- Summaries and comments about three more chapters of Steven Pinker’s THE BLANK SLATE;
- And YouTube tracks from one of my favorite film scores: Richard Robbins’ for The Remains of the Day.
I’ll try to get through the rest of book this week, though I’ll need to be more succinct, or I’ll never finish. Three chapters done previously; 17 to go. Three more in this post.
Chapter 3 described the steps that led to the fall of the walls between matter and mind — the material and spiritual, and so on. Via cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology.
— Ch4, Culture Vultures
Culture is not simply absorbed by people; it depends on learning, which relies on faculties of the mind. Much of culture is simply accumulated local wisdom. People tend to follow the norms of their community. Many things in life lie along a continuum, but decisions must often be binary. [[ well, this is a good point ]] And some conventions exist only in people’s minds [[ one of Harari’s central themes ]]. Cultures, like languages, become different when separated. Why do some cultures dominate others? It’s not about race, cf books by Thomas Sowell and Jared Diamond [[ the latter is GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL ]]. Geography was destiny. Nonscientists fear a kind of reductionism. But there’s greedy and good reductionism; the latter is hierarchical [[ as we’ve seen in Carroll and currently in Brian Greene ]]. The very word ‘understanding’ means a kind of reductionism, i.e. descending to deeper levels of analysis. Summary para:
Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than bank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.
— Ch5, The Slate’s Last Stand
There are three scientific developments put forth by some, typically scholars in the humanities, as undermining the idea of a universal complex human nature. Author describes how each of these is barely coherent, and arises from the notion of the blank slate.
The first is the human genome project, which found fewer genes than had been anticipated; wouldn’t this imply more freedom of thought? But it’s impossible to assign more or less to any specific number. Great complexity arises from combinations of genes.
The second is connectionism, the idea that the brain is like an artificial neural network. These ‘train’ by generalizing from earlier items; the idea echoes the school of associationism of Locke, Hume, and Mill. But they are too underpowered to explain actual feats of human intelligence, which require combinatorial architectures (as discussed in previous book).
Third is the idea of plasticity, how training can ‘rewire’ sections of the brain. This appeals to the notion of the ghost in the machine. But there are many components of the brain, and many of these are *not* plastic, from sexual orientation to blindness to the effects of certain kinds of brain damage.
— Here, not quite a quarter of the way into the book, Pinker concludes his case that the mind is *not* a blank slate, but comprises an innate, evolutionarily derived, human nature. The evidence is summarized on page 101: the necessity of innate mechanisms for learning; the way humans draw infinite sets of generalizations from finite sets of inputs; how evolutionary biology shows that natural selection generates complex adaptations, and that different species have different drives and abilities; how many human facilities are better adapted for the ancestral environment rather than the modern one; how hundreds of universals cut across the world’s cultures. And so on, with evidence from cognitive science, genetic studies, and neuroscience.
The rest of the book is about the implications of the existence of a complex human nature.
Part II: Fear and Loathing
By the mid 20th century the political ideals of the social sciences — the eradication of eugenics, colonial conquest, sexism, etc etc — had won out; yet discoveries about human nature were feared as threats to those progressive ideals. Such opposition appeared first on the left, with those concerns about its progressive ideals, but spread to the right, with its moral objections.
–Ch6, Political Scientists
Early reactions from Joseph Weizenbaum, Richard Hernstein, and Margaret Mead culminated in the reactions to two books: E.O. Wilson’s SOCIOBIOLOGY in 1975, and Richard Dawkins’ THE SELFISH GENE in 1976. Pinker goes into considerable detail about the attacks by various scientists and in their books, dismissing many of those criticisms as demonstrably false. Similarly a 2000 book about the Yanomamo, trying to defend the doctrine of the Noble Savage, rejected biological explanations for human behavior, but its charges were soon demolished.
Why this behavior among scientists? First, the blank slate had become a sacred doctrine among social scientists, and the critics reacting moralistically. Last para of this chapter:
A second reason is that “radical” thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all. That made it all the more pressing to discredit the heretics making the discoveries. If ordinary standards of scientific argumentation were not doing the trick, other tactics had to be brought in, because a greater good was at stake.
This last para is a loaded one for several reasons.
- Scientists are human too, and can behave badly, even dishonestly, especially when defending ‘sacred’ assumptions i.e. the kind of worldviews that Thomas Kuhn addressed. At least in science, reason and evidence eventually win out, even if it takes the time for the elderly sticks-in-the-mud to die out.
- Here is a central theme in Pinker’s book: *just because* certain behaviors seem inherent in human nature does not make them any less despicable in modern society. Pinker solves the quandary by insisting that, while tendencies and stereotypes may exist, the only moral thing to do is evaluate each person on their own, not as a member of some class.
- What then, as I’ve wondered before, is the sensibility that allows Pinker, or anyone, to consider certain attitudes despicable? Where did that sensibility come from, if it’s not part of basic human nature? The answer is what I’ve gone on and on about: the difference between tribal human morality, or let’s call it monocultural morality, and multi-cultural or global morality. As humanity fills up the world, previously isolated groups, in which base human nature and morality work to defend each group from all the others, need give way to a wider understanding of the unity of humanity, if only so humanity can solve global problems that no single tribe or nation can do.
- Which is why conservatives, e.g. the MAGA conservatives in the US, actually think racism, sexism, and so on, are just fine! They say it! And of course this aligns with fundamentalist religious beliefs, in which these base human nature instincts are validated by their religious books, which were of course written by tribalists.
- Finally, those tactics reflect the tactics of modern conservatives, who don’t use evidence or arguments to advance their goals, but all sorts of casuistry and intimidation. Because they feel they have a “greater good” at stake. See, for example, the “lie, cheat, and steal” item in my Jun 21st post.
More tomorrow.
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Today’s musical note. One of my favorite soundtracks is the one by Richard Robbins for the 1993 film The Remains of the Day, based of course on the earlier novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The movie is a Merchant/Ivory production, as were earlier films like A Room with a View, Howards End and Maurice; very lush visually, and with fine casts of actors. Richard Robbins did scores for those movies, and also this one, with a very rich score, somewhat inspired obviously by Philip Glass.
Here’s the full score, separated into tracks:
But my favorite part of the score is this passage near the end, with its glittering flutes. It’s about 1:20 into this track, and lasts for only about 40 seconds. The flutes continue to inform the restatement of the main theme.
