The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

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.

In social psychology experiments, people consistently overrate their own skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy. They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise.81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to the experimenter but lying to themselves.

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.83 Self-deception is one of the reasons that the moral sense can, paradoxically, often do more harm than good,

the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.

But there is still much to be wary of in human moralizing: the confusion of morality with status and purity, the temptation to overmoralize matters of judgment and thereby license aggression against those with whom we disagree, the taboos on thinking about unavoidable tradeoffs, and the ubiquitous vice of self-deception, which always manages to put the self on the side of the angels. Hitler was a moralist (indeed, a moral vegetarian) who, by most accounts, was convinced of the rectitude of his cause. 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.”

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.

In every era for thousands of years critics have bemoaned the decline of culture, and the economist Tyler Cowen suggests they are the victims of a cognitive illusion. The best works of art are more likely to appear in a past decade than in the present decade for the same reason that another line in the supermarket always moves faster than the one you are in: there are more of them. We get to enjoy the greatest hits winnowed from all those decades, listening to the Mozarts and forgetting the Salieris. Also, genres of art (opera, Impressionist painting, Broadway musicals, film noir) usually blossom and fade in a finite span of time. It’s hard to recognize nascent art forms when they are on the rise, and by the time they are widely appreciated their best days are behind them. Cowen also notes, citing Hobbes, that putting down the present is a backhanded way of putting down one’s rivals: “Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.”

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.