The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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A memorable name for this doctrine was given three centuries later by a detractor, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976):
There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory…. The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function. Human bodies are in space and are subject to mechanical laws which govern all other bodies in space…. But minds are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws….
… Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”6
The Ghost in the Machine, like the Noble Savage, arose in part as a reaction to Hobbes. Hobbes had argued that life and mind could be explained in mechanical terms. Light sets our nerves and brain in motion, and that is what it means to see. The motions may persist like the wake of a ship or the vibration of a plucked string, and that is what it means to imagine. “Quantities” get added or subtracted in the brain, and that is what it means to think.
Descartes rejected the idea that the mind could operate by physical principles. He thought that behavior, especially speech, was not caused by anything, but freely chosen. He observed that our consciousness, unlike our bodies and other physical objects, does not feel as if it is divisible into parts or laid out in space. He noted that we cannot doubt the existence of our minds—indeed, we cannot doubt that we are our minds—because the very act of thinking presupposes that our minds exist. But we can doubt the existence of our bodies, because we can imagine ourselves to be immaterial spirits who merely dream or hallucinate that we are incarnate.
Descartes also found a moral bonus in his dualism (the belief that the mind is a different kind of thing from the body): “There is none which is more effectual in leading feeble spirits from the straight path of virtue, than to imagine that the soul of the brute is of the same nature as our own, and that in consequence, after this life we have nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than the flies and the ants.”7 Ryle explains Descartes’s dilemma:
When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.8
It can indeed be upsetting to think of ourselves as glorified gears and springs. Machines are insensate, built to be used, and disposable; humans are sentient, possessing of dignity and rights, and infinitely precious. A machine has some workaday purpose, such as grinding grain or sharpening pencils; a human being has higher purposes, such as love, worship, good works, and the creation of knowledge and beauty. The behavior of machines is determined by the ineluctable laws of physics and chemistry; the behavior of people is freely chosen. With choice comes freedom, and therefore optimism about our possibilities for the future. With choice also comes responsibility, which allows us to hold people accountable for their actions. And of course if the mind is separate from the body, it can continue to exist when the body breaks down, and our thoughts and pleasures will not someday be snuffed out forever.
As I mentioned, most Americans continue to believe in an immortal soul, made of some nonphysical substance, which can part company with the body. But even those who do not avow that belief in so many words still imagine that somehow there must be more to us than electrical and chemical activity in the brain. Choice, dignity, and responsibility are gifts that set off human beings from everything else in the universe, and seem incompatible with the idea that we are mere collections of molecules. Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as “reductionist” or “determinist.” The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad. The dichotomy between mind and body also pervades everyday speech, as when we say “Use your head,” when we refer to “out-of-body experiences,” and when we speak of “John’s body,” or for that matter “John’s brain” which presupposes an owner, John, that is somehow separate from the brain it owns. Journalists sometimes speculate about “brain transplants” when they really should be calling them “body transplants,” because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.
The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine—or, as philosophers call them, empiricism, romanticism, and dualism—are logically independent, but in practice they are often found together. If the slate is blank, then strictly speaking it has neither injunctions to do good nor injunctions to do evil. But good and evil are asymmetrical: there are more ways to harm people than to help them, and harmful acts can hurt them to a greater degree than virtuous acts can make them better off. So a blank slate, compared with one filled with motives, is bound to impress us more by its inability to do harm than by its inability to do good. Rousseau did not literally believe in a blank slate, but he did believe that bad behavior is a product of learning and socialization.9 “Men are wicked,” he wrote; “a sad and constant experience makes proof unnecessary.”10 But this wickedness comes from society: “There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice to be found in it of which it cannot be said how and whence it entered.”11 If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us, like Rousseau, associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred, and unsullied, and of the nouns blemish, blot, mark, stain, and taint.
The Blank Slate naturally coexists with the Ghost in the Machine, too, since a slate that is blank is a hospitable place for a ghost to haunt. If a ghost is to be at the controls, the factory can ship the device with a minimum of parts. The ghost can read the body’s display panels and pull its levers, with no need for a high-tech executive program, guidance system, or CPU. The more not-clockwork there is controlling behavior, the less clockwork we need to posit. For similar reasons, the Ghost in the Machine happily accompanies the Noble Savage. If the machine behaves ignobly, we can blame the ghost, which freely chose to carry out the iniquitous acts; we need not probe for a defect in the machine’s design.
PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father’s reply was “Luft!”—Yiddish for “air.” And then there’s the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, “Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?”
But far from being idle or airy, the ideas of philosophers can have repercussions for centuries. The Blank Slate and its companion doctrines have infiltrated the conventional wisdom of our civilization and have repeatedly surfaced in unexpected places. William Godwin (1756–1835), one of the founders of liberal political philosophy, wrote that “children are a sort of raw material put into our hands,” their minds “like a sheet of white paper.”12 More sinisterly, we find Mao Zedong justifying his radical social engineering by saying, “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.”13 Even Walt Disney was inspired by the metaphor. “I think of a child’s mind as a blank book,” he wrote. “During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.”14
I would submit that the world native Americans knew was more stable, happier, and less barbaric than our society today…. there were no employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown, crime nearly nonexistent. What warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter. While there were hard times, life was, for the most part, stable and predictable…. Because the native people respected what was around them, there was no loss of water or food resources because of pollution or extinction, no lack of materials for the daily essentials, such as baskets, canoes, shelter, or firewood.15
Not that there haven’t been skeptics:
Calvin and Hobbes © Watterson. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate.
All rights reserved.
The third doctrine, too, continues to make its presence felt in modern times. In 2001 George W. Bush announced that the American government will not fund research on human embryonic stem cells if scientists have to destroy new embryos to extract them (the policy permits research on stem-cell lines that were previously extracted from embryos). He derived the policy after consulting not just with scientists but with philosophers and religious thinkers. Many of them framed the moral problem in terms of “ensoulment,” the moment at which the cluster of cells that will grow into a child is endowed with a soul. Some argued that ensoulment occurs at conception, which implies that the blastocyst (the five-day-old ball of cells from which stem cells are taken) is morally equivalent to a person and that destroying it is a form of murder.16 That argument proved decisive, which means that the American policy on perhaps the most promising medical technology of the twenty-first century was decided by pondering the moral issue as it might have been framed centuries before: When does the ghost first enter the machine?
These are just a few of the fingerprints of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine on modern intellectual life. In the following chapters we will see how the seemingly airy ideas of Enlightenment philosophers entrenched themselves in modern consciousness, and how recent discoveries are casting those ideas in doubt.
Chapter 2
Silly Putty
THE DANISH PHILOLOGIST Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) is one of history’s most beloved linguists. His vivid books are still read today, especially Growth and Structure of the English Language, first published in 1905. Though Jespersen’s scholarship is thoroughly modern, the opening pages remind us we are not reading a contemporary book:
There is one expression that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others: it seems to be positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it….
To bring out one of these points I select at random, by way of contrast, a passage from the language of Hawaii: “I kona hiki ana aku ilaila ua hookipa ia mai la oia me ke aloha pumehana loa.” Thus it goes on, no single word ends in a consonant, and a group of two or more consonants is never found. Can any one be in doubt that even if such a language sounds pleasantly and be full of music and harmony the total impression is childlike and effeminate? You do not expect much vigor or energy in a people speaking such a language; it seems adapted only to inhabitants of sunny regions where the soil requires scarcely any labour on the part of man to yield him everything he wants, and where life therefore does not bear the stamp of a hard struggle against nature and fellow-creatures. In a lesser degree we find the same phonetic structure in such languages as Italian and Spanish; but how different are our Northern tongues.1
And so he continues, advertising the virility, sobriety, and logic of English—and ends the chapter: “As the language is, so also is the nation.”
No modern reader can fail to be shocked by the sexism, racism, and chauvinism of the discussion: the implication that women are childlike, the stereotyping of a colonized people as indolent, the gratuitous exalting of the author’s own culture. Equally surprising are the sorry standards to which the great scholar here has sunk. The suggestion that a language can be “grown-up” and “masculine” is so subjective as to be meaningless. He attributes a personality trait to an entire people without any evidence, then advances two theories—that phonology reflects personality, and that warm climates breed laziness—without invoking even correlational data, let alone proof of causation. Even on his home ground the reasoning is flimsy. Languages with a consonant-vowel syllable structure like Hawaiian call for longer words to convey the same amount of information, hardly what you would expect in a people without “vigor or energy.” And the consonant-encrusted syllables of English are liable to be swallowed and misheard, hardly what you would expect from a logical, businesslike people.
But perhaps most disturbing is Jespersen’s obliviousness to the possibility that he might be saying anything exceptionable. He took it for granted that his biases would be shared by his readers, whom he knew to be fellow men and speakers of “our” Northern tongues. “Can any one be in doubt?” he asked rhetorically; “you do not expect much vigor” from such a people, he asserted. The inferiority of women and other races needed neither justification nor apology.
I bring up Otto Jespersen, a man of his time, to show how standards have changed. The passage is a random sample of intellectual life a century ago; equally disturbing passages could have been taken from just about any writer of the nineteenth or early twentieth century.2 It was a time of white men taking up the burden of leading their “new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child”; of shores teeming with huddled masses and wretched refuse; of European imperial powers looking (and sometimes throwing) daggers at one another. Imperialism, immigration, nationalism, and the legacy of slavery made differences between ethnic groups all too obvious. Some appeared educated and cultured, others ignorant and backward; some used fists and clubs to preserve their safety, others paid the police and the army to do it. It was tempting to assume that northern Europeans were an advanced race suited to rule the others. Just as convenient was the belief that women were constitutionally suited for the kitchen, church, and children, a belief supported by “research” showing that brainwork was bad for their physical and mental health.
Racial prejudice, too, had a scientific patina. Darwin’s theory of evolution was commonly misinterpreted as an explanation of intellectual and moral progress rather than an explanation of how living things adapt to an ecological niche. The nonwhite races, it was easy to think, were rungs on an evolutionary ladder between the apes and the Europeans. Worse, Darwin’s follower Herbert Spencer wrote that do-gooders would only interfere with the progress of evolution if they tried to improve the lot of the impoverished classes and races, who were, in Spencer’s view, biologically less fit. The doctrine of Social Darwinism (or, as it ought to be called, Social Spencerism, for Darwin wanted no part of it) attracted such unsurprising spokesmen as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.3 Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton had suggested that human evolution should be given a helping hand by discouraging the less fit from breeding, a policy he called eugenics.4 Within a few decades laws were passed that called for the involuntary sterilization of delinquents and the “feebleminded” in Canada, the Scandinavian countries, thirty American states, and, ominously, Germany. The Nazis’ ideology of inferior races was later used to justify the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals.
We have come a long way. Though attitudes far worse than Jespersen’s continue to thrive in much of the world and in parts of our society, they have been driven out of mainstream intellectual life in Western democracies. Today no respectable public figure in the United States, Britain, or Western
Europe can casually insult women or sling around invidious stereotypes of other races or ethnic groups. Educated people try to be conscious of their hidden prejudices and to measure them against the facts and against the sensibilities of others. In public life we try to judge people as individuals, not as specimens of a sex or ethnic group. We try to distinguish might from right and our parochial tastes from objective merit, and therefore respect cultures that are different or poorer than ours. We realize that no mandarin is wise enough to be entrusted with directing the evolution of the species, and that it is wrong in any case for the government to interfere with such a personal decision as having a child. The very idea that the members of an ethnic group should be persecuted because of their biology fills us with revulsion.
These changes were cemented by the bitter lessons of lynchings, world wars, forced sterilizations, and the Holocaust, which showcased the grave implications of denigrating an ethnic group. But they emerged earlier in the twentieth century, the spinoff of an unplanned experiment: the massive immigration, social mobility, and diffusion of knowledge of the modern era. Most Victorian gentlemen could not have imagined that the coming century would see a nation-state forged by Jewish pioneers and soldiers, a wave of African American public intellectuals, or a software industry in Bangalore. Nor could they have anticipated that women would lead nations in wars, run huge corporations, or win Nobel Prizes in science. We now know that people of both sexes and all races are capable of attaining any station in life.