| Another book I need to read
Although I haven't mentioned it recently, I did finally finish working my way through A New Kind of Science a few weeks ago (I confess I didn't read all the Notes). More on that another time. So next up at bat in the must-read science/idea book category will be Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. The New York Times describes some of the book's agenda:
Dr. Pinker argues that significant innate behavioral differences exist between individuals and between men and women. Discussing child-rearing, he says that children's characters are shaped by their genes, by their peer group and by chance experiences; parents cannot mold their children's nature, nor should they wish to, any more than they can redesign that of their spouses. Those little slates are not as blank as they may seem.
Dr. Pinker has little time for two other doctrines often allied with the Blank Slate. One is "the Ghost in the Machine," the assumption of an immaterial soul that lies beyond the reach of neuroscience, and he criticizes the religious right for thwarting research with embryonic stem cells on the ground that a soul is lurking within.
The third member of Dr. Pinker's unholy trinity is "the Noble Savage," the idea that the default state of human nature is mild, pacific and unacquisitive. Dr. Pinker believes, to the contrary, that dominance and violence are universal; that human societies are more given to an ethos of reciprocity than to communal sharing; that intelligence and character are in part inherited, meaning that "some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems," and that all societies are ethnocentric and easily roused to racial hatred.
In general, I've found that when anyone, even scientists, make sweeping statements about human beings, they're generally subsequently shown to be wrong. So the straw man that describes human beings as blank slates is of course due for debunking. But I believe it's safe to say that it will also eventually be shown that parental behavior and example is NOT to be excluded as a significant influence upon the lives and personalities of children. Also, doesn't it seem a bit incoherent to say that character is determined primarily by genetics and then say the parents don't count? Or that peers or random events can be an influence, but parents somehow can't?
The "Ghost in the Machine" (soul) theories ~ and it seems inappropriate to lump them all together (if Pinker does) and ascribe them to the religious right ~ and the "Noble Savage" myth also come in for a clobbering. I'm not entirely convinced that they must also stand or fall together, or that the historical linkage between them is as tight as Pinker claims.
All of this is basically to say that I think there are very few of these Big Questions that can be answered with Black or White, Yes or No, Up or Down, Nature or Nurture. Please to note the name of my page here: both2and (I had to use the "2" because you can't have a "/" in a domain name. Maybe I should have just called it "all of the above"! ). And I don't mean to imply that we should accept sloppy thinking, or throw our hands up and say there are no answers, just that it's unlikely that the answers will be in one syllable rather than sentences or paragraphs.
According to the New York Times, Pinker decouples the factual questions from the moral or ethical (and, I presume, political) questions. If true, I can refrain from training the Argument-From-Nature booby slingshot at him straightaway.
12:07:31 AM  |
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