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becca_g_powell's review against another edition
5.0
I think this book (like the other Pinker books I've read) is fantastic. He is meticulously thorough, and explains complicated concepts and research with as much context as practicable, so that the lay reader doesn't have to just take his word for it. It's ambitious, tackling the large topic of our collective scientific, political, and artistic views about human nature. It's long and engrossing, but definitely worth it. It's a tad dated, but not in any way that takes away from the narrative. He leaves the possibility of lots of future discovery open, and mostly stresses that we need to be ready to take the facts as they are discovered, and not bend them to fit our cultural or political narratives. (It is a bit fun to smile over passing references to sheep cloning, the World Wide Web, and palm pilots).
And I'm not just reading in an echo chamber - at the beginning of the book, I was really resistant to his general thesis. I have often made the logical leap he identifies, where if we accept that the science shows that a trait is heritable or a result of an innate way our brains are wired, that must necessarily translate into policy judgments about what "should be." I have (to my embarrassment) been guilty of the logical misstep of assuming that when a researcher proclaims something is "natural," or at least partially explained by natural phenomena, he must be suggesting that that something is also "good." Pinker carefully deconstructs this problem, and extricates empirical research about what Is from policy judgments about What Should Be.
Don't worry - I'm not so wowed by this book that I automatically agree with him on everything. :) I disagreed with the penultimate chapter about how his findings affect the world of art and artistic expression. He seems to me to be guilty of the same broad brushstrokes he calls out in the other 95% of his book - he points out that we may be evolutionarily primed for art because of our mind's need to carefully appreciate the nuances and depth of the world around us (so we like good landscape paintings) and other people (so we like good portraiture, etc.) But it appears that he sees none of the things that should please our brain in modern art, and instead chalks it up whole-cloth to the fact that a lot of the most avante-garde art is probably just designed to shock, and those who pretend to like it are just doing so as an attempt to grab status as a cultural elite. As a result, we have a glut of "ugly, baffling, and insulting art."
Although I agree that plenty of postmodern art is probably that at bottom, plenty of it is not. Pinker seems to just assume that the Purpose Of Art is to represent the world around us. But that ignores the purposes of expression across language, evocation of certain feelings through color, shape, shadow, and movement (without those colors actually representing or portraying an object or person that we would recognize in the world). And even if postmodern theory is ultimately wrong that there is no objective perspective, that doesn't mean that the attempt to get viewers to see their perspective and realize that it is one is a worthless enterprise. Pinker repeatedly states throughout the books that what makes humans special is the ability to self-consciously think thoughts about our thoughts (about our thoughts, etc.). So even if some thoughts about our thoughts turn out to be empirically the wrong ones, that doesn't make the enterprise pointless. He's right that if a person who is trying to be moral and right wants to hang a clown picture over their couch it's none of our damn business, but it's equally right that if someone else wants to hang a Jackson Pollock above theirs because they find the random, unrepresentative colors beautiful, it's also none of our damn business. He's right that postmodernists don't hold the key to the universe and everyone else is wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their work is always "ugly, baffling, and insulting." (As an aside, he also defines modernism and postmodernism, like Virginia Woolf does, as everything after December 1910. But of course, that was the beginning of a developmental period that over the next 100 years varied significantly. If you think the most over-the-top, shocking, pointless performance art pieces today are stupid, that doesn't necessarily mean you find Matisse equally stupid.)
And I'm not just reading in an echo chamber - at the beginning of the book, I was really resistant to his general thesis. I have often made the logical leap he identifies, where if we accept that the science shows that a trait is heritable or a result of an innate way our brains are wired, that must necessarily translate into policy judgments about what "should be." I have (to my embarrassment) been guilty of the logical misstep of assuming that when a researcher proclaims something is "natural," or at least partially explained by natural phenomena, he must be suggesting that that something is also "good." Pinker carefully deconstructs this problem, and extricates empirical research about what Is from policy judgments about What Should Be.
Don't worry - I'm not so wowed by this book that I automatically agree with him on everything. :) I disagreed with the penultimate chapter about how his findings affect the world of art and artistic expression. He seems to me to be guilty of the same broad brushstrokes he calls out in the other 95% of his book - he points out that we may be evolutionarily primed for art because of our mind's need to carefully appreciate the nuances and depth of the world around us (so we like good landscape paintings) and other people (so we like good portraiture, etc.) But it appears that he sees none of the things that should please our brain in modern art, and instead chalks it up whole-cloth to the fact that a lot of the most avante-garde art is probably just designed to shock, and those who pretend to like it are just doing so as an attempt to grab status as a cultural elite. As a result, we have a glut of "ugly, baffling, and insulting art."
Although I agree that plenty of postmodern art is probably that at bottom, plenty of it is not. Pinker seems to just assume that the Purpose Of Art is to represent the world around us. But that ignores the purposes of expression across language, evocation of certain feelings through color, shape, shadow, and movement (without those colors actually representing or portraying an object or person that we would recognize in the world). And even if postmodern theory is ultimately wrong that there is no objective perspective, that doesn't mean that the attempt to get viewers to see their perspective and realize that it is one is a worthless enterprise. Pinker repeatedly states throughout the books that what makes humans special is the ability to self-consciously think thoughts about our thoughts (about our thoughts, etc.). So even if some thoughts about our thoughts turn out to be empirically the wrong ones, that doesn't make the enterprise pointless. He's right that if a person who is trying to be moral and right wants to hang a clown picture over their couch it's none of our damn business, but it's equally right that if someone else wants to hang a Jackson Pollock above theirs because they find the random, unrepresentative colors beautiful, it's also none of our damn business. He's right that postmodernists don't hold the key to the universe and everyone else is wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their work is always "ugly, baffling, and insulting." (As an aside, he also defines modernism and postmodernism, like Virginia Woolf does, as everything after December 1910. But of course, that was the beginning of a developmental period that over the next 100 years varied significantly. If you think the most over-the-top, shocking, pointless performance art pieces today are stupid, that doesn't necessarily mean you find Matisse equally stupid.)
blairconrad's review against another edition
3.0
Some very interesting concepts, and for the most part well-presented. I enjoyed learning about much of the reasoning behind the public's fears of the Blank Slate, and Pinker's rebuttals. I did find, though, that the book dragged at times, and there was a great deal of repetition, so I kept thinking "Get on with it!". Also, while most of the "hot button" topics at the end were interesting, some had a tenuous connection at best. "The Arts"? Really?
drae's review against another edition
1.0
I listen to and enjoy a lot of nonfiction, but this book went straight to my "abandoned" shelf. Not sure whether it's the audiobook narrator or the content, but it was so monotone and dry that I couldn't absorb anything of value after two+ hours of listening. No way I could endure another 20 hours of this.
rbogue's review against another edition
4.0
What makes a man a man? What drives our behavior? What makes us us? These are the questions that Steven Pinker tries to answer in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. The answers are surprisingly entangled in religion and our belief in our own free will. The book, when it was originally released, was labeled “controversial.” In other words, Pinker challenged the status quo. What we believe intuitively or through faith didn’t mesh with his decomposition and recompositing of the discoveries of science. This review will be broken into two parts: the first where we cover the basics of The Blank Slate, and the second where I talk about the implications.
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tac107's review against another edition
4.0
This was a really interesting book that challenged a lot of preconceived notions that I didn't even realize I had. I think it's a must-read for anyone interested in sociology or psychology. For the most part, it offers a different way of looking at things from philosophy to violence. The language is easy to understand - I was afraid the book would be full of philosophical buzzwords but for the most part it is really easy to follow. The tone is conversational, not too dry, and at times funny.
The arguments are MOSTLY well supported. There were a few times that I felt the author was contradicting himself or leaning too heavily on anecdotes. For instance, when the author was arguing that utopianism doesn't work because people are biologically inclined to violence (which suggests that the absence of policing leads to more crimes), he cited countries that are in civil wars and his own anecdote about the Montreal Police strike of 1969. He also attributes the drop in violent crime in the 1990s to more active policing, which other books like Freakonomics have seemingly disproven.
The author definitely comes across as being slightly conservative, but he gives both liberal and conservative viewpoints roughly equal airing. He does defend conservative positions more vigorously for certain and spends a lot of time talking about the failures of Marxism/communism/collectivism/utopian society/what have you.
However, where this book completely fell apart for me was one of the final chapters, which is about rape. While reading it, I could not help but feel that the author was living in a different universe than me. He does not believe the conception that rape is about power, rather than sex. While he offers some interesting arguments that rape is primarily about sex, he does not say anything to back up his assertion that it is NOT about power. If you believe that having sex with someone against their will is an assertion of power over them, as I do, he is really bolstering the opposing argument. He also suggests that men who rape are "losers" who can't get sex in any other way, but this totally discounts the prevalence of rape by coercion, marital rape, serial rape, and rapes committed by powerful politicians/sports figures/movie stars/etc. When you look at the statistic that most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows I find this hard to believe.
What made me put this book down without finishing it was the author's attitude toward rape prevention. He admiringly quoted Paglia's comparison of leaving your car keys on your hood in New York and having your car stolen to drinking at a fraternity party and then going upstairs and expecting nothing to happen. After a chapter saying that, even if men have a biological drive to rape, it does not excuse them of responsibility, he reproduces Paglia saying that you should NOT be able to expect a man to not rape you after drinking and being alone with him, plus Paglia's assertion that, in this situation, she and the police have the right to say "You idiot, what the hell were you thinking?"
Having spent 18 months working at a rape crisis center and having seen the psychological damage that occurs when the police or others act like this, I felt sick and had to put the book down. I am sure the rest of it is very interesting but in my non-professional opinion the author knows nothing about this particular subject and this chapter is best being skipped.
The arguments are MOSTLY well supported. There were a few times that I felt the author was contradicting himself or leaning too heavily on anecdotes. For instance, when the author was arguing that utopianism doesn't work because people are biologically inclined to violence (which suggests that the absence of policing leads to more crimes), he cited countries that are in civil wars and his own anecdote about the Montreal Police strike of 1969. He also attributes the drop in violent crime in the 1990s to more active policing, which other books like Freakonomics have seemingly disproven.
The author definitely comes across as being slightly conservative, but he gives both liberal and conservative viewpoints roughly equal airing. He does defend conservative positions more vigorously for certain and spends a lot of time talking about the failures of Marxism/communism/collectivism/utopian society/what have you.
However, where this book completely fell apart for me was one of the final chapters, which is about rape. While reading it, I could not help but feel that the author was living in a different universe than me. He does not believe the conception that rape is about power, rather than sex. While he offers some interesting arguments that rape is primarily about sex, he does not say anything to back up his assertion that it is NOT about power. If you believe that having sex with someone against their will is an assertion of power over them, as I do, he is really bolstering the opposing argument. He also suggests that men who rape are "losers" who can't get sex in any other way, but this totally discounts the prevalence of rape by coercion, marital rape, serial rape, and rapes committed by powerful politicians/sports figures/movie stars/etc. When you look at the statistic that most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows I find this hard to believe.
What made me put this book down without finishing it was the author's attitude toward rape prevention. He admiringly quoted Paglia's comparison of leaving your car keys on your hood in New York and having your car stolen to drinking at a fraternity party and then going upstairs and expecting nothing to happen. After a chapter saying that, even if men have a biological drive to rape, it does not excuse them of responsibility, he reproduces Paglia saying that you should NOT be able to expect a man to not rape you after drinking and being alone with him, plus Paglia's assertion that, in this situation, she and the police have the right to say "You idiot, what the hell were you thinking?"
Having spent 18 months working at a rape crisis center and having seen the psychological damage that occurs when the police or others act like this, I felt sick and had to put the book down. I am sure the rest of it is very interesting but in my non-professional opinion the author knows nothing about this particular subject and this chapter is best being skipped.
zedseayou's review against another edition
5.0
It's not often that I read a book and can honestly say it changed my outlook on life, but The Blank Slate is definitely one of them (trite, I know). In the book, Steven Pinker analyzes the current concepts of human nature, of culture and heritability, and reveals why in both popular and intellectual circles the prevailing viewpoints are flawed, and indeed detrimental to both research and society.
Brief summary:
The first section of the book introduces Pinker's three fallacies, which contribute to our misunderstanding of human nature. These are the Blank Slate, the tabula rasa, which considers each human being to be a moldable clay at birth, intrinsically shaped by their environment and culture.
Brief summary:
Spoiler
The first section of the book introduces Pinker's three fallacies, which contribute to our misunderstanding of human nature. These are the Blank Slate, the tabula rasa, which considers each human being to be a moldable clay at birth, intrinsically shaped by their environment and culture.
davemmett's review against another edition
5.0
While I had never believed that humans are born as a Blank Slate, I hadn't really considered the effect that this belief has on how people interpret the world - and how they work to change it.
A few things I took away from this:
The naturalistic and moralistic fallacy.
What is good is natural. What is natural is good.
This fallacy is so widespread in our society. Food is only good for you if it's natural. Violence can't be natural, because we know it isn't good.
Over-moralizing
We like to turn almost anything into a moral argument, which makes it nearly impossible to reach a mutually beneficial agreement for different groups (see - abortion debates, the design of Starbucks coffee cups, the appropriate number of flags to display on your car).
The Utopian Vision vs. the Tragic Vision
The Utopian vision is that we can create a perfect society if we just put our minds to it. The Tragic Vision is that we shouldn't presume to be able to define a perfect environment for ourselves or others. I feel very old when I say the (unfortunately named) Tragic Vision is more convincing.
Highly recommended.
A few things I took away from this:
The naturalistic and moralistic fallacy.
What is good is natural. What is natural is good.
This fallacy is so widespread in our society. Food is only good for you if it's natural. Violence can't be natural, because we know it isn't good.
Over-moralizing
We like to turn almost anything into a moral argument, which makes it nearly impossible to reach a mutually beneficial agreement for different groups (see - abortion debates, the design of Starbucks coffee cups, the appropriate number of flags to display on your car).
The Utopian Vision vs. the Tragic Vision
The Utopian vision is that we can create a perfect society if we just put our minds to it. The Tragic Vision is that we shouldn't presume to be able to define a perfect environment for ourselves or others. I feel very old when I say the (unfortunately named) Tragic Vision is more convincing.
Highly recommended.