The Blank Slate: Steven Pinker Stuck in the Seventies

Steven Pinker became a celebrity when he published How the Mind Works, a book that explains the human mind using evolutionary biology (which explains why we evolved the emotional biases and intellectual capabilities that we have) and cognitive science (which uses computer models to explain human thought). It is an excellent book that is about 95% science and is only about 5% physicalist dogma claiming that there is nothing to the human mind except what these sciences can explain.

Once you are a celebrity, publishers are eager to bring out anything you write. Pinker continued to write some books that explain his scientific work to the public, such as The Language Instinct. But he was also able to publish works that are more dogma than science.

The most dogmatic is The Blank Slate. This diffuse, disorganized book devotes some time to Pinker's valuable scientific work, but it devotes much more time to Pinker's amateurish attempts at philosophy and to political opinions that he formed in the 1970s and has not rethought since.

Beating Dead Horses

Pinker begins the book by saying that colleagues always told him that he was beating a dead horse when he told them that he was working on a book about the theory that the mind is a blank slate that our experience writes upon, a theory that goes back to the seventeenth-century writings of John Locke. No, Pinker says, it is still central to the intellectual debate today.

But the first example he discusses at length to show that the blank slate is still central is behaviorist psychology-the theory, most famously expounded by B.F. Skinner, that our behavior is entirely the result of conditioning and not of human nature. Skinner believed that we could condition people to produce a utopian society, and he replied to criticism that he would reduce human freedom by saying we are already the products of conditioning, so we are "beyond freedom and dignity."

This is an unfortunate way for Pinker to make his point that the blank slate is central to today's intellectual debates, because the influence of behaviorist psychology peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, and virtually no one believes in it today. Today, the most common theory among the public is that our psychology depends on brain chemistry-which is why we try to restore the normal chemical balance in the brain by giving Ritalin to school children and Prozac to adults. How can Pinker possibly use behaviorism to show that the blank slate is important today?

Pinker also argues for the relevance of this book by providing a long series of quotations from anthropologists who are cultural relativists, claiming that every culture is equally valid because there is no human nature, just a blank slate. Yet the quotations range from the 1930s through the 1970s. The influence of this sort of thinking has declined dramatically in the face of evolutionary psychology, which shows that there is an evolved human nature. How can Pinker use a series of quotations that ends in the 1970s to show that the blank slate is important today?

Radical Marxists and Feminists

The reason becomes clear later in the book, when Pinker begins to talk about his own personal introduction to these issues: Pinker is still fighting against the ideas that were popular when he was a graduate student in the 1970s.

At that time, politics in the academy was dominated by Marxists, who believed there is no human nature and our behavior is the result of economic factors, and by radical feminists, who believed there is no human nature and that differences between men and women are purely the result of social stereotypes. Pinker compares these thinkers to modernist urban planners, such as Le Corbusier, who created utopian designs for cities that failed because they ignored human nature. In later chapters of the book, he adds deconstructionists to the crew he attacks.

Yet the influence of these schools of thought among academics peaked in the 1970s. The influence of Marxism has waned dramatically since the collapse of communism in eastern Europe in 1989, and the influence of the most extreme radical feminists has waned dramatically since feminism entered the mainstream. The influence of modernist planning in the style of Le Corbusier peaked in the 1960s, and today modernist planning has been eclipsed by New Urbanism, with its neo-traditional urban design. As one sign of this change, over 96,000 units of public housing in the modernist style were torn down under the federal government's HOPE VI program and replaced with neo-traditional urban neighborhoods.

Pinker is quite right to say that these schools of thought are dehumanizing. He is particularly good in later chapters of the book, where he adds deconstructionism to the enemies' list and refutes it using his own theories about language rather than just attacking his opponents rhetorically. But throughout, he is beating horses that are either dead or dying: deconstructionism was still on the rise in the 1970s, but its influence peaked in the 1980s and has been declining since.

He complains about scientists who wanted to make their work serve "hard-left ideology," some calling themselves the "radical science movement," and his leading example is the first lecture he attended as an graduate student at Harvard in 1976. It was true in the 1970s, but how many scientists are there today who say they are part of the "radical science movement"?

1970s Environmentalists

Environmentalists were also very influential when Pinker was a graduate student, and in The Blank Slate, he parrots conventional conservative arguments against environmentalism, focusing on environmental issues that were current in the 1970s and ignoring those that are most important today.

He attacks environmentalists for what he calls their "Malthusian" predictions that there are limits on resources, criticizing the Club of Rome Report named The Limits of Growth, which focused national attention on the issue when it was published in 1972. To refute this report, he mentions the famous wager between Paul Ehrlich, an early environmentalist, and Julian Simon, a fellow at the free market Cato Institute, about whether the price of natural resources would rise in real terms between 1980 and 1990; they bet about the price of five strategic metals, and Ehrlich lost all five bets, because (Pinker says) "Malthusian prophesies ignore the effect of technological change in increasing the resources that support a comfortable life." Pinker mentions in passing that The Limits of Growth said that uncontrolled growth would ultimately cause both resource shortages and more pollution than the earth could absorb-but he goes on to ignore pollution and only discuss resources.

Yet elementary economics tells us that the free market gives businesses an incentive to increase the supply of a resource when shortages drive its price up, but that the market has no mechanism that gives businesses an incentive to reduce pollution. Environmentalists are clearly right to say that government must control pollution. In 1990, the United States set up a cap-and-trade program to reduce the emissions that caused acid rain, and it worked: acid rain is no longer killing our forests and lakes, as it was in the 1980s. By the time Pinker wrote The Blank Slate, environmentalists considered global warming to be the greatest environmental threat and were calling for cap-and-trade to control it also. In fact, California passed a law using cap-and-trade to control greenhouse gas emissions just four years after this book was published.

When it comes to global warming and other problems caused by pollution, Pinker is clearly wrong to attack environmentalists and claim that new technology in itself will solve the problems. Yes, we do need to develop new clean energy technologies to control global warming, but the market does not provide the incentive needed to shift to clean energy quickly enough. It will remain cheaper for quite a while to keep existing dirty power plants than to replace them with clean energy, so we need the government to provide incentives to shift to clean energy in time to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The entire world realizes this, with the exception of the Trump administration, which is why the world adopted the Paris agreement in 2016 and governments worldwide pledged to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

This is elementary economic theory-the market does not account for what economists call "externalities"-but Pinker simply ignores it and keeps repeating the claim that technology alone will solve our problems.

Pinker attacks environmentalists of the 1970s, such as Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, and he ignores what environmentalists are saying today. The resource shortages and economic disruption of the 1970s led many environmentalists to be overly pessimistic during that decade and to think that environmental crisis was inevitable. Today, as we face the problem of global warming, most environmentalists are guardedly optimistic: we can avoid the worst effects of climate change if world governments can agree to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to transition to clean energy, as they did in the Paris Agreement, and then can move quickly enough to limit emissions. Yet the Paris agreement would never have been signed if we listened to the right-wing slogan that we do not need to control pollution because technology will solve all our problems.

Since global warming is the biggest environmental issue that the world faces today and was the biggest at the time he wrote, we would expect Pinker to look at what environmentalists say about this issue, rather than focusing on what Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were saying during the 1970s. With the overwhelming majority all climate scientists agreeing that human-caused global warming is a significant threat, we would expect Pinker to look at scientific evidence and economic realities that exist today, but instead he restates the political prejudices that he formed in the 1970s.

Materialist Moral Philosophy

Though his philosophy is amateurish, Pinker does know more about the subject than most evolutionary psychologists, and he does a better job of justifying morality than the usual account of how altruism evolves. He understands how altruism evolved, but he also understands that he would be committing the naturalistic fallacy if he tried to justify morality on the basis of how it evolved.

Instead, he justifies morality by reproducing a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin says he does not believe in morality and Hobbes shoves him so he falls in the mud. Pinker comments:

The brain may be a physical system made of ordinary matter, but that matter is organized in such a way as ... to feel pleasure and pain. And that in turn sets the stage for the emergence of morality. ... since one is better off not shoving and not getting shoved than shoving and getting shoved, it pays to insist on a moral code, even if the price is adhering to itself oneself."

Pinker is saying that morality is a matter of expediency: we want to have pleasure and avoid pain, and we invent morality because it helps us get what we want, sacrificing some pleasures to avoid greater pains. This is similar to the social contract theory of philosophers beginning with Hobbes. It is also similar to the evolutionary psychologists' theory of reciprocal altruism, but it presented in a way that justifies morality rather than explaining how it evolved. Yet there are obvious problems with this theory.

If morality is just a matter of expediency, then it makes sense to cheat. If I go along with my society's morality just because it helps me to get pleasure and avoid pain, then I will also cheat if it helps me to get pleasure and avoid pain. In most cases, I will not cheat, because being detected would hurt my reputation and make my life less pleasant, but if I am sure that my cheating will never be detected (or if I think the benefits of cheating outweigh the risk of being detected) then I will cheat.

If morality is just a matter of expediency, then I will not help the poor and powerless unless it also helps me. The powerless generally cannot retaliate for any damage I do to them and cannot repay me adequately for any benefits I give them. I will help them only if I think it will make my own life better by giving me a reputation for charity, which will make people admire me and will make my own life more pleasant.

If morality is just a matter of expediency, then it does not apply to people outside of my society. I go along with my society's morality because my life will be more pleasant if everyone I encounter accepts this morality, but if my society discovers some new part of the world where primitive people live, then I will decide what to do with those people by asking myself whether my own life will be more pleasant if my group treats them morally or if my group enslaves or exterminates them.

If morality is just a matter of expediency, then it certainly does not apply to animals. Animals cannot join in the social contract by accepting society's morality, so there is no benefit to me in treating animals kindly. I will treat them in the way that is most expedient for me, and if treating animals cruelly saves me a bit of money when I buy food, that is what I will do. Why should I do anything for animals, when animals will not do anything for me in return?

Notice that all of these examples talk about what I "will" do, rather than about what I "ought" to do. Pinker understands the naturalistic fallacy, so he should agree with me that, if ethics is based on expediency, it is logically impossible to get from "is" to "ought." It "is" true that I desire to have pleasure and to avoid pain and that I am more likely to satisfy this desire if my society has a moral code, but it is impossible to get from those "is" statements to the statements that I ought to obey the moral code.

Epicurus, the earliest materialist philosopher whose writing survives, was the first to advocate Pinker's idea that morality is just a matter of expediency. Like Pinker, he believed that only matter exists, that we try to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that we invent morality as a matter of expediency, to avoid being harmed by others.

Despite all of his scientific knowledge, Pinker is not able to do a better job of justifying morality than Epicurus did over two millennia ago. No materialist can. They can only appeal to expediency, because they live in a world of "is statements" where there cannot be any justification for "ought statements."

Physicalism and Freedom

Pinker blames the blank slate for the totalitarian ideologies of Marxism and radical feminism: if there is no human nature, then we can manipulate people in any way that is needed to reach our utopian goals. He doesn't mention that John Locke, his earliest example of the blank slate, inspired the liberal ideals of the American Revolution-that Jefferson had a bust of and Locke in his study and based the argument of the Declaration of Independence on Locke's ideas.

As usual, Pinker's argument is out of date. Utopians used to claim that there was no limit to their ability to manipulate people because there was no human nature, but the technology being developed today gives us more power over nature. Even if there is a human nature, utopian totalitarians can potentially use drugs and genetic engineering to change human nature.

Totalitarians potentially have much more power than they had in the past. In the past, they ignored human nature, so their utopias ultimately failed, as Pinker says. Today, they are on the edge of being able to manipulate human nature to make humanity fit into their utopias.

In the days of B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists, educators talked about conditioning children, but today, educators are more likely to get drug prescriptions for children: instead of trying to condition children who are disruptive, they say the children have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and give them prescriptions for Ritalin. Some children can benefit from psychiatric drugs, but the fact that we in the United States prescribe psychiatric drugs more than twice as often as the Netherlands and more than three times as often as Germany shows that we are over-using drugs to control children who do not fit in.

Utopian totalitarians will welcome new drugs that control behavior more effectively and will also want to use genetic engineering to change human nature. How can we justify resistance to these new forms of totalitarianism?

The usual justification is that controlling people in these ways would violate their freedom, but Pinker says explicitly that we have no freedom, and our behavior is determined.

He spends a chapter of The Blank Slate talking about the conflict between determinism and free will. He says that his physicalism is deterministic, but we should not worry about determinism because it does not undermine personal responsibility. We make people responsible for their actions, for example, by punishing criminals, and people take these consequences into account when they plan their actions. The possibility of punishment is one of the factors that determines their behavior, so they are held responsible for their behavior even though it is determined.

But he does not notice a deeper implication of his view: if we are nothing more than computers whose behavior is determined, rather than humans who have freedom, then we can no longer say that utopians who control our behavior are violating our freedom.

It is odd that Pinker believes in determinism, which is based on classical physics, rather than seeing that modern physics allows for randomness as well as determinism. We have seen that Daniel Dennett uses twentieth-century physics to argue that freedom is worthless, because it can only be random behavior, which is no better than determined behavior. By contrast, Pinker sticks with the old debate between freedom and determinism, based on the nineteenth-century physics. This is one more example of how amateurish his philosophy is.

Either way, physicalists like Pinker or Dennett do not believe in freedom, so they do not believe in the most important reason to resist totalitarian use of drugs and genetic engineering. Our minds are just evolved computers, so why shouldn't redesign and improve them, just as we constantly redesign and improve the computers on our desktop?

A dualist or new-physics materialist can believe that evolution took advantage of some unknown property of matter to create freedom-the ability to make deliberate decisions-and can believe that freedom is so valuable that we should not allow utopian social planners to control us. But physicalists do not believe in freedom. Though Pinker himself seems to be a decent person who would resist totalitarianism, he is promoting a theory that implies there is nothing wrong with totalitarian control of human behavior.

In The Blank Slate, he argues at length for genetic engineering of food, and some of arguments would also support genetic engineering of people. It seems that he overlooks human genetic engineering because it is unthinkable in our society-but if our society accepted Pinker's physicalism, human genetic engineering would be thinkable, there would be no coherent argument against it, and we would be heading straight for Brave New World.

Pinker doesn't realize what today's real problem is. The theory of the blank slate promoted totalitarianism in the past, when human nature was an obstacle to utopian schemes. But today, we are developing the ability to control human nature, and Pinker's physicalism removes the best reason to stop totalitarians from changing human nature to fit it into their utopian schemes.

In the future, as we gain more and more power to control human nature, Marx's dialectical materialism will not be as great a threat to freedom as Pinker's physicalist materialism.