Demons in the shadows, THE BLANK SLATE, by Steven Pinker A review (thanks to Charles Murtaugh for the link) of Steven Pinker’s new book THE BLANK SLATE by Robert J. Richards in THE NEW YORK TIMES includes the following snide snippet:

He focuses on ''dirty tricks'' [only conservatives can be capable of “dirty tricks”] and political biases of leftish scientists who reject his genetic version of human nature. He charges Lewontin with using a ''doctored'' [distortion in the service of a noble cause is simply virtuous cleverness] quotation from an opponent (careless, inconsequential misquotation, it seems to me) [it would seem so wouldn’t it?] and derides Gould's Marxism -- which most biologists take to be faux Marxism that merely adds rhetorical flourish to serious ideas [some would say that Gould was all rhetorical flourish]. He is somewhat less irritated by neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Leon Kass and Tom Wolfe, since their metaphysics has no sting.

Perhaps Pinker is also less irritated by neoconservatives because they are less apt to mischaracterize his perspective and position in the following manner:

With the triumph of evolutionary theory, Pinker sees a new scientific, cultural and political alignment near, one that accepts a more constrained conception of human nature and adopts corresponding social and economic policies, but does not neglect the genetically less endowed -- in short, a compassionate conservatism.

Pinker is an avowed liberal and an admitted atheist. Since when were liberal atheists partisans of compassionate conservatism? George Bush’s guiding philosophy derives in large part from the writings of an evangelical Christian, Marvin Olasky, and owes an intellectual debt to the Catholic idea of “the seamless garment.” One of Pinker’s repeated refrains in THE BLANK SLATE is the scientific bankruptcy of the ghost in the machine, a position adhered to religiously by those who affirm compassionate conservatism and the seamless garment. Could Steven Pinker be so intellectually incoherent? Of course not. Is Richards simply playing a game with us? Prodding us to explore Pinker’s assumptions and the political implications of his ideas? Of course not. Compassionate conservatism used in this context was stripped away of any philosophical or political depth and denuded to the point of becoming a common slur, an insult hurled at a heretic who dared to question the indefensible dogma of the blank slate. Steven Pinker’s dissent from one of the many contradictory axioms of the modern day Left has resulted in his expulsion from the ranks of decent society in the eyes of the reviewer. Richards seems to feel that he can take a merry jaunt over content-free fields of verbal diarrhea and not be called to account for his absurd and superficial style. While much of the Right disagrees with Pinker’s position on the ghost in the machine, they will give credit where it is due and admit that he fights the good fight on the issues of the blank slate and the noble savage. The Left on the other hand ignores whatever commonalties it might have with this pagan barbarian and exiles him to the outermost hells of conservatism. This fanatic adherence to dogma is why Pinker savages the Left more than the Right. But of course the Left is somewhat justified it deconstructing and smearing Pinker so thoroughly, for his broadside against them is axiomatic, while his critique of the Right happens to be with particular policies rather than overarching principles. Pinker never agues for genetic determinism, only that the genes be allowed their time in the sun to speak their truth [1]. The Left though adheres to the dogma of the infinitely malleable and perfectible human nature, and commits the fallacy of deriving is from ought! [2] As Pinker points out, the irony of it all is that the political positions of the most demonic of the sociobiologists range from moderate to radical Left! [3] The circle of the pious Left-Elect grows ever smaller until it reaches the singularity point of the modern post-modernist Left, which closes its eyes to reality to swim in a sea of its own imaginings. Of course the great horror of it all is that their fantasies now percolate into the public discourse and inform the political life of many nations. What hath the demon wrought in the end? Steven Pinker’s book, though titled THE BLANK SLATE, is actually about three ideas. The blank slate, the idea that human nature doesn’t truly exist, but only is created by inputs from the outside world after birth, the noble savage, that we are by nature peaceful beings who do good without compulsion, and the ghost in the machine, that we exist as more than the sum of our biological parts, that humanity is more than an emergent property of the four forces of nature and quarks and electrons [4]. As many reviewers and commentators have noted, there is a problem with Pinker’s thesis, insofar as the three ideas seem a bit strangely fitted. After all, the idea of the noble savage seems to contradict the blank slate, and many who accept the ghost in the machine have no problem with rejecting the blank slate or the noble savage. Most of the book is given over to the blank slate, and the other two ideas are often appended to the chapters almost as afterthoughts. The congealing of the three ideas has in my opinion tenuous sociological reality at best, and seems more like a monstrous chimera on the verge of collapsing due to the tremors of its own tensions [5]. Though Leftists were perturbed by Pinker’s attacks on the blank slate and the noble savage, Rightists who generally sympathize with Pinker were dismayed by his consistent, and to their mind gratuitous, attacks on their faith via the ghost in the machine. What to make of this? Pinker is no Dawkins, he cuts and chops through metaphysical supernaturalism (and its child, dualism) mercifully, where the British ethologist would rather saw slowly with a dull rusty implement to extract the maximum pain and discomfort. The author’s explications of the scientific materialist position would have been more neatly slotted into a separate book or pamphlet, for it seems more a digression in defending secular moralism than anything else [6]. As a secular person with no god-belief to speak of, I sympathize and agree with many of Pinker’s critiques of theism and the ghost in the machine, but I don’t see the point in connecting them to the blank slate unless he wishes to engage in an act of expansive consilience that would unify even more fields than he already dares too. That Leftists ignore Pinker’s persistent anti-clerical and anti-theist chatter throughout the book makes me wonder if they read it closely, or if they cared much what Pinker said after declaring his partially hereditarian manifesto in the introduction out of the bounds of correct thought. They might not have noticed that one of the most interesting chapters in the book, titled “Children,” is a thorough demolition of one of the dictums of modern conservatism, that parental guidance is crucial to the development of the child. Perhaps because it is one of the last chapters means that many people who purchased THE BLANK SLATE as a coffee table book will never understand that it is more than as some would say a collection of “saloon-bar assertions.” In this chapter, Pinker points out that many studies purporting to show parents’ behavioral influence on children have an a priori assumption of the blank slate, and so mistakenly assume that environment rather than genes are the cause of parent-child congruency. Here are Pinker’s “three laws of behavioral genetics”:

• All human behavioral traits are heritable
• The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes
• A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families

You can purchase it or check out the book from a library to get a detailed elucidation of laws 1 & 3. I want to focus in on the second law. Here is some relevant explanatory text from Pinker:

…The actual findings are easy to understand. First, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up together or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins are no more similar than one would expect from the effects of their shared genes….

Parents don’t matter as much you think, the peer groups they choose do! All those anti-drug commercials that mention that children rate their parents' opinions as the number #1 factor in their behavior is simply a regurgitation of platitudes that the children have learned to emit when queried in that tone that adults have mastered to impress each other. Perhaps it does take a village! And surely, that should be crow for any modern American conservative who asserts the centrality of the nuclear family. Compassionate conservatism indeed. Much of the rest of the book is a synthesis of a broadly accessible swath of modern day evolutionary psychology. Pinker has a section that is a superficial survey of genetics and neuroscience. Specialists in either field will likely find his treatment unsatisfying though accurate enough in its generalities (I make this assertion based on the genetics section, which I can judge. The neuroscience part fascinated me, and I ate it up, but frankly I don’t know if Pinker is pulling my leg when he presents his ideas as the accepted wisdom of the day in that field). He spends considerable time rehashing modern day evolutionary psychology, our propensity for violence (where he can insert relevant lectures on the foolishness of the idea of the noble savage), sex and selfishness. He touches upon the intellectual controversies that have more to do with politics than science that involved Lewontin, Wilson, Gould and Rose. All of these areas are covered in more detail in the technical literature, or in books more aimed at the academic audience (for a entertaining and accessible narrative of the sociobiology controversy, I suggest DEFENDERS OF THE TRUTH). If one is not especially aquainted with the ideas of evolutionary psychology, THE BLANK SLATE can serve as an excellent guide, and the notes can act as a window into a bright and diverse intellectual universe. On the other hand, for those more well read in this area, I suggest that a careful examination of the contents will clarify what would most interest any given person, though I hope everyone reads the chapter titled “Children” simply so that one can be exposed to some of the counter-intuitive heterodoxies that can emerge from evolutionary psychology. Of course, Pinker tosses many darts and spears at his enemies, but he hesitates at a certain point. Here are the chapters listed under the heading “Hot Buttons”: Politics, Violence, Gender, Children, The Arts. Anything seem missing? Of course, race. Steve Sailer has observed that Steve kind of wimped out on this issue. Pinker asserts that race differences probably don’t exist on the behavioral level several times. But, unlike many who are dogmatic, he does admit that it is possible that they do, though he simply does not believe that the data warrants that position [7]. He draws upon Thomas Sowell’s work to show how cultures can be influenced by geography and history, rather than their biological substrate. And yet note the following passage:

The comedian Richard Pryor described his experience at the Arizona State Penitentiary during the filming of Stir Crazy: It made my heart ache, you know, to see all these beautiful black men in the joint. Goddam; the warriors should be out there helping the masses. I felt that way, I was real naïve. Six weeks I was up there and I talked to the brothers. I talked to ‘em, and …. [looks around, frightened] … Thank God we got penitentiaries! I asked one, “Why did you kill everybody in the house?” He says, “They was home.”…I met one dude, kidnap-murdered four times. And I thought, three times, that was your last, right? I says, “What happened?” [Answers in falsetto] “I can’t get this shit right! But I’m getting paroled in two years.” Pryor was not, of course, denying the inequities that continue to put disproportionate numbers of African Americans in prison. He was only contrasting the common sense of ordinary people with the romanticism of intellectuals-and perhaps exposing their condescending attitude that poor people can’t be expected to refrain from murder, and that they should not be alarmed by the murderers in their midst.

Pinker implies in several chapters that certain individuals have a genetic predisposition toward criminality. They are amoral, and are in need of a deterrent to prevent them from committing crimes. It is part of his debunking of the noble savage. Some of the examples he uses are the like the ones above, of African-Americans, though he is careful to disavow the idea of group differences. But it is in these passages and chapters that I think Leftists spy the seeds of the demons that hide behind Pinker’s paradigm. Race is the elephant in the room, the Hot Button that dare not speak its name. Here is another section from THE BLANK SLATE:

But the theory of reciprocal altruism raises another possibility: that some of the genetic differences among people in their social emotions are systematic. One exception to the rule that selection reduces variability arises when the best strategy depends on what other organisms are doing. The child’s game of scissors-paper-rock is one analogy, and another may be found in the decision of which route to take to work. As commuters being to avoid a congested highway and opt for a less traveled route, the new one will no longer be less traveled, so many will choose the first one, until congestion builds up t here, which will induce still other commuters to choose the second route, and so on. The commuters will eventually distribute themselves in some ratio between the two roads. The same thing can happen in evolution, where it is called frequency-dependent selection. One corollary of reciprocal altruism, shown in a number of simulations, is that frequency-dependent selection can produce temporary or permanent mixtures of strategies. For example, eve if reciprocators predominate in a population, a minority of cheaters can sometimes survive, take advantage of the generosity of the reciprocators as long as they don’t grow so numerous as to meet other cheaters too often or to be recognized and punished by the reciprocators. Whether the population ends up homogenous or with a mixture of strategies depends on which strategies are competing, which start of more numbers, how easily they enter and leave the population, and the payoffs for cooperation and defection.

Evil hereditarian that I am, I wonder, could it be possible that different populations, responding to different environmental stimuli, might employ different permanent mixtures of strategies? I think I’ll end this before I dig myself any deeper, but I suggest you read THE BLANK SLATE closely and connect whatever dots you find in it yourself. [1] Read attacks on Pinker, and you will note many of his critics grant a role for genes, but distort Pinker's position into a grotesque parody of genetic determinism. [2] Lysenkoism was an early example of this. [3] Yes, the most conservative have the temerity to be Democrats, while the most radical supported the black Panters. Reactionaries all! [4] I refer to Electromagnetic, Weak, Strong and Gravity. [5] If I was more of a cynic, I would say Pinker strung together the three ideas because it seemed a novel way of presenting yet another book on evolution and human behavior. [6] John Derbyshire accuses Pinker of naive materialism and scientism. I don't go so far, but I will admit many scientists are historically and philosophically innocent and make mistakes or espouse ideas a century out of date, logical positivism for instance is one that comes to mind. In any case, I think some of Derbyshire's criticism of naive materialism can be avoided if one hews to methodological naturalism. [7] I think that like many people, Pinker will stick to the cultural model until an overwhelming amount of evidences shifts his opinion.