by Tim Folger
In any species, attention diminishes with persistence or reiteration, but humans are especially curious and thus susceptible to boredom. And as the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello and colleagues have particularly stressed, attention, especially shared or commonly focused attention, has become unprecedentedly important to our species. To attract attention, art explores variation, even in traditional societies, and all the more so in societies where professional art and a highly competitive market for attention act as incentives to discover either new variations within existing forms or entirely novel combinations.
If art is "unnatural" variation, science is "unnatural" selection. Art appeals to our species preferences and our intuitive understandings, often as they have been modified by local culture. Science rejects our species preferences and our intuitive understandings, even as modified by local culture. It tests ideas not against human preferences but against a resistant world not designed for humans. Its methods of testing, by logic, observation, and experiment, encourage us to reject ideas, even those that seem self-evident and apparently confirmed repeatedly by tradition.
By exposing itself to falsifying evidence, science makes possible the cumulative retention of only the most rigorously selected ideas. This does not prove them all correct, but it improves on the ratio of tested to untested ideas attainable by any other known procedure. After the winnowing process, although there may still be wrong ideas in what we think of as science, there are far fewer than in any other human domain.
Art could evolve as an adaptation because it appealed to our deep-grained species preferences. Science could not. It appeals to one strong species preference, our curiosity, but it otherwise goes against the grain of our intuitive understanding. Until Galileo, people assumed, with Aristotle, that a heavier object fell more rapidly than a lighter one. Information gathering, invaluable for all kinds of animals and even for plants, has mattered especially for humans, but the knowledge gained has mostly been in the form of heuristics, partly right, but not necessarily so, like our hunches about falling objects or the sun's motion around Earth. And although accurate information is invaluable, indecision is fatal, and no organism can afford the time to search for correct information at a moment when immediate responses are required. It was not possible to devote effort to a time-consuming, diffi cult-to-imagine, and increasingly resource-expensive process of testing ideas until in Renaissance Italy the right conditions happened to converge: a considerable buffer of security and overproduction; opportunities for intense specialization; and the availability of information and conflicting explanations that the printing press made possible.
Science still calls for qualities that are unnatural. Children are information sponges and soak up what they need to understand, like the basics of their world or their language. They need not be taught how to speak or to play. But they do need slow formal instruction to read, write, or calculate, and they need even more training and the help of externalized information (books, diagrams, models) to master the knowledge on which science builds. If they undergo the intensive training required of scientists, they will still need imagination to find new ways of testing or reexplaining received knowledge. Even for those with training, looking for potential refutations of cherished ideas is both emotionally difficult and imaginatively draining. And whereas art appeals to human preferences, science has to account for a world not built to suit human tastes or talents.
Unnatural selection though it is, science allows for the accumulation of advantageous variations and the rapid "evolution" of complex intellectual and technological design. Art functions very differently, as a form of unnatural variation. Much that it produces is therefore not intrinsically deeply valuable. But some art is deeply valuable and speaks profoundly to many people, over long stretches of time or life and across many cultures. Because art is primarily a process of variation—although artists and audiences also select—there is not the same ratcheted accumulation of better design that occurs in science. Hence art of thousands of years ago, like that of Homer or Nok sculptors, can be superior in many ways, as ex amples of creativity, to most works generated now, simply because Homer or the Nok craftsmen could appeal to preferences that they understood deeply and that have not changed massively since their day.
Religion partakes of elements of both art and science. It could not have begun without our uniquely human understanding of false belief, which develops in individuals during their fourth year—our awareness that another person can have a different understanding of a situation from what we know to be the case, and our concomitant awareness that in other circumstances we may not have all we need to understand this or that situation. Our capacity to understand false belief has amplified our curiosity and spurred us to the quest for the deeper knowledge that has led to both religion and science.
Nor could religion have begun without the capacity for storytelling that grew out of our theory of mind and our first inclinations to art, like chant and bodily decoration. Storytelling launched a thousand tales. Those tales most often retold not only involved agents with exceptional powers but also helped to solve problems of cooperation by suggesting that we are continually watched over by spirits who monitor our deeds and punish or reward them.
Religious stories could also allay the unease that arose in us because of our awareness of false belief. The social intelligence out of which our grasp of false belief arose allowed us to imagine being dead and to foresee the world without us. It brought with it a new anxiety about the possible purposelessness of our lives, although this could be allayed to some extent by stories of spirits without bodies as a guarantor of purpose prior to human life or as a promise of continued existence afterward.
Religion and power commandeered art, not entirely but substantially, for millennia. Not that art as play did not persist—between parent and child, or among children, or among adults letting off steam. But where they could, religion and power appropriated toward their own ends art's ability to appeal to human imaginations.
Only when science began to offer alternative, naturalistic explanations of the world did religion and art start to diverge widely again. When science offered a detailed explanation of natural de sign without the need for a designer—the theory of evolution by natural selection— that, more than any other single idea, stripped us of a world made comfortable by a sense of purpose, apparently guaranteed by beings greater than ourselves.
Nevertheless, if we develop Darwin's insight, we can see the emergence of purpose, as of life itself, by small degrees, not from above, but by small increments, from below. The first purpose was the organization of matter in ways complex enough to sustain and replicate itself—the establishment, in other words, of life, or in still other terms, of problems and solutions. With life emerged the first purpose, the first problem, to preserve at least the improbable complexity already reached, and to find new ways of resisting damage and loss.
As life proliferated, variety offered new hedges against loss in the face of unpredictable circumstances, and even new ways of evolving variety, like sex. Still richer purposes emerged with emotions, intelligence, and cooperation, and most recently with creativity itself, pursued naturally, and unnaturally, through human invention, in art, and pursued unnaturally, through challenging what we have inherited, in science.
Art at its best offers us the durability that became life's first purpose, the variety that became its second, the appeal to the intelligence and the cooperative emotions that took so much longer to evolve, and the creativity that keeps adding new possibilities, including religion and science. We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, but we can add as much as we can to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them.
PHILIP GOUREVITCH The Monkey and the Fish
FROM The New Yorker
BACK IN THE 1980s and '90s, Greg Carr made a couple of hundred million dollars developing and m
arketing voice-mail and Internet services. Carr came from Idaho, and he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 1998, just before he turned forty, he decided that he would become a full-time philanthropist. He didn't just want to give his money away; he also wanted to give himself to his projects—body and soul. So, for instance, a few years later, when Carr was out walking in Cambridge with a friend, the theater director and critic Robert Brustein, they passed an old building that used to house Grendel's bar, on JFK Street; Brustein said it would be fun to turn that place into a sort of laboratory theater, and Carr fell in love with the idea. He put more than $1 million into converting the place into a proper, ninety-nine-seat theater and began producing plays. "What I would do is spend all summer in Idaho, a lot of it by myself, with stacks of plays, just reading," he said.
Alongside what he called "new, strange" work, Carr read ancient Greek drama, and he became obsessed with Euripides. In contrast to Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom he saw as paragons of the Athenian establishment—"apologists for the current order"—Euripides, he said, "is writing these plays about slaves, and women taken captive in war, and noncitizens, and crazy people, all the outsiders. And he's writing these plays about—well, what if you were an outsider? What would it be like?" The play that really blew Carr away was The Bacchae, in which the women of Thebes rebel against the city's Apollonian order (sunshine and rationality) and turn to wor shipping Dionysus (night and debauchery). The leader of these women is called Agave, and her son Pentheus is the king of Thebes, and one night, in a Bacchanalian frenzy, the women set upon him, and Agave tears his head off. "And she's holding this bloody head in her hands," Carr told me. "And she kind of looks at him, and she goes, Oh, that's my son. And then she has this moment of recognition, like, Who am I? What have I become? I've been fever-following a god and, um, I don't know who I am anymore. Maybe I've been following the wrong god. What path am I on?"
Carr became obsessed with such moments—the moment when one fever breaks and gives way to a new fever, the moment of self-regard when one calls oneself into question and reverses course. He commissioned a filmmaker, Jessica Yu, to make a documentary about people who experience an "Agave moment"—a terrorist, for instance, and a bank robber, who suddenly saw themselves engaged in action of a kind that they wanted to believe they stood against. In Carr's own life, there was no severed head, no drama worthy of Euripides, but the chapter that was at odds with the way he thinks of himself was, he said, the years he spent as a "crazed businessman"—and after he cashed out he had gone through a long period of not knowing what to do. His theatrical venture, the Market Theatre, belonged to that period. After just two seasons, he shut it down. He had fallen in love with a national park in Africa, which is where we met a few months ago, and he told me this story.
Gorongosa National Park is a wilderness at the southern tip of the Great Rift Valley in central Mozambique, and when Carr showed up there five years ago, it had been all but abandoned to ruin. The park is the size of Rhode Island and was established in 1960 by Portugal, which had dominated Mozambique for nearly five hundred years. For a time, it was one of the top safari parks in Africa: choked with big herds of big game, served by commercial airlines, equipped with a headquarters—Chitengo Camp—that boasted modish accommodations, including a pool, and provided Volkswagen microbuses for exploring the bush. But in 1975 a Marxist liberation movement called FRELIMO drove the Portuguese out of Mozambique, and independence was soon followed by sixteen years of civil war. It was an epoch of appalling national devastation: 1 million Mozambicans killed, 5 million driven from their homes, tens of thousands tortured or maimed, the national infrastructure effectively dismantled, the ground sown with a seeming infinitude of land mines.
Gorongosa District, which includes the park, was the scene of much of the heaviest fighting. Both district and park take their names from Mt. Gorongosa, a 6,000-foot rainforested peak that rises fifteen miles west of the park and that served throughout the civil war as the military and political stronghold of RENAMO, the anti-FRELIMO insurgency, which was sponsored by the white supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Gorongosa was a full-tilt battlefield, a zone of terrifying close-range combat, with tank battles and air raids adding to the maelstrom, as towns and villages were repeatedly overrun by one army, only to be reclaimed by the other, back and forth, year in and year out.
The war was even more unsparing of the wildlife than it was of people, as soldiers from both sides slaughtered game for food and commerce. When the fighting finally ended, the park was left a no man's land. Local trappers desperate for meat, along with organized and heavily armed poaching syndicates, moved into the breach, and the hunt only accelerated, until the fields shimmered with bleaching bones. Between 1972 and 2001, the number of Cape buffalo counted in the park fell from 13,000 to just 15; the wildebeest count fell from 6,400 to 1; hippos went from 3,500 to 44; and instead of 3,300 zebras there were 12. Elephant herds and lion prides, too, were reduced, by 80 to 90 percent. Of hyenas, black and white rhinos, and wild dogs, there were none.
In 2004, Carr said, you could walk or drive all day without seeing any other living thing but some birds. That was when he committed much of his fortune and much of the rest of his working life to resurrecting the park. Now, when we rode out from Chitengo Camp, we routinely saw lions, elephants, any number of species of antelope (oribi, impala, nyala, eland, sable, Lichtenstein's hartebeest, reedbuck, waterbuck, duiker), and sometimes even the rare buffalo. Vervet and green monkeys popped up here and there. Baboons and warthogs were everywhere. In Lake Urema, pods of hippos milled in the shallows, and shoals of giant crocodiles crowded the muddy banks. Once I nearly stepped on a spitting cobra, and later I watched a giant monitor lizard lumbering along the edge of a pond. At night we saw civet cats and water mongoose and listened to the cries of bush babies against the general clamor of bugs and frogs. The bird life was stupendous. Carr, who has never married and has no children, takes a patriarchal pride in every animal he sees in the park. "You give nature half a chance and it's resilient," he said.
Mozambicans generally express surprise on meeting Greg Carr because he likes to dress like a bum and projects none of the grandeur of his wealth. His uniform at Gorongosa is a couple of days' growth of beard, a rumpled short-sleeved shirt or T-shirt, tattered cargo shorts, and Timberland boat shoes with no socks. Carr is happy with the look—it's comfortable and it's disarming. Although he is not in Gorongosa for profit, he considers giving to be a form of entrepreneurship, and he retains a fast belief that private enterprise is the surest instrument for positive change in the world. His idea in Gorongosa is to use his philanthropy to create the conditions and set the example that will attract for-profit ecotourism businesses to the park, insuring its economic self-sufficiency, and benefiting the impoverished rural communities that surround it. He has already spent more than $20 million on revitalizing the park and its environs, and he expects to spend at least as much again before Gorongosa will no longer need him, which is his definition of success.
So far, Carr's team of 120 game scouts has dismantled hundreds of thousands of poachers' snares and gin traps in the park and confiscated nearly a hundred poachers' guns. As a result, more animals have survived and multiplied, and those animals have grown less chary of human presence. But the scouts keep finding more traps and making more arrests, and for every poacher they thwart they have to assume that several more are prospering.
The big animals that the park has lost are not only valuable as tourist attractions but essential to sustaining its ecosystem. If grass is not eaten in sufficient quantities, forest encroaches, and the inevitable dry-season fires that flicker across the savannahs and woodlands rage out of control. There were never fewer than half a dozen—and at times there were more than forty—sizable burns going in the park during the two weeks I spent there in the wicked heat (frequently over 100 degrees at midday) and desiccation of early October. Similarly, in the wetlands, lakes, and rivers that keep
the land alive, hippos are needed to churn the muddy bottom and prevent excessive silting; and they are needed, too, to shit in the water to fertilize the rainy-season floods, which begin in December.
So Carr is not just leaving nature to replenish itself. Three years ago, he started bolstering Gorongosa's depleted species with animals donated from parks that can spare them elsewhere in Mozambique and in South Africa. So far he has brought in 180 wildebeest, 139 buffalo, 6 elephants, and 5 hippos, and he figures that he needs at least as many more again of these species before the park has the breeding stock it requires. "We're probably twenty thousand bulk grazers short of what we need to keep the grass down," he said.
Carr is particularly keen to get more zebras, but his chief conservationist says that the subspecies that is endemic to the park can be had only in Zimbabwe, and in the current political crisis it's impossible to get them from there. "We're going to have to get the president of this country to call Mugabe," Carr told me. "That's next year's challenge." And he'd like some rhinos. And he wants predators: hyenas, leopards, maybe some more lions. And he wants Africa's top safari tourism operations to lease concessions—Carr's staff of ecologists, tourism consultants, and engineers have carved Gorongosa into nine huge tracts—and to develop environmentally correct lodges that will generate $30 million a year of business (10 percent of which will go to the park's budget), in addition to park entry fees. And then there is what Carr calls the "greater Gorongosa ecosystem" to attend to—the 10-kilometer-wide buffer zone around the park, where the species in most immediate need of attention is humankind.