The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

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.”