10/30/2002
WBUR
Headline: Tabula Pinker: In his latest book, linguist Steven
Pinker calls for a scientific revolution
"The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature," By Steven Pinker, Viking, 528 pages.
In his earlier volumes, "The Language Instinct"
and "How the Mind Works," Steven Pinker won critical and popular
acclaim for his lucid expositions of how language and the brain function.
Surprisingly, his new book is an overgrown broadside, by turns dull and
illuminating. What happened?
Pinker assumes the mantle of bellicose and ambitious
prophet, proclaiming, as the century starts, that mankind is in for a
transformation of Copernican proportions. There is a shorter, more modest, and
more trustworthy volume huddling in the folds of this one, but maybe it's
better that it had not been written. Since this book is nothing less than a
manifesto for a scientific revolution, we might as well have the whole agenda
on the table, prejudices and all.
Other writers, including the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, call for a bracing synthesis of computer science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and genetics. But they were interested primarily in theory building. Pinker focuses on the social and cultural implications of the synthesis. As he sees it, the "new sciences of human nature" will change the way we think about sex, violence, child rearing, education, social conflict, and the arts. In other words, it will reformulate our vision of human life. But as is always the case with such radical proposals, there is an obstacle or enemy in the way. For Pinker, it's the notion of the Blank Slate, the idea that who we are owes everything to history, society, and culture -- but absolutely nothing to biology.
Pinker traces the blank slate to philosopher John Locke's
notion of a Tabula Rasa, acknowledging that, in the 17th century, the concept
had a democratic edge, challenging leftover feudal assumptions about the divine
right of rulers. Since then, however, the idea has congealed into a dogma
promulgated by figures as diverse as Steven Jay Gould and Mao Zedong, Walt
Disney, and Big Brother. In fact, Big Brother gives the doctrine definitive
modern form. In a passage Pinker quotes from Orwell's "1984," the
main character is told that "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."
Big Brother, Pinker knows, is more about Communism than Nazism.
Nazism drew on a bastardized notion of genetics: if you were a Jew no amount of
mere culture could turn you into an Aryan. But, in Pinker's view, fears of a
Nazi comeback reinforce a reigning "taboo" on facing simple truths
concerning the power of genetics. Merely to admit the scientifically
indisputable fact that genes accounts for 50% of who we are is enough, as
Pinker sees it, to set off alarm bells in our culture.
With regard to politics, Pinker's approach is even-handed:
there's something for everyone to resent. So far as pure theory goes, he is
more sympathetic to what he calls the right-wing's Tragic vision -- that,
contrary to Big Brother, there are nonnegotiable limits to social engineering
-- than to the left- wing's Utopian view -- that a Blank Slate is always ready
to be rewritten. Still, this book may ruffle right-wing feathers more, since
one of Pinker's core points is that morality, no less than a proclivity for
violence, is part of human nature, and can stand on its own without any help
from religion.
Pinker doesn't aim for originality in this book, but to
provide a pointed summary of findings in the relevant fields. For example, when
explaining where the non-genetic half of human character comes from, he leans
heavily on recent work by Judith Harris. In her book, "The Nurture
Assumption", she claimed that the 50% of personality that isn't nature
isn't nurture either, at least not in the usual sense of parental influence.
Our parents shape us by giving us their genes, period. After that, we are
influenced by peer groups. So much, then, for that homespun Freudian narrative
on the theme of: I am this way because my mother did this and my father that.
sPinker and Harris claim that kind of story has run out of gas. They urge us to
park it for a while, clearing the air of the guilt and blame that are its
inevitable byproducts.
The devil in Pinker's book isn't in arguments like this,
which can be engrossing. It's partly in the tone. Pinker sounds much like
conservatives did during the Reagan Presidency. They were the majority, but
couldn't give up the pretense that they remained a band of outsiders, bravely
speaking for unfashionable truths. Despite Pinker's assumption of underdog
status, his views, for the most part, couldn't be more mainstream. And they
didn't win pride of place because people hunkered down with the collected works
of E.O. Wilson and mastered sociobiology. They won because millions have taken
Prozac or related drugs and, suddenly, life with Mom and Dad seemed less
important than serotonin and bugs in neural wiring. Genetics has gone
mainstream, not because people are thrilled to death about the details of
protein folding, but because the mapping of the human genome was a monster
media event, like landing on the moon. Genes are hot. Between brains and
computers, wiring always makes the news. And everyone today is an armchair
evolutionist, cooking up a scenario about how this trait or that behavior
helped get the species to its current state.
The truth is that Pinker and his cohorts are in power. Why,
then, the aggrieved and vengeful tone? Partly it's about mopping up pockets of
resistance, and partly about settling old scores (Steven Jay Gould is now
beyond the range of the multifarious tortures Pinker would devise for him.) But
mostly Pinker is acerbic and confrontational because his view is as radical and
thoroughgoing as any of the utopian schemes he scorns. Pinker knows we evolved
with naive notions of how the mind and the world works. Those versions served
us well enough for tens of thousands of years, but are unsuited to our
freakishly complex civilization. Pinker wants to eradicate them wholesale and
replace them with the counter-intuitive lessons of modern science. For example,
we are predisposed to think in polarities -- clean and unclean, sacred and
profane, permitted and taboo. But the outcomes we care about in the world today
elude such absolutes. They need to be grasped in terms of costs and benefits,
calculated in terms of probabilities. Hence, Pinker advocates that we drop the
classics from the educational curriculum and teach our children statistics.
That's not such a terrible idea, on the face of it. But he
doesn't really believe classics are the problem, as if the increasingly rare
propagation of Greek and Latin could hold back a scientific revolution. By
classics, Pinker means literature and the arts. And when Pinker gets started on
the arts, he sounds less like the brilliant linguist and cognitive psychologist
he is, and more like a hatchet man for some Central Committee of the New
Synthesis. If you have any regard for Picasso and Joyce, van Gogh or
Stravinsky, don't skip to the chapter on the arts, or you'll be sorry you
bought the book.
Modern art is a dirty word for Pinker. van Gogh (van Gogh!),
Picasso, and Stravinsky et al, have broken faith with the tastes in music,
visual art and narrative that constitute our evolutionary heritage, and are the
universals of our species, manifest in every culture. Pinker will grab at any
argument to hammer this point home, including ones so patently false you wonder
if you can take his word for the scores of surveys and studies he cites
earlier. For example, he writes: "Western museum collectors plundered the
prehistoric treasures of Africa, Asia, and the Americas not to add to the
ethnographic record but because their patrons found the works beautiful to gaze
at." Really? If the virtues of African art were so immediately apparent,
why did literally tons of the stuff languish for decades in museums of natural
history next to meteors and bones, rather than being showcased in art museums?
When talking about art, Pinker reveals the mailed fist of
the new synthesis. Comrade van Gogh: less agitation, if you will, calm vistas,
soothing views of rivers and trees, please. Comrade Joyce, what do you mean by
sullying the tastes of the masses with your filthy and obscure excrescences? To
this attitude, it's only fitting to respond that it is peculiar that Pinker
honors the limitless complexity of science, but purges any semblance of complexity
from the arts. Does this show that underneath it all, the genetic view only has
contempt for the depth and variety of human culture?
Twentieth-century dictators spoke on behalf of a class or a
race. Pinker presumes to speak for the genome itself. We'd all be safer if he
stuck to linguistics rather than social engineering. Yes, the Tabula Rasa is
outdated, but Tabula Pinker is no solution.
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