The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

But some of the most painful shocks come from the social world—from the manipulations and betrayals of other people. According to the fable, a scorpion asked a frog to carry him across a river, reassuring the frog that he wouldn’t sting him because if he did, he would drown too. Halfway across, the scorpion did sting him, and when the sinking frog asked why, the scorpion replied, “It’s in my nature.” Technically speaking, a scorpion with this nature could not have evolved, but Trivers has explained why it sometimes seems as if human nature is like the fabled scorpion nature, condemned to apparently pointless conflict.

Nothing prevents the amoral process of natural selection from evolving a brain with genuine big-hearted emotions. It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions.

Because we are not clones, or even social insects (who can share up to three-quarters of their genes), what ultimately is best for one person is not identical to what ultimately is best for another. Thus every human relationship, even the most devoted and intimate, carries the seeds of conflict.

In the movie AntZ, an ant with the voice of Woody Allen complains to his psychoanalyst: It’s this whole gung-ho superorganism thing that I just can’t get. I try, but I just don’t get it. What is it, I’m supposed to do everything for the colony and . . . what about my needs?

But love and solidarity are relative. To say that people are more caring toward their relatives is to say that they are more callous toward their nonrelatives.

When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement. 25

The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has shown that the tradeoff between working and mothering was not invented by power-suited Yuppies of the 1980s. Women in foraging societies use a variety of arrangements to raise their children without starving in the process, including seeking status within the group (which improves the children’s well-being) and sharing childcare duties with other women in the band. Fathers, of course, are usually the main providers other than the mother herself, but they have bad habits like dying, deserting, and not making a living, and mothers have never depended on them alone. 28

anachronism

A philandering woman can have better offspring by conceiving a child by a man with better genes than her husband while having her husband around to help nurture the child. But when a wife gets the best of both worlds from her affair, the husband gets the worst of both worlds, because he is investing in another man’s genes that have usurped the place of his own. We thus get the flip side of the evolution of fatherly feelings: the evolution of male sexual jealousy, designed to prevent his wife from having another man’s child. Women’s jealousy is tilted more toward preventing the alienation of a man’s affections, a sign of his willingness to invest in another woman’s children at the expense of her own.

On strictly rational grounds, the volatility of sex is a paradox, because in an era with contraception and women’s rights these archaic entanglements should have no claim on our feelings. We should be ziplessly loving the one we’re with, and sex should inspire no more gossip, music, fiction, raunchy humor, or strong emotions than eating or talking does. The fact that people are tormented by the Darwinian economics of babies they are no longer having is testimony to the long reach of human nature.

The real alternative to romantic collectivism is not “right-wing libertarianism” but a recognition that social generosity comes from a complex suite of thoughts and emotions rooted in the logic of reciprocity. That gives it a very different psychology from the communal sharing practiced by social insects, human families, and cults that try to pretend they are families. 43

Psychopaths, as far as we know, cannot be “cured.” Indeed, the psychologist Marnie Rice has shown that certain harebrained ideas for therapy, such as boosting their self-esteem and teaching them social skills, can make them even more dangerous.

In his book Antigones, the literary critic George Steiner showed that the Antigone legend has a singular place in Western literature. Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, but the fact that her father was her brother and her mother was her grandmother was only the beginning of her family troubles. In defiance of King Creon, she buried her slain brother Polynices, and when the king found out, he ordered her buried alive. She cheated him by killing herself first, whereupon the king’s son, who was madly in love with her and unable to get her a pardon, killed himself on her grave. Steiner observes that Antigone is widely considered “not only the finest of the Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit.” 85 It has been performed for more than two millennia and has inspired countless variations and spinoffs.

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that; was it OK for them to make love? The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have presented the story to many people. 2 Most immediately declare that what Julie and Mark did was wrong, and then they grope for reasons why it was wrong.

Several scholars have noticed that their students are unequipped to explain why Nazism was wrong, because the students feel it is impermissible to criticize the values of another culture. 8 (I can confirm that students today reflexively hedge their moral judgments, saying things like, “Our society puts a high value on being good to other people.”)

Donald Symons comments on the way that people’s judgments can do a backflip when they switch from autonomy- to community-based morality: If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including feminists.

villain (originally meaning “peasant”), vulgar. The Myth of the Noble Noble is obvious in contemporary celebrity worship. Members of the royalty like Princess Diana and her American equivalent, John F. Kennedy Jr., are awarded the trappings of sainthood even though they were morally unexceptional people (yes, Diana supported charities, but that’s pretty much the job description of a princess in this day and age). Their good looks brighten their halos even more, because people judge attractive men and women to be more virtuous. 10 Prince Charles, who also supports charities, will never be awarded the trappings of sainthood, even if he dies a tragic death.

Haidt’s subjects seem to have conflated contamination with sin when they condemned eating a dog, having sex with a dead chicken, and enjoying consensual incest (which reflects our instinctive repulsion toward sex with siblings, an emotion that evolved to deter inbreeding).

the ostracism of the “untouchable” caste in India, the sequestering of menstruating women in Orthodox Judaism, the fear of contracting AIDS from casual contact with gay men, the segregated facilities for eating, drinking, bathing, and sleeping under the Jim Crow and apartheid policies, and the “racial hygiene” laws in Nazi Germany.

One of the haunting questions of twentieth-century history is how so many ordinary people committed wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim’s status or cleanliness or both.

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.

But of course it is the job of scholars to think about things, even if only to make it clear why they are wrong. Moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a collision course.

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.”

capitulate,

When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar, with a correlation coefficient of .62 (on a scale from -1 to +1).

In the sociological tradition, a society is a cohesive organic entity and its individual citizens are mere parts. People are thought to be social by their very nature and to function as constituents of a larger superorganism. This is the tradition of Plato, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Kroeber, the sociologist Talcott Parsons, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and postmodernism in the humanities and social sciences.

In the economic or social contract tradition, society is an arrangement negotiated by rational, self-interested individuals. Society emerges when people agree to sacrifice some of their autonomy in exchange for security from the depredations of others wielding their autonomy. It is the tradition of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, and of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and Bentham. In the twentieth century it became the basis for the rational actor or “economic man” models in economics and political science, and for cost-benefit analyses of public choices.

The modern theory of evolution falls smack into the social contract tradition. It maintains that complex adaptations, including behavioral strategies, evolved to benefit the individual (indeed, the genes for those traits within an individual), not the community, species, or ecosystem. 6 Social organization evolves when the long-term benefits to the individual outweigh the immediate costs. Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith, and many of his successors analyze the e...

Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

People who call themselves “classical liberals” are likely to be called “conservatives” by adherents of the version of leftism known as political correctness.

Nor can most contemporary liberals and conservatives articulate the cores of their belief systems. Liberals think that conservatives are just amoral plutocrats, and conservatives think that if you are not a liberal before you are twenty you have no heart but if you are a liberal after you are twenty you have no brain (attributed variously to Georges Clemenceau, Dean Inge, Benjamin Disraeli, and Maurice Maeterlinck).

Strategic alliances—such as the religious fundamentalists and free-market technocrats on the right, or the identity politicians and civil libertarians on the left—may frustrate the search for any intellectual common denominator. Everyday political debates, such as whether tax rates should be exa...

At Robert Kennedy’s funeral, his brother Edward quoted from one of his recent speeches: All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort. The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when that power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest.

The Utopian Vision seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who would implement these policies—namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic fiefdoms—and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing their own interests.

Instead, the Tragic Vision looks to systems that produce desirable outcomes even when no member of the system is particularly wise or virtuous. Market economies, in this vision, accomplish that goal: remember Smith’s butcher, brewer, and baker providing us with dinner out of self-interest rather than benevolence. No mastermind has to understand the intricate flow of goods and services that make up an economy in order to anticipate who needs what, and when and where. Property rights give people an incentive to work and produce; contracts allow them to enjoy gains in trade. Prices convey information about scarcity and demand to producers and consumers, so they can react by following a few simple rules—make more of what is profitable, buy less of what is expensive—and the “invisible hand” will do the rest. The intelligence of the system is distributed across millions of not-necessarily-intelligent producers and consumers, and cannot be articulated by anyone in particular.

Adherents of the Tragic Vision, with their cynical view of human nature, see war as a rational and tempting strategy for people who think they can gain something for themselves or their nation. The calculations might be mistaken in any instance, and they may be morally deplorable because they give no weight to the suffering of the losers, but they are not literally pathological or irrational. On this view the only way to ensure peace is to raise the cost of war to potential aggressors by developing weaponry, arousing patriotism, rewarding bravery, flaunting one’s might and resolve, and negotiating from strength to deter blackmail.

AND ONTO THIS battlefield strode an innocent E. O. Wilson. The ideas from evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. That vision was, after all, based on the Blank Slate (no permanent human nature), the Noble Savage (no selfish or evil instincts), and the Ghost in the Machine (an unfettered “we” that can choose better social arrangements). And here were scientists talking about selfish genes! And saying that adaptations are not for the good of the species but for the good of individuals and their kin (as if to vindicate Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society”). That people scrimp on altruism because it is vulnerable to cheaters. That in pre-state societies men go to war even when they are well fed, because status and women are permanent Darwinian incentives. That the moral sense is riddled with biases, including a tendency to self-deception. And that conflicts of genetic interest are built in to social animals and leave us in a state of permanent tragedy. It looked as if the scientists were saying to proponents of the Tragic Vision: You’re right, they’re wrong.

My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. The sciences say nothing, of course, about differences in values that are associated with particular right-wing and left-wing positions (such as in the tradeoffs between unemployment and environmental protection, diversity and economic efficiency, or individual freedom and community cohesion). Nor do they speak directly to policies that are based on a complex mixture of assumptions about the world. But they do speak to the parts of the visions that are general claims about how the mind works. Those claims may be evaluated against the facts, just like any empirical hypothesis. The Utopian vision that human nature might radically change in some imagined society of the remote future is, of course, literally unfalsifiable, but I think that many of the discoveries recounted in preceding chapters make it unlikely.

The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom. 24

The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty. 26

The first revolution with a Utopian Vision was the French Revolution—recall Wordsworth’s description of the times, with “human nature seeming born again.” The revolution overthrew the ancien régime and sought to begin from scratch with the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and a belief that salvation would come from vesting authority in a morally superior breed of leaders. The revolution, of course, sent one leader after another to the guillotine as each failed to measure up to usurpers who felt they had a stronger claim to wisdom and virtue.

revolution by The Who: Meet the new boss; same as the old boss. Sowell points out that Marxism is a hybrid of the two visions. 27 It invokes the Tragic Vision to interpret the past, when earlier modes of production left no choice but the forms of social organization known as feudalism and capitalism. But it invokes a Utopian Vision for the future, in which we can shape our nature in dialectical interaction with the material and social environment. In that new world, people will be motivated by self-actualization rather than self-interest, allowing us to realize the ideal, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Marx wrote that a communist society would be the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved. 28 It doesn’t get any less tragic or more utopian than that.

Marxism is now almost universally recognized as an experiment that failed, at least in its worldly implementations. 30 The nations that adopted it either collapsed, gave it up, or languish in backward dictatorships. As we saw in earlier chapters, 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.

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

encomiums

How to anticipate and limit that corruption became an obsession of the framers. John Adams wrote, “The desire for the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger. It is the principal end of government to regulate this passion.” 37 Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The love of fame [is] the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” 38 James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Madison was especially adamant that the Constitution rein in the part of human nature that encourages war, which is not a primitive lust for blood, he claimed, but an advanced lust for esteem: War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is created, and it is the executive will to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war finally that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and the most dangerous weakness of the human breast—ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame—are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace. 41

The belief on the left that human nature can be changed at will, and the belief on the right that morality rests on God’s endowing us with an immaterial soul, are becoming rearguard struggles against the juggernaut of science. A popular bumper sticker in the 1990s urged, QUESTION AUTHORITY. Another bumper sticker replied, QUESTION GRAVITY. All political philosophies have to decide when their arguments are turning into the questioning of gravity.

Singer replies, “If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain life at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that that is just the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation.” 47 Singer’s leftism, like traditional leftism, is defined by a contrast with a defeatist Tragic Vision. But its goal—“doing something”—has been downsized considerably from Robert Kennedy’s goal in the 1960s of “building a new world society.”