The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

“NOT ANOTHER BOOK on nature and nurture! Are there really people out there who still believe that the mind is a blank slate?

To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged.

I will retrace the history that led people to see human nature as a dangerous idea, and I will try to unsnarl the moral and political rat’s nests that have entangled the idea along the way.

Nor does acknowledging human nature have the political implications so many fear. It does not, for example, require one to abandon feminism, or to accept current levels of inequality or violence, or to treat morality as a fiction. For the most part I will try not to advocate particular policies or to advance the agenda of the political left or right. I believe that controversies about policy almost always involve tradeoffs between competing values, and that science is equipped to identify the tradeoffs but not to resolve them.

I hope to make our collective choices, whatever they are, better informed. If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs.

The refusal to acknowledge human nature is like the Victorians’ embarrassment about sex, only worse: it distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse, and our day-to-day lives.

First, the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate has distorted the study of human beings, and thus the public and private decisions that are guided by that research.

The analysis of ideas is commonly replaced by political smears and personal attacks. This poisoning of the intellectual atmosphere has left us unequipped to analyze pressing issues

Finally, the denial of human nature has not just corrupted the world of critics and intellectuals but has done harm to the lives of real people. The theory that parents can mold their children like clay has inflicted childrearing regimes on parents that are unnatural and sometimes cruel. It has distorted the choices faced by mothers as they try to balance their lives, and multiplied the anguish of parents whose children haven’t turned out the way they hoped. The belief that human tastes are reversible cultural preferences has led social planners to write off people’s enjoyment of ornament, natural light, and human scale and force millions of people to live in drab cement boxes.

the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like,”