The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Review
I picked up The Blank Slate as a follow up book after reading the excellent Matt Ridley's The Red Queen - Sex and The Evolution of Human Nature. Call me stupid but I thought at first The blank Slate to be a counterpoint to The Red Queen. Despite of the book's title Steven Pinker does not endorse the Blank Slate vision. The subtitle is the obvious giveaway: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Pinker's book is a criticism of the tripod that makes up the modern denial of human nature::
1 - The Blank Slate vision or the belief that humans are "infinitely malleable" as stated by O'Brian, the government agent in Orwell's 1984;
2 - The Noble Savage concept or the idyllic notion that in the natural state humans are selfless, peaceful and untroubled;
3 - The Ghost in the Machine doctrine or the idea that mind and body are made up of two different materials that can even exist separately.
Pinker's is a somewhat crooked tripod I must say. It barely stands up since the Ghost in the Machine leg is not very well developed. My take is that the Ghost in the Machine is where a lot of otherwise rational people succumb to superstition and it is also where a book can start to hurt feelings. Richard Dawkins, writer of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, and many other great books would press on but Pinker is more gentle and controversy averse, I suppose.
Pinker criticises the Blank Slate tripod by doing a thorough bibliographical review and showing that the common fears that are usually placated by the tripod are undeserved. The common fears are::
1 - The Fear of Inequality - If humans are born with innate differences these differences could grow into inequalities among people;
2 - The Fear of Imperfectability - If we are born already saddled with our sins and flaws any effort to improve society would be a waste of time;
3 - The Fear of Determinism - The fear of legal defences starting with "my genes made me do it" or "biology ate my homework";
4 - The Fear of Nihilism - The fear that life would lose its meaning if, after all, our motives and values are mere products of the physiology of the brain.
The Blank Slate strides the divide between social sciences and - for lack of a better word - hard sciences but with a much firmer foot on the social sciences side. Instead of throwing at us the latest and greatest scientific discovery that supposedly rebuffs one of the Blank Slate tripod legs Pinker prefers to use old-school philosophy, sociology, ethnography or psychology to convince the reader that the fear that gave rise to the tripod leg was unwarranted to start with.
The book was one of the two 2003 general nonfiction Pulitzer finalists. In my humble opinion it deserved the prize.
Leonardo Alves
Belo Horizonte - Brazil - 2010
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Feature
- ISBN13: 9780142003343
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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Overview
In
The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.
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Customer Reviews
Prepare to get pissed - Glenn E. Graham - Pflugerville, TX USA
Mr. Skinner likes to show one side of the picture. If you check the facts. He tends to take the statistics that support his points. Oh that is life Lies, Damn Likes, and Statistics. Can't blame him.He does make you rethink my views.
Bitter Pills and Stone Soup - Markar Melkonian -
In his bestselling book The Blank Slate, psycholinguist Steven Pinker recalls how sixteen hours of lawless mayhem during a police strike in Montreal shook his faith in the perfectability of human nature and set his idealistic former self on the high road of science. Here is the passage:
As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960's, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 am on October [7], 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order.
"Montreal is in a state of shock," the CBC reported on Oct. 8, 1969--and so was young Pinker, barely fifteen years of age. "Shattered shop windows and a trail of broken glass are evidence of looting that erupted in the downtown core when 3700 members of the Montreal Policemen's Brotherhood walked off the job over a pay dispute. With no one to stop them, students and separatists joined the rampage." By the time the trucks had hauled away the shattered glass, a police officer lay dead, 108 people had been arrested; thirty citizens had been injured, and a certain Russian anarchist had lost a teenage fan. In the minds of some Canadians, moreover, their country had lost its special exemption from the large-scale urban violence that had seemed to be the special province of its southern neighbor. Since Harlem 1964, more than one hundred "riots" south of the border had claimed more than one hundred fatalities. But Canadians wanted to believe that their country was different. A year after the Police Strike, a Canadian rock band produced a hit song that proclaimed, perhaps too self-righteously, "I don't need your war machines, I don't need your ghetto scenes." But by that time Canada's pacific self-image bore a battle scar or two.
The police strike had put to the test Pinker's assumption that humans, left to their own devices, "all just get along," as Rodney King put it, in the form of a request, two decades later. "Montreal's Night of Terror" had tested those assumptions and falsified them. As soon as Pinker's fabulously peaceable fellow citizens had noticed that the thin blue line had faded for a day, they reverted to conduct unbecoming of Canadians. "L'anarchie frappe Montréal," announced a Radio Canada report of October 7, and this anarchie did not look pretty. "When law enforcement vanishes," Pinker concluded, "all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias." One can imagine the wagging finger and the eyebrows raised for emphasis.
The Montreal Police Strike came about as close to a crucial experiment in history or sociology as one could expect. And the verdict was clear to all who even for a moment dropped their ideological blinders: thanks to intractable human nature, utopia is indeed a nowhere destination. "This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters," Pinker reported, and then added parenthetically: "and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist." Disabused of his Bakunin-stoked illusions, the young Pinker learned to accept the verdict of evidence, even when it confuted his most cherished assumptions. And this, as the historically inaccurate cliché would have it, is what science is all about. The foretaste of life as a scientist was the taste of a bitter pill, and in the fall of 1969 Steven Pinker swallowed an adult dose.
The bank robbers, the looters, and the armed shopowners who tried to fend them off are all exemplary embodiments of human nature. Presumably, the in-group solidarity of unionized taxi drivers, or of undergraduates and Québécois separatists was another instantiation of out-group bias in Montreal. In this respect they did not differ much from gangs and mafias. Even the solidarity of 2400 metropolitan firefighters who joined the strike in support of the Policemen's Brotherhood could easily be explained as an instance of reciprocal altruism at best, or as an extended and ramified instance of kin selection. Or to a xenophobic closing of ranks against mutual outsiders. Or perhaps it was just radical-chic street theater. If humans were angels, of course, rulers would be unnecessary. But humans are incapable of pure altruism; the compass of communal sharing is narrow, and so we require "government"--which notably includes the repressive power of the police--to keep a lid on the violence that boils up otherwise.
Pinker has presented us with a dramatic story of lost innocence, and to his credit he kept the story short. In the end, young Pinker swallowed the bitter pill, accepted the facts of life and human nature, and followed the trail of shattered glass to the high road of science. Reluctantly, sadly but stalwartly, he embraced the Tragic View of Life, the realization that life is not fair.
The author of The Blank Slate, of course, would acknowledge that the Wretched of the Earth do not need a Harvard professor to teach them that life is not fair. Sweatshop workers, refugees, targets of tyrants and death squads, mothers of a billion children who go to bed hungry every night--these people can figure out on their own that life is not fair. But Pinker's more likely audience, including overeducated Up-Towners and graduates of Comp Lit programs, need a little reminder every now and then.
The high road of science, we have heard, is paved with objectivity. Objectivity, presumably, involves taking the facts as they are, without embellishment or spin. To be objective, one must acquire a taste for bitter pills.
But here and there in The Blank Slate one encounters less-than-optimal modeling of the prescribed behavior. Here, for instance, is Pinker's version of an old French tale, recounted in Marcia Brown's Caldecott Honor book, Stone Soup, first published in 1947:
In the children's story called "Stone Soup," a hobo borrows the use of a woman's kitchen ostensibly to make soup from a stone. But he gradually asks for more and more ingredients to balance the flavor until he has prepared a rich and hearty stew at her expense.
We return once again to the hard facts of life: there is no such thing as pure altruism; people are out for themselves and their nearest of kin. The woman was a fool; the hobo was a knave, and as long as knaves conceal their knavery, they come out on top.
But compare this to the familiar story as Brown tells it: not a hobo in the famous children's tale nor in the older tale, either; rather, three hungry soldiers returning from a war. (In the older version of the story, it was a Napoleonic war.) Not one woman, but the entire village. Not a private kitchen, either, but a public space. And "at her expense" in what way? The soldiers set up a borrowed pot in a conspicuous spot, light a fire, fill the pot with water and plop stones into it. At first the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry soldiers, but one by one, reluctantly, they add ingredients to the pot, and in the end the soldiers and the villagers eat their fill, dance, and laugh together into the night. The clever soldiers tricked villagers out of their greed and xenophobia, and as a result of sharing and working together, advantages accrued to each and all. That, one can pretty confidently conclude, is the moral of the unreconstructed story. As Pinker has spinned it, though, the story has a very different moral, a moral more in keeping with the tragic view of life that "the new sciences of human nature" are said to certify.
Here and throughout The Blank Slate, Pinker has done us the favor of supplying the morals to the stories that objectivity and human nature require. Those famous ideological blinders, it seems, are a funny sort of accessory: only former selves and other people ever wear them.
A definitive case - Toban Wiebe -
Pinker presents nothing new, he is simply popularizing and tracing out the implications of the discoveries in the sciences of human nature. The book is very enjoyable to read. He rips apart such nuisance ideologies as relativism, constructionism, Utopianism, gender-feminism, and modernism/post-modernism. Most importantly, he takes the moral high ground, showing that the Blank Slate is an unacceptable moral position. The book drips with insights. For example, he shows that parents have virtually no influence on how their children turn out, thus invalidating a huge body of parenting advice. I was surprised at how well read Pinker is, the book is remarkably cross-disciplinary. He definitely did his homework.
"that eternally fascinating thing we call human nature" - David Wolf - U.S.
First of all, this is one of the best science books I have read. It is very long and detailed, and some have complained about the thoroughness of the work, but as such, it reminded me of how it was to read "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin. It is that well argued, with copious references, and places the idea of the human brain as a blank slate in the trash bin where it belongs with flat earth theory and intelligent design.
It is difficult to review this book which already has over 200 very detailed reviews, so my focus on this review will be the error of some of the negative reviews.
The thesis of this book is simply that there is such a thing as human nature. The reason the argument is being put forth in the book is because there have been three main alternate hypotheses for what humans are guided by in regard to their minds. The three ideas that have been argued in the past have been:
1. The Blank Slate
2. The Noble Savage
3. The Ghost in the Machine
These may be self-explanatory, but the blank slate is the idea that the brain has no built in propensities, and thus may be entirely guided and developed by environment. The noble savage is the idea that native man without civilization is much more gentle and peaceable than civilized man. The ghost in the machine is the idea promoted by many religions that there is a spirit or soul which is the being, and so the brain is not really the source of the mind.
It appears many of the negative reviews have spouted many of the arguments for one of these ideas, and therefore the reviewers may not have actually read the book, wherein Pinker thoroughly shreds each of these ideas, and the arguments put forth by the reviewers.
I will not explain Pinker's view of human nature in detail here, as it is done in great detail in the book, as well as in many of the excellent reviews already present, but I will simply say that the theory he promotes is infinitely more reasonable, being an amalgam of genetics, epigenetics, biological development, and environment, in varying degrees. I leave it to the intelligent reader to come to their own conclusions as to which of these ideas has the most merit, and read the book if you want to read one of the most erudite books of our time, keeping in mind that to explain a thing is not to endorse ugly side effects of that thing.
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