Feb 2003
By Melvin Konner
BOOKS IN REVIEW
The Blank Slate:The Modern
Denial of Human Nature By Steven Pinker. Viking Press, 509 pages, $27.95
AMONG THE CALAMITIES OF the
20th century were vast social experiments that tried to transform humanity with
disastrous con-sequences. The Nazi experiment, based on the notion that evil is
inborn in certain races, rejected education as a means of correction and
instead pursued the extermination of millions of alleged incorrigibles. It drew
upon a then-legitimate scientific tradition that had been widely accepted in
Western countries for half a century. The Khmer Rouge experiment, based on the
contrasting notion that complete "re-education" is possible,
attempted to change the behavior of millions of Cambodians and killed them if
they resisted change. Presumably their deaths would serve as salutary examples
for survivors. Both these vicious programs, if they did not derive from theories
of human nature, clearly derived comfort from them, and should lay to rest
permanently the claim that such theories do not matter.
The question, of course-after
getting the right theories-is how they should matter. Both of these books
consider the implications for society of a new theory, which if it leans toward
the inborn-nature side of the ledger does so in a more modest and sophisticated
way than such theories have in the past. The importance of genes can no longer
be denied. The genome has been sequenced, some diseases are yielding their
secrets to genetic research and, in the realm of behavior, statistical studies
are demonstrating genetic influences on everything from reaction time to
religiosity and happiness. As for evolution, flat earthers are still denying
Darwin, but in scientific circles he has won the day, and his theory and
extensions of it are clearly more than a little relevant to behavior. Here,
too, the approach bears little resemblance to the parallel efforts of the late
19th century. Finally, a revolution in brain science-- not least of all due to
advanced techniques of brain imaging-has removed all reasonable doubt as to the
isomorphism of brain and mind. This is a direct extension of the 19th-century
program in brain science, but it is much, much better.
These two books promise to help us think through the social
implications of this great transformation. The first, Pinker's The Blank Slate,
is the broader and more ambitious work, attempting to show how commitment to a
tabula rasa view of human nature has misled the modern social sciences and
therefore misled policy. If it sometimes seems to be flogging a dead horse, it
is nonetheless a brilliant and forceful summary of the current evidence for
biological influences on human social life.
Pinker reviews the blank-slate
notion from John Locke to Margaret Mead, thoroughly demolishing it with
evidence for the power of genes in behavior, evolution in culture, brain in
mind. With equal cogency he also replies to challenges raised by recent
advocates of blank slatism. How, for example, can the human genome, only twice
as big as that of the near-microscopic roundworm, determine anything about our
complex mental life? It can if we consider not just the number of genes but
their interactions and hierarchical ordering. How can the human brain be less
malleable than artificial neural networks, which have great capacity for
learning? Because the brain has evolved over hundreds of millions of years and
contains many pieces of dedicated circuitry-some as old or older than the
hills-assembled largely by the genes.
In the philosophical core of
his book, Pinker considers four feared outcomes of Darwinian theory: justifying
discrimination, abandoning attempts to improve humanity, destroying free will
and responsibility, and the loss of meaning and purpose from life. Each of
these understandable fears, Pinker argues, is unfounded.
Asking if racism and sexism
could be justified, he answers emphatically, "Absolutely not! The case
against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically
indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual
according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual
belongs." Of course, if the average traits of certain groups do differ,
that might lend support to "statistical discrimination." But in the
case of race, Pinker points out that the biological differences are, in fact,
trivial. Moreover, Jefferson's urging "that all men are created equal"
was about rights, not sameness. Perfectibility, for its part, is enhanced by
knowledge of our own natures. Furthermore, Pinker writes, a concept of human
nature itself "provides a yardstick to identify suffering in any member of
our species." It is because we have comparable natures that universal
empathy for suffering is possible and universal notions of human rights
valid.
As to responsibility, legal
assessments increasingly entertain the argument that biological influences are
exculpatory. But punishment also is an influence on human action that is
mediated by the same brain that generated the crime. Both evolutionary and
criminal psychologies suggest that the certainty of punishment turns the power
of human nature against wrongdoing. Nor need biology drain life of meaning;
Pinker cites Kant's awe at "the moral law within" as evidence of the
opposite effect.
"A man has got to know
his limitations," is the apt Clint Eastwood quote that sets the tone for
the rest of the book, a well-informed and well-written account of those
limitations. In a graceful interleaving of scientific and literary sources,
Pinker takes us through some of what we know of our constraints. They are
sobering. We unquestionably have selfish and violent tendencies, tempered
mainly for our children and other close relatives and in reciprocal or gainful
relations with others. For all our efforts at nurturance, Pinker finds little
evidence that different styles of parenting significantly shape our children's
personalities and behavior, instead ceding most causation to genes and peers.
Unlike race, gender is a valid and significant biological and psychological
category, which, despite huge overlaps between male and female, does help us
predict some aspects of behavior and mental life.
The science dovetails with
discussions of policy issues, and here Pinker is less helpful. For example, he
quotes a Boston Globe columnist who asks, "So why is America more violent
than other industrialized Western democracies?" The columnist gives a
cultural answer, but Pinker proceeds to debunk all the usual cultural
explanations. After explaining what he calls the "evolutionary logic of
violence"-which he does very well-he goes on to say, "Human nature is
the problem, but human nature is also the solution.") Alas, he only gives
us evidence for the first half of that sentence, and he doesn't answer the
Globe columnist's question. If Americans share the same human nature with
people in much less (as well as much more) violent cultures, how can human
nature explain the differences? This is not a minor problem; Pinker seems to
believe that evolutionary biology has the answer to everything, but actually it
can only be a starting point and, in some ways, a guide for a complex
biocultural analysis, most of which depends on the same social-science
approaches that have served us in the past.
But it's enough to ask Pinker
to debunk blank slatism, trace its history and offer a more than competent
summary of what we know now about what evolution and genes have written on the
slate without asking him to solve the problems, too. Pinker is not a policy
maker, nor does he have all the answers to our social ills. But he does know
one big thing: No policies of any sort, in any realm of life, can fare well
ignoring human nature. Do the European democracies with lower levels of
violence achieve that result through policies that reflect an understanding of
human nature? Perhaps not in the scientific sense, but Europeans in general
have always tended to be more cynical than Americans, less sanguine, for better
or for worse, about the possibility of change. Americans have often done well
with our high expectations, but unless we come to terms with the limitations of
human nature, they will continue to stand squarely in our way.
…
Both these fine books help with a task that we all
must begin to take seriously. Pinker and Rubin suggest that we are ready to
overcome the fruitless nature-nurture battles, which have generated so much
more heat than light, and do the hard work of incorporating advances in biology
into our thinking about political and social life. I am not an optimist, but
these two books are encouraging. Can it be that we have
finally grown up?
MELVIN KONNER, the Samuel
Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and associate professor of Psychiatry
and Neurology at Emory University, is the author of The Tangled Wing:
Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, Revised and Updated Edition.