From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat Jan 18 2003 - 15:34:19 MST
Here's my newspaper review of Pinker's book, published (under some
sub-editor's witless header `Natural-born Fellows') in the Weekend
Australian for a general audience:
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
By Steven Pinker, Allen Lane, 509pp, $A 29.95
As a Catholic brat, I learned that humans share a corrupted nature, spoiled
by the sin of Adam but salvaged by our Creator in a startling act of
self-sacrifice. Despite redemption, that fatal, tragic condition of original
sin left us prey to wickedness, always liable to slip off the narrow path
into theft, lies, betrayal, sensuality. Let your human nature run free, and
you'd wind up burning in Hell.
During the hopeful 1960s, many rejected that gloomy doctrine. What if there
were no fixed human nature after all? What if we are born as a blank slate
with no text inscribed on it, no instincts or bents, only endless
opportunity for making ourselves? Then we might painfully develop more
humane and creative modes of living, casting off racism, sexism, jealousy
and material envy, the prejudices and bad habits of a cruelly deprived
history: call it the Fabian theory of improvement. "Wadda we want?" "Gradual
change!" "Wenna we want it?" "In due course!"
Or maybe, delirious thought, it might come in a thunderclap of revolution,
violent if need be or fueled by sweet magic insight. Either way, it seemed
pretty certain that "human nature" was an ideological fossil from grimmer
eras when people had been conditioned to distrust the body and each other.
If that was the wistful hope of the young Boomers, it faded and chipped
badly as the years passed. Insurrections guttered. Vietnam threw out the
Americans, then rediscovered capitalism. The old Soviet Union turned to God.
Meanwhile, nature made a big comeback. The Boomers' kids, when they weren't
plotting their next takeover, worshiped Gaia, ate natural foods, rejected
synthetic medicines for natural remedies. This was Nature, but not the old
Adam; Nature was a goddess of purity, and all we needed to do was find her
within ourselves. Ideology switched again: if it's natural, it must be good.
If it's bad, that must be the fault of wrong words, calculation rather than
spontaneity, people playing god and setting themselves above nature.
Meanwhile, science was looking again at what human nature might actually
be. Humans are evolved critters, and just as we have opposed thumbs for
grasping, maybe we inherit templates for action as well. Speech, for
example: without specialised areas in the brain, pre-shaped to acquire words
and fit them to the outside world, we'd never learnt to talk. Could we also
inherit predispositions to behave in certain ways under certain conditions?
Every other animal does. But that's a terrifying suggestion to a culture
when "nature" now equals "wholesome". If ordinary men can find it within
themselves to rape women under brutal conditions of war and lawlessness,
that would imply rape is "natural" and we'd have to accept it!
The error should be obvious. Salmonella is also part of nature, but we work
hard to prevent it making us sick. Actually, if we do have a complex human
nature, we'll only contain its nastier aspects by facing them fearlessly.
The rediscovery of a persistent and universal human nature forged by our
Darwinian history is detailed in Steven Pinker's ample, readable new book.
His sensitive investigation of rape, and of other "don't-go-there" topics,
is exemplary and brave.
Linguistic psychologist Pinker's earlier excellent popularisations, The
Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, covered findings in evolutionary
and cognitive science, game theory, etc. Controversially, he renews these
themes while drawing on his polymathic knowledge to propose ways communities
might balance private and public virtues and failings. What he dubs the
Utopian Left will resent and deplore his claim that "the new sciences of
human nature really do resonate with assumptions that historically were
closer to the right than to the left" (since genes build individuals, not
societies, even if those individuals are social beings), but the Tragic
Right will also be discomfited.
Should people be free to spend their own money, not have it seized away by
tax authorities? Not so fast: "economists repeatedly find that people spend
their money like drunken sailors". Why? Original sin? Stupidity? No, because
the mental planners in our brains evolved in a dangerous ancestral
environment where you were likely to die young, so you might as well live
for the day. Libertarians will be surprised, too, by his account of the
merits of a state, and of a more egalitarian income distribution. We share
behavioral templates that provoke bloody escalating contests of honour in
the absence of mediating, somewhat neutral, adjudicators. And crime rates
are higher in regions of great income disparity because, for evolutionary
reasons, "chronic low status leads men to become obsessed with rank and kill
each other over trivial insults". So it is prudent, as well as humane, not
to make the poorest feel like worthless dogs. (Forget the fabled peaceful
traditional indigenes, though: in such cultures, between 10 and 60 percent
of men die by violence.) Those on the left, meanwhile, might learn something
unsettling from Pinker's account of why he follows Noam Chomsky in
linguistics but not in politics.
An extraordinarily fertile book: highly recommended.
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