Counting your friends in threes

Posted on March 20, 2014 by

Professor Robin Dunbar is the Director of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford and the author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Here he shares his thoughts about the arithmetic of friendship.

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Noah, it is said, counted the animals into his Ark two by two. Perhaps sensibly in view of the circumstances, he was no doubt thinking in terms of reproduction. Had he been thinking socially, he might instead have counted his animals by threes. That, at least, is the message of several recent studies suggesting that our social networks have a very distinctive structure based on multiples of three.

We all know that we can distinguish friends from acquaintances by how we feel about them. Friends are those we want to spend time with, whereas acquaintances are those whose company is more of a momentary convenience. But it seems that we make even finer judgements than this in real life. What’s perhaps more intriguing is that if you look at the pattern of relationships within the group of 150 that constitutes our social world, a number of circles of intimacy can be detected. The innermost group consists of about three to five people. These seem to constitute the small nucleus of really good friends to whom you go to in times of trouble – for advice, comfort, or perhaps even the loan of money or help. Above this is a slightly larger grouping that typically consists of about ten additional people. And above this is a slightly bigger circle of around thirty more.

The numbers that make up these circles of acquaintanceship seem to have no obvious pattern. But if you consider each successive circle inclusive of all the inner circles, a very clear pattern emerges: they seem to form a sequence that goes up by a factor of three (roughly five, fifteen, fifty and 150). In fact, there are at least two more layers beyond this: there is a grouping at about five hundred and another at about fifteen hundred. And the Greek philosopher Plato even managed to get the next layer out: he identified 5,300 (and I’ll happily allow him the extra three hundred) as the ideal size for a democracy.

We are not sure what all of these successive circles correspond to in real life, or why they should increase in size by a multiple of three, but some correspond to very well known groupings. The grouping of twelve to fifteen, for example, has long been known to social psychologists as the ‘sympathy group’ – all those whose death tomorrow would leave you distraught. Curiously, this is also the typical team size in most team sports, the number of members on a jury, the number of Apostles . . . and the list goes on. The fifty grouping corresponds to the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southernAfrica. And 1,500 is the average size of tribes among hunter-gatherer peoples (usually defined as all the people that speak the same language, or, in the case of very widespread languages, the same dialect).

It seems that each of these circles of acquaintanceship map quite neatly onto two aspects of how we relate to our friends. One is the frequency with which we contact them – at least once a week for the inner circle of five, at least once a month for the circle of fifteen, at least once a year for the 150. But it also seems to coincide with the sense of intimacy we feel: we have the most intense relationships with the inner five, but we have a slightly cooler relationship with the ten additional people that make up the next circle of fifteen. And successively cooler still are our feelings towards the next two layers (those in the circles of fifty and 150).

So it seems as though there is a limit to the number of people we can hold at a particular level of intimacy. There are just so many boxes you can fill in your innermost circle, and if a new person comes into your life, someone has to drop down into the next level to make room for them. Interestingly, kin seem to occur more often than you would expect by chance in each of these successive levels. This isn’t to say that we have to include (or even like!) all our kin, but it does seem that kin get given preference: when all else is equal, blood really is thicker than water and we are more willing to help them out.

[This post is an edited extract from:  Robin Dunbar (2010)  How Many Friends Does One Person Need: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. London: Faber & Faber. Reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]

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Female alliances

Posted on March 20, 2014 by


Amanda E. Herbert is Assistant Professor of History at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.   Her first book is Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, published by Yale University Press in 2014.  

This blog post is an edited excerpt from that book, which explores women’s social networks in Britain, c. 1550-1750, and the many ways in which early modern women were encouraged to make and keep friends, including making marmalade…

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On October 25, 1617, Anne Clifford wrote that she “gave [my friends] some marmalade of Quinces for about this time I made much of it.” Clifford’s record of a gift of quince marmalade affords a good example of the friendly ties that were engendered when early modern women gave the gift of fruits and preserves. Marmalades, sweetmeats, comfits, and conserves, the sugared and preserved yield of fruit trees, were early modern delicacies. When women gave these objects, they manifested their social position and wealth in two ways: first, in their associations with the fruits themselves and, second, in their extravagant use of sugar.  Consumable gifts such as these were meant to signal a woman’s culinary acumen, but they were also intended to convey a sociable and affectionate taste. When women gave gifts of fruit and confection, they worked to reinforce the ties, both emotional and social, which bound them together.

From a young age, elite girls were taught that the preparation of sugared fruits was a woman’s art. Women worked extensively in gardens watering, weeding, and fruit picking. Works of prescriptive literature suggested that a so-called useful woman was one who managed her household’s produce carefully and thriftily. Richard Allestree’s Ladies Calling (1696) suggested that “the art of Oeconomy and householdmanagery [is] . . . the most proper Feminine business, from which neither wealth nor greatness can totally absolve them.” But while elite women were encouraged to refine their skills in food production and practice economy as part of “the most proper Feminine business,” elite men were, in contrast, actively discouraged from participating in culinary work.

Anne Dormer ridiculed her husband for his culinary interests, confessing to her sister that his fascination with cooking was a troubling and aggravating sign of a selfish desire to “please his fancy”: “Mr. D is now much taken with all sorts of cookery and spends all his ingenuity in finding out the most comodious way of frying broileing rosting stewing and preserving his whole studdy is to please his fancy in every thing and by runing away from all things that might shew him his errors.” Dormer’s experiments in food production were quickly and harshly condemned by his wife as lazy and even ruinous, a waste of “all his ingenuity.” Dormer equated her husband’s cooking activity not with female industriousness but with idleness, wasteful luxury, and indulgence. She was particularly put off by his fascination with sugared confection and fruit preserves, adding derisively,  “[He] loiters aboute, somtimes stues prunes, som times makes chocalate, and this somer he is much taken with preserving.”

But early modern women, who were encouraged to do sugar-work, saw fruit as a highly desirable gift.  Then as now, raw fruits had to be preserved if they were to be enjoyed for any length of time. This required enormous quantities of sugar. The amounts of sugar called for in British recipes of the period were an indulgence and extravagance, even for those who had the means to afford them. Sugar had become more widely available in Great Britain by the 1660s, when British West Indian colonies in Barbados and the Leeward Islands shifted from tobacco to sugar production and began shipping greater quantities of the sweet substance to Britain. The product of exploitative transtlantic slave labor, sugar increased in availability during the second half of the seventeenth century, but its consumption in Britain was still restricted by status. Wealthy individuals bought sugar by the loaf, each loaf ranging in weight from three to fourteen pounds. Lower-status families could only afford “scraped” sugar, which was scratched off of a common, store-owned loaf and sold in small quantities inside paper packets. And taxes on the refined product remained high throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, ensuring that the confection remained an expensive commodity even in small quantities.

Title page of a later edition of Markham Gervase’s book (c) Library of Congress

Despite its cost, sugar was used extensively in preserving fruits. The prescriptive author Gervase Markham wrote a recipe in 1615 for “Marmalade of quinces red” illuminated the process women would have gone through as well as the ingredients they would have used to create fruit marmalades, jellies, and candies: “Take a pound of quinces and cut them in halves . . . then take a pound of sugar and a quart of fair water and put them all into a pan . . . when it beginneth to be thick then break your quinces, with a slice or a spoon . . . and then strew a little fine sugar in your box’s bottom, and so put it up.” In this recipe copious amounts of sugar were used both in the mixture itself and for the purpose of forming a light crust around the bottom edge of the finished marmalade. Sugar was the vital ingredient in most early modern preserving and conserving, and a pound of sugar per every pound of fruit was fairly standard in most of Markham’s marmalade recipes. Recipe book author Hannah Woolley’s recipe for “Quince Marmalade” called for the maker to “put white Sugar to it, as much as you please.” Considering the character of the British-grown quince, this amount could have been quite considerable; as Martin Crawford states in his article on quinces, “In warm temperate and tropical regions, the fruits can become soft, juicy, and suitable for eating raw; but in cooler temperate areas like Britain, they do not ripen so far. Here, raw quince fruits are hard, gritty, harsh and astringent.”

And so when Anne Clifford gave her female friends quince marmalade in 1617, she used the gift to convey many messages. The wealthy, well-educated Clifford (1590–1676) was the daughter of the Earl of Cumberland, and her first husband was the Earl of Dorset. She shared an uneasy relationship with both her natal and married families. Clifford’s extensive manuscript papers document disagreements with family members over inheritance issues, estate management, child care, and personal comportment. When Clifford recorded her present of quince marmalade in her personal daily diary, the sentences surrounding provision of marmalade hint at the weightiness of this gift to Clifford and to the greater importance of gift exchange to her own sometimes shaky alliances: “Upon the 25th, being Saturday, my Lady Lisle, my Lady ___ [blank in manuscript], and my Coz. Barbara Sidney [visited]. I walked with them all the wildernesse over & had much talk of my Coz. Clifford & many other matters. They saw the Childe and much commended her. I gave them some marmalade of Quinces for about this time I mad[e] much of it.” Clifford wrote of the bestowal of the present within the context of a visit, in which three elite women, at least one of whom was a female relative of Clifford’s, traveled to Dorset to socialize with her at her home. The women spent time walking together out of doors, talking, and exchanging information. The visit was then recorded as concluded with a gift that was both luxurious and handmade and that Clifford was careful to note was of her own creation.  By the end of this meeting, Clifford and her female friends had affirmed their alliances, and gift giving was central to the interaction.

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Curious about the sources cited in this post?  You can find them here:

  1. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling in Two Parts (London, 1696).
  2. Martin Crawford, “Quince,” Agroforestry News 6, no. 2 (January 1998).
  3. Anne Dormer, Letters to her sister Elizabeth Trumbull, 1685–91, Add. 72516, ff. 156–243, British Library.
  4. Anne Clifford Herbert, The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–1619: A Critical Edition, ed. Katherine O. Acheson (New York: Garland, 1995).
  5. Gervase Markham, The English Housewife: Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to be in a Complete Woman, ed. Michael R. Best (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1986).
  6. Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion or, a Guide to the Female Sex: The Complete Text of 1675, ed. Caterina Albano (Devon, UK: Prospect Books, 2001).
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Follow Amanda Herbert on Twitter @amandaeherbert

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Friends and families

Posted on March 20, 2014 by

Naomi Tadmor is Professor of History at Lancaster University. She has researched and written about the histories of the family, religious life, language, and friendship in the early modern period. She is the author of Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England.  In this post for the History of Emotions blog, she explains the meaning of the term ‘friend’ in earlier periods, and the relationship between friendship and kinship.

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A modern dictionary defines ‘friend’ as ‘one joined to another in intimacy and mutual benevolence’ independent of ‘family love’. For a person living in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this would have sounded odd.

Certainly, people living at that time had personal friends from outside their family circles, as we do today; but their common use of ‘friend’ was to designate relatives through blood and marriage (retaining the ancient Germanic sense of the word). As well as that, ‘friend’ could refer to other close and senior people who mattered in one’s life, such as patrons, guardians, employers, and other supporters. The seventeenth-century diarist Ralph Josselin, for example, used ‘friend’ when referring to his sisters, brothers-in-law, uncles, and other relations. When the eighteenth-century shopkeeper Thomas Turner complained about his ‘friends’, he was thinking first and foremost about his mother and siblings, who lived in the neighbouring village and interfered in his life. When a young woman was asked for her hand in marriage, the most appropriate response for her would have been to seek the consent of ‘friends’: her parents (if either or both were alive), senior siblings, aunts and uncles, or any other kin who mattered, alongside guardians, masters, and mistresses.

Nor was this ‘friendship’ necessarily symmetrical. Today friendship is commonly associated with ideals of freedom, equality, and reciprocity. So was it depicted by classical philosophers. But in the hierarchical world of early modern England, friendship was frequently tied not only to kinship, but to patronage. Support, advice, protection, and material goods were sought and bestowed as ‘marks of friendship’. This was considered to be virtue. As the clergyman Jeremy Taylor said: ‘excellency and usefulness’ are the great ‘indearment’ of friendship. Edward Gibbon expressed this notion well when he explained that one of the main purposes of winning a seat in Parliament is ‘to employ the weight and consideration it gives in the service of one’s friends’. The instrumental and emotional aspects of friendship were very closely linked.

While family members and patrons could be ‘friends’, non-related people could count as ‘family’. The word ‘family’ was used in the early modern world to designate not only kin (dead and living), but entire household frameworks, which often included non-related persons such as servants, boarders, and lodgers. The shopkeeper Thomas Turner’s family contained at various times maidservants, shop-assistants, siblings, in-laws, nephews, as well as a wife and child. Turner considered these as his ‘family’ as they were under his roof and care. His mother, an independent householder, had a separate ‘family’ of her own. Even institutions such as schools and houses of corrections could be described as ‘families’, for they included dependants living together under the authority of a householder. Aptly, Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, defined ‘family’ as ‘those who live in the same house’.

In the early modern world of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century England, these social structures made perfect sense. This was a society where many left home young to undertake service, education, or to learn a trade. Whereas the brokerage of marriages, trade, and support was negotiated along ‘friendship’ networks; work, care, and manufacture habitually took place within household-family frameworks. At the same time, mortality was high. Roughly one third of marriages ended prematurely, and many marriages were re-marriages, leading to complex half- and step relations and living arrangements. ‘Friend’ was in fact one of a number of kinship terms of the time that were usefully and intentionally opaque, concealing more than they revealed. The word disclosed only that the individual concerned had ‘friends’, and could be backed by allies. Their number, gender, and status remained unknown. The word ‘family’ – likewise inclusive and opaque – was also useful in a social world in which habitation and co-habitation were not necessarily tied to blood and marriage, and could be a matter of individual circumstances, preference, and choice.

Does any of this sound familiar?  We also have words that are inclusive and opaque, and can be applied to relatives and non-relatives within and beyond households. ‘Partner’, for example, historically described those linked by business or marriage, but is currently widely used ‘to refer to a member of a couple in a long-standing relationship of any kind’ (to quote the Oxford English Dictionary), thereby often intentionally giving equal kinship recognition to marriage, co-habitation, same-sex relationships, and so on, while obscuring the exact status and gender of the individuals concerned. Likewise definitions of ‘family’ have continued to evolve, as present-day ‘families of choice’ embrace not only an array of step- and half-relations but also persons with diverse gender alliances and with no formal ties of blood and marriage.

Taking a historical birds’ eye view, it is clear that times are very different for individuals, families, and households – our predecessors had lower life-expectancies, while practices of partnership and divorce, and social hierarchies, have greatly changed since Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian times. Still, some patterns seem suggestively similar. Social structures typical of early modern notions of ‘friendship’ and ‘family’ might bring to mind present-day ‘new families’ and ‘families of choice’. What is more, both the present-day and the historical patterns show how language is continually adapted to negotiate changing forms of alliance and relatedness.

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Naomi Tadmor has written about families and friends in:

Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Friendship, love and letter-writing

Posted on March 20, 2014 by

Dr Sally Holloway is a historian of emotions, material culture, and romantic love. She contributed to the research for Five Hundred Years of Friendship, and is an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. In this blog post she explores how letters mediated and sustained relationships of love and friendship in the eighteenth century. 

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Love and friendship during the eighteenth century were inextricably intertwined. The notion that friendships between men and women could blossom into an enduring love provided the central pillar of the idea of companionate marriage. As the philosopher Mary Astell (1666-1731) argued in Some Reflections Upon Marriage in 1700:

He who does not make Friendship the chief inducement to his Choice, and prefer it before any other consideration, does not deserve a good Wife, and therefore should not complain if he goes without one. Now we can never grow weary of our Friends; the longer we have had them the more they are endear’d to us.[1]

The heroine of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1740) similarly noted that ‘Love before Marriage is absolutely necessary’ and that ‘Wives and Husbands are or should be Friends’.[2] Eighteenth-century suitors followed this dictum in writing love letters to female friends who had captured their hearts. Some hoped for ‘an entire assurance of continued Friendship’ until fortune permitted them to ‘oblige you as I ought’ with a romantic suit.[3] The unsteady growth of literacy and flourishing of the culture of letters provided a way for literate friends to maintain and intensify their relationships through the continual exchange of letters.

While friendship could pave the path to matrimony, certain men wrote to complain to their sweethearts when their courtships had stalled at friendship. In the 1740s, the Exeter physician George Gibbs was frustrated when his sweetheart Ann Vicary’s father insisted that ‘I ought not to visit you with any view but of mine Friendship’ because ‘Intimacies of another nature if they are long continued, cannot be broke off without great Uneasiness’. George was thus encouraged to content himself with friendship until he had received his inheritance, granting him parental permission to continue his suit. He comforted himself by maintaining their romantic correspondence, and holding on to his ‘Expectations of one day calling you by a much dearer name than that either of an acquaintance or Friend’.[4]

As women’s courtships progressed towards marriage, they gleefully reported every detail of their romantic escapades in letters to female friends. Elite marriages were not exempt from the frisson of romance, as illustrated by the letters of Georgiana Poyntz (1737-1814) during her courtship with John, first Earl Spencer (1734-83). In 1755, Georgiana wrote a dreamy account of her love to her friend and confidant Theadora Cowper:

now my dear Thea I will own it & never deny it again that I do love Spencer above all men upon Earth…the last glimpse I had of him was to see him in the utmost Perfection for he was on a very fine prancing Grey Horse with a long tail & mane…I wish to god he loved me half as well as I love him. Oh Thea I could write of him for ever & not be tir’d.[5]

While Georgiana could not have written such an explicit account of her attraction to John himself, writing to her friend provided the perfect outlet to rationalise her emotions, verbalise her love, and fantasise about her dashing future husband. The couple were married bedecked in diamonds at his country seat Althorp in Northamptonshire on 20th December 1755.[6]

In return, Georgiana’s letters provided a source of support for Theadora during her ill-fated romance with her first cousin, the poet William Cowper (1731-1800). Georgiana advised her friend in May 1754 that ‘Mamma said I think the best Thing Thea could do would be to marry Billy Cowper if she Can be Contented with a Little. He is a very good young man & I dare say will do very well in the world’.[7] Sadly, the courtship was cut short in 1756 due to her father’s objections, and a melancholic Theadora remained unmarried. Georgiana understood that imposing upon her friend at this time would only add to her pain, recognising that ‘it would be only tormenting you for nothing’ and would ‘add to your Afflictions’.[8] By the time Theadora’s father finally acquiesced to the match in August 1763, the moment had passed, and William declined his offer.[9]

The Two Friends, London, 1786, hand-coloured mezzotint, plate mark 35.3 x 25cm, Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT.

Theadora at least had her correspondence with her friend Georgiana as a means of comfort. The virtues of friendships between women were celebrated in prints such as The Two Friends (1786), depicting two fashionably dressed young women composing a letter (Fig. 1). On the table before them are an inkwell and a stack of books. The text rhapsodised,

Friendship thou soft propitious power,
Sweet Regent of the social hour,
Sublime thy Joys not understood,
But by the Virtuous and Good.

The woman on the left helps her friend to compose a letter, which begins, ‘Dear Sir, When last I had the honor [sic] to…’ Her companion wears a white dress printed all over with red hearts, and her eyes glaze over in a lovelorn expression, suggesting that they may be replying to a suitor. The image presents the two friends colluding over the letter, as the more composed woman dressed in blue points to their missive, and puts an arm around the shoulder of her lovelorn accomplice.

While friendships between men and women could blossom into love, women’s faithful friends provided an essential resource in navigating the unpredictable world of courtship. Letters to friends enabled women to fantasise about their suitors, dispense advice, and provide an unerring source of support when their love went awry. The Spectator described the following Biblical maxim as ‘very just as well as very sublime’ in 1711: ‘A faithful Friend is a strong Defence; and he that hath found such an one, hath found a Treasure’.[10]

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[1] Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1706), third edition, p. 93.

[2] Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford, 2001), Vol. II, pp. 448-9.

[3] Copy of a love letter, undated (early to mid 18th century), Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, HA11/B1/1/6.

[4] George Gibbs to Ann Vicary, Exmouth, undated (1740s), London Metropolitan Archives, MS/11021/1.

[5] Georgiana Poyntz to Theadora Cowper, 1755, Althorp Collection, BL Add Mss 75691. I am grateful to Hannah Greig for sharing this reference with me.

[6] ‘An Account of Mr. Spencer’s Grand Wedding with Mrs Poyntz wrote by a Lady who had it from a Relation of Mrs Poyntz who saw the Cloaths before they went out of Town’, BL Add Mss 64082 E.

[7] Poyntz to Cowper, May 11th 1754, BL Add Mss 75691.

[8] Spencer to Cowper, June 6th 1756.

[9] See James King, William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, 1986), pp. 21-9.

[10] The Spectator, No. 68, Friday May 18th 1711. Cf. Ecclesiasticus 6:14.

On theology versus medical materialism in crime dramas

Posted on March 15, 2014 by

true-detective-S01-about-16x9-1True Detective has an unusual amount of theology for a cop show. The hero, Rustin Cohle, is a fervent atheist, who delivers soliloquies on the meaninglessness of existence as he and his partner drive to the next crime scene. Human consciousness is an ‘evolutionary misstep’, humans are ‘biological puppets’, religion is a consoling ‘fairy tale’ for morons.

Cohle has his own atheist fairy tales, however. He is drawn to Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return, according to which time circles round and repeats itself. The baddies he is chasing happen to share this quirky cosmic theory. What are the chances! You can’t move for all the Nietzscheans in Louisiana.

Although it’s unusual for a TV cop show to be so overtly theological (or atheological), True Detective in fact comes from a long tradition of thinking theologically through detective fiction, which stretches back through PD James, Dorothy L. Sayers and Father Roland Knox all the way to GK Chesterton (or, if you want to go back further, to Daniel, the first sleuth in literature).

tumblr_m8hhehHdkY1royoaao1_1280As crime writer Jason Webster recently argued, the detective is a sort of priest-figure for secular modernity. Crucially – and in accordance with the second of Father Knox’ ‘Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction’ – the detective does not rely on divine assistance to solve crimes. Instead, they try to solve the problem of evil and suffering using only their natural attributes of intelligence, empathy and scientific method.

They may also be assisted by the technocratic bureaucracy of the police force – the detective novel arose in the 19th century, side-by-side with the establishment of state police systems. However, detective fiction often shows a sort of Weberian ambivalence towards bureaucracy – it is often corrupt or simply an annoying obstacle to the Nietzschean genius of the detective (think Dirty Harry).

Although the detective is a secular priest-substitute, they exhibit many of the features of their predecessor. The detective is often a ‘man of sorrows’, a solitary figure, isolated and driven to the brink of destruction by his transcendental passion for truth and justice. He or she has a burning sense that the universe must be intelligible, it must make sense. But why should we care so passionately about truth and justice? As his partner says to him, for someone who thinks the universe is meaningless, Cohle gets very worked up.

The detective will follow the clues, uncover the crimes, and free the kidnapped victims like Jesus harrowing Hell. They will reveal the hidden machinations of the Enemy. They can do this because, like a priest, they know the dark depths of the human heart. GK Chesterton’s Father Brown says a good detective must know the capacity for evil within themselves, within all of us. The detective’s ability to get a confession is also priest-like – although Cohle in True Detective tends to listen sympathetically before leaning over and whispering ‘you should probably kill yourself’.

Rustin Cohle as messianic Man of Sorrows

Rustin Cohle as messianic Man of Sorrows

Above all, as Chesterton wrote, the detective story gives us a religious sense that the landscape of modernity is infused with signs, clues, glimpses of a higher pattern. It becomes a landscape infused with meaning, redeemed from banality and meaninglessness. And yet the code we are deciphering is not God’s, but the murderer’s.

The murderer has taken the place of God. They have – particularly in recent crime dramas – become a sort of Nietzschean myth-maker, creating the legend of themselves, and using their victims as materials.

The pioneer of this idea of the serial killer as myth-maker is Thomas Harris – in Silence of the Lambs, the serial killer literally uses other people as material for his Nietzschean self-construction. Red Dragon has a similar idea of the serial killer authoring themselves, transforming themselves into something new through their acts of violence.

The serial killer as Nietzschean myth-maker in Thomas Harris' Red Dragon

The serial killer as Nietzschean myth-maker in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon

We also meet the serial killer as myth-maker in David Fincher’s films – John Doe in Se7en uses his victims as materials for his ‘masterpiece’. We see it in David Pease’s Red Riding books, where the murdering paedophiles give themselves mythical identities – the Wolf, the Swan, the King. True Detective clearly owes a lot to Red Riding – it has a similarly layered time structure and sense of the sediment of evil building up over time. And it also involves a paedophile ring with mythical pretensions, who wear animal masks and call themselves things like the Yellow King.

In all of these, the murderer is the artist, the detective a mere literary critic. To solve the crime, they go not to forensics or ballistics, but to the library to read Dante. The author of True Detective used to teach English in academia, and his hero even looks like an academic, with a corduroy jacket and a leather-bound journal.

This is the strange conclusion then – we are so starved of myths and of meaning in secular modernity, that we turn with something like relief to the work of serial killers, to pore over their mythical patterns, like the obsessive amateur sleuth played by Jake Gyllenhall in David Fincher’s Zodiac.

The detective as literary critic

The detective as literary critic

The murderer redeems our world from ennui and triviality. Violence redeems it. Mortality redeems it – think how, in the 24-hour frenzy of narcissism and triviality that is Twitter, each celebrity death, no matter how minor the celebrity, is greeted with awed and mawkish reverence.

Our continued fondness for detective fiction shows we have a nostalgia for evil. There is no such thing as evil in a strictly materialist world-view. There are only various medical pathologies – autism, personality disorder, psychopathology. TS Eliot said ‘all psychology ends either in glands or theology’. In psychiatry it ends in glands. As Nietszche foresaw, once God has died, one can quickly feel a terrible flatness and boredom. That ancient cosmic battle between Good and Evil is revealed to be a neurological puppet-show, nothing more.

We have lost the dignity of sin. Some morbid souls still long for that dignity. One of them was Baudelaire. As TS Eliot perceived, Baudelaire’s attraction to evil is a rejection of naturalism ‘in favour of Heaven and Hell’. Eliot wrote: “In…an age of bustle, programmes, platforms, scientific progress, humanitarianism and revolutions which proved nothing, Baudelaire perceived that what really matters is Sin and Redemption…and the possibility of damnation’. Damnation becomes “a relief…a form of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to living’.

Lars Von Trier is another morbid soul. The heroine of his new film, Nymphomaniac, insists that her nature is evil, even though she is not religious. Her interviewer asks her: ‘why would you hold onto the least sympathetic concept in religion – the idea of sin – while rejecting the rest of it’? The answer is because there is a pride and dignity in sin, which medical materialism takes away.

What is Duende?

Posted on March 6, 2014 by

I’m researching ecstatic experiences at the moment, which involves looking at ecstasy in the arts. This morning I’ve been reading some Edward Hirsch, the poet and literary critic, who has a very ecstatic conception of art. That’s quite rare these days. There’s a danger, when talking about ecstasy, of sounding like some gushing New Age hippy. On the other hand, if you don’t talk about the ecstatic at all, there’s a danger of sounding like Daniel Dennett.

I’m reading Hirsch’ The demon and the angel: searching for the source of artistic inspiration. It was itself inspired by Hirsch’s reading of a famous essay by the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca, about the Spanish notion of duende.

Duende, as far as I understand it, means those moments in artistic activity when something else takes over, when something speaks through you. It’s similar to the Muse or the angel, but these things come from some lofty height, while duende rises up from the chthonic depths, from the body and the groin, from the darkness, from death itself.The word comes from duen de casa, ‘Lord of the house’, meaning a sort of daemon or local spirit.

Lorca writes:

All through Andalusia, from the rock of Jaén to the snail’s-shell of Cadiz, people constantly talk about the duende and recognise it wherever it appears with a fine instinct. That wonderful singer El Lebrijano, creator of the Debla, said: ‘On days when I sing with duende no one can touch me.’: the old Gypsy dancer La Malena once heard Brailowsky play a fragment of Bach, and exclaimed: ‘Olé! That has duende!’ but was bored by Gluck, Brahms and Milhaud. And Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife spoke this splendid sentence: ‘All that has black sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that.

 

Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Black sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’

You can never be sure if duende will turn up, or if a performance will simply be flat and mechanical. That is the mystery – it is not easily replicable in randomised controlled trials. It is most manifest in live arts like spoken poetry, music or (for Lorca) bull-fighting. You could be in a bar, and everything is stale and flat, and then

La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

Suddenly the god is there:

In all Arab music, dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether they are not the same? And in all the songs of Southern Spain, the appearance of the duende is followed by sincere cries of: ‘Viva Dios!’ deep, human, tender cries of communication with God through the five senses, thanks to the duende that shakes the voice and body of the dancer, a real, poetic escape from this world, as pure as that achieved by that rarest poet of the seventeenth century Pedro Soto de Rojas with his seven gardens, or John Climacus with his trembling ladder of tears.

The poet Frank O’Hara remembers one such moment of duende, when he was in the Five Spot in New York to listen to Mel Waldron. Billie Holiday was in the audience, and everyone begged her to sing. It was actually illegal for her to perform in a venue that sold liquor, as she’d recently been arrested for heroin possession, but she did anyway. By that stage her voice was almost gone, but she still used it to convey an electrifying emotion (as Seneca said, ‘the skilled pilot can steer even with a torn sail’). O’Hara remembers:

she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mel Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

(from the poem, ‘The Day Lady Died‘)

Why does duende seem particularly to inhabit damaged souls? Why is it sometimes out of moments of brokenness and despair that people create art that soars? Perhaps you have to know spiritual imprisonment and despair to know the elation of moments of freedom. Perhaps it is when you are at the limits of your consciousness that you can find gifts to bring back. Perhaps that’s the idea behind the lines by Leonard Cohen:

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

It’s also worth remembering, in these vapid managerial days of ‘ten top tips for creativity’, that for people who really have duende, sometimes it destroys them. It can be both a gift and a curse. Like a torero with a bull, an artist is engaged in a sort of dance with their duende, flirting with disaster, seeing how vulnerable and exposed they can be to their own destruction while still emerging with a flourish.

Are there moments you remember of duende in music? Lorca’s essay makes me think particularly of Amy Winehouse, a queen of ‘black sounds’, whose voice could electrify like no one else’s in her generation. The electricity of her voice, shivering like an exposed wire, seemed to be connected to her vivid sense of her own vulnerability, brokenness, and mortality.  But this gave her music an occasional elation, a sudden soaring from the limits she was so conscious of.

So, for example, listen to the duende in this plaintive song, complaining wearily about her lover, and then suddenly soaring off from 3.10:

Or watch this performance at the Brits, where she goes on stage after Adele, and just completely out-duende‘s her, and puts in a performance so joyous and alive it seems to redeem the whole tawdry artificial spectacle of an industry award show.

Here, by the way, is an excellent Nick Cave lecture on duende and melancholia in pop music. Thanks to Eliot Whittington for pointing it out to me.

Jeff Kripal on the mystical humanities

Posted on February 20, 2014 by

Is it taboo for academics to talk about their spiritual experiences? What can the humanities bring to the study of such experiences? Can we steer between the Scylla of religious dogmatism and the Charybidis of materialist reductionism when interpreting such experiences? I interviewed Jeff Kripal, professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University, and one of the more entertaining, brave and unusual voices in religious studies and the humanities in general.

Jeff, your mentor, Wendy Doniger, has just had her book The Hindus pulped by Penguin India, after a nationalist campaign against it. This must give you deja-vu back to 1995, when your first book, Kali’s Child, provoked a similar shit-storm, even leading to debates in the Indian parliament over whether it should be banned, because of its suggestion that the mysticism of Ramakrishna was connected to his possible homosexuality. You were 33, it was your dissertation, it must have been unpleasant.  

Yes. The book got me into a huge amount of trouble, and I’m still in trouble. It was awful and scary. The hate was over the top. The book itself is deeply appreciative and warm and sensitive about Hindu culture. It’s just that it tackles ideas that haven’t reached a tipping point yet in India.

Did people think you were being reductive? Because it seems to me you were suggesting Ramakrishna’s mysticism was both sexual and spiritual.   

The people who drove the campaign were mainly engineers and scientists. And when I explained my argument that it was mystical and sexual at the same time, it just fried all their circuits. They think of things in very binary terms. Everything has to mean one thing, it has to be very clear.

In subsequent books, you’ve returned to that point, about the close relationship between the erotic and the mystical. That seems to be an uncontroversial point – look at Plato, for example, or charismatic Christianity, where encounters with the Holy Spirit often sound pretty much like orgasms. 

Right. One of the things I wanted to do in my second book, Roads of Excess,  Palaces of Wisdom (2001), was show that my ideas about sex and mysticism were not just applicable to a single Indian saint in the 19th century, but that actually they work across the board, in western culture as well.

In Roads of Excess, you look at various western academics who wrote about mysticism, including Evelyn Underhill and Elliot Wolfson, and argued that they had mystic experiences themselves, but didn’t talk about them. They kept them secret. 

Yes, and I think one of the reasons they kept them secret was their mystical experiences were connected to their sexuality.

In that book you ‘came out’, as it were, about your own spiritual-erotic experiences. Could you tell us about the spiritual experience you talk about in Roads? 

I was living in Calcutta in 1989. In late October and early November, I was engaging in Kali Puja rituals, which to any western eye seem like a combination of Halloween and a religious celebration. The imagery is very macabre, and its a profound beautiful event that goes on for days. I had been visiting these temples all day, and went to bed late.

Sometime early in the morning, I woke up, but my body didn’t. My body was paralysed but my mind came on line. Classic sleep paralysis experience. Then this presence came into the room, or out of me, or something – I don’t know where the fuck it came out of – but it was on top of me, and it was engaging me sexually. But in a really scary way. I thought I was dying. My first thought was I was having a heart attack or being electrocuted. Because it felt like I imagine it feels like when you stick a fork in the wall-socket. My whole body was vibrating. But it was also intensely erotic, to the point where it got so intense it propelled me out of my body – I had a classic out of body experience where I was floating in the room. I eventually got back into my body and woke up. But I felt residual energies in me – the feeling was that something was planted or downloaded in me. It wasn’t just blind energy, it was noetic – it had a philosophical content to it which I couldn’t have articulated at the time. All the books since have been trying to get that out on the page. It wasn’t a revelation event. It was a transmission event, which sent me off looking for similar events in texts and other people’s experience.

It reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s strange Valis experience, and how it wasn’t clear or certain to him what he meant. He spent eight years trying to figure out what it was. 

This is what attracted me to his writing. When I read him, I recognized the experience, although his experience went on for weeks and months. I could see in Dick’s Valis event, the feel of what I had known. I suppose an emotion is some sort of intellectually coded energy.

You suggest unusual experiences like that are both culturally constructed – shaped by the culture you’re immersed in – but also not just culturally constructed. 

I think particular cultural contexts allow them and catalyse them. I wouldn’t have had that particular experience without the Kali Puja going on around me. But I don’t think the Kali Puja caused it. I think it allowed it and catalysed it. Cultural context shapes, mediates and expresses the phenomenological feel of these events. But it’s not producing them. I think they’re cross-cultural. They’re not even historical – they’re not located on a particular point in space-time. But when they interact with human beings, they are. Philip K. Dick said he heard a voice in a dream, which said ‘someday the mask will come off, and you will realize the truth as it really is’. Dick says: ‘the mask came off, and I realized, I was the mask’. That’s the sort of flip I’m talking of – anything that happens to Jules and Jeff will become ‘us’, because we’re the mask.

In Mutants and Mystics (2011), you looked at how superhero comics and sci-fi helped to shape new forms of spiritual experience in the 20th century, including alien abduction experiences. You suggest science fiction and ‘marvellous tales’ became a way for people to connect with the paranormal and the mystic in an ostensibly rationalised and disenchanted culture. Is the field of Religious Studies beginning to take the paranormal more seriously? 

I think so. You’re seeing a mini-renaissance on that. This is the origins of the field. The field of psychical research was central to people like William James, and Carl Jung, and Freud to some extent, and to Andrew Lang. Our fore-fathers or founders all began here. And then we pushed it off the academic table over the last 100 years. What I’m trying to say is, let’s put it back, not because that’s what religion is about, but because when we put it back on the table, all the other stuff looks slightly different. When people talk about the paranormal, it’s behind what we used to call magic, what we used to call myth, what we used to call mysticism – it’s fricking everywhere.

In Authors of the Impossible (2010),you talk about writing and creative inspiration as a paranormal act – a sort of co-creation between the imaginer and the Imaginal. 

Yes. One of the conclusions of the humanities is that we’re written. And one of the things we’re most written by is culture and religion. If you talk to people who have these paranormal experiences, they say are things like ‘it was as if I was a character in a novel’, or ‘it was as if I was inside a movie’. I think they are. I think we are too, right now. We’re written, composed by our ancestors.

What shocked me was how many textual allusions people would naturally use to describe a paranormal event. They would talk about puns, jokes, allusions, readings or messages. It’s a textual process going on in the physical environment.

A paranormal event becomes an invitation to re-write the script.  That could be on a personal level, or a cultural level for writers and film-makers. Take writers like Philip K. Dick or Whitley Strieber – these are people who create fantasy for a living. They know their spiritual experiences are fantastic. They know they’re being mediated by their imagination. They’re not taking them literally. And yet they would insist that something very real is coming through. That’s what drew me to them – I don’t find that in a lot of religious people. They confuse the stained glass window with the light coming through.

You mean that with fantasy or sci-fi writers like Dick and Strieber, there’s a playfulness or sense of co-creation? 

Exactly.

The idea of the imagination as a sort of generator of spiritual realities reminds me of the Romantic-transcendentalist idea that creative minds are the legislators of the world. You have a similar idea with the Inklings – Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield – and their idea of stories and the imagination co-creating reality with God. 

There are all kinds of older precedents too – the idea of Christ as the logos, the Kabbalistic notion of reality being composed of Hebrew letters. There are all these intuitions about this.

Zhivago seeing Lara from a tram – an uncanny coincidence

You talk a lot about uncanny coincidences, which reminds me of something novels do for us – they affect our emotions by creating certain uncanny moments when characters’ paths cross again through some weird coincidence. Like in Dr Zhivago when the hero happens to see his long-lost love after decades apart, or War and Peace when the injured Andre Volkonsky happens to find himself in a surgeon’s tent next to his greatest enemy Anatole Kuragin, and thinks ‘this man is somehow closely and painfully connected to me’. Perhaps that’s one of the reason we love novels – because they give us that sense of an aesthetic pattern to life. Milan Kundera talks about this in the Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.  It is wrong then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Right. Synchronicity is a flash moment where you’re glimpsing a hidden structure or web of connections. But these can also be little hints that, yes, I am caught in a novel. That can be reassuring or disturbing, depending if you like the novel or not.

You clearly have a real sense of the power of books and reading. Reading a book can be like a seance, connecting you to the dead. It can be a portal into another dimension. Your books give a sense of reading as something potentially dangerous. 

I hope so. That’s the intention for sure.

One of the things you get across is the complete uncertainty of religious experience – we can’t be sure what’s out there. I think of your chapter on Charles Fort in Authors of the Impossible, and all the theories he put forward about what’s happening with religious experiences – that there’s some massive Solaris-type consciousness playing games with us, or possibly there are innumerable spiritual entities around us, some of which are trying to eat us! 

Charles Fort, chronicler of the marvellous, creator of the Fortean Times

Right – some might be trying to feed on our emotions. I love Charles Fort. He was a bold thinker. He emphasized the silliness or the trickster dimension of a lot of this. That’s important. The way this stuff seems to be playing with us, it has a kind of playful quality.

A skeptic might say, OK, these experiences seem very much tied up with our imaginations, very much tied up with our cultural expectations. Does that not suggest it’s just our imagination.

The problem with that is we lack a sufficiently robust theory of the imagination. The skeptic means the imagined is simply the imaginary. I would say often it is. But what you get in these moments is a double sensibility – the visionary knows what he or she is seeing is imagined, but also that it pertains to something that is not imagined. Sometimes that’s symbolic, but sometimes it’s empirical.

For example, Mark Twain dreams about his brother’s funeral. It’s really detailed. Two weeks later his brother dies in an explosion, and the funeral is exactly what he had seen in his dream. There you have an imagined event that corresponds perfectly to an event in space-time. So you have to say, the imagination is acting as a super-sensory organ cognizing something two weeks down the space-time continuum.

You write about the Society for Psychical Research in the 1890s, and how it tried to build an empirical evidence base for the paranormal. You prefer a more anecdotal approach – telling stories playfully, where the reader is never sure if you’re being serious or not. They’re marvelous stories. But they won’t convince the skeptic. 

No, it will never convince the skeptic because the skeptic is really a materialist debunker. And here’s the other problem. A lot of the skeptical strategies are along these lines – you show us a robust paranormal event in a laboratory and we will believe you. The problem is, that demand is ignorant of how paranormal phenomena normally arise, which is in moments of trauma, death, illness or accident.

Or sex. 

None of which you can get in a laboratory. So setting up the test like that is like saying, you prove that there are stars in the sky, but you can only do that during the day.

But a medium should be able to do their thing in a laboratory as well. Myers thought paranormal phenomena would be open to that sort of scientific inquiry and a convincing evidence base would arise. That doesn’t seem to have happened. 

I think any reasonable person who reads up on the paranormal literature will be convinced they established something. But it’s difficult to say what, because the phenomena are not objects. They’re always stories that someone is telling you. It’s a different kind of data set. This is why one of my arguments is that the study of these phenomena should be done by the humanities.

Some scientists are still trying to build up the evidence base, aren’t they, like Dean Radin or Rupert Sheldrake. 

Yes, and I admire their work. They are getting evidence but it’s not the UFO landing on the White House lawn that people are asking for. I don’t think that will happen because I don’t think that’s what these phenomena are. Ultimately I think it’s us. We’re the ones doing this. I don’t mean Jules and Jeff, I mean something weirder coming through us. But it’s not an object, it’s a subject.

OK. Many of the spiritual visionaries you’ve written about tried to find a middle-ground in their approach to spiritual experiences, between the dogmatism of organized religion and the dogmatism of scientific materialism. You’ve maintained that position yourself, outside of any organized religion. Indeed, you’ve written a book about Esalen, the commune in California that helped to create the New Age, a new ‘religion of no religion’. 

Indeed.

I personally have recently joined the Christian tradition, with full acceptance that people can reach God through other traditions, because, firstly, I think religious traditions have a practical idea of ethics – which helps to protect you from the darkness outside you and inside you. As Charles Fort pointed out, how do we know what is out there and whether it wishes us good or ill? I think religious tradition and community is one way to protect yourself (though it doesn’t always work). 

There’s also the idea of an ethics beyond the self – I’m not sure how often the New Age goes beyond the Self. I think there’s sometimes a risk of Gnostic hubris there: rather than worship God, people want to become gods or superheroes. What I like about Christianity is the emphasis on brokenness and humility – it’s focused on the god who cries, the god who dies. 

A third reason is that older religious traditions provide community structures for all levels of society including the poorest, while with the New Age it’s often more that you pay to go on a course in massage or holotropic breathing or Tarot, then carry on your lonely journey to self-actualization. It’s more individualistic and capitalistic. And the final reason to join the Christian tradition, for me personally, is that my imagination is so grown out of Christian culture. 

Right. It’s your mask. Listen, I think there are lot of responses to the situation we’re in that are entirely honourable and have a lot of integrity. And I think sticking within a religious tradition while adopting a pluralist openness to other traditions is a perfectly good way to go. And most people will probably continue to go that way. I come out of a Benedictine education and I sometimes think all my work is just a heretical Christology. It’s about Jesus still.

Having said that, I don’t buy the critique of the New Age / Spiritual-but-not-religious as not ethical or socially engaged. I see the opposite actually. The individuals I have come to know intimately who led those movements all left Christianity or Judaism not out of some superficial pride, but because they were deeply wounded by the tradition, usually around issues of gender or sexuality, so they had to leave to maintain their own physical and moral health. The other reason they left was out of intellectual honesty. They just couldn’t believe anymore – science dissolved their old world-views. They were just being honest. They moved into the human potential movement for really deep and honest reasons, and also to help create a new world, which does not yet exist. It’s sort of like, what would it be like to be a Christian in the first century?

Do you think the US is moving towards an Esalen-like religious culture? 

I think the younger generations are. There’s still a lot of superficiality there. A lot of the SBNR folk, it’s a kind of fall-back position. But we know from the polls that the majority of people under 30 describe themselves that way. The big question is whether that holds into their 40s. You’re right that churches and synagogues provide the stability when people have children and want stability and something more black-and-white.

My goal is not to make everyone like me. I’m trying to describe the religious crisis we’re in by virtue of religious pluralism. I want to take people’s religious experience seriously no matter whether they’re seeing Jesus or being abducted by an alien. I don’t see any criteria to reject one and not the other.

There was a piece about the rise of New Atheism in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik, and he divides Americans into supernaturalists who believe in some sort of God, versus self-makers, who think we create ourselves. You strike me as a supernatural self-maker. 

I know, there it is again! No matter what binary you put on the table I’ll be in the middle of it.

But what does that mean, becoming the author of ourselves? It sounds a bit like lucid dreaming. 

The reason I’m a supernaturalist in Gopnik’s terms is I don’t think we can manufacture these events. They’re given to us. They’re moments of grace and revelation. Our choice is whether to interact with them or not. To use your language, these are co-creations, between another form of mind or consciousness – which I’m happy to call God – and our own little psyches or masks. I would insist that in many of these cases it’s both supernatural and self-authored.

But explain your idea of waking up, no longer being written but being a more conscious author. In Jewish, Christian or Muslim culture, there’s this idea we’re taking dictation from God or his angels. In that sense we’re being written. But you’re saying we need to wake up and author ourselves? 

Part of the problem is a historical one. With the traditional religions, we’re weighed down by scriptural texts written thousands of years ago, which reflect the culture and values of those times.

So we’re stuck in a 2000-year-old story? 

Yeah. And it doesn’t work for us anymore. Because we have different moral values and know more about the physical universe.

But there have been so many Christian stories told since then, from Wesley’s electric boogaloo spirituality, to CS Lewis’ multiple worlds science fiction. There have been a series of creative improvisations on some traditional standards, and that’s still going on. 

Well, I think they’re really writing new stories, and that’s OK, I’m not a critic of that.

OK, last question, how do academics get to work at Esalen?!

Academics can become work scholars, they can just sign up and go. It involves living for a month, working every day, doing Gestalt work in the day-time and taking the course at night. It’s a total immersion over a four-week period, and it’s relatively reasonable, it’s like $1100 bucks.

Kripal’s next book, Comparing Religions: Coming To Terms, has just come out in the UK. 

Circuits of Feeling in The Age of Empathy

Posted on February 17, 2014 by

This is a guest post by Carolyn Pedwell, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University and AHRC Visiting Scholar at The Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London.

With the rise of the ‘science of empathy’ in the wake of the ‘discovery’ of mirror neurons, we have seen a veritable return to biology, ethology, neuroscience, genetics and various evolutionary theories to explain not only human circuits of feeling, but also the emotional politics of contemporary societies internationally.  The final chapter of my forthcoming book, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014), grapples with the implications of the multiple layers of translation involved in politicising the science of empathy.

I am particularly interested in what happens in the translation of scholarly scientific research on empathy into the language of popular science.

Within popular science literatures about empathy, it is clear that a particular view of ‘the biological’ is mobilised to argue for an authoritative explanation of empathy’s autonomic workings and for the restoration of ‘science’ as the preferred epistemological framework for understanding the nature of both individual behaviour and the wider moral and ethical workings of societies.

In his exploration of empathy’s evolutionary roots in The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, for example, the leading primatologist Frans de Waal argues that ‘biology constitutes our greatest hope’ (2010: 45) for building a more equitable and just society ‘based on a more generous and accurate view of human nature’ (back cover). ‘Being in tune with others, coordinating activities and caring for those in need’, he notes, are all evolutionary traits linked to empathy shared by humans and many other species that have long ‘produced the glue that holds communities together’ (45).

It is in harnessing our innate capacity for empathy, de Waal suggests, that we might welcome a ‘new epoch that stresses cooperation and social responsibility’ over selfishness and ‘greed’ (ix).  Importantly, from his perspective, this means accepting our neurobiologically-determined fate and avoiding over-investment in, as he puts it, ‘the whims of politics, culture and religion’ as resources for engendering ‘the humaneness of our society’.  Indeed, as de Waal insists, ‘[i]deologies come and go, but human nature is here to stay’ (45).

Similarly, examining neuroscientific advances in understanding empathy in Mirroring People, neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni figures the ‘discovery’ of mirror neurons as parallel to the DNA revolution in its scientific and social significance.1  For Iacoboni, in enabling embodied simulation, mirror neurons ‘are the foundations of empathy and possibility of morality, a morality that is deeply rooted in our biology’ (2008: 4-5).  The crucial links between biology and morality that neuroscience illuminates, he argues citing President Obama, attest to the importance of ‘restor[ing] science to it’s rightful place’ in society (Obama, 2009 cited in Iacoboni, 2008: 273).  As these examples attest, the translation of scholarly scientific research on empathy into the language of popular science often involves establishing analogical links between the biological workings of the individual organism and the health of the body politic.

Frans de Waal

Drawing on de Waal’s The Age of Empathy, I want to think more carefully, and critically, about some of the potential political implications of such analogies.  In his book, de Waal, who is Professor of primate behaviour in the Psychology Department at Emory University, in Atlanta, figures empathy as an automated response, developed through natural selection, which enables a range of animals to map the bodies of others, to become in tune with their emotional states and able to feel ‘distress at their distress and pleasure at their pleasure’ (2010: 43).  From de Waal’s perspective, although ‘biology is usually called upon to justify a society based on selfish principles’ (ix), ‘a truly Darwinian perspective’ should lead us to ‘expect a “social motive” in group-living animals, one that makes them strive for a well-functioning whole’ (36).  He therefore concludes that empathy – our inborn ‘capacity to connect to and understand others and make their situation our own’ – ‘can only be to any society’s advantage’ (225).

In a mode characteristic of its popular science genre, The Age of Empathy upholds the absolute objectivity of its scientific claims, which are presented as untouched by ideology.  And yet, de Waal’s observations regarding the evolutionary underpinnings of empathy underscored by, and employed to promote, a distinct politico-economic standpoint.  That is, I want to argue, a centrist neoliberal ideology which espouses broad ideals of social justice understood to be congruent with, and enabled by, individuals competing in a merit-based, market society.

From de Waal’s perspective, harnessing the potential of our innate capacity for empathy means thinking about ‘the common good’, which he associates with the key question of ‘how to combine a thriving economy with a humane society’ (3).  While, as a Dutch immigrant to the US, he admires America’s ‘merit-based society’, as ‘truly liberating for those who up to the challenge’, he nevertheless remains ‘perplexed by the wide-spread hatred of taxes and government’ (29) evident in the US, and wonders how this trend can ever be reconciled with, what he refers to as, ‘good old Christian values, such as care for the sick and poor’ (5).  de Waal’s strongest censure, however, is reserved for Europeans and their misplaced sense of ‘entitlement’, characterised by their over-reliance on the state:

When I see twenty-year-olds march in the streets of Paris to claim job protection or older people to preserve retirement at fifty-five, I feel myself all of a sudden siding with American conservatives, who detest entitlement.  The state is not a teat from which one can squeeze milk any time of day, yet that’s how many Europeans look at it (29).

As such, de Waal’s ‘middle of the Atlantic’ political philosophy (29) is one that recognises broad ideals of co-operation and social justice so long as they do not undermine fundamental neoliberal principles of free market economic competition and individual responsibility.

de Waal’s political truths are, of course, presented as congruent with his biological observations.  Indeed, the kind of embodied behaviours de Waal refers to as ‘empathy’ have less to do with sympathy, kindness, or fairness than they do with ‘“enlightened” self-interest’ which, he argues, ‘makes us work toward the kind of society that serves our own best interests’ (36-7).   Furthermore, just as empathy is ‘a human universal’, The Age of Empathy claims, ‘so is our tendency to form social hierarchies’ (209).  We are, at our biological core, ‘incentive-driven animals, focused on status, territory and food security’ (5).  And given de Waal’s ultimate faith in the ideal of a ‘merit-based society’, the maintenance of social hierarchies, it appears, is not only ‘natural’ but also, in some senses, desirable: ‘Is it fair’, he asks, ‘for two people to earn the same if their efforts, initiatives, creativity and talents differ?  Doesn’t a harder worker deserve to make more?  (196-7).

From this perspective, it could be argued that de Waal’s evolutionarily-rooted ‘empathy’ is one that functions precisely to maintain capitalist relations of power (though relations ideally less ‘cut-throat’ than found in the current world system).  In a telling political anecdote, for example, de Waal recounts his research team’s amusement after receiving an angry email branding them as ‘communists’:

The funny thing is that the impression we have of our monkeys is the exact opposite.  We look at them as little capitalists with prehensile tails, who pay for one another’s labor, engage in tit for tat, understand the value of money and feel offended by unequal treatment.  They seem to know the price of everything (195-6).

Elsewhere in the book he makes clear his disdain for Marxism, which he argues ‘floundered’ (as did, in his view, the US feminist movement) ‘on the illusion of a culturally engineered human’, the idea that human beings were ‘blank-slates’ who could be conditioned to ‘build a wonderfully cooperative society’ (202).  Indeed, ‘if any good has come out of the communist “experiment”’, de Waal argues, it has been a ‘clarification of the limits of solidarity’ (italics mine, 36).  In The Age of Empathy, therefore, empathy is effectively severed from the ideological ‘contamination’ of a feminist politics of care or of a Marxist revolutionary solidarity and is presented as inborn capacity which may be cultivated to foster relations, and to create value, which serve neoliberal capitalism.

Moreover, from de Waal’s description, it is evident if empathy engenders cooperation and care within groups, it may simultaneously reinforce boundaries and antagonisms between groups perceived as ‘different’ (115).  The perceived group similarities and differences likely to promote or thwart empathy are, in his view, explicitly gendered, racialised and culture-specific:

We have a hard time identifying with people whom we see as different or belonging to another group.  We find it easier to identify with those like us – with the same cultural background, ethnic features, age, gender, job, and so on – and even more so with those closest to us, such as spouses, children and friends.  Identification is such a basic precondition for empathy that even mice show pain contagion only with their cage mates (80).

From this perspective, it is not clear at all why amplifying the kind of empathy de Waal outlines would help to engender a ‘more just society’ (ix); indeed, on the basis of his description, such relations of feeling seem more likely to exacerbate social and geo-political divisions and grievances than to ameliorate them.  If empathy frequently works to solidify or amplify perceived group differences and antagonisms, then why does de Waal claim that ‘it can only be to any society’s advantage’ (225)?

One answer is to this question is that, framing empathy as an (almost magical) affective solution to complex social, political and economic problems sells books – the catch line ‘greed is out empathy is in’ is a good marketing ploy, even if it glosses what, for de Waal, is a much more disturbing evolutionary story.  In this sense, we might say that The Age of Empathy participates in what Nikolas Rose refers to as the ‘translational imperative’ (2012: 4): ‘the obligation on researchers in biology and biomedicine to make promises’ about the utility of their work ‘on the fly, the worm, the mouse or the macaque’ to a host of external stakeholders including funders, university press offices, publishers, and media.

The other answer, I would argue, is that the optimum global society de Waal envisions is one that would keep many existing social, economic and political hierarchies intact.  While he would prefer that healthcare be extended beyond its current limits in the US, that capitalism would be somewhat more humane and less open to abuses by multi-nationals such as Enron, and that endemic violence between neighbouring ethnic groups in many parts of the world be ceased, de Waal’s overarching political vision is one that invests in both neoliberalism and American exceptionalism.

Without empathy’s aggressive underside, he claims, productivity would plummet and ‘the world might into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free love’ (203).  Without ‘something of the brutal, domineering chimpanzee’, he asks, how ‘would we conquer new frontiers and defend our borders’? (italics mine, 203).  Importantly, de Waal’s ‘we’ in this book is very much a Western ‘we’ – and indeed often a masculine ‘we’ – and his centre-right politics slide quickly at certain points into a neoimperial register.

Thus, despite its uplifting affective rhetoric of social transformation, The Age of Empathy is a book that seeks largely to maintain the social and political status quo rather than to question it or imagine substantive alternatives.  As in other popular scientific accounts of empathy, and indeed in many more scholarly discourses emerging from the life sciences, empathy is understood by de Waal as an affective process which functions to maintain organic regulation, equilibrium and stasis.  When this biological vision of homeostasis as necessary to survival is translated in a way that moves from the individual organism to the social body, it results in a political vision that seeks to keep dominant social, economic and geo-political structures and systems in place.

The argument my book makes, however, is that this is not the only possible or plausible translation of ‘the science of empathy’; there are other ways of making the science of empathy speak to its politics and indeed for politics to speak to empathy.  This is not, of course, to suggest that there is an originary ‘science of empathy’ that is objective or neutral and which can simply be applied to support different political objectives or visions – rather, like all science, ethological and neurological research about empathy is political and imbricated with power, culture and translation from the beginning.  The project of the longer chapter from which the above discussion is drawn is to explore some of the different points within these processes of affective translation that we might intervene, the particular conjunctures at which we might read against the grain and translate differently – keeping in mind that translation itself is always a material and productive practice…

References

de Waal, F. (2010) The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for Kinder Society (Toronto: McClleland and Stewart Ltd).
Gallese, V. (2009) ‘Mirror Neurons, Embodied Simulation and the Neural Basis of Social Identification’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives,  19(5): 519-536.

Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., and Rizzolatti, G. (1996) ‘Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex’, Brain, 119(2): 593-609.

Iacoboni, M. (2009) Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect to Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Pellegrono G. di, Fadiga L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V. and Rizzolatt, G. (1992) ‘Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study’, Experimental Brain Research, 91: 176-80.

Rose, N. (2012) ‘The Human Sciences in a Biological Age,’ Institute for Culture and Society Occasional Paper Series, 3(1): 1-24).

The ‘famous amorous Knight’: Sir John Dineley

Posted on February 14, 2014 by

Dr Sally Holloway completed her AHRC-funded PhD on romantic love in eighteenth-century England at Royal Holloway in 2013. She is currently a Historical Researcher at Kensington Palace, and Affiliated Research Scholar at the Centre for the History of the Emotions. In this Valentine’s Day post, she tells the story of a love-lorn Georgian aristocrat….

Figure 1 – The Courteous Baronet or The Windsor Advertiser, printed by Charles Knight, 1799, © British Museum.

On 24th February 1799, the ageing baronet Sir John Dineley (1729-1809) of Windsor published an unusual advertisement in the Publicans Morning Advertiser. The advert promoted his quest ‘FOR TENDER LOVE’ as part of his search for a suitable wife. Dineley wrote,

My sweetest Comforters, I trust your Sound Reason will direct you to avoid the false Delicacy that prevents many of you from instantly using your charming Pens, when a Marriage is so safely and profitably offered you, with £300,000; – GLORY IN THIS, and evidently laudable would you be for calling publicly for your Pens to set forth your due GRATITUDE to be adored, commended, and improved in your humane Lines by all around you, – to enable me, or my Attorney to delineate every Mystery in my honourable and sacred Offer that can give you Satisfaction.

 

SHAME is generally the Sign of Guilt or Ignorance, – By the above Advice you will plainly avoid them both. – Envy or Calumny may deceive you in saying there is no LOVE in the case, but how can you reconcile this Judgment with my Six last Words I advertised in April last, – “In Time to prove your Affection”.

 

The advertisement noted the many negative emotions which may have been stirred by his curious approach to matrimony, including shame, guilt, ignorance and envy. However, Dineley hoped that certain female readers would be grateful for his promise of love and fortune, and enable him to prove his credentials as a husband. His intriguing proposal was repeated in a pamphlet entitled ‘To the Fair Ladies of Great Britain, Old, or Young’ (Fig. 1), which he distributed among ladies with a ‘most profound bow’.[1] The pamphlet featured his portrait above the rhyme,

‘How happy will a Lady be
To have a little Baronet to dandle on her Knee’.

Dineley also penned a tract entitled Methods to Get Husbands, which could be purchased for one shilling from circulating libraries.[2] He employed all of the tactics in the troubadour’s arsenal, writing ‘A short and elegant song for the ladies’ and repeatedly encouraging women to ‘unbosom your sentiments’ and unleash the ‘feelings of the mind’. A poem anticipated the happy couple’s wedding day, when ‘A beautiful Page shall carefully hold, / Your Ladyship’s Train surrounded with Gold!’

Over the following two years, more than four hundred ladies enquired with Sir John about becoming his wife, with newspapers describing his ‘eccentricities’ as ‘familiar to the public’. Although peculiar, Dineley’s approach was not unheard of – advertisements for love in England and America have recently been analysed in Francesca Beauman’s Shapely Ankle Preferr’d: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad 1695-2010 (2011) and Pamela Epstein’s ‘Advertising for Love: Matrimonial Advertisements and Public Courtship’. As Epstein notes, men and women printing such adverts ‘expressed the same frustration with the difficulty of meeting a spouse due to restrictive social etiquette as well as isolation in big cities’.[3]

A comparable advertisement can be found from a well-to-do lady advertising for a husband ‘far above the middling class’. The gentlewoman was middle-aged and had been married previously, hoping to find a spouse aged over forty to become a ‘sincere friend, the first treasure in life’. Her advert has been preserved at the Lewis Walpole Library alongside materials relating to Sir John Dineley, and appears to have been published during the same period.[4] If written at a comparable date, it is unfortunate that the two did not meet. However, the proud Sir John would likely have dismissed the lady’s ‘very small’ income, famously tracing his ancestry from ‘the houses of Plantagenet, Lancaster, Tudor, and Stuart’.

Dineley’s own social status had suffered a downward spiral; after inheriting the title of fifth baronet in 1761, he squandered the family money, and was forced to sell their home at Burhope in Herefordshire just nine years later. In 1798 he was saved from destitution and admitted as one of the Poor Knights of Windsor, receiving a pension and accommodation in the grounds of Windsor Castle.[5] His relative poverty did not deter Dineley from his quest for love, parading around leisure venues such as Kensington Gardens, Vauxhall Gardens and Drury Lane dressed in all his finery. Newspapers in 1803 mocked his tehnicolour trappings, describing him as ‘a droll figure, covered with all the colours of the rainbow, and having all the exterior of insanity…He had on scarlet small clothes, a blue waistcoat, and orange coat…as if this dress was not sufficiently attractive, expanded over his head was a large silk umbrella, to protect his delicate countenance from the sun’.[6]

            Figure 2 – Sir John Dineley by W. Hopkins, etching, 1809, © National Portrait Gallery.

Unfortunately Dineley’s efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, and the ‘famous amorous Knight’ died a bachelor in 1809.[7] An etching by W. Hopkins the same year depicts Dineley in his powdered wig and bicorn hat, dolefully gazing at the viewer with a furrowed brow. His eccentricities had ‘attracted the attention of a number of people, who followed him wherever he went’.[8] However he never found the companion he yearned for. Perhaps the traditional methods of courtship, whether a love letter, romantic gift, or Valentine’s Card, would have been more effective in helping Dineley to attain wedded bliss. Nonetheless, his actions and how they were perceived by contemporaries provide us with a fascinating insight into the accepted parameters of courtship during the long eighteenth century, and the age, methods, intentions and emotional expectations of those involved.

Follow Sally Holloway on Twitter  @sally_holloway

[1] The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1841), pp. 356-7.

[2] See advertisement in World, London, 15th July 1793, Issue 2042.

[3] Pamela Epstein, ‘Advertising for Love’ in Peter N. Stearns and Susan J. Matt (eds.) Doing Emotions History (2014), pp. 120-142, at 121.

[4] ‘Materials Relating to Sir John Dineley’, LWL MSS Vol. 187, Lewis Walpole Library.

[5] See entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and post by Eleanor Cracknell on the Windsor Castle Archives blog http://www.stgeorges-windsor.org/archives/blog/?tag=sir-john-dineley

[6] The Bury and Norwich Post: Or, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, and Cambridge Advertiser, Bury St Edmunds, 20th April 1803, Issue 1086.

[7] Phrase used in the Bury and Norwich Post, 14th May 1806. His death was also reported three years earlier in The Morning Post and Jackson’s Oxford Journal.

[8] Star, London, 19th June 1798, Issue 3060.

Stoicism for Everyday Life

Posted on February 13, 2014 by

The Centre helped to organize and fund an event in November, held at Birkbeck, called Stoicism for Everyday Life. It brought together classicists, philosophers and psychologists, as well 300 or so members of the public, to talk about how to practice Stoicism in modern life, and to consider its relationship to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), mindfulness, Positive Psychology and Christianity. You can find out more about the project here.

Here’s a video of the opening session, in which members of the project presented their work on ‘Live Like A Stoic For A Week’:

Here’s a panel considering whether Stoicism really is applicable in modern life, featuring Chris Gill, Richard Sorabji, Antonia Macaro, Julian Baggini, Mark Vernon and Jules Evans:

And here is a video summing up the day: