The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

For the same reason, Frank argues, we would be better off if we implemented a steeply graduated tax on consumption, replacing the current graduated tax on income. A consumption tax would damp down the futile arms race for ever more lavish cars, houses, and watches and compensate people with resources that provably increase happiness, such as leisure time, safer streets, and more pleasant commuting and working conditions.

low status triggers an ancient stress reaction that sacrifices tissue repair and immune function for an immediate fight-or-flight response.

But as with the other moral concerns examined in this part of the book, the effort to figure out what is going on has been hijacked by an effort to legislate the correct answer.

Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biological and psychological one. Nonetheless, the phenomena we call “social” and “political” are not external happenings that mysteriously affect human affairs like sunspots; they are shared understandings among individuals at a given time and place.

emphasis on the open-endedness of human rationality resonates with the finding from cognitive science that the mind is a combinatorial, recursive system.

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.

Harris, noting how recent and parochial is the belief that we can shape our children, quotes a woman living in a remote village of India in the 1950s. When asked what kind of man she hoped her child would grow into, she shrugged and replied, “It is in his fate, no matter what I want.”

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.

It is a scene that has the voice of the species in it: that infuriating, endearing, mysterious, predictable, and eternally fascinating thing we call human nature.