The New Darwinism in the Humanities: Part II: Back to Nature, Again

Between the year 1997, when How the Mind Works was published, and 2002, the year of The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker’s treatment of art seems to have undergone a certain amount of refinement. In 1997, far from seeing the arts as “adaptive,” in the Darwinian sense of conducive to fitness for survival and reproduction, Pinker described music and fiction as “cheesecake” for the mind that provided a sensual thrill like the feel of fat and sugar on the taste buds. With a view such as this, there wasn’t much difference between the psychological impact of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and pornography off the Web. Pinker made things even worse by adding, “Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.” Whether the passage of time has caused him to reconsider or whether harsh critics such as Joseph Carroll1 have had a chastening effect, by the time of The Blank Slate, Pinker remarks, “Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties.” In other words, our response to art is a component of human nature and, even if he still considers it a pleasure-technology or a status-seeking feat, Pinker now seems to see it as more deeply connected with being human. “Organisms get pleasure from things that promoted the fitness of their ancestors,” he writes, and he mentions food, sex,