|
|
|
 |
FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
|
|
|
|
Posted on 10/07/2002 7:53:51 AM PDT by shrinkermd
I was standing by a swimming pool in Australia in 1993, entangled in a rapidly degenerating politico-philosophical argument, when my interlocutor saw the light. I was, she said, a humanist. I thought this was a nice thing to be (still do), but she emitted the word with anger and derision and took it to end the argument in her favour. I discovered that humanism is a term of heavy moral opprobrium in fashionable, post-modern, politically correct areas of the academy; a term of abuse that denotes someone like Winston in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - someone who believes in a fundamental shared human nature in the teeth of his opponent, government agent O'Brien, who insists that "men are infinitely malleable", that "we create human nature".
Agent O'Brien subscribes to the "Blank Slate" - the subject of Steven Pinker's excellent new book: the doctrine (in its extreme form) that we are born mentally the same in every way, intellectually, emotionally and so on; boys and girls alike. Genes are for nothing in how we turn out to be; environmental influences are everything. Human nature is Silly Putty: "man has no nature" (José Ortega y Gasset); "the human being is instinctless" (Ashley Montagu); "our emotions are cultural products" (Clifford Geertz); "a blank sheet of paper has no blotches" (Mao Tse Tung).
No one now accepts the extreme Blank Slate, except perhaps for the zany anthropologists, and many of its supporters also embrace the strictly speaking incompatible doctrine of the "Noble Savage", Rousseau's (anti-Hobbesian) idea that we are all naturally kind and good and have "no selfish or evil instincts".
These two ideas are perhaps the most characteristic and most idealistic - but in practice the ugliest - product of the Enlightenment, and together they hold out promise of future bliss. Human beings can live in total harmony. All we have to do is to get our social and educational arrangements right. It's true that we've failed to do so throughout recorded history, but the problem can be fixed.
Aren't idealism and optimism good things? No. Blank Slate and/or Noble Savage led to totalitarian communism and hundreds of millions of deaths. Realism is the thing. You have to be a dough-brained ideologue to believe either of these views, even in their lighter versions. You have to lack any genuine understanding of what it is to be human (it is part of human nature to be rather good at this).
Pinker documents the error in detail, examining the fabulous damage that the Blank Slate has done and setting out the scientific findings that demolish it. The Blank Slate gives the full story of how it is reeling back from advances in neuropsychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.
How alike are we, psychologically, given all our striking differences? How deep does our common nature run? Well, the extent of the differences between human minds is exactly like the extent of the differences between human bodies: body differences can be highly dramatic, but they are all variations on a massive base of body similarity (we all have heads, limbs, hearts, kidneys and so on).
So too mental differences can be dramatic, but they all depend on a vast base of mental similarity (from ability to talk and sense to a profound common susceptibility to fundamental emotions such as surprise, anger, disgust, joy and fear). And all the truly fundamental mental variation between people (between the introvert, the extravert, the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, the melancholic) is to be found within a given society; not when we compare different societies.
Can we quantify how much mental variation is down to the genes, and how much to environmental influence? Studies of identical twins raised apart from birth show the huge influence of genes on intellectual ability and personality, and also on peculiarly trivial matters (both like to pretend to sneeze in lifts, wear rubber bands round their wrist, dip buttered toast in coffee).
The figure that's constantly confirmed is that about half of the variation in intelligence, personality and life outcomes is "heritable" - a correlate or indirect product of the genes. One particularly striking finding is that family environment has no significant effect on variations in character or personality, and that "virtually all the differences in parenting within a family can be explained as reactions to the genetic differences that the children were born with".
Pinker lays it all out with clarity and wit; he also gives the history of the Blank Slate and Noble Savage, ranging widely and quoting copiously and devastatingly. He considers the fears raised by proof of the profound extent of genetic influence on minds - fear of determinism (no free will), of ineradicable human inequality, of nihilism, of insoluble human discord - and shows, first, that abandoning the Blank Slate makes no real difference to these issues, second, that problems of human inequality and conflict are far better dealt with by admitting the truth about human nature.
He has excellent chapters on politics, violence, gender, children and art - in particular the anti-human character of post-modern art which allows someone like Karlheinz Stockhausen to call the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos".
Humanists, then, fight for the existence of something utterly obvious (so often one has to fight for the obvious): a deep, complex, specific, shared, fundamentally unalterable human nature with wonderful inlaid variations. And they also point out, against the Noble Savage, that some parts of human nature are pretty bad news.
What follows? Well, human nature is certainly the problem; but it is also the solution, as Pinker says. You want to bring about change in society? Forget the utopia freaks whose utopias are always dystopias because they ignore human nature. Listen instead to the long history of humanity's mature thought about itself, from Buddha to Bellow. Listen to Chekhov: "Man will become better when you show him what he is like."
THE BLANK SLATE by Steven Pinker , Penguin Press £25/Viking $27.95 528 pages
In spite of our natures, Alfred Adler's dictum still stands --"..We are all more alike than we are different..."
|
|
|
|
|
FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
|
|
|
|
It is certainly debatable that human culture is more or less responsible for offsetting or enhancing those behaviors that are influenced by one's physiological and chemical makeup - one's genetic inheritance if I may further misuse that already much-abused term. It may be true that genetic inheritance does not count in terms of human behavior, but it not we're the only animals on the planet that are like that.
And that's where I stopped. I always thought the first paragraph of an essay was supposed to draw the reader in, not make him think he's too stupid to understand the gist of the essay.
Do people actually talk like this?
Yes, quite commonly in formal essays and in academe.
. . . such as the fact that SCoNJ, in manipulating the election-law timetable for the benefit of the Democratic Party, is delegitimating our entire electoral process.
Me too! I really like it when he says parents can kill their children up until age two or something like that. Way cool!
You don't know what you are talking about. Stephen Pinker has advocated no such thing. Do some research.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.