The little switch under the dash that will put the left back in the ascendancy [Archive]

View Full Version : The little switch under the dash that will put the left back in the ascendancy

Mark Blair

25th August 2008, 01:03

Here I open a discourse to the effect that an elemental principle of the left is wrong in a matter of degree, that this error has enormously affected left politics, and that we need to undertake forthwith a spirited analysis of the matter. I ask from the bottom of my heart that we put in abeyance our knee-jerk reactions to this considered-to-be-an-indicator-of-right-wing-views notion . . . and discuss it, and assist me/us in clarifying and assessing this thesis, to which we are sure to add a swag of codicils on the way – I kid you not, comrades, if we can outflank the right wing on this one, we'd be back from the wilderness . . .

The left cherishes notions of certain degrees of equality as being the very foundation of a successful social practice. The fly in the ointment is human nature, anathema to the left. I think that the left grossly misapprehends the biological nature of homo sapiens, and that the policies based on this misapprehension have been a major reason why left politics have failed.
Consider how often arguments of all types rapidly polarise unto an unproductive binary: no consciousness of spectrum, no subtlety. Consider the social practice of, for example, Nineteenth Century Russia, the birthplace of anarchism: absolute monarchy, with a side-order of serfdom, a model lacking human sacrifice, it's true, but as social systems go, pretty ugly (for us slaveys). Note that, from the theoretical perspective, from the metaphysical perspective, the shifts in the social practice of progressive nations over the following century or more were shifts from essentialist social practice (a notion joined at the hip to Philosophical Idealism, the undergirding ideology of the right wing) to anti-essentialist social practice (a practice consciously based on Philosophical Materialism, the undergirding ideology of the left wing). Consider the notion that in (a very reasonable) pursuit of a just society, we pushed the cursor just a little too far across the spectrum -- 'blank-slatism.'
O.k., now an example: suppose a person had a truly great voice. Suppose people spontaneously gave her gifts to express their appreciation of her singing – organic spinach or an antique metronome. Would we confiscate those gifts and forbid her to sing? After all, we have discernible inequality (difference) here! Can't have her goin' around bellittling people by singing better than them! Readers will immediately grasp my logic, though having a great voice is not an example of 'human nature' – but what if male homo sapiens are genetically predisposed to spread their genes, their seed, about the place? It make perfect evolutionary sense; and if it does, what then of the non-penetrative-sex agenda of some currents of (I state bluntly here, lunatically blank-slatist) feminism?
Is it possible that the left made the horrible theoretical mistake (translated into practice), of trying to extirpate inequality/difference rather than develop models of social practice that appropriately (very greatly) limit the 'band of social inequality'?* (I saw in India fellow humans who lacked even a cardboard box to live in: ExxonMobil netted a profit of $40,000,000,000 over two years – don't misjudge my politics, comrades: I'll put the E.M. fuckers against a wall.)
What if homo sapiens have a genetic predisposition (among other, equally disturbing, predispositions) to, not only accept, but to actually seek a place in a social system characterised by some degree of social inequality? The sort of social systems that we had on the savannah (claims of primitive communism notwithstanding)?
In closing, I ask that readers not fall for the fallacy of the slippery slope (“If we admit any genetic predisposition to the acceptance of inequality/difference in our social practice, then, before you know it . . . ”); but rather help me to better analyse our 'biological reality' (cryptonym for 'human nature') in relation to forging a communist social practice that fits the bill.
Thanks in advance. Mark.

* I personally focus on the notion of systems of preclusion, in which gross inequalities just can't exist -- you can 'own' a piece of land by living on it and working it*, but you can't own half the city -- and accept that, within that system, certain realities of the human dynamic (which realities the right considers as normal as the sun rising, but the left has struggled in vain against) are, quite demonstrably, real and ineradicable, and we just gotta live with 'em!

* And can you bequeath it to your kids? That's a biggie!

Hit The North

25th August 2008, 01:17

We're interested in abolishing social, political and economic inequality, not in levelling the abilities between individuals. The point is to create a world where everyone has the equal freedom and ability to develop their individual talents. We demand an end to private ownership of the means of production, not an end to the expression of human talent and individuality.

gla22

25th August 2008, 01:57

leftism is in no way incompatible with existentialism. In fact I see leftist society as birthplace for non-destructive existentialism.

Led Zeppelin

25th August 2008, 02:03

No offense but if a writer of about 100 years ago has already answered your "criticisms" then you don't really have a leg to stand:

In order to play the part of the highest criterion, human nature obviously had to be considered as fixed once for all, as invariable. The writers of the Enlightenment did in fact regard it as such as the reader could see from the words of Condorcet quoted above. But if human nature is invariable, how then can it serve to explain the course of the intellectual or social development of mankind? What is the process of any development? A series of changes. Can those changes be explained with the help of something that is invariable, that is fixed once for all? Is this the reason why a variable magnitude changes, that a constant magnitude remains unchanged? The writers of the Enlightenment realised that this could not be so, and in order to get out of their difficulty they pointed out that the constant magnitude itself proves to be variable, within certain limits. Man goes through different ages: childhood, youth, maturity and so forth. At these various ages his needs are not identical: “In his childhood man has only his feelings, his imagination and memory: he seeks only to be amused and requires only songs and stories. The age of passions succeeds: the soul requires to be moved and agitated. Then the intelligence extends and reason grows stronger: both these faculties in their turn require exercise, and their activity extends to everything that is capable of arousing curiosity.”

Thus develops the individual man: these changes are conditioned by his nature; and just because they are in his nature, they are to be noticed in the spiritual development of all mankind. It is by these changes that is to be explained the circumstance that peoples begin with epics and end with philosophy. [20] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch02.htm#f20)

It is easy to see that “explanations” of this kind, which did not explain anything at all, only imbued the description of the course of intellectual development of man with a certain picturesqueness (simile always sets off more vividly the quality of the object being described). It is easy to see likewise that, in giving explanations of this kind, the thinkers of the eighteenth century were moving round the above-mentioned vicious circle: environment creates man, man creates environment. For in effect, on the one hand, it appeared that the intellectual development of mankind, i.e., in other words the development of human nature, was due to social needs, and on the other it turned out that the development of social needs is to be explained by the development of human nature.

Thus we see that the French historians of the Restoration also failed to eliminate this contradiction: it only took a new form with them.

[...]

But on what does the economy of the given society depend? Neither the French historians, nor the Utopian Socialists, nor Hegel have been able to reply to this at all satisfactorily. All of them, directly or indirectly, referred to human nature. The great scientific service rendered by Marx lies in this, that he approached the question from the diametrically opposite side, and that he regarded man’s nature itself as the eternally changing result of historical progress, the cause of which lies outside man. In order to exist, man must support his organism, borrowing the substances he requires from the external nature surrounding him. This borrowing presupposes a certain action of man on that external nature. But, “acting on the external world, he changes his own nature.” In these few words is contained the essence of the whole historical theory of Marx, although naturally, taken by themselves, they do not provide an adequate understanding of it, and require explanations.

[...]

Geographical environment exercises no less decisive an influence on the fate also of larger societies, the fate of states arising on the ruins of the primitive clan organizations.

“It is not the mere fertility of the soil, but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural surroundings, spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capabilities, his means and modes of labour. It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economizing, of appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the work of man’s hand, that first plays the decisive part in the history of industry. Examples are, the irrigation works in Egypt, Lombardy, Holland, or in India and Persia where irrigation, by means of artificial canals, not only supplies the soil with the water indispensable to it, but also carries down to it, in the shape of sediment from the hills, mineral fertilizers. The secret of the flourishing state of industry in Spain and Sicily under the dominion of the Arabs lay in their irrigation works.” [14] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05.htm#n14)

Thus only thanks to certain particular qualities of the geographical environment could our anthropomorphic ancestors rise to that height of intellectual development which was necessary to transform them into tool-making animals. And in just the same way only certain peculiarities of the same environment could provide the scope for using in practice and constantly perfecting this new capacity of “tool-making.” [8*] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05.htm#nh) In the historical process of the development of productive forces, the capacity of man for “tool-making” must be regarded first of all as a constant magnitude, while the surrounding external conditions for the use of this capacity in practice have to be regarded as a constantly varying magnitude. [15] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05.htm#n15)

The difference in results (the stages of cultural development) achieved by various human societies is explained precisely by the fact that environment did not permit the various human tribes to make practical use to an equal extent of their capacity to “invent.” There is a school of anthropologists who trace the origin of the difference in results mentioned in the different qualities of the races of man. But the view of this school does not hold water: it is merely a new variation of the old method of explaining historical phenomena by references to “human nature” (or here, references to racial nature), and in its scientific profundity it has not gone very much farther than the views of Molière’s doctor, who sagely proclaimed that opium sends one to sleep because it has the quality of sending to sleep (a race is backward because it has the quality of backwardness).

Acting on external nature, man changes his own nature. He develops all his capacities, among them also the capacity of “tool-making.” But at any given time the measure of that capacity is determined by the measure of the development of productive forces already achieved.
Link (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/index.htm)

I could go on and on but you get the point. You are basically defending a view which was already refuted over 150 years ago, not just by Marxists, but by science, philosophy and anthropology in general. The view that there is a fixed "human nature" is just pure nonsense, for the reasons mentioned above. I could sum it up but it would do you well to read it, and not just what I have posted, but the entire book.

Also, this part of your post is interesting; "claims of primitive communism notwithstanding", just claims? No, they are facts, I shall quote some more from the same book I quoted from above:

Pointing out that the social life of primitive tribes bears on itself the stamp of communism, Mr. Kovalevsky (listen, Mr. V.V.: he also is a “professor”) says:

“If we enquire as to the real foundations for such an order of things, if we try and discover the reasons which forced our primitive forefathers, and still oblige modern savages, to maintain a more or less sharply expressed communism, we shall have in particular to learn the primitive modes of production. For the distribution and consumption of wealth must be determined by the methods of its creation. And as to this, ethnography states the following: hunting and fishing peoples secure their food as a rule in hordes ... In Australia the kangaroo is hunted by armed detachments of several tens, and even hundreds,, of natives. The same takes place in northern countries when hunting the reindeer ... It is beyond doubt that man is incapable of maintaining his existence alone; he needs help and support, and. his forces are multiplied ten-fold by association ... Thus we see social production at the beginning of social development and, as the necessary natural consequence – of this, social consumption. Ethnography abounds in facts which prove this.” [29] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05b.htm#n29)

Having quoted the idealist theory of Lermina, according to which private property arises. from the self-consciousness of the individual, Mr. Kovalevsky continues:

“No, this is not so. It is not for this reason that primitive man arrives at the idea of the personal appropriation of the chipped stone which serves him as a weapon, or of the skin which covers his body. He arrives at this idea in consequence of the application of his individual forces to the production of the object concerned. The flint which serves him as an axe has been chipped by his own hands. At the hunt in which he engaged together with many comrades, he struck the final blow at the animal, and therefore the skin of that animal becomes his personal property. The customary law of savages is distinguished by great exactness on this question. It carefully provides beforehand, for example, for the case in which the hunted animal fell under the joint blows of two hunters: in that event the animal’s skin becomes the property of the hunter whose arrow penetrated nearest to the heart. It also provides for the case in which an already wounded animal was given the finishing blow by a hunter who turned up accidentally. The application of individual labour logically gives rise, consequently, to individual appropriation. We can trace this phenomenon through all history. He who planted a fruit tree becomes its owner ... Later a warrior who won a certain booty becomes its exclusive owner, so that his family no longer has any right to it. In just the same way a priest’s family has no right to the sacrifices which are made by the faithful, and which become his personal property. All this is equally well confirmed by the Indian laws and by the customary law of the South Slavs, Don Cossacks or ancient Irish. And it is important not to make any mistake as to the true principle of such appropriation, which is the result of the application of personal effort. to the procuring of a definite object. For when the personal efforts of a man are supplemented. by the help of his kin ... the objects secured no longer become private property.” [30] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05b.htm#n30)

After all that has been said, it will be comprehensible why it is arms, clothes, food, adornments, etc., that first become objects of personal appropriation. “Already from the first steps taken, the domestication of animals – dogs, horses, cats, working cattle – constitutes the most important fund of personal and family appropriation ...” [31] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05b.htm#n31)

But to what extent the organization of production continues to influence the modes of appropriation is shown, for example, by such a fact: among the Eskimos the hunting of whales takes place in big boats and big detachments, and the boats which serve for this purpose represent social property. But the little boats which serve for transporting the objects of family property themselves belong to separate families, or “at most to three kindred families.”

With the appearance of agriculture, the land also becomes an object of appropriation. The subjects of property in land become more or less large unions of kindred. This, naturally, is one of the forms of social appropriation. How is its origin to be explained? “It seems to us,” says Mr. Kovalevsky, “that its reasons lie in that same social production which once upon a time involved the appropriation of the greater part of movable objects.” [32] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05b.htm#n32)

Naturally, once it has arisen, private property enters into contradiction to the more ancient mode of social appropriation. Wherever the rapid development of productive forces opens a wider and wider field for “individual efforts,” social production fairly rapidly disappears, or continues to exist in the shape, so to speak, of a rudimentary institution. We shall see later on that this process of the disintegration of primitive social property at various times and in various places through the most natural, material necessity, was bound to be marked by great variety. At present we will only stress the general conclusion of the modern science of law that legal conceptions – or convictions, as Puchta would have said – are everywhere determined by the modes of production.
Link (http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/ch05b.htm)

Sorry for the long quotes but I really couldn't be bothered writing all of this myself, it's a pretty basic question which any serious Marxist already knows the answer to, and I'm moving this to Learning by the way.

JimmyJazz

25th August 2008, 04:00

We demand an end to private ownership of the means of production, not an end to the expression of human talent and individuality.

Not only this, but one of the biggest misconceptions of leftist thought is that this is not true. Last time I checked, the dictionary definition of socialism still revolved around the means of production, yet most Americans (and perhaps Euros) still think "socialism" is just some sort of massive levelling project driven by a pathological desire to eradicate human difference and create equality of outcome. That's why the majority of criticisms of socialism go along the lines of "doctors shouldn't be paid the same as trash collectors", "nobody will work if everyone is paid the same", etc. It's very frustrating. People I talk to somehow think they are the ones who would be pulled down by socialism. But the people I talk to usually do not own large tracts of arable land or a production facility.

Rosa Lichtenstein

25th August 2008, 04:08

This should be in OI.

Rosa Lichtenstein

25th August 2008, 16:26

Can a mod move it please?

Led Zeppelin

25th August 2008, 16:40

No this does not belong in OI Rosa, I have spoken to Mark via PM and he is not a reactionary trying to stir up trouble, he is seriously concerned about this issue and I'm sure many other people new to Revolutionary Leftism are as well.

Anyway, I have replied to his PM and I shall re-post it below:

I am unashamedly skirting the system:Thank you, Led, Gla, and Bob – but no, and I did so hope that this, the dumping-on-the-newbie-of-the-chunk-of-Plekhanov-and-that-solves-it, would not happen. The Twentieth Century was a disaster of unprecedented proportions; and quoting Plekhanov to the current crowd of crypto-righty academics who are discrediting us will only get us laughed at – well, me, anyway: I bang heads with people conversant with current research, and Plekhanov doesn't enter into it.

Firstly, may I ask that you please use the standard font of the forum when you type something? It makes it much easier for me to reply to you.

I understand that me quoting Plekhanov extensively may have annoyed you, but I did not just quote him because I thought you were a newbie, I quoted him because the issues which you raised were "newbie-ish", if that makes sense.

The issue of Human Nature has plagued philosophers for centuries, and it was resolved by Historical Materialism. Now, you may say that the answer to that is outdated or that it no longer applies because it's too old...would you say the same of Newton's law of universal gravitation? Or of Darwin's theory of evolution? Of course the theories have been built upon, more and more scientific data have supplemented those theories and proven them over and over again, but the same is the case with Historical Materialism.

If you want a modern example, take Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which piles on evidence after evidence of the things which Plekhanov proved over a century ago!

The point is; Just because the answer to the question is "old" it does not follow that the answer is wrong, on the contrary, if in the time passed since then more and more evidence has proven that answer to be correct, it is so.

[Removed Personal Information] My theoretical background is elegantly sufficient.

I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I believed your theoretical background is not sufficient, I didn't mean to imply that at all. However, when you raise concerns about issues that have already been dealt with long ago, and have been demonstratively proven to be correct, then I have to resort to old answers to them.

More on this below:

Please don't make me wank on like this, guys. Could we start again? Pinker et al. are kickin' our arses theoretically; and my misgivings, misgivings of some fifteen years, dovetail frighteningly with their analyses – and it's interesting stuff! but they are running fuckin' rings around us.I wasn't being flip in my choice of article-heading. If we can rip the ball from these pricks' hands, and run with it, we'll have done the cause a great service. I need your help, as sounding-boards. I am perfectly capable, thank you, of doing the research; but I live in a lonely little farm house far in the bush ('cause the air is pure, so I can read . . . ), and I appeal to you for comradely help – particularly, Led, in respect of historical left texts, such as Plekhanov, which are my weakness: my background is in metaphysics-as-politics.

Pinker seems interesting, especially since he's not a historical curiosity, in fact there have been many "Pinkers" before him.

I am guessing you are referring to Steven Arthur Pinker, the advocator of evolutionary psychology?

Well let's see here, a person who believes in evolution, but opposes historical materialism and brings forth the argument of "human nature"...that is a contradiction in terms.

Evolution entails change, change in consciousness, change in behavior, change in the entire being of living organisms. If there was a static "human nature" that was not eligible to change, then the entire theory of evolution would be put in doubt. In fact, the religious nutjobs could have a strong case for their "God created the soul and that is unchangeable!" blabble.

We have to approach this issue seriously and scientifically.

Human behavior changes, correct? Yes, that is a fact.

Human consciousness in general changes as well, correct? Yes, that is also a fact.

Now, the question which has astounded philosophers for centuries was; How do they change and develop?

Is it the environment which changes and develops the human consciousness and human nature, or is human nature and human consciousness which changes the environment?

Well, if it was the former, then how would the environment itself change? After all, society needs an incentive to move ahead, to develop, but if human nature prevents it from developing due the fact that it is conditioned by the static development of society itself, then you would have no progress.

No, that is not a scientific answer.

So, then, is it human consciousness which changes the environment? But how then does consciousness itself develop? Is it by blind chance that society evolves? Do we have to wait for "an idea" to come down from the heavens in the shape of an atom and take-over the brain of some King before society finally goes forward?

No, this is not scientific either.

This was the question remained unanswered until Hegel, Marx and Engels came along.

Instead of looking it from an "either-or" perpsective, they looked it from an "both" perspective. There is a mutual relationship between the environment and human nature, both have an effect on the other. But what conditions this effect? What brings it forward?

Hegel could not answer this, but Marx and Engels could; the means of production, the material development of society at any given time.

Take away the means of production in America and the human nature of the people will change overnight. Take away the bow and arrow of some tribe in the Amazon and their human nature will change overnight as well. The development of human consciousness is determined by the development of the means of production.

As I said, this is as true today as it was over a century ago, and it has only been confirmed by facts. There are countless of scientific books out there which support this, all of them have passed over into the realm of "classics", but as Mark Twain said of the classics; "Everyone wants you to read them but no one does".

My advice to you, comrade, is to extensively research the history of this question, and you will find the right answers. Don't just stop at Plekhanov's book, there are literally countless of others out there supporting the same thing.

Don't re-think something which does not re-thinking just because some people are whining about it. We have people whining about evolution all the time too, do we abandon the theory? No, unless solid concrete evidence has refuted it, we shall not abandon it.

Rosa Lichtenstein

25th August 2008, 17:27

Ok, LZ, fair enough.

I've posted this before, but it is worth re-posting. Here, Simon Blackburn demolishes a central plank of Pinker's book, The Blank Slate:

Meet the Flintstones

By Simon Blackburn

The Blank Slate:

The Modern Denial of Human Nature

By Stephen Pinker.

I.

When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly. And as Leavis once remarked, whenever this is so, we can suspect that the differences have little to do with thinking. Still, the question certainly obsesses thinkers, and crops up in various terminologies and under various rubrics: human essence versus historical accident, intrinsic nature versus social construction, nativism versus empiricism. In the ancient world the nativist Plato held that we come into the world equipped with knowledge obtained in a previous life, while the empiricist Aristotle denied it. In our own time Chomsky has revived the nativist doctrine that our capacity for language is innate, and some ultras have even held that our whole conceptual repertoire is innate. We did not ever have to learn anything. We had only to let loose what we already have.

There is a standard move, call it the Demon Move, in such a debate. First we establish our own reasonable credentials. We, the good guys, are not taken in by the labels. We recognize, of course, that any human being is the result of both nature and nurture. There is the biological or genetic endowment and there is the environment in which the genetic endowment gets expressed. We good guys understand that it is meaningless to ask whether iron rusts because of the nature of iron or because of the environment in which the iron is put. We know that the rusting requires both. It is the deluded others, the bad guys, who forget entirely about one of these components.

So if you wish to demonize theorists on the nature side, present them as genetic determinists, holding that there is no more to growing up than following a formula written in the genes. These dangerous fools think that iron is programmed to rust wherever you put it, as if oxygen and damp had nothing to do with it. And if you are demonizing theorists on the nurture side, then portray them as holding that human beings have no characteristics at all except those that are inscribed by environment and culture. These dangerous fools think that the chemical nature of iron has nothing to do with whether it rusts. (There is also a second-order or meta-demonizing move to make. Not only have the dangerous fools got themselves into an extreme position, they also have the gall to paint people like us as ourselves extreme. They are not only blind to their own extremism, they are blind also to our moderation. The things they call us! They must be doubly demonic.)

The irony is that having satisfactorily trashed the other side, people tend not to stay in the reasonable middle that they claim to occupy. The fig-leaf of moderation is very quickly discarded. Just as in football a defeat for one side is a victory for the other, and in politics a defeat for the left is a victory for the right, so here a defeat of the others is a victory for whichever extreme appealed in the first place. We want simplicity, and our binary thinking is not hospitable to compromise or to pluralism. George W. Bush can woo the people by saying that you are either with us or against us. He cannot do so by saying that you are either with us or against us or somewhere in between. It appears that only fitfully and with effort can we keep it in our heads that iron rusts owing to a number of factors. In our hearts, we are pulled one way or the other.

This is certainly so with the debate about human nature. The dichotomy between nature and nurture rapidly acquires political and emotional implications. To put it crudely, the right likes genes and the left likes culture, although there are cross currents even in this scheme. (Chomsky is a left-wing nativist.) But the natural thought is that if, say, crime is scripted in the genes, then there is no reason on that score to work for the equality of wealth and the eradication of poverty, because you will get crime anyhow. If mad jealousy or rape are evolved strategies for unsuccessful males, then there is no reason on that score to promote an atmosphere of respect for women, because you will get mad jealousy or rape anyhow. Steven Pinker insists that politics needs first and foremost a view of human nature, since only unrealistic politics will be the consequence of unrealistic views.

Pinker presents himself as entirely reasonable, naturally; and for large parts of his book he succeeds in being so. He is certainly a skillful expositor and a persuasive writer. He is intelligent and humane. There is a lot to be learned from The Blank Slate. Pinker seems to know everything (the bibliography runs to nearly thirty pages of very small print). He certainly has opinions about everything, and answers to all the questions. The panache and the promise are intoxicating. It is difficult to talk with perfect certainty of human nature, but where Shakespeare and Proust could only crawl, Pinker gallops, He is the messianic prophet of a new world, in which a confluence of sciences finally delivers us the truth about ourselves.

Students of rhetoric will also admire his mastery of the Demon Move. As is clear from the book’s title, it is the nurture side of the debate that is Pinker’s demon. He hails from the citadel of nativism, the linguistic and philosophy departments at M.I.T. The enemy is empiricism, and the blank slate of the title is the “tabula rasa” or white paper to which John Locke famously compared the human mind. The doctrine of the blank slate is taken to deny that we have a nature at all. The blank slate is the universal human endowment, which waits passively to be written on by experience and environment. It has no nature; or to put it another way, nothing in its nature determines the upshot when experience does its work. It is the clay waiting for the sculptor to form it, and the sculptor can make anything at all of it. It is this model of the mind, and its political and practical implications, that are Pinker’s target.

We might feel some disquiet about Pinker’s polemic when we remember that Locke himself held no such view and intended no such view by his famous analogy. He is perfectly happy with the idea that the nature of the slate or paper may determine what can be written on it. As a good Christian, Locke believed that an All-Wise Maker has granted us a very definite constitution, enabling us to know what we need to know and not much more. We can know what matters to us and know how to do what is good for us. But Locke also believes in our fallen nature, and he is constantly harping on “the narrow measure of our capacities” and the ways in which we are not fitted for various kinds of understanding, whereas better endowed creatures, such as angels, might be. Locke, in other words, thought that basic powers and limitations of our human nature determined the scope and the limits of our understanding. You cannot think that, if you also deny that we have a human nature at all.

Locke wanted only to deny innate ideas and innate knowledge, not innate powers or tendencies, nor innate limitations, nor innate cognitive and emotional capacities. This may sound like a mere historical quibble, but it arouses a powerful doubt about Pinker’s diagnosis of modernity. If Locke did not hold the doctrine of the blank slate, then Leibniz and Hume and Kant, not to mention the massed ranks of churchmen declaiming about human depravity and Freudians declaiming about the nature of men and women, most certainly did not hold it either. And then its status as a central and unsalutary determinant of modern thought looks a little shaky.

Still, Pinker insists that the doctrine of the blank slate is one of a trio of views that have dominated modern life, wreaking havoc in education, politics, and culture generally. Skipping for a moment, the third member of the Pinker’s malign Trinity is Cartesian dualism: the notorious separation of mind and body expressed for the modern era by Descartes. This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will. Pinker thinks that this bad idea has obstructed the emergence of a genuine science of the mind, which is still struggling to emerge from its oppression. Here he is on stronger ground, since Cartesian dualism has surely influenced many people, and goes on doing so. It is the philosophy that makes the survival of the soul after bodily death intelligible. It is also a philosophy that makes downward causation, from mind to body, impossible to understand, enabling the cruder kind of theorist to deny that it happens.

The second Pinker’s unholy Trinity is in some ways the most interesting. It is Rousseau’s doctrine of the noble savage, or the view that human beings are naturally unselfish and peaceful and happy, and that our greed and violence and misery are entirely the products of culture or civilization. Early in the book Pinker writes:

Nobody can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.

Here we may feel another stirring of discomfort. The passage and its tone of certainty nicely illustrate the way the Demon Move works. For on the face of it the features of contemporary thought that Pinker here highlights admit of much more nuanced, and sensible, explanations than any simple doctrine of the Noble Savage. Perhaps we like natural foods because artificial foods taste so ghastly by comparison, as anyone returning to the United States from almost anywhere else will testify. Perhaps we like natural medicines because we mistrust the influence of the drug companies on what are presented as results in pharmacology. Perhaps we like natural childbirth (unless things go wrong) because we think that in this area at least evolution might have resulted in something fairly optimal, or perhaps like my own daughter we have a parent who strongly resented being forced to take unpleasant and dangerous drugs like pethadone by a profession bent on making things easy for itself. And perhaps we dislike authoritarian styles of childrearing not because we think children are naturally saintly, but because we have learned to doubt whether violence is the best way to eradicate violence. Finally, perhaps it is our policy to think of social problems as repairable because sometimes there is just a chance that they are, and if there is, hand-wringing over their tragic inevitability will not find the repair. Or perhaps we are just more careful about inferring tragic inevitability from science. To avoid such a mistake it is good to remember examples like this. Our susceptibility to cholera is a result of our genome, but the repair lay outside, in the public health provision of clean water.

In other words, right from the start there is a question-mark over Pinker’s historical method. It may be that an extreme view, the doctrine of the Noble Savage, has influenced some people at some times. But few parents retain the belief that their infants are angels for very long, and the ruthless European extermination of indigenous peoples everywhere scarcely testifies to the general belief in their superior nobility. A more detailed history, either of parenting or of colonialism, would uncover a whole tapestry of shifting and conflicting attitudes. So we ought to worry about the ease with which Pinker conjures his demons.

This is especially so given that the doctrine of the blank slate is inconsistent with the doctrine of the noble savage. The latter talks of innate tendencies to peace, happiness, and altruism, whereas the former denies innate tendencies at all. Can people really have held both? Pinker notices the problem, but minimizes it on the grounds that if you think there is nothing there to begin with, then at least you think there is nothing harmful there, and that is half-way to accommodating the idea of innate purity and nobility. Perhaps, but the association remains imperfect, and the more we test it, the harder it is to see modern life as really dominated by the diabolical Trinity. Pinker indeed quotes, very effectively, some hair-raising blank-slate claims, especially from the behaviorists J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, who claimed to be able to turn anyone into anything with sufficient conditioning But then these behaviorist advertisings had nothing whatever to do with belief in the noble savage, nor in free will, with both of which they fit badly.

Still, it is not for its cultural history that people are buying this book in alarming numbers, but for the promise of a new synthesis, a science of the mind that finally tells us who we are, what is possible for us, how our politics should be organized, how people should be brought up, what to expect of ethics, or in short, how to live. In the old days, philosophers, dramatists, historians, anthropologists, writers and poets monopolized these subjects. Now behavioral economists, biologists, cognitive scientists, evolutionary theorists and neurophysiologists occupy the territory. A brave new dawn is upon us.

II.

If we imagine a score from 0 (genes have nothing to do with human nature) to 10 (culture has nothing to do with human nature), I should guess that Pinker scores about 9. He holds, for example, that the way children turn out is almost wholly unaffected by how their parents bring them up. This is mostly certified by studies of identical twins brought up apart, although here he does not refer to Cyril Burt, the British psychologist who wrecked the education system on the basis of such evidence, having made it all up.

Actually, there is a whole lot more to worry about with twins studies. Their results are expressed in terms of the heritability of properties, or proportion of variance supposed due to genetic factors. There is already a worry, since by the time of birth the twins’ genes have been expressing themselves in identical environment for nine months, and the time of separation and its extent are confounding factors (many “separated” twins are brought up within the extended family). The results of this research have included such gems as the heritability of milk and soda intake (high) or of fruit juice and diet soda (not so high). What is not usually stressed, and not stressed here, is that any measure of heritability is highly contextual. In a world of clones, the heritability of properties is zero; in a world of absolute sameness of environment, it goes to 100%. That is, if iron is put in a uniform environment, differences of rust are 100% due to difference of composition, but if identical samples of iron are put in a variety of environments, differences of rust are 100% due to environment. Heritability has also little or nothing to do with the malleability of the trait in question. In Swedish twins studies, heritability estimates for regular tobacco use was given as three times as great for men as for women, but for women it also ranged from zero to sixty percent in three different age cohorts, presumably because of changing cultural pressures on female smoking. Pinker is either not aware of the health warnings attached to this kind of research, or suppresses mention of them.

Anyhow, he thinks that violence in America is not to be approached in terms of media violence, childhood abuse, guns, discrimination, poverty, divorce, alcohol, drugs, or indeed anything except Hobbes’s view of the inevitable nature of human aggression. Indeed, he writes as if any explanation of human phenomena that invokes culture is positing a “superorganism” or a free-floating “cloud” lying above and beyond the individual.

Pinker believes that anybody who scores around 5 on my scale is in the grip of his demon myths, and really scores 0. So he routinely sets tests for the other side and parades their inability to meet them, without revisiting the question of whether his side can meet them. Thus he makes much of the fact that if exposure to the media were implicated in violence, we might expect Canada’s homicide rate to be about the same as that of the United States, while in fact it runs at about one quarter. But Pinker is silent about the fact that if nothing but a shared Hobbesian human nature were the explanation, we would also expect an identical homicide rate. (To be fair, in a different part of the book Pinker does mention an explanation of the difference in the different history of expansion of the two nations_a geographical and cultural explanation that leaves you wondering about the efficacy of his otherwise cherished biological explanation). There is also a rather startling absence of countervailing evidence, such as the recent Surgeon-General’s report about media violence , or the well-known meta-study of studies of violence by Haejung Paik and George Comstock, which found in 1994 that media violence affects young peoples’ chance of being violent about as much as smoking affects the chance of lung cancer.

In sum, Pinker is an unblushing proponent of “evolutionary psychology,” the descendant of sociobiology that has swept campuses and bookstores alike for the last decade or so. The building blocks of this addition to science are well-known. At its simplest, we find some allegedly common human trait, and we explain why we have it by imagining how a propensity towards it might have been beneficial in the Flintstone world, or in the Pleistocene conditions in which apes evolved into humans. Suppose, for instance, a finding that women typically prefer richer and taller men. We take such a fact, or factoid, and then hypothesize that this preference is an adaptation in the biologist’s sense. It contributed to increased reproductive success. That is, there is some mechanism (at its simplest, a gene or two) that increases the probability of that preference, and women who have it reproduce more successfully than women who do not. Their mate’s riches enable their children to survive in greater numbers, and their mate’s height makes them better hunters (ignore the fact that they are presumably worse gatherers). Women without the gene gradually lose out. Only those with it produced lineages descending as far as the present.

Such stories go nicely with other views about the mind. One is the doctrine of the “modular mind”, often known as the Swiss army knife picture of the mind. The mind is not one huge general-purpose information processor, but an agglomeration of modules specifically dedicated to particular tasks. It is not so much one tool as a commonwealth of little tools. So Pinker likes to talk of a faculty such as sympathy or of a propensity to aggression as switches and knobs that can be turned on or off, or set at one level or another.

Pinker rightly notices that if we go in for these stories we must be extremely careful to distinguish our overt psychologies, which he calls proximate mechanisms, from their underlying evolutionary function. I can illustrate this little trick with the juicy case of sexual desire. The evolutionary rationale is reproduction. But the overt objects of desire need have nothing whatever to do with that rationale: just think of the huge variety of non-reproductive sexual pleasures to which people are so irresistibly drawn, and the precautions that they take in order to avoid reproduction. People want sex without wanting to reproduce, and for that matter they sometimes want to reproduce without wanting sex. We should also notice that the example puts a question mark in front of the idea of a single human nature, since the overt objects of desire are so extraordinarily various. Indeed, evolutionary stories about psychology should embrace this, since evolution can only happen where variation exists and selection works on it, which fits badly with the generally monolithic ambition of finding one “real” human nature within.

Pinker can be admirably clear about these things, but he falters when it comes to their applications. Consider one of the poster-children of evolutionary psychology, the robust finding by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson that step-children are more at risk from parental abuse than natural children. Pinker writes:

Daly and Wilson had originally examined the abuse statistics to test a prediction from evolutionary psychology. Parental love is selected over evolutionary time because it compels parents to protect and nurture their children, who are likely to carry the genes giving rise to parental love. In any species in which someone else’s offspring are likely to enter the family circle, selection will favor a tendency to prefer one’s own, because in the cold reckoning of natural selection an investment in the unrelated children would go to waste. A parent’s patience will tend to run out with stepchildren more quickly than with biological children, and in extreme cases this can lead to abuse.

Well, maybe. Actually, it is not clear that evolutionary psychology predicts good fathers at all: back in the Pleistocene, gadabout cads presumably fathered more offspring than stay-at-home dads. I seem to recall that Wilma Flintstone was a jealous and possessive wife. But in any event, we might agree that if Abel and Bertha have a child, and then Abel disappears and Chuck hooks up with Bertha, it seems plausible that Chuck should care less for the child than for one that he himself had fathered with Bertha. This is what the statistics bear out. But now we may reflect that if Abel and Bertha bought a dog or a sofa, and then Abel disappeared and Chuck hooked up with Bertha, it seems equally plausible that Chuck should care less for the step-dog or the step-sofa than if he had bought them together with Bertha. My bet would be that an incomer’s abuse of step-dogs and step-sofas is worse than abuse of dogs and sofas couples buy together. Conversely, when the genetic link is absent but the togetherness is present, as when couples decide together to adopt children, parental love seems to function perfectly well: at least Pinker does not suggest otherwise. Normal people take pleasure in the doings of children in general. The mothers at a playgroup do not typically snarl at one another’s children for being genetic competitors to their own.

The point is not that parental love is anything other than an adaptation: such a notion is absurd. The point is that its strength and its direction can be quite independent of any belief in a genetic link with the object of love. It may be that, as Pinker says, in the cold reckoning of natural selection Chuck’s investment in his adopted offspring goes to waste. How fortunate, then, that Chuck’s own reckoning is not that one. Indeed, if Chuck is anything like a good parent, he will not be thinking in terms of investment and return at all. Supposing that Chuck’s reckoning has to be that of natural selection is no better than supposing that strength and direction sexual desire is proportionate to the expectation of reproductive results. From Augustine onwards, generations of churchmen have wished that this were so, but it isn’t.

Once we become properly alert to the huge distance between our overt psychologies and the evolutionary rationales that can be offered to explain them, the messianic promise of evolutionary psychology in general, and The Blank Slate in particular, begin to look awfully thin. Pinker says, and I am sure that he is right, that some faculties, or modules, incline us to greed, lust, malice, envy, anger and aggression. Others incline us to sympathy, foresight, self-respect, desire for the good opinion of others. And then we can exchange information with others, and personal and social change can come about when we do.

But suddenly the notion of a faculty or module starts to evaporate. The Swiss army knife may have a corkscrew that works however blunt the knife is. But if there is one thing clear about our psychologies, it is that the functioning of one module can affect the delivery of another module. Our tendency to anger is suppressed by our prudence. Even at the sensory level, how we smell something is affected by what we are told it is. In the right cultural climate, our greed is checked by our desire for the esteem of our fellows. We imitate and respond and adapt ourselves to the expectations of others. And this leaves scope, to put it mildly, for culture and ethics. It means we will no longer respond in the same way. We will no longer be made angry by what might have made us angry in a different milieu, or desire what we would have desired, or envy what we would have envied.

In his less doctrinaire moods, Pinker does not deny this. He quotes with approval Peter Singer’s image of the expanding circle, whereby our concerns can come to embrace not only ourselves but also our family, tribe, class, nation, race, humanity, and eventually animals, or even plants. The circle of our concerns can widen, and indeed has done so: “once the sympathy knob is in place, having evolved to enjoy the benefits of cooperation and exchange, it can be cranked up by new kinds of information that other folks are similar to oneself.” This sounds about right to me, apart from the mixed metaphor. And apart from the lingering sense that the evolutionary rationale of sympathy, the “benefits of cooperation and exchange” taint the purity of our concern for others, even at our best, which, to flog the horse once more, is like supposing that even sodomites and foot fetishists are secretly trying to reproduce.

III.

It sounds, then, as though there remains plenty of room for education and culture, conceived of as natural devices for turning up the good knobs, and turning down the bad ones. We would look to the inherited experience of history, or the experience of parents and educators, to find how to replace competition with cooperation, or aggression with peaceability. We would try to think seriously about why the homicide rate in Canada is one quarter that of the United States, and we would welcome narratives from historians or anthropologists telling us of similar variations. We would applaud the way in which peaceful Scandinavians have descended from bloodthirsty Vikings (Pinker’s example), and we would hope to reproduce whatever factors enabled this to happen. Biological theory cannot provide the answers, or the descendants would resemble the ancestors, since evolution has had too little time to act.

We might try saying that the Scandinavians and their ancestors share a psychology. They both seek to maximize their utility. Homo Economicus is each of us, a simple fellow, always and only asking: what’s most in it for me? The environment is relevant insofar as it means that sometimes peace might be the answer, and sometimes violence. Our human natures are not so much a blank slate as a slate with a single scratch on it. Pinker does not really believe this, and after all it would mean that blank slate theorists were very nearly right. But neither is he prepared to avoid it by admitting the vast variety of psychologies that history parades before us, and by celebrating the cultural transformations that give us some control over them. He insists on a one-way street: culture is the product of individual psychologies. You should not explain individual psychologies by reference to culture. We need to see “culture as a product of human desires rather than as a shaper of them.”

This is a very surprising ideology for a professional linguist, and so far as I can make out Pinker does nothing to defend it. Faced with the question “do we explain language in terms of individual language speakers, or individual language speakers by reference to language?”, the only possible answer seems to be that we have two-way traffic. We learn at our mothers’ knees, and when our generation grows up we transmit what we learned, modified by us individually and collectively, onwards to the next generation. The English language is a cultural resource, and there is nothing unscientific about invoking facts about it to explain facts about individuals. The trick is to remember that facts about culture are not facts about some cloudy superorganism, some transcendental spirit of the age hovering around in hyperspace. They are summaries of facts about ourselves and our interactions. What they summarize is the very, very important part of our environment that concerns our interactions with other people. Those interactions shape the way we speak, but also the way we hope and fear and take pride and feel shame. They summarize what we imitate and emulate and eventually what we grow to be.

So the Viking has ambitions, fears, conceptions of esteem, pride and honor, all of which he gets from his culture and which determine his bloodthirstiness. All of these are lacking to his pacific descendants, while other values have been put in their place. In other words, their psychologies are indeed different, and the interesting thing for politicians, educators, and parents is the question of how those differences came about, and how the progress that they represent can be cemented and duplicated. That is what culture is. Explaining the Scandinavian progress by reference to it is just as proper as explaining my accent by reference to the prevailing sound of English where I grew up. The Viking is bloodthirsty because he lives in a bloodthirsty culture. And the culture is bloodthirsty because of the people in it. You can have both, and there are no demons anywhere.

Once we get past the demonizing and the rhetoric, take proper notice of the space between overt psychology and evolutionary rationale for it, and lose any phobia of cultural phenomena, what is left? There are plenty of sensible and plausible observations about human beings in Pinker’s book. But it is not clear that any of them are particularly new: Hobbes and Adam Smith give us more than anybody else. And at least their insights have stood the test of time, unlike that of some more recent work. Consider again the example of media violence. Here it seems that psychologists cannot speak with one voice about its effects. But worse than that, much worse, they cannot even speak with one voice about what psychological studies find about its effects. That is, the meta-studies that Pinker cites flatly disagree with the meta-studies that I mentioned earlier. If this is the state of play, we do well to plead the privilege of skepticism. We also do well too not to jettison other cultural resources too quickly. The depressing thing about The Blank Slate is that behind the rhetoric and the salesmanship, I suspect that Pinker knows this as well as anyone else.

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His books Think and Being Good are published by Oxford University Press.

http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm

And, anyone impressed with that pseudo-science called 'Evolutionary Psychology' should read David Stove's book 'Darwinian Fairytales':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinian_Fairytales

And then the following (Dupré is a socialist):

Dupré, J. (2001), Human Nature And The Limits Of Science (Oxford University Press).
--------, (2002), Humans And Other Animals (Oxford University Press).
--------, (2003), Darwin's Legacy. What Evolution Means Today (Oxford University Press).

Buller, D. (2005), Adapting Minds. Evolutionary Psychology And The Persistent Quest For Human Nature (MIT Press).

Lynx

25th August 2008, 18:48

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_adaptation
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex system

Nobody posting to this thread is scoring a 0 or 10 I hope!

redarmyfaction38

25th August 2008, 22:22

Trystan

25th August 2008, 22:43

syt
leftism is in no way incompatible with existentialism. In fact I see leftist society as birthplace for non-destructive existentialism.

Existentialism is about freedom and authenticity. Would you not agree that capitalist society is both unfree and has an inauthentic view of freedom?

gla22

26th August 2008, 02:44

syt

Existentialism is about freedom and authenticity. Would you not agree that capitalist society is both unfree and has an inauthentic view of freedom?

I would agree. Capitalist society prevents people from realizing their potential and doing what they want to do with their lives.

Trystan

26th August 2008, 03:07

I would agree. Capitalist society prevents people from realizing their potential and doing what they want to do with their lives.

lol, yes of course you would. You said it was in no way incompatible with leftism. Ah. Note to self: read posts properly in future.

trivas7

26th August 2008, 15:46

I've posted this before, but it is worth re-posting. Here, Simon Blackburn demolishes a central plank of Pinker's book, The Blank Slate:

http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm (http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/%7Eswb24/reviews/Pinker.htm)

And, anyone impressed with that pseudo-science called 'Evolutionary Psychology' should read David Stove's book 'Darwinian Fairytales':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinian_Fairytales

Thanks for these Rosa; I have an abiding interest in Pinker as a leading linguist/theorectician of renown in the US today. He's a hell of a good writer and i've enjoyed everything I've read by him (but haven't gotten to the Blank Slate). AFAIK his approach isn't exactly the sociobiologist one and he comes to his conclusions entirely by way of conventional evolutionary theory. I wouldn't entirely write him off. But thanks for the heads up.

Having said that IMO questions of human nature have an air of theological/metaphysical posturing re them that have no place in a scientific understanding of man. When given the response that something -- homosexuality, e.g. -- is "against human nature" it usually means I'm dealing with someone who implicitly denies evolutionary science.

Rosa Lichtenstein

26th August 2008, 16:32

Well, Stove is a right-wing git (who used to be a Marxist), and an atheist, but he is one of the best philosophical essayists since Descartes (no exaggeration!), who constructs a pretty convincing case against the sociobiological/evolutionary psychological interpretation of human evolution -- in fact, the best I have ever read, and by a long way.