In tonight's post, I am going to talk about two issues – an erroneous hypothesis promulgated by evolutionary psychologists and a mystery in narrative theory. These two issues are quite distinct but I wish to discuss them both. There were other issues I considered talking about in this post but for the sake of brevity I shall focus just on this pair of unrelated topics. Bear with me: the essay gets more interesting and better written as it goes along.
In this blog, I have often inveighed against evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology can be characterised as the theory that many psychological traits are adaptions that evolved during prehistory as the result of evolution, of the interaction between chance mutations and natural selection. This theory is quite popular today and has infiltrated many of the social sciences, including English departments, but I believe it to be quite mistaken. I have discussed evolutionary psychology in posts such as "Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong: Group Selection vs. Inclusive Fitness" and "Some More Thoughts about Group Selection." In the post "Nature vs. Nurture" I offered an argument which I think very forcefully demonstrates the weaknesses of the claims of evolutionary psychology, and I will offer it again in a more elaborate form, now, because I think it such a good argument. It runs as follows. The vast majority of people in New Zealand and in many other countries can drive cars. Suppose an alien descends to Earth in Auckland and begins secretly observing the daily habits of ordinary people. Suppose furthermore that this alien is a devotee of evolutionary psychology. The alien might conjecture that the ability to drive cars is an evolved trait, that humans must have been driving cars for hundreds of thousands of years and that natural selection had acted on natural variation in driving capability, favouring the better drivers and weeding out the worse drivers. She might posit a car-driving module in the human brain that developed as a result of evolutionary pressure to produce ever more adroit car handlers. But the alien would be quite wrong. Humans have only been driving cars for just over a hundred years, and although there may be some evolutionary pressure acting in favour of good drivers (bad drivers are more likely to killed in traffic accidents), one hundred years is not long enough for an entire species to evolve a new trait. The ability to drive cars is a learned ability, even though it might appear to an alien to be natural. If driving cars is a learned ability, it stands to reason that many other apparently natural traits are also learned rather than genetic.
In this particular post, however, I do not want to discuss evolutionary psychology generally but focus on one particular hypothesis. In A Natural History of Rape, Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer propose that men are evolutionarily hardwired to want to rape women. A Natural History of Rape was a controversial but successful book on its publication in 2000 and has made an enormous impression on public intellectuals since, particularly people like Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and Bret Weinstein, those who already subscribe to the tenets of evolutionary psychology. In one of his podcasts, Harris refers to the hypothesis in relation to the 'naturalistic fallacy', a term that, in this context, means "the fallacious belief that everything that is natural is good" – Harris points out that even if rape is natural that doesn't mean it should be socially desirable, that such a conclusion would be fallacious. In a recent livestream, his forty-ninth, Bret Weinstein answers a question about the 'rape-is-an-evolutionary-adaption hypothesis', expressing the view that that the authors' conclusions were obvious to everyone, saying (I quote) "When this book came out, every evolutionary biologist working at the time had the same sense that like, well, this isn't exactly news, obviously it's an evolutionary strategy." I have a love-hate with Bret and his wife Heather Heying. They often say interesting things but have a faintly fanatical devotion to the core principles of evolutionary biology. These principles have certain consequences. If you do accept the fundamental assumptions of evo-psych, that the purpose of life is to have as many offspring as possible, then it is indeed obvious that rape might prove a successful evolutionary strategy, so long as the rapist can get away with it. But is there any reason to accept the core assumptions of evolutionary psychology?
In writing about A Natural History of Rape, I should say that I haven't actually read it (I have often put myself into this embarrassing position in this blog). Because I haven't read it, I am unsure if Thornhill and Palmer are arguing that there are two sorts of men in the world, rapists and non-rapists, or if they are arguing that all men are potentially rapists. My impression is that they are proposing the second possibility. All men would rape if they could and the only reason that civilisation does not fall apart is because men fear the punitive social and legal consequences of violent crime. For high status men, the costs of rape outweigh the benefits and so they tend to prefer monogamous relationships; it is low status men, men who have difficulty soliciting consensual sex, who have the strongest incentive to rape. When A Natural History of Rape was released many commentators pointed out its flaws. If the 'ultimate cause' of rape is the motivation to father offspring, men should only want to rape women of reproductive age (this is in fact what the authors argue); many critics have pointed out that this fails to explain rape of children, the elderly, and other men. As the Wikipedia article on the book indicates, this particular criticism has been levelled at the book by many people multiple times. A second objection to the thesis is that sometimes high-status men rape, as evinced by Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. There is a logical error in the argument. If all men are potentially rapists but are deterred by punitive social and legal consequences, then it would be men who feel somehow above the law, rather than low status men, who would be the ones most likely to rape. (Think Genghis Khan or the English nobles who indulged in prima Nocta.) A related and important point, incidentally, is that I don't think Harvey Weinstein ever regarded his actions as immoral, as rape.
I have been thinking about this issue over the last week and have come up with another objection to the hypothesis proposed by Thornhill and Palmer. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post, "my soul is an irritant", in which I pointed out that both men and women fantasise when they masturbate. Obviously, a person's fantasies are private and so a person is not liable for legal or social censure for indulging in fantasies which would be illegal if enacted in reality. Therefore, if all men are potentially rapists, we would expect a large number of men to entertain fantasies of rape when they masturbate. My hunch is that they don't. Thornhill and Palmer define rape as "copulation resisted to the best of the victim's ability unless such resistance would probably result in death or serious injury to the victim or in death or injury to individuals the victim commonly protects". Do many men fantasise about such scenarios when they jerk off? This is a potentially answerable question. We could survey a random, representative sample of men and ask them if they fantasise about rape and, if so, how often. The survey would have to be anonymous to ensure, as much as possible, that the men surveyed answer the question honestly. Such a survey would be an excellent way to test Thornhill and Palmer's hypothesis, but, so far as I know, no such survey has ever been carried out. My hunch, however, to reiterate, is that such a survey would return a negative result.
I do not have access to other men's fantasies but I do have access to my own. I am a low status male who hasn't had a girlfriend in a very long time, and so am a prime candidate to be one of those who might adopt a coercive reproductive strategy such as the one outlined by Thornhill and Palmer, at least in fantasy, in my private moments alone. But I never fantasise about non-consensual sex. Although I may sometimes fantasise about casual sex, an integral component of my fantasy life is the feature that the woman I am fantasising about should want to have sex with me and should enjoy sex with me. I fantasise about the female orgasm. There is a romantic aspect to my sexual fantasies, a belief that sex should be tied to love, that would be otiose or downright counterproductive if Thornhill and Palmer were right in supposing that the only purpose of male sexual activity is procreation; if a person believes that sex should ideally only take place within the context of a loving relationships, this reduces the number of possible sexual partners a man can have. There can be, in fact, a significant disconnect between a person's fantasy life and the sorts of sexual practice that can actually pass genetic material down to successive generations. In August of this year, it was revealed that Jerry Falwell Jr's wife had had a years long affair with their pool boy and that not only did Falwell know about the relationship, he liked to sit in the corner of room and watch. Just as evolutionary psychologists cannot explain homosexuality, they cannot explain scoptophilia, or most of the other peculiar fetishes that some people indulge in.
The topic of rape is somewhat unsavoury, but unavoidable in modern discussions of evolutionary biology. Perhaps I am wrong in projecting my own libidinal preferences onto other people, in assuming that others are as innocent as I am, but the question of what people actually fantasise about can be posed and can perhaps be answered by others. And this would be a way of testing the hypothesis. Simply put, if evolutionary psychology is right, then Thornhill and Palmer are right; if Thornhill and Palmer are wrong, then evolutionary psychology is wrong. It was this type of logic that led to the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem.
At this point in the post, I wish to switch topics and discuss something I regard as a great mystery. Solving this mystery falls within the scope of narrative theory. This is the mystery of fictive worlds. When we read a book, we form some impression of the characters, of their actions and relationships, and of the setting of the story. But the author does not spell everything out. Some narrative theorists have proposed that the author of a work has in mind a complete fictive world from which he or she selects only some details to report. The assumption behind this in my view quite silly idea of fictionality is that an author has in mind a total world, in all its plenitude, and chooses which details to report, and that readers, when reading, imagine that world in all its details, going beyond what the author tells them. But this is specious. Yes, it is true that when we read a typical book, we tend to assume that the characters have two arms and two legs each, unless the author specifies otherwise, as Robert Louis Stevenson does with Long John Silver in Treasure Island when he describes him as having a peg leg. If we read a story by a white author, we do tend to assume that the characters are white unless the author tells us something to the contrary. But we do not, I contend, imagine for instance the eye colour of a novel's protagonist or whether a female character is wearing jeans or a skirt in a particular scene, unless the author tells us so explicitly. Not only do readers not go far beyond what the author tells them directly, I contend that it is quite possible that the author herself does not have in mind these details. The author only imagines and reports on those elements that are relevant to the story being told and the reader only bears in mind those elements that are relevant to the story being told. The proposal that has been made by some narrative theorists that an author imagines a complete fictional world and then, through the agency of a narrator, selects which details to report, is quite wrong.
I can give an example from my own writing that illustrates this point. One of the best short stories I have written and published in this blog is A Refusal to Mourn. Early on in this story, its protagonist, Xanthe, walks around Raglan. In these early scenes, is she wearing jeans or a skirt? I don't know. And I wrote it. Of course, the reader is free to imagine her attire precisely if he or she wishes, but I myself didn't have in mind any particular dress. The only details I included in the story that have any bearing on her appearance is that she is nineteen, attractive, and has blond dreadlocks. The relevance of her youth to the story being told is, obviously, that the story is a kind of coming-of-age tale. Her attractiveness is important to the story because it helps make her sympathetic and explains why the male characters is the story are interested in her. Why, though, does she have blond dreadlocks? In my view, Xanthe is unconventional, adventurous, rebellious, a free spirit – after all, she has made the decision to live in a van by herself near a West Coast beach for three months. Her blond dreadlocks, along with the detail that she has studied at Elam, are signifiers of these personality traits, traits that are relevant to the story. But beyond these details, I do not myself have a clear idea of what she looks like.
A story is set in a world. Much modern literature is set in the real world, our world, but describes and relates the adventures and misadventures of people who are totally fictional. For instance, the novel Normal People by Sally Rooney is set in County Sligo and Dublin in the several years immediately after the 2008 Irish economic downturn: the novel's protagonists Connell and Marianne, along with the other characters, are totally fictional but the setting is real. I don't believe the story mentions Brian Cowen, the Taoiseach of Ireland during this period, but it wouldn't be a revolution in literary technique if it did. We could easily imagine a novel set in New Zealand in 2011 which mentions John Key in passing. The film that I wrote in 2012 was also set in this world, in this country, and featured the 2011 Christchurch earthquake quite prominently – Jess, however, was at least partly fictional. The general rule for much modern literature is that the fictional characters and real world people do not impinge upon each other, or interact only in one direction, from the real to the unreal. We are supposed to imagine that the characters in much modern fiction could live in the same city as us, perhaps just a few streets over, might be affected by the same kind of events that affect us, but do not have any effect on the larger world they are encompassed by.
However, there is much fiction that breaks this general rule. Famously, the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow mixes fictional characters with fictionalised real people. (It is a long time since I read Ragtime so I cannot speak about it with authority.) The Gabriel Allon series of spy novels by Daniel Silva deliberately smudges the line between the real and unreal in that the fictional characters have the power to influence world events. Allon himself is presented as the Director of Mossad, a real position occupied by a real person in the real world; in The New Girl, a major character is modelled closely after Muḥammad bin Salmān bin 'Abd al-'Azīz Āl Sa'ūd, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are referred to, although not by name. Silva writes fiction that could approximate reality, the reality we see sometimes reported about in newspaper articles. By contrast, Franz Kafka took reality and warped it fantastically. The world in which The Trial is set is Prague in the very early twentieth century but Kafka adds to this world the strange, arcane, and inscrutable court system that has Joseph K. arrested and charged and which seems to operate in parallel with the real court system. Where Silva seeks to present a world that is a plausible approximation of reality, the types of diplomatic and political incidents reported on in the news, Kafka sought to take reality and make it unheimlich.
Whether we are reading Normal People, The New Girl or The Trial, we are bringing to bear on all these stories our knowledge of the milieus in which they are set, whether the setting be Ireland, Israel and the Middle East, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914. It seems that, when we seek to understand the environment the characters inhabit, we fill in the gaps based on our knowledge of the particular geographical and temporal locales in which the stories take place. However, there are many books, particularly fantasy books and science fiction books, which are not set in anything like the real world, and consequently cannot rely on our shared common knowledge of Earthly history and of Earthly cultures. Recently I read The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, a novel first published in 1924. This novel has two principal settings, the Vale of Erl and Elfland. The Vale of Erl is modelled somewhat after the kind of feudal society found in England during the Middle Ages, rendered timeless in Dunsany's treatment. Elfland is entirely fantastical. The novel features a number of stock tropes from fantasy literature – elves, trolls, unicorns, and will o' the wisps. It seems that when we read fantasy fiction the world we imagine is based on all our previous reading of fantasy fiction. (Of course, when we first start to read fantasy fiction, we need to begin somewhere – the ability to 'fill in the gaps', form a sense of a story's setting, is perhaps stronger in children than in adults.) Modern fantasy fiction is indebted to Tolkien, to the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and to more modern computer games like World of Warcraft. Commonly, modern fantasy is filled with elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, and dragons. But the world of each fantasy novel or fantasy series differs in subtle ways from all the others – Middle Earth differs from Krynn (the setting for the many Dragonlance novels) and both differ utterly from Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea.
Similarly, science fiction introduces the readers to worlds of which they have no prior knowledge. One of my favourite books as a kid was Use of Weapons by Ian M. Banks. This novel centres on a kind of mercenary known as Zakalwe who employs his highly sophisticated military skills to intervene in planetary conflicts on behalf of his employer, an extraordinarily technologically advanced and utopian galaxy wide civilisation known as the Culture. In the novel, Zakelwe visits many planets. However, the societies that he engages with are always composed of humans, and tend to be intelligible as past or potential future stages in Terran social and political development. We can make sense of the worlds he visits because, except in ways that the author specifies, they can be grasped as possible variants of human societies. Other science fiction novels use a different technique. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card deals with a planet, Lusitania, that has its own peculiar ecosystem and biome entirely unlike Earth's. However, the story is told from the point of view of human scientists who are stationed in Lusitania to study it; the culture of the humans is close enough to our own culture and to the way future human society is organised in other science fiction novels that the reader has no difficulty comprehending the wider human setting. We learn about Lusitania through characters who are also strangers to it. This technique, presenting a foreign world through the eyes of a person or people who come from a world similar to our own, is common in science fiction and can sometimes be found in fantasy. In the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson, for instance, the Land (a world which shares with Middle Earth the existence of a Suaron-like archenemy, Lord Foul, but is otherwise very different from the fantasy template originating with Middle Earth) is seen through the eyes of a human from our world who has been magically transported there.
We now arrive at the mystery. Whether we are reading Normal People, The Trial, A Wizard of Earthsea, or Use of Weapons, we are dealing with incomplete information. This is inevitable. A book that explicated every detail associated with its characters' appearances, lives, and social, political and cultural settings would be infinitely long. And yet, when we are reading, we are never troubled by our incomplete understanding the world in which a particular story is set. We form a vague sense of the milieu in which the tale takes place but generally just race through a novel without wondering too much about what we don't know. There are sometimes exceptions. In the previous post, I discussed the novel The Night Circus. When I was reading this novel, a niggling question that bothered me was that I couldn't understand how Marco could influence the Circus when we he was stationed in London while the Circus travelled internationally. Eventually, the novel's author Erin Morgenstern answers this question – Marco controls some of the exhibitions through the intermediating agency of the bonfire at the centre of the circus, a bonfire that acts as a conduit for his magic. The reason that the precise method Marco influences the Circus is a question that requires an answer while Marco's precise living address in London is a question that doesn't is that the first question is relevant to the story being told while the second question is superfluous. We arrive back at the idea I proposed earlier in the post. An author seeks to tell a story and reports on only those details that are relevant to the story being told. A reader, in complementary fashion, makes the assumption that the everything the author tells him or her has been told for a reason. Chekhov, in a letter, made the same point. "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."
So it seems that we can read, comprehend, and enjoy a novel without a complete understanding of the world in which it is set, and that the author herself may not know herself all the details of the world she is representing. This raises a number of issues in narrative theory related to 'suspension of disbelief' and notions of truth and falsity in fiction. It raises, furthermore, the most fundamental question of all: what is a story? I wish to conclude this discussion with two points. The first is that this mystery doesn't just bedevil fiction but ordinary discourse. When we read a newspaper article about, for instance, the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, we can understand the import, the purpose, of the article even if we are hazy about what Rohingya Muslims are. Some may be inspired to carry out independent research about Rohingya Muslims but most people, I suggest, read the article, incorporate it into what they already know about the world, and move on. Likewise, if a friend gossips about a person she knows, we can understand the point she is making even if we know nothing else about the subject of the gossip. Our understanding of even the real world is compromised by incomplete information. The second point is that the ability to distinguish between the real world and fictive worlds, between reality and fiction generally, is present almost from infancy, as I have discussed in this blog before. Children who read the Harry Potter books, or have the Harry Potter books read to them, understand from the very beginning that the wizardly world is unreal and, I suggest, enjoy these books precisely because they realise that the wizardly world is unreal. This seems to me another great mystery.
In this post, I have discussed two issues, the hypothesis that rape is a natural evolutionary behavioural adaption and the mystery of how we are capable of making sense of fictive worlds despite a lack of information about these worlds. Readers of this blog will realise that these two issues are related to other subjects I have tackled in the past. Perhaps I will discuss them again in the future.
