A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

by Siri Hustvedt

  At the same time, the idea that my mind is not my body, that somehow I, the speaker, was witness to the strange contortions of my corporeal self, was particularly strong while I was giving birth. My internal narrator, busy forming sentences in my head, was a commentator on, not a participant in, the proceedings. This reality, too, must be accounted for in the mind-body dilemma. That baby was going to be born whether my internal narrator liked it or not. Then again, my narration of events and my understanding of them cannot be thought of as purely floating psychological phenomena, can they? I wanted that baby, had looked forward to the small person’s arrival impatiently, and, despite the agonies of Pitocin, I pushed her out of me in a paroxysm of joy. But my experience is hardly universal. It was specific to me, to my body as and in a situation. It is easy to change the story and change the experience: the twelve-year-old who gives birth in fear, the woman who was raped and gives birth, or the woman who already has five children, cannot afford another, and gives birth, not to speak of the woman who looks and feels and wants to be pregnant but carries no fetus inside her and will not give birth. What exactly is psychological and biological in these “birth” narratives?

  A Marriage of Minds: Evolutionary Psychology

  The psychology to which Pinker and others subscribe reflects a merger of sociobiology and computational theory of mind, a marriage that is now called evolutionary psychology. The two halves of this union are rather like spouses who don’t appear to have all that much in common but nevertheless seem to get along quite well. Sociobiology asserts that Darwinian natural selection and its adaptations can, in part, explain animal and human behaviors, not a particularly controversial claim in scientific quarters. The book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by the entomologist E. O. Wilson, made the term “sociobiology” famous and infamous when it was published in 1975. Although most of Wilson’s book was uncontroversial, his last chapter applied his evolutionary ideas of adaption and natural selection to human beings and created a fury of criticism, specifically that Wilson was advocating a dangerous form of biological determinism that resonated with earlier ideas in eugenics used to justify racism, sexism, and various ugly human versions of survival of the fittest. Professor Wilson, however, is not Professor Lynn. Lynn, of the “rutting stags,” describes himself as a eugenicist. Among Wilson’s most vociferous critics was the biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin, who was profoundly aware of the ideological uses of science and the professional atmosphere that encourages preordained boxes for understanding. Although Wilson nowhere in the book advocated eugenic policies, his arguments do presuppose, as did Galton before him, that what is innately human can be separated from cultural and environmental influences and is the product of naturally selected traits.

  In an article published in the New York Times Magazine the same year the book was published, Wilson wrote, “In hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women stay home. This strong bias persists in most agricultural and industrial societies and, on that ground alone, appears to have genetic origin.”157 Actually, women do not “stay home” in hunter-gatherer cultures, something Wilson surely knew. They are out “gathering.” Without the daily labor of women foraging for food, the members of the group would starve because it is generally recognized that hunters do not always return with game. But there is another odd assumption here. Women in both agricultural and industrial societies have been working outside “the home” in droves for centuries. Wilson must have thought the word “women” referred to white middle-class housewives or to Victorian ladies of a certain economic status. Were the countless women working in laundries or in factories or the women out in the fields for centuries all over the world at home? It may be useful to remember that in 1975, second-wave feminism was gaining ground, and there may have been “cultural” reasons for Wilson to wish the ladies would simply shut up and go home.

  The nature/nurture view in sociobiology was well articulated in 1979 by one of its high-profile proponents, David Barash: “Biology and culture undoubtedly work together, but it is tempting to speculate that our biology is somehow more real, lying unnoticed within each of us, quietly but forcefully manipulating much of our behavior. Culture, which is overwhelmingly important in shaping the myriad details of our lives, is more likely seen as a thin veneer, compared to the underlying ground substance of our biology.”158 It is true that biology is generally regarded as more real and hard than culture, but as an intellectual position, this strikes me as naïve. What would Barash say about the rates of pseudocyesis in Sudan? Again, what does “biology” mean here? Isn’t learning to read biologically real? Isn’t gaining literacy at once a cultural and a biological process? The illiterate brain and literate brain are different. This too has been studied.159

  Perhaps Barash would regard literacy itself as a cultural veneer. It certainly came late in human history. He admits he is tempted to speculate on biology’s more robust reality, but what exactly, I wonder, is so tempting about imagining that our behaviors are caused and manipulated by some hidden biological substance? Is this substance our genes? Biological, for Barash, means, I believe, a naturally selected adaptive trait rather than simply a physiological process. Barash’s use of the word “biology” further demonstrates the semantic slippage that occurs in its use. “Sociobiology” has mostly vanished as a name for a discipline. Sarah Hrdy, who changed thinking about how our Pleistocene human ancestors organized their lives, especially the roles played by women, proudly calls herself a sociobiologist, but many have dropped the term altogether.

  Computational theory of mind, unlike sociobiology, is only indirectly biological, however one uses that word. It maintains that the human mind literally, not metaphorically, functions as a computer by processing information. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon argued for the physical symbol system hypothesis in 1976. In this theory, intelligence is equated with symbol manipulation. In their paper they state, “A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action.”160 A digital computer is a physical symbol system. Newell, who made contributions to artificial intelligence, argued, “Our minds are a technology—like other technologies in being a set of mechanisms for the routine solution of a class of problems.”161 Newell created a structural model of human cognition. He did not pretend to explain how this model was realized in an actual physical brain. The application of computers processing symbolic information to organic processes is reminiscent of François Jacob’s explanation of the computer metaphor in genetics. The difference is that Newell does not treat “mind as technology” as a metaphor. His mind is a Hobbesian “calculating machine,” but unlike Hobbes, Newell didn’t seek to explain mind as part of the organic body. He felt no need to root his claims in actual brain processes.

  The difference between sociobiology and what is now called evolutionary psychology can be explained as one of emphasis, from an organism’s behavior—what it does—to its thoughts or inner psychological states that are believed to cause what it does. Evolutionary psychology focuses on the idea of mind. Behaviorism, which dominated American psychology in the early half of the twentieth century, had no interest in the internal workings of the human mind. It posited that everything could be explained by observing behaviors. Behaviorism has fallen on bad times. The extremity of some of the positions held by James Watson and B. F. Skinner are no doubt to blame. Their emphasis on behavior to the exclusion of all internal mental processes became dogma, and dogmas often collapse under their own weight, despite the fact that human and animal behaviors obviously deserve to be studied closely. Unlike both the behaviorists and the sociobiologists who came before them, evolutionary psychologists are interested in human psychology, in the human mind as an evolved mechanism or machine that drives behaviors. But to understand how this idea came about, why so many people now assume the mind is a computer technology, it is necessary to track some examples of the remarkable variety in thinking about how to frame the question of how human beings became who they are.

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p; Hardening and Softening Darwin?

  Charles Darwin is the father of evolutionary theory. I use my metaphors carefully and have given him the patriarchal role, which suits him. He was decidedly not a feminist, in sharp contrast to his fellow luminary of the period John Stuart Mill, who published The Subjection of Women in 1869, ten years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and three years before his Descent of Man. Evolution is a scientific theory that is widely accepted in science as an explanation for why we became who and what we are. Darwin’s writing on evolution, however, does not include a mechanistic or machine-like mind evolving over millennia. In my own extensive, if not complete, reading of Darwin, I have no memory of ever coming across machine metaphors or the idea that natural selection is a Hobbesian “mechanism.” Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading Darwin is his gift for vivid description and detailed illustrations from the natural world that help the reader see what he is talking about. Like a good novelist, Darwin is a writer who luxuriates in the particular. In his “Historical Sketch,” which prefaced the first American and second English editions of On the Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged several thinkers, including Goethe, who had anticipated aspects of his own theory.

  What Goethe called morphology was the study of natural forms founded on intense observations of nature. His Romantic science was fiercely antimechanistic. He did not believe nature was machine-like, and, as I noted earlier, he was suspicious of hypotheses that turned into dogmas. He objected to Newton’s ideas about color and proposed his own color theory, one that has some enduring admirers. He also overturned an idea that had become so widespread it was accepted as truth: that the difference between human beings and monkeys could be explained by the fact that the intermaxillary bone of the skull was present in monkeys but missing in man. Goethe, by way of “reflection and coincidence,” as he put it, found or, more accurately, rediscovered the supposedly absent bone in humans.162 This discovery demonstrates an obvious affinity to Darwin, despite the fact that Goethe’s ideas about morphology and ideal forms deviate from the English scientist’s.

  Goethe’s science writing has often been treated as an odd sideline to his literary works, but some contemporary scholars and scientists exploring new paradigms have resurrected Goethe’s science, especially his methodology. In an essay, “Goethe and the Phenomenological Investigation of Consciousness,” the physicist Arthur Zajonc writes that in Goethian science, “the relation between the observer and the observed is dynamic and inseparable.”163 This idea—that the observing subject has an effect on what is seen—recalls de Beauvoir’s body as situation, but it remains an uneasy idea among many scientists, because many continue to regard subjectivity as a polluting presence in what is ideally an entirely objective process. Darwin’s admiration for Goethe, however, makes good sense because, despite their many differences, they share what Goethe called a “tender empiricism” (zarte Empirie), a confidence that an intimate observation of nature can yield genuine insights, that a likeness between apes and human beings, for example, can be empirically seen and studied. Darwin and Goethe trusted their senses, although neither believed science was purely about sensual observation.

  Nevertheless, the theory of evolution was, to an important degree, born of Darwin’s acute vision, and it tells a dynamic narrative of changing forms that takes place over millions of years. My hunch that Darwin did not use the machine as a model for nature was confirmed by Michael Ruse. In his book Defining Darwin: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology, he writes, “With the help of concordances, printed and computerized, I have surveyed all of Darwin’s major and several not-so-major works. I have looked also at all of the letters, published and unpublished. He simply does not speak of natural selection as a mechanism. He does not use the language of the ‘nature is a machine’ general metaphor at all.”164 So, despite the fact that Darwin spoke of natural laws, he did not present those laws as mechanistic, even in a metaphorical sense. It simply was not how he looked at the natural world. This is interesting because the use of the word “mechanism” for a host of biological processes, including natural selection, is now ubiquitous. The word is not used metaphorically but literally to mean simply an identifiable biological function or process.

  The Darwin I read and still read, however, is not a neo-Darwinist. He is not the Darwin of Richard Dawkins’s immensely popular book The Selfish Gene (1976). This more recent incarnation of Charles Darwin has been “hardened” by several turns in intellectual history, which means the new Darwin has lost whatever connection the historical Darwin had with Goethe’s Romantic science. Dawkins is a polemicist who writes without jargon and makes his points broadly and clearly, with help from a host of metaphors. As a writer, he has no Hobbesian worries about using tropes. Were his sentences less zippy, I doubt his book would have succeeded to the degree it has. The seductions of rhetoric, including the allure of certain metaphors over others, have considerable power. Dawkins’s language must be considered if we want to understand how “the selfish gene” became a cultural slogan.

  Although Dawkins freely concedes that there is no “universally agreed” upon definition of a gene, that environment plays an important part in an organism’s development, that the relation between genotype and phenotype is not direct—there is no gene for long legs, for example—and that embryonic development is “so complex we had best not contemplate it,”165 the personality he gives his gene or “Replicator” closely resembles the old Master Molecule. The DNA molecule is compared to building blocks. Unlike Descartes’s corpuscles, Darwin’s gemmule, or the dependent gene of molecular genetics, the selfish gene comes across as a tough nut, a hard, atom-like coding mechanism. In their paper “The Many Faces of the Gene,” Paul Griffiths and Eva Neumann-Held make a clear distinction between the molecular gene and the evolutionary gene. They define the latter as “a theoretical entity with a role in a particular, atomistic approach to the selection of phenotypic and extended phenotypic traits. Evolutionary genes need not, and often do not, correspond to specific stretches of DNA.”166 Like the gene of behavioral genetics, this gene is particulate and atomistic. Definitions are vital to outcomes.

  The message Dawkins repeats over and over in various forms is this one: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Dawkins is fond of the robot image in his writing; we are sightless automatons, directed by a microscopic survival monster inside us. In this genetic parable, Dawkins equates “replication” with “fecundity.”167 He puts quotation marks around “fecundity” to demonstrate to his reader that genetic replication is not exactly the same as whole men and women having sex and making children. The metaphor, however, is potent, and his personified Replicator Molecule begins to look a lot like a selfish, horny, heterosexual male robot, which will stop at nothing to spread his seed. What is utterly fascinating to me is not Dawkins’s introduction to genetics, which includes many appropriate qualifiers, but his figurative language, which turns human beings into mechanistic “vehicles” and “robots.” Dawkins believes the species can modify the designs of those tiny gene demons through learning and thinking, but he repeatedly personifies them as aggressive, greedy imps. Although notably similar to Barash’s hidden biological manipulators, Dawkins’s gene is described in a far livelier fashion. His molecules have zest. They appear to be possessed of a will to power, reminiscent of an idea put forward by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

  Schopenhauer’s “will” is an unconscious, irrational, instinctual force for survival and reproduction. Unlike Dawkins, who is an adamant materialist, Schopenhauer was influenced by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism—we can’t know the world itself, what he called “das Ding an sich,” the thing in itself. We can know only our experience of it. It isn’t that things don’t exist in the world, but rather that for us the things we perceive are filtered through our representations of them. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer has been frequently identif
ied as a forerunner of Darwin. Reading the German philosopher and the English scientist, however, are very different tonal experiences. Schopenhauer’s blind universal “will” is most perfectly expressed in an overwhelming sexual instinct: “The vehemence of the sexual impulse . . . [is] evidence that, through the function that serves it, the animal belongs to that in which its true inner being really and mainly lies, namely the species; whereas all the other functions and organs serve directly only the individual, whose existence is at bottom only secondary.”168 Schopenhauer knew nothing of modern genetics, of course, but his driving “will” and Dawkins’s “selfish gene” are both more ruthless and randy than either Darwin’s notion of gemmules or his survival instinct. Schopenhauer’s will and Dawkins’s gene are both serving the species, and they have enough force to run over the individual in the name of survival.