitely large) of states that all belong to the group “happiness”, and there will be certain common features of this group such that if a new member were to be discovered, it could be easily identified as such. Most importantly, we may also be able to assert (and this can in principle be empirically tested) that a certain mental state, or more precisely a certain set of mental states (e.g. happiness or regret) may be out of reach for a certain person with a certain brain structure. Such an assertion would provide an obvious way to deal with an obvious objection—the objection being, “what if a madman finds contentment in evil deeds?”; the retort being, “madmen are incapable in principle of being content”.

Clearly, the origins of our potential for behaving morally—our empathy, our sense that all humanity is fundamentally the same, and our reason—arise from the complex tale of our evolutionary past. With this in mind, it seems to me that if we intend to draw the family tree of sets of possible mental states, we can only then assert with some measure of impartiality the superiority of one state over another if we understand their origins. So we can say that mental state Z439126H, which is a member of the “happiness” set (which in turn we can give a completely nondescript name so that its appellation provokes no controversy), arises because the circumstances that attend it are good for the survival of the genes that make up Homo sapiens. Similarly, we can say that mental state Y129087A, which corresponds to the feeling that a madman gets on committing a particular evil deed, is not connected with a state of affairs that promotes the survival of the genes of Homo sapiens. So we can claim that Z439126H is superior to Y129087A from the evolutionary perspective.

This leads us into an apparent conundrum, because there is no obvious reason to say that the evolutionary foundation is a good one for morality. But there are many assumptions which we make in ordinary life, which we all agree on, and which none of us feels the need to justify. We all agree that the proverbial table and chair exist, and it would be silly to have to prove this in order to prove some larger point. However, the evolutionary foundation is not so experientially self-evident as the existence of solid objects. Even if most reasonable people believe that we are the product of evolution, nevertheless it has not yet been proven beyond doubt that evolution has conspired to make us moral.

Perhaps the most we can ever say, then, is that the general survival of the species is the fountain from which all our behaviours spring. When our instincts do not work to this end (even in some indirect way), then there is something functionally wrong with them. Now it might be objected that from this point of view there is nothing really wrong with killing one person, since this is pretty negligible compared to the six billion people on earth. However, if we were not repulsed by murder, this would mean that our own gene-preserving instincts would be diminished, and humanity would be slightly the worse for it.

Sam Harris has made a bold first step in producing the case for a science of morality. But people have not yet converted en masse, and that is largely because such a science is in its very inchoate stages. In the near future, the instruments currently at our disposal will seem positively blunt, and we may well be able to talk in vastly more precise terms than we can now. At the moment, an objective morality only feels like a safe bet, but it cannot yet be asserted without very reasonable arguments to the contrary.

More information can be found here and here.

Suppose that someone very dear to you was tragically killed. Your natural reaction would almost certainly be extreme grief and probably anger towards the guilty party. But suppose further that God descended to give you the following message: “you are not to grieve, nor to be angry at the killer, since it was I who ordered him to do what he did. It was for the greater good.” You then have two choices: you take God at his word, thus conceding that morality is relative; or you take a stand and say that God is objectively wrong, thus conceding that you think morality, whether objective or not, does not come from God.

(As an aside, suppose that you are the killer doing God’s will. What do you make of the position that God’s plan put you in?)

This is not substantially different from the all-part-of-God’s-great-plan case. Many theists simply posit that the Haitian earthquake was part of a masterplan, without any idea at all of what that masterplan might be. This kind of view can only be followed by a wad of theological interpretation, none of which can be conclusive. And even though God might exist and might have a grand plan, nonetheless it would be decidedly unhealthy, if faced with the hypothetical situation above, to console yourself with the idea that this plan evidently trumps both the value of people’s lives and any meaning that life might have.

South Park recently aired two episodes in which the prophet Mohammed is depicted—or, perhaps more accurately, not-depicted. The conceit is that the litigious celebrities who have been the butt of the comedy series’ jokes want access to Mohammed so that they can take his “goo”, which would mean that they would acquire the Power To Not Be Ridiculed. At one point, Mohammed is supposedly ferried around in a bear suit (to avoid accusations of depicting him—though this makes no sense within the reality of the show itself), but it is revealed that in fact it is Santa Claus in the suit. This, of course, cleverly anticipates any extremist reaction: Mohammed was not represented as a bear, nor even as being dressed as a bear, yet there will still be controversy around his role in the episodes. At other times, Mohammed is covered with a giant “CENSORED”. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, its creators, have hinted that Comedy Central have censored more than was intended. The extent of this is unknown, but it seems certain that the censoring of Mohammed was deliberate on Matt and Trey’s part, since when Mohammed’s goo is transferred to Tom Cruise, the recipient is censored as well. The comment is clearly on the seeming arbitrariness of who can be made fun of.

So far the only reaction to South Park’s not-depiction of Mohammed has been from a fringe group based in New York, making liberal use of the freedom of speech they would deny to others. Of course, when Mohammed has been directly represented in the recent past, the reactions have been considerably less muted. Not only have there been death threats, but actual murders as well; and although this reaction has hardly ever been condoned, there are many in the more politically correct quarters of the West who have pinned the blame on those to whom the violence was directed, arguing for the respect that they say religion deserves. But clearly such a violent reaction is not warranted even if Islam was clear that illustrations of Mohammed are sacrosanct.

The Qur’an contains absolutely nothing about depicting Mohammed. It is only the Hadith, most of which came several hundred years after Mohammed’s death, that discuss this—one of them bans all depictions of living creatures outright, and another merely says that such illustrations are not to be encouraged, but does not decree that those found guilty are to be punished. The major reason it is widely considered wrong to depict Mohammed, especially among the Sunni majority of Muslims, is that it might encourage idolatry. This might be fair enough within the Islamic world, but is clearly absurd to apply outside of it. After all, non-believers cannot make themselves any more guilty of non-belief or idolatry by drawing pictures. But if the justification behind fatwas against depicters of Mohammed is based in the Hadith, then clerics would have to issue fatwas against all those who draw pictures of living creatures—a crime which virtually every person on earth is guilty of.

As is usually the case with the more extremist sections of the Muslim community, many of the ideas they are so convinced of are far more modern than they would have us believe, and have their origins in human invention that is clearly separate from the holy texts. Mohammed has been visually depicted many times in the past, both by Muslims and non-Muslims, presumably without a word spoken of blasphemy. The following are a few examples:

The Investiture of Ali at Ghadir Khumm, MS Arab 161, fol. 162r, AD 1309/8 Ilkhanid manuscript illustration.

A 16th century Persian miniature painting with a veiled Muhammad's ascent into the Heavens, a journey known as the Miraj.

Muhammad's Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation; leaf from a copy of the Majmac al-tawarikh (Compendium of Histories), ca. 1425; Timurid. From Herat, Afghanistan. In The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The second of these, given that the painter saw fit not to include any facial detail, is the only one to betray an element of ambivalence about depicting Mohammed, but it is a depiction nonetheless, and it is in the minority.

Reasoning with extremists is clearly impossible. Once groups like Revolution Muslim have been convinced that visual depictions of Mohammed are the height of blasphemy, and that threatening (or not-so-subtly hinting at) death to those who do so is perfectly moral, not even the wisest, most knowledgeable scholar of Islam could convince them otherwise. More responsible Muslims, though, should do far more to promote a good, unbiased understanding of Islam, both in the West and in the Muslim world, than they are currently doing: only a truly concerted effort will prevent the fear that presently accompanies something so basic as freedom of speech, and, consequently, the feeling of persecution experienced by many Muslims in the West.

Captions borrowed from Wikipedia.

“People, it’s time to tell the truth! This is a great crime! A conspiracy of Tusk, Obama and Putin!” Thus shouted one man through a loudspeaker in Warsaw when the coffin of Maria Kaczyńska, the Polish president’s wife, was being carried through the streets. In itself, this was unusual—if not necessarily the theory expounded, at least the public voicing of it in such a time of national mourning—but what followed was perhaps even more so. A white-shirted member of the public pleaded with the man to calm down, put away the loudspeaker, kneel on the ground and pray to God for forgiveness. The bewitched conspiracy theorist did so, after which he silently left the scene of the crime, loudspeaker in hand.

One wonders at the level of conviction necessary to leave one’s home, loudspeaker in hand, and brave the grieving crowd, surely aware all along that they none of them would agree with you, and finally to shout at the top of one’s voice. But such a thing is a relative commonplace in history. It is curiouser still to speculate on the lone protester’s thoughts when the man asked that he pray, and then during the prayer itself. Could he have been embarrassed? It seems that such a feeling must not register in the mind of one with such conviction. Most of us would be terribly embarrassed at spouting absurdities through a loudspeaker in the first place. But something must have engendered in him this apparently drastic a change of heart.

Poland’s identity is defined perhaps more than that of any other nation by its historical state of exile. The national anthem goes, “Poland is not yet lost, while we still live”. This was composed in 1806, while Poland had no official statehood, divided as it was among the hungry imperial powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia. The words have not lost their relevance since then: after gaining independence, there was only a very brief window before the Nazi invasion, followed by half a century of Soviet rule, during which time a “government in exile” resided in London more as a symbol of continuity than a wielder of any real power. For most of modernity, the Polish people have been in exile from statehood, but kept a strong identity in other ways. Roman Catholicism was one of them. The Solidarity movement, arguably, may not have happened if it wasn’t for the leadership of Pope John Paul II, who spoke soon after his accession to rapturous crowds. Many of those who came to hear him speak or watched on television imagined that the pope spoke directly to them, and recall that moment as a turning point in their political awareness. The social glue of Catholicism, so often a conservative and unbending force, now became a crucial catalyst for change.

As in so many Catholic nations, many of its citizens hold their religious identity even while disbelieving. Perhaps it is hypothesising too far to suggest that the man with the loudspeaker was, in a cultural sense, deeply Catholic, and that it was his Catholicism that caused him, more efficiently than common sense would have, to see the fruitlessness of his tirade. Perhaps it is overanalysing to suggest that his Catholicism made him see that there is more that unifies the Polish people than residential coincidence. Perhaps so. But if such a theory is true of any nation, it must be of Poland.

Source: here.

The main object of his ire is secular liberalism, or some combination of philosophical liberalism and secularism. He lumps this together with radical Islamism, because, “while Islamist terrorism seeks the outright dissolution of that [social] texture, such liberalism merely allows it to unravel, but the result may be much the same: an atomism that destroys effective solidarity.” This can hardly be called an argument: he only appeals to our more conservative fear of slippery slopes, hardly addressing the precise way in which liberalism really leads to the dissolution of the social fabric. When he does attempt to provide us with evidence to support his view, it is tenuous at best, and ironically fails by the standards it uses to judge its opposite. For instance, he claims that the theoretical tradition of secular liberalism is that of “thought-experiments by ratiocination”, which, he says, is always inclined to deny history and particularity. If he means that it is inclined to deny the particularities of different religious beliefs, then equally Fr Nichols seems to deny the particularity of non-religious attitudes in general, and implies that all history is defined, to a greater or lesser degree, by its religion. Even if there is some truth to his accusation, then it can only be claimed of the present manifestation of secular liberalism, and not the thing in itself, because it seems rather obvious that thought-experiments, if they are to tell us anything of value, should certainly take particularity into account.

The real crux of his argument, though he never explicitly names it, is that morality is difficult if not impossible without God, and that in our modern godless societies there is no permanence to any moral views we might hold. He says:

But once we see that we posit values, we also see that we can equally “unposit” them. They thus lose all authority for us. So, far from giving meaning to our lives, thinking of what is important to us in terms of values shows that our lives have no intrinsic meaning. As long as we think in terms of value positing rather than being gripped by shared concerns, we will not find anything that elicits our commitment… “No one dies for mere values.”

Of course it is true that if we can posit a value, we can equally unposit it. But it is disingenuous to imply that this is impossible in the religious sphere, and dangerous to imply that the freedom to unposit is not a good thing. A theologian can easily and consistently take issue with, say, the claim that we are all born with original sin. Is this pragmatically any different from unpositing a value? Both beliefs, when taken to their proper limits, lead to very different lives and attitudes, yet neither has superior claim to being truly Christian. Indeed, one can change scriptural interpretations many times in a life, and yet consistently call themselves religious, because they are genuinely grappling with the text. If one of these interpretations, however, leads to some dissolution in the social fabric, are we right to say this person is no longer really religious?

This is not to dismiss Fr Nichols’ serious claim that the lack of some ethical and philosophical consensus, other than a very soft and vague one, is a potential cause of social disunity and may even, as he strongly asserts, be the cause of “the descent of our young into the miasma of drink and drugs.” But Fr Nichols can hardly be said to have put forward a practical solution to this problem. After all, by his rationale, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism are just as effective cures as is Christianity.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection [...]

Undoubtedly, the machinery of culture is a complex thing, and much of Shakespeare might not have been written without Tyndale’s Bible, which obviously could not have been written without the Bible itself, and may have been radically different if not for the spirit of reformation in the Europe of the day. It is also undoubtedly true that Shakespeare would not have been quite the same Shakespeare had he been born thirty years earlier or later. But to reduce his role, as Emerson seems to do, to that of the man who gave the final tug on the final stone of the Great Pyramid, is greatly to misconceive the nature of genius. The bard stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton did, but those giants were not so different for Shakespeare than they were for Marlowe or for Jonson, yet those two, as brilliant as they were, paled in comparison. All writers since Shakespeare have him to add to the list of cultural progenitors, but there has not yet been anyone who can seriously challenge his position at the top of the canon.

Emerson’s problem seems to be a misconception of the nature of originality. Of Chaucer, he says that “he steals by this apology,—that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it.” Chaucer and Shakespeare were indeed liberal borrowers, yet it’s no contradiction to say that they were also highly original. If Shakespeare is called unoriginal for his theft of the story of Amleth and its reuse in Hamlet, then what are we to make of the fact that the Prince of Denmark is nowhere to be found in his forebear? Indeed, if we are to believe Harold Bloom, Hamlet is one of the most original creations in all fiction—one who is not only unprecedentedly new in literature, but also in life. Emerson might retort that this originality is still just a clever reappropriation and rejigging of ideas that existed before—and no one could doubt the truth of that. But then, there is no such thing as ex nihilo originality anyway, and only ever a persuasive illusion of it. As original as Homer is, there is nothing in the Iliad or the Odyssey that did not in some form or other exist before. By this logic, though, human beings are not particularly original creations of nature, because the bare subatomic particles necessary for our existence were there since the Big Bang.

One gets the sense throughout the piece that Emerson has a barely concealed agenda: that of explaining his own genius to the world. He would like his contemporaries to see what he is so convinced of; but, he despairs, “you cannot see the mountain near.” He says of Shakespeare’s genius that “it took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.” Perhaps this is true, but then Ben Jonson did write of Shakespeare that “he was not of an age, but for all time.” Even if Jonson believed he was his rival’s superior, this is hardly the sort of thing one says just to fill a few lines in the preface to the First Folio.

Shakespeare, says Emerson, “was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand.” (My italics.) In other words, Emerson would have us think that Shakespeare really was quite similar to himself, but where the Stratford poet chose drama, the Concord poet chose the essay, each as easily and arbitrarily as the other. Suppose Shakespeare had found essays in the mode of Montaigne next at hand, would he have taken to them as successfully? It seems likelier that he relied on the form and the distance of a narratorless narrative to give full vent to his brain’s exhaling thoughts and images.

Perhaps Emerson suffers an anxiety of influence in relation to Shakespeare, in his sense of himself as a poet and as a genius. If there is one thing that we all know of Shakespeare, it’s that we know hardly anything about him. But Emerson insists that,

so far from being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentlemen has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

I think as highly as Emerson of Shakespeare’s wisdom, but fail to see his point here. I would, in fact, ask the opposite of all these rhetorical questions. When we see a performance of King Lear, or read Measure for Measure, we don’t really learn anything at all, other than about human nature—although it’s probably more correct to say that we are sensitised to it, and our imaginations are expanded to embrace parts of it whose existence we never dared picture. Clearly, it is Emerson who would like to be the sage who was wiser than all sages, and the Talma who could instruct all Napoleons.

Even if it is true that Shakespeare really did settle all points of morals and manners, that still does not tell us much about the man’s personality. That is rather akin to saying “we know for certain that Shakespeare was a great writer, therefore we do indeed know something about him—he must have been a sensitive man, and he must have been the sort of person who takes writing seriously.” A man’s knowledge or talent tells us only a bare minimum about the man himself. Believers contend that God is omnipotent and omniscient, but that tells us nothing about where he stood on the Christological debate in the early years of the church, what his favourite colour is, or what he likes to do in his spare time.

But Emerson does also say the following:

The Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new, who sees the works, and ask in vain for a history. Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

So on the one hand, Shakespeare draws up the ladder after him, and on the other, he is the most thoroughly known of all authors, because we have heard his pronouncements on everything of any import. What are we to make of this apparent contradiction?

Perhaps Emerson means to tell us that we can’t get at the workings of Shakespeare’s mind, but that that is immaterial given our knowledge of what his mind was able to produce? But that still seems a little unsatisfactory. Aristotle may be said to be the first universal man, but the fact that his abilities were so varied in itself tells us nothing about the man, other than that his abilities were so varied. It would seem to follow by force of reason that, if we hear a man’s pronouncements on everything, we might know something of his views, because many facts are correct opinions, no matter how much controversy they might court. And so if there is a correct opinion to be had about whether monarchy is the best form of government, Shakespeare might have expressed it in the Henriad, say—yet we glean nothing from it on the matter. If there is a correct opinion to be had about the best action of a king, he might have expressed it in King Lear—but we are none the wiser. The fact is that if we happen to find such “pronouncements”, these are incidental to Shakespeare’s truest interest in human nature. And on this Shakespeare hardly ever pronounces at all, he merely shows. Who is to know what Shakespeare’s stance was on the conduct of Macbeth? Surely we cannot argue that Shakespeare uses the play to remind us all that murder is wrong and that it leads to terrible consequences for those who do it—we hardly need High Shakespearean tragedy for that. Indeed, the opposite might be argued. As Nietzsche says in Daybreak (section 240), “Whoever thinks that Shakespeare’s theatre has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy.”

One wonders whether the idea of Shakespeare’s inscrutability has not been rather overplayed by those who have written about him. The fact that he created such diverse personalities almost necessarily implies that it’s difficult to get at the man himself. But this inscrutability is due in very large part to a combination of historical factors—the sparse personal records, the cultural flowering of the period (which meant that minds were opened), and enough censorship to make a pragmatic writer scared to express controversial opinions—as well as to the plays and poems. If some significant discovery were to be made tomorrow about Shakespeare’s life, or if his correspondence were to be found beneath the floorboards of his Stratford house, it would very likely throw the plays in a different light, and we would probably see which of his characters was closest to him. Suddenly all those who desire easy explanation of the plays will be gorged on interpretive possibilities—but even if the plays will continue to defy such explanation, the man himself will not have escaped the Evil Eye of historical evidence.

Emerson’s ambivalence about the knowability of Shakespeare’s soul suggests a deeper ambivalence about the position of his own genius in relation to posterity. It is a perennial myth of Western civilization (and perhaps elsewhere too) that genius is mysterious and unfathomable. Emerson, therefore, had to remain so, whilst also being a full man who liked to talk, and who liked to pronounce his opinions on everything of import. Such a balance is hard to strike, to say the least—and perhaps explains the inscrutability, and even incoherence, of much of his writing.

Jonathan Gottschall, in a piece for the Boston Globe, wrote about how new modes of literary analysis are becoming ever more popular in the academy and beginning to excavate revelations that traditional criticism would not be able to. But the techniques he describes, as fascinating as they are as far as they go, are nevertheless quite limited, and apparently amount to a statistical analysis of a text or multiple texts. As he says, one can find out, perfectly objectively, that Western literature is no more sexist than non-Western literature. Female characters are six times as likely to be described with reference to their attractiveness than male characters—a ratio that holds in all literature, regardless of its place of origin. This is no doubt a fascinating statistic, though I wonder whether this is actually an anthropological insight, and not really a literary one. Gottschall would no doubt agree that the pervasiveness of this six-to-one ratio is not enough in itself to decide decisively on the matter of which literature is more sexist, if any. What is needed is a far more precise understanding of sexism, and this is something that statistics alone cannot provide. If such analysis is the only route that a possible literary science can take, then it can hardly be called a science at all, since we are still using our pre-conceived, subjective judgements to hew our understanding of the facts.

But then we are walking through a very misty forest here. What is needed is a better understanding of what a literary science will achieve. And surely there is no goal more sought after in the field than the holy grail of literary greatness—what is its nature, and is it possible for anyone to achieve so long as they know the relevant rules? David Cope, the creator of EMI, a computer program that can compose its own music in the style of any given musician, has shown that non-genius computers can make more than passable original creations which garner praise even from experts on Mozart and Beethoven. Indeed, some were fooled into thinking that the Mozart-like pieces really were by Amadeus Wolfgang, albeit far inferior to his masterpieces. A new edition of his software, called Emily Howell, even composes music that’s not influenced by any given composer—though of course they cannot escape the influence of Cope’s algorithms. Cope has not yet created a musical genius, but he has shown us that the traditional treatment of artists as divine, transcendent beings is a mythic balloon that can be burst, as long as we don’t tread too carefully for fear of the charge of iconoclasm.

As scientific as Cope’s approach is and must necessarily be, he presumably bases his program on his own ideas of musical beauty, and this is a limiting factor. If there is one thing that great artistic geniuses can be guaranteed to do, it is to find new ways of achieving beauty that do not appear to be subject to the previously accepted laws. So a true science of art in general cannot escape the root of art—that is, the human brain itself. Man is the measure of all things, as a certain sophist once said; and that is true, though perhaps not so far as it leads to an all-consuming relativism. But did the chicken or the egg—or should I say, art or the brain—come first? It may seem obvious that the brain did, but consider for a moment that our brains evolved in response to their surroundings, and one of those surroundings was art. Obviously, a brain in some form came far prior to art, but when we speak of our brain, we cannot but speak of the brain in its current form. A better understanding of evolution and its relation to art is clearly crucial if we are to take a scientific approach to it.

But we must be careful of taking the all-encompassingly Darwinian approach that is gaining popularity. Brian Boyd, author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction wrote a piece for the American Scholar adopting just such a stance. The need for pattern, he insists, is one of the major reasons we cling to literature as we do, and the need for pattern, clearly, has evolutionary roots. This in itself is hardly a controversial or revolutionary insight, but Boyd seems to base his whole literary stance on this view and little more, and so magicks very little in the way of conclusions that would not have been arrived at had he ignored evolution entirely. The fact that patterns are important in art is taken for granted by virtually all scholars of it; they spend their days searching for and attempting to understand exactly these patterns. Once we have established that art needs patterns, we are no closer to understanding what makes great art great. Can it just be that it requires a more complex set of patterns?

Evolutionary science may lead us to conclude only that what we seek in literature is, at bottom, entertainment. This would be an anticlimax. But it would also show the limitations of thinking in a purely Darwinian way. It may very well be that in evolutionary terms there is not really that much to say about art, other than that it performs a useful function in our inner and social lives. And clearly it’s true to say that the majority of literature is not great, and there never was a time when that wasn’t the case. But those of us who seek to read the classics know that there is something objective about their greatness, and certainly this must be explicable scientifically. Yet it cannot be so simple as to say, for instance, that we evolved a sensitivity for the sublime because it is necessary as a warning against impending danger, and that is all. Even if we all do have a sensitivity for the sublime, clearly it manifests itself differently amongst us, because not that many of us appreciate the sublimity of King Lear, even if a far greater proportion might appreciate the sublimity of a thunderstorm.

Perhaps we have evolved so comprehensively that we are no longer really subject to evolution’s constraints. Although it’s true that we can never escape the rule of nature, and that if we were faced with a terrible natural disaster, the effects of nature on us would be far harder to deny than they are now, yet that doesn’t mean that we haven’t somehow transcended it. Given that we are relatively comfortable, and on the whole are not so pressured by questions of survival that we can think of little else, perhaps the primary way in which we change now is culturally, and biological change is miniscule if it exists at all. The “need” for art might not be a need at all, and merely a highly sophisticated cultural manifestation of some primal need of which we bear only the smallest remnant. That is to say, understanding what caused this primal need can never be sufficient for understanding what makes good art.

A literary science must take all these considerations into account. It cannot look only at statistics or only at evolution. It must look at psychology, it must look at anthropology, it must look at the evolution of language, it must look at syntax and morphology, and, most dauntingly of all, it must look at how all these fields intersect. But no matter how advanced our scientific knowledge of literature becomes, there may remain one problem that turns out to be intractable—we still need a way of identifying greatness to begin with. Even though we may be able to say that Oedipus Rex causes a certain reaction in the brain that Guy Ritchie’s Revolver does not, but on what basis can we say that that reaction suggests that Oedipus Rex is better? Perhaps such a basis is impossible to find. Art, after all, is quite useless. And so, as far as a literary science can take us, there may never be a time when literary criticism becomes entirely pointless.

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