The Blank Slate
by Steven Pinker
(Notes written in February, Year 3)
How do taboos come about? For instance, how does it happen that the Civil War Confederate battle flag (red field, blue X-cross on a slightly larger white one, stars) is an emblem most people not only won't salute but won't fully look at? The process may not be very complicated: Men followed these colors with honor, if not in an honorable cause, but later, in reaction to the advancing twentieth century, some other people co-opted the flag to stand for their fear of racial equality. The association, I'm afraid, was a natural one, for the "heritage" in which many Southerners take such pride boils down to one simple statement: Every white person stood above every black person. Beginning as a reminder of "heritage," that flag became an emblem of intransigence and hatred. The people who fly it in honor of their forebears won't admit that they have lost to those who fly it to signal adherence to the worst idea the South ever had. Not just the rest of the country but many in the South now regard the thing as taboo, something not to be touched with hand or eye, much less venerated.
Steven Pinker, a scientist of power who's written popular books about how children learn language and how the brain organizes itself, now takes up a set of taboo ideas: Boys and girls are different; intelligence and character depend largely on what you're born with, not who reared you; people in 2003 respond to beauty and harmony in the same way as people in 1903 or for that matter 1003; while not everyone uses violence to gain power and respect, everyone has the capacity to do so. These ideas are not merely unpopular, they are "unacceptable" to many people. Unthinkable.
(Do those statements, by the way, contradict the old saw "You can't change human nature"? Of course they do. Isn't it odd that you can say that while believing that children won't learn sex roles if the preschool doesn't teach them?)
Pinker says that today's orthodox or thinkable ideas rest on three premises, which he calls the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine. Blank Slate: You came into the world with no personality, no predispositions or innate abilities, and what you have today you picked up from family or society. Noble Savage: People used to live without violence and injustice and could do so again if taught the ways of peace and fairness. Ghost in the Machine: Your physical being has a nonphysical "driver," whether you call it personality, essence or soul. Accept these three positions and you must reject Pinker's taboo ideas with horror.
Much of this book (subtitled The Modern Denial of Human Nature) deals with the ideas of scholars and deep thinkers. The author dwells, for example, on "the Standard Social Science Model, in which cultures are arbitrary symbol systems that exist apart from the minds of individual people" (p. 67), and it might be tempting to object, "Let the social scientists alone, they don't tell me what to think." But your government provides you with services on the strength of this model, your schools put it into practice in a hundred ways, and even your local "arts community" tacitly follows it. Social scientists do tell you what to think. Whether you really think that is another matter, one that Pinker is perhaps less concerned with.
People in all cultures find satisfaction in viewing a scene that shows green grass, scattered clumps of trees, and running water. Why do highly esteemed artists present images that give you no satisfaction (exploded subjects, outrageous juxtapositions, painful edges)? Because, claims Pinker, they mean to improve you; their program rests on the notion that society taught you to like trees and streams, and now you can learn to like rectangles, discordance and smears of dung in the same way. If your mind is a Blank Slate, why not? Personally, I think the author is shortchanging Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, who does not lack for admirers, but that's beside the point, which is "in all cultures." If society teaches you what to enjoy but all human societies arrive at the same answer, should you be thinking again about what may be common to all human beings?
The author is ready to help. After setting out the three social science premises at length, he makes a case that "History and culture . . . can be grounded in psychology, which can be grounded in computation, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution" (p. 69). He cites masses of research to show that we do have ways of understanding (at least beginning to understand) what goes on in your mind and how a lot of that is the same as what goes on in my mind. Suppose he's got it right. Then we can push ahead on questions like this: What makes people criminals (or good mothers, or religious leaders, or conservatives, or autistic)? It's debatable whether the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine have led us to anything useful or will in the future; Pinker thinks no, on balance, but sees a good deal of progress in the fields that engage him.
I really don't intend to sum up what Pinker says. This is a big book and not an easy or diverting one. On the other hand, it stands out as a well-written and extremely argumentative work about something you probably care a good deal for. I'd pick it up if I were you, even just to read the first three or four chapters and learn what all those social scientists want you to think.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
The Blank Slate