54 pages • 1 hour read
The Blank Slate
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Themes
There is No Blank Slate
The major contention of Pinker’s book is that science shows that there is a “universal complex human nature.” Not everyone agrees. Various philosophers, social scientists, and religious leaders have promulgated the idea that humans are born with their minds as a kind of “blank slate,” advancing the view that humans are entirely the product of the social and cultural environment into which they are born. Pinker’s thesis, on the contrary, is that cutting-edge cognitive brain science undermines this idea and reveals an inherent universality to human nature. In the same way that computers come pre-loaded with software, we arrive with certain inherent cognitive, behavioral, and moral baselines.
The Blank Slate connects to another shared cultural idea with which Pinker takes issue: the Noble Savage, which contends that in their most primitive state, people are inherently peaceful and good. In other words, the violence that has been endemic to humans throughout history is not a result of internal nature but a response to a kind of corruption resulting from civilization. The final idea Pinker deconstructs is the Ghost in the Machine, the idea that there is a soul that is separate from the body.
Though he disagrees with its thesis, Pinker understands why people are so wedded to the Blank Slate, acknowledging that the metaphor helps advance a more progressive, egalitarian worldview and undermines explanations of human difference that rely on indefensible racism. To Pinker, however, the Blank Slate is the wrong means to achieve this worthy end.
Consilience
Pinker uses the biologist E.O. Wilson’s idea of “consilience,” or the unification of all knowledge, to show that the mind is the last frontier that stands in the way of this unification. The author writes about “walls” that have fallen in the past, including the discovery of Newtonian physics governing the motion of all objects and Darwin’s discovery of natural selection as a force in the evolution of all living things. He says that the mind is the last frontier—the one area that many thinkers believe is not governed by the rules of science and matter. However, Pinker believes that recent discoveries in neuroscience are pulling down this wall and that the workings of the mind will soon be united with the laws of science.
Politics Versus Science
Pinker writes about how people ignore scientific findings, or choose to refute them, for political reasons. He examines the ways in which both the political left and right have resisted the recent findings from cognitive science about the way the brain works and examines people’s motives for doing so. According to Pinker, the left holds firmly to the idea that we are all born the same because it is invested in eradicating preconceptions about race, gender, sexuality, or other variables. On the other hand, the right holds firmly to the idea that life begins at conception—an idea that Pinker says is hard to substantiate from a biological perspective. He argues that, while an acceptance of science about the mind will challenge political ideas, it need not promote a return to discriminatory stereotypes or atrocities of the past.
Biological Determinism
People have been afraid of jettisoning the idea of the Blank Slate because they believe that wrongdoers will be able to explain away their misdeeds by saying, “Darwin made me do it!” The chapter on violence (Chapter 17) is particularly provocative, as Pinker argues that rape is an outgrowth of men’s desire to copulate with as many women as possible to reproduce. Pinker says, however, that just because one has an urge to do something does not mean that one has to do it, given the brain’s ability to think of recursive solutions to problems.
While people fear the idea of biological determinism--that we are totally controlled by our genes--Pinker does not endorse this idea. Just because we inherit a greater likelihood to do certain things, it does not mean that we will do them or that we are controlled by our genes. He also says that acts of wrongdoing should be punished, no matter what their determinants.
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By Steven Pinker
