The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Its author, Richard Dawkins from Oxford, imagined in one of his crucial passages a bird population made up entirely of either hawks or doves. Hawks always fight but doves always back down. Now enters the mathematics. Dawkins attaches relative – and entirely arbitrary – values to various encounters. For example, the winner in a contest between two doves scores 50 but pays a penalty of – 10 for a long staring ritual, meaning he scores 40 in all. The loser is penalised —10 for also wasting time and staring. On average therefore any one dove, in competition with other doves, can expect to win half and lose half of his contests, so the average payoff is half the difference between +40 and – 10, which is +15.42 Now assume a mutant, a hawk. He never backs down so wins every fight, at 50 a time. He enjoys a big advantage over doves whose average payoff is only +15. In such a world, there is a clear advantage to being a hawk. But now hawk genes spread through the population, and soon all fights will be hawk fights, where the winner scores +50 but the loser is so seriously injured that he scores —100. If a hawk wins half and loses half of his fights, the average payoff of all hawk fights is halfway between +50 and —100, which is —25. If, amid such society, a dove mutant arises, he loses all his fights but never gets injured, so his average payoff is o. This may not sound much, but it beats —25. Dove genes should now start to spread. Looking at the arithmetic in this way, communities of birds would eventually arrive at an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) in which 5/12 are doves and 7/12 are hawks. When this point is reached, the payoff for hawks and doves is the same, and selection does not favour either of them. The point about this admittedly simple example is to show that a group of birds can take on a certain character while selection is taking place on an individual level.

  Now Dawkins moves on to a slightly more complex example. This time he asks us to assume that he is an animal who has found a clump of eight mushrooms – food. To these he attaches a value of +6 units each (again, these units are entirely arbitrary). He writes, ‘The mushrooms are so big I could eat only three of them. Should I inform anybody else about my find, by giving the “food call”? Who is within earshot? Brother B (his relatedness to me is ½ [i.e., he shares half my genes]), cousin C (relatedness to me = ⅛), and D (no particular relation: his relatedness to me is some small number which can be treated as zero for practical purposes). The net benefit score to me if I keep quiet about my find will be +6 for each of the three mushrooms I eat, that is +18 in all. My net benefit score if I give the food call needs a bit of figuring. The eight mushrooms will be shared equally between the four of us. The payoff to me from the two that I shall eat will be the full +6 units each, that is +12 in all. But I shall also get some payoff when my brother and cousin eat their two mushrooms each, because of our shared genes. The actual score comes to (1 × 12) + (½ × 12) + (⅛ × 12) + (0 × 12) = 19½. The corresponding net benefit for the selfish behavior was +18: it is a close-run thing, but the verdict is clear. I should give the food call; altruism on my part would in this case pay my selfish genes.’43 Dawkins’s overriding point is that we must think of the central unit of evolution and natural selection as the gene: the gene, the replicating unit, is ‘concerned’ to see itself survive and thrive, and once we understand this, everything else falls into place: kinship patterns and behaviour in insects, birds, mammals, and humans are explained; altruism becomes sensible, as do the relations of non-kin groups (such as races) to one another.

  Dawkins’s argument, eloquently made, and Wilson’s, together sparked a resurgence in Darwinian thinking that characterised the last quarter of the century. One remaining aspect of Dawkins’s and Wilson’s arguments is the link to Tom Wolfe, Christopher Lasch, John Rawls, and economics. They are yet another example of the way knowledge began to come together toward the end of the century. Wolfe’s book The Me Decades, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissim, and The Selfish Gene all reflect an emphasis on individuation and selfishness. They were quite different books, with ostensibly different aims, but the selfish theme common to them all was remarkable. The link to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice is that his ‘original position’ and ‘veil of ignorance’ describe what is essentially the very opposite of the position the selfish gene is in: no one knows their inheritance, and only by not knowing, Rawls is saying, can we ever hope to arrive at a true system of fairness, a way of living life together with selfishness taken out. In Rawls’s original position there are by definition no hawks or doves and no relatives. Rawls’s system is all too well aware of Dawkins-type arguments and seeks to circumvent them. Daniel Bell had drawn attention to the cultural contradictions of capitalism; Rawls’s ideas threw up some contradictions of Darwinism. Dawkins’s ideas also show certain similarities to the market system. This arises partly from the way he attaches values to the outcomes of behavior, but though simplifications, these outcomes – gains and losses – are real enough. The situation of hawks and doves, for example, is mirrored to an extent in price-fixing agreements in humans. It is in the best interests of garage owners (say) to fix the price of petrol at one (relatively) stable price; in that way all garage owners benefit. However, the temptation always exists for a wayward ‘hawk’ to drop his prices for a very heavy quick profit. Of course, other garage owners would soon follow suit, until the situation again stabilised and, perhaps, price fixing is reestablished. Many democracies have laws against this sort of behavior being carried too far, but that does not cancel out the fact that in some respects evolution shares a lot of features with market economics.

  35

  THE FRENCH COLLECTION

  On the evening of 31 January 1977, at twenty minutes past eight, regardless of who had arrived and who had not, the doors to the Galérie Beaubourg, the Centre Nationale d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, in central Paris, were shut tight. President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was about to make a speech, declaring the Pompidou Centre open, and there was no escape. Men in black tie and women in long dresses were milling on all floors, many searching for a drink – in vain, as the president, for reasons best known to himself, had decreed that there should be no refreshments. When he delivered his speech, Giscard began with a tribute to Pompidou (a former president of the French republic, who had nursed the project), snubbed Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris and the man in charge of the department that had commissioned the centre, and made no mention of either the building’s designers or builders. Forced to listen to the president without a glass in their hands, the assembled guests wondered whether the omissions in his speech meant that he didn’t like the building.1

  Many didn’t. Many thought that the Pompidou Centre was then, and still is, the ugliest building ever constructed. Whatever the truth of this, its importance cannot be doubted.2 In the first place, it was intended not just as a gallery or museum but as an arts complex and library, designed to help Paris regain its place as a capital of the arts, a tide it had lost since World War II and the rise of New York. Second, the centre was important architecturally because whatever its appearance, it undoubtedly marked a robust attempt to get away from the modernist aesthetic that had predominated since the war. And third, it was important because the centre also housed IRC AM, the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique, which was intended to become a world centre for experimental music. The directorship of IRCAM was offered to Pierre Boulez, to lure him back from America.3

  But the significance of ‘Beaubourg’ was predominantly architectural. Its designers were Renzo Piano, an Italian, and Richard Rogers, from London, two of the most high-tech-minded men of the times, while the jury who selected them included Philip Johnson, Jørn Utzon, and Oscar Niemayer, respectively American, Danish, and Brazilian architects who had between them been responsible for some of the most famous buildings constructed since the war. Philip Johnson represented the mainstream of architecture as it had followed on from the Bauhaus – Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. In the thirty years between 1945 and 1975 most Western architecture was dominated, functionally, by two matter
s: the corporate building and mass housing. Following the International style (a term coined by Philip Johnson himself), architecture had devised solutions mainly by means of straight lines and flat planes, in buildings that were often either wholly black (as with Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram’s Tower in Manhattan) or, more usually, wholly white (as with countless housing projects). Despite heroic attempts to escape the tyranny of the straight line (zigzags, diamonds, lozenges, most notably successful in the building boom of new universities in the 1960s), too often modern architecture had resulted in what Jane Jacobs famously called the ‘great blight of dullness,’ or what the critic Reyner Banham labelled the ‘new brutalism.’ The problem, as identified by the Italian critics Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, was an ‘obsessive preoccupation with restoring meaningful depth to a repertory of inherited forms that are devoid of meaning in themselves.’4 The South Bank Complex in London (the ensemble that houses the National Theatre) and the Torre Velasca, near the Duomo in Milan, are good examples of these massive buildings, which feel almost menacing.

  Niemayer and Utzon were notable for at least trying to break away from this tradition. Niemayer trained with Le Corbusier and became famous for his curved, shell-like concrete roofs, most notably in the new Brazilian capital, and vistas reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico. Jørn Utzon designed many housing projects, but his most famous building was Sydney Opera House, in Australia, which, in its white, billowing roofs, sought to recapture the line of the sailing ships that had first discovered Australia not so very long before. Here too, though undoubtedly popular with the public (and without question strikingly original), the Opera House was perhaps too much of a one-off in function and location (on the waterfront, where it could be easily seen) to be widely imitated. Nevertheless, for all their faults, Niemayer and Utzon had tried hard to get away from the conventional architectural wisdom epitomised by Johnson, and in theory that made the Beaubourg jury a good one, the more so as it also included Wilhelm Sandberg, curator of the Stedelijk (Modern Art) Museum in Amsterdam, and widely regarded as the most important museum curator of the century (though Alfred Barr would surely run him close). They considered 681 valid submissions, which they reduced first to 100, then to 60, and finally to project 493 (all drawings were considered anonymously): Messrs Piano, Rogers, Franchini, architects; and Ove Arup and Partners, consultant engineers (who had worked both on the South Bank Complex and Sydney Opera House).5

  Renzo Piano, born in 1937, was Genoese and did not consider himself only an architect but also an industrial designer – Olivetti were one of his clients. Richard Rogers was born in England in 1933 but came from a family that was mainly Italian – his cousin, Ernesto Rogers, taught Piano in Milan. A Fulbright scholar, Rogers had studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and then at Yale, where he met his one-time partner Norman Foster, and Philip Johnson. Piano and Rogers’ winning design had two main features. It did not use up all the space, an area of Paris of about seven acres that had been cleared many years before. Instead, a rectangle was left free in front of the main building for a piazza, not simply for tourists but for street theatre – jugglers, fire eaters, acrobats, and so on. A more controversial feature of the building was that its ‘innards,’ essentially the parts of a building that are usually hidden, such as the ducts for air conditioning, plumbing, and elevator motor rooms, were on the outside, and brightly painted, turned into a prominent design feature. One reason for this was flexibility: the building was expected to develop in the future, and the existing machinery might need to be changed.6 Another reason was to avoid the idea that yet another ‘monument’ was being erected in Paris. By exposing those elements that would normally be hidden, the ‘industrial’ aspects of the centre were highlighted, making the building more urban.

  An escalator also snaked up the building, on the outside, covered in a glass tube. This feature especially appealed to Philip Johnson.7 The Pompidou Centre was only a shoebox festooned in ducts; yet it looked like nothing that had gone before, and certainly not like an international modern building. Like it or loathe it, Pompidou was different, and a mould was broken. It didn’t inspire many copies, but it was a catalyst for change.

  IRCAM was part of the specifications for the Pompidou Centre. The brief was to make it the world’s pre-eminent centre for musical technology, with special studios that had absolutely no echo, advanced computers, and acoustical research laboratories, plus a hall for performances that would seat up to 500. This centre, which became known as ‘Petit Beaubourg,’ was originally conceived on five underground levels, with a glass roof, a library, and, in the words of Nathan Silver, the Pompidou’s historian, ‘studios for musical researchers from all over the world.’8 It was cut back after Giscard became president, but even so it was enough to entice Boulez home.

  Pierre Boulez was born in 1925. He was one of a handful of composers – Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage were others – who dominated musical innovation in the years after World War II. In the 1950s, as we have seen, serious composers had followed three main directions – serialism, electronics, and the vagaries of chance in composition. Boulez, Stockhausen, and Jean Barraqué had all been pupils of Olivier Messiaen. He, it will be recalled from chapter 23, had tried to write down the notes of birdsong, believing that all forms of sound could be made into music, and this was one important way he exerted an influence on his pupils. Stockhausen in particular was impressed by the music of Africa, Japan (where he worked in 1966), and South America, but Boulez too, in Le Marteau sans maitre (The Hammer Unmastered), 1952–4, scored for vibraphone and xylorimba, used the rhythms of black African music. Serialism in the late compositions of Anton von Webern, who had died in 1945, was just as influential, however. Boulez described these compositions as ‘the threshold,’ and Stockhausen agreed, as did Milton Babbitt in America. In Europe the centre of this approach was the Kranichstein Institute in Darmstadt, where in the summer months composers and students met to discuss the latest advances. Stockhausen was a regular.9

  Boulez was perhaps the most intellectual in a field that was, more than most, dominated by theory. For him, serialism was a search for ‘an objective art of sound.’ He saw himself as a scientist, an architect, or an engineer of sound as much as a composer. In a paper entitled ‘Technology and the Composer,’ he lamented the conservative tendencies in music which had, as he saw it, prohibited the development of new musical instruments, and this is why, according to the critic Paul Griffiths, he thought Messiaen’s approach, electronic music, and the computer so important to the advance of his art form.10 As one of his most famous compositions, Structures, shows, he was also concerned with ‘structure,’ which, he wrote, was ‘the key word of our time.’ In his writings Boulez made frequent references to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Bauhaus, Ferdinand Braudel, and Picasso, each of which was a model. He had frequent meetings, some of them in public, with Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes (see below). In a celebrated remark, he said that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: ‘It should simply be destroyed.’ In order to do this, he rigorously pursued new forms of sound, where ‘research’ and mathematical patterns were not out of place.11 Both Boulez and Cage used charts of numbers in setting up rhythmic structures.

  Electronic music, including the electronic manipulation of natural sounds, metallic and aqueous (musique concrète), provided yet another avenue to explore, one that offered both new structures and a seemingly scientific element that was popular with this small group. New notations were devised, and new instruments, in particular Robert Moog’s synthesiser, which arrived on the market in 1964, bringing with it a huge variety of new electronically generated sounds. Babbitt and Stockhausen both wrote a great deal of electronic music, and the latter even had a spherical auditorium (for maximum effect) built for him at the 1970 Osaka exhibition.

  Chance in music was described by Paul Griffith as the equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings in art, and the swayi
ng ‘mobiles’ of Alexander Calder in sculpture.12 In America John Cage was the leading exponent; in Europe, chance arrived at Darmstadt in 1957, with Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI and Boulez’s Piano Sonata no. 3. In Stockhausen’s composition the musician was presented with a single sheet of paper containing nineteen fragments that could be played in any order. Boulez’s work was less extreme: the piece was fully notated, but the musician was forced to make a choice of direction at various points.13

  Boulez epitomised the radical character of these postwar composers, even to the extent that he questioned everything to do with music – the nature of concerts, the organisation of orchestras, the architecture of concert halls, above all the limitations imposed by existing instruments. It was this that led to the idea of IRCAM. John Cage had tried something similar in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, but Boulez didn’t float the idea until May 1968, a revolutionary moment in France.14 He was ambitious in his aims (he once said, ‘What I want to do is to change people’s whole mentality’). It is true, too, that Boulez, more than anyone else of his generation, more even than Stockhausen, saw himself in a sense in a ‘Braudelian’ way, as part of la longue durée, as a stage in the evolution of music. This was why he wanted IRCAM to make music more ‘rational’ (his word) in its search for creativity, in its employment of machines, like the ‘4X,’ which was capable of ‘generating’ music.15 In May 1977, in the Times Literary Supplement, Boulez set out his views. ‘Collaboration between scientists and musicians – to stick to those two generic terms which naturally include a large number of more specialised categories – is therefore a necessity that, seen from the outside, does not appear to be inevitable. An immediate reaction might be that musical invention can have no need of a corresponding technology; many representatives of the scientific world see nothing wrong with this and justify their apprehensions by the fact that artistic creation is specifically the domain of intuition, of the irrational. They doubt whether this Utopian marriage of fire and water would be likely to produce anything valid. If mystery is involved, it should remain a mystery: any investigation, any search for a meeting point is easily taken to be sacrilege. Uncertain just what it is that musicians are demanding from them, and what possible terrain there might be for joint efforts, many scientists opt out in advance, seeing only the absurdity of the situation.’16 But, he goes on, ‘In the end, musical invention will have somehow to learn the language of technology, and even to appropriate it…. A virtual understanding of contemporary technology ought to form part of the musician’s invention; otherwise, scientists, technicians and musicians will rub shoulders and even help one another, but their activities will only be marginal one to the other. Our grand design today, therefore, is to prepare the way for their integration and, through an increasingly pertinent dialogue, to reach a common language that would take account of the imperatives of musical invention and the priorities of technology…. Future experiments, in all probability, will be set up in accordance with this permanent dialogue. Will there be many of us to undertake it?’17