Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, London: Allen Lane, 2002. xvi + 509, #25.00. (ISBN: 0-713-99256-5)

The blank slate of Stephen Pinker’s title is the ‘white paper void of all characters, without any ideas’ to which Locke compares the original state of the mind, as it passively waits for experience to provide it with the materials of thought and knowledge. Generalized beyond anything Locke intended, the idea would be that the mind is empty of any powers or dispositions at all until life’s journey gets under way. Leibniz and Hume, to mention but two, saw that this was hopeless, since at the very least the mind or brain needs the capacity to make something of whatever it is that experience affords us. But according to Pinker’s messianic book the idea lived on, often harnessed (inconsistently) with the romantic view that the blank mind is inherently noble, so that violence and aggression, or for that matter a deficient sense of humour or a tin ear, must be the fault of bad parenting or bad environment or other defects of Culture or Society. Pinker believes that this bad idea continues to infuse a whole cocktail of practical mistakes, including utopian politics, madcap schemes of social engineering, optimistic educational programmes, ludicrous views about gender, and shapeless modernisms and postmodernisms in the arts. He mobilizes the modern sciences of man, notably neuroscience, genetics, evolutionary theory and particularly evolutionary psychology, in order to oppose it.

The book is brilliant in several dimensions. It is enjoyable, informative, clear, humane, and sensible. It is well aware of the emotions and self-deceptions that swirl around the science of human nature, and it parades a lurid cast of villains, from B.F. Skinner to Jerome Kagan. It is difficult to be morally sensitive while treading on peoples’ dreams, but Pinker manages it, while never compromising on the point that good morals and politics need to acknowledge the truth about human beings as they are, rather than issue blank cheques about what they might become. Its political motto might be the remark E. O. Wilson made about Marx: “Wonderful theory. Wrong species”.

All this is very sound. But is the breathless deference to the new sciences of the mind and brain appropriate? Pinker writes rhetorically: “Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?” Yet his chapter on conflict and violence explicitly relies almost entirely on Hobbes, and his perceptive remarks on human greed and status come from Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen. Pinker contrasts real science with “armchair” theorizing, but most theorizing is done in armchairs, and such writers were gifted observers of human nature long before they sat in theirs. Meanwhile if we read carefully, the amount added by evolutionary theory, psychology, or neuroscience, appears to be either little or controversial. To take just one example, Pinker says that there is an overwhelming consensus among experts that exposure to media violence does not make children more violent. But I read the book immediately after attending a conference on law and human nature which was told with equal certainty of a consensus among experts on just the opposite. Evidently measuring what the experts think is as hard as measuring anything else.

When it comes to evolution and psychology the matter is no different. Pinker is unusually clear about the distinction between underlying evolutionary mechanisms (selfish genes) and proximate psychological mechanisms, (overt motivations, such as lust or envy, altruism or malice). But politics and education need to assess the degree of freedom evolution may leave to those mechanisms, as we seek to influence them for the better. If we want to know about that, Hobbes or Tolstoy may still be better guides than the American Psychological Association.