Eight Little Piggies (25 page)

I grew up in Queens, next to a fine establishment called the T-Bone Diner (it is still there,
mirabile dictu
). The contrast between railroad-car-style diners of my youth and McDonald’s of my midlife brings us to the heart of the dilemma. Diners were manufactured in a few standardized sizes and shapes—many by the Worcester Car Company in my adopted state—and then shipped to their prospective homes. Owners then took their standard issue and proceeded to cultivate the distinctness that defines this precious item of American culture: menus abounding with local products and suited to the skills and tastes of owners; waiters and waitresses with a flair for uniqueness, even eccentricity, of verve, sassiness, or simple friendliness; above all, a regular clientele forged into a community of common care. McDonald’s works in precisely the opposite way and becomes perverse in its incongruity. It enters the small-scale domain of appropriate uniqueness within the interstices of an allowable uniform framework. It even occupies spaces of widely differing designs, placements, and previous uses. It then forges this diversity into a crushing uniformity that permits not a millimeter of variation in the width of a fry from Oakland to Ogunquit.

But we are not defeated. Uniqueness has a habit of crawling back in and around the uniformities of central planning. Uniqueness also has staying power against all the practical odds of commercial culture because authenticities speak to the human soul. Many of those old diners are still flourishing in New England. I am at least a semiregular at one of the finest. On my last visit, the counter lady pointed to a jar with dollar bills. A regular customer, she told me, had a sick child in need of an operation—and everyone was kicking in, if only as a symbol of support and community. No one even mentioned the jar to casual customers on that particular morning, but I was simply told to contribute: no pleas, no harangues, no explanations beyond the simple facts of the case. Our communities are many, overlapping, and of various strengths. I am proud to be part of this aggregate, forged to a coherent species by a common place of local integrity. So long as these tiny communities continue to form in the interstices of conformity, I will remain optimistic about the power of diversity. And I will remember Elijah’s discovery during his flight from Jezebel (1 Kings 19:11–12): “After the wind an earthquake…. And after the earthquake a fire…. And after the fire a still, small voice.”

Postscript

As the dateline indicates, I wrote this essay just a week before the great San Francisco earthquake of October 17. This violently altered circumstance converted my closing line into an utterance that, if intended after the fact rather than written unwittingly before, might seem overly pointed, if not verging on cruel. In using Elijah to reemphasize my central contrast between small-scale, local, and distinctive diversity (the “still, small voice”) and global effects (well represented by general catastrophes), I was, I freely confess, also trying to make a small joke about San Francisco as the location of my essay—for the 1906 earthquake did wreak destruction with a tremor followed by fire.

Little did I know that my attempt at humor would soon be turned so sour by nature. I could, of course, just change the ending, sink this postscript, and fudge a fine fit with history. But I would rather show what I wrote originally—appropriate to its moment, but not a week later—as a testimony to nature’s continuing power over our fortunes, and as a working example of another theme so often addressed in these essays: the quirky role of unique historical events both in nature and in human life.

The earthquake has also illuminated several other points that I raised about authenticity and local diversity. The World Series, although delayed, was not moved to neutral turf but honored baseball’s powerful tradition for authenticity of place, despite the practical difficulties. My line about “people taking care of each other in small ways of enduring significance,” although meant only as a comment about the Sears counter, soon extended to the whole region. Every fire or flood provokes endless rumination and pious commentary on why we need disaster to bring out the best in us. But clichés are hackneyed because they are true, and the framework of this essay does put a different twist upon a commonplace. Just as McDonald’s marks the dark side by bringing the allowable conformity of large-scale public space into the inappropriate arena of local distinctiveness, human kindness after disaster, on the bright side, has a precisely opposite effect, for pervasive trouble promotes the usual caring of small and local communities to the large and overt domain of anonymity and callousness. Now how can this still, small voice be heard and felt at all scales all the time?

DAINES BARRINGTON
(1727–1800), a lawyer and wealthy member of the lesser nobility, published so many short articles on such a variety of subjects that he could scarcely avoid a reputation as a dilettante. In numerous communications to the Royal Society of London, he discussed the landing place of Caesar in Britain, the merely local nature of Noah’s flood, the antiquity of playing cards, and the death of Dolly Pentreath, the last native speaker of Cornish (an extinct branch of the Celtic languages). Some of his colleagues considered him superficial and overly credulous. One detractor even composed a heroic couplet in his dishonor:

Then, in 1764, Barrington happened onto something truly important. But, stung by rebukes for his previous carelessness and hyperbole, Barrington proceeded cautiously. He waited six years before publishing his observations as a note in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
, Britain’s leading scientific journal both then and now. And he began his article by invoking the classical literary form for understatement—
litotes
. (These Greek terms for parts of speech and forms of rhetoric have paralyzed generations of schoolkids who can’t remember the difference between a dactyl and a synecdoche. Monty Python got back at professorial pedants by making great merriment with “litotes” and its improbable pronunciation.) Litotes (from the Greek
litos
, meaning “small” or “meager”) is a form of understatement that expresses an affirmative by the negative of its contrary—as in “not bad” for “good.” In his opening paragraph, Barrington used litotes in a near apology to readers for taking their time:

In the second paragraph, Barrington sneaked up a bit further upon his actual discovery:

The third paragraph, though only in historical retrospect, drops the bombshell:

Litotes had ceded to overt wonderment.

Mozart’s skills were so astounding that Barrington even doubted his extreme youth; could father Leopold’s game be an elaborate ruse, passing off a well-trained adult midget as a young son? Barrington delayed publication for six years until he could obtain proof in the form of Mozart’s birth certificate from the register of Salzburg, “procured from his excellence Count Haslang, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the electors of Bavaria and Palatine” (you just gotta believe somebody with a title like that).

Young Mozart at the piano.
Courtesy of Photographie Bulloz, Paris
.

Leopold Mozart made quite a business of showing off his precocious son. Barrington, graced with a private visit, proceeded as any intellectual would: He tested eight-year-old Wolfgang for a variety of musical skills in reading, memory, and improvisation, and his letter to the Royal Society is a report of his impressions. (I learned about this publication at a special exhibit on Mozart at the British Museum. Barrington’s article, entitled “Account of a very remarkable young musician,” appeared in 1770, in volume 60 of the
Philosophical Transactions
. The notion that young Mozart had served as subject for a scientific paper in England’s leading journal was too much to resist as a topic for this series. What better symbol could we possibly advance for the fruitful interaction of art and science?)

One issue, above all, fascinated Barrington as he observed Mozart and affirmed in spades all the reports he had heard about the young child’s precocity (for Barrington sought, in this article, to plumb the nature of genius itself, not merely to explicate Mozart who, remember, was then just a remarkable little boy, not yet an icon of Western achievement): Apparent “wholeness” must be decomposable into separate modules, each subject to independent development. How else could a mere child be so transcendent in one particular arena, but ordinary in most other ways? This idea of dissociability must provide a key to understanding human talents: Genius is not integral, but must result from a hypertrophy of particular modules.

Barrington cites two examples of dissociation in grasping the nature of genius. First, he marvels at Mozart’s musical sophistication in an otherwise ordinary and rambunctious eight-year-old boy. If young Wolfgang had been a miniature adult, as adept in manners as in music, then genius might be portrayed as integral, but he acted like an ordinary kid in all domains outside his special talent:

Second, Barrington gained some insight about the dissociability of basic emotions. He asked Mozart to improvise songs expressing particular emotions—a song of love and a song of anger. Again, Barrington took refuge in litotes to describe the successful result:

The song of rage was even more dramatically successful:

But how could an eight-year-old boy, with presumably limited experience, at least of sexual love, so abstract and distill these basic modules of our emotional repertoire? This could only be possible, Barrington reasoned, if the fundamental emotions reside in our behavioral storehouses as dissociable packages. Our totality must be an amalgam of separable components.

We have, before and ever since, been fascinated with such “splinter skills”—extraordinary talents in otherwise undistinguished or even severely handicapped people—for the same reason that so intrigued Barrington: Such dissociation seems to argue for a separate origin and causation of talents that we would prefer to view, but cannot on this evidence, as expressions of a more general genius. We all know the standard examples of chess grandmasters who cannot balance their check books, and mentally handicapped people with prodigious skills in apparently instantaneous numerical calculation or reckoning the day of the week for any date over centuries or millennia.

For all the criticism that Barrington received as an injudicious dilettante, this time he chose well—both in subject and argument. For the principle of dissociation, and construction from separable modules, is central to our understanding of any complex system that arises by natural evolution. Barrington identified the right issue for his wonderment, and the breadth of application extends well beyond divine Mozart to the evolution of any complex organism and the structure of mind. Integral wholeness may sound warm, fuzzy, and romantic, but dissociability is the necessary way of the world.

Since principles are often best illustrated by exposing the fallacy of their contraries, I present the most important, and probably most intelligent, argument ever raised against evolution by a great scientist in the turbulent generation before Darwin. In the
Discours préliminaire
to his four-volume work on fossil vertebrates, published in 1812, Georges Cuvier denied the possibility of evolution by affirming the doctrine of intrinsic and nondissociable wholeness.

Cuvier designated his principle as “the correlation of parts,” maintaining that all features of an organism are intricately designed and coordinated to function in a certain optimal way. No part can change by itself. Any conceivable alteration in one organ would require the redesign of every other feature, for optimal function requires complete integration:

Cuvier used this principle primarily to argue that he could reconstruct entire organisms from fossil fragments, because one bone implied a necessary shape for all others. But Cuvier had a second, even grander motive—the denial of evolution. How can transmutation occur if parts cannot alter separately, or at least with some degree of independence? If each tiny modification requires a redesign of absolutely every other feature, then inertia itself must debar evolution. How can we imagine a coordinated change of all parts every time some minute advantage might attend a slight alteration in one feature? Cuvier continued:

The logic of this argument is impeccable. If parts are not dissociable, then evolution cannot occur. “All for one” might be good morality for a Musketeer but cannot describe the pathway of natural change in complex systems. Yet logical arguments are only as good as their premises. The chain of inference may be irrefutable, but if the premise be false, then the conclusion will probably fail as well. To cite the harsh motto of our computer age: GIGO, or garbage in, garbage out (no matter how phenomenal the inner workings of the machine).

Cuvier’s logic was correct, but his premise of total integrity is false. Evolution does proceed (as it must) by dissociating complex systems into parts, or modules made of a few correlated features, and by altering the various units at differing rates and times. Biologists refer to this principle as “mosaic evolution,” and we need look no farther than the history of our own species. Human ancestors, like Lucy and her early australopithecine cousins, evolved an upright posture of nearly modern design before any substantial enlargement of the brain had occurred.

This cardinal principle of dissociability works just as well for the mental complexities of emotions and intelligence as for designs of entire bodies. As he began to compile the notes that would lead to his evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin recognized that he could not give an evolutionary account of human emotions without the principles of modularity and dissociation.

He wished, for example, to trace facial gestures to antecedent states in ancestral animals. But if the human complement forms an integrated array, locked together by our unique consciousness, then a historical origin from simpler systems becomes impossible. Darwin recognized that two principles must underlie the possibility of evolution. First, gestures cannot be subject to fully conscious control; some, at least, must represent automatic, evolved responses. As evidence for ancestral states, Darwin cited several gestures that make no sense without modern morphology, but must have served our forebears well. In sneering, we tighten our upper lips and raise them in the region of our canine teeth. This motion once exposed the fighting weapons of our ancestors (as it continues to uncover the long and sharp canines in many modern mammals that perform the same gesture), but human canines are no bigger than our other teeth and this inherited reaction has lost its original function.

Second, just as young Mozart could separate and abstract single emotions, Darwin realized that standard facial gestures must be modules of largely independent action—and that the human emotional repertoire must be more like the separate items in a shopper’s bag than the facets of an unbreakable totality. Evolution can mix, match, and modify independently. Otherwise we face Cuvier’s dilemma: If all emotions are inextricably bound by their status as interacting, optimal expressions, then how can anything ever change?