Another five chapters, mostly addressing the fears people have with the idea of an innate human nature, as opposed to the idealized blank slate: concerning inequality, imperfectibility, determinism, and nihilism.
Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3.
–Ch7, The Holy Trinity
Further examples of traditionalists trying to save the concepts of the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine, presumably as sources of meaning and morality. Their claims, even from scientists like Gould and Lewontin, are political, or moral, not evidence based. The ghost in the machine is especially important to the right, and to religious fundamentalists with their moral fears and Biblical literalism, as if without such morality we’d behave like beasts. This has led to the corruption of American science education. They don’t like neuroscience any more than evolution. Scientists reject the Intelligent Design folks, like Michael Behe, while leading (political) neoconservatives have embraced the idea. (Author quotes “Inherit the Wind” about how simple, poor people need to believe in something beautiful, so why take that away from them?)
The influence of the right on intellectual life is limited by its denial of evolution. The hostility on the left is more substantial, while erroneously equating genetics with eugenics, or evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism. But evidence has not supported these critics, and the principles of sociobiology have become part of routine science.
Now, what do we do with the knowledge we’ve learned about human nature?
Part III: Human Nature with a Human Face
When Galileo said the Earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa, he challenged to moral order of the universe, that ranged from the perfection of the heavens to the animals and earth and devils and hell—an elaborate hierarchy. People lived in their proper stations. Galileo was aware of all this. Today we have further separated the physical arrangement of the universe from any moral order. Currently we are living through a similar transition… We will survive with a renewed conception of meaning and morality, without the Blank Slate. The author does not pretend to provide any profound moral insights himse; what follow are ideas from some of the great thinkers of human history. Anxieties boil down four fears, as follows. In each case, the fears are illogical and do not follow. And the denial of human nature is more dangerous than people think.
–Ch8, The Fear of Inequality
If the mind is blank, then we’re all equal; it we’re not, then discrimination might be justified. But this isn’t true, and facts may change.
The amount of variation among humans is less than in many species. Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate; races aren’t “social constructions,” they’re more like large inbred families. And the two sexes *are* different if only by virtue of having different reproductive organs. But none of these justify racism or sexism; bigotry is judging an individual by the average traits of some group. Some traits *are* used to judge a person, and with age discrimination. So we don’t need the Blank Slate to combat racism and sexism. What about class? Some people do have inborn talents, especially intelligence (Gould argued otherwise). But many factors are involved in anyone’s success, and inherited talents don’t mean success is deserved in a moral sense; that’s the naturalistic fallacy. Policies that do treat all people as identical have led to atrocities in the 20th century: The Cultural Revolution, Cambodia. All political system deal with some tradeoff between freedom and equality.
Concerning eugenics, we need to distinguish biological facts from human values. Why should a government be given the right to make such decisions? Examples of both Hitler and Marx, mishmashes of ideas, some right, some wrong; Hitler followed a bastardized understanding of Darwinism. Their followers embraced the Blank Slate, as did Mao and the Khmer Rouge, with attendant desires to reshape humanity. [[ Some of their ideas, p157b ff, echo the policies of the religious MAGA folks, in which the good of society is paramount over individuals, who are ideally interchangeable components of that society, with no individual rights. To, for example, marry the person they like, lest doing so harms the ideals of family and society. ]]
–Ch9, The Fear of Imperfectibility
Many people are obsessed with overcoming the wickedness of humanity, being born again and overcoming our flaws and sins. Is the wickedness of humanity permanent? Is social reform a waste of time?
This fear goes to two fallacies: the naturalistic fallacy, that what is natural is ideal and worth preserving; and the moralistic fallacy, that whatever is moral must be found in nature. In reality, the natural world is harsh and immoral, by human standards. At the same time, people on the right who call homosexuality “unnatural” are ignorant of biology. Most of what they consider “moral” are in fact unnatural in the rest of the living world.
So do we “rise above nature”? This is the wrong question, presuming assumptions about the blank slate. The mind is made up of many parts, and we can explain moral progress to date, through evolution and the law of complex systems. Human societies have become more complicated and cooperative over time. (Pinker cites Robert Wright’s NONZERO here.) Humans have the ability to figure out how the world works, resolve conflicts, have a cosmopolitan awareness. Thus moral progress can ratchet upwards, not in spite of human nature, but because of it. [[ again my take is that such progress is a natural consequence of changing circumstances (as human have expanded across the world and necessarily interacted more and more) and increased knowledge ]] Beware those who would re-engineer people, who would design utopia top down.
–Ch10, The Fear of Determinism
This is the problem of ‘free will,’ that we’re not in control of our own choices. But choosing is a real process, a selection of behavior according to foreseeable consequences. Worrying about determinism is a waste of time; better worry about taking responsibility.
Explanation is not exculpation. The idea of responsibility has the function of deterring harmful behavior. Overly harsh punishments, true in most societies until recently, are barbaric because they’re unnecessary. Civilization is about an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain.
So: author doesn’t claim to have solved the problem of free will; only that we don’t need to solve it to preserve the idea of personal responsibility.
–Ch11, The Fear of Nihilism
Would biological explanations strip our lives of meaning and purpose? No. A moral sense has evolved, and exists in all cultures; religion is just an expression of that innate moral sense. Yet biologically, where is the meaning if it’s all just chemicals working? Example from Annie Hull, and the confusion of scales, or levels of analysis [[ once again, as in Carroll and Greene ]]. The motives of gene are not the same as the motives of organisms. Some artifacts of experience are accidental consequences of information processing, like colors. The same may be true of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, etc. Still, our thoughts are not fictitious, such as our innate sense of number. Thus we expect similar mathematics from different cultures or even different planets (p192.8). Perhaps the same is true for morality. There are situations that are inherently right and wrong, given the goals of living and being better off. We’d expect them to evolve similarly elsewhere too. Anyway, a moral sense is part of the standard equipment of the human mind.
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And… we’re not quite half way through the book.
