John Hunter
Comparative Humanities Program
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA 17837
jchunter@bucknell.edu
A Response to Marc D. Hauser’s “The Possibility of Impossible Cultures”
As a scholar in the humanities (trained in early modern literature and with interests in the
classics and contemporary culture), I welcome the new contributions made by the
cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to the ongoing debates that
have fascinated Western philosophy (broadly conceived) since Aristotle. I believe that it
is imperative that scholars in my division learn as much as possible about the approaches
to ethical, aesthetic, and economic issues that these scientific disciplines are beginning to
propose: not as a “know the enemy” course, but as a fruitful source for stimulating ideas
that we can incorporate in our own thinking.
The essay under consideration proposes that some phenomena from evolutionary
biology and generative linguistics can be used to understand some specific aspects of
human culture. As such, it represents the boldest and most challenging strain in recent
scientific work’s analysis of culture – the attempt to explain contingent cultural
phenomena with genetic or cognitive phenomena. It is, as a result, precisely the sort of
work that humanists feel most threatened by – as a group, we tend to explain cultural
phenomena through other cultural phenomena and take the cognitive and/or genetic
operations behind them as givens that cannot explain specific situations. In what follows
here, I will trace out the philosophical problems that Prof. Hauser’s essay (quite
unconsciously) echoes and lay out what I see as the empirical and logical problems that
make his specific conclusions untenable without further evidence. The big question here
(and elsewhere) is how our cognitive structures and genetic make-up are constitutive of
the immense variety of specific human cultural expressions. That this essay does not, I
believe, present plausible answers means only that the search must go on, not that it is
futile or misguided.
Prof. Hauser’s proposal that there are limits to the possible expressions in human
culture that are analogous to limitations in morphology and linguistic expression echoes
an ancient philosophical problem about origins. As both Aristotle and St. Paul (in
remarkably similar ways) demonstrated, any organized body of human thought can only
be understood differentially. If we create a category called “reason” or “rationality,” we
call into being “unreason” and “irrationality” at the same time. Even if we grant a
cognitive or genetic propensity for rational thought, it has to be developed by each
individual and its founding assumptions vary widely across time and space. Nothing
about “reason” makes it self-evident or self-explanatory (pace the rational decision
theorists), so we have to evaluate anything that would be deemed “reasonable” against
some set of criteria and place it either in or out of the category. Paul discusses this idea
with respect to law and sin. There can be no such thing as sin, he points out, until there
are laws forbidding certain acts. Vice and virtue cannot, therefore, exist in isolation, only
reciprocally and only in a cultural context. No body of thought, it follows from this, has a
singular origin – there has to be a network of other possibilities in place or it cannot be
culturally meaningful (though it could, of course, be meaningful for an individual). For
anything to be meaningful, there has to be a context in which it can be recognized as
such. Without this context, there can be the possibility of meaning but never anything
concrete. Not all possible ideas are imaginable at any one time, then.
The other philosophical idea at play here is the idea of the unthought. For each
political, ethical, aesthetic, or even practical situation, there are always other possible
configurations and it can be a valuable exercise to ask what the unthought of a given
debate might be. Innovations, scientific and otherwise are frequently driven by imagined
alternatives to seemingly intractable problems. Alan Turing solved the Enigma code by
turning the problem on its head: instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, he found a
way to burn down the haystack until only the needle was left. But many situations are
constrained – alternatives can be difficult to perceive and, as Hauser rightly points out,
individuals and communities get stuck in imaginative ruts that can make it difficult or
even dangerous to challenge (just ask Galileo).
Does the solution proposed here account for these cultural gaps in what is known
or knowable? I believe that the answer is “No” and that the main reason is that the
analogy that Prof. Hauser draws between morphological/linguistic phenomena and
cultural phenomena does not hold. Chomskyan linguistics, which came into being as a
critique of discredited culturally-based explanations of linguistic phenomena such as the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, does indeed propose that all human beings share brain-based
linguistic cognitive equipment and capacities that makes them able to use language in
similar ways. It is very important to note, however, that Chomsky and his successors
deliberately turned their backs on the cultural specifics of language as it is used in the
world. Chomsky can thus demonstrate that Welsh and Japanese work in very similar
ways (and he has done) at a generative level despite a complete lack of developmental
cultural contact between the two cultures. He’s right: but Welsh and Japanese are still
completely different in terms of syntax, phonology, and semantics, and knowing one
language won’t help you to learn the other in real life. For Chomsky, this is trivial – he’s
a self-described cognitive scientist and he’s simply not interested in how the Welsh
describe sunsets in their language compared to how the Japanese do it in theirs.
For this reason, Chomsky’s approach to language cannot be used as a guide to the
specifics of a given language and how it changes over time or develops slangs and patois
versions; nor did it ever claim to do so. Chomsky knows this limitation is inherent in his
work and is rightfully unconcerned by it: he’s a scientist trying to explore how our
species generates language in general, not Pennsylvania Dutch in particular. And we can
extend this limitation of this approach to cultural specifics as well. Unlike morphology
and generative grammars, the specifics of, to use but one example, music change over
time not just in response to genetic and environmental factors, but in response to itself.
Darwin’s finches cannot change their beak shape because they want to be different from
other finches, but musicians can and do change their practices in response to the available
forms of music of which they know. In the mid 1990s, just as digital recording techniques
reached their apogee and tape hiss was banished forever, the low-fi movement was
started – bands like Guided by Voices started using now-archaic analog recording devices
precisely because they wanted the audible traces of the recording process to be part of
their sound. A musical movement was thus generated as a deliberate push against the
mainstream trend of the Western recording industry.
It is the vast variety of culturally-generated specifics like this that inevitably
overturn generalizations such as “are there musical forms that cannot be perceived and
therefore represent impossible structures? The answer is unambiguously, yes.” (6). There
could hardly be anything more ambiguous than definitions like this! There have been
many examples of musical forms that others within the same culture do not recognize as
music and many experimental forms of music that go far beyond any stable definition of
it as a practice. Mash-ups and sampling in hip hop are broadly accepted as creative
activities today; they would have been unimaginable (as well as technically impossible)
fifty years ago. His assumption that no moral system will ever operate on the assumption
that “side-effects are worse than means” is even more dubious – one could list several
historical examples of moral codes that do precisely that; for most of human history, it
would have been an obvious truism that sacrificing a slave, peasant, or child to save ten
lives was well worth it. The analogy that Prof. Hauser suggests actually just reverses the
traditional philosophical assumption I mentioned at the outset – instead of taking human
cognitive capacity as a given, he assumes that cultural phenomena can be classified and
understood using genetic or evolutionary criteria. What both humanists and scientists
approaching these questions need is the means to take on the complexities of both
approaches – to recognize that our cognitive, genetic, and neuroscientific capacities
produce all of our thought and expression, but that culture does have many lives of its
own. There is much that science can contribute to our understanding of culture, but until
a synthesis like this is possible, it cannot have the explanatory force for culture that Prof.
Hauser would like.
One specific query: the 5,000 year period of intense cultural activity that Prof. Hauser
links to a genetic revolution is not necessarily evidence of “fundamental changes in
genomic function” (4), though it might be. As the intense creative and cultural energy of
the digital era shows, one or two technological or cultural breakthroughs can occasion a
flood of consequences in a very short space of time.