reason is emotion for the sexless

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.

- Joe Quirk

sexual selection drives art

Why we evolved larger brains:

Miller argues that during human evolution, “sexual selection seems to have shifted its primary target from body to mind.” It is sexual selection, therefore, that is responsible for the astonishingly large human brain, an organ whose peculiar capacities wildly exceed survival needs on the African savannahs. And beyond its sheer size, the human brain makes possible a mind that is uniquely good at a long list of features found in all cultures but which are difficult to explain in terms of survival benefits: “humor, story-telling, gossip, art, music, self-consciousness, ornate language, imaginative ideologies, religion, morality.” Miller offers us a new model to understand the evolved mind. It’s not Descartes’s ghost, nor the mental hydraulic system of Freud, nor the computer chip of cognitive science. From the standpoint of sexual selection, the mind is best seen as a gaudy, over-powered home-entertainment system, devised in order that our stone-age ancestors could attract, amuse, and bed each other. Bed, however, was not the only object, since the qualities of mind chosen and thus evolved made for enduring pairings, the rearing of children, and the creation of robust social groups.

Art is whatever that requires skill:

Again, admiration for the ability to do something difficult is not unique to art: we admire athletes, inventors, skillful orators or jugglers. Miller is claiming that this is at least as much intrinsic to art as it is to any other field of human endeavor. He cites Ellen Dissanayake’s much-discussed notion of “making special” as essential to the arts. But whereas she sees making special as something that tends to promote an intense communal sense in a hunter-gatherer group, he interprets the phenomenon as more connected with display: “Indicator theory suggests that making things special means making them hard to do, so that they reveal something special about the maker.” It follows that almost anything can be made artistic by executing it in a manner that would be difficult to imitate. “Art” as an honorific therefore “connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement.” Cooking as a mundane productive activity is one thing; elevate it to “the art of cooking” and you emphasize its potential to be practiced as a skill and achievement that could be a useful fitness indicator. Miller adds to this a mordant comment: it is because artistic activity is an important fitness display that people will argue so passionately about whether something is or is not a work of art. Thus might the whole philosophical sub-field of aesthetics be understood as an extension of courtship rituals.

Modern art may look easy, but it's not. Action painting is not easy to do and modern art is not just about the art object, but more about the originality and the theory behind the art, the narrative and credibility of the artist, the reputation of the gallery/agent/dealer supporting the artist, and so on and so forth. Modern art is not about the painting, but the packaging of the painting.

Miller is aware just how controversial these ideas are. He grants that these days artistic elites may prefer abstraction to representation, but it is in the history of the tastes of hoi polloi that we’re going to find the keys to the origin of the arts. So the vulgar gallery comment, “My kid could paint better than that,” is vindicated as valid from the standpoint of sexual selection, and can be expected to be heard in popular artistic contexts for the rest of human time: people are not going to “learn” from their culture that skill doesn’t count (any more than they will learn that general body symmetry does not indicate fitness). Moreover, even with the elites it’s really not so different: the skill-discriminations of elites are simply accomplished at a more rarefied level. Cy Twombly’s blackboard scribbles, which look to many ordinary folk like, well, children’s blackboard scribbles, are viewed by high-art critics such as Arthur Danto as demonstrating an extremely refined artistic skill. That the works do not obviously show skill to the uninitiated simply demonstrates that they are being produced at a level that the unsophisticated cannot grasp. The esoteric nature of art, and with it status and hierarchy, thus remains in place.

- Denis Dutton