The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine—or, as philosophers call them, empiricism, romanticism, and dualism—are logically independent, but in practice they are often found together.

The doctrine of Social Darwinism (or, as it ought to be called, Social Spencerism, for Darwin wanted no part of it) attracted such unsurprising spokesmen as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.3 Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton had suggested that human evolution should be given a helping hand by discouraging the less fit from breeding, a policy he called eugenics.

Educated people try to be conscious of their hidden prejudices and to measure them against the facts and against the sensibilities of others. In public life we try to judge people as individuals, not as specimens of a sex or ethnic group.

The very idea that the members of an ethnic group should be persecuted because of their biology fills us with revulsion. These changes were cemented by the bitter lessons of lynchings, world wars, forced sterilizations, and the Holocaust, which showcased the grave implications of denigrating an ethnic group.

(There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? “It was good for you; how was it for me?”)

As in the story of Socrates drawing abstract philosophical concepts out of a slave boy, Boas showed that he could elicit new word forms for abstract concepts like “goodness” and “pity” out of a Kwakiutl native from the Pacific Northwest.

In these three chapters I have given you a summary of the current scientific case for a complex human nature. The rest of the book is about its implications.

I had misgivings about the book, which was short on argument and long on sanctimony.

I love this phrase. I fully intend to steal it sometime.

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE IS not for sissies. Researchers may wake up to discover that they are despised public figures because of some area they have chosen to explore or some datum they have stumbled upon.

Today the idea of guiding scientific research by “a conscious application of Marxist philosophy” is just embarrassing, and as the evolutionary psychologist Martin Daly pointed out, “Sufficient research to fill a first issue of Dialectical Biology has yet to materialize.”

Samuel Johnson wrote, “We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.”

Confucius could have been right when he wrote, “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart.”

There are more genetic differences among chimpanzees, for instance, than there are among humans, even though we dwarf them in number. The reason is that our ancestors passed through a population bottleneck fairly recently in our evolutionary history

Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do.

cultural capital: habits and values that promote economic success.

Unequal treatment in the name of equality can take many forms.

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.

When the biochemist (and radical scientist) George Wald was solicited for a semen sample by William Shockley’s sperm bank for Nobel Prize–winning scientists, he replied, “If you want sperm that produces Nobel Prize winners you should be contacting people like my father, a poor immigrant tailor. What have my sperm given the world? Two guitarists!”

Hitler was evil because he caused the deaths of thirty million people and inconceivable suffering to countless others, not because his beliefs made reference to biology (or linguistics or nature or smoking or God). Smearing the guilt from his actions to every conceivable aspect of his factual beliefs can only backfire.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.”

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.

utopians have to think of ways to control behavior, and when propaganda doesn’t do the trick, more emphatic techniques are tried. The Marxist utopians of the twentieth century, as we saw, needed a tabula rasa free of selfishness and family ties and used totalitarian measures to scrape the tablets clean or start over with new ones.

The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are primary in people’s minds. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name, at least not for long. Names for minorities will continue to change as long as people have negative attitudes toward them. We will know that we have achieved mutual respect when the names stay put.

Very important.

So the “moment” of conception is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours.22 Nor is the conceptus destined to become a baby. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of them never implant in the uterus and are spontaneously aborted, some because they are genetically defective, others for no discernible reason.

Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times.

The bizarre misconceptions of cloning can be traced to the persistent belief that the body is suffused with a soul.

Virtually every animal and vegetable sold in a health-food store has been “genetically modified” for millennia by selective breeding and hybridization.

A blanket fear of all artificial and genetically modified foods is patently irrational on health grounds, and it could make food more expensive and hence less available to the poor.

A recurring event in human history is the outbreak of ghettoization, confiscation, expulsion, and mob violence against middlemen, often ethnic minorities who learned to specialize in the middleman niche.49 The Jews in Europe are the most familiar example, but the expatriate Chinese, the Lebanese, the Armenians, and the Gujeratis and Chettyars of India have suffered similar histories of persecution.

The immediate problem with Malthusian prophecies is that they underestimate the effects of technological change in increasing the resources that support a comfortable life.55 In the twentieth century food supplies increased exponentially, not linearly.

the effect of being raised by a given pair of parents within a culture is surprisingly small: children who grow up in the same home end up no more alike in personality than children who were separated at birth; adopted siblings grow up to be no more similar than strangers.

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.

There is an old joke about two social workers discussing a problematic child: “Johnny came from a broken home.” “Yes, Johnny could break any home.”

Indeed, the problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality. The problem may be that we have too much.

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.

Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.

Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on the other side don’t immediately capitulate, it only proves they are impervious to reason.

Reciprocal altruism, in particular, is just the traditional concept of the social contract restated in biological terms. Of course, humans were never solitary (as Rousseau and Hobbes incorrectly surmised), and they did not inaugurate group living by haggling over a contract at a particular time and place.

THE RIGHT-LEFT AXIS aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that at first glance seem to have nothing in common.

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.

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

“Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried,” said Winston Churchill. These are encomiums worthy of the Tragic Vision. For all their flaws, liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale social organization our sorry species has come up with so far.

Modern democracies never have famines, almost never wage war on one another, and are the top choice of people all over the world who vote with their feet or with their boats. The moderate success of democracies, like the failures of radical revolutions and of Marxist governments, is now widely enough agreed upon that it may serve as another empirical test for rival theories of human nature.

(Significantly, the founders appear not to have been influenced by Rousseau at all, and the popular belief that they got the idea of democracy from the Iroquois Federation is just 1960s granola.)

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.”

By working within the glaringly undersized moral circle of the day, the Constitution failed to stand in the way of the genocide of native peoples, the slavery and segregation of African Americans, and the disenfranchisement of women. It said little about the conduct of foreign affairs,

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.1 WINSTON CHURCHILL’S

Members of Homo antecessor, relatives of the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, bashed and butchered one another too, suggesting that violence and cannibalism go back at least 800,000 years.

THE STATEMENT THAT “violence is learned behavior” is a mantra repeated by right-thinking people to show that they believe that violence should be reduced. It is not based on any sound research. The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that “we know the conditions that breed violence,” we barely have a clue.

Most countries in the Third World, and many of the former republics of the Soviet Union, are considerably more violent, and they have nothing like the American tradition of individualism.