This is from an ongoing discussion I have been having with Claude. For this discussion I had uploaded the paper that David Hays and I wrote on cognitive evolution, which is our basic paper of cultural ranks, and Max Tabarrok’s post, Romae Industriae, which poses the question of why Rome didn’t have an industrial revolution. I have posted earlier segments of this conversation: 1) Why didn’t Rome have an industrial evolution? and 2) where I argued that the printing press did not play the role in cultural history that is usually assigned to it.
The general idea of cultural ranks came out of my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. I took a course on the Scientific Revolution, where we read Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In another course I learned that the novel emerged as a literary form in roughly the same time frame. In yet another course I read Centuries of Childhood, by Philippe Aries. He argued that the conception of childhood that is familiar to us, a distinct phase in human development, was not a “natural” concept, but rather emerged, yes, again within roughly the same time period. In a course on the theatre, taught by Dick Macksey, I read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which concocted a story about the historical emergence of tragedy in ancient Greece which made it seem as though the Athenians had “swallowed” an older society and put it on the stage. Ritual celebrants in the older social formation became the principle characters in tragedies while the general popular of that formation became the chorus.
During my sophomore year I’d taken a course in developmental psychology where I was introduced to the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget theorized that children’s mental development progressed through a series of more or less distinct stages, where each stage is characterized by specific cognitive capabilities, with later stages building on earlier ones. He also applied this concept to the history of ideas, e.g. in Genetic Epistmology, which read while working on an MA thesis. That’s also when I read Walter Wiora’s The Four Ages of Music. It was a slim volume in which Wiora argued that the first age emphasized rhythm, the second added an intense development of melody, then came harmony (emerging in Europe) and the contemporary phase, which involved exploration of new forms and methods. I read that and posed a question: Isn’t everything like that, four stages?
I took that question with me to SUNY Buffalo, where I enrolled for a PhD in the English Department, but also spent a great deal of time discussing computational linguistics, cognitive science, and cultural evolution with David Hays in Linguistics. That’s where we developed the idea of cultural ranks. I included an account of narrative development in my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory.”
I note, then, that while the scientific revolution certainly played an important role in my thinking about cultural evolution, the arts played perhaps an even more important role in developing the idea. However, the ranks idea only accounts for the overall shape of development. What about development within a given rank? I have some preliminary notes about that in a recent post, Confabulation, Dylan’s epistemic stance, and progress in the arts: “I’ll let you be in my dreams of I can be in yours.”
The rest of this post consists of a conversation I had with Claude 3.7 on March 3, 2025. As always, my comments are set in bold type while Claude’s are plain.
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Hazlitt on progress in the arts
While it is common to say that there is progress in the sciences and technology, it’s less common to think of progress in the arts. William Hazlitt published a well-known essay in 1814, Why The Arts Are Not Progressive, and that’s remained the standard view. He observed:
“What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. [...] The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the birth barbarous. Those arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was, in other respects, comparatively have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after.”
I see you're interested in exploring the contrast between progress in sciences/technology versus the arts. This is a fascinating philosophical question that bridges cultural evolution, aesthetics, and the nature of human creativity.
Hazlitt's essay presents the classic view that the arts, unlike sciences, don't experience linear progress. His central argument distinguishes between domains that are "mechanical, reducible to rule" (sciences) versus those dependent on "genius, taste, and feeling" (arts). He suggests artistic achievements often peak early in civilizations and then stagnate or decline.
The two documents you've shared offer interesting frameworks to consider this question: From "Cognitive Evolution," Benzon and Hays propose a four-rank model of cognitive development across cultures:
1. Rank 1: Abstraction through metaphor (preliterate societies)
2. Rank 2: Rationalization through metalingual definition (literate societies)
3. Rank 3: Theory through algorithm (Renaissance onward)
4. Rank 4: Model building through control (20th century)
They argue these cognitive advances shape all cultural domains, not just science. While they don't specifically refute Hazlitt's view on art, their model suggests that artistic expression would also evolve with new cognitive tools.
The "Romae Industriae" document examines why Rome didn't achieve an industrial revolution despite its technological sophistication. The author concludes cultural factors, particularly the lack of a printing press and the disdain for mechanical arts in slave-based societies, were key constraints rather than just technological limitations.
What's interesting is how these perspectives might inform a response to Hazlitt. Could we argue that while individual artistic genius may appear at any time, the evolution of artistic forms and movements does show a pattern of development tied to cognitive and cultural evolution? For example, the Renaissance's perspective techniques in painting required Rank 3 thinking about algorithmic representation of space.
Would you like to explore this tension between Hazlitt's view and the cognitive evolution framework more deeply, or focus on another aspect of these materials?
Bloom, Shakespeare, the novel
Ah, yes, this ranks business. Benzon has published on both the evolution of narrative and the evolution of music using ranks theory and Hays has published on expressive culture in general. Perhaps one day I’ll upload those papers for you to examine. I note, though, that they don’t address the issue of progressive change within individual ranks. For example, I suspect that there is expressive change in the novel, from the 18th century up through the end of the 19th century, but that’s entirely within Rank 3 culture, and I’d think the progress continues in the 20th century. [...] And then we have Harold Bloom’s assertion that Shakespeare, in some sense, “invented” the human, but which I think he means that Shakespeare was the first writer to give voice to certain aspects of human behavior and mental life. But I don’t think Bloom ever systematically developed that idea, not even in is book on the Western canon or in his Shakespeare book.
[...] You raise an excellent point about progressive change within individual ranks that wasn't fully addressed in the paper. The progression of the novel within Rank 3 culture is a perfect example of this phenomenon. From Defoe and Richardson through Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, and on to James and Conrad, we see remarkable development in narrative technique, psychological depth, and formal complexity—all while remaining within the algorithmic thinking characteristic of Rank 3.
This intra-rank progression continues into the 20th century with modernist innovations by Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, who pushed the boundaries of what the novel could express while still operating within Rank 3 cognitive structures. Then perhaps writers like Pynchon and DeLillo begin to engage with Rank 4 model-building approaches to fiction.
Regarding Bloom's assertion about Shakespeare "inventing the human," this does seem to suggest a kind of progressive leap in artistic representation. Bloom never fully systematized this idea, but it appears to indicate that Shakespeare's achievement wasn't just artistic excellence but a cognitive breakthrough in representing human interiority. In ranks terminology, one might say Shakespeare was pushing against the upper limits of Rank 2 representation toward something like early Rank 3 thinking about human psychology, even before the scientific revolution had fully taken hold.
