The same principles hold even more strongly in the modern world. Where we once signalled our status with bird feathers on our bodies and a giant clam shell in our hut, we now do it with diamonds on our bodies and a Picasso on our wall. Where Siassi islanders sold a carved bowl for the equivalent of twenty dollars, Richard Strauss built himself a villa with the proceeds from his opera Salome and earned a fortune from Der Rosenkavalier. Nowadays we read increasingly often of art sold at auction for tens of millions of dollars, and of art theft. In short, precisely because it serves as a signal of good genes and ample resources, art can be cashed in for still more genes and resources. So far, I have considered only the benefits that art brings to individuals, but art also helps define human groups. Humans have always formed competing groups whose survival is essential if the individuals in that group are to pass on their genes. Human history largely consists of the details of groups killing, enslaving, or expelling other groups. The winner takes the loser's land, sometimes also the loser's women, and thus the loser's opportunity to perpetuate genes. Group cohesion depends on the group's distinctive culture—especially its language, religion, and art (including stories and dances), hence art is a significant force behind group survival. Even if you have better genes than most of your fellow tribesmen, it will do you no good should your whole tribe (including you) get annihilated by some other tribe.
By now, you're probably protesting that I have gone completely overboard in ascribing utility to art. What about all of us who just enjoy art, without converting it to status or sex? What about all the artists who remain celibate? Are there not easier ways to seduce a sex partner than to take piano lessons for ten years? Is private satisfaction not a (the?) main reason for our art, just as for Siri and Congo?
Of course. Such expansion of behavioural patterns far beyond their original role is typical of animal species whose foraging efficiency gives them much leisure time, and who have brought their survival problems under control. Bowerbirds and birds of paradise have much leisure time, because they are big and feed on wild fruit trees out of which they can kick smaller birds. We have much leisure time because we use tools to obtain food. Animals with leisure time can channel it into more lavish signals to outdo each other. Those types of behaviour may then come to serve other purposes, such as representing information (a suggested function of Cro-Magnon cave paintings of hunted animals), relieving boredom (a real problem for captive apes and elephants), channelling neurotic energy (a problem for us as well as for them), and just providing pleasure. To maintain that art is useful is not to deny that art provides pleasure. Indeed, if we were not programmed to enjoy art, it could not serve most of its useful functions for us. Perhaps we can now answer the question why art as we know it characterizes us, but no other animal. Since chimps paint in captivity, why do they not do so in the wild? As a solution, I suggest that wild chimps still have their day filled with problems of finding food, surviving, and fending off rival chimp groups. If wild chimps had more leisure time plus the means to manufacture paints, they would be painting. The proof of my theory is that it actually happened: we are still ninety-eight per cent chimps in our genes.
Thus, human art has come far beyond its original functions. But let us not forget that even the greatest art may still serve those primal functions. As evidence, may I quote excerpts from a letter that an English lady named Rebecca Schroter wrote to the famous musician who was her lover:
My Dear
I cannot close my eyes to sleep till I have returned you ten thousand thanks for the inexpressible delight I have received from your ever enchanting compositions and your incomparably charming performance of them. Be assured, my dear, that no one can have such high veneration for your most brilliant talents as I have. Indeed, my dear love, no tongue can express the gratitude I feel for the infinite pleasure your Music has given me. Let me assure you also, with heartfelt affection, that I shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the chief blessings of my life. I shall be happy to see you for dinner, and if you can come at three o'clock, it would give me great pleasure, as I should be particularly glad to see you, my dear, before the rest of our friends come.
Most sincerely, faithfully, and affectionately yours,
REBECCA SCHROTER.
This letter of surrender was addressed to the composer Franz Josef Haydn, who, at the same time as he was enjoying this doting English lover, also boasted of an Italian mistress and an Austrian wife. Haydn knew how to use great art for its original purposes.
TEN
AGRICULTURE'S TWO-EDGED SWORD
Agriculture is conventionally regarded as the human hallmark whose adoption made the biggest material contribution to the improvement in our lifestyle over that of apes. In fact, recent archaeological studies have made it clear that agriculture brought many of the curses as well as the blessings of modern civilization.
To science, we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth is not the centre of the universe but merely one of nine planets circling one of billions of stars. From biology, we learned that humans were not specially created by God but evolved along with tens of millions of other species. Now, archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the last million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture (plus animal husbandry), supposedly our most decisive step towards a better life, was actually a milestone for the worse as well as for the better. With agriculture came not only greatly increased food production and food storage, but also the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse modern human existence. Thus, among the human cultural hallmarks being discussed in Part Three of this book, agriculture represents in its mixed blessings a halfway station between our noble traits discussed in Chapters Eight and Nine (art and language) and our unmitigated vices, discussed in many of the remaining chapters (drug abuse, genocide, and environmental destructiveness).
At first, the evidence for progress and against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth-century Americans and Europeans as irrefutable. We are better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than Ice-Age cavemen, who were still better off than apes. If you are inclined to be cynical, just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied food, the best tools and material goods, the longest and healthiest lives in human history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We obtain most of our energy from oil and machines, not just from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would really trade the life of today for that of a medieval peasant, caveman, or ape? For most of our history, all humans had to practise a primitive lifestyle termed 'hunting and gathering': they hunted wild animals and gathered wild plant food. That hunter-gatherer lifestyle is often characterized by anthropologists as 'nasty, brutish, and short'. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (according to this view) no respite from the time-consuming struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was launched only after the end of the last Ice Age, when people began independently in different parts of the world to domesticate plants and animals (see Chapter Fourteen). The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it is nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, the question 'Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture? is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Our planted crops yield far more tons per acre than do wild roots and berries. Just imagine savage hunters, exhausted from searching for nuts and chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it took those hunters to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?