The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

  This inspired the War Powers Clause, which gave Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. (It was infamously circumvented in the years of the Vietnam conflict, during which Johnson and Nixon never formally declared a state of war.)

  McGinnis notes that even the freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press were motivated by features of human nature. The framers justified them as means of preventing tyranny: a network of freely communicating citizens can counteract the might of the individuals in government. As we now say, they can “speak truth to power.” The dynamic of power sharing protected by these rights might go way back in evolutionary history. The primatologists Frans de Waal, Robin Dunbar, and Christopher Boehm have shown how a coalition of lower-ranking primates can depose a single alpha male.42 Like McGinnis, they suggest this may be a crude analogue of political democracy.

  None of this means that the American Constitution was a guarantee of a happy and moral society, of course. By working within the glaringly undersized moral circle of the day, the Constitution failed to stand in the way of the genocide of native peoples, the slavery and segregation of African Americans, and the disenfranchisement of women. It said little about the conduct of foreign affairs, which (except with regard to strategic allies) has generally been guided by a cynical realpolitik. The first failing has been addressed by explicit measures to expand the legal circle, such as the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; the second is unsolved and perhaps unsolvable, because other countries are necessarily outside any circle delineated by a national document. The Constitution also lacked any principled compassion for those at the bottom of the meritocracy, assuming that equality of opportunity was the only mechanism needed to address the distribution of wealth. And it is incapable of stipulating the suite of values and customs that appear to be necessary for a democracy to function in practice.

  Acknowledging the relative success of constitutional democracy does not require one to be a flag-waving patriot. But it does suggest that something may have been right about the theory of human nature that guided its architects.

  The left needs a new paradigm.

  —Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left (1999)43

  Conservatives need Charles Darwin.

  —Larry Arnhart, “Conservatives, Design, and Darwin” (2000)44

  What’s going on? That voices of the contemporary left and the contemporary right are both embracing evolutionary psychology after decades of reviling it shows two things. One is that biological facts are beginning to box in plausible political philosophies. The belief on the left that human nature can be changed at will, and the belief on the right that morality rests on God’s endowing us with an immaterial soul, are becoming rearguard struggles against the juggernaut of science. A popular bumper sticker in the 1990s urged, QUESTION AUTHORITY. Another bumper sticker replied, QUESTION GRAVITY. All political philosophies have to decide when their arguments are turning into the questioning of gravity.

  The second development is that an acknowledgment of human nature can no longer be associated with the political right. Once the Utopian Vision is laid to rest, the field of political positions is wide open. The Tragic Vision, after all, has not been vindicated in anything like its most lugubrious form. For all its selfishness, the human mind is equipped with a moral sense, whose circle of application has expanded steadily and might continue to expand as more of the world becomes interdependent. And for all its limitations, human cognition is an open-ended combinatorial system, which in principle can increase its mastery over human affairs, just as it has increased its mastery of the physical and living worlds.

  Traditions, for their part, are adapted not to human nature alone but to human nature in the context of an infrastructure of technology and economic exchange (one does not have to be a Marxist to accept this insight from Marx). Some traditional institutions, like families and the rule of law, may be adapted to eternal features of human psychology. Others, such as primogeniture, were obviously adapted to the demands of a feudal system that required keeping the family lands intact, and became obsolete when the economic system changed in the wake of industrialization. More recently, feminism was in part a response to improved reproductive technologies and the shift to a service economy. Because social conventions are not adapted to human nature alone, a respect for human nature does not require preserving all of them.

  For these reasons I think political beliefs will increasingly cut across the centuries-old divide between the Tragic and Utopian Visions. They will diverge by invoking different aspects of human nature, by giving different weightings to conflicting goals, or by offering different assessments of the likely outcomes of particular courses of action.

  I end the chapter with a tour of some thinkers on the left who are scrambling the traditional alignment between human nature and right-wing politics. As its title suggests, A Darwinian Left is the most systematic attempt to map out the new alignment.45 Singer writes, “It is time for the left to take seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior too.”46 For Singer this means acknowledging the limits of human nature, which makes the perfectibility of humankind an impossible goal. And it means acknowledging specific components of human nature. They include self-interest, which implies that competitive economic systems will work better than state monopolies; the drive for dominance, which makes powerful governments vulnerable to overweening autocrats; ethnocentrism, which puts nationalist movements at risk of committing discrimination and genocide; and differences between the sexes, which should temper measures for rigid gender parity in all walks of life.

  So what’s left of the left? an observer might ask. Singer replies, “If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain life at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that that is just the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation.”47 Singer’s leftism, like traditional leftism, is defined by a contrast with a defeatist Tragic Vision. But its goal—”doing something”—has been downsized considerably from Robert Kennedy’s goal in the 1960s of “building a new world society.”

  The Darwinian left has ranged from vague expressions of values to wonkish policy initiatives. We have already met two theoreticians at the vaguer end. Chomsky has been the most vocal defender of an innate cognitive endowment since he nailed his thesis of an inborn language faculty to the behaviorists’ door in the late 1950s. He has also been a fierce left-wing critic of American society and has recently inspired a whole new generation of campus radicals (as we saw in his interview with Rage Against the Machine). Chomsky insists that the connections between his science and his politics are slender but real:

  A vision of a future social order is… based on a concept of human nature. If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the “shaping of behavior” by the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.48

  He describes his political vision as “libertarian socialist” and “anarcho-syndicalist,” the kind of anarchism that values spontaneous cooperation (as opposed to anarcho-capitalism, the kind that values individualism).49 This vision, he suggests, lies in a Cartesian tradition that includes “Rousseau’s opposition to tyranny, oppression, and established authority,… Kant’s defense of freedom, Humboldt’s precapitalist liberalism with its emphasis on the basic human need for free creation und
er conditions of voluntary association, and Marx’s critique of alienated fragmented labor that turns men into machines, depriving them of their ‘species character’ of ‘free conscious activity’ and ‘productive life’ in association with their fellows.”50 Chomsky’s political beliefs, then, resonate with his scientific belief that humans are innately endowed with a desire for community and a drive for creative free expression, language being the paradigm example. That holds out the hope for a society organized by cooperation and natural productivity rather than by hierarchical control and the profit motive.

  Chomsky’s theory of human nature, though strongly innatist, is innocent of modern evolutionary biology, with its demonstration of ubiquitous conflicts of genetic interest. These conflicts lead to a darker view of human nature, one that has always been a headache for those with anarchist dreams. But the thinker who first elucidated these conflicts, Robert Trivers, was a left-wing radical as well, and one of the rare white Black Panthers. As we saw in Chapter 6, Trivers viewed sociobiology as a subversive discipline. A sensitivity to conflicts of interest can illuminate the interests of repressed agents, such as women and younger generations, and it can expose the deception and self-deception that elites use to justify their dominance.51 In that way sociobiology follows in the liberal tradition of Locke by using science and reason to debunk the rationalizations of rulers. Reason was used in Locke’s time to question the divine right of kings, and may be used in our time to question the pretension that current political arrangements serve everyone’s interests.

  Though it may come as a shock to many people, the use of IQ tests and a recognition of innate differences in intelligence can support—and in the past did support—left-wing political goals. In his article “Bell Curve Liberals,” the journalist Adrian Wooldridge points out that IQ testing was welcomed by the British left as the ultimate subverter of a caste society ruled by inbred upper-class twits.52 Together with other liberals and socialists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb hoped to turn the educational system into a “capacity-catching machine” that could “rescue talented poverty from the shop or the plough” and direct them into the ruling elite. They were opposed by conservatives such as T. S. Eliot, who worried that a system that sorts people by ability would disorganize civil society by breaking the bonds of class and tradition at both ends of the ladder. At one end it would fragment working-class communities, dividing them by talent. At the other it would remove the ethic of noblesse oblige from the upper classes, who now would have “earned” their success and be responsible to no one, rather than inheriting it and being obligated to help the less fortunate. Wooldridge argues that “the left can hardly afford to ignore I.Q. tests, which, for all their inadequacies, are still the best means yet devised for spotting talent wherever it occurs, in the inner cities as well as the plush housing estates, and ensuring that talent is matched to the appropriate educational streams and job opportunities.”

  For their part, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (the authors of The Bell Curve) argued that the heritability of intelligence ought to galvanize the left into a greater commitment to Rawlsian social justice.53 If intelligence were entirely acquired, then policies for equal opportunity would suffice to guarantee an equitable distribution of wealth and power. But if some souls have the misfortune of being born into brains with lower ability, they could fall into poverty through no fault of their own, even in a perfectly fair system of economic competition. If social justice consists of seeing to the well-being of the worst off, then recognizing genetic differences calls for an active redistribution of wealth. Indeed, though Herrnstein was a conservative and Murray a right-leaning libertarian and communitarian, they were not opposed to simple redistributive measures such as a negative income tax for the lowest wage earners, which would give a break to those who play by the rules but still can’t scrape by. Murray’s libertarianism leads him to oppose government programs that are more activist than that, but he and Herrnstein noted that a hereditarian left is a niche waiting to be filled.

  An important challenge to conservative political theory has come from behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler and George Akerlof, who were influenced by the evolutionary cognitive psychology of Herbert Simon, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Paul Slovic.54 These psychologists have argued that human thinking and decision making are biological adaptations rather than engines of pure rationality. These mental systems work with limited amounts of information, have to reach decisions in a finite amount of time, and ultimately serve evolutionary goals such as status and security. Conservatives have always invoked limitations on human reason to rein in the pretense that we can understand social behavior well enough to redesign society. But those limitations also undermine the assumption of rational self-interest that underlies classical economics and secular conservatism. Ever since Adam Smith, classical economists have argued that in the absence of outside interference, individuals making decisions in their own interests will do what is best for themselves and for society. But if people do not always calculate what is best for themselves, they might be better off with the taxes and regulations that classical economists find so perverse.

  For example, rational agents informed by interest rates and their life expectancies should save the optimal proportion of their wages for comfort in their old age. Social security and mandatory savings plans should be unnecessary—indeed, harmful—because they take away choice and hence the opportunity to find the best balance between consuming now and saving for the future. But economists repeatedly find that people spend their money like drunken sailors. They act as if they think they will die in a few years, or as if the future is completely unpredictable, which may be closer to the reality of our evolutionary ancestors than it is to life today.55 If so, then allowing people to manage their own savings (for example, letting them keep their entire paycheck and investing it as they please) may work against their interests. Like Odysseus approaching the island of the Sirens, people might rationally agree to let their employer or the government tie them to the mast of forced savings.

  The economist Robert Frank has appealed to the evolutionary psychology of status to point out other shortcomings of the rational-actor theory and, by extension, laissez-faire economics.56 Rational actors should eschew not only forced retirement savings but other policies that ostensibly protect them, such as mandatory health benefits, workplace safety regulations, unemployment insurance, and union dues. All of these cost money that would otherwise go into their paychecks, and workers could decide for themselves whether to take a pay cut to work for a company with the most paternalistic policies or go for the biggest salary and take higher risks on the job. Companies, in their competition for the best employees, should find the balance demanded by the employees they want.

  The rub, Frank points out, is that people are endowed with a craving for status. Their first impulse is to spend money in ways that put themselves ahead of the Joneses (houses, cars, clothing, prestigious educations), rather than in ways that only they know about (health care, job safety, retirement savings). Unfortunately, status is a zero-sum game, so when everyone has more money to spend on cars and houses, the houses and cars get bigger but people are no happier than they were before. Like hockey players who agree to wear helmets only if a rule forces their opponents to wear them too, people might agree to regulations that force everyone to pay for hidden benefits like health care that make them happier in the long run, even if the regulations come at the expense of disposable income. For the same reason, Frank argues, we would be better off if we implemented a steeply graduated tax on consumption, replacing the current graduated tax on income. A consumption tax would damp down the futile arms race for ever more lavish cars, houses, and watches and compensate people with resources that provably increase happiness, such as leisure time, safer streets, and more pleasant commuting and working conditions.

  Finally, Darwinian leftists have been examining the evolutionary psychology of economic inequality. The econ
omists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, formerly Marxists and now Darwinians, have reviewed the literature from ethnography and behavioral economics which suggests that people are neither antlike altruists nor self-centered misers.57 As we saw in Chapter 14, people share with others who they think are willing to share, and punish those who are not. (Gintis calls this “strong reciprocity,” which is like reciprocal altruism or “weak reciprocity” but is aimed at other people’s willingness to contribute to public goods rather than at tit-for-tat exchanges.)58 This psychology makes people oppose indiscriminate welfare and expansive social programs not because they are callous or greedy but because they think such programs reward the indolent and punish the industrious. Bowles and Gintis note that even in today’s supposedly antiwelfare climate, polls show that most people are willing to pay higher taxes for some kinds of universal social insurance. They are willing to pay to guarantee basic needs such as food, shelter, and health care, to aid the victims of bad luck, and to help people who are down and out become self-sufficient. In other words, people are opposed to a blanket welfare state not out of greed but out of fairness. A welfare system that did not try to rewrite the public consciousness, and which distinguished between the deserving and the undeserving poor, would, they argue, be perfectly consonant with human nature.