The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Pinker does himself credit, though, by anticipating this objection in the very first sentence of his premise, and goes on to effectively demonstrate that, no, this battle isn't quite over yet, as is seen in the oft rabid reaction to such recent books as "A Natural History of Rape" and "The Nurture Assumption." Pinker's main rhetorical flaw in "How The Mind Works" was structure -- he saved the tastiest bits for the latter half, frontloading the book with abstruse information on computational processing and vision research that, while valuable, probably drove away half of his potential audience.

The same phenomenon occurs here, but to a lesser extent -- the first half of the book isn't going to tell Bolling anything he didn't already suspect, but it does a good job of presenting a readable history of the whole "Blank Slate" fallacy. Pinker cuts some corners -- he conflates the Blank Slate with "The Noble Savage," which isn't precisely the same thing, but the thrust is there, and as the book goes on and he draws closer and closer to the controversies of the present, the stakes start to rise in a quite page-turning manner.

It's the second half of the book that's really worth your money, though, in which Pinker nimbly inverts virtually every Social Constructionist theory to demonstrate that what superficially seem like noble and idealistic (if misguided) principles -- that people are "born good" and it's society/parents/the media that ruins them -- are actually far more nihilistic and bleak in their implications than the much more likely thesis: we're incredibly complex animals whose instincts, while able to be subverted or counteracted by our conscious minds, cannot be completely ignored. To me -- an nth generation leftist who nearly ended up a Republican by the end of college, thanks to the truly ludicrous theories being bandied about in the early 90s -- the most valuable thing this book does is provide a basis for maintaining a progressive ideology without having to subscribe to pie-in-the-sky theories about how men and women are precisely identical other than their reproductive organs, violence is entirely a product of a dysfunctional culture, rape could not possibly have an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, and all children who end up doing wrong as adults are the products of shoddy parenting. As Pinker points out over and over, the problem with this sort of conflation of Is and Ought (i.e., nature and morality) is that you wind up painting yourselves into a corner -- if it turns out that, say, rape does have an evolutionary adaptive source, one would be forced to conclude that therefore it's okey-dokey. Better to separate the two and conclude that rape is evil because it's a horrific act of violence that can scar the victim for life, not because it's "unnatural," and to try to figure out how the circumstances that cause it to arise can best be prevented.

Pinker has his flaws, of course -- he can be glib at times, he doesn't always attempt to be even-handed, his cultural references are hit-or-miss (if anything, Public Enemy is an _anti-_gangsta rap group, and Borges and Wallace are certainly examples of modernist/postmodernist writers that don't fail to account for human nature and aren't merely products of stylistic oneupsmanship), and he fails to address the pressing issue of how evolution could possibly have selected for his goofy-ass Geddy Lee mullet. But flaws aside, this is an incredibly valuable work that points to where the Left is going to have to go in the 21st century if it doesn't want to wind up eating its tail as it did at the end of the 20th. As Peter Singer put it in his essential treatise, "A Darwinian Left": "Wood carvers presented with a piece of timber and a request to make wooden bowls from it do not simply begin carving according to a design drawn up before they have seen the wood. Instead they will examine the material with which they are to work, and modify their design in order to suit its grain. Political philosophers and the revolutionaries or reformers who have followed them have all too often worked out their ideal society, or their reforms, and sought to apply them without knowing much about the human beings who must carry out, and live with, their plans. Then, when the plans don't work, they blame traitors within their ranks, or sinister agents of outside forces, for the failure. Instead, those seeking to reshape society must understand the tendencies inherent in human beings, and modify their abstract ideals in order to suit them." Or, as King of Ants E.O. Wilson more succinctly said of Marxism: "Wonderful theory. Wrong species."


Human Nature Makes a Comeback   April 9, 2003
Paul R. Thomas (Myrtle Beach, SC United States)
64 out of 72 found this review helpful

The Blank Slate deserves all the praise it has received. Steven Pinker presents an extremely eloquent, well reasoned, comprehensive and entertaining renunciation of the holy trinity of social science - the blank slate, noble savage, and ghost in the machine; ideologies that have created serious obstacles to the application of modern scientific research in genetics, biology and psychology to a better understanding of who we really are.

The more widely this book is read, the sooner we can increase the effectiveness with which we understand and tackle real personal and social problems from a fact-based and positive perspective of human nature.

The book is academically very strong and the arguments are well presented and convincing, so much so that this book will doubtless receive future credit for putting the study of human nature back onto the social science agenda. Steven Pinker may surprise you, perhaps provoke you but he will definitely educate you, entertain you and leave you thinking about human nature in a very new way.


Nature vs. nurture case closed--with reservations   December 25, 2002
M. Spiller (Ashby, MA United States)
52 out of 58 found this review helpful

Sociobiology is a controversial, yet important and growing field of scientific exploration. No other field of science elicits as much condemnation from academics and intellectuals, yet no other scientific endeavor has ever cast as much light on the truth about the evolution of human nature. The reason for the distain shown by academic intellectuals is sociobiology's crushing refutation of the concept known as the "blank slate" theory of human nature, which has become the cornerstone of postmodernist ideals of political correctness. The entire edifice of the postmodern human engineering project carried on at many universities and in the popular media is based upon the concept that "everything is political", and that the attribute we call "human nature" is nothing more than cultural propaganda instilled into children by their parents and reinforced throughout their lives by a rigid, chauvinistic propaganda machine that has become known as "Western Civilization". Evidence is fast mounting that human nature is anything but nonexistent, sociobiology is the area of science where this evidence is researched and proven, and Steven Pinker has done a good job of organizing and, with some reservations, elucidating the evidence. In short, boys and girls are no more identical above the neck than they are below, and every personal psychological attribute is nearly as genetically heritable as every physical attribute. This book proves to my satisfaction that human nature is a factor in the human condition, and that the blank slate theory of personality is a politically correct joke.

This is a long book, a bit tedious in places, but well written, interesting and even humorous overall. The inference that genetic influences are the all-important factor in life outcome is, I think, patently false and contradicted by experience and common sense. The best possible proof of this is contained in a short, fascinating book written by Theodore Dalrymple called "Life at the bottom", which I would strongly recommend as a reality-check by which to measure some of the tenants of sociobiology presented in Pinker's book. This is especially useful when evaluating chapter 19 on the debate about nature/nurture as it concerns children. Dalrymple's book is a collection of anecdotes gleaned from the experiences of a physician who has spent his life ministering to the British underclass. He does not discredit sociobiology, a subject which is never mentioned in his book. He illuminates the subject in the light of harsh reality.

In spite of its deficiencies, however, sociobiology goes a long way toward explaining how genetic tendencies coalesce into the characteristics known as "human nature". It also casts light upon the reasons that 20th century attempts to engineer utopian societies culminated in failure (and in the case of Marxist projects, the deaths of as many as a hundred million people). Sociobiology is, however explicitly silent upon the subject of how best to contain these human impulses in order to establish and maintain an orderly, yet progressive and free civilization. The "fact" of Human Nature presents us with a slew of "natural" behaviors. On the other hand, just because a behavior may be natural does not necessarily mean that its uninhibited expression is appropriate for the maintenance of an orderly civilization and a happy life.

While evidence from sociobiology seems to refute some of the cherished beliefs of modern conservatism as well as liberalism, the case against liberalism is much stronger. Pinker works very hard to establish his credentials as a modern liberal throughout the book, and in some areas I believe that his desire to be seen as a liberal has colored the conclusions he draws from his evidence. This is definitely a worthwhile book. Take the evidence seriously, but be wary when navigating the shoals of the author's opinions.


If you read one book in your life, read "The Blank Slate."   November 3, 2002
Paul D. Tozour (Austin, TX USA)
66 out of 75 found this review helpful

This is the book I've been waiting for all my life.

"The Blank Slate" is an utterly brilliant work. Its science is unassailable, its conclusions are astounding, and its implications for the future of both science and the humanities are enormous.

Like Samson toppling the temple of Dagon, Pinker casts down three of the major pillars of modern political and academic debate: the Blank Slate (the view that the mind is infinitely malleable, and is shaped entirely by parents and/or the media), the Noble Savage (the view that indigenous peoples of the world are far more peaceable and enlightened than the citizens of modern societies, and, consequently, that modern civilization itself is the root of all social ills), and the Ghost in the Machine (the belief that the human "soul" is made up of some magical material somehow separate from the operation of the human brain).

This book builds a desperately-needed bridge between the sciences and the humanities. It presents a worldview that is simultaneously pragmatic, moral, ethical, scientifically defensible, and unflinchingly moderate. In the process, Pinker brilliantly smashes many of the most extreme intellectual and political fallacies of our day -- the intellectually bankrupt social constructionism of academia, the racist theories of modern Nazism, the fallacious social-engineering ideals of modern Marxism, the absurd relativism of modern gender feminism, and the sanctimonious moralistic paranoia of modern religious conservatism.

I should note that a few reviewers inaccurately complain that "Nobody believes in the blank slate any more." This is a gross mischaracterization. Pinker's book is not intended for the scientific community, which has generally accepted the facts and conclusions presented in this book for decades. The Blank Slate is intended for a much broader audience. The arts, the media, the humanities, and the political extremes of both the right and the left frequently behave as though the doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine were self-evident truths. As science continues to shovel dirt onto the graves of these fallacies, much of modern political and intellectual debate continues as though they still lived.

This book has the potential to radically transform our shared worldview. We as a society desperately need to heal these mischaracterizations of the human mind and learn from the discoveries of modern science.

I for one will be rereading this book for a long time to come.

I cannot recommend any book more highly.


A Treatise On Human Nature for Our Times   October 5, 2002
john o. mcginnis (Chicago, Ill.)
179 out of 214 found this review helpful

Steven Pinker's book is a wonderful explication of what we now know about human nature. As such, it mounts a powerful attack on postmodernist attemps to argue that humans are completely malleable and socially constructed. The book reminds me most of David Hume's A Treatise on Human Nature. Like Hume, Pinker attacks the reigning orthodoxies and pieties of the politically and religiously correct. Because of such sacrilege, he will be attacked as an immoralist, just as Hume was. But like Hume, Pinker is in reality engaged in a deeply moral enterprise. By dispelling myths that are often propogated by ideologues to advance their agenda (such as the myth that the average man and woman differ only anatomically and not in their desires and interests), he makes it easier to understand the real costs and benefits of different social policies (such as quotas for women, whether in college athletics or on the job). By helping us understand the biologicaly wellsprings of our conflicts with others, be they parents, children, friends, or mates, he provides an important step to living with them more humanely and kindly. In perhaps its most completely original chapter, the book even uses his a theory of biologically shaped human nature to diagnose the discontents of much modern art, and if taken to heart, may show a way out of the cul de sac in which those who claim the mind is a blank slate have trapped many proud artistic traditions. The Blank Slate is a vaccination against the characteristic follies and errors of postmodernism and as such should be required reading for all students at our often diseased universities.