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A review by becca_g_powell
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
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.)