The Blank Slate

I just finished reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Unlike my favorite blogger I am the Rain King, I have no hopes of accomplishing a 50 book a year program, so me and my measly "please make it through one book a month" club are pleased to announce that book #1 for January is finally completed. After a whopping 434 pages, what new never before known knowledge did I walk away with? Well I'm glad you asked! (bullet points, anyone?)

• In sum, this book is about how nature vs nurture is still actually alive and well as a debate, and how Steven Pinker thinks that's dumb.
• There are three versions of the "nurture" theory that are alive and well. Blank slate is the theory that we are born empty and wait for culture and the world to shape our every behavior and habits. The Noble Savage is (according to Pinker) "a Gauguinesque portrait of native peoples as peaceable, egalitarian, materially satisfied, and sexually unconflicted." The basic premise is that man is born a noble, peaceful, and prone towards innate goodness, and it is only modern culture and lack of will that prevents us from achieving this noble state again. This belief is part and parcel of the same thing that compels people to believing that all things "natural" are therefore "wholesome" and "good." Pinker argues vehemently that this is inane, using the example of the outrage caused by genetically altered foods and the new trend for organic and "whole" foods that is spawned by this philosophy of "the noble savage." The final theory in the triumverant is The Ghost in the Machine. This, roughly stated, is the belief in who it is that runs the human body organism. This can be alternatively thought of as the soul, or the mind, or some other elan vital (special essence) that allows us to change who "we" are and what "we"don't like.
• Pinker then goes on to talk about the history of each of these theories and then debunks them each in turn. Not the most exciting part of the book, I fear
• Onward and upward to section three - why each of these theories is so appealing and why we needn't fear debunking them. For example, if the slate is not blank, and people are inherently different, doesn't that make it ok to discriminate? No, argues Pinker. What is genetically and scientifically accurate is different from what is morally right.
• To me, the meat of the book and what made it a good read as opposed to just another book that will sit on the shelf stamped "Done! Go me!" is section 4 - where he shows how each of the various trinity of theories is applied to modern hot button topics and why it is invalid. He takes on politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts.
• The most interesting section, to me, was children. Pinker debunks the common mythology that parents can have a great deal of developmental impact on their children by how much they read to them, how they behave around them, etc. He points out that there are three things that make up a child's eventual development: genes (50%), shared environment (parental home and upbringing) (about 0%), and then "other" - which he attributes to a combination of random chemical interactions and development in the womb and "group socialization" - a theory put forward by Harris that states that peer groups define more about how children turn out then their parental homes or cultures (the last 50%). Controversial, but interesting nonetheless. Best quote from the book on child rearing:

  [it is easy] to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship. Even the theory that children adapt to their peer group becomes less surprising when we think of them as human beings like ourselves. 'Peer group' is a patronizing term we use in connection with children for what we call 'friends and colleagues and associates' when we talk about ourselves. We groan when children obsess over wearing the right kind of cargo pants, but we would be just as mortified if a very large person forced us to wear pink overalls to a corporate board meeting or a polyester disco suit to an academic conference.

• Wanna read some Pinker yourself? Of course you do. Lucky for you, our good friends at Google have put The Language Instinct up on the web.

Other interesting things about Steven Pinker

• He has a major beef against postmodernism in the Arts.

  Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction. As we saw in preceding chapters [well, as I saw -you'd have to read pages 1-411 to get to this point on your own. But, I will grant him that we did see this in preceding chapters] the visual system of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects. We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes.

• He adores Calvin and Hobbes.
• Much like Ninjas, Cognitive scientists fight all the time.