Pinker, Steven- The Blank Slate
I think I’ve always instinctively sided with a “bleak” view of human nature. When I was about twelve I kept a little “favorite quotes” book and one of those quotes was by Alexander Hamilton- “To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.” Looking at the collection of quotes I now keep in an MS Word file, many of them, by people like Seneca and Voltaire, echo that sentiment. The idea of an innate and sometimes dark human nature is one I’ve easily adopted. People like Rousseau and Margaret Mead, who take the opposite view, always seemed overly optimistic and pseudoscientific.
I guess this leads to the fact that I loved Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Pinker has been painted as a troglodyte by many on both the left and right who hold dear the doctrines he picks apart: the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine. Pinker elucidates the irrationality of these doctrines and their harmfulness to intellectual progress, which of course is going to rattle some cages. I remember my P.H.D. history teacher telling my class that humans are naturally peaceful and that violence is a product of human settlement. I laughed- someone had been reading too much Chomsky and not enough archeology. He’d obviously never heard of how bloody hunter gatherer tribes can be, or of the caves inhabited by prehistoric hunter gatherers filled with stacks of bashed in skulls. The Blank Slate shows the reader, from an empirical view, how humans do have innate predispositions to violence and other undesirable behavior.
Such a view might seem overly dark and unhelpful to progress, but Pinker presents his theory that knowing human nature allows us to know how to solve the problems humanity faces. The doctrine of the blank slate is actually the dangerous one, as it leads to the desire to “reprogram” humans and supports unworkable philosophies such as Marxism. Pinker notes how in Orwell’s 1984 the government operates on The Blank Slate with O’Brien saying “We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” He also shows how such pseudoscientific sentiments are behind everything from some of the worst instances of human cruelty to criminal “rehab” programs that operate on false premises and release dangerous people out into the world to faulty educational systems.
Pinker explains that just because “evil” is part of human nature does not mean it is inevitable. The naturalistic fallacy, which states that what is natural is good, is part of the fear of discovering that “evil” is embedded within us. Pinker also notes that the brain is not some sort of elaborate function. It is the most complex object humans know of and inner predispositions don’t mean “this will happen” but “this is more likely to happen.” Even with the innatist genetic view in mind, there is a lot that is dependent on the environment and on our internal structures that govern choice. I come from a long line of illustrious alcoholics, so knowing my predisposition to alcoholism, I have consciously avoided keg parties. The same goes for my bad temper- I know it’s there, so I can consciously develop strategies for working around it. The idea that humans have predispositions obviously does not make us robots.
Some of the more controversial chapters are at the end and they deal with specific subjects like children and politics. They might be antagonistic to even those who agreed with the first part of the book. Particularly I found the chapter on children a bit disagreeable, but in some of these chapters I believe he’s working with scant scientific evidence because these things just haven’t been studied enough. I liked the scathing chapter on the arts, as it dissects the poor suppositions behind certain instances of modern “art.” As a whole the little subject specific chapters are the weak point of the book, as they come at a point where they seem to just be drilling in points that have already been made. This is a problem commonly found in popular science books like Jared Diamond’s or E.O. Wilson’s. Then there is the ghost in the machine. Pinker doesn’t spend much time on that idea. It’s obviously about as useful for scientists as creationism, but like creationism it’s in the realm of metaphysics. Not being a theologian, I understand why Pinker doesn’t really spend much time on it.
I thought Pinker’s writing was enjoyable and amusing. Even if you still think he’s some sort of Darwinist gone awry, The Blank Slate dredges up some important ethical questions that are becoming even more important as science delves deeper into the human mind.
Steven Pinker- The Blank Slate @ Amazon
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