Personal Justice and Homicide in Scott’s Ivanhoe: :: Scott Ivanhoe Psychology papers

Personal Justice and Homicide in Scotts IvanhoeAbstract Scotts Ivanhoe reveals a conflict between our indispensable concept of arbiter as individualised justice and the nonpersonal justice which is imposed on us by the modern nation-state. This conflict causes the split between the proper hero, who affirms the order of impersonal justice, and the dark hero, who acts according to personal justice, in Scotts work.In evolution and Literary Theory, Joseph Carroll provides a paradigm for the integration of literary criticism with evolutionary psychology. First, he argues that literary critics should learn to understand and respect the evidence for the underlying contention of evolutionary psychology, namely, that the humans mind is non a lacuna slate which receives all of its content from an external culture, but that human experience and the culture that is based on it are highly constrained by innate psychological mechanisms, which evolved in the environment in which humans washed-out most of their evolutionary history, the hunting-gathering bands of Pleistocene Africa. Humans evolved a rich troops of specialized mental mechanisms for dealing with this environment, including mechanisms for determining mate value (see Buss), for protect kin (see Daly and Wilson, 17-121), for social exchange (see Cosmides and Tooby 1992) and many others. These psychological mechanisms collectively socio-economic class the human nature which underlies the proceedsion and consumption of literary texts. However, the scope of an evolutionarily apprised literary analysis is not limited to simply finding these human universals in literary texts. Rather, many of these psychological mechanisms are open programs which allow for of a wide range of cultural and individual variation (Carroll 152). Carroll identifies the common chord levels at which a literary criticism informed by evolutionary psychology should work human nature, cultural order, and individual identity (150). eyepatch human nature constrains all cultural productions, cultural forms are themselves the product of a complex interaction among various innate dispositions and between innate dispositions and variable environmental conditions (152). Evolutionary psychology enables us to understand not only literary universals, but also the complex and often at odds(p) relationship between human nature, culture, and the individual.In their book Homicide, evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly signalise one such conflict between human nature and the modern cultural order. They argue that humans have an innate concept of justice which is based on the idea of personal revenge. According to this concept of justice, it is trustworthy and even praise-worthy for people to whom a wrong has been done to avenge the wrong-doing themselves.