What Is a Man? - The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Book Review

National Review, Nov 11, 2002 by Anthony Daniels

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker (Viking, 528 pp., $27.95)

Patients often ask me why they do the things they do. Naturally, they inquire only after their bad habits and actions, such as drinking too much or burgling houses; their good habits and actions are, to them at least, self-explanatory, as being manifestations of their true or innermost selves, and thus arousing no curiosity. I ask these patients what would count as a satisfactory explanation of their behavior, and not one of them has ever been able to answer me. Man is a mystery so deep that we don't even know what a solution to it would be like.

Of course, human nature is often invoked to explain human conduct, especially when that conduct appalls. But human nature is a slippery concept; and so great is the variety of human behavior over time and geography that many intellectuals have denied that man has any invariant nature at all. History and culture, it is said, have freed man of his biological inheritance.

Steven Pinker's object in this long book is threefold: to rehabilitate the idea of human nature, to give it some flesh, and to explain why there has been such a persistent denial by intellectuals that man has such a nature.

Very little reflection should be necessary to establish that man must have a nature, otherwise he would hardly be distinguishable from an amoeba or indeed from any other kind of creature. The fact that man-and only man-has developed language, and that, barring neurological catastrophe, every human being learns to speak a native language, should be more than sufficient to establish that there must be at least some invariant and inborn human propensities that we can call his nature.

It is no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that it should be a neurolinguist and follower of Noam Chomsky who should seek to rehabilitate the concept of an invariant human nature. Not only is it by now pretty well established that human beings have an innate capacity to learn language, an ability that cannot be explained by any environmental factor (puppies and kittens don't learn to speak even in the most disputatious of households), but language is a rule-governed system that is nevertheless infinite in its capacity to generate novelty. In a sense, then, we might say that human nature is to human conduct as grammar is to language. It lays down the rules or parameters, but does not fully determine any actual behavior. Thus, the search for social status, which is a biological inheritance from our evolutionary forebears, does not mean that I must stab a passerby who "disses" me, or indulge in insider trading on the stock exchange, but it does mean I will strive to establish myself in one way or another.

Where does the denial of human nature come from? It would surely amaze the great writers of literature to hear that there was no such thing as human nature, for otherwise their efforts at transcendence of their own time and place would have been in vain: Shakespeare could appeal only to Renaissance Englishmen and Chekhov only to prerevolutionary bourgeois Russians. But in fact they both speak to us directly, because an invariant nature underlies all human conduct, and they are able to show it to us with unusual clarity.

Pinker says that the main opposition to the idea of human nature has come from left-wing utopianism, which sees man as a blank slate upon which, as Mao once famously said, the most beautiful characters can be written. This crackbrained idea was responsible for untold misery and murder during the last century, though its proponents were (or claimed to be) in part reacting against the crude social Darwinism that saw nature as red in tooth and claw, man as an indistinguishable part of nature, and therefore man himself as inescapably red in tooth and claw. Since the Nazi horror seemed to derive from this horrible view of things, any idea that could remotely lead to it via the slippery slope- such as that of an indelible human nature-had to be opposed, whatever the evidence in its favor. Pinker redresses the balance by pointing out the horrible political consequences of the blank-slate hypothesis, responsible for even more deaths.

The concept of a biologically based human nature is also, says Pinker, opposed by the religious Right, which fears that it will both undermine the concept of personal responsibility and empty the world of divine mystery. If human nature is just another part of nature, it can be investigated by natural science; there is no room left for the spiritual. Religious people no more want to have the heart of their mystery plucked out than Hamlet wanted his plucked out by Rosencrantz.

The question naturally arises as to whether we, that is to say mankind, are any nearer to plucking out the heart of our mystery than was Shakespeare. Thanks to science, says Pinker, we are. We know a lot about the genome, and the neurosciences advance apace. Evolutionary sociobiology explains our social behavior satisfactorily. All that remains to fill in are the details, but the outline is clear. At last we understand ourselves.