Art and Intimacy

How the Arts Began

Ellen Dissanayake

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780295979113
• eBook ISBN: 9780295997469
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy, what we commonly call love. It all begins with the human trait of birthing immature and helpless infants. To ensure that mothers find their demanding babies worth caring for, humans evolved to be lovable and to attune themselves to others from the moment of birth. The ways in which mother and infant respond to each other are rhythmically patterned vocalizations and exaggerated face and body movements that Dissanayake calls rhythms and sensory modes. Rhythms and modes also give rise to the arts. Because humans are born predisposed to respond to and use rhythmic-modal signals, societies everywhere have elaborated them further as music, mime, dance, and display, in rituals which instill and reinforce valued cultural beliefs. Just as rhythms and modes coordinate and unify the mother-infant pair, in ceremonies they coordinate and unify members of a group. Today we humans live in environments very different from those of our ancestors. They used ceremonies (the arts) to address matters of serious concern, such as health, prosperity, and fecundity, that affected their survival. Now we tend to dismiss the arts, to see them as superfluous, only for an elite. But if we are biologically predisposed to participate in artlike behavior, then we actually need the arts. Even -- or perhaps especially -- in our fast-paced, sophisticated modern lives, the arts encourage us to show that we care about important things.

1

Mutuality

IN CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICA and elsewhere, the subject of love is confused and confusing. The word is used to mean everything from affection to devotion, from endearment to passion, from caritas to agape. Often, like intimacy, it refers automatically to romantic love and sex (“lovemaking”). I use the words “love” and “intimacy” in this book because of their intrinsic appeal, but what I mean by both words is more usefully addressed with a less familiar (and less culturally freighted) word—“mutuality.”¹

Although mutuality sounds, at least in English, rather boringly legal or financial, other of its dictionary definitions are more instructive, as well as more inviting: “directed by each toward the other or others,” “having the same feelings one for the other,” “shared in common,” and “characterized by intimacy.”

Obviously love and mutuality are not always quite the same thing, for we can love one-sidedly or unrequitedly, at a distance, in vain, too much, not enough. In these cases, mutuality is what love desires but may well not have. We might say, as people often do, that love is a funny or crazy thing, a mystery, a sort of divine madness. Or we are told (or tell ourselves) that love is an illusion, a will-o’-the-wisp; more clinically, it is viewed as projection, narcissism, self-delusion, or nature’s trick for propagating the species.

Mutuality between mother and infant, as I will describe it, is none of these things—neither one-sided, unrequited, nor an illusion, projection, or trick. It is, I suggest, the originary source of subsequent affectional, affiliative bonds—many of which we call “love”—between individuals as pairs or members of groups. Further, the same rhythmic-modal capacities and sensitivities that evolved to make possible mother-infant mutuality also create and sustain these other ties of intimacy, including adult love-making—to be distinguished from copulation as dining is distinguished from feeding, or as expressing gratitude to a game animal after one has killed it is distinguished from throwing it in the back of one’s pickup.

In my view, these considered ways of accomplishing vital subsistence activities should not always be automatically reduced, as evolutionary psychologists frequently have done, to nothing but immediate satisfaction of the underlying physical need. Humans evolved with the capacity and desire to perform at least some ordinary activities in special or elaborated ways. But that is getting ahead of my story.

Because sex is an obvious biological necessity, and we are predisposed to find it of compelling interest, let us first look more closely at the standard evolutionary view of love, before expanding the discussion with the subject of mutuality.

THE SEXUAL IMPERATIVE

Especially in modern societies, romantic love is the theme of countless songs, poems, novels, films, plays, operas—testimony to its pervasive importance in our lives and to the varieties of emotional turmoil that attend falling in love, courtship, sexual desire, possession, and the bliss of union, as well as jealousy and the end of love. This preoccupation with love is not uniformly the case everywhere. Although people in many other societies certainly compose and listen to love songs and love poetry, they are frequently even more interested in tales of adventure and valor or stories with built-in object lessons about correct behavior. Young men of Nilotic cattle-keeping cultures in southern Sudan devote considerable time and originality to describing and praising the unique features of their oxen (Coote 1992).²

Evolutionists, of course, explain our preoccupation with love in song and story as a fundamentally sexual one—as evidence and assurance that people will reproduce. As I write this chapter, I am aware of a pair of swallows diligently fetching insects for their five babies in a nest on a little ledge under the eaves. They seem never to rest but, almost on the wing, quickly stuff one gaping beak and then swoop off again. This frenzy of activity, which so far as I can determine never ends from dawn to dusk, is the last chapter of the swallows’ seasonal raison d’être: reproduction of another generation.

About a week after their arrival from South America, the pair together build a nest from pellets of mud which they place in regular layers mixed with long slender grasses. They line the nest with a circular mat of grass and top it with a blanket of soft white feathers. Altogether, nest building requires about a week of labor, after which the female lays her eggs. The birds alternate sitting on them and providing each other with food. The nestlings hatch after two weeks, and the parents then really go to work, collecting around nine hundred insects per day over the ensuing three weeks—a total of some twenty thousand weevils, chinch bugs, grasshoppers, beetles, mosquitoes, and other insects (Dunning 1994, 156)—until the young ones are able to leave the nest under their own wingpower. Even then, the parents still provide food, often on the wing.

The activities of birds in spring vividly illustrate an imperative of nature that is true for all of life: you are here to make small copies of yourself and then (if, like the swallows, parental care is required) to do all you can to assist them to grow up healthily so that they can eventually make, in turn, small copies of their own.

Hence the importance of sex—our name for the urge that ensures that all this will happen, even if ordinary usage tends to restrict the meaning of the term to the physical activity of copulation. Yet for every animal, the act of mating is usually only a minute part of the whole—a means to the end of manufacturing offspring. Biologically speaking, sex (or, more accurately, reproduction) is a general behavioral category that encompasses nearly everything the animal does.

For males, this usually includes finding a territory and defending it, as well as acquiring and displaying other resources of vigor and virility (by such means as singing, showing off, even fighting other males), in order to attract the best possible mate. Females, too, display their resources—usually signs of youth and hence health and fertility—and then, after bearing young, give their all to raising them. In some species there are slight variations in these roles, as when both members of the pair share in nest building and provisioning. But in all creatures of two sexes, reproduction in this broad sense makes themselves, if not the world, go around. If this were not so, there would be no new creatures every season to replace those that have grown old.

Is this true for humans? As all-absorbing as sex may be at certain periods of one’s day or one’s life, most people believe that they exist for reasons other than making love or even reproducing. Apart from the burdens and satisfactions of child rearing, we have work-in-the-world that provides self-fulfillment. While some of us seem to do nothing but make and spend money, and others suffer from not knowing what we are here for, a lot of us probably feel (or hope) that we make a few others’ lives better or happier. We are here to learn, teach, preach, serve, befriend, build, create, defend, help the helpless, and—so far as we are able—find hope and meaning in life.

In the earliest millennia of hominid evolution, some four or five million years ago, our ancestors—like other animals—probably did not think about the meaning and purpose of life in general or of their individual lives. Like the crustaceans, lizards, and antelope that they hunted for food (or like the swallows under my eaves), our ancestors existed to stay alive and to reproduce—that is, their daily lives consisted of engaging in activities that ultimately contributed to the survival of themselves and their offspring. If ancestral humans, like other wild animals, had not given their supreme efforts to successful reproduction, you and I would not be pursuing our individual existences today.

Because we live much longer than ancestral humans, long past the age of primary childbearing, and because we are shielded by a prosperous society from the pressures of primary subsistence, we may not be particularly aware of the significance of reproductive imperatives in our lives. But an evolutionary perspective helps us to realize that even though our lives may not be principally devoted to reproduction in an obvious sense, we nevertheless frequently behave like our ancestors in ways that in the past would have enhanced our reproductive success (and may, indeed, enhance it now).

We generally choose our clothing, makeup, and hairstyles in order to make ourselves look good for others—to attract mates and allies or to compete with rivals. We work hard to acquire a nice house, car, and other possessions. We strive to improve and display our skills—our athleticism and physical fitness, our kindliness, sociability, competence, leadership, prosperity, dependability, mastery, discernment, knowledge. Although these strivings benefit others and are socially useful, they also advertise our reproductively advantageous qualities even if we have no children or are, for various reasons, imperfect parents.

For males, the reproductive imperative further means enjoying the company of healthy young women with physical and temperamental features that indicate good childbearing potential. What we call “beauty” in women usually refers to signs of youth (and even a few traits reminiscent, subliminally, of infancy): smooth, light-toned, and unblemished skin, firm flesh, glossy hair, full lips, shapely firm breasts and hips with a proportionately narrow waist, and a friendly, receptive disposition.

While some older women may be “interesting” and even have their own kind of dignified or mature beauty (and young women need not be all that “beautiful” in a Hollywood starlet sense), it is evident that, given the choice, most men prefer the company of young females to those who display signs of age (and its attendant loss of reproductive potential): wrinkled or pouchy faces, gray or faded thin hair, compressed lips, flabby, loose, blotched or darker-toned skin and flesh, a thick waist, and a “mature” (competent, assertive, or argumentative) manner. It is not simply a matter of general taste, because men do not have similar standards for their male companions. Again, this observation is not meant to imply that older women do not possess sexual attractiveness at all, but to point out that in most cases women of reproductive age tend to receive more attentive and favorable treatment from men than do older women. It does not seem fair, but there are unarguable evolutionary reasons for the bias.

Females, too, are romantically interested in young, healthy, attractive males, but unlike men, they usually require more than sex appeal before agreeing to sexual union. They look for indications that the man has “resources” (of time, money, attentiveness, and emotion) that he is willing to “invest” in the relationship. Although women may not be consciously aware of it, these are tacit signs of male willingness to stay around to help provide for any results of their mating, something that was of critical concern to their Paleolithic forebears.

Even when they are not particularly youthful or physically attractive, men with ambition, dominance, and status (social, athletic, financial, political) are usually attractive to women because they demonstrate superiority in acquiring resources that over the millennia have contributed to their mates’ (and their eventual children’s) reproductive success. These differences in how men and women present themselves to each other and in what they want from partners have been ascertained in numerous research studies. They are also evident from a brief perusal of the personals advertisements of any newspaper.

To be sure, men like women with status too, as trophies. But highstatus women rarely mate with low-status men, whereas high-status men are quite willing to mate with low-status women and even to marry them if they are young and beautiful. Generally speaking, youth and beauty are sufficient resources for females.

While it is true that differences between males and females in both sexual behavior and sexual attitudes have declined in Western societies over the past four or five decades, there remain noteworthy differences in such things as frequency of masturbation (males do it more), timing and causes of arousal (males are aroused more quickly than females, females are aroused less by sight, which arouses men, than by touch), finding the trait of dominance attractive (females do, males do not), being willing to dissociate coitus from emotional involvement (males are, females are not), and motivation for coitus (Townsend, Kline, and Wasserman 1995, 31). For a female, the number of sexual offers she has is less important to the number of partners she will have than her expressed attitudes about her behavior, whereas for males, opportunity tends to be the major influence on number of partners, apart from what is claimed to be one’s attitude (Townsend, Kline, and Wasserman 1995, 43).

Some might attribute American women’s preoccupation with prospective partners’ emotional investment to the ideology of rapturous romantic love that permeates the novels, popular songs, and films that many women avidly consume. One might ask, however, why—since romantic fantasy is so inescapable—it is females who patronize this stuff, whereas males generally choose adventure stories and films and read pornography more readily than romance.

Such differences in human male and female sexual attitudes and behavior are based in evolved biological differences. That is, for ancestral females, a fertile copulation required that she then invest in her offspring nine months of gestation, the perils of childbirth, two years or more of lactation, almost continuous tending of a helpless, demanding infant, and another several years of unflagging vigilance and solicitude. Her reproductive success depended not only on a healthy, vigorous mate to produce high-quality sperm that contained his healthy, vigorous qualities but also on having a partner who would be able to provision, defend, and otherwise care for her and the child, especially during the early weeks, months, and even years when both were most at risk. Ancestral males, on the other hand, theoretically needed to invest only their quickly replenished sperm and fifteen minutes of their time in a fertile copulation. Thus for a male there was far less need to look for anything beyond a prospective mate’s youthful sexiness as a return on his physical contribution.

Of course it is better for a male’s reproductive success if he stays around and helps the mother care for his infant. But his loss due to irresponsibility or careless mate choice is nothing like hers. (She loses not only a child but also at least a year of her life in host...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Love and Art
• 1 Mutuality
• 2 Belonging
• 3 Finding and Making Meaning
• 4 “Hands-On” Competence
• 5 Elaborating
• 6 Taking The Arts Seriously
• Appendix: Toward a Naturalistic Aesthetics
• References Cited
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects