The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (review)

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate has many virtues: its critique of radical scientists is cogent, even shocking; its differentiation between the reasonable theories of equity feminists and the unreasonable assumptions of gender feminists is helpful; its deft and copious references to popular culture for apt illustrations of otherwise abstruse philosophical concepts, and its willingness to engage science in addressing ethical issues, is entirely laudable.

As its title indicates, the purpose of Pinker's book is to counter the (to him) prevailing modern notion that humans have no intrinsic natures. But Pinker's attempt at debunking this notion of "the blank slate" by conflating it unhelpfully with "the Noble Savage" and "The Ghost in the Machine" is decidedly problematic.

Let us take the notion of "The Blank Slate": neither Hume nor Locke ever denied the existence of human nature (indeed, Pinker quotes Hume's comments on the innate human appreciation for beauty to advance his own convictions about "a universal human aesthetic"; cf. p. 408). Hume and Locke proceeded from the same premise which the phenomenologists advanced, and which remains unrefuted philosophically or psychologically, that all knowledge of external reality is acquired through the senses, and that, insofar as these senses are unreliable, each human being is "impressionable"—like a blank slate. Neither Hume nor Locke, however, ever denies that human beings have innate propensities, or, to pursue the metaphor, they acknowledge that the slate has inherent properties of its own. Yet, Pinker imputes to them the assumption that human behavior is determined only by the environment, highlighting nurture over nature. He also assumes that "the blank slate" thesis entails the assumption that all human beings have equal traits, abilities, potential ("a blank slate is a blank slate is a blank slate"). This assumption is particularly problematic in his critique of gender feminists and radical scientists, and their (alleged) claim that all individuals are equal in ability—although I suspect that they are referring to potential rather than natural endowments. And his claim that parenting skills have negligible effects on the upbringing of children is flawed, both logically and methodologically. He claims that experiments fail to show that siblings and twins brought up in the same household develop similar behaviors, values, attitudes, habits. The nurture argument never claims that they would, given the vagaries of relationships and different individual natures. But Pinker's analysis and the research he cites is also methodologically flawed, because he is convinced that they indicate that children grow up differently regardless of shared upbringings. This is hardly surprising, especially if one restricts oneself ethnocentrically, and ethnotemporally, to the modern United States, where parents encourage their students to be individual and different. The result that US children emerge as very distinct individuals can, in fact, be argued against Pinker's bias in favor of the innate: those differences might be offered as proof that the majority of US parents have succeeded (reinforced by the prevailing ethos) in fostering teenage rebellion, fashionable eccentricity, and capitalistic novelty and originality (read: the tendency to stress innovativeness and creativity as cardinal US virtues). Hence the disparity between siblings raised in the same family and in the same environment can be argued as proving rather than disproving the effects of nurture—when nurture fosters individuality.

We must remember that, until the modern period, children were, in fact, more likely to be occupational and behavioral clones of their parents: boys followed in their father's professions more often than not, girls imitated their mothers in childrearing and in marriage. Butchers, bakers, tailors, farmers, blacksmiths, usurers, jewelers, craftsmen of all kinds, bankers all—until the modern period—ran in the family. To select research restricted to the modern period is merely to use an exceptional sample (exceptional in the course of history since the tradition of family professions stretches back to time immemorial). Children who rebelled in the past were the exception rather than the rule. The reverse is true in today's...