Blank Slate
Blank Slate
Blank Slate
Steven Pinker
This essay is adapted from S. Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of
Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
20.1
steven pinker
20.2
the blank slate
20.3
steven pinker
20.4
the blank slate
20.5
steven pinker
20.6
the blank slate
20.7
steven pinker
20.8
the blank slate
ence. The question is, how do they work? When Locke wrote
that “there’s nothing in the intellect that was not first in the
senses,” the appropriate reply came from Leibniz, who said,
“Except for the intellect itself.”
Today the sciences of human nature have threatened the
blank slate by trying to delineate what has to be present in the
mind in order for learning to occur in the first place. My own
field, cognitive science, has tried to explicate the innate mech-
anisms that have to be in place in order to do the learning that
obviously gets done. They include: the basic concept of an en-
during object and lawful causation, which can be seen even in
young infants; a number sense that allows us to grasp quantity
of number; a number of spatial representations that allow us to
negotiate the world and recognize objects and faces; a “theory
of mind” or intuitive psychology with which we understand the
mental states of other people; a language instinct that allows
us to communicate our own thoughts and feelings via words;
and the executive systems of the frontal lobes of the brain,
which receive information from the rest of the brain and exe-
cute decision rules that determine how the person as a whole
behaves.
Evolutionary psychology has challenged the blank slate in at
least two ways. One is by documenting that beneath the unde-
niable fact of cross-cultural variation there is a bedrock of hu-
man universals: ways of thinking and feeling and behaving that
can be seen in all of the cultures documented by ethnography.
The anthropologist Donald Brown a few years ago compiled a
list of them, and they number some 300, everything from
20.9
steven pinker
20.10
the blank slate
20.11
steven pinker
20.12
the blank slate
20.13
steven pinker
20.14
the blank slate
20.15
steven pinker
20.16
the blank slate
Many people are sorry to “lose God” when they hear of these
findings, or at least sorry to lose the values that have tradition-
ally been associated with God. There has been a widespread
fear and loathing of human nature, both from the left and
from the right, for some reasons that are distinct and some
that are overlapping.
From the academic left, there was a vehement, and some-
times violent, reaction to the people who first publicized these
ideas in the 1970s, such as E. O. Wilson. An example is the
manifesto called “Against ‘Sociobiology,’” written by Stephen
Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and published in the New
York Review of Books, which said:
20.17
steven pinker
20.18
the blank slate
20.19
steven pinker
evident, that all men are created equal,” it surely did not mean
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
clones.” Rather, a commitment to political equality means two
things. First, it rests on a theory of universal human nature, in
particular, universal human interests, as when the declaration
continues by saying that “people are endowed . . . with certain
inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” It’s also a commitment to prohibit
public discrimination against individuals based on the average
of certain groups they belong to, such as their race, ethnicity,
or sex. And as long as we have that policy, it doesn’t matter
what the average statistics of different groups turns out to be.
I mentioned that there are downsides of believing in the
blank slate. In the case of individual differences, the downside
to denying that they exist is the tendency to treat more suc-
cessful people as larcenous. That is, if you really believe that
everyone starts out identical, and you look around and you see
that some people have more stuff than others, the temptation
is to think that they must have stolen more than their fair
share. Many of the worst instances of 20th-century persecu-
tion have been aimed at ethnic and social groups in cultural
conditions that allowed their more talented members to pros-
per, with the result that they were viewed as parasites or blood-
suckers and subjected to expulsions, persecutions, and some-
times genocide. Famous examples include the overseas
Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, the Indians in East Africa,
the Ibos in Nigeria, and the Jews in Europe.
The second fear is the fear of imperfectability: the dashing
20.20
the blank slate
20.21
steven pinker
and can be exploited with impunity. But over the course of his-
tory, one can see signs of the circle expanding to embrace
other villages, other clans within the tribe, other tribes, other
nations, other races, and most recently, as in the Universal De-
claration of Human Rights, all members of Homo sapiens. This
change in sensibility didn’t come from reengineering human
nature de novo, but rather from taking a knob or slider that ad-
justs the size of the circle that embraces the entities whose in-
terests we treat as comparable to our own.
I have emphasized that there are downsides to the blank
slate. The belief in perfectibility, despite its rosy and uplifting
connotation, has a number of dark sides. One of them is the
invitation to totalitarian social engineering. Dictators are apt
to think: “If people are blank slates, then we damn well better
control what gets written on those slates, instead of leaving it
up to chance.” Some of the worst autocrats of 20th century ex-
plicitly avowed a belief in the blank slate. Mao Tse-tung, for
example, had a famous saying, “It is on a blank page that the
most beautiful poems are written.” The Khmer Rouge had a
slogan, “Only the newborn baby is spotless.”
And far less horrifically, one can see this sentiment in urban
planners such as Le Corbusier, who wrote that city planners
should begin with “a clean tablecloth. We must build places
where mankind will be reborn.” An example of what he had in
mind was his sketch of what Paris would look like if he had
been granted his wish to bulldoze it and start over from a clean
tablecloth: a vista of concrete high-rises separated by empty
plazas and interconnected by superhighways. It was part of a
20.22
the blank slate
20.23
steven pinker
20.24
the blank slate
20.25
steven pinker
20.26
the blank slate
20.27
steven pinker
20.28
the blank slate
20.29
steven pinker
20.30
the blank slate
20.31
steven pinker
20.32
the blank slate
20.33
steven pinker
20.34