The Blank Slate. - book review

Humanist, March-April, 2003 by Thomas Patton

by Steven Pinker (See Viking, New York, 2002); 509 pp.; $27.95 hardcover

Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate, which demolishes the obstinate fallacy of tabula rasa, is anything but a blank slate. It is tempting to suggest, in fact, that in its breezy artlessness it just might be a defining document for our age.

Pinker opens a chapter with a lengthy quotation from Jorge Luis Borges' story The Lottery in Babylon, an ironic allegory signifying society's caprice and cruelty, which says that life can be an arbitrary game, rules change without warning, and winning is often losing. Pinker's use of this metaphor is intended to point out the earnestness with which educated adults still subscribe to the notion of l'homme natural (human the innocent), creating a pandemonium of depredations as though society and culture occupy a separate dimension from brains, genes, and evolution. The preface suggests that by now most of us should have figured out that the rich tapestry of culture that pundits celebrate and sociologists relentlessly assess is an uneven warp and gnarly weft of rhetoric.

A reader may be immediately on guard: "Not another book on nature and nurture!" Well, yes and no. So what sets The Blank Slate apart? Imagine a matrix of fundamental concerns--the life sciences, philosophy, anthropology, history, politics, art, race, gender, religion, crime, and punishment--the gamut of our aspirations, torments, and paradoxes. Now imagine this matrix parsed by evolutionary analysis (biological vectors and valences, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neural network models). Finally, imagine a wealth of emerging patterns and insights all made accessible within a wonderfully droll narrative that buries old rhetorical dichotomies as deftly as it grows a new unification of knowledge, aptly termed as concilience by biologist E. O. Wilson.

Which rhetorical dichotomies? In brief, those created by the standard social science model that has dominated scholarship since Emile Durkheim and Franz Boaz. Enough is enough, says Pinker. It's time to "fess" up. He asks:

   Why are empirical questions about how the
   mind works so weighted down with political,
   moral, and emotional baggage? Why do
   people believe that there are dangerous
   implications to the idea that the mind is a
   product of the brain, that the brain is organized
   in part by the genome, and that the
   genome was shaped by natural selection?

Pinker accepts that there is such a thing as human nature (a supposition that much of the social science community has denied throughout the twentieth century). It can be described with increasing Comprehension and accuracy, but there are three major obstacles to accomplishing its understanding:

* The religio-political doctrine of the blank slate: "that humans have no inherent talents or temperaments because their mind is shaped completely by the environment, parenting, culture, and society."

* The notion of the noble savage: "that evil motives are not inherent to people but come from corrupting social institutions."

* The implicit acceptance of the ghost in the machine: "that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history."

Pinker says these three ideas are increasingly being challenged by the sciences of the mind, brain, genes, and evolution:

   but they are tenaciously held [by most of
   us] as much for their moral and political
   uplift as for any empirical rationale. People
   think that these doctrines are preferable on
   moral grounds and that the alternative is
   forbidden territory that we should avoid at
   all costs.

In sum, his brilliantly argued text spans the continuum of human concerns. Pinker persuades us on virtually every page that our fears of inequality, imperfectability, determinism (bad genes made me do it), and nihilism (it's all a random meaningless fraud) prevent our coming to terms with real--but not absolute--evolutionary forces. He is right to insist we can't hope to expand our circle of creative, life-affirming choices without truthfully identifying its factual, natural, and evolutionary constraints. In this and other important respects, The Blank Slate is a courageous and rewarding book that requires a measure of bravery in its readers. Few books as engagingly explore the paradigm shift in evolutionary psychology toward a more viable and humanistic worldview. Fewer still wear their erudition as easily.

Thomas Patton, editor of the Maine Progressive, is completing a book entitled Playing the Mandarin: Notes on Envy, Schadenfreude, and Resentment.