The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

As for cultural norms of masculinity and sexism, Spain has its machismo, Italy its braggadocio, and Japan its rigid gender roles, yet their homicide rates are a fraction of that of the more feminist-influenced United States.

The Israelis and Swiss are armed to the teeth but have low rates of violent personal crime, and among American states, Maine and North Dakota have the lowest homicide rates but almost every home has a gun.

According to independent surveys in several countries by the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss, more than 80 percent of women and 90 percent of men fantasize about killing people they don’t like, especially romantic rivals, stepparents, and people who have humiliated them in public.

Studies of warfare in pre-state societies have confirmed that men do not have to be short of food or land to wage war.50 They often raid other villages to abduct women, to retaliate for past abductions, or to defend their interests in disputes over exchanges of women for marriage. In societies in which women have more say in the matter, men still compete for women by competing for the status and wealth that tend to attract them.

When George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he once saw a man running for his life half-dressed, holding up his pants with one hand. “I refrained from shooting at him,” Orwell wrote. “I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to your self.”

The historian Barbara Tuchman has highlighted the role of self-deception in calamitous wars throughout history in her books The Guns of August (about World War I) and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Cultures of honor spring up all over the world because they amplify universal human emotions like pride, anger, revenge, and the love of kith and kin, and because they appear at the time to be sensible responses to local conditions.

In Culture of Honor, the social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen show that violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen.81 Societies that herd animals meet both conditions.

African American inner-city neighborhoods are among the more conspicuously violent environments in Western democracies, and they too have an entrenched culture of honor.

conspicuous economic inequality is a good predictor of violence (better than poverty itself), presumably because men deprived of legitimate means of acquiring status compete for status on the streets instead.

Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.

each understood they were in a Hobbesian trap. Kennedy had just read The Guns of August and saw how the leaders of great nations could blunder into a pointless war.

denying the logic of violence makes it easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extinguish it.

There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

Equity feminism opposes sex discrimination and other forms of unfairness to women. It is part of the classical liberal and humanistic tradition

Gender feminism holds that women continue to be enslaved by a pervasive system of male dominance, the gender system, in which “bi-sexual infants are transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey.”

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.

In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down. As we shall see, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, and ethnography are documenting sex differences that almost certainly originate in human biology.

So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.

When Hunter has two mommies, he acts just as much like a boy as if he had a mommy and a daddy.

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Pinker's views on this subject are very similar to the views Maya Angelou expressed in her book <i>Letters to My Daughter</i>:“I am concerned that the pundits, who wish to shape our thinking and, subsequently, our laws, too often make rape an acceptable and even explainable social occurrence. If rape is merely about the possession of power, the search for and the exercising of power, we must simply understand and even forgive the natural human action of sex in the extreme.”

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.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but much of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle.

Decades of studies have shown that, all things being equal, children turn out pretty much the same way whether their mothers work or stay at home, whether they are placed in daycare or not, whether they have siblings or are only children, whether their parents have a conventional or an open marriage, whether they grow up in an Ozzie-and-Harriet home or a hippie commune, whether their conceptions were planned, were accidental, or took place in a test tube, and whether they have two parents of the same sex or one of each.

Even growing up without a father in the house, which does correlate with troubles such as dropping out of school, remaining idle, and having babies while a teenager, may not cause the troubles directly.

People’s accents almost always resemble the accents of their childhood peers, not the accents of their parents. Children of immigrants acquire the language of their adopted homeland perfectly, without a foreign accent, as long as they have access to native speaking peers. They then try to force their parents to switch to the new language, and if they succeed, they may forget the mother tongue entirely.

by the same token she is assigning adults responsibility for their own lives: if your life is not going well, stop moaning that it’s all your parents’ fault. She is rescuing mothers from fatuous theories that blame them for every misfortune that befalls their children, and from the censorious know-it-alls who make them feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to work or skip a reading of Goodnight Moon.

Harris puts it, “If you don’t think the moral imperative is a good enough reason to be nice to your kid, try this one: Be nice to your kid when he’s young so that he will be nice to you when you’re old.”

Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than narrative) is a by-product of three other adaptations: the hunger for status, the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends.

Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties. Here are some of those roots.

ONCE WE RECOGNIZE what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability—stripping away pretense—to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!

Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.

Many biologists are starting to express their exasperation with the use of epigenetics as “the currently fashionable response to any question to which you do not know the answer,” as the epidemiologist George Davey Smith has put it.

Though evolutionary psychologists and behavioral geneticists no longer walk around with a target painted on their backs (and as I mentioned, I suffered no dirty tricks in the wake of The Blank Slate), the intimidation and censoring of heterodox thinkers in American universities may have worsened since 2002.

It was when modernism exerted a chokehold over elite arts, and then spawned postmodernism, that the denial of intrinsic beauty went overboard and gave us genres such as atonal music, brutalist architecture, postmodernist lit-crit, and grotesque conceptual art.