The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

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 prevailing theories of mind were refashioned to make racism and sexism as untenable as possible.

The word culture used to refer to exalted genres of entertainment, such as poetry, opera, and ballet. The other familiar sense—“the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought”—is only a century old. This change in the English language is just one of the legacies of the father of modern anthropology, Franz Boas (1858–1942).

What mattered to him was the idea that all ethnic groups are endowed with the same basic mental abilities.

The suggestion that they can be solved by a lump of Silly Putty that is passively molded by something called “culture” just doesn’t cut the mustard.

the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.

simple explanation is that the affect programs fire up facial expressions in the same way in all people, but a separate system of “display rules” governs when they can be shown.

Cognitive scientists at the East Pole suspect that the content-based modules are differentiated largely by the genes; 24 those at the West Pole suspect they begin as small innate biases in attention and then coagulate out of statistical patterns in the sensory input. 25

The conscious mind—the self or soul—is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. Sigmund Freud immodestly wrote that “humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naïve self-love”: the discovery that our world is not the center of the celestial spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we were not specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

There is much we don’t understand about how the brain is laid out in development, but we know that it is not indefinitely malleable by experience.

An innate difference among people is not the same thing as an innate human nature that is universal across the species.

Initiation rites, tribal badges, prescribed periods of mourning, and ritualized forms of address may not answer these questions definitively, but they can remove clouds of suspicion that would otherwise hang over people’s heads.

We should understand culture, according to the cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber, as the epidemiology of mental representations: the spread of ideas and practices from person to person.

CULTURE, THEN, IS a pool of technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them live their lives, not a collection of arbitrary roles and symbols that happen to befall them.

HISTORY AND CULTURE, then, can be grounded in psychology, which can be grounded in computation, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution.

Good reductionism (also called hierarchical reductionism) consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying them.

What is the payoff for connecting the social and cultural levels of analysis to the psychological and biological ones? It is the thrill of discoveries that could never be made within the boundaries of a single discipline, such as universals of beauty, the logic of language, and the components of the moral sense.

The problem lies in the credo that one can do everything with a generic model as long as it is sufficiently trained.

Some parts of the mind just aren’t plastic, and no discoveries about how sensory cortex gets wired will change that fact.

onlookers reacted differently from how they would to discoveries about, say, the origin of comets or the classification of lizards, and scientists reverted to the moralistic mindset that comes so naturally to our species.

The problem is with the line of reasoning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all.

the amount of genetic variation found among humans is what a biologist would expect in a species with a small number of members.

The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races.

Here is where the distinction between innate variation and innate universals is crucial.

Equality in spite of evident nonidentity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity.

Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. “The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary,” wrote Marx; “the will to create mankind anew” is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. 49 They also shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disaster. 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.”

naturalistic fallacy, the belief that whatever happens in nature is good.

As the legal scholar Owen Jones points out, the evolutionary analysis of stepparenting—or of anything else—has no automatic policy implications. Rather, it delineates a tradeoff and forces us to choose an optimum along it. In this case, the tradeoff is between minimizing child abuse while stigmatizing stepparents, on one hand, and being maximally fair to stepparents while tolerating an increase in child abuse, on the other.

biology of human nature would seem to admit more and more people into the ranks of the blameless.

Hume noted the dilemma inherent in equating the problem of moral responsibility with the problem of whether behavior has a physical cause: either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them.

Whatever may be its inherent abstract worth, responsibility has an eminently practical function: deterring harmful behavior.

People who are emotionally driven to retaliate against those who cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more credible adversaries and less likely to be exploited.

From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible sort of moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.

The explanations may help us understand the parts of the brain that made a behavior tempting, but they say nothing about the other parts of the brain (primarily in the prefrontal cortex) that could have inhibited the behavior by anticipating how the community would respond to it. We are that community, and our major lever of influence consists in appealing to that inhibitory brain system.

nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

“As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view.”

Most cognitive psychologists believe that conceptual categories come from two mental processes. 12 One of them notices clumps of entries in the mental spreadsheet and treats them as categories with fuzzy boundaries, prototypical members, and overlapping similarities, like the members of a family. That’s why our mental category “duck” can embrace odd ducks that don’t match the prototypical duck, such as lame ducks, who cannot swim or fly, Muscovy ducks, which have claws and spurs on their feet, and Donald Duck, who talks and wears clothing. The other mental process looks for crisp rules and definitions and enters them into chains of reasoning. The second system can learn that true ducks molt twice a season and have overlapping scales on their legs and hence that certain birds that look like geese and are called geese really are ducks.

As with so many ideas in social science, the centrality of language is taken to extremes in deconstructionism, postmodernism, and other relativist doctrines.

But as the technical terms of the theory make clear, language is serving as a slave of an executive, not as the medium of all thought.

Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.

A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term.

As the bioethicist Ronald Green has pointed out, it just means we have to reconceptualize the problem: from finding a boundary in nature to choosing a boundary that best trades off the conflicting goods and evils for each policy dilemma.

They mentally tabulate the number of disaster scenarios, rather than mentally aggregating the probabilities of the disaster scenarios.

He begins by pointing out that human material existence is limited by ideas, not by stuff. People don’t need coal or copper wire or paper per se; they need ways to heat their homes, communicate with other people, and store information.

the combinatorial process of creating new ideas can circumvent the logic of Malthus:

few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as “beautiful” or “elegant.”

The genetic economics of sex also predicts that both sexes have a genetic incentive to commit adultery, though for partly different reasons. A philandering man can have additional offspring by impregnating women other than his wife. 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.

autonomy-community-divinity trichotomy

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.