cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/911607

This is a book that I had put on my reading list a few years ago but couldn’t tackle until last month. If I were to read it sooner, I wouldn’t have known how to respond to the author’s arguments with anything other than contempt and unjustified hostility.

In his book, Pinker addresses the good ol’ nature-nurture debate—whether our behavior is innate or taught to us. While the book and its writer aggressively tries to portray his book as scientific and descriptive, it becomes quickly clear that it is more likely an attempt at making a (political) point. Before delving into the review, we should be aware that this a layman’s guide and not a veritable scientific work, so it will inevitability contain inaccuracies and oversimplifications, especially given that Pinker didn’t make any research himself but simply relied on others’ hard work and research; I can play the referencing game too and find equally authentic research that refutes his. Nevertheless, this 500-page book isn’t to be taken for granted, as it took me an entire month—a month that I can’t take back—to wrap my head around its premise.* Hence I am writing this exhaustive review and sharing it with my fellows so you don’t have to read it.

*It took me an equal amount to write a review (this is an excerpt, the full text is 12 pages long).

It comes naturally with scientific attitide an exceptional obsession with “neutrality” and “moderation”. Pinker paints his beliefs as being on “the middle ground”, a common strategy to gain the trust of the reader, yet it never made sense to me since 1) why should centrism be deemed necessarily good; and 2) how can one measure opposing views on a fictitious spectrum and deduce its middle point? Pinker will constantly boast his supposedly empirical, scientific attitude—that of rationalism, objectivity and disinterest. Relying solely on his own writings, I will argue that the science he’s praising isn’t insulated from culture and politics.

I highlighted the most reflective passages of this book and classified them into two categories: the red highlights which correspond to debatable statements, and the yellow highlights which correspond to potentially meritorious statements. The ratio of red highlights to yellow ones should make clear my opinion on this book: approximately 80 reds to 40 yellows. In the following passages, I will examine some of the arguments in a detailed manner; but to give a generalized observation, while the the general theory that Pinker roots for isn’t nonviable per se, the intricacies of his argument are deeply erroneous.

“Every society must operate with a theory of human nature,” Pinker introduces the purposes of this book with these words. A theory of “human nature”, among other mythologies, is what keeps human society glued together; it is through this theory that we justify the existence of said society. Our worldview, according to Pinker, has been infested with nasty theories that completely relegated the role of nature in favor of nurture as a source of human behavior in the last centuries. This modern worldview is represented by three doctrines or pillar: the Blank Slate (or tabula rasa ; Man is born void of a priori qualities), the Noble Savage (Man is inherently good), and the Ghost in the Machine (Man is the cumulation of a free mind/soul and a mechanical body). Those doctines that emerged from liberal Enlightenment philosophers are indeed quite susceptible to heavy criticism. However, indiscriminately invoking them onto nurture proponents lacks nuance, since proponents of nature could (and did) also cling into those same doctrines (we will look into this later). Pinker, as a matter of fact, unwittingly (?) assumes that “[t]he 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.” What an attractive hypothesis—for a moment there I thought I was reading a children’s book. However, the Blank Slate matches with its proclaimed “companion doctrines” as much as opposite doctrines. Marxist materialists are atheists, empirical and simultaneously proponents of the Blank Slate. A large number religious people, fundamentalists especially, may believe in an innate human nature and in mind-body dualism. Even more interesting, neuroscientists Charles Sherrington, John Eccles, Roger Sperry, and Benjamin Libet as well as physicist Roger Penrose were all dualists.

And if the Blank Slate invokes the blankness of Man, then how is it compatible with the Noble Savage which implies the inherent goodness of Man? Pinker replies that virtue is heavily correlated to terms conveying blankness: clean, fair, immaculate, pure, spotless, unsullied…

Against the Ghost in the Machine, it is interesting to mention that Pinker is a staunch proponent of the so-called “computational theory of mind”. “It is not the same as the “computer metaphor” of the mind, the suggestion that the mind literally works like a human-like database.” Key expression is “not literally ”. But in principle, it is since it tries to “explain [human] minds… using some of the same principles.” The backlash against this theory isn’t because it literally assimilates computers to human minds per se; it’s rather because it assumes how the human mind must be functioning based on the artificial, manmade logic of computer engineering. This ambiguity of Pinker’s language will be a constant theme throughout the book.

He then discusses artificial intelligence. He mentions at the time (2002) recent technologies that “have written credible short stories, composed convincing Mozart-like symphonies, drawn appealing pictures of people and landscapes, and conceived clever ideas for advertisements.” (As a side note, this shows how AI hasn’t seen remarkable progress for decades but are nonetheless advertised as “the technology of the future.”) “[A]ccording to the computational theory of mind, [the] capacities [for judgement, reflection, and creativity] are themselves forms of information processing and can be implemented in a computational system, [basically Artificial Intelligence].” Unfortunately for Pinker, those computational systems do not follow the same logic as humans when creating “new” work. I think, at least when speaking of art and literature, it is not merely the act of creating itself which constitutes human creativity, but the process of creation. It isn’t just the result, but how we created such result. However, in a weak attempt to avoid criticsm, Pinker backtracks on his statement: “None of this is to say that the brain works like a digital computer.” This is incoherence at best.

“The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything.” (Chapter 3). This is how Pinker criticizes (and defines) the Blank Slate. For Pinker, the Blank Slate signifies that there is no basic cognitive structure in the mind; or more precisely, that there is no mind at all. I take this as an intentional distortion of notions he disagrees with. The Blank Slate, as it is usually and contemporarily conceived, shouldn’t deny the existence of primordial mechanisms in the biological design of the mind; rather, the inherent blankness refers to how those mechanisms are to be used. In other words, it is the content which is blank, not the structure. Two points can be deduced from this standpoint: 1) there is a universal biological design; 2) racial discrimination based on biology is refuted. If the Blank Slate is (correctly) defined and characterized as the foregoing, then funnily enough, Pinker would be a proponent of the Blank Slate. This whole debacle and misinterpretation, he invokes, is aimed against so-called extremists who want to erase biological features from the conception of human behavior: “My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing—no one believes that—but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme.” From this quote, Pinker implies that the majority of people—academics and nonacademics alike—support a twisted notion of the Blank Slate, which is a false assumption. I don’t think this incoherence is an innocent mistake from Pinker’s end, but a malicious attempt to disfigure his political rivals under the guise of science.

Pinker then transitions to neuroscience. In a respectable attempt to dismiss the mind-body dualism, he argues (read: cites experts) that thoughts and emotions are the product of physiological activity in the brain; put elegantly, “the brain causes the mind, or one can say that it is the mind.” I am not sure if he realizes the implications of such statement. I personally don’t disagree with Pinker on this point, but I’d like to offer a more nuanced perspective. I think that the mind doesn’t exist per se ; it is an attempt at empirically locating consciousness in us, and thus to justify our consciousness. So we got used to relate notions such as consciousness, mind and reason to the brain but the reality is that the brain alone cannot constitute the mind. That being said, the creation of the mind (and its assimilation to the brain) is a natural feature in conscious beings, and so, in my opinion, it remains valid despite its objective incoherence. What I actually have a problem with is the example Pinker gives to the foregoing: “When a surgeon sends an electrical current into the brain, the person can have a vivid, lifelike experience. When chemicals seep into the brain, they can alter the person’s perception, mood, personality, and reasoning.” Indeed, this is all factually correct yet deceiving. The activity of internal processes such as hormone and neurotransmitter secretion in normal occasions (i.e. not initiated within a laboratory experiment or a surgery) is heavily related to our environment. To be concrete, the bodily mechanism which regulates behavior doesn’t matter as much as the environment, the root cause of behavioral changes. Hormone shifts simulated in an isolated bubble (think surgical operation or laboratory experiment) silences the role which environment plays in those processes.

For his argument against the Noble Savage, Pinker notes that, contrary to old studies, indigenous, primitive tribes aren’t as peaceful as they were previously illustrated. He proceeds to showcase a graph which compares male deaths percentages caused by warfare in different tribes to that of 20th century US and Europe:

He comments: “Many intellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield casualties in pre-state societies as evidence that primitive warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States”. Ironically, what Pinker in his turn does not notice is the fact that percentages (and generally statistics for that matter) do not show the full truth. Pinker assumes that statistical percentages in practical contexts are proportional, yet nothing guarantees that those tribes growing in population size will also accrue in warfare deaths; in fact, the Huli people numbering over 250,000 people, has a significantly lower warfare death rate than the Jivaro whose population is estimated between 15,000 and 50,000. This is to show that more factors—namely cultural and historical—contribute into warfare deaths and help offer a nuanced picture. For instance, several indigenous tribes in the Americas partake in ritualistic wars which feature a limited number of combatants in proportion to the size of their population. I agree with Pinker on the notion that warfare violence is (though not always) a predominant feature in human societies around the world, but his perverse techniques he uses to push forward his beliefs are flawed at best.

My distaste in Pinker largely derives from his tainted colonial rethoric and sympathy for cultural homogenization. In chapter 4, he argues that “traditional cultures change, too,” and willingly “borrow” the innovations of neighboring cultures. This isn’t particularly a wrong statement, but we must take into consideration the very specific case of colonialism and how colonial practices diffused cultural innovation. In a case like this, the colonized culture wasn’t in the fullest sense borrowing from its colonizer. The colonized, regardless of their opinions, weren’t in a bargaining spot to accept or refuse cultural difgusion. Further, in the traditional sense of cultural diffusion, there is an exchange of ideas and traditions at the moments of contact. In the colonial framework, there was only a one-way diffusion. Even imperialist occupation of foreign peoples’ land weren’t as culturally rigid as colonialism: Ottoman turks took from Arabs, Persians and other groups; the Manchu from the Hans; the Romans from the Greeks; and the Mongols from whoever they occupied… “nor did the Plains Indians ride horses before the arrival of the Europeans.” True, but this stems from the simple fact that there were no horses on the continent before the arrival of Europeans. Llamas and alpaccas, the closest animals in the Americas to resemble horses, were already domesticated then. Another bigoted misconception debunked.

Further, Pinker dissimulates his eurocentrism with talks of universal morality that the entire human species can achieve. I concur from a theoretical point of view. But how is this to be achieved? And which morality is thre “right” one? A supporter of the enlightenment and liberalism, Pinker would contend that Western democracy and secularism are the way to go, as evinced by his writings. “liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale social organization our sorry species has come up with so far. They provide more comfort and freedom, more artistic and scientific vitality, longer and safer lives, and less disease and pollution than any of the alternatives. Modern democracies never have famines, almost never wage war on one another, and are the top choice of people all over the world who vote with their feet or with their boats.” (Chapter 16). (There is another quote that affirms his view on universal morality but sadly I didn’t highlight it and can’t find it anymore.) Pinker is so confident in his “universally recognized” statement; a brief look at the footnotes and references shows exclusively American, British and French writers. So much for universality. Pinker largely avoids quoting non-Western scholars because whoever disagrees with him is probably irrelevant and may be easily dismissed to the peripheries of the academic and political worlds. Pinker’s universe consists mainly of people who agree with him—everyone else can just go to hell. This is the biggest reason why I gave this book one star; the author attempts to control how “democracy,” “morality,” and “civilization” are to be defined. That he can inconsequently dismiss entire works of scholarship because they do not conform to his terms and rules is tyrannical. We have democracy, you do not; we are moral while you are not; we are civilized and you are savages.

This is even more apparent in his chapter on politics. I don’t see any problem in mixing politics with science, because this is what usually happens in reality. We make scientific theories not in isolation of our societies, afterall. Yet it doesn’t make sense from Pinker’s perspective. Sixteen chapters earlier, Pinker promised that “for the most part I will try not to advocate particular policies or to advance the agenda of the political left or right,” since the scientific attitude is objective and neutral, isn’t it? “it is Lewontin [geneticist] and Rose [neuroscientist] who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones,” but not Pinker, because unlike all other beings he is entirely disinterested. However, chapter 16 removes the cloack of benevolence which hides Pinker’s political agenda.

“Marxism is now almost universally recognized as an experiment that failed, at least in its worldly implementations.” To back up his claims, he exclusively makes reference to authors from the Western hemisphere: Alan Bullock (British), Daniel Chirot (French), Robert Conquest (British-American), Stéphane Courtois (French) and Johnathan Glover (British). Going through their works, these are the authors who were mainly behind the claims that communism generates famines, that communism was behind the deaths of one hundred million people, and that communism equals Nazism. He concludes based on this that “the nations that adopted it either collapsed, gave it up, or languish in backward dictatorships.” I leave this for you to scrutinize further. I am contented with proving Pinker’s discrepancy and him failing to conciliate between his science and politics. “The social sciences were taken over by the doctrine that social facts live in their own universe.” Ironically, it is he who has fallen into this trap.

“It is a brute fact that greater rewards will go to people with greater inborn talent.” This is true until one reintroduces the nuance: the greatest source of inequality is property and inheritance. Privileged individuals born into wealthy families get a better start than those who were born into the working class. Until the right to property is abolished, there can’t be a truly meritocratic system. To add to the salt, Pinker inserted in the appendix of the book a list of human universals programmed onto our biology. Among them one can find economic inequalities, property, males dominate public/political realm, and other similar notions. I should note that all of these are “surface”-level phenomena observed by ethnographers. Put in blunt terms, those “experts” do not follow any scientific basis in assessing what is an actually programmed universal; they simply observe from the outside and call it an experiment. This is a backhanded attempt to justify reactionary fantasies.

From politics I move to contemporary philosophy, and precisely postmodernism. Because if we are to slander Marxism and anything that goes against capitalism and liberalism, we may as well bring in postmodernism. Pinker, unsurprisingly, conflates postmodernism with absolute relativism. However, to be a postmodernist is not to consider all opinions and theories as being equally valid and thus interchangeable with one another. This is an intentional misunderstanding of what postmodernism essentially is. To quote one blogger,

“…it is not surprising that we postmoderns are constantly viewed as trapped within an inescapable relativism or some form of anarchy. This perception is a complete misunderstanding of the postmodern perspective itself.” “What we postmoderns have realized is that the framework wherein something is or is not truth is always changing and adapting to produce systems of “truths” that will better equip us to cope with our always changing historical conditions. In this sense, we postmoderns are pragmatic, but not pragmatic about discrete instances of truth, pragmatic about the rules we establish as a society and that circumscribe the limits wherein something is or is not regarded as “true””.

In his lecture, Rick Roderick also retorts,

“Since there’s no the “right way,” then any way is as good aa any other… Derrida isn’t compelled to hold that view and he doesn’t… and no one holds that view.”

Derrida himself says,

“there’s not a trace of [relativism] in my writing. Nor of a critique of Reason and the Enlightenment.”

If postmodernism acknowledges the plurality of interpretation and truth-making, it doesn’t attempt to hold all of them at an equal pedestal.

Again, I have to remind the readers that some of the premises presented by the book are appealing. For instance a universal framework that governs the biology of human beings is logical; we humans are diverse enough to differ in oir core framework. When homosapiens migrated to different continents, they have been separated and insulated for a relatively short period of time which wasn’t enough to make of each group a separate species. Today, globalization has ruptured this isolation, rendering the biggest factors to human differences cultural. Of course, there are as well differences in individual traits that are governed by genetics. But as Pinker rightly argues, those genetic differences do not necessarily extend to ethnic groups. “Human nature is a scientific topic, and as new facts come in, our conception of it will change.” (Chapter 10).

Moreover, Pinker makes a great point when arguing that the Blank Slate isn’t necessarily a humanistic and progressive theory. Behaviorists and the CIA in the early 20th century attempted ethically controversial experiments on human beings. Also (and the the following wasn’t addressed by Pinker), European colonialists believed they can westernize their colonial subjects.

On the other hand, the contradictory statements, the falsifications and the tainted eurocentrism make this work hard to digest. As one goodreads user said, if the book was two hundred pages and focused just on brain science, it’d be one thing. The trouble is that it ends up reading as if Pinker gathered every single study that seemed to support his position and threw it into a blender, and then threw in a number of screeds against groups he has a bone to pick with.

Some of the irritations I experienced were the misquotations of Pinker’s biggest rivals, Lewontin and Rose. The two sceintists made the claim that the role that each of human anture and han environment play is not dissociable from the whole (they offer the metaphor of a cake whose ingredients mix together complexly to achieve the desired taste). Pinker agrees that human environment and nature interact in a complex relation—for he does not aim to dismiss environment afterall. However, confusingly, he rejects the claims of Lewontin and Rose: “The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment—Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place.” (Chapter 7). I was left incredulous by this claim and so I had to check if Lewontin and Rose really said that. Note that Pinker only referenced their work in the footnotes and not directly quoted them. It turns out that this was a malicious manipulation of their argument because in fact, they propose a more radical theory of interdependence between nature and nurture. They didn’t see the interaction as a “deeper mistake,” but only as not sufficient.

More flagrantly, our author also fabricated inexistent quotes. One quote he associated with Susan Brownmiller wasn’t present in the book he referenced. This only shows how little we can trust Pinker with what he quoted and referenced throughout the book. And this should be sufficient to strip Pinker from all authenticity.

Finally, what do we learn from all of this? What message was Pinker conveying? I am not sure. He says at the end of his book that agreeing with what was posited doesn’t force people to change their worldview. I am inclined to believe that Pinker, by disguising his book as a scientific treatise, wanted to slander people he found irritating (social scientists, marxists, postmodernists, religions…)

There are obviously more points to make about the book and its (de)merits, but going any further would be an overkill. The book is two decades old, and many references are half a century older which, in the world of science, is considered anachronistic. If you value the nature-nurture debate, my only advice is to read more recent works.