Steven Pinker
New York, NY: Viking, 2002
$27.96
509 pp.
Reviewed by Jared Taylor
For the last half of the previous century, it was common—sometimes obligatory—to believe there is no such thing as human nature, that men are “blank slates” on which society can write any message it chooses. It was widely believed that humans are born essentially equal, with almost no predispositions or inherent abilities, and that behavior was almost entirely controlled by rearing and environment.
Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which takes its name from that theory, purports to be an introduction to new findings that support an older view, that human beings are born with differing abilities but the same general characteristics, and that all societies are built upon and reflect these characteristics. There is, in other words, such a thing as human nature, which largely dictates our social arrangements rather than the other way around, and that men (and women) are not born equal. The Blank Slate also offers to explain why so many people denied this for so many decades, and why they resorted to every trick to suppress and discredit those whose research contradicted their view.
This book does these things to some degree, but its real purpose is not to explain the discoveries of science but to instruct us what to think about them. It begins by leaving out a great deal—the entire field of racial differences, for example—and goes on to lather what science it does present in layers of moralizing, hand-holding, reassurances, and apologies. Steven Pinker, who teaches psychology at MIT, has therefore written a book that is polemic masquerading as science. It is perhaps one-tenth science, eight-tenths spin, and one-tenth blather. Prof. Pinker writes altogether like a man who does not trust his readers to think for themselves, and in offering to do their thinking for them, tries to uphold the liberal doctrines that were erected on the very blank-slate assumptions he is attacking.
This is the perfect book for liberals who have heard unpleasant rumors that what they have always pretended to believe about human nature is wrong, but who are dying to be told they can go on being liberals anyway, and this no doubt explains why the book has been well received. On balance, we should welcome any book that acknowledges the deep, biological roots of human behavior, but it is hard to be enthusiastic about an author so given to preaching.
Whatever he thinks privately, Prof. Pinker would never suggest anything that might offend anyone at the New York Review of Books. Prof. Pinker tosses off the view that “intellectuals have a responsibility to take reasonable care that their ideas not be misused for evil ends.” How are they supposed to do that? By misrepresenting their ideas? By concealing them? By shading the facts? By offering antidotes they don’t believe in? It is hard to think of a way to protect ideas from misuse that does not involve deceit.
Although Prof. Pinker quotes him disapprovingly, one cannot help but wonder if he does not have a sneaking sympathy for Irving Kristol, who once wrote:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriated for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.