The Blank Slate

by Steven Pinker

  The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful.50 Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share.51 It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.52

  The ideology of group-against-group struggle explains the similar outcomes of Marxism and Nazism. The ideology of the Blank Slate helps explain some of the features that were unique to the Marxist states:

  • If people do not differ in psychological traits like talent or drive, then anyone who is better off must be avaricious or larcenous (as I mentioned earlier). Massive killing of kulaks and “rich” or “bourgeois” peasants was a feature of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

  • If the mind is structureless at birth and shaped by its experience, a society that wants the right kind of minds must control the experience (“It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written”).53 Twentieth-century Marxist states were not just dictatorships but totalitarian dictatorships. They tried to control every aspect of life: childrearing, education, clothing, entertainment, architecture, the arts, even food and sex. Authors in the Soviet Union were enjoined to become “engineers of human souls.” In China and Cambodia, mandatory communal dining halls, same-sex adult dormitories, and the separation of children from parents were recurring (and detested) experiments.

  • If people are shaped by their social environments, then growing up bourgeois can leave a permanent psychological stain (“Only the newborn baby is spotless”). The descendants of landlords and “rich peasants” in postrevolutionary regimes bore a permanent stigma and were persecuted as readily as if bourgeois parentage were a genetic trait. Worse, since parentage is invisible but discoverable by third parties, the practice of outing people with a “bad background” became a weapon of social competition. That led to the atmosphere of denunciation and paranoia that made life in these regimes an Orwellian nightmare.

  • If there is no human nature leading people to favor the interests of their families over “society,” then people who produce more crops on their own plots than on communal farms whose crops are confiscated by the state must be greedy or lazy and punished accordingly. Fear rather than self-interest becomes the incentive to work.

  • Most generally, if individual minds are interchangeable components of a superorganic entity called society, then the society, not the individual, is the natural unit of health and well-being and the proper beneficiary of human striving. The rights of the individual person have no place.

  None of this is meant to impugn the Blank Slate as an evil doctrine, any more than a belief in human nature is an evil doctrine. Both are separated by a great many steps from the wicked acts committed under their banners, and they must be evaluated on factual grounds. But it is meant to overturn the simplistic linkage of the sciences of human nature with the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century. That glib association stands in the way of our desire to understand ourselves, and it stands in the way of the imperative to understand the causes of those catastrophes. All the more so if the causes have something to do with a side of ourselves we do not fully understand.

  Chapter 9

  The Fear of Imperfectibility

  But Nature then was sovereign in my mind,

  And mighty forms, seizing a youthful fancy,

  Had given a charter to irregular hopes.

  In any age of uneventful calm

  Among the nations, surely would my heart

  Have been possessed by similar desire;

  But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,

  France standing on the top of golden hours,

  And human nature seeming born again.

  —William Wordsworth1

  IN WORDSWORTH’S REMINISCENCE we find the second fear raised by an innate psyche. The Romantic poet is exhilarated by the thought that human nature can be born again, and could only be depressed by the possibility that we are permanently saddled with our fatal flaws and deadly sins. Romantic political thinkers have the same reaction, because an unchanging human nature would seem to subvert all hope for reform. Why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and will just foul it up no matter what you do? It is no coincidence that the writings of Rousseau inspired both the Romantic movement in literature and the French Revolution in history, or that the 1960s would see a resurfacing of romanticism and radical politics in tandem. The philosopher John Passmore has shown that a yearning for a better world through a new and improved human nature is a recurring motif in Western thought, which he summarizes in a remark by D. H. Lawrence: “The Perfectibility of Man! Ah, heaven, what a dreary theme!”2

  The dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One is a practical fear: that social reform is a waste of time because human nature is unchangeable. The other is a deeper concern, which grows out of the Romantic belief that what is natural is good. According to the worry, if scientists suggest it is “natural”—part of human nature—to be adulterous, violent, ethnocentric, and selfish, they would be implying that these traits are good, not just unavoidable.

  As with the other convictions surrounding the Blank Slate, the fear of imperfectibility makes some sense in the context of twentieth-century history. A revulsion to the idea that people are naturally bellicose or xenophobic is an understandable reaction to an ideology that glorified war. One of the most memorable images I came across as a graduate student was a painting of a dead soldier in a muddy field. A uniformed ghost floated up from his corpse, one arm around a cloaked and faceless man, the other around a bare-breasted blond valkyrie. The caption read, “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.” Was it a kitschy poster recruiting cannon fodder for an imperial exploit? A jingoistic monument in the castle of a Prussian military aristocrat? No, Death and Victory was painted in 1922 by the great American artist John Singer Sargent and hangs prominently in one of the world’s most famous scholarly libraries, the Widener at Harvard University.

  That a piece of pro-death iconography should decorate these hallowed halls of learning is a testament to the warmongering mentality of decades past. War was thought to be invigorating, ennobling, the natural aspiration of men and nations. This belief led world leaders to sleepwalk into World War I and millions of men to enlist eagerly, oblivious to the carnage that lay ahead. Beginning with the disillusionment following that war and culminating in the widespread opposition to the war in Vietnam, Western sensibilities have steadily recoiled from the glorification of combat. Even recent works meant to honor the courage of fighting men, such as the movie Saving Private Ryan, show war as a hell that brave men endured at terrible cost to eliminate an identified evil, not something they could possibly feel “happy” about. Real wars today are waged with remote-control gadgetry to min
imize casualties, sometimes at the cost of downgrading the war’s objectives. In this climate any suggestion that war is “natural” will be met with indignant declarations to the contrary, such as the recurring Statements on Violence by social scientists averring that it is “scientifically incorrect” to say that humans have tendencies toward aggression.3

  A hostility to the idea that selfish sexual urges might be rooted in our nature comes from feminism. For millennia women have suffered under a double standard based on assumptions about differences between the sexes. Laws and customs punished the philandering of women more harshly than the philandering of men. Fathers and husbands stripped women of control over their sexuality by constraining their appearance and movement. Legal systems exonerated rapists or mitigated their punishment if the victim was thought to have aroused an irresistible urge by her dress or behavior. Authorities brushed off victims of harassment, stalking, and battering by assuming that these crimes were normal features of courtship or marriage. Because of a fear of accepting any idea that would seem to make these outrages “natural” or unavoidable, some schools of feminism have rejected any suggestion that men are born with greater sexual desire or jealousy. We saw in Chapter 7 that the claim that men want casual sex more than women do has been denounced by both the right and the left. Even heavier bipartisan fire has recently been aimed at Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer for suggesting in their book A Natural History of Rape that rape is a consequence of men’s sexuality. A spokesperson from the Feminist Majority Foundation called the book “scary” and “regressive” because it “almost validates the crime and blames the victim.”4 A spokesperson for the Discovery Institute, a creationist organization, testified at a U.S. congressional hearing that the book threatened the moral fabric upon which America is founded.5

  A third vice with political implications is selfishness. If people, like other animals, are driven by selfish genes, selfishness might seem inevitable or even a virtue. The argument is fallacious from the start because selfish genes do not necessarily grow selfish organisms. Still, let us consider the possibility that people might have some tendency to value their own interests and those of their family and friends above the interests of the tribe, society, or species. The political implications are spelled out in the two major philosophies of how societies should be organized, which make opposite assumptions about innate human selfishness:

  It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.

  —Adam Smith

  From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

  —Karl Marx

  Smith the explainer of capitalism assumes that people will selfishly give their labor according to their needs and will be paid according to their abilities (because the payers are selfish, too). Marx the architect of communism and socialism assumes that in a socialist society of the future the butcher, the brewer, and the baker will provide us with dinner out of benevolence or self-actualization—for why else would they cheerfully exert themselves according to their abilities and not according to their needs?

  Those who believe that communism or socialism is the most rational form of social organization are aghast at the suggestion that they run against our selfish natures. For that matter, everyone, regardless of politics, has to be appalled at people who impose costs on society in pursuit of their individual interests—hunting endangered species, polluting rivers, destroying historic sites to build shopping malls, spraying graffiti on public monuments, inventing weapons that elude metal detectors. Equally disturbing are the outcomes of actions that make sense to the individual choosing them but are costly to society when everyone chooses them. Examples include overfishing a harbor, overgrazing a commons, commuting on a bumper-to-bumper freeway, or buying a sport utility vehicle to protect oneself in a collision because everyone else is driving a sport utility vehicle. Many people dislike the suggestion that humans are inclined to selfishness because it would seem to imply that these self-defeating patterns of behavior are inevitable, or at least reducible only through permanent coercive measures.

  THE FEAR OF imperfectibility and the resultant embrace of the Blank Slate are rooted in a pair of fallacies. We have already met the naturalistic fallacy, the belief that whatever happens in nature is good. One might think that the belief was irreversibly tainted by Social Darwinism, but it was revived by the romanticism of the 1960s and 1970s. The environmentalist movement, in particular, often appeals to the goodness of nature to promote conservation of natural environments, despite their ubiquitous gore. For example, predators such as wolves, bears, and sharks have been given an image makeover as euthanists of the old and the lame, and thus worthy of preservation or reintroduction. It would seem to follow that anything we have inherited from this Eden is healthy and proper, so a claim that aggression or rape is “natural,” in the sense of having been favored by evolution, is tantamount to saying that it is good.

  The naturalistic fallacy leads quickly to its converse, the moralistic fallacy: that if a trait is moral, it must be found in nature. That is, not only does “is” imply “ought,” but “ought” implies “is.” Nature, including human nature, is stipulated to have only virtuous traits (no needless killings, no rapacity, no exploitation), or no traits at all, because the alternative is too horrible to accept. That is why the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies are so often associated with the Noble Savage and the Blank Slate.

  Defenders of the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies are not made of straw but include prominent scholars and writers. For example, in response to Thornhill’s earlier writings on rape, the feminist scholar Susan Brownmiller wrote, “It seems quite clear that the biologicization of rape and the dismissal of social or ‘moral’ factors will… tend to legitimate rape…. It is reductive and reactionary to isolate rape from other forms of violent antisocial behavior and dignify it with adaptive significance.”6 Note the fallacy: if something is explained with biology, it has been “legitimated”; if something is shown to be adaptive, it has been “dignified.” Similarly, Stephen Jay Gould wrote of another discussion of rape in animals, “By falsely describing an inherited behavior in birds with an old name for a deviant human action, we subtly suggest that true rape—our own kind—might be a natural behavior with Darwinian advantages to certain people as well.”7 The implicit rebuke is that to describe an act as “natural” or as having “Darwinian advantages” is somehow to condone it.

  The moralistic fallacy, like the naturalistic fallacy, is, well, a fallacy, as we learn from this Arlo and Janis cartoon:

  Arlo & Janis reprinted by permission of Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc.

  The boy has biology on his side.8 George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral”9 Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities.10 Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote:

  The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion’s lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha’s] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful…”11

  As soon as we
recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “ Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

  Crucially, this cuts both ways. Many commentators from the religious and cultural right believe that any behavior that strikes them as biologically atypical, such as homosexuality, voluntary childlessness, and women who assume traditional male roles or vice versa, should be condemned because it is “unnatural.” For example, the popular talk-show host Laura Schlesinger has declared, “I am getting people to stop doing wrong and start doing right.” As part of this crusade she has called on gay people to submit to therapy to change their sexual orientation, because homosexuality is a “biological error.” This kind of moral reasoning can come only from people who know nothing about biology. Most activities that moral people extol—being faithful to one’s spouse, turning the other cheek, treating every child as precious, loving thy neighbor as thyself—are “biological errors” and are utterly unnatural in the rest of the living world.

  Acknowledging the naturalistic fallacy does not mean that facts about human nature are irrelevant to our choices.12 The political scientist Roger Masters, noting that the naturalistic fallacy can be invoked too glibly to deny the relevance of biology to human affairs, points out, “When the physician says a patient ought to have an operation because the facts show appendicitis, the patient is unlikely to complain about a fallacious logical deduction.”13 Acknowledging the naturalistic fallacy implies only that discoveries about human nature do not, by themselves, dictate our choices. The facts must be combined with a statement of values and a method of resolving conflicts among them. Given the fact of appendicitis, the value that health is desirable, and the conviction that the pain and expense of the operation are outweighed by the resulting gain in health, one ought to have the operation.