The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the malleability of their original endowment. . . . The great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them. —Ruth Benedict (1934) 36 We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions. —Margaret Mead (1935) 37

The women got it the most right (nuance!)

Ghost in the Machine. The declaration that we can change what we don’t like about ourselves became a watchword of social science.

Transing

Face-recognition systems have advanced to the point that civil libertarians are concerned about possible abuse when they are used with security cameras in public places.

I remember when we spoke this way. :[

(A few anthropologists say there are cultures with no emotions at all!) 20 For example, Catherine Lutz wrote that the Ifaluk (a Micronesian people) do not experience our “anger” but instead undergo an experience they call song. Song is a state of dudgeon triggered by a moral infraction such as breaking a taboo or acting in a cocky manner. It licenses one to shun, frown at, threaten, or gossip about the offender, though not to attack him physically. The target of song experiences another emotion allegedly unknown to Westerners: metagu, a state of dread that impels him to appease the song-ful one by apologizing, paying a fine, or offering a gift.

Common chimps are among the most aggressive mammals known to zoology, bonobos among the most peaceable; in common chimps the males dominate the females, in bonobos the females have the upper hand; common chimps have sex for procreation, bonobos for recreation.

Don’t we all want to be more like the bonobos, peaceful and joyously sexually active?

monogamous or polygamous? Gentle or aggressive? Cooperative or selfish? Indulgent with children or stern with them? Optimistic, pragmatic, or pessimistic?

Better, not to mention more human, to be fluid and non-binary about all that

National cuisines, too, have shallow roots. Potatoes in Ireland, paprika in Hungary, tomatoes in Italy, hot chile peppers in India and China, and cassava in Africa come from New World plants, and were brought to their “traditional” homes in the centuries after the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. 21

The most obvious cultural difference on the planet is that some cultures are materially more successful than others.

Almost as obvious is when some cultures are spiritually more successful than others.

The most famous evidence for extreme plasticity in humans had been the ability of some children to grow up relatively normal even with an entire hemisphere surgically removed in infancy. 72 But that may be a special case, which arises from the fact that the primate brain is fundamentally a symmetrical organ. The typically human asymmetries—language more on the left, spatial attention and some emotions more on the right—are superimposed on that mostly symmetrical design. It would not be surprising if the hemispheres were genetically programmed with pretty much the same abilities, together with small biases that lead each hemisphere to specialize in some talents while letting others wither. With one hemisphere gone, the remaining one has to put all its capabilities to full use.

our brain hemspheres are specialized but also somewhat fluid and non-binary

The study of humans from an evolutionary perspective has shown that many psychological faculties (such as our hunger for fatty food, for social status, and for risky sexual liaisons) are better adapted to the evolutionary demands of our ancestral environment than to the actual demands of the current environment.

well that really depends on the type of fat, status, and liason

As the new sciences of human nature began to flourish, it was becoming clear that thinking is a physical process, that people are not psychological clones, that the sexes differ above the neck as well as below it, that the human brain was not exempt from the process of evolution, and that people in all cultures share mental traits that might be illuminated by new ideas in evolutionary biology. These developments presented intellectuals with a choice. Cooler heads could have explained that the discoveries were irrelevant to the political ideals of equal opportunity and equal rights, which are moral doctrines on how we ought to treat people rather than scientific hypotheses about what people are like. Certainly it is wrong to enslave, oppress, discriminate against, or kill people regardless of any foreseeable datum or theory that a sane scientist would offer.

But it was not a time for cool heads. Rather than detach the moral doctrines from the scientific ones, which would ensure that the clock would not be turned back no matter what came out of the lab and field, many intellectuals, including some of the world’s most famous scientists, made every effort to connect the two. The discoveries about human nature were greeted with fear and loathing because they were thought to threaten progressive ideals. All this could be relegated to the history books were it not for the fact that these intellectuals, who once called themselves radicals, are now the establishment, and the dread they sowed about human nature has taken root in modern intellectual life.

The specific accusations against Chagnon crumbled as quickly as those against Neel. Chagnon, contrary to Tierney’s charges, had not exaggerated Yanomamö violence or ignored the rest of their lifestyle; in fact, he had meticulously described their techniques for conflict resolution. 44 The suggestion that Chagnon introduced them to violence is simply incredible. Raiding and warfare among the Yanomamö have been described since the mid-1800s and were documented throughout the first half of the twentieth century, long

Compare to Sex at Dawn passage from yesterday

In an update of John Watson’s claim that he could turn any infant into a “doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors,” Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket précis claims that “our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit.”

wonder what the trans would say