The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

“Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is ‘the opium of the people’; they add a heartfelt, ‘Thank God!’”

Many writers today casually equate behavioral genetics with eugenics, as if studying the genetic correlates of behavior were the same as coercing people in their decisions about having children. Many equate evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism, as if studying our evolutionary roots were the same as justifying the station of the poor.

Twenty-five years of data have not been kind to its predictions. Chimpanzees are not peaceful vegetarians, as Montagu claimed, nor is the heritability of intelligence indistinguishable from zero, IQ a “reification” unrelated to the brain, personality and social behavior without any genetic basis, gender differences a product only of “psychocultural expectations,” or the number of murderous clans equal to the number of pacific bands.

In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience—beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence—in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research.

But I will go farther than that. It’s not just that claims about human nature are less dangerous than many people think. It’s that the denial of human nature can be more dangerous than people think.

Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs.

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.

SO COULD DISCOVERIES in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Absolutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs.

(The fact that the Declaration originally was applied only to white men, and that Jefferson was far from an egalitarian in the conduct of his own life, does not change the argument. Jefferson defended political equality among white men—a novel idea in his time—even as he acknowledged innate differences among white men.)

Can one really reconcile biological differences with a concept of social justice? Absolutely. In his famous theory of justice, the philosopher John Rawls asks us to imagine a social contract drawn up by self-interested agents negotiating under a veil of ignorance, unaware of the talents or status they will inherit at birth—ghosts ignorant of the machines they will haunt. He argues that a just society is one that these disembodied souls would agree to be born into, knowing that they might be dealt a lousy social or genetic hand.

A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is inherent to all political systems. The major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend there is no tradeoff. And that in turn means that any discovery of innate differences among individuals is not forbidden knowledge to be suppressed but information that might help us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner.

It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend

Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human.

Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.

As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

Most activities that moral people extol—being faithful to one’s spouse, turning the other cheek, treating every child as precious, loving thy neighbor as thyself—are “biological errors” and are utterly unnatural in the rest of the living world.

If, however, the mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, self-respect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors.

The difference between explaining behavior and excusing it is captured in the saying “To understand is not to forgive,” and has been stressed in different ways by many philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and Sartre.13 Most philosophers believe that unless a person was literally coerced (that is, someone held a gun to his head), we should consider his actions to have been freely chosen, even if they were caused by events inside his skull.

The dynamic between Calvin and Hobbes (the cartoon characters) is inherent to social organisms, and there are reasons to believe that the solution to it—a moral sense—evolved in our species rather than having to be deduced from scratch by each of us after we’ve picked ourselves up out of the mud.

Children as young as a year and a half spontaneously give toys, proffer help, and try to comfort adults or other children who are visibly distressed.

The alternative, then, to the religious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others’), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other people’s pain).

What would be the right thing to do if God had commanded people to be selfish and cruel rather than generous and kind? Those who root their values in religion would have to say that we ought to be selfish and cruel. Those who appeal to a moral sense would say that we ought to reject God’s command. This shows—I hope—that it is our moral sense that deserves priority.8

The recurrence of evil acts committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions. An omnipotent authority that no one can see is a useful backer for malevolent leaders hoping to enlist holy warriors.

This is why we should reject the argument that if people stopped believing in divine retribution they would do evil with impunity. Yes, if nonbelievers thought they could elude the legal system, the opprobrium of their communities, and their own consciences, they would not be deterred by the threat of spending eternity in hell. But they would also not be tempted to massacre thousands of people by the promise of spending eternity in heaven.

No creature equipped with circuitry to understand that it is immoral for you to hurt me could discover anything but that it is immoral for me to hurt you. As with numbers and the number sense, we would expect moral systems to evolve toward similar conclusions in different cultures or even different planets. And in fact the Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative.13 Our moral sense may have evolved to mesh with an intrinsic logic of ethics rather than concocting it in our heads out of nothing.

The concept of truth and reality behind such tests appears to be universal. People in all cultures distinguish truth from falsity and inner mental life from overt reality, and try to deduce the presence of unobservable objects from the perceptible clues they leave behind.

Yes, every snowflake is unique, and no category will do complete justice to every one of its members. But intelligence depends on lumping together things that share properties, so that we are not flabbergasted by every new thing we encounter.

Students cannot learn Newtonian physics until they unlearn their intuitive impetus-based physics.14 They cannot learn modern biology until they unlearn their intuitive biology, which thinks in terms of vital essences. And they cannot learn evolution until they unlearn their intuitive engineering, which attributes design to the intentions of a designer.

Between two-thirds and three-quarters of them never implant in the uterus and are spontaneously aborted, some because they are genetically defective, others for no discernible reason.

There is no solution to these dilemmas, because they arise out of a fundamental incommensurability: between our intuitive psychology, with its all-or-none concept of a person or soul, and the brute facts of biology, which tell us that the human brain evolved gradually, develops gradually, and can die gradually. And that means that moral conundrums such as abortion, euthanasia, and animal rights will never be resolved in a decisive and intuitively satisfying way.

This does not mean that no policy is defensible and that the whole matter should be left to personal taste, political power, or religious dogma. 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.

Many people avoid flying, though car travel is eleven times more dangerous.

They fear getting eaten by a shark, though they are four hundred times more likely to drown in their bathtub.

The possibility that we might come to the end of our cognitive rope has been brought home by modern physics. We have every reason to believe that the best theories in physics are true, but they present us with a picture of reality that makes no sense to the intuitions about space, time, and matter that evolved in the brains of middle-sized primates.

Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can entertain.

As they say, insanity is hereditary: you get it from your children.

Since it takes one member of each sex to make a baby, access to females is the limiting resource for males in reproduction. For a male to maximize the number of his descendants, he should mate with as many females as possible; for a female to maximize the number of her descendants, she should mate with the best-quality male available. This explains the two widespread sex differences in many species in the animal kingdom: males compete, females choose; males seek quantity, females quality.

The fact that people are tormented by the Darwinian economics of babies they are no longer having is testimony to the long reach of human nature.

If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including feminists.

The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us.

H. L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Liberals are liberal about sexual behavior but not about business practices; conservatives want to conserve communities and traditions, but they also favor the free market economy that subverts them.

And the assumption that central planners were morally disinterested and cognitively competent enough to direct an entire economy led to comical inefficiencies with serious consequences.

John Adams wrote, “The desire for the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger. It is the principal end of government to regulate this passion.”

For their part, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (the authors of The Bell Curve) argued that the heritability of intelligence ought to galvanize the left into a greater commitment to Rawlsian social justice.

Unfortunately, status is a zero-sum game, so when everyone has more money to spend on cars and houses, the houses and cars get bigger but people are no happier than they were before.

The point is that traditional political alignments ought to change as we learn more about human beings. The ideologies of the left and the right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone knew what a gene or a neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?

American children are exposed to violent role models, of course, but they are also exposed to clowns, preachers, folk singers, and drag queens; the question is why children find some people more worthy of imitation than others.

People were more violent in the centuries before television and movies were invented. Canadians watch the same television shows as Americans but have a fourth their homicide rate. When the British colony of St. Helena installed television for the first time in 1995, its people did not become more violent.24 Violent computer games took off