Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. (2002, 2016)

In a paragraph

The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine have become established in intellectual life although they contradict science and commonsense.  By contrast, science is providing a rich picture of human nature that we can appreciate and employ.

Key points

• The Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves. That theory of human nature — namely, that it barely exists — it is based on a miracle — a complex mind arising out of nothing.

• The doctrine of the Blank Slate has become established in intellectual life, although it contradicts science and common sense.Similarly, the related doctrines of the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine are widely assumed but clearly untrue. The doctrines arose from ancient instincts, associationism, behaviourism, anti-racism, utopianism and religion.

• Know Thyself. Having attempted to make the very idea of human nature respectable, it is time to say something about what it is and what difference it makes for our public and private lives . I present some current ideas about the design specs of the basic human faculties . These are not just topics in a psychology curriculum but have implications for many arenas of public discourse. Ideas about the contents of cognition — concepts , words , and images — shed light on the roots of prejudice, on the media, and on the arts . Ideas about the capacity for reason can enter into our policies of education and applications of technology. Ideas about social relations are relevant to the family, to sexuality, to social organization, and to crime. Ideas about the moral sense inform the way we evaluate political movements and how we trade off one value against another. In each of these arenas, people always appeal to some conception of human nature, whether they acknowledge it or not.

• Reality is not socially constructed.Our concepts need to correspond to the world.   Our thoughts come before language, which is a tool to communicate and work out thoughts.

• Of all the faculties that go into the piece of work called man, language may be the most awe-inspiring.But a funny thing happened to language in intellectual life. Rather than being appreciated for its ability to communicate thought, it was condemned for its power to constrain thought. Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another, and we can co-opt it in many ways to help our thoughts along.

• Understanding the difference between our best science and our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective decisions better informed.Our faculties are imperfect for modern life. Our instinctive physics, biology,  psychology and economics need to be re-learnt.  For example, we do not have souls. Education is about learning what we cannot do instinctively and therefore can be hard and unnatural.

• The biological tragedy of the sexes is that the genetic interests of a man and a woman can be so close that they almost count as a single organism, but the possibilities for their interests to diverge are never far away.

• The tragedy of reciprocal altruism is that sacrifices on behalf of nonrelatives cannot survive without a web of disagreeable emotions like anxiety, mistrust, guilt, shame, and anger. Reciprocity hangs, like a sword of Damocles, over every human head.

• Psychopathy is a cheating strategy that evolved by frequency-dependent selection with a distinct cluster of traits.

• Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly.

• The moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error — moral illusions— just like our other faculties.

• Relativists might interpret the three spheres of morality as showing that individual rights are a parochial Western custom and that we should respect other cultures’ ethics of community and divinity as equally valid alternatives. I conclude instead that the design of the moral sense leaves people in all cultures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant passions and prejudices.

• 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.

• Personality comes from: Gene’s 50 percent, Shared Environment 0 percent, Unique Environment 50 percent. Realistic parents would be less anxious parents .

• Our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully complex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet. But except for a few intellectuals who have let their theories get the better of them, this is not a revolution in the world views of most people. I suspect that few people really believe, deep down, that boys and girls are interchangeable, that all differences in intelligence come from the environment, that parents can micromanage the personalities of their children, that humans are born free of selfish tendencies, or that appealing stories, melodies, and faces are arbitrary social constructions.

• O’Brien’s lecture in 1984 should give pause to the advocates of postmodernism. It is ironic that a philosophy that prides itself on deconstructing power should embrace a relativism that makes challenges to power impossible, because it denies that there are objective benchmarks against which the deceptions of the powerful can be evaluated.

• The doctrine that a collectivity is a living thing lies behind Marxist political philosophies and the social science tradition begun by Durkheim. Orwell is showing its dark side: the dismissal of the individual — the only entity that literally feels pleasure and pain — as a mere component that exists to further the interests of the whole . The sedition of Winston and his lover Julia began in the pursuit of simple human pleasures.

• Human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Comments

The book presents a thorough case against Blank Slate thinking, and sets out a modern scientific view of human nature.  It makes the case that psychology is a compellingly pursuit that is producing an understanding of man that is important for decision-making. 

For me the arguments against Blank Slate ideas at the start of the book were less interesting than the later positive discussions of aspects of human psychology.  I found particularly impressive the sections on cognition, instinctive thinking, family conflicts, morality and child development. Throughout, Pinker’s writing is superb.

NOTES

Preface

The Blank Slate: The dogma that human nature does not exist, in the face of evidence from science and common sense that it does. The problem is not just that these claims are preposterous but that the writers did not acknowledge they were saying things that common sense might call into question. This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety.

The wondrous complexity of the human mind, which we are apt to take for granted precisely because it works so well.

Part I: THE BLANK SLATE, THE NOBLE SAVAGE, AND THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Everyone has a theory of human nature . Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick. A tacit theory of human nature — that behavior is caused by thoughts and feelings — is embedded in the very way we think about people. We fill out this theory by introspecting on our own minds and assuming that our fellows are like ourselves, and by watching people’s behavior and filing away generalizations. We absorb still other ideas from our intellectual climate: from the expertise of authorities and the conventional wisdom of the day. 

For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from religion. 76 percent of Americans believe in the biblical account of creation, only 15 percent believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution is the best explanation for the origin of human life on Earth.

The Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves. That theory of human nature — namely, that it barely exists — it is based on a miracle — a complex mind arising out of nothing.

The chapters in this part of the book (Part I) are about the ascendance of the Blank Slate in modern intellectual life, and about the new view of human nature and culture that is beginning to challenge it. In succeeding parts we will witness the anxiety evoked by this challenge (Part II) and see how the anxiety may be assuaged (Part III). Then I will show how a richer conception of human nature can provide insight into language, thought, social life, and morality (Part IV) and how it can clarify controversies on politics, violence, gender, childrearing, and the arts (Part V). Finally I will show how the passing of the Blank Slate is less disquieting, and in some ways less revolutionary, than it first appears (Part VI).

1: The Official Theory

“Blank slate” is a loose translation of the medieval Latin term tabula rasa — literally, “scraped tablet.” Locke was taking aim at theories of innate ideas.

John Dryden’s Noble Savage: I am as free as Nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, when wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The Ghost in the Machine, like the Noble Savage, arose in part as a reaction to Hobbes. 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 joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, “Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?”

2: Silly Putty

The doctrine of the Blank Slate became entrenched in intellectual life in a form that has been called the Standard Social Science Model or social constructionism.

For Locke the Blank Slate was a weapon against the church and tyrannical monarchs. Locke’s intellectual heir John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873) was perhaps the first to apply his blank-slate psychology to political concerns we recognize today.

The associationism of Locke and Mill has been recognizable in psychology ever since. It became the core of most models of learning, especially in the approach called behaviorism

In behaviorism, an infant’s talents and abilities didn’t matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology.

Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946 and famous for recommending indulgence toward children, was in part a reaction to Watson. Skinner wrote several bestsellers arguing that harmful behavior is neither instinctive nor freely chosen but inadvertently conditioned.

Strict behaviorism is pretty much dead in psychology, but many of its attitudes live on.

Many neuroscientists equate learning with the forming of associations. Humans, then, are just rats with bigger blank slates, plus something called “cultural devices.”

The father of modern anthropology, Franz Boas (1858 – 1942).  Social scientists saw the malleability of humans and the autonomy of culture as doctrines that might bring about the age-old dream of perfecting mankind.

3: The Last Wall to Fall

The unification of knowledge, which the biologist E. O. Wilson has termed consilience.

Five ideas from the cognitive revolution that have revamped how we think and talk about minds. Computational theory of mind. The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures. The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts.

Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. 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.”

Part IV: KNOW THYSELF

Now that I have attempted to make the very idea of human nature respectable, it is time to say something about what it is and what difference it makes for our public and private lives. The chapters in Part IV present some current ideas about the design specs of the basic human faculties. These are not just topics in a psychology curriculum but have implications for many arenas of public discourse. Ideas about the contents of cognition — concepts, words, and images — shed light on the roots of prejudice, on the media, and on the arts. Ideas about the capacity for reason can enter into our policies of education and applications of technology. Ideas about social relations are relevant to the family, to sexuality, to social organization, and to crime. Ideas about the moral sense inform the way we evaluate political movements and how we trade off one value against another. In each of these arenas, people always appeal to some conception of human nature, whether they acknowledge it or not.

12: In Touch with Reality

The starting point for acknowledging human nature is a sheer awe and humility in the face of the staggering complexity of its source, the brain.  The fantastic complexity of the brain is there in part to register consequential facts about the world around us.

According to the relativistic wisdom prevailing in much of academia today, reality is socially constructed by the use of language, stereotypes, and media images. The idea that people have access to facts about the world is naïve, say the proponents of social constructionism, science studies, cultural studies, critical theory, postmodernism, and deconstructionism. False consciousness.  People may be mistaken about their own desires.

Naïve realism. Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.  But just because the world we know is a construct of our brain, that does not mean it is an arbitrary construct — a phantasm created by expectations or the social context. The demonstrations that refute naïve realism most decisively also refute the idea that the mind is disconnected from reality. There is a third alternative: that the brain evolved fallible yet intelligent mechanisms that work to keep us in touch with aspects of reality that were relevant to the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. And that is true not just of our perceptual faculties but of our cognitive faculties.

The seemingly innocuous suggestion that the categories of the mind correspond to something in reality became a contentious idea in the twentieth century because some categories — stereotypes of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation — can be harmful when they are used to discriminate or oppress. Richard Rorty. An unstated theory of human concept formation: that conceptual categories bear no systematic relation to things in the world but are socially constructed.

Intelligence depends on lumping together things that share properties, so that we are not flabbergasted by every new thing we encounter.

Most cognitive psychologists believe that conceptual categories come from two mental processes. 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. The other mental process looks for crisp rules and definitions and enters them into chains of reasoning.  The psychology of categorization. With some important exceptions, stereotypes are in fact not inaccurate.

Of all the faculties that go into the piece of work called man, language may be the most awe-inspiring.  But a funny thing happened to language in intellectual life. Rather than being appreciated for its ability to communicate thought, it was condemned for its power to constrain thought. Famous quotations from two philosophers capture the anxiety. “We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prisonhouse of language,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. Most linguists believe that deconstructionists have gone off the deep end.

Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another, and we can co-opt it in many ways to help our thoughts along. But it is not the same as thought, not the only thing that separates humans from other animals, not the basis of all culture, and not an inescapable prisonhouse, an obligatory agreement, the limits of our world, or the determiner of what is imaginable. A constant give-and-take between the thoughts we try to convey and the means our language offers to convey them.

The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are primary in people’s minds.

If we want to understand how politicians or advertisers manipulate us, the last thing we should do is blur distinctions among things in the world, our perception of those things when they are in front of our eyes, the mental images of those things that we construct from memory, and physical images such as photographs and drawings.

The reason that images cannot constitute the contents of our thoughts is that images, like words, are inherently ambiguous.

The “crisis of representation,” with its paranoia about the manipulation of our mind by media images, is overblown.

Exotic pronouncements about the limitations of our faculties, such as that there is nothing outside the text or that we inhabit a world of images rather than a real world, make it impossible even to identify lies and misrepresentations, let alone to understand how they are promulgated.

13: Out of Our Depths

Mismatch between the source of our passions in evolutionary history and the goals we set for ourselves today. What is true for the emotions may also be true for the intellect. Some of our perplexities may come from a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today.

People do not try to multiply six-digit numbers in their heads or remember the phone number of everyone they meet, because they know their minds were not designed for the job. But it is not as obvious when it comes to the way we conceptualize the world.

Intuitive physics, intuitive version of biology, intuitive psychology, spatial sense, number sense, sense of probability, intuitive economics, mental database and logic, language.  Our own cognitive makeup is a missing piece of many puzzles.

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history.

Far from being empty receptacles or universal learners, then, children are equipped with a toolbox of implements for reasoning and learning in particular ways, and those implements must be cleverly recruited to master problems for which they were not designed. That requires not just inserting new facts and skills in children’s minds but debugging and disabling old ones. Students cannot learn Newtonian physics until they unlearn their intuitive impetus-based physics. 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. Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant.

The ghost in the machine is deeply rooted in our way of thinking about people. A belief in the soul, in turn, meshes with our moral convictions.  The idea that ensoulment takes place at conception.

Fundamental incommensurability: between our intuitive psychology, with its all-or-none concept of a person or soul, and the brute facts of biology. Reconceptualize the problem: from finding a boundary in nature to choosing a boundary that best trades off.

People’s intuitive biology begins with the concept of an invisible essence residing in living things, which gives them their form and powers. These essentialist beliefs. The fear of genetically modified foods no longer seems so strange: it is simply the standard human intuition that every living thing has an essence.

The mind is more comfortable in reckoning probabilities in terms of the relative frequency of remembered or imagined events. They mentally tabulate the number of disaster scenarios, rather than mentally aggregating the probabilities of the disaster scenarios.

Understanding the difference between our best science and our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective decisions better informed.

Alan Fiske.  Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing.  Mandatory pricing schemes.  Outlawing interest. Ideas are what economists call “nonrival goods.”  Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.

Our intuitions about life and mind, like our intuitions about matter and space, may have run up against a strange world forged by our best science.

14: The Many Roots of Our Suffering

The biological tragedy of the sexes is that the genetic interests of a man and a woman can be so close that they almost count as a single organism, but the possibilities for their interests to diverge are never far away.  There are never just two people in bed. 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.

The tragedy of reciprocal altruism is that sacrifices on behalf of nonrelatives cannot survive without a web of disagreeable emotions like anxiety, mistrust, guilt, shame, and anger. Reciprocity hangs, like a sword of Damocles, over every human head.

The theory of reciprocal altruism raises another possibility: that some of the genetic differences among people in their social emotions are systematic.  Frequency-dependent selection can produce temporary or permanent mixtures of strategies.  Psychopathy is a cheating strategy that evolved by frequency-dependent selection. A distinct cluster of traits. Inveterate psychopaths and conditional psychopaths.

Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly.

15: The Sanctimonious Animal

The moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error — moral illusions, as it were — just like our other faculties.

Relativists might interpret the three spheres of morality as showing that individual rights are a parochial Western custom and that we should respect other cultures’ ethics of community and divinity as equally valid alternatives. I conclude instead that the design of the moral sense leaves people in all cultures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant passions and prejudices.

Words that implicitly equate status with virtue — chivalrous, classy, gentlemanly, honorable, noble — and low rank with sin — low-class, low-rent, mean, nasty, shabby, shoddy, villain.

There may be good arguments against human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them.   As recently as 1978, many people (including Kass) shuddered at the new technology of in vitro fertilization, or, as it was then called, “test-tube babies.” But now it is morally unexceptionable and, for hundreds of thousands of people, a source of immeasurable happiness or of life itself.

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.

The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste.

Part V: HOT BUTTONS

19: Children

To say that the heritability of intelligence is 0.5, for example, does not imply that half of a person’s intelligence is inherited (whatever that would mean); it implies only that half of the variation among people is inherited.

Even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity.

The effects of shared environment are small (less than 10 percent of the variance), often not statistically significant, often not replicated in other studies, and often a big fat zero.

Genes 50 percent, Shared Environment 0 percent, Unique Environment 50 percent.

Life is a pinball game in which we bounce and graze through a gantlet of chutes and bumpers.

Realistic parents would be less anxious parents. They could enjoy their time with their children rather than constantly trying to stimulate them, socialize them, and improve their characters. Don’t think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.

“Peer group” is a patronizing term we use in connection with children for what we call “friends and colleagues and associates.” “Being socialized by a peer group” is another way of saying “living successfully within a society.”

20: The Arts

Art is in our nature — in the blood and in the bone, as people used to say; in the brain and in the genes, as we might say today.

Part VI: The Voice of the Species

Our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully complex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet.

But except for a few intellectuals who have let their theories get the better of them, it is not a revolution in the world views of most people. I suspect that few people really believe, deep down, that boys and girls are interchangeable, that all differences in intelligence come from the environment, that parents can micromanage the personalities of their children, that humans are born free of selfish tendencies, or that appealing stories, melodies, and faces are arbitrary social constructions.

What follows are five vignettes from literature that capture, for me, some of the morals of the sciences of human nature.

Emily Dickinson’s “The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky”

Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron.”  The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.  The Handicapper General enforces equality by neutralizing any inherited (hence undeserved) asset.

George Orwell’s 1984.  Every component of the nightmare interlocked with the others to form a rich and credible whole.

O’Brien replies: You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

O’Brien’s lecture should give pause to the advocates of postmodernism. It is ironic that a philosophy that prides itself on deconstructing the accoutrements of power should embrace a relativism that makes challenges to power impossible, because it denies that there are objective benchmarks against which the deceptions of the powerful can be evaluated. Without a notion of objective truth, intellectual life degenerates into a struggle of who can best exercise the raw force to “control the past.”

The doctrine that a collectivity (a culture, a society, a class, a gender) is a living thing with its own interests and belief system lies behind Marxist political philosophies and the social science tradition begun by Durkheim. Orwell is showing its dark side: the dismissal of the individual — the only entity that literally feels pleasure and pain — as a mere component that exists to further the interests of the whole. The sedition of Winston and his lover Julia began in the pursuit of simple human pleasures — sugar and coffee, white writing paper, private conversation, affectionate lovemaking. O’Brien makes it clear that such individualism will not be tolerated: “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.” Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated … . There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.  We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.”

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  The origin of violence in a culture of honor. Huck has met up with two instances of the Southern culture of honor. Among the low-lifes it amounted to hollow bluster and was played for laughs; among the aristocrats it led to the devastation of two families and played out as tragedy.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story.  Victims of their own personalities and fates. The human tragedy lies in the partial conflicts of interest that are inherent to all human relationships. Herman Broder. What a wealth of psychology is folded into that scene! Men’s inclination to polygamy and the frustrations it inevitably brings. Women’s keener social intelligence and their preference for verbal over physical aggression against romantic rivals. The stability of personality over the lifespan.  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.

Afterword to the 2016 Edition

I am a cognitive scientist, with an appreciation of the infinite combinatorial powers of thought and language.

Emphasis on human nature impels us to ask how people create and respond to their cultural environments, not whether they do.

I find it hard to credit that anyone with an acquaintance with biology, a pair of eyes, and a dose of common sense could really believe that men and women are indistinguishable, that children’s personalities are sculpted by their parents, that all individuals have the same native intelligence, that people can be trained to find anything as aesthetically pleasing as anything else, or that all aggression is a cultural fad. Yet these are the beliefs that respectable intellectuals are compelled to profess in public — while many of them, I can testify, profess very different beliefs in private. The Blank Slate, I like to think, gave voice to this intellectual discomfort.

Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works (2010).  Godwin’s Law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”). Children: this is my favorite chapter, and indeed one of my favorite things I have ever written.  Children undergo unique experiences that assign them social roles within a peer group , and which they build upon in developing their personalities.

Human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.