Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct was one of the most engaging and interesting books I've read in the last couple of years. In it, he explored the modern science of linguistics, how the human mind literally creates language, and many of its implications for how the human mind works. He also nicely skewers a lot of traditional English-language grammarians for certain "rules" he considers highly artificial, while still defending the need to teach clear writing and speaking skills.
He's recently published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which is sure to be a good deal more controversial. In it, Pinker explores a wide array of science to illustrate the enormous role genetics plays in human talents and personality--and how the reaction against such notions has often held human advancement back. For a wide variety of reasons, many of us deeply fear exploring such ideas, but Pinker seeks to gently peel away these fears, explaining both where they come from and why we should not be so fearful.
I must confess that Pinker hooked me in a recent interview by saying something I've been saying for a long time now:
[In the late 20th Century,] Intellectual life was enormously affected by an understandable revulsion to Nazism, with its pseudoscientific theories of race, and its equally nonsensical glorification of conflict as part of the evolutionary wisdom of nature. It was natural to reject anything that smacked of a genetic approach to human affairs. But historians of ideas have begun to fill in another side of the picture. During the twentieth century, equally horrific genocides were carried out in the name of Marxism, such as in the mass purges and manmade famines of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and the madness in Kampuchea. The remarkable fact is that the two great ideologically driven genocides of the 20th century came from theories of human nature that were diametrically opposed. The Marxists had no use for the concept of race, didn't believe in genes, and denied Darwin's theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolutionary adaptation. This shows is that it's not a biological approach to human nature that is uniquely sinister. There must be common threads to Nazism and totalitarian Marxism that cut across a belief in the importance of evolution or genetics. One common thread was a desire to reshape humanity. In the Marxists' case it was through social engineering; in the Nazis' case it was eugenics. Neither of them were satisfied with human beings as we find them, with all their flaws and weaknesses. Rather than building a social order around enduring human traits, they had the conceit that they could re-engineer human traits using scientific—in reality pseudoscientific—principles.
Pinker is an enormously interesting fellow. In many ways I think he's the new Stephen Jay Gould, synthesizing and popularizing complex scientific ideas. Gould would probably be horrified at the comparison, since he spent much of his intellectual life trying to obscure or even dismiss concepts that Pinker fearlessly examines, and yet the comparison otherwise seems right on. The man has a knack for exploring and explaining ideas.
An interesting interview with Pinker was recently published by the "Third Culture" intellectuals over at Edge.org. The quote I used above comes from that interview. To read the rest of it, simply click here.
* Update * This article has also been published by Blogcritics.
Back in the 70s, EO Wilson, of "Sociobiology" fame, was severely put upon by leftists, for daring to suggest a connection between genes and human behavior. Stephen J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and other all star Harvard profs of Marxist persuasion wanted Wilson's head--they wanted him fired. A weaker man would have yielded to the overwhelming pressure and gone to another university.
Times have changed--somewhat. Pinker still exhibits a great deal of courage coming out so openly in debate of a question that even now, powerful forces in academia would prefer to stay closed.
Kudos to Pinker for his courage. I also enjoyed "The Language Instinct." "How the Mind Works" had some interesting sections as well.
This is an issue I would like to examine further, not as an issue of academic freedom but as an adoptive father and the son of an alcoholic. I have always suspected some kind of link between genes and behavior but found little credible evidence to back it up as the subject is clouded in taboo in the academic world. This could become the most important philosophical issue of the century not for what it adds to the nature vs. nurture debate, but more importantly forcing us to examine what freedom of action we actually have and reflecting on how we exercise that freedom.
The fear of something like this is that people will be pigeonholed. That's the negative. If you've ever seen the movie GATTACA, you should. It's exceptional and should have gotten more attention.
That's the negative side. But there are many positive sides. We can start noticing when kids have certain negative or positive tendencies, and start developing more creative approaches to stimulating their weak points more effectively, as well as playing to their strengths. Right now we tend to have a cookie-cutter approach to education and childrearing that could be enhanced for kids with certain tendencies.
Overall I view it as a positive development. It'll definitely open up ethical cans of worms. But you know what? The sooner we face the problems openly the sooner we'll be able to hash out the right way to deal with the issues.