The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

  Suppose rape is rooted in a feature of human nature, such as that men want sex across a wider range of circumstances than women do. It is also a feature of human nature, just as deeply rooted in our evolution, that women want control over when and with whom they have sex. It is inherent to our value system that the interests of women should not be subordinated to those of men, and that control over one’s body is a fundamental right that trumps other people’s desires. So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men’s sexuality. Note how this calculus requires a “deterministic” and “essentialist” claim about human nature: that women abhor being raped. Without that claim we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape and trying to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw material.

  In other cases, the best way to resolve a conflict is not as obvious. The psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have documented that stepparents are far more likely to abuse a child than are biological parents. The discovery was by no means banal: many parenting experts insist that the abusive stepparent is a myth originating in Cinderella stories and that parenting is a “role” that anyone can take on. Daly and Wilson had originally examined the abuse statistics to test a prediction from evolutionary psychology.14 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.

  Does all this mean that social service agencies should monitor stepparents more closely than biological parents? Not so fast. The vast majority of both kinds of parents never commit abuse, so putting stepparents under a cloud of suspicion would be unfair to millions of innocent people. As the legal scholar Owen Jones points out, the evolutionary analysis of stepparenting—or of anything else—has no automatic policy implications. Rather, it delineates a tradeoff and forces us to choose an optimum along it. In this case, the tradeoff is between minimizing child abuse while stigmatizing stepparents, on one hand, and being maximally fair to stepparents while tolerating an increase in child abuse, on the other.15 If we did not know that people are predisposed to lose patience with stepchildren faster than with biological children, we would implicitly choose one end of this tradeoff—ignoring step-parenting as a risk factor altogether, and tolerating the extra cases of child abuse—without even realizing it.

  An understanding of human nature with all its weaknesses can enrich not just our policies but our personal lives. Families with stepchildren tend to be less happy and more fragile than families with biological children, largely because of tensions over how much time, patience, and money the stepparents should expend. Many stepparents, nonetheless, are kind and generous to a spouse’s children, in part out of love for the spouse. Still, there is a difference between the instinctive love that parents automatically lavish on their own children and the deliberate kindness and generosity that wise stepparents extend to their stepchildren. Understanding this difference, Daly and Wilson suggest, could enhance a marriage.16 Though a marriage based on strict tit-for-tat reciprocity is generally miserable, a good marriage finds each spouse appreciating the sacrifices that the other has made over the long haul. Acknowledging a partner’s conscious benevolence toward one’s children may ultimately breed less resentment and misunderstanding than demanding such benevolence as a matter of course and begrudging any ambivalence the partner may feel. It is one of many ways in which a realism about the imperfect emotions we actually have may bring more happiness than an illusion about the ideal emotions we wish we had.

  So IF WE are put in this world to rise above nature, how do we do it? Where in the causal chain of evolved genes building a neural computer do we find a chink into which we can fit the seemingly unmechanical event of “choosing values”? By allowing for choice, are we just inviting a ghost back into the machine?

  The question is itself a symptom of the Blank Slate. If one starts off thinking the slate is blank, then when someone proposes an innate desire one will mentally plunk it onto the barren surface in one’s imagination and conclude that it must be an ineluctable urge, because there is nothing else on the slate to counteract it. Selfish thoughts translate into selfish behavior, aggressive urges beget natural-born killers, a taste for multiple sexual partners means that men just can’t help fooling around. For example, when the primatologist Michael Ghiglieri appeared on the National Public Radio program Science Friday to talk about his book on violence, the interviewer asked, “You explain rape and murder and war and all the bad things that men do as something—if I would just boil it down—something they can’t help because of its—it’s locked up in their evolutionary genes there?”17

  If, however, the mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, self-respect, a. desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are “biological” but that thinking and decision making are something else.

  The faculties underlying empathy, foresight, and self-respect are information-processing systems that accept input and commandeer other parts of the brain and body. They are combinatorial systems, like the mental grammar underlying language, capable of cranking out an unlimited number of ideas and courses of action. Personal and social change can come about when people exchange information that affects those mechanisms—even if we are nothing but meat puppets, glorified clockwork, or lumbering robots created by selfish genes.

  Not only is acknowledging human nature compatible with social and moral progress, but it can help explain the obvious progress that has taken place over millennia. Customs that were common throughout history and prehistory—slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, genocide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers, rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal ownership of women—have vanished from large parts of the world.

  The philosopher Peter Singer has shown how continuous moral progress can emerge from a fixed moral sense.18 Suppose we are endowed with a conscience that treats other persons as targets of sympathy and inhibits us from harming or exploiting them. Suppose, too, that we have a mechanism for assessing whether a living thing gets to be classified as a person. (After all, we don’t want to classify plants as persons and starve before we would eat them.) Singer explains moral improvement in the title of his book: The Expanding Circle. People have steadily expanded the mental dotted line that embraces the entities considered worthy of moral consideration. The circle has been poked outward from the family and village to the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and most recently (as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to all of humanity. It has been slackened from royalty, aristocracy, and property holders to all men. It has grown from including only men to including women, children, and newborns. It has crept outward to embrace criminals, prisoners of war, enemy civilians, the dying, and the mentally handicapped.

  Nor are the possibilities for moral progress over. Today some people want to enlarge the circle to include great apes, warm-blooded creatures, or animals with central nervous systems. Some want to count in zygotes, blastocysts, fetuses, and the brain-de
ad. Still others want to embrace species, ecosystems, or the entire planet. This sweeping change in sensibilities, the driving force in the moral history of our species, did not require a blank slate or a ghost in the machine. It could have arisen from a moral gadget containing a single knob or slider that adjusts the size of the circle embracing the entities whose interests we treat as comparable to our own.

  The expansion of the moral circle does not have to be powered by some mysterious drive toward goodness. It may come from the interaction between the selfish process of evolution and a law of complex systems. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry and the journalist Robert Wright have explained how evolution can lead to greater and greater degrees of cooperation.19 Repeatedly in the history of life, replicators have teamed up, specialized to divide the labor, and coordinated their behavior. It happens because replicators often find themselves in non-zero-sum games, in which particular strategies adopted by two players can leave them both better off (as opposed to a zero-sum game, where one player’s profit is another player’s loss). An exact analogy is found in the play by William Butler Yeats in which a blind man carries a lame man on his shoulders, allowing both of them to get around. During the evolution of life this dynamic has led replicating molecules to team up in chromosomes, organelles to team up in cells, cells to agglomerate into complex organisms, and organisms to hang out in societies. Independent agents repeatedly made their fate hostage to a larger system, not because they are inherently civic-minded but because they benefited from the division of labor and developed ways of damping conflicts among the agents making up the system.

  Human societies, like living things, have become more complicated and cooperative over time. Again, it is because agents do better when they team up and specialize in pursuit of their shared interests, as long as they solve the problems of exchanging information and punishing cheaters. If I have more fruit than I can eat and you have more meat than you can eat, it pays each of us to trade our surplus with the other. If we face a common enemy, then, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  Wright argues that three features of human nature led to a steady expansion of the circle of human cooperators. One is the cognitive wherewithal to figure out how the world works. This yields know-how worth sharing and an ability to spread goods and information over larger territories, both of which expand opportunities for gains in trade. A second is language, which allows technology to be shared, bargains to be struck, and agreements to be enforced. A third is an emotional repertoire—sympathy, trust, guilt, anger, self-esteem—that impels us to seek new cooperators, maintain relationships with them, and safeguard the relationships against possible exploitation. Long ago these endowments put our species on a moral escalator. Our mental circle of respect-worthy persons expanded in tandem with our physical circle of allies and trading partners. As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can’t kill someone and trade with him too.

  Non-zero-sum games arise not just from people’s ability to help one another but from their ability to refrain from hurting one another. In many disputes, both sides come out ahead by dividing up the savings made available from not having to fight. That provides an incentive to develop technologies of conflict resolution, such as mediation, face-saving measures, measured restitution and retribution, and legal codes. The primatologist Frans de Waal has argued that the rudiments of conflict resolution maybe found in many species of primates.20 The human forms are ubiquitous across cultures, as universal as the conflicts of interest they are designed to defuse.21

  Though the evolution of the expanding circle (its ultimate cause) may sound pragmatic or even cynical, the psychology of the expanding circle (its proximate cause) need not be. 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. Words and images from erstwhile enemies can trigger the sympathy response. A historical record can warn against self-defeating cycles of vendetta. A cosmopolitan awareness may lead people to think, “There but for fortune go I.” An expansion of sympathy may come from something as basic as the requirement to be logically consistent when imploring other people to behave in certain ways: people come to realize that they cannot force others to abide by rules that they themselves flout. Egoistic, sexist, racist, and xenophobic attitudes are logically inconsistent with the demand that everyone respect a single code of behavior.22 Peaceful coexistence, then, does not have to come from pounding selfish desires out of people. It can come from pitting some desires—the desire for safety, the benefits of cooperation, the ability to formulate and recognize universal codes of behavior—against the desire for immediate gain. These are just a few of the ways in which moral and social progress can ratchet upwards, not in spite of a fixed human nature but because of it.

  WHEN YOU STOP to think about it, the idea of a pliant human nature does not deserve its reputation for optimism and uplift. If it did, B. F. Skinner would have been lauded as a great humanitarian when he argued that society should apply the technology of conditioning to humans, shaping people to use contraception, conserve energy, make peace, and avoid crowded cities.23 Skinner was a staunch blank-slater and a passionate Utopian. His uncommonly pure vision allows us to examine the implications of the “optimistic” denial of human nature. Given his premise that undesirable behavior is not in the genes but a product of the environment, it follows that we should control that environment—for all we would be doing is replacing haphazard schedules of reinforcement by planned ones.

  Why are most people repelled by this vision? Critics of Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity pointed out that no one doubts that behavior can be controlled; putting a gun to someone’s head or threatening him with torture are time-honored techniques.24 Even Skinner’s preferred method of operant conditioning required starving the organism to 80 percent of its free-feeding weight and confining it to a box where schedules of reinforcement were carefully controlled. The issue is not whether we can change human behavior, but at what cost.

  Since we are not just products of our environments, there will be costs. People have inherent desires such as comfort, love, family, esteem, autonomy, aesthetics, and self-expression, regardless of their history of reinforcement, and they suffer when the freedom to exercise the desires is thwarted. Indeed, it is difficult to define psychological pain without some notion of human nature. (Even the young Marx appealed to a “species character,” with an impulse for creative activity, as the basis for his theory of alienation.) Sometimes we may choose to impose suffering to control behavior, as when we punish people who cause avoidable suffering in others. But we cannot pretend that we can reshape behavior without infringing in some way on other people’s freedom and happiness. Human nature is the reason we do not surrender our freedom to behavioral engineers.

  Inborn human desires are a nuisance to those with Utopian and totalitarian visions, which often amount to the same thing. What stands in the way of most utopias is not pestilence and drought but human behavior. So Utopians have to think of ways to control behavior, and when propaganda doesn’t do the trick, more emphatic techniques are tried. The Marxist Utopians of the twentieth century, as we saw, needed a tabula rasa free of selfishness and family ties and used totalitarian measures to scrape the tablets clean or start over with new ones. As Bertolt Brecht said of the East German government, “If the people did not do better the government would dismiss the people and elect a new one.” Political philosophers and historians who have recently “reflected on our ravaged century,” such as Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth Minogue, Robert Conquest, Jonathan Glover, James Scott, and Daniel Chirot, have pointed to Utopian dreams as a major cause of twentieth-century nightmares.25 For that matter, Wordsworth’s revolutionary France, “thrilled with joy” while human nature
was “born again,” turned out to be no picnic either.

  It’s not just behaviorists and Stalinists who forgot that a denial of human nature may have costs in freedom and happiness. Twentieth-century Marxism was part of a larger intellectual current that has been called Authoritarian High Modernism: the conceit that planners could redesign society from the top down using “scientific” principles.26 The architect Le Corbusier, for example, argued that urban planners should not be fettered by traditions and tastes, since they only perpetuated the overcrowded chaos of the cities of his day. “We must build places where mankind will be reborn,” he wrote. “Each man will live in an ordered relation to the whole.”27 In Le Corbusier’s utopia, planners would begin with a “clean tablecloth” (sound familiar?) and mastermind all buildings and public spaces to service “human needs.” They had a minimalist conception of those needs: each person was thought to require a fixed amount of air, heat, light, and space for eating, sleeping, working, commuting, and a few other activities. It did not occur to Le Corbusier that intimate gatherings with family and friends might be a human need, so he proposed large communal dining halls to replace kitchens. Also missing from his list of needs was the desire to socialize in small groups in public places, so he planned his cities around freeways, large buildings, and vast open plazas, with no squares or crossroads in which people would feel comfortable hanging out to schmooze. Homes were “machines for living,” free of archaic inefficiencies like gardens and ornamentation, and thus were efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing projects.