Books and
Cooks West
October 2004
The Blank Slate by
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate: The
Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Kim's place
Saturday, November 6 at 5:30 PM
Pasta with sauces, salad, slaw, bread, cheese, wine, chocolate cake
From Publishers Weekly
In his last
outing, How the Mind Works, the author of the well-received The
Language Instinct made a case for evolutionary psychology or the view
that human beings have a hard-wired nature that evolved over time. This
book returns to that still-controversial territory in order to shore it
up in the public sphere. Drawing on decades of research in the
"sciences of human nature," Pinker, a chaired professor of psychology
at MIT, attacks the notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate,
arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure
shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with
plenty of room for cultural and individual variation. For those who
have been following the sciences in question including cognitive
science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology
much of the evidence will be familiar, yet Pinker's clear and witty
presentation, complete with comic strips and allusions to writers from
Woody Allen to Emily Dickinson, keeps the material fresh. What might
amaze is the persistent, often vitriolic resistance to these findings
Pinker presents and systematically takes apart, decrying the hold of
the "blank slate" and other orthodoxies on intellectual life. He goes
on to tour what science currently claims to know about human nature,
including its cognitive, intuitive and emotional faculties, and shows
what light this research can shed on such thorny topics as gender
inequality, child-rearing and modern art. Pinker's synthesizing of many
fields is impressive but uneven, especially when he ventures into moral
philosophy and religion; examples like "Even Hitler thought he was
carrying out the will of God" violate Pinker's own principle that one
should not exploit Nazism "for rhetorical clout." For the most part,
however, the book is persuasive and illuminating.
