Politics versus Science: an Answer
Steven Pinker is a linguist, a Harvard professor, and a writer of several scholarly books. His first bestseller, The Blank Slate, refutes modern doctrines of human behavior that “have infiltrated the conventional wisdom of our civilization.” While Pinker is a center-left academic, Blank Slate is a trailblazer for honoring science over academic orthodoxy and political opportunism. In the end, Pinker urges us all to reason from a correct understanding of the “landscape of the sciences of human nature.”
Blank Slate starts by explaining a “holy trinity” of modern doctrines. The blank slate was introduced by John Locke and suggests that human behavior is overwhelmingly shaped by personal experience. The noble savage was popularized by Rousseau in response to the primitive societies encountered by European empires. The ghost in the shell was conceived by Rene Descartes and suggests that the mind selects thoughts and learns behaviors completely independent from the brain.
Blank Slate then calls on “the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution” to debunk these doctrines. At the cultural level, cognitive science reveals universal mental heuristics beneath diversity, which evolutionary psychology then translates into universal behaviors. At the personal level, neuroscience reveals brains that are constrained as much as skeletons, exhibiting small-scale variations within an immovable structure. Similarly, behavioral genetics instructs that personality traits are highly constrained by biology.
The stage is now set for Blank Slate to describe the science of human nature. Pinker firmly locates human nature in the brain, which is born with accurate perceptions of the natural world. It has innate capacities for flexible language and simple math, but it falls prey to (bio)logical fallacies when considering the complexities of modern life. Pinker continues that the brain (not society or culture) contains the building blocks of emotions. These in turn create the benefits and harms of social hierarchies, relationship strategies (generosity, revenge, etc.), and moralizing.
Blank Slate ends by drawing a scientific outline for “a universal complex human nature” that happens to be consistent with the conservative worldview. However, Pinker reassures progressives that their false theories are not necessary to (and are often contradictory to) their policy goals.
Politics is largely built on opposing worldviews. The Utopian Vision urges us to change institutions to rewrite human nature and create history. The Tragic Vision dwells on human imperfectability and treasures “time-tested techniques” from history. Pinker concedes, “the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook.”
The blank slate and noble savage doctrines appear to support feminism, but they are contradicted by repeated scientific evidence of the biological roots of male-female differences. Still, Pinker stresses that significant gender differences do not undermine feminist values (just feminist theories).
Blank Slate echoes another bestseller in claiming that parents don’t mold their children’s brains or successes (but not having parents seems to harm kids). Beyond merely existing, Pinker holds out hope that selecting a sub-culture in which to raise their kids could be the key parental influence.