A review by lassebirk
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
5.0
SUMMARY:
The blank slate idea won the intellectual scene in the 20th century, but neuroscience, psychology, biology and related fields are showing it to be false. There are human universals such as love, violence, jealousy, gender differences, and many others, and there are compelling evolutionary explanations for them, and behavioral sciences have shown that all human traits are significantly heritable.
Many fear that discarding the blank slate theory will enable group discrimation such as racism and sexism, but Pinker reminds us that some of the biggest atrocities of the 20th century were justified using blank slate ideology:
Many also fear that heritable traits such as intelligence will justify social inequalities and thus favor policies that increase inequality, but it might as well be argued that heritable traits prove that bad life outcome is not necessarily the individual's fault and thus justify helping disadvantaged groups.
The blank slate idea won the intellectual scene in the 20th century, but neuroscience, psychology, biology and related fields are showing it to be false. There are human universals such as love, violence, jealousy, gender differences, and many others, and there are compelling evolutionary explanations for them, and behavioral sciences have shown that all human traits are significantly heritable.
Many fear that discarding the blank slate theory will enable group discrimation such as racism and sexism, but Pinker reminds us that some of the biggest atrocities of the 20th century were justified using blank slate ideology:
"More sinisterly, we find Mao Zedong justifying his radical social engineering by saying, “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written."
Lenin endorsed Nikolai Bukharin’s ideal of “the manufacturing of Communist man out of the human material of the capitalist age.”43 Lenin’s admirer Maxim Gorky wrote, “The working classes are to Lenin what minerals are to the metallurgist”44 and “Human raw material is immeasurably more difficult to work with than wood” (the latter while admiring a canal built by slave labor).45 We come across the metaphor of the blank slate in the writings of a man who may have been responsible for sixty-five million deaths: A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it. —Mao Zedong
Many also fear that heritable traits such as intelligence will justify social inequalities and thus favor policies that increase inequality, but it might as well be argued that heritable traits prove that bad life outcome is not necessarily the individual's fault and thus justify helping disadvantaged groups.