The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

  Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible.

  The goal of postmodernist art is to help us break out of this prison. The artists try to preempt cultural motifs and representational techniques by taking capitalist icons (such as ads, package designs, and pinup photos) and defacing them, exaggerating them, or presenting them in odd contexts. The earliest examples were Andy Warhol’s paintings of soup can labels and his repetitive false-color images of Marilyn Monroe. More recent ones include the Whitney Museum’s “Black Male” exhibit described in Chapter 12 and Cindy Sherman’s photographs of grotesquely assembled bi-gendered mannequins. (I saw them as part of an MIT exhibit that explored “the female body as a site of conflicting desires, and femininity as a taut web of social expectations, historical assumptions, and ideological constructions.”) In postmodernist literature, authors comment on what they are writing while they are writing it. In postmodernist architecture, materials and details from different kinds of buildings and historical periods are thrown together in incongruous ways, such as an awning made of chain-link fencing in a fancy shopping mall or Corinthian columns holding up nothing on the top of a sleek skyscraper. Postmodernist films contain sly references to the filmmaking process or to earlier films. In all these forms, irony, self-referential allusions, and the pretense of not taking the work seriously are meant to draw attention to the representations themselves, which (according to the doctrine) we are ordinarily in danger of mistaking for reality.

  ONCE WE RECOGNIZE what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability—stripping away pretense—to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!

  Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction. As we saw in preceding chapters, the visual system of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects. We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to feed us information about the consequential things out there, like rocks, cliffs, animals, and other people and their intentions.

  Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical structure of the world. It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one.49 Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.50

  When we perceive the products of other people’s behavior, we evaluate them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of art at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with them and what effect they hope to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of course, people can be taken in by a clever liar, but they are not trapped in a false world of words and images and in need of rescue by postmodernist artists.

  Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, especially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited.51 Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes from the desire for attention on the part of the artists.

  In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.

  One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the senses. On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and lightweight.52 In his 1913 book Art, the critic Clive Bell (Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law and Quentin’s father) argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences.53 People use beautiful in phrases like “beautiful huntin’ and shootin’,” he wrote, or worse, to refer to beautiful women. Bell assimilated the behaviorist psychology of his day and argued that ordinary people come to enjoy art by a process of Pavlovian conditioning. They appreciate a painting only if it depicts a beautiful woman, music only if it evokes “emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces,” and poetry only if it arouses feelings like the ones once felt for the vicar’s daughter. Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was “the desire to destroy beauty.”54 Postmodernists were even more dismissive. Beauty, they said, consists of arbitrary standards dictated by an elite. It enslaves women by forcing them to conform to unrealistic ideals, and it panders to market-oriented art collectors.55

  To be fair, modernism comprises many styles and artists, and not all of them rejected beauty and other human sensibilities. At its best, modernist design perfected a visual elegance and an aesthetic of form-following-function that were welcome alternatives to Victorian bric-a-brac and ostentatious displays of wealth. The art movements opened up new stylistic possibilities, including motifs from Africa and Oceania. The fiction and poetry offered invigorating intellectual workouts, and countered a sentimental romanticism that saw art as a spontaneous overflow of the artist’s personality and emotion. The problem with modernism was that its philosophy did not acknowledge the ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure. As its denial of beauty became an orthodoxy, and as its aesthetic successes were appropriated into commercial culture (such as minimalism in graphic design), modernism left nowhere for artists to go.

 
Quentin Bell suggested that when the variations within a genre are exhausted, people avail themselves of a different canon of status, which he added to Veblen’s list. In “conspicuous outrage,” bad boys (and girls) flaunt their ability to get away with shocking the bourgeoisie.56 The never-ending campaign by postmodernist artists to attract the attention of a jaded public progressed from puzzling audiences to doing everything they could to offend them. Everyone has heard of the notorious cases: Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of sadomasochistic acts, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (a photo of a crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine), Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung, and the nine-hour performance piece “Flag Fuck (w/Beef) #17B,” in which Ivan Hubiak danced on stage wearing an American flag as a diaper while draping himself with raw meat. Actually, this last one never happened; it was invented by writers for the satirical newspaper The Onion in an article entitled “Performance Artist Shocks U.S. Out of Apathetic Slumber.”57 But I bet I had you fooled.

  Another result is that elite art could no longer be appreciated without a support team of critics and theoreticians. They did not simply evaluate and interpret art, like movie critics or book reviewers, but supplied the art with its rationale. Tom Wolfe wrote The Painted Word after reading an art review in the New York Times that criticized realist painting because it lacked “something crucial,” namely, “a persuasive theory.” Wolfe explains:

  Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time…. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer—waiting, waiting, forever waiting for… it… for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there—waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28,1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.58

  Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for “linguistic transparency” because it hobbles the ability “to think the world more radically” and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity.59 This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which “celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.”60 In 1998, first prize went to the lauded professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence:

  The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

  Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest, assures us that this is not a satire. The rules of the contest forbid it: “Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.”

  A final blind spot to human nature is the failure of contemporary artists and theorists to deconstruct their own moral pretensions. Artists and critics have long believed that an appreciation of elite art is ennobling and have spoken of cultural philistines in tones ordinarily reserved for child molesters (as we see in the two meanings of the word barbarian). The affectation of social reform that surrounds modernism and postmodernism is part of this tradition.

  Though moral sophistication requires an appreciation of history and cultural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are a particularly good way to instill it compared with middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional education. The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to how people entertain themselves in their leisure time. The conviction that artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry for status (see Chapter 15). As the critic George Steiner has pointed out, “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”61 Conversely there must be many unlettered people who give blood, risk their lives as volunteer firefighters, or adopt handicapped children, but whose opinion of modern art is “My four-year-old daughter could have done that.”

  The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to be proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal lives, and many embraced fascism or Stalinism. The modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos” and added, enviously, that “artists, too, sometimes go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world.”62 Nor is the theory of postmodernism especially progressive. A denial of objective reality is no friend to moral progress, because it prevents one from saying, for example, that slavery or the Holocaust really took place. And as Adam Gopnik has pointed out, the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like “racism is bad.” But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.

  As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class—personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy—are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass Utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it’s none of our damn business.

  The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves?

  A REVOLT HAS begun. Museum-goers have become bored with the umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring dismembered torsos or hundreds of pounds of lard chewed up and spat out by the artist.63 Graduate students in the humanities are grumbling in emails and conference hallways about being locked out of the job market unless they write in gibberish while randomly dropping the names of authorities like Foucault and Butler. Maverick scholars are doffing the blinders that prevented them from looking at exciting developments in the sciences of human nature. And younger artists are wondering how the art world got itself into the bizarre place in which beauty is a dirty word.

  These currents of discontent are coming together in a new philosophy of the arts, one that is consilient with the sciences and respectful of the
minds and senses of human beings. It is taking shape both in the community of artists and in the community of critics and scholars.

  In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly announced a new “movement” in the arts, Derrière Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative.64 If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement “a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters.”65 Ideas similar to Derrière Guard’s have sprung up in movements called the Radical Center, Natural Classicism, the New Formalism, the New Narrativism, Stuckism, the Return of Beauty, and No Mo Po Mo.66 The movements combine high and low culture and are opposed equally to the postmodernist left, with its disdain for beauty and artistry, and to the cultural right, with its narrow canons of “great works” and fire-and-brimstone sermons on the decline of civilization. It includes classically trained musicians who mix classical and popular compositions, realist painters and sculptors, verse poets, journalistic novelists, and dance directors and performance artists who use rhythm and melody in their work.

  Within the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to reestablish human nature at the center of any understanding of the arts. They include Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Patrick Hogan, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner.67 A good grasp of how the mind works is indispensable to the arts and humanities for at least two reasons.