The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

The doctrine of the superorganism has had an impact on modern life that extends well beyond the writings of social scientists. It underlies the tendency to reify “society” as a moral agent that can be blamed for sins as if it were a person. It drives identity politics, in which civil rights and political perquisites are allocated to groups rather than to individuals. And as we shall see in later chapters, it defined some of the great divides between major political systems in the twentieth century.

If people are assumed to start out identical but some end up wealthier than others, observers may conclude that the wealthier ones must be more rapacious. And as the diagnosis slides from talent to sin, the remedy can shift from redistribution to vengeance. Many atrocities of the twentieth century were committed in the name of egalitarianism, targeting people whose success was taken as evidence of their criminality. The kulaks (“bourgeois peasants”) were exterminated by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union; teachers, former landlords, and “rich peasants” were humiliated, tortured, and murdered during Chinas Cultural Revolution; city dwellers and literate professionals were worked to death or executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.24 Educated and entrepreneurial minorities who have prospered in their adopted regions, such as the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Jews almost everywhere, have been expelled from their homes or killed in pogroms because their visibly successful members were seen as parasites and exploiters.25

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful.50 Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share.51 It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, includ...

Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists—that is why they invented hell.”

In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. “Mortal things suit mortals best,” wrote Pindar; “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” wrote Kant.

In the Tragic Vision, moreover, human nature has not changed. Traditions such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores, and political institutions are a distillation of time-tested techniques that let us work around the shortcomings of human nature. They are as applicable to humans today as they were when they developed, even if no one today can explain their rationale. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate enough to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up, because human nature always leaves us teetering on the brink of barbarism. And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best we can hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted according to feedback about the sum of their good and bad consequences. It also follows that we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person’s gain may be another person’s loss. The best we can do is trade off one cost against another.

In the Utopian Vision, human nature changes with social circumstances, so traditional institutions have no inherent value. That was then, this is now. Traditions are the dead hand of the past, the attempt to rule from the grave. They must be stated explicitly so their rationale can be scrutinized and their moral status evaluated. And by that test, many traditions fail: the confinement of women to the home, the stigma against homosexuality and premarital sex, the superstitions of religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation, the dangers of patriotism as exemplified in the mindless slogan “My country, right or wrong.” Practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and patriarchy once seemed inevitable but have disappeared or faded from many parts of the world through changes in institutions that were once thought to be rooted in human nature. Moreover, the existence of suffering and injustice presents us with an undeniable moral imperative. We don’t know what we can achieve until we try, and the alternative, resigning ourselves to these evils as the way of the world, is unconscionable.

As the conservative philosopher Michael Oakshott wrote, “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.”

the ambition to remake human nature turned its leaders into totalitarian despots and mass murderers. And the assumption that central planners were morally disinterested and cognitively competent enough to direct an entire economy led to comical inefficiencies with serious consequences. Even the more humane forms of European socialism have been watered down to the point where so-called Communist Parties have platforms that not long ago would have been called reactionary. Wilson, the world’s expert on ants, may have had the last laugh in his verdict on Marxism: “Wonderful theory. Wrong species.”

attractive people on average are more assertive than unattractive ones.17 (In one experiment, subjects undergoing a fake interview had to cool their heels when the interviewer was called out of the room by a staged interruption. The plain-looking subjects waited nine minutes before complaining; the attractive ones waited three minutes and twenty seconds.)

when it comes to genes, people suddenly lose their ability to distinguish 50 percent from 100 percent, “some” from “all,” “affects” from “determines.” The diagnosis for this intellectual crippling is clear: if the effects of the genes must, on theological grounds, be zero, then all nonzero values are equivalently heretical.

Whatever experiences siblings share by growing up in the same home makes little or no difference in the kind of people they turn out to be.

The enigma was noted by other behavioral geneticists such as Thomas Bouchard, Sandra Scarr, and David Lykken and spotlighted again by David Rowe in his 1994 book The Limits of Family Influence. It was also the springboard for the historian Frank Sulloway’s widely discussed 1996 book on birth order and revolutionary temperament, Born to Rebel.

Judith Rich Harris, an unaffiliated scholar (whom the press quickly dubbed “a grandmother from New Jersey”), published The Nurture Assumption.

Siblings reared together end up no more similar than siblings separated at birth. Adopted siblings are no more similar than strangers. And the similarities between siblings can be completely accounted for by their shared genes. All those differences among parents and homes have no predictable long-term effects on the personalities of their children. Not to put too fine a point on it, but much of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle.

It is not free will because among the traits that may differ between identical twins reared together are ones that are stubbornly involuntary. No one chooses to become schizophrenic, homosexual, musically gifted, or, for that matter, anxious or self-confident or open to experience. But the old idea of fate—in the sense of uncontrollable fortune, not strict predestination—can be reconciled with modern biology once we remember the many openings for chance to operate in development. Harris, noting how recent and parochial is the belief that we can shape our children, quotes a woman living in a remote village of India in the 1950s. When asked what kind of man she hoped her child would grow into, she shrugged and replied, “It is in his fate, no matter what I want.”70

Yes, it is disappointing that there is no algorithm for growing a happy and successful child. But would we really want to specify the traits of our children in advance, and never be delighted by the unpredictable gifts and quirks that every child brings into the world? People are appalled by human cloning and its dubious promise that parents can design their children by genetic engineering. But how different is that from the fantasy that parents can design their children by how they bring them up? Realistic parents would be less anxious parents. They could enjoy their time with their children rather than constantly trying to stimulate them, socialize them, and improve their characters. They could read stories to their children for the pleasure of it, not because it’s good for their neurons. Many critics accuse Harris of trying to absolve parents of responsibility for their children’s lives: if the kids turn out badly, parents can say it’s not their fault. But by the same token she is assigning adults responsibility for their own lives: if your life is not going well, stop moaning that it’s all your parents’ fault. She is rescuing mothers from fatuous theories that blame them for every misfortune that befalls their children, and from the censorious know-it-alls who make them feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to work or skip a reading of Goodnight Moon. And the theory assigns us all a collective responsibility for the health of the neighborhoods and culture in wh...

Second, a parent and a child have a human relationship. No one ever asks, “So you’re saying it doesn’t matter how I treat my husband or wife?” even though no one but a newlywed believes that one can change the personality of one’s spouse. Husbands and wives are nice to each other (or should be) not to pound the other’s personality into a desired shape but to build a deep and satisfying relationship. Imagine being told that one cannot revamp the personality of a husband or wife and replying, “The thought that all this love I’m pouring into him (or her) counts for nothing is too terrible to contemplate.” So it is with parents and children: one person’s behavior toward another has consequences for the quality of the relationship between them. Over the course of a lifetime the balance of power shifts, and children, complete with memories of how they were treated, have a growing say in their dealings with their parents. As Harris puts it, “If you don’t think the moral imperative is a good enough reason to be nice to your kid, try this one: Be nice to your kid when he’s young so that he will be nice to you when you’re old.”73 There are well-functioning adults who still shake with rage when recounting the cruelties their parents inflicted on them as children. There are others who moisten up in private moments when recalling a kindness or sacrifice made for their happiness, perhaps one that the mother or father has long forgotten. If for no other reason, parents should treat their...

Western societies are good at providing things that people want: clean water, effective medicine, varied and abundant food, rapid transportation and communication. They perfect these goods and services not from benevolence but from self-interest, namely the profits to be made in selling them. Perhaps the aesthetics industry also perfected ways of giving people what they like—in this case, art forms that appeal to basic human tastes, such as calendar landscapes, popular songs, and Hollywood romances and adventures. So even if an art form matured in the West, it may be not an arbitrary practice spread by a powerful navy but a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic. This all sounds very parochial and Eurocentric, and I wouldn’t push it too far, but it must have an element of truth: if there is a profit to be made in appealing to global human tastes, it would be surprising if entrepreneurs hadn’t taken advantage of it. And it isn’t as Eurocentric as one might think. Western culture, like Western technology and Western cuisine, is voraciously eclectic, appropriating any trick that pleases people from any culture it encounters. An example is one of America’s most important culture exports, popular music. Ragtime, jazz, rock, blues, soul, and rap grew out of African American musical forms, which originally incorporated African rhythms and vocal styles.

Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible.

the psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited.51 Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes from the desire for attention on the part of the artists.

the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was “the desire to destroy beauty.”54 Postmodernists were even more dismissive. Beauty, they said, consists of arbitrary standards dictated by an elite. It enslaves women by forcing them to conform to unrealistic ideals, and it panders to market-oriented art collectors.55

Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for “linguistic transparency” because it hobbles the ability “to think the world more radically” and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity.59 This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which “celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.”60 In 1998, first prize went to the lauded professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest, assures us that this is not a satire. The rules of th...

The conviction that artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry for status (see Chapter 15). As the critic George Steiner has pointed out, “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”

The Blank Slate was an attractive vision. It promised to make racism, sexism, and class prejudice factually untenable. It appeared to be a bulwark against the kind of thinking that led to ethnic genocide. It aimed to prevent people from slipping into a premature fatalism about preventable social ills. It put a spotlight on the treatment of children, indigenous peoples, and the underclass. The Blank Slate thus became part of a secular faith and appeared to constitute the common decency of our age. But the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering. Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of “a government of laws and not of men.” It blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions.

The ideal of political equality is not a guarantee that people are innately indistinguishable. It is a policy to treat people in certain spheres (justice, education, politics) on the basis of their individual merits rather than the statistics of any group they belong to. And it is a policy to recognize inalienable rights in all people by virtue of the fact that they are sentient human beings. Policies that insist that people be identical in their outcomes must impose costs on humans who, like all living things, vary in their biological endowment. Since talents by definition are rare, and can be fully realized only in rare circumstances, it is easier to achieve forced equality by lowering the top (and thereby depriving everyone of the fruits of people’s talents) than by raising the bottom. In Vonnegut’s America of 2081 the desire for equality of outcome is played out as a farce, but in the twentieth century it frequently led to real crimes against humanity, and in our own society the entire issue is often a taboo.

Orwell is showing its dark side: the dismissal of the individual—the only entity that literally feels pleasure and pain—as a mere component that exists to further the interests of the whole.