Resurrecting King Louis XIV

These scientific studies are, of course, the highest affirmation for my scientific social psychology. Nevertheless, when this science is such that it inspires those scholars in the humanities and fine arts, that is in some way a jeweled crown for Human Sin or Social Sin. It is one thing for a biologist and a psychologist like Edward O. Wilson and Steven Pinker, respectively, to defend my cultural models, but it is something else when scholars in the humanities concur. When I was 25, it was these areas that I wanted to periodize, and I had no interest in or knowledge of science. To my eternal delight, studies on the arts along these lines have been published.

Since much of modern social, artistic, and political history started in France, for my books to be the foundation of a return to classical humanism in the Louvre Museum and related communities could not be more thrilling—and is one of the best indicators of the canonization of Human Sin or Social Sin. To make the arts and society lucid and to unify them, of course, has been a goal of philosophy since its beginning in ancient Greece. This clarifying and unifying process was completed in the peer review of my book, not just in the visual arts, but also in music and opera and represents the canonization of Human Sin or Social Sin. I will first describe the development in the Louvre and then in music.

Three recent publications show a resurrection of humanism in French art history, and, by extension, throughout the Western elites. The seminal publication is The Louvre: The History, The Collections, The Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 2020). While the book itself is written by a former curator, it is published with the Louvre Museum logo on it, and it is sold on the Louvre Museum website. It is a coffee table book with lavish illustrations to help make the point that Beauty is Back.

The French-language edition is from a French publisher, while the English-language edition is published by Rizzoli, a distinguished New York publisher of museum catalogues. The book makes three central points: (1) the psychological primacy of the human figure; (2) the legitimacy of the traditional academic hierarchy of human beings over nature; and (3) the moral drive of the modernists to “purge” the arts of—to use my term—“disgusting humanism.” The author shows how the drive to purify the Louvre collection impacted art history, curatorial policy, and the architecture of the building itself. This realigning, on a dime, at the top of elite art institutions is stunning.

Another study that is a more narrative treatment of broader social history is James Gardner’s The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum. Gardner is an American art and literary critic, who has written for several periodicals, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Spectator (UK).

In 2016, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art published a general catalogue of its paintings in all its departments, entitled The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Museum Masterpieces (New York: Rizzoli, 2016), the museum’s first such publication in forty-five years, signaling a major publishing event.

To my amazement, the primary goal of both the text and the plates is to mainstream and canonize my psychology of art, and by extension the canon of Western art history and its methods. The Foreword to the catalogue is written by Thomas P. Campbell, past Director and CEO of the museum, and the main essay is by Kathryn Calley Galitz, an educator and curator at the Met.

The catalogue text supports the most important aspect of my model for art: how the psychology of resonance creates an emotional connection between viewers and art objects. The plates illustrate how this works by juxtaposing images of low emotional resonance with images of high emotional resonance. This technique is so effective that one critic on Amazon.com described it as causing a “head explosion”: “Head exploding: With 544 pages and 1,100 color images of the Met’s art collection, this book is intense. Masterpieces, indeed.— TheStyleSalononiste.com”. This image may allude to my description of my “brain on fire,” while listening to Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth.

As the reader moves back and forth from one type of image to another, the felt contrast is a kind of empirical support for the model. Given that the catalogue is from one of the top five museums in the world, it helps to mainstream and canonize my model for art.

In brief, what I show in Human Sin is that the mind, as illustrated by dreams, is comprised of images of humans in three-dimensional space. The images are taken in from what people see during their lives, and I show that a body map is hardwired in the brain from evolution. So, by extension, people prefer or resonate more with art that portrays the human figure in three dimensions, compared to the flat art that characterizes the world outside the West.

The catalogue illustrates this model in two ways: first, the introductory text uses the term resonance several times; and second, the plates contrast flat, ethnic art with deep, dynamic, and sensuous Western art. When an image of flat art is placed directly next to an example of Western art, viewers can feel the greater resonance (“head explosion”) as they start to view Western art. At the end of this essay, I will present two images that demonstrate flat versus deep art.

The sheer size of the volume helps to emphasize the experience of resonance. The book is 10 by 13 inches, 550 pages, and weighs a hefty 9 pounds. The first use of resonance is on the inside flap: “Freed from the constraints imposed by the physical layout of the Museum, the paintings resonate anew; and this chronological framework reveals unexpected visual affinities among the works.”

The “unexpected visual affinities” refer to the fact that all ethnic art, from across the globe and stretching back thousands of years, appears to comprise one class of basically flat art, while Western art, from all periods, is a class of visually flexible and sensuous art. As viewers move from one image to another, it becomes clear that all ethnic art, regardless of origins, has a clear family resemblance, whereas Western art forms its own family.

The Foreword by Thomas P. Campbell, while only one page long, concludes by tying in the “presence” of the names of the Met’s patrons with the art they donated: “Names such as Morgan, Rogers, Altman, Bache, Havermeyer, Clark, Lehman, Dillon, Wrightsman, and Annenberg resonate as both remarkable collectors and symbols of historic generosity” (p. 7).

The introductory essay, “Painting Through the Ages,” by Kathryn Calley Galitz, expands the first reference to resonance, which is on the front flap: “Freed from the constraints imposed by the physical layout of the museum and the distribution of works among separate curatorial departments, the paintings resonate anew” (p. 10). A few sentences later, Galitz mentions the discovery by Giotto of three-dimensional space.

The first sentence in the next paragraph begins, “Proximity in time also reveals some unexpected visual affinities” (p. 10, italics added). Later in the paragraph, she points out “the emphatic contours and flattened forms that characterize the American folk painter Ammi Philip” (p. 10, italics added).

In the last paragraph, Galitz broadens the descriptions of deep versus flat so as to create the hierarchies we see develop in Western history. That paragraph is worth quoting at length:

This group of five hundred paintings…reveals broader themes in the history of art—a testament to the unparalleled breadth and depth of the Museum’s collection. We see a range of responses to the challenge of representing three dimensions on a flat surface, from the cast shadows that suggest depth in Roman wall paintings made in the first century B.C. to the codification of linear perspective by Renaissance artists and its eschewal in the flat gold grounds of the Japanese Rinpa aesthetic (p. 11).

The paragraph continues with the standard history of linear perspective and its rejection by modernists.

The author’s description of Japanese art’s “eschewal” of Renaissance art alludes to something similar in Human Sin, where I describe how I was viewing an exhibition of paintings from India when the curator asked my opinion. I responded, “The figures are doll-like; it looks like medieval art.” He instantly twisted his face away from me and said, “Arrogant.”

Notice the curator’s “eschewal” of the obvious beauties of Old Master art! My statement was descriptive, as in “2 + 2 = 4,” whereas the curator, in contrast, became threatening. Unable to respond in an impartial way with honest discourse in the spirit of a scientist’s pursuit of universal truth, he simply declared war. I ignored his thug tactics, including his effort to reduce me to his “servant of love,” and just continued on with my pursuit of universal and collective truth. So here we are with the canonization of Human Sin and Social Sin.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote, “Real advances in knowledge, like science in its contest with the church, usually have short-term winners and losers, but all of humanity wins in the long run.” If I had known, at age 16, that my new commitment to art history would result in all of the above, …well, you know what I’m getting at.

The crowning achievement in the area of architectural history is Versailles: A Private Invitation (Paris: Flammarion, 2017). It is also a coffee table book and has the Chateau de Versailles logo on it. The book has the unusual formatting of placing one block of text floating on the left page and a luxurious photo on the facing page.

There are two types of texts: quotations in a large roman font from courtiers who lived in Versailles; and passages from the authors, in a small italicized font. About half of the pages are quotations from the courtiers.

Of central importance, the book is divided into chapters devoted to each room type in Versailles and how they functioned in the social and reproductive life of the monarchs, courtiers, and their families. The original residents described the palace as having a status that enhanced reproductive roles—all through spacious and luxurious displays of the rooms. This book may be the first catalogue of old master art that uses this biological methodology. Genuine progress, indeed! My goal during my first year of professional writing was to view society impartially, as a scientist studies a crystal.

Barbara Jatta is the director of the Vatican Museums, and she wrote the “Presentation” or an introductory note, to the Vatican’s recent catalogue The Sistine Chapel (Bologna: Scripta Maneant, 2018). It is worth quoting her at length to see her elegant defense of the “stratified” aesthetics of traditional mind/body dualism in the arts:

“The Sistine Chapel, a universal place in history, art and faith, presented [in this catalogue] as never before…[the Vatican Museums are] the world’s most beautiful Museums, the result of the stratified passions for collecting of the pontiffs and high prelates who over the centuries have enriched an increasingly important and universal patrimony…[of] the most famous chapel in the world.

The volume presents the Cappella Magna of the pontiffs, the Sistine Chapel: which takes its name precisely from Sixtus IV della Rovera, the great patron of the major fifteenth-century Umbrian and Tuscan artists. The detailed presentation of images enables the reader to know those wonderful, rich frescos…[and] that stun the eye and mind of the visitor.”

As Italy was the home of the rebirth of Classical humanism, this quote, with its implied support of Human Sin or Social Sin, can only be described as a dream come true for any serious scholar in the arts and humanities. She announces, in subtle, yet clear and power language, that Beauty is Back.

The British Museum was another arts organization that led the reintroduction of humanism. They are famous for their rescue of the marbles from the façade of the Parthenon, now known as the Lord Elgin Marbles, named for the great British aristocrat who saved them from certain destruction in about 1800. While the Vatican director assumes that humans naturally prefer the idealized image of the human figure, a recent catalogue from the British Museum very carefully shows how the stories in Homer’s poems reflect a natural, erotically charged, “dominant” preference for the human figure. The authors show how Homer portrays men and women in preferred, reproductively relevant roles: men as exerting physical power to demonstrate fertility, while women display their bodies as a desired and visual object to show fertility.

My model for the psychology of the figure has been supported by a biological anthropologist, cited elsewhere, but the authors of this exhibition catalogue also support it with a word that is essential for my model: Resonance. As in the resonance between felt and imagined desire for the body and similar objects. Here is the context for the use: “That this quiet family scene could be chosen to represent the theme of war is an indication of the resonance and impact these characters had in an era versed in classical literature” (240-241). The scene shows a woman holding a baby and saying farewell to an armed, Greek warrior. In a discussion of violence and gender I describe how a young, married couple from a west African tribe describe with glee that their marriage is based on the man’s fighting ability. The parallel between the British museum and my description is exact, and when combined with my term resonance is very powerful support.

There is a similar development in the United States; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is, of course, the only fine arts organization designed to equal the biggest in Europe, and a recent publication from the Met appears to support my models for both traditional humanism and modern art. The essay, “Broadening Perspectives,” in the catalogue Making the Met (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020), by Met director Max Hollein is a flawless application of what could be called my model of “heroic aesthetic masochism,” to modern art. This matrix of emotions was reproduced by experimental psychologist Ellen Winner in a study described below.

The major museums of Europe and America have published coffee table books that support my models, so several of them are best treated together. They use my psychological term “resonance,” which is used in a high-profile way by the British Museum in its exhibit “Homer: Myth and Reality.” (For a description of this show, see my homepage.)

Museum catalogs commonly put the term either in the book blurb or close to the beginning.

After the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, probably the most prestigious old master collection in New York is The Frick Collection. Frick’s recent exhibition “Bertoldo Di Giovanni” (1440–1491) showed how the artist was the manager of the Medici sculpture garden and directed the informal art academy. Most importantly, he was a student of Donatello and a teacher of the teenage Michelangelo.

The exhibition was curated by Xavier F. Saloman, who is the Chief Curator at The Frick Collection, and by Aimee Ng, also a curator at The Frick. They co-authored the Preface, of which the fourth paragraph begins: “Bertoldo’s extant work combines iconographic innovation with the use of antique motifs, a hallmark of Renaissance art, resulting in a recognizable visual language layered with classical resonance.”

Broader use of the term came from a recent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum entitled “The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I.” The Amazon blurb reads: “[Maximilian] created a profile for the ruler—a combination of idealism and vainglory—that not only helped shape the identity of the growing German nation but also has resonances in the current political climate worldwide.” When these two uses of the term resonance are combined with the highly developed use of the term by the British Museum, the trend is clear.

The recent catalog of Roman Art (New York: Scala Arts Publishers, 2020) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is primarily written by the eminent art historian Paul Zanker. While Zanker never uses the actual term resonance, he and the other authors use synonyms such as connection (p. 11), and affinity (pp. 12 and 30). With these terms in the background, Zanker then talks about the portrayal of political leaders with words and phrases such as allegiance (p. 295), face to face (p. 295), mingle convivially (p. 296), powerful expression (p. 296), whom they [the viewers] were dealing (p. 296), and express their loyalty (p. 301). When all these uses are combined, it is clear that art history will no longer be understood as descriptions of stylistic norms, but rather of how art in different historical periods expresses the deepest currents of human nature and social life.

Of all the museum publications, the recent catalog to the exhibit commemorating the death of Raphael is, in important ways, the most important. The catalog was published by the Uffizi Gallery, and the first essay was written by Marzia Faietti, one of the curators of the show and past director of art history at the Uffizi.

This essay is central to canonization for two reasons. First, Raphael is a primary figure in the High Renaissance, and so the rebirth of art. And second, my models are now commonly seen in the liberal arts as giving birth or rebirth to the Enlightenment more broadly and the old master arts traditions more specifically. So for my model to be the basic subject of the first essay in this catalog shows that Human Sin goes to the central intersections of art, history, and ethics.

The two primary aspects of my model for art and art history are covered in the essay: first, imitative resonance; and, in the end, the inversion of Platonism. The essay covers imitative resonance very broadly over most of its twenty pages, but the inversion is captured very quickly—in a condensed and powerful fashion—at the end in the example of the Madonna of the Chair, which I viewed in a similar vein at the Pitti Palace. Marzia Faietti places the painting in precise literary and aesthetic debates of the High Renaissance, thereby lending support to my modeling of modern social history and cultural history. Without this kind of support, from both social scientists and art historians, my models would remain tentative.

Most of her essay, entitled “With Study and Imagination,” covers imitative resonance, but without using either of those terms. So the essay’s support is similar to that of Paul Zanker’s on Roman art, in that resonance and imitation are referred to with synonyms that were used in the historic debates in the arts and broader aesthetic developments.

The general approach that she uses in her essay covers the debates at the time regarding the competition between painting and poetry in their ability to copy nature, especially the beauty of the human figure and face. Faietti discusses the tradition of the “mirror sonnet” (p. 25) and the myths of Narcissus and Echo, both of which describe imitation: Narcissus with his reflection in the water, and the echo of the voice of Echo over a landscape. Faietti mentions a poet’s ability to “establish effective interaction between subject, artist, and viewer,” and she also covers, as I do, the subject of how an artist reconciles the ideal and particular in portraying the face (p. 26). She also mentions “the harmonious integration of the individual into the collectivity” (p. 30). Alluding to my body-based model for aesthetics, she says, about Raphael’s attempt to use design to unify the arts, that he went “far beyond the debate on the superiority of painting over the sculpture in an attempt to regain an organic vision in the artistic praxis, and more besides” (p. 36). What I show is that design types and traditions themselves need to be judged by their ability to anthropomorphize the special characteristics of media, such as stone, paint, or music. In her brief discussion of The School of Athens, Faietti describes the need to get agreement on social ethics to achieve domestic peace, which is precisely what I do throughout my book, especially in the “before and after” discussion in my Conclusion concerning the Seven Deadly Sins.

But the jewel in the crown for Faietti’s essay, and what it means for Human Sin or Social Sin, is her brief but powerful discussion of Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair. The painting is in Michelangelo’s muscular style, portraying the Madonna as a gypsy who has an “organic unity” and represents the norm “upside-down” (p. 38) or inverted.

When I looked at the work in the Pitti Palace, I thought how odd it was for such an earthy treatment to occur at that time and place, which just underscores the larger idea of Human Sin of the body and emotion as universal undercurrents of culture and history that we must always respond to constructively.

When one combines the long tradition of imitation and inversion, the modeling and unifying achievement of Human Sin or Social Sin has been put at the center of the Western canon. To achieve a consensus between biological science, human nature, and ultimately history was a fundamental goal of my writing from the beginning. That is why I spent twenty-five years reading, and only five years writing.

I may be among the very few scholars who have lived to see a textbook he used in graduate school revised in light of his book. I took ancient Greek history and used the Oxford textbook A Brief History of Ancient Greece (New York: 2020). Two of the authors teach at City College of New York and first wrote the book in 1999 to “modernize” the study of Greece. The edition I read was from 2013 and had the usual anachronistic denunciations of “sexism,” “apartheid,” “elitism,” etc. All that is now gone.

When the popular enthusiasms are mentioned by the authors, they maintain a sober tone. In the latest edition, the authors describe the rise of the first elites as a “good,” state that girls “absorb” gender roles, and note that the picture on a pot of a woman applying makeup is with “other women.” In the index, there is no listing for “race,” “racism,” “gender,” or “patriarchy.”

On a related issue, I also took a class on Roman history, and the textbook, also from Oxford, I describe Human Sin as being completely pessimistic in its simple description of Roman history as one big “anti-Whig nightmare.” That edition of the textbook on Roman history is from 2011 and has not yet been updated. It was so biased that Oxford probably thought it was more economical to just scrap it and commission a new text. The scholarship does move on!

A new textbook from Oxford of great significance for the liberal arts more generally in Europe in the Modern World: A New Narrative History Since 1500 (New York: 2021). This is a two-volume work with one volume devoted to primary sources and the other describing the flow of events from the author, Edward Berenson, chairman of the history department at New York University. All of the primary sources are written by Europeans except one, which was written by Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the North Vietnamese communists.

From the perspective of Human Sin, the Berenson text that is most important, entitled “Disillusionment with Democracy and Consumerism,” describes the 1960s. The title and treatment lack the usual triumphalism given this era and subject. I describe the 1960s as the rise of our present theocracy, and Berenson does exclude the usual hagiographies and instead uses my religious psychology. For instance, he highlights the fact that students at the time believed that the Vietnam War was “like the Holocaust,” which is exactly how I describe it.

That the old orthodoxy has been rewritten may make the Berenson textbook, which is formal scholarship meant for undergraduates, the most revolutionary text since the Enlightenment. The peer review from Oxford for this kind of textbook is at the most rigorous level to ensure it will be marketable for the next few years.

The book’s cover image, below, is of a parade of Soviet athletes from the 1930s, who give the impression that the Russian people are in charge of their destiny.

One reason for such a quick and complete acceptance of Human Sin was the nature and strength of the anti-Trump movement. The situation is similar to what would exist if Darwin had not only discovered evolution by natural selection but had also created a time machine that allowed us to see millions of years of evolution in just a few hours. So, applying this metaphor to the anti-Trump movement, almost every minute of every day has allowed scholars to see in the popular media and student activism the evolutionary psychology I describe as driving all social history since antiquity, which is consistent with chimpanzee behavior. If a scholar is committed, at least nominally, to The Good, then it would be hard to continue to advocate for our present theocracy and redemption culture.

The Royal Opera staged production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Keith Warner, and the Die Walküre was released on Blu-ray (2020). The latter film explores themes of the purity of the body and free love, and how they are polluted and oppressed by slime and formal marriage, as symbolized by the “oppressive dress” of Fricka.

Taylor Swift’s song “Champagne Problems” symbolizes the fact that, without the real problems faced by most people in our history, such as disease and famine, we can obsess over things like “trigger words” and “thought crimes”—that is, “Champagne Problems.”

A work that I just started is The Oxford Illustrated History of the World (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. In the first 20 pages it supports my notions of a universal serpent/demon psychology and its expression today in our notions of technology as being a “monster” type threat, and the biological basis of history with notions of dominance and deference, the relationship between imagination and emotion, the importance of “reciprocal dependence” (p. 5), the difficulty of dealing with conflict and how we mostly just move it from one part of our lives to another, and the importance of evolution for intelligence and human biodiversity. For my model to structure the beginning of the History of the World, from Oxford University Press, is certainly a clear sign of the canonization of Human Sin or Social Sin.

The canonization of Human Sin or Social Sin has also started to come from literary figures. Literature is an area that I studied as a student, but did not include in my research for my books. Literature of course engages with many of the same aesthetic issues regarding the role of the individual in civic life, so I am happy that important literary scholars have lent robust support for Human Sin or Social Sin.

Umberto Eco is both a well-known writer and professor with a specialty in religion, which is the subject of his first novel, The Name of the Rose. While he died in 2016, Harvard University Press published a posthumous collection of essays, On The Shoulders of Giants. The last essay, “Representations of the Sacred” supports several of my key ideas regarding religion, such as ritual submission, dependent rank, and the sublime.

A very exciting study from an American literary scholar is The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Princeton University Press, 2020) from Princeton University Press, authored by Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and former MacArthur Fellow. She is a prize-winning poet and her nonfiction addresses literary theory and philosophy of art.

What is stunning about her work is her ability to show, as I do, how the materiality of object is an essential aspect of experience and meaning. Her writing is compact and very powerful. The nature of her peer support is what I have come to call “potted,” which entails dropping a sentence that restates an important element of my models.

Camille Paglia of course has been a “bomb thrower” since the publication of her best seller, Sexual Personae that launched her career in the 1980s, when the feminists and others were starting to develop their own sort of sex and race primness. Her recent collection of essays, Provocations (New York: Vintage Books, 2019) contains “Resolved: Religion Belongs in the Curriculum” in which she agrees that the various area studies curricula reflect,

…“a toxic brew of paternalistic neo-Victorian philanthropy and dogmatic political correctness—a sanctimonious creed promulgated and enforced with missionary zeal by a priestly caste of college administrators and faculty censors in an unholy alliance with intrusive federal bureaucrats,…”

And, to use my phrase, reflect a retention of the race consciousness of the 1950s. This quote could be put almost anywhere in my book.

A scholar who is well known for his PBS documentaries is Simon Schama, who is an eminent, English historian who has taught at Ivy League colleges for his entire career. To celebrate the new millennium, the BBC asked him to write a three-volume History of England. The title itself of his recent collection of essays, Wordy: Sounding off on high art, low appetite and the power of memory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019) makes clear that a subtheme will be to support my model of these areas. His essay on musician Tom Wait describes his music as “like chewing on barbed wire,” a basic point I make about pop culture and its contrast with humanist high culture.

The paper that supports my political psychology, “Liberalism, Populism and the Fate of the World,” uses the most oblique method of support that I have so far encountered. It comes across as militantly leftist, but the way he jams in religious references to the Left makes it clear that he supports my model. And he ends with the famous quote from Voltaire on the Catholic Church: “Ecrasez l’infame,” or “slay the infamy.” And he also agrees with Jared Diamond on the crisis of third world overpopulation we must soon face.

Harold Bloom, who taught at Yale, made himself famous by vigorously defending Western literature with his high profile The Western Canon. It was commonly seen by the media as “shameless” boosterism. Scholars like him normally have a very strong allergy to biology, but the title itself of his last book is extremely suggestive: Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death (Yale University Press, 2020).

The title is very long by modern standards, and, as it contains several of my most important ideas, the purpose is to make clear to the reader that this study represents Harold Bloom’s very robust and even dramatic support for Human Sin or Social Sin. He died, at age 90, just after finishing it, but what is compelling is that it was written from a hospital room via dictation. I’ve never heard of a scholar with his reputation and age write a 600 page book with this kind of urgency. I’ve heard of deathbed documents, but never of a “deathbed book.” And its full of quotes from primary sources and with very detailed analysis.

The title itself, “Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles” refers to my discussion of Homer and how the idea of heroic “coming back” or returning home from a dangerous sea trip reflects my descriptions of a basic function of the Greek City State and the arts. This notion of returning acts as a ritualized haven from the violence of nature. Both his title and my interpretation refer well to the subtitle: “The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over the Universe of Death.” This refers to the adaptive history of humans resulting from their conflict with nature. The adaptation created deep structures in the human mind or brain that, in turn, result in the drama of human conflict, both domestic and with hostile neighbors and nature.

In terms of the content of the book itself, he supports the centrality of groups, the Christ-types, and the inversion of Platonism. Harold Bloom is not the type of scholar to need scientific studies to support a volume like Human Sin or Social Sin, but given the recent publishing date of his book, October 2020, he was probably familiar with some of it.

“Only Music is real; everything else is bullshit.”—Howard Dachslager, PhD. (My father and pianist)

My early goal was to periodize modernism, and the subjects I had in mind were primarily in the arts and social philosophy, such as gender and race. Studying music was particularly important to me, so I am thrilled that important studies have been published that show the canonization of my models in classical music history.

A happy coincidence is that the year 2020 is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and there are two new biographies of him that use elements of my models. The first, Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces, from Yale University Press, is by Laura Tunbridge, a musicologist at Oxford University. The second, Beethoven: A Life (University of California Press, 2020), by Jan Caeyers, is endorsed by the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, has its logo on it, and was released as part of the BTHVN 2020 festival. The Beethoven-Haus contains the largest archive about the composer’s life and music. The author, Jan Caeyers, had unprecedented access to the archive, conducts a Beethoven Orchestra, and is a musicologist.

As Beethoven is the true beginning of the standard repertoire with a capital R, this biography by Jan Caeyers is in important ways a corner stone of the canonization of Human Sin or Social Sin. It almost a biography of Beethoven fused with my models for modernism and aesthetic psychology and history. Let’s stop and note that the traditional humanist approach to music has been sustained by the peer review; but what has changed in this biography is the methods by which that standard humanist psychology is negotiated.

Some of the biggest changes are the use of my network theories for the music and the social communities that Beethoven had to work through growing up and as both a man and composer in Vienna. Beethoven is portrayed as exhibiting his well-known hubris, but it is portrayed as part of the larger logic that structures Human Sin or Social Sin. There are important discussions of musical styles, and these are schematized in ways consistent with my models for dualism that I apply in the visual arts and social ethics. When all these basic methods are weaved together, it is thrilling in its clarity and expansion of a life into a truly lived, social space. This work is the beginning of end of the banal, moral attacks on the humanist fine arts and the men that developed them. As we saw in the peer review from the visual arts, Beauty is Back in music. It’s all too too good to be true.

The biography by Laura Tunbridg, Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces, describes Beethoven’s social and artistic life through nine of his better-known works. Robustly, she uses the traditional humanist division of mind and body in modeling how the Viennese organized both class relations and the development of musical style by Beethoven, on the one hand, and, on the other, the composers of less complex and less mentally demanding music.

Very few of the studies cause me to be both misty and to think back with bitter-sweet nostalgia to the turmoil of my 20s. But the monumental study by Ashley Mears, VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, (Princeton University Press, 2020) did that almost miraculous thing. Though I finished the book some time ago, when I stop and think about it, I’m still reduced to awe.

When I combine this study with everything else that has been published, I feel as if my entire past rushes up and engulfs me like a cloud. To use a prosaic image, the work book-ends my past and present; renders my entire intellectual trajectory lucid and present. What was a life comprised of jerks, halts, stumbles, steady trekking and soring insights, suddenly compresses into a tight grid of—yes—sex, violence, and most importantly, HISTORY, both mine and all of the West. I can only think of about 3 authors that I’d like to hug, and Ashley is one of them.

What I can suggest about her work—Humans-Under-A-Microscope—is to read it after mine, and the life that courses through should be gripping.

The roots of this study are in the two critical changes that I made during my 20s: first, I changed my focus of study from class to gender, and, second, I then used gender to re-conceptualize class and race. So instead of using class to model gender and race, I used gender to model class and race. This basic method contains the structure of the evolutionary social psychology that I subsequently developed. Ashley’s work can be described as a study using the new bio-realism of gender that I discovered in the 1980s, and then wrote about in the 1990s and now forms the basic structure of all my work.

In fact, during my first year of writing, I said that I would stick to it so future generations wouldn’t have to go through the hell that I did. That vision is more than fulfilled with the Mears study.

A musicologist I cite in my book a few times is Robert Greenberg, who recently came out with a lecture series called Music as a Mirror of History (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2018). Greenberg describes the historical periods of Europe in a fairly orthodox way, as do I, and while he appears to reject group selection, he supports my characterizations of modern music.

An important work is by Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker since 1996. He has degrees in both English and music from Harvard, and became well known in music when his first book, The Rest Is Noise, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ross is the only American music critic who has a national profile. His most recent book is Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). One thing that stands out is the number, quality, and enthusiasm of his endorsements. Musicians, art curators, and playwrights all praise his work highly.

It is common to hear how Wagner influenced later modernist composers, artists, and writers, but Ross documents this with an encyclopedic amount of details, and in almost all areas of the arts and social history. Since my interests are mostly in music and art, I use Wagner and art to illustrate my core models for modern history, and social values more generally.

What is surprising about Ross’s style of support is the precision of his examples. He often uses examples of my model that cannot be improved on and are often better than any one example that I use. He quotes Mark Twain, who described minstrel shows as “pure and perfect.” He quotes a modern artist, who wrote on her painting that she felt “oppressed.” And, centrally, he describes how Wagner’s music was demonized during World War II and thereafter. It was this weird, moral status of Wagner’s music, and classical music in general, that prompted me to study music history and philosophy. Ross states that, while Wagner’s music is very moving, rock’n’roll casts a spell “over vast numbers of people” (p. 601).

I have discussed how the Metropolitan Opera uses my ideas in their productions, but in the documentary film The Opera House: Making the New Met, which describes the creation of the new Opera House at Lincoln Center, my social psychology is used to organize the company’s social history.

To cause a paradigm shift in classical studies is indeed a delight. I spent five years studying ancient Greece, and so Part 2 of Human Sin or Social Sin is devoted to how my evolutionary model for religion also structures much of ancient life and thought. My model was used to good effect by two well-known classicists, Anthony Everitt in his Alexander the Great, and Barry Strauss in his Ten Caesars.

The opus by Barry Strauss is mostly a tightly knit study of leadership psychology, or how various personal and social/historical dynamics play out relative to human dominance psychology. The Everitt study of Alexander the Great relates many of the standard stories, but it is greatly enriched by the kind of broad socio-historical psychology that I use and derive from chimpanzee behavior. Like me, Everitt, uses dependent rank to show how people pivot off each other and the gods to maneuver through historical circumstances, family, and physical terrain. While my work mostly describes various standard social psychological “types,” Everitt, by using these types, does the brilliant work of showing how individuals live in a moment-to-moment fashion. History is quickly turning into an open book, instead of the oft-lamented “foreign country.” As I show, the key to history is not toward greater complexity but greater structural or hierarchical simplicity.

I’d like to add a note about French music. I discuss this in my book, but I have more specific thoughts about it now after spending two years in New York and going to recitals and concerts at Carnegie Hall. The two that impressed me where Elina Garanca singing Ravel’s song cycle, Scheherazade, and the Carnegie Hall debut of Sabine Devieilhe, in a recital of French song. After both performances, I was simply stunned. For those only familiar with Italian and German opera, a ceramics analogy is probably best: it’s like looking at the delicate lines and shapes on Sevres porcelain. The music similarly “floats and shimmers.” But with the power of the human voice and the full space accorded by a recital hall. The recordings give a good idea of the voice, but the overall aesthetic, like for most music, has to be heard live. In the book is discuss “realms of perfection” or the idea that each art form must be judged by its own, internal standards, and so, let’s say, that the jury is still out on French music, but it’s looking good!

Mark Bauerlein, who earned a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, is a professor of English at Emory University. For two years, he served as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the editor of The State of the American Mind, a collection of essays that broadly support my model for moral psychology, education, and aesthetics. One paper in that volume states that we today have to "have fun, or else." This quote manages to capture most of Part One of Human Sin or Social Sin.

A particular delight is the volume Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet (Basic Books) by the dance critic Laura Jacobs. She refers to my psychological model of imitative resonance, and in the strongest possible language advocates for the high art of ballet. Of all the art forms, ballet is the one that I am the least informed about, but it has been a growing passion for me during the past ten years, so for my discussion to receive glowing support from such an authority can only be described as enormously exciting.

Joseph Carroll, who earned a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, is Curator's Professor of English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. The first issue mentions foundational areas of human biodiversity, and volume 2.2 clearly supports my sexual psychology of display and evolutionary political psychology.

Joseph Carroll co-edited with Edward O. Wilson Darwin's Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences (Oxford University Press), whose essays contain support for my models of inversion and human biodiversity. He contributed the paper on literature to the Buss Handbook, and he mentions how "crude" is a factor in literature.

Mark Foster Gage is assistant dean and tenured associate professor of architecture at Yale University. His edited volume, Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses on Art, Architecture, and Philosophy (MIT) supports the application of human fertility to art, Hellenic Aesthetic Idealism, and supports my model of the inversion of Platonism.

To storm the citadel of philosophy is also a major landmark for a scientist. (Contemporary philosophers, like almost all in the liberal arts, have a long tradition of hating scientific reductionism). R. Jay Wallace is the Judy Chandler Webb Distinguished Chair in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. His recent study, The Moral Nexus (Princeton University Press) supports my relational and group-based ethics, meritocracy, and my emphasis on "right and wrong."

Richard Taruskin is Professor Emeritus of Music Scholarship at UC Berkeley. He is the author of the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music (2006), and coauthor of the textbook The Oxford History of Western Music (2013, 2nd ed., 2018).

In Richard Taruskin’s college textbook he describes the Enlightenment musical debate regarding how the more natural Italian style emerged and was used to oppose, in an adversarial way, the more artificial French Lyric Tragedy. In the first edition he places this debate in the more intellectual philosophical and political debates of the time. In the second edition, from 2018, he inserts this completely new paragraph: “So what seems a greatly inflated press controversy about opera was in fact an important coded episode in an ongoing battle between political absolutism and the emerging Enlightenment movement that would consume much of the eighteenth century. Italian commercial opera—epitomized in La Serva Padrona by a feisty maidservant who dominates her master, subverting the social hierarchy that French opera affirmed—stimulated the politics of opposition.” (2018, 300)

Part One of Human Sin or Social Sin is devoted to descriptions of the use of music, opera, and the visual arts to subvert social structures.

This particular example of the peer review has much greater personal meaning for me than all of the other individual studies in the arts. As a child I would listen to my father play the great Classical composers, and he coached me on questions of technique and interpretation.

In college I first started as a performance major and then gradually drifted to musicology, until dropping out of school at 24. I realized that the issues behind the arts were broad psychological and moral questions, and I saw no obvious way to study this in school. Also, I’m an extremely slow reader and writer, and so lacked the necessary skill set for an academic career. So I worked odd jobs and traveled to New York and Europe to learn from different people regarding the state of the culture.

At age 29 I discovered my “three thesis” that led to spending 15 years writing a book on crime and the Christian structure of modernism. With that complete I then spent 10 years writing a book on the Platonist structure to social and aesthetic culture. In this context I discovered the role of social subversion, as described above by Taruskin, in driving social and aesthetic changes. Talk about achieving my life goals the hard way!

Hence it is with the utmost pleasure to have one of the most distinguished musicologists support my social psychology and in the context in which these questions first germinated. My music theory teacher at College of Marin said that “Of all the students, Paul is most likely to become a musicologist.” (I seem to be a good example of Socrates’ belief that “Excellence can’t be taught.”) As I don’t have any significant formal education, I feel similar to the school janitor who buys a lotto ticket every week for 20 years, and then finally wins! My life right now does have a surreal quality.

Davide Gasparotto Allan, Peter Bjorn Kerber, & Anne T. Woollett. Masterpieces of Painting: J. Paul Getty. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019; Lapatin, Kenneth. Buried by Vesuvius: The Villa de Papiri at Hurculaneum. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019. These two recent works show that some of the Getty curators use the traditional elitism. Paul sent Human Sin or Social Sin to the Getty.

Anthony T. Kronman.  The Assault on American Excellence. New York: Free Press, 2019. Kronman is a professor of law at Yale Law School and the former Dean of the Law School. He shows how the political leveling of the last century has come into the college culture and eroded what was once a natural aristocracy of intellectual achievement. Kronman refers to the present ethic that “turns the proper order of things upside down,” and notes that “around the seminar table, the force of the ideal is as clear as day” (p. 113).

Eric Nelson. The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Nelson shows the Christian moral origins of today’s drive toward leveling, and the importance of intelligence and genetic similarity theory in creating a natural aristocracy. He supports Paul’s idea that as Christian fundamentalism declined during the last century, the strong moral demands of the New Left rose to fill the psychological power vacuum or desire for absolutism. For instance, a female counselor had a sign in her office that read: “Love: No Exception.” This impulse is common today.

Martha Nussbaum. The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble But Flawed Ideal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Nussbaum simply tries to nudge the reader away from the extremes of universal love that cripple us today and blind us to the “crooked wood” of human nature. (The review of this book in Modern Age [Fall, 2019] made clear that this work was a departure for Nussbaum.)

Ben Shapiro. The Right Side of History. New York: HarperCollins, 2019. Shapiro uses Paul’s distinction between notions of culpability as being either individual or social.

Ellen Winner. How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. This book supports Paul’s mind-centered model for high art aesthetics, Classical humanism for objective aesthetic experience, and what could be described as the aesthetic masochism in the West today.

William R. Braun.  “Cutting Through The Noise: Operagoing as a Mindful Experience.” Opera News, September, 2019. This article, in an opera magazine popular with New York audiences, makes the important points that opera audiences need a great mental focus, and that one should concentrate on the orchestra. Notice the similarity of this idea to that in Ellen Winner’s How Art Works, which shows the centrality of mind in the creation of the high art aesthetic.

David Thomas. Sleeping With Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire (New York: Knopf, 1919). This work, by one of America’s most well-known film authors, supports my display model for human sexuality, and that film allows for actors to display preferred or ideal characteristics, and which audiences have fetishized in the past century and used as a beacon to guide the rise of popular culture.

A point that I make in many different ways is that the high arts in the last century unconsciously assisted in their own delegitimization. The New York Metropolitan Opera seems to have responded to my observation. This is clear in their recent restaging of their Ring Opera Cycle. At the premier of this production in 2011, at the end of Götterdammerung, the heads of Greek statues fall off, and this kind of interpretation is what Wagner intended for the end. This can be seen on the version released on video. In my book, I give this decapitation as an example of the status of the arts. This production was recently restaged, and the statues just fell over and were not decapitated.

Subtler examples of changes at the Met are the recent characterizations of the traditional villains in the most popular Italian operas. During the two seasons from 2017 to 2019, the Scarpia in Tosca was not portrayed as vicious; Baron Ochs, in Der Rosenkavalier, was not buffoonish; the Duke in Rigoletto was not pompous and overbearing; and the jester Rigoletto was not pathetic. The Duke and Rigoletto were more equalized in their characterizations. There is a documented example of this kind of change. The princess Amneris, in Aida, is not portrayed as jealous. When the soprano portraying her was interviewed during the intermission in the Live in HD transmission, she said that the character is not a bad woman.

During the summer of 2019, when I visited the Huntington Library and Art Galleries, I noticed that their new signage had a boosterism regarding art and history similar to the publications by Getty. I confirmed that this was a new development with a long-time employee.

Three recent films, which seem to be remedial, illustrate some of the ideas in Human Sin or Social Sin:

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) by Quentin Tarantino.
Joker (2019) by Todd Phillips.
Richard Jewell (2019) by Clint Eastwood.

Kevin McDonald, who is a retired psychology professor from California State University, Long Beach, is the intellectual leader of political anti-Semitism. In a recent speech given before the National Policy Institute, he said that "liberalism doesn't come from the Jews." So we see the beginning of the end of political anti-Semitism. Since even God rested on the seventh day, I, too, am in semi-retirement, so I will now let the evangelists, who are far more godlike than I, carry on the work.

Some individual studies have been published that are from scholars who are specialists in areas that, while not often discussed, are nonetheless an important part of the canon. Probably the most important is Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), by James Hankins, professor of history at Harvard University, founder and general editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, an imprint of Harvard University Press, and one of the world’s leading authorities on humanist political thought.

To receive this level of support for my humanist psychology, ethics, and moral aesthetics is almost mortifying. Just looking at this tome makes me feel that I don’t deserve it, but there it is. The author even discusses, on page 50, how music should be used to cultivate virtue. An important goal of the study is to determine how the different thinkers dealt with the problems of how to educate wise leaders who, while dedicated to the public good, are not hampered by the imperative to pander to popularity.

A fascinating study, Poussin as a Painter: From Classicism to Abstraction, is by Richard Verdi, former professor of fine art and director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham. This is a full-bore defense of the classical style using my model for how ethics intersects with aesthetics. I am delighted that my many days in the Louvre bore fruit. Being a total outsider may have given me the neutrality necessary to effectively weigh the merits of the various art schools and organize them into the evolutionary social psychology that every society and artist is subject to.

A delightful study is The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), by Orlando Figes, professor of history at the University of London. Figes is a Russian specialist, and this study shows how the dominant artistic schools of the nineteenth century developed out of the cooperative efforts of Russian and French figures in literature and opera and with the burgeoning book trade and fast communications of the telegraph and railways. Figes even presents evidence of how my color symbolism works in the context of eye color, and how the cosmopolitan culture laid the basis for multiculturalism in the twentieth century. His style is similar to mine, in that individuals and cultural movements are shown developing together and are rarely strictly separated.

A publication that represents the canonization of Human Sin or Social Sin is The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (2020), edited by Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi. Publications of this type are meant to bring together several of the mainstream perspectives on its topic, with essays on the normal subjects for this music drama, from Greek tragedy to the Bayreuth Festival.

The editors wrote the introduction, and by page 9 are referring to issues that I show are central to Wagner, such as how his music is transcendent, and how “Wagner also exposes the dynamics of social structures and offers a critique of modern modalities that quite remarkably continue to have relevance today” (p. 9). This is a reference to my use of Wagner to show how today’s Left is using the inversion of Platonism first brought to the big stage by Wagner.

And then there is the question of how dramatic and musical scale affects the mind. The editors first describe how Italian opera is small scale, and then describe “the cosmic scale of the Ring; its lines, dramatic and musical—rarely can or should one separate the two—extend in all manner of directions. That holds for chronological narrative, leitmotivic conjunction, long-term harmonic journey, and verbal and/or musical revelation in one of the Ring’s epic narrations, and our intellectual and emotional interpretive stance…become in this complex web of associations both laden down and yet also dramatically enriched as almost to be liberated” (pp. 11–13). Much of my modeling of music and art focuses on how people associate classical music either with oppression or liberation. The editors support this.

A study that may be unique so far is The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), by Peter Burke, an emeritus professor of cultural history at Cambridge University. One might think that the objective would be to give a survey of the various thinkers’ accomplishments and how they exemplify the trend for the superlearned, but Burke does something that only someone familiar with Human Sin or Social Sin would notice: he ends each minibiography with how that thinker foreshadowed important elements in my models. Most other descriptions are cursory. Surprisingly, in Burke’s discussion of Leibnitz, there is no mention of calculus. That shows that something funny is happening. Particularly appreciated are his quotes by Jacques Derrida to illustrate the same point I make regarding humility, and his quote of Isaac Barrow, at the very end, to illustrate the importance of dependent rank.

The most common features of my work that Burke mentions are either how the polymaths divided elements or related them. This big picture treatment is similar to when Richard Lynn described me as “the Newton and Einstein of psychology and history.”

A fascinating study, Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time (New York: Basic Books, 2020), is by Gaia Vince, who was the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book Prize for her debut study, Adventures in the Anthropocene. Her fluent and almost hypnotic writing style keeps one engaged as she examines many of my standard methods, such as dependent rank, competitive aggression, human biodiversity, nature/culture, and the tension between intergroup and interpersonal conflict. I should say that she may have learned about my ideas secondhand. She has outstanding blurbs, including from Richard Wrangham at Harvard.

John Green, Ph.D. France Through the Ages (The Great Courses (2019). This DVD lecture series is presented by. This is a series of lectures that combine the highlights of French history and modern social and cultural history, including cuisine, wine, fashion, and nature. John Green, who is a professor of French at the University of Kentucky, supports me in a few important ways—for instance, by quoting Charles de Gaulle on the “Idea of France,” which incorporates my ideas regarding aesthetics. Most importantly, he describes the French Revolution as a triumph of brute power over the hegemony of mind and enlightenment. This is a clear precursor to the vigilante violence we saw in the anti-Trump movement.

Nadine Meisner, Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): Marius Petipa is the founder of classical ballet, the style of ballet loved by so many for Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Nutcracker. So, amazingly, this is the first biography of Petipa in English. It celebrates the 200th anniversary of his birth.

This towering figure demands, and Meisner provides, the cultural movements that led to Petipa and those cultural movements that he created. This study applies to ballet history my model of the contrast between nature and culture, or the form-creating faculty of the mind as it struggles to order and make lucid the nature of our environment and the nature of humans and their social psychology.

This contrast between culture and nature is explored in two broad ways. The first of these ways explores how the overall cultural landscape was negotiated in this contrast, and how this created tensions in public opinion regarding new and ongoing issues involving dancers, choreography, costumes, staging, and even social history. Perhaps the best single example of this was the difficulty that the Russians had when they initially tried to adapt to the more vigorous dance styles from Italy.

The second way that this contrast is described is in the long-term development of the Kirov and Bolshoi companies. The Kirov Ballet Company was based in St. Petersburg, and so the audience was dominated by the royal court, the military, the governmental administration, and various networks among the aristocracy and universities. That audience was very formal, so the overall social tone that this created inspired a more restrained and elegant style of dance. That formality is contrasted with the style of the Bolshoi Ballet Company, which was based in Moscow and had a much more casual audience, which inspired a looser and more dynamic dancing style. That contrast between the two companies can still be seen in the videos of the two companies from the 1980s.

It is palpable how Nadine Meisner, with real clarity and care, shows how this contrast between nature and culture “sculpted” the moment-to-moment struggles and movements of dance history itself. In this study, dance history itself “dances” with near flawless choreography. The future looks bright.

Ariane Thomas and Timothy Potts, Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020): This is the catalogue for an exhibition organized by the Louvre and Getty Museums. As Nadine Meisner’s study shows how the contrast between nature and culture drove the genesis and development of classical ballet, so this catalogue shows how religion is the matrix in which the human mind understands social life, aesthetics, and political elites—all of which are seen as pretty much the same. In Human Sin, I show how these aspects of psychology work today.

The chapter entitled “A Religious World” is a standard survey of the hyper-anthropomorphic nature of early religion, which usually inspires a smile today. It creates a broad context for the later chapter, “First Kingdoms: ‘When Kingship Descended from Heaven.’” In the title itself, there is an image of power descending from heaven that is an image of dependent rank, which indeed structures my models for social and cultural history.

This chapter maps out the basics of what is familiar from our own social and political history: competition between different groups highlights the nature of power as group-based and formed to create internal agreement and outgroup military wins. As time passes between the fourth and first millennia BCE, rulers increasingly see themselves as promoters of things we recognize as important in our own recent history, such as justice, the arts, and scholarship. All of this is negotiated within stratified groups, as it is in the West today. The one big difference is that today we have successfully answered the problem of universals—that is, science—and hence we have created the modern miracle of civilization with its many comforts.

Mary Beard, SPQR (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016): This history of Rome helps with the problem of Whig history and its stranglehold on classics.

Martyn Rady, The Hapsburgs (New York: Basic Books, 2020): I have only read the beginning of this book, but it has a remedial “boosterism” that is anathema to the masochists who dominate the humanities departments in Western universities.

Gillian Wilson and Arlen Heginbotham, French Rococo Ébénisterie in the Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021): This publication uses the same technique that is used by Paul Zanker and others, of describing in a powerful way how people resonate to art. This study opens with a quote by J. Paul Getty, which describes how he resonates with his new decorative arts:

The apartment was furnished with and included many examples of 18th-century French and English furniture of good quality, and one 18th- century Gobelins tapestry. I had never been particularly interested in antique furniture or in tapestries, but after living in the apartment for a few months, I felt their charm.

My first year of writing was spent while I was working in an antique furniture store, and I had a similar experience of resonance.

Lloyd Kramer, R. R. Palmer, and Joel Colton, A History of Europe in the Modern World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2020): This standard college textbook, now in its twelfth edition, only has one cursory paragraph on the 1960s and omits the usual hero worship. Since the authors can’t tell the truth about the subject, they just don’t discuss it at all or in any detail. Edward Berenson, in his textbook, Europe in the Modern World: A New Narrative History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), also omits hero worship, but he does include a discussion of the era in the terms used in Human Sin. Since the Berenson textbook is published by a university press, it felt more comfortable with a new approach, while McGraw-Hill, a commercial press, was more circumspect.

Mary McAuliffe, Ph.D, Paris, City of Dreams: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Creation of Paris (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020): This fine study highlights the role of human energy in the rise of the Left during the nineteenth century, and how the nature of leadership started to change, from more military and rational to more personal and appeasing.

Diane Harris Cline: The Greeks, audio version (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2016): On a subject like the Greeks and the traditional idea of them as a cultural origin, National Geographic would have the highest standards for knowledge claims, which should be based on science. So, many traditional ideas regarding the Greeks are used here, and they are often based on the science of psychology and history first put forward in Human Sin and developed and supported by the scientific community.

Two of the biggest organizing concepts that are drawn from Human Sin are my notions of groups and dependent rank. These are most salient when she discusses civic religion, dinner parties, aesthetics, law, and war. Let’s start with my favorite, which is aesthetics or art. Apparently, the dinner parties placed an emphasis on beautiful interior design as an important enhancement of more rational thought. These kinds of claims were pretty much gone by the 1980s, but apparently have been recently supported by scholars who have applied the psycho-aesthetics of Human Sin to re-examining texts like Plato’s Symposium.

Mary Beard, How Do We Look (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018): Mary Beard teaches classics at Cambridge University and hosts the BBC’s Civilizations, a program adapted by PBS. She is a prolific author, with several books on art. Her newest book on art is How Do We Look, which supports Human Sin in a robust way by reframing art history as a viewer-inspired tradition. Beard quotes E. H. Gombrich, who stated, “There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists,” which she counters by stating, “I am putting the viewers of art back in the frame” (p. 11). This statement has the power of a manifesto. Notice that Beard flips or inverts Gombrich’s relationship between art and viewer by making the viewer active, instead of passive

In Human Sin, the main chapter on the psychology of art is entitled “Body in Mind; Art in Mind.” The introduction to How Do We Look is entitled “A History of Looking.” Part 1 of the book is entitled “The Body in Question,” which has a family resemblance to “Body in Mind; Art in Mind.”

Beard states that statues functioned in Greece:

not as passive art works but as active players with roles to perform in the lives of those who viewed them.…. Memnon’s statue reminds us very powerfully that images often did something. And Balbilla’s poetry especially reminds us that the history of art is not just a history of artists, of the men and women who painted and sculpted. It’s also a history of the men and women, who, like her, looked and interpreted what they saw, and the changing ways in which they did so. (pp. 31–32)

Beard nicely captures my notion of resonance when she describes the figures on painted pottery:

Imagine, in particular, the men at their drinking parties, or the women at their spinning and weaving, looking at the distinctive red and black of Athenian ceramics with designs which reflected their own roles, as Athenians, back to them. (p. 34)

So the images reflect life, and not vice versa, as is maintained by the popular conspiracy theory of today.

Notice how the title of the book itself has an ambiguity that captures how art reflects and resonates with life: How Do We Look can mean both the method of looking and how we are represented in art. Beard nicely shows how there is a continuum between what we want to see, in terms of our deepest nature, and what we do see, in terms of the actual portrayal and how we manage to “live up to it.” In the tension between these two interpretations, we can see the notion of resonance. The viewer’s subjective self, both biological and social, is the main area for the terms of interpreting or resonating with the art work.

Looking back over thirty years of writing, I can say that half of my effort was to try to show how the Western traditions—from science and politics to art—are reflections of our solutions to surviving in this world and enjoying this world. Of course, many readers find this proposal a moral threat, a “debasement,” and just disgusting! Sound familiar? I, and the rest of the scientific community, were able to stem the tide of our new christian Dark Age just in time.

For further information about Paul's life and work, visit:  Peer Review & Book Quotes | Author Biography

Claudio Monteverdi | Galileo | Francis Bacon | Sir Isaac Newton | Joseph Haydn | Charles Lyell