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Where culture and biology meet By Dror Wahrman Tags: Daniel Smail, biology  "On Deep History and the Brain" by Daniel Lord Smail, University of California Press (Berkeley), 286 pages, $21.95 When was masturbation invented? That question seems ludicrous, and an answer such as "in 1712" only makes it appear ever more so. But that is precisely what Thomas Laqueur, one of the leading cultural historians of our generation, claims in his compelling 2003 book on the cultural history of masturbation. "Modern" masturbation, he argues, came into being with the publication in 1712 of a virulent pamphlet titled "Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes Considered," which sent shockwaves through the whole of Europe. Of course, the denunciation of masturbation was not new - the word "onanism" itself, as we know, has biblical origins - but in the previous millennia of moral finger-wagging, this phenomenon had not been particularly central or meaningful. Now, however, the issue took on an unprecedented moral and social urgency, thus launching Western culture's obsessive preoccupation with the dangers of masturbation and with the pressing duty to suppress it at all costs. Advertisement It is this sudden and far-reaching cultural phenomenon that Laqueur describes as the modern "invention" of masturbation. He provides a detailed account of the panic sparked by the 1712 pamphlet, and tries to explain it by tracing the similarities between, on the one hand, certain characteristics of modern masturbation - in particular, the importance of privacy, secrecy and imagination - and on the other, the new anxieties that accompanied the period's most significant social process: the emergence of Western consumer society and the modern culture of the marketplace. This bold - and convincing - claim is, in fact, a predictable outcome of basic assumptions that characterize cultural history, which has emerged in recent decades as a dominant school in historical writing. Cultural history's point of departure is the need to challenge all those basic categories that heretofore have been perceived as a natural, unavoidable, self-evident "reality": gender, race, nationality, identity, selfhood, the body and so on. These categories, the cultural historian argues, are in fact constructed, temporary, specific to a particular historical moment, context and location, and politically charged. Cultural history's task is therefore to reveal the historical processes, cultural contexts and power relations that underlie the portrayal of these categories as essential and unchanging. The insistence that any reality or experience is "basic" or "fundamental" was and is perceived by cultural history as a regressive position - one that has even been given its own negative epithet: "essentialism." For an anti-essentialist history of masturbation, therefore, nothing is more natural than to identify the particular time and context - in this case, the emergence of market society in the early 18th century - when the West was struck by a new perception of this sexual behavior, a behavior that until now we might have ignorantly considered to be an unchanging constant intrinsic to the human species. But cultural history's uncompromising constructivism exacts a price. Surprisingly, perhaps, the body and sexuality play no role in Laqueur's narrative about masturbation. Sexual activity is merely the fodder for the unfolding of other, unrelated, developments. This is evident from the fact that the very same anxieties that Laqueur traces in the masturbation debate - anxieties accompanying the emergent market culture - also appear simultaneously elsewhere: for instance, in the attack on the phenomenon of gambling. What changes from one period to the next is the cultural stratum; the body and sex remain outside the account of the historical process. While cultural historians explore perceptions and representations of the body, it is more difficult for them to write about the body itself without falling into the essentialist trap. Bypassing a trap Thus I come to Daniel Lord Smail's fascinating book, "On Deep History and the Brain," which opens up new ways to bypass this trap and perhaps to eliminate it altogether. A historian of the Middle Ages, Smail arrived at the interface of culture and biology when he searched for the starting point of Western culture's well-known historical narratives. Isn't it odd, he asks, that when the Judeo-Christian chronology of humanity (that which announced its beginning some six millennia ago in the Middle East) was replaced by a supposedly scientific historical chronology, the latter established the beginning point of Western civilization's history (as distinguished from its prehistory) at the invention of writing, which also happened to take place about 6,000 years ago, and in the same Middle East? Wishing to free himself from this "sacred chronology," therefore, and to weave history and prehistory into a single narrative, Smail sets out to find another common thread that will characterize human development over a longer range of time. This range is what he calls "deep history." Smail finds his solution in breakthroughs made in biology, neurophysiology and cognitive science in the last 20 years. In recent evolutionary science he focuses on "micro-evolution" - that is, on evolutionary changes that occur during a relatively short time. These allow him to examine the interaction between culture and biology in historical time ("There are good reasons," he writes, "to treat genes as if they were potsherds"). Take, for example, the ability of European, South Asian and Middle Eastern adults to digest lactose - an ability that Africans, East Asians, Indians and natives of the Pacific usually lose once they are weaned. These distinct differences are a relatively new phenomenon, only a few millennia old, which developed as an evolutionary response to a cultural change: the domestication of cattle, sheep and goats and the emergence of dairy farming. A new social-cultural pattern provided the mechanism of natural selection that propelled the micro-evolutionary process. Examples of this kind, carefully selected and deftly served up, are the appetizers for the main course, which is the brain. Of all the ways the human body has evolved, Smail identifies the changes in the brain as the most important connective thread for rewriting the history of the last millennia. The knowledge that has been accumulated since the 1990s, "the decade of the brain," about brain chemistry and especially about its evolution, provides the basis for the book's central historical argument. The main characteristic of human history in the last 5,000 years, Smail claims, is a new regime of brain-body chemistry. "Chemistry" should here be understood literally: chemical agents that take part in the transmission of particular feelings. During this period, human beings became accustomed to a new, dynamic balance of chemicals, which are released in the body following shifts in emotion and mood. As a result, we have become attuned like never before to the influence of cultural behavior patterns that effect a change in our moods. The list is long and varied: song, ritual, gossip (an especially interesting example, whose chemistry and socio-biological meaning Smail discusses at length), shopping, the use of stimulants, sexual activity for pleasure (rather than for procreation). The human need for an active, dynamic balance in body-brain chemistry, a need of which these are only a few manifestations, is what provides the "deep historical narrative," and with it the deep meaning, of the modern age in human history. (By the way, it is interesting to note that ultimately, although the book also examines longer processes that began 30,000 years ago and which situate the beginning of the story in Africa rather than the Middle East, Smail's central narrative returns, without comment, to a chronology bearing a striking resemblance to that "sacred," bibliocentric chronology he sought to evade.) How, then, might these insights help in the writing of history? Let's take for example one of the characteristic fields of cultural and social history in the last generation: the history of the family. Historians such as Philippe Ari?s and Lawrence Stone have taught us that even the most basic of family relations - for example, the love of parents for their children - are not instinctive and innate, but rather dependent on a cultural and historical context. In recent years, however, more and more evidence has been accumulating of significant continuity in parenting patterns over very long historical periods. These discoveries led one of the foremost feminist historians of the family, Amanda Vickery, to admit that as a result of the new evidence, "instinct," as an ahistorical, unchanging factor, might be making a comeback in the historiography of the field - which is, as she puts it, "an uncomfortable suggestion for historians and feminists alike." Not so from Smail's point of view. The neuro-physiological studies he cites have shown that parenting involves high levels of certain hormones (prolactin and oxytocin in males), and that species characterized by a high investment in parenting develop more receptors for these hormones in the brain. Biology and culture, then, are locked in a pas de deux: As Smail dryly comments, these findings do not suggest that injecting deadbeat fathers with prolactin would turn them into model parents, since they may lack the necessary receptors, because of cultural conditioning or personal development. On the other hand, it is not culture alone that influences the brain's ability to receive these hormones. Parenting is shaped by culture, which is shaped by neuro-physiology, which is shaped by culture. It is thus perhaps not surprising, nor particularly essentialist, to find good parenting to be a matter of "deep history." 'Psychotropic profile' More surprisingly, Smail's theory can teach us something not only about patterns of continuity, but also about moments of change. In his account, covering 5,000 years of the deep history of modernity through the prism of the brain, there is one particular moment that signals faster change: the 18th century. Europe of the 18th century witnessed a significant expansion in the range of mechanisms and practices that influenced the individual's body chemistry. Europeans became prone to the chemicals released in their brains by a wide variety of stimulating practices, and to some extent they even became addicted to them (addiction itself was only then identified as a new socio-cultural trend; the word "addiction," in its modern meaning, did not come into use until the end of the 17th century). This cultural pattern was in part nourished by stimulants that then became available to a much broader public than previously: coffee, sugar, chocolate, tobacco. It also fed on new cultural habits that picked up momentum in this period. These included: the pleasure of shopping in a market society that was becoming rapidly commercialized (shopping as a social activity also emerged in this same period); the frenzy of participating in the stock market and in other realms that were opened up by the financial revolution that swept across parts of Europe during the same era; the reading of novels - the 18th century's new literary genre - and, more generally, reading for pleasure at leisure; or the consumption of pornography. These activities all released particular bodily chemicals, and the desire to alter one's own body chemistry is what lay at the heart of their success. The 18th century, Smail concludes, had its own "psychotropic profile" - a term he coins in order to describe how previously discrete behaviors and patterns merge to form a comprehensive new cultural framework. Smail, as he himself stresses, is not an 18th-century specialist; but to the student of the period, such as this reviewer, the portrait he paints seems quite convincing. In conclusion, therefore, let's return to Laqueur's argument about the rise of the modern masturbation panic during precisely the same period and consider it through Smail's spectacles. First, the new "psychotropic profile" of the 18th century might explain a rise in the actual practice of masturbation in these years - a possibility that Laqueur, as we recall, does not raise at all. Second, Smail adds that contemporary ruling elites, who until then had themselves overseen many of the practices that affected body chemistry, reacted to the new patterns of behavior by trying to impose rules and restrictions on activities that now appeared as unfettered self-stimulation. And after all, what can be a better example of unfettered self-stimulation than masturbation? So thus we can make sense of the dramatic rise in the obsession about masturbation and the cultural pressure to regulate it, which Laqueur documented in such detail. Through Smail's juxtaposition of culture and biology, then, what emerges is an entirely new context - a context, what's more, in which the body plays a central role - for a significant chapter in the cultural history of sexuality. Are we, then, on the verge of a new era of neurobiological cultural history? I remain doubtful. The resistance to any inkling of essentialism is strong, and with good reason. The campaign against the entrenchment of essentialist perceptions of gender, race and other distinctions between people, and against the use of these perceptions to support hierarchies of power and exploitation - this campaign is far from over, and many rightly fear opening even the slightest crack through which the conservative reaction might effect a setback. A more serious obstacle is the fact that historians lack the critical tools for the evaluation of biological and medical discoveries. I myself, for example, am unable to tell whether what I have written here about the findings of neuro-physiological research is correct, controversial, or total nonsense. It may be that the same is true for Smail as well. It is hard to imagine many scholars in the humanities developing the scientific expertise they would need in order to participate in this discourse and not just accept it on faith. But even if we should not yet expect to see the imminent rise of biological history, Daniel Lord Smail's experiment clearly reminds us of the limits of anti-essentialist constructivism: It is entirely possible, it seems, to take the body seriously in a way that does not threaten cultural history, but rather enriches it. Prof. Dror Wahrman teaches European history at Indiana University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bookmark to del.icio.us   History in the making N.Y. governor pays historic visit to Orthodox synagogue for Sabbath services. Under the rubble Five Palestinians suffocate to death after Egypt blows up tunnel.

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