Music and Morality 4: The Problem of Culture

In my first course on Gregorian chant, Fr. Gerard Farrell, OSB, spent one class on the affects of the modes. The idea is that Mode 1 (in modern parlance "Dorian," the scale that goes from D to d using only white keys on the piano) connotes joy, strength, and so forth, whereas Mode 2 (same notes, but utilizing a lower range) connotes mystery, reserve, reflection. While the distinctions are not completely universally valid, there is much to be said for them. It is not a coincidence that the antiphons for the Divine Office of Easter Sunday are almost entirely set in Mode 7, the mode said best to connote exuberance and rejoicing.

When I mentioned this once to a novice who had studied ethnomusicology, he laughed out loud. It would seem, from the perspective of this modern and very useful discipline, that these connotations are strictly the work of inculturation and bear no intrinsic value. In modern music, for example, we often distinguish 'major' and 'minor' triads and keys by linking them to feeling of happiness and melancholy. Does this not happen simply because from an early age, we sing happy songs in major keys, (Happy Birthday, Jesus Christ is Risen Today) and darker songs in minor keys (Pray for the dead... Beethoven's Fifth)? Could we condition ourselves to hear keys in different ways?

In support of this cultural relativism, it is often pointed out that what was considered a noisy racket a generation ago is mainstream today. Fifty years ago, Ed Sullivan would only broadcast Elvis from the waste up. His music sounds almost silly compared to the hard rock and heavy metal trotted out today. When Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" was premiered, the crowd rioted. Today, we hardly bat an eye at the harsh sounds demanded of 'new music' orchestras, that is, if anyone attends the concerts.

This phenomenon of novelty creating a stir is not itself new. Here is a quiz: guess the century of this quote and the style of music being condemned:

Indeed, when such practices are taken to excess, they can more rapidly stir up the urgings of the lower regions of the body than devotion in the mind.

Answer: John of Salisbury (ca. 1150 A.D.) condemning the polyphonic compositions at Notre Dame of Paris, the distant forebears of the music of Palestrina, today held up as the style closest to Gregorian chant in appropriateness for the Divine Liturgy.

In attempting to assign affect to musical practices, are we really dealing merely with a case of de gustibus non disputandem est? Must we simply learn to put up with 'other peoples' preferences' and be suspect of our own, rather than holding ours up as exemplary and risking insensitivity or even musical colonialism?

Much of what I hope to write in this series will deal with this difficult question. In fact, there are two ways of attending to this problem. The first, which is somewhat easier perhaps, is to acknowledge that communities do, in fact, inculturate their members and ought to. Communities cannot survive, and by extension individual human beings cannot survive, without common standards of behavior. In any community, there will be a tradition of music which will be used to elicit proper emotional response in certain circumstances and also music whose use will be highly circumscribed or even outright prohibited. In such a case, we can limit ourselves to studying the rules of specific cultures or communities and see how music is linked to the passions by conditioning (see the previous post), and then draw conclusions about the morality of the use of music within this particular culture or community. I intend to do some of this, but we must admit that it veers somewhat close to moral relativism or situation ethics, that any type of behavior can be justified given the right circumstances. From a more positive perspective, I intend to treat the Church as a highly specific culture in which the restrictions on music are higher than they are when we function as members of our respective cultures in the world.

However, my own conviction, one that is backed by recent scientific studies about the biological effects of music and sound on the human body, is that certain musical gestures bear intrinsic moral weight, so that there are absolute rules for music that would transcend culture. This possibility is more easily entertained if we share some assumptions regarding the ordering of the cosmos. I hope to write on this aspect of the argument next. For today, we can restrict ourselves to obvious points. Loud sounds, especially when alternated with quiet sounds, can damage the human ear and tend to provoke irritation that disposes to violence. Loud sounds are also effective for announcing the threat of violence, as is the case with many car stereos today. Long exposure to steady rhythms has been shown to alter mental states, with the tendency to provoke a lowering of normally maintained personal boundaries, both physical and emotional. And so on. It is well established that certain styles of music assist the body and mind in healing (Pythagoras believed that certain illnesses could be cured by playing the flute; modern science has confirmed the underlying idea!).

Today, advocates of health food, non-smoking bars and green consciences are only too happy to make it moral obligation to restrict what is put into our bodies. Why is it considered controversial to suggest moral restrictions on what we allow into our ears?

Mystagogy Beta

Mystagogy, properly speaking, refers to the mysteries that Catholics celebrate in the 'Liturgy of the Eucharist' (this same holds, but with different terminology, for Orthodox Christians). During Lent, when there are catechumens present at the Divine Liturgy, they are allowed to participate only as far as the end of the Liturgy of the Word. At this point, they are dismissed and cannot yet participate in the 'mysteries' because they are not yet baptized or otherwise fully initiated. So in this series of reflections, I will meditate with you on the principal mysteries of the liturgy that are connected to the Eucharist, including the Sursum Corda (Lift up your hearts!), the Eucharistic Prayer and consecration of the sacred elements, the Lord's Prayer, the Kiss of Peace, and Communion, which of its nature implies what I will ultimately be driving at: The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ and Bride of Christ, of which we baptized are members and without which we have no access to these mysteries.

However, as I indicated yesterday, to appreciate fully the notion of mystery and the incredible dignity that flows from our access to the sacraments, we need to do some spade work to break up the dry and unimaginative worldview that we inherit from our present situation. We are not inclined to allow for things 'mysterious', or, when we do have such an inclination, it is often a highly personal affair and not infrequently confused (in my opinion as an artist) with singular states of mind or feeling. In other words, the tumult of our own passions tricks us into thinking that we are in the presence of the mysterious when in fact we are simply prey to unreason. The life-giving mysteries of God fulfill and perfect reason while utterly transcending it. It does not follow that anything not open to our reason, especially before reason has been purified and elevated, is divine. This is why catechumens first undergo instruction and testing in virtue before being allowed to gaze upon the mysteries.

However, let me return to the first problem, which I think is possibly more pernicious because more habitual: the disinclination toward the mysterious, the numinous, the Other. A veritable pot pourri of modern ideologies, Darwinsim, Freudianism, Marxism and positivism, produces in us a habit of trying to explain away things of the spirit as mere byproducts of material forces (Freud's role in this is a bit more complicated, but I will cover that elsewhere, if I have the time). Falling in love is explained by pheremones and biological drives to reproduce. Enjoyment in music is summed up by fanciful evolutionary postulates. These reductionist enterprises lead us to mistrust our experience, especially when it suggests something mysterious. The 'hermeneutics of suspicion' block our ability to read our own lives with the spiritual level in view.

If you will permit me a light-hearted reference to that Canadian poet-duo, Neil Peart and Geddy Lee, are we merely "A planet of playthings?" Do "we dance on the strings/of powers we cannot perceive?" If so, do we ultimately discover anything of significance through more and more science? That is, if we succeed in perceiving the powers that account for our behavior, does that leave us with anything worth living for: any freedom, any spirit? I suspect that there is a lingering uneasiness in many of us today that materialism might finally explain everything, and we reinforce this malaise by being quick to return our spiritual freedom in order to get a pass on the possibility that our freedom causes us to choose evil. Again, to quote Peart/Lee, "Blame is better to give than receive." (In the context of their song "Freewill" this quote is ironic...)

This dilemma is in many ways a recent one, and yet like most human phenomena it connects us to the dilemmas of past ages. Like the world of St.Paul, we live in a time of great upheavel and global connectness that tends to seek out a universalist 'Grand Unified Theory'. We also live in a time of unprecedented prosperity that makes seeking comfort into an easy way out of dealing with these questions. So in his letters (or his disciples' letters) to the Colossians and Ephesians, St. Paul is concerned to demonstrate precisely that our freedom in Christ dispels these powers by investing us with the spiritual power of the gospel.

Before ending today, let me emphasize that this is not a disgression. If we feel uneasy with talk of our lives being manipulated by hidden forces, that uneasiness is a good sign. It suggests that we have a more deeply rooted sense of the goodness of things and of our own freedom. We have maintained a sense of the wrongness that happens when we sense our freedom threatened by malice hidden within what otherwise strikes us as a good and benign creation. These intuitions are not provable by scientific hypothesis and experiment, but are rather reflections on precisely the experience that scientism would tend to exclude. Thus it is an elevation to the spiritual level, the level without which there can be no discussion of mysteries, of God or of eternal salvation.

Best Books of 2007 - Science

In a recent First Things article, Avery Cardinal Dulles presents three Catholic schools of thought regarding evolution: strict (theistic) Darwinism, in which God oversees the scientifically random events that produce higher life forms; Intelligent Design, in which God intervenes in the evolutionary process to produce steps that could not occur randomly; and the philosophical critique of the lack of explanatory power in Darwinism. Cardinal Dulles professes sympathy with the third, and I suppose I would as well. "As a matter of policy," he writes, "it is imprudent to build one’s case for faith on what science has not yet explained, because tomorrow it may be able to explain what it cannot explain today. History teaches us that the “God of the gaps” often proves to be an illusion."

True as this is, and much as I am personally reluctant for the same reasons to embrace Intelligent Design (understood as this particular movement; I believe in an Intelligent Designer!), Michael Behe continues to make me think hard about whether there really are gaps in evolution. In his first book, Darwin's Black Box, he introduced the concept of 'irreducible complexity'. I was pleased to see Cardinal Dulles adopt the term in his article. The idea of irreducible complexity is, roughly, that a system such as the human immune system is a complex of numerous subsystems, many of which are interdependent on another. If one system 'randomly mutates', it breaks the system. There have to be several mutations at once to build such a mechanism, and the potential for this to happen randomly starts to look more paltry.

This argument appealed to me when I first read it and still does. As a non-biologist, I had an intuition about this problem while studying evolution in college. I used the idea of a 'step function' to describe it. A step function (in calculus) produces a graph with gaps in it. There is a not a smooth transition from one value to another (e.g. "Round up to the nearest whole number" is a function that cannot produce any values between 5 and 6). In the case of the reproductive function of chromosomes, for example, sexual animals can only have offspring with members of species that have the same amount of chromosomes (this is before cloning). The more complex animals have more pairs of chromosomes. So how does one go from being a chimpanzee (22 pairs) to being a human (23)? If a human-like chimp is born with 23 pairs of chromosomes, it might be intellectually superior to his fellow simians, but he is, alas, sterile. So we have to posit two random mutations of the same sort at the same time in the same geographical vicinity, and then we have the problem of Cain and Abel all over again: so imagine that two mutant chimpanzee/proto-humans manage, against even the remotest odds, to produce offspring with 23 pairs of chromosomes...how do their offspring ensure their own survival? What if the litter only produces males, for example? The difficulties in these scenarios boggle lesser minds such as my own, and these scenarios must be played out many, many times for Darwinism to work.

Whenever I've posed these problems to real, live biologists (I have a sister who is one of them), the response is usually something like, "well, you have to understand that this whole process takes a long time, but in two billion years of evolution, enough of these random coincidences add up to make evolution work." Behe's newest book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, puts this staple Darwinist assumption to a scientific test.

Side note: this is also one of my frustrations with Darwinism, that it does not qualify as an empirical science, strictly understood. We can't set up controls and variations in a laboratory and reproduce random mutations. Thus there is no test for Darwinism...until now.

Behe notes that in the ten years since Black Box the science of genetics has undergone an exponential development. Among other advancements, we have now decoded the whole human genome. We can isolate the genes for certain structures in the human body, and therefore we know what needs to change for a mutation to take place. This previously was part of Darwin's 'Black Box' the mechanism that Darwin himself admitted needed to be taken for granted for evolution to work.

We've opened the box, and the grandeur of what is inside astounds me. Behe, in terms fitting for laymen, describes the genetic and chemical arrangements that make possible the construction of a bacterial flagellum. The jaw-dropping complexity and ingenuity (sorry, I can't help but ascribe this to God at this point) opened my eyes to a new level of beauty in the universe. I mean, if you or I had to build a living flagellum, we'd be pretty hard-pressed, but in real life the flagellum builds itself! And it does so by means of cascading chemical programs hard-wired into the genes of the bacterium. The mechanism would make Rube Goldberg jealous.

More intriuguing from a standpoint more scientific than aesthetic is Behe's investigation into real random mutations. He points out that at any one moment, there are more malaria organisms in the world than there have been vertebrates throughout history. Since the malaria organism is less complex than a vertebrate, we should expect that it will mutate faster for survival advantage.

What we find in studying malaria is that evolution is better at breaking things than at building new and improved things. So indeed malaria does mutate to get around certain drugs, but in a weakened strain. Importantly, malaria, with more chances at mutating than we human have ever had, has not 'figured out' how to survive in sub-tropical temperatures. Similarly, sickle cell anemia provides protection against malaria (note that this is another breaking of a mechanism, what Behe calls 'trench warfare'), and in centuries of available time and googles of mutations, malaria hasn't cracked the code to 'learn' how to bond to sickle cells.

Behe's analytical skills have been considerably honed in controversy since the excellent Black Box. More importantly, the scientific evidence in his books deserves to be reckoned with. While it is bad policy to look for God in the gaps, one can hardly deny that the gaps are there.

Best Books of 2007 - Music1

"Just in the last 20 years, there has grown up an ability to examine the living brain when people are listening to music or imagining music or composing music and to define--in a way which would have been unimaginable 30 years ago--what goes on in many different parts of the brain when one listens to music, imagines music, composes music, et cetera. Althought I was experiencing both the power of music and the varieties of musical experience 20 or 30 years ago, I couldn't have given it the scientific backing which is possible today."

--Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks in Discover magazine Dec 2007

The fruits of this neurological research in the perception of music are now coming into print. Had I finished Sacks' new book this year, it undoubtedly would have made the list, but an equally worthy book deserves mention this year: Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music.

How do we perceive pitch? How does the cerebellum track rhythm, and why do we find a 'groove' pleasant? Why we do we tend to like the songs of our teenage years more than kids' music today? Why are some people tone deaf? These questions and many others are explored with the new science and given fascinating, if at times conjectural, answers. Levitin is a gifted writer whose encyclopedic knowledge of musical genres gives him credibility when he has to talk about touchy subjects like musical preference.

If there is a weakness to the book, it is his reliance on 'evolutionary science'. Here and there I have made reference to my doubts about evolution being a genuinely scientific theory. I will save comments for tomorrow's post. I will simply note here that we have no way to test that any human trait that 'evolved' thousands of years ago imbued us with any survival advantage. There is simply no way to test such a claim. So I find such arguments unpersuasive.

On the other hand, I have taken a real interest in the neuroscience part. I found Sacks' quote in the recent issue of Discover to mirror my own feelings with the recent spate of books and articles in this area (music therapy continues to be a growing field of psychological research). My ultimate interest is in the connection of music and morality. Trying to argue that music has moral value is often like arguing that space aliens caused human evolution. As one who holds (with almost every thinker before Kant) that music affects us morally, I find these scientific findings helpful. Scientists, after all, are not afraid to weigh in with the possible moral ramifications of other biological and psychological findings. We are regularly given moral lectures on how and when to exercise, not to smoke or eat trans fats, et cetera, and for a legitimate reason. The good of our own bodies and the good of others is affected by what we put into our bodies and our minds. Now we can see some of the results of certain types of music on the brain. This at least opens up some possibilities of giving 'scientific backing' to assertions about music's effect on the human person.

Don't avoid this book because you think that neuroscience and music theory are too cerebral. Levitin miraculously makes it all understandable and even enjoyable. A great book!