The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

It is a bad idea to say that violence and exploitation are wrong only because people are not naturally inclined to them.

On violence

People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations, and so on.

Euphemism Threadmill

The belief that bodies are invested with souls is not just a product of religious doctrine but embedded in people’s psychology and likely to emerge whenever they have not digested the findings of biology.

On souls

“Adult” and “child” are fuzzy categories, which is why we could raise the drinking age to twenty-one or lower the voting age to eighteen. But that did not put us on a slippery slope in which we eventually raised the drinking age to fifty or lowered the voting age to five. Those policies really would violate our concepts of “child” and “adult,” fuzzy though their boundaries may be.

The price of looking credible is being unable to lie with a straight face, and that means a part of the mind must be designed to believe its own propaganda—while another part registers just enough truth to keep the self-concept in touch with reality.

On self-deception

Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly. It implies that the faculties that ought to allow us to settle our differences—seeking the truth and discussing it rationally—are miscalibrated so that all parties assess themselves to be wiser, abler, and nobler than they really are. Each party to a dispute can sincerely believe that the logic and evidence are on his side and that his opponent is deluded or dishonest or both.

On self-deception 2

In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.

On harmony

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

On justice

Cutting across these sets of emotions we find a distinction among three spheres of morality, each of which frames moral judgments in a different way. The ethic of autonomy pertains to an individual’s interests and rights. It emphasizes fairness as the cardinal virtue, and is the core of morality as it is understood by secular educated people in Western cultures. The ethic of community pertains to the mores of the social group; it includes values like duty, respect, adherence to convention, and deference to a hierarchy. The ethic of divinity pertains to a sense of exalted purity and holiness, which is opposed to a sense of contamination and defilement.

Richard Shweder

When someone strips a person of dignity by making jokes about his suffering, giving him a humiliating appearance (a dunce cap, awkward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy conditions, ordinary people’s compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to treat him like an animal or object.

On compassion

The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us.

Rationalizing morality

As the historian Ian Buruma wrote, “This shows once again that true believers can be more dangerous than cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal; the former have to go to the end—and drag the world down with them.”

On cynicism

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.

On social problems - Tragic vision

Wilson, the world’s expert on ants, may have had the last laugh in his verdict on Marxism: “Wonderful theory. Wrong species.”

On Marxism

For the same reason, Frank argues, we would be better off if we implemented a steeply graduated tax on consumption, replacing the current graduated tax on income. A consumption tax would damp down the futile arms race for ever more lavish cars, houses, and watches and compensate people with resources that provably increase happiness, such as leisure time, safer streets, and more pleasant commuting and working conditions.

Tax on consumption

In fact, the entire question of what went wrong (socially or biologically) when a person engages in violence is badly posed. Almost everyone recognizes the need for violence in defense of self, family, and innocent victims.

On violence

More generally, whether a violent mindset is called heroic or pathological often depends on whose ox has been gored.

On violence-2

In the twentieth century, according to the political scientist R. J. Rummel in Death by Government, 170 million people were killed by their own governments.

Hobbes

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

On violence - closure

As in many other topics related to human nature, people’s unwillingness to think in statistical terms has led to pointless false dichotomies. Here is how to think about gender distributions in the professions without having to choose between the extremes of “women are unqualified” and “fifty-fifty absolutely,” or between “there is no discrimination” and “there is nothing but discrimination.”

Statistics

In most professions, average differences in ability are irrelevant, but average differences in preferences may set the sexes on different paths.

Sexes and preferences

To repeat: none of this means that sex discrimination has vanished, or that it is justified when it occurs. The point is only that gender gaps by themselves say nothing about discrimination unless the slates of men and women are blank, which they are not.

On gender gaps

The sciences of human nature can strengthen the interests of women by separating those herrings from the truly important goals. Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.

Gender

• The First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable. • The Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes. • The Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

Three laws of behavioral genetics

General intelligence is heritable, and so are the five major ways in which personality can vary (summarized by the acronym OCEAN): openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and neuroticism. And traits that are surprisingly specific turn out to be heritable, too, such as dependence on nicotine or alcohol, number of hours of television watched, and likelihood of divorcing. Finally there are the Mallifert brothers in Chas Addams’s patent office and their real-world counterparts: the identical twins separated at birth who both grew up to be captains of their volunteer fire departments, who both twirled their necklaces when answering questions, or who both told the researcher picking them up at the airport (separately) that a wheel bearing in his car needed to be replaced.

Heritability

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.

On parenting experts

A correlation between parents and children does not mean that parents affect children; it could mean that children affect parents, that genes affect both parents and children, or both.

On correlation vs causation

In his book The Myth of the First Three Years, the cognitive neuroscience expert Jon Bruer showed that there was no science behind these astonishing claims.41 No psychologist has ever documented a critical period for cognitive or language development that ends at three. And though depriving an animal of stimulation (by sewing an eye shut or keeping it in a barren cage) may hurt its brain growth, there is no evidence that providing extra stimulation (beyond what the organism would encounter in its normal habitat) enhances its brain growth.

Myth of three years

It’s not all in the genes, but what isn’t in the genes isn’t from the parents either. Socialization—acquiring the norms and skills necessary to function in society—takes place in the peer group. Children have cultures, too, which absorb parts of the adult culture and also develop values and norms of their own. Children do not spend their waking hours trying to become better and better approximations of adults. They strive to be better and better children, ones that function well in their own society.

Genes + society

Studies also confirm what every parent knows but what no one bothers to reconcile with theories of child development: that whether adolescents smoke, get into scrapes with the law, or commit serious crimes depends far more on what their peers do than on what their parents do.

Peers vs parents

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.

On parenting

Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.58

On modern art

Though moral sophistication requires an appreciation of history and cultural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are a particularly good way to instill it compared with middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional education. The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to how people entertain themselves in their leisure time. 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

Moral sophistication

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

On human nature