You will occasionally hear postmodern historians say that chivalric troubadours in eleventh-century Provence invented the experience of romantic love. This is absolute crap. Pleistocene people fell madly in love long before medieval minstrels started prancing around in tights. Erotic love is a human universal, existing in some form in all 168 cultures studied. The anguish of love dominates most art, music, and poetry; everywhere. Falling in love is a sacrament coded into our genes. We can't get around it.
All living things blossom when it's time for courtship. Caterpillars turn to butterflies. Buds turn into flowers and fruit. You turn into an idiot. Females everywhere perfume the atmosphere and sprout fecundity announcements. Males turn into warriors with weapons growing from their heads and brightly colored flags sticking up from their tails or manes or genitals. All living things become ready to breed or die trying. It seems like it's what they were created for, their purpose in life.
But, there is no purpose in life. All biological beauty happens not in order to copy genes, but because it happened to copy genes in the past.
The gene reproduction strategy that happened to work for our species is love. That's why we act like love is something special. Once you go insane for another Homo sapiens, you transmogrify into the state your sanity was built for.
Petunias are very good at hiding, conserving energy, and surviving until it's time to trade genes, when all of a sudden they go crazy and become beautiful. All living things are conservative, efficient, safe, and drab until it's time to breed, at which point they become extravagant, wasteful, risky, and beautiful. The primary purpose of the sober state of being is to prepare for the impassioned state of being.
We Homo sapiens are very good at thinking clearly and surviving in a social context, until it's time to trade genes, at which point we go mad. The stupidity of our overwhelming passions comes from a deeper wisdom than anything the wise can control. The definition of passion: when you become animated by an ancient imperative that transcends your mortal life. Passion comes from before you were born, and it reaches out beyond your death. To a gene, your passions are more important than you. We celebrate that ecstatic agony in our art and gossip, because there is no state achievable by humans that is more self-transcendent.
Fools don't fall in love. Lovers only look like fools to the wise, because those who aren't in love are merely preserving their bodies and social structures until they or their relatives fall in love, so they have nothing better to do than be wise. He who is wise is reason's slave. "Reason is emotion for the sexless," said the actor and poet Heathcote Williams. "People who are sensible about love are incapable of it," said Douglas Yates. Bob Dylan said, "You can't be in love and wise at the same time."
I've stopped expecting love to make sense. "Sense" is the servant of its master. We are not the authors of our decisions. We are the rationalizers of our impulses. Our passions read from a script written in our DNA text. As John Lennon proved with his love of Yoko, love is not only blind but deaf.
Love, or erotic passion, sometimes overrides our passion for self-preservation. That's why Romeo and Juliet makes us sigh and cry. We know they're stupid teenagers. We know it won't last. We also remember we never felt so alive as when we were stupid teenagers in stupid love.
That's because teenagers hold the keys to the driving force behind human evolution. Many Pleistocene newborns struggled to focus on the faces of their teenage parents. Most humans got born because of the passionate impulses of young people, not the sober decisions of the mature. When it came to surviving on the savanna, teenage passion worked like a high-octane engine.
If we didn't have our neocortical ability to foresee scenarios and weigh consequences, there would be a lot more tragic stories. In harsher, poorer societies, people risk death for sexual passion much more readily. They look to their futures and don't see much worth preserving. Now is their only chance to live—which is really each gene screaming in divine chorus," Get me the heck out of this mortal body! This is our last chance!"
Most art and gossip is not about the old and wise and responsible. Most art and gossip is about the young and foolish and impassioned. When characters struggling in stories attain the safe, enlightened, or married state of being, stories end, because drama stops. Stories end where conflicts are resolved. The only social event worth talking about is conflict.
Young people act young, and old people act old, because the way they act is the best strategy for the genes for which they encode. Older people want to preserve family stability and impart wisdom. Younger people want to assert their individuality and compete for attention to distinguish themselves from competing breeders.
Everybody's got a different job to do, and we all work for the same boss. The passionate die in much larger numbers than the sober. The passionate breed and bond faster than the sober. The sober maintain bonds they forged when they were passionate, so they can rear and guide little demons of passion.
No comments:
Post a Comment