The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

  A second reason is that “radical” thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all. That made it all the more pressing to discredit the heretics making the discoveries. If ordinary standards of scientific argumentation were not doing the trick, other tactics had to be brought in, because a greater good was at stake.

  Chapter 7

  The Holy Trinity

  BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE IS not for sissies. Researchers may wake up to discover that they are despised public figures because of some area they have chosen to explore or some datum they have stumbled upon. Findings on certain topics—daycare, sexual behavior, childhood memories, the treatment of substance abuse—may bring on vilification, harassment, intervention by politicians, and physical assault.1 Even a topic as innocuous as left-handedness turns out to be booby-trapped. In 1991 the psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published statistics in a medical journal showing that lefties on average had more prenatal and perinatal complications, are victims of more accidents, and die younger than righties. They were soon showered with abuse—including the threat of a lawsuit, numerous death threats, and a ban on the topic in a scholarly journal—from enraged lefthanders and their advocates.2

  Are the dirty tricks of the preceding chapter just another example of people taking offense at claims about behavior that make them uncomfortable? Or, as I have hinted, are they part of a systematic intellectual current: the attempt to safeguard the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine as a source of meaning and morality? The leading theoreticians of the radical science movement deny that they believe in a blank slate, and it is only fair that their positions be examined carefully. In addition, I will look at the attacks on the sciences of human nature that have come from their political opposites, the contemporary right.

  COULD THE RADICAL scientists really believe in the Blank Slate? The doctrine might seem plausible to some of the scholars who live in a world of disembodied ideas. But could hardheaded boffins who live in a mechanistic world of neurons and genes really think that the psyche soaks into the brain from the surrounding culture? They deny it in the abstract, but when it comes to specifics their position is plainly in the tradition of the tabula rasa social science of the early twentieth century. Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and the other signatories of the “Against ‘Sociobiology’” manifesto wrote:

  We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange.3

  Note the tricky framing of the issue. The notion that money is a genetically coded universal is so ridiculous (and not, incidentally, something Wilson ever proposed) that any alternative has to be seen as more plausible than that. But if we take the alternative on its own terms, rather than as one prong in a false dichotomy, Gould and Lewontin seem to be saying that the genetic components of human behavior will be discovered primarily in the “generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping.” The rest of the slate, presumably, is blank.

  This debating tactic—first deny the Blank Slate, then make it look plausible by pitting it against a straw man—can be found elsewhere in the writings of the radical scientists. Gould, for instance, writes:

  Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-biological “environmentalism”; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality, with a brain capable of a full range of human behaviors and predisposed to none, against the idea of biological determinism, with specific genes for specific behavioral traits.4

  The idea of “biological determinism”—that genes cause behavior with 100 percent certainty—and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene, are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould’s dichotomy would seem to leave “biological potentiality” as the only reasonable choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is “capable of a full range of human behaviors” is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be capable of a full range of human behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the Blank Slate. “Predisposed to none” literally means that all human behaviors have identical probabilities of occurring. So if any person anywhere on the planet has ever committed some act in some circumstance—abjuring food or sex, impaling himself with spikes, killing her child—then the brain has no predisposition to avoid that act as compared with the alternatives, such as enjoying food and sex, protecting one’s body, or cherishing one’s child.

  Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin also deny that they are saying that humans are blank slates.5 But they grant only two concessions to human nature. The first comes not from an appeal to evidence or logic but from their politics: “If [a blank slate] were the case, there could be no social evolution.” Their support for this “argument” consists of an appeal to the authority of Marx, whom they quote as saying, “The materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.”6 Their own view is that “the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is ‘in’ that nature to construct its own history.”7 The implication is that any other statement about the psychological makeup of our species—about our capacity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and so on—is not “sensible.”

  Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin do make one concession to biology—not to the organization of the mind and brain but to the size of the body. “Were human beings only six inches tall there could be no human culture at all as we understand it,” they note, because a Lilliputian could not control fire, break rocks with a pick-axe, or carry a brain big enough to support language. It is their only acknowledgment of the possibility that human biology affects human social life.

  Eight years later Lewontin reiterated this theory of what is innate in humans: “The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many connections as it has.”8 Once again, the rhetoric has to be unpacked with care. If we take the sentence literally, Lewontin is referring only to “the most important fact” about human genes. Then again, if we take it literally, the sentence is meaningless. How could one ever rank-order the thousands of effects of the genes, all necessary to our existence, and point to one or two at the top of the list? Is our stature more important than the fact that we have a heart, or lungs, or eyes? Is our synapse number more important than our sodium pumps, without which our neurons would fill up with positive ions and shut down? So taking the sentence literally is pointless. The only sensible reading, and the one that fits in the context, is that these are the only important facts about human genes for the human mind. The tens of thousands of genes that are expressed primarily or exclusively in the brain do nothing important but give it lots of connections; the pattern of connections and the organization of the brain (into structures like the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and a cerebral cortex divided into areas) are random, or might as well be. The genes do not give the brain multiple memory systems, complicated visual and motor tracts, an ability to learn a language, or a repertoire of emotions (or else the genes do provide these faculties, but they are not “important”).

  In an update of John Watson’s claim that he could turn any infant into a “doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardl
ess of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors,” Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket précis claims that “our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit.”9 Watson admitted he was “going beyond my facts,” which was forgivable because at the time he wrote there were no facts. But the declaration on Lewontin’s book that any individual can assume any identity (even granting the equivalence of races, sexes, and classes), in defiance of six decades of research in behavioral genetics, is an avowal of faith of uncommon purity. And in a passage that re-erects Durkheim’s wall between the biological and the cultural, Lewontin concludes a 1992 book by writing that the genes “have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action.”10

  So while Gould, Lewontin, and Rose deny that they believe in a blank slate, their concessions to evolution and genetics—that they let us eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, grow bigger than a squirrel, and bring about social change—reveal them to be empiricists more extreme than Locke himself, who at least recognized the need for an innate faculty of “understanding.”

  THE NOBLE SAVAGE, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been “strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies.” I looked up these “studies,” which were collected in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies).11 Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.”) In any case, the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare. Nor did Montagu’s summary essay, which simply rehashed attacks on the concept of “instinct” from decades of behaviorists. One of the only chapters with data “refuted” Lorenz’s claims about warfare and raiding in the Ute Indians by saying they didn’t do it any more than other native groups!

  Twenty years later, Gould wrote that “Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species.” His new argument comes from what he calls the Great Asymmetry. It is “an essential truth,” he writes, that “good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one.”12 Moreover, “we perform 10,000 acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly balancing, moment of cruelty.”13 The statistics making up this “essential truth” are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are definitely not “good and kind people,” make up about three or four percent of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent.14 But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as “evil and destructive,” it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it “evil.” Also, does it make sense to judge our entire species, as if we were standing en masse at the pearly gates? The issue is not whether our species is “evil and destructive” but whether we house evil and destructive motives, together with the beneficent and constructive ones. If we do, one can try to understand what they are and how they work.

  Gould has objected to any attempt to understand the motives for war in the context of human evolution, because “each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence; each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan.”15 Once again a ratio has been conjured out of the blue; the data reviewed in Chapter 3 show that “pacific clans” either do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the “murderous bands.”16 But for Gould, such facts are beside the point, because he finds it necessary to believe in the pacific clans on moral grounds. Only if humans lack any predisposition for good or evil or anything else, he suggests, do we have grounds for opposing genocide. Here is how he imagines the position of the evolutionary psychologists he disagrees with:

  Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source—and as an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility…. A group devoid of xenophobia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others replete with genes to encode a propensity for such categorization and destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are programmed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged (and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances may now spell our undoing (or at least propagate our tragedies)—but we cannot be blamed for these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the night.17

  In this passage Gould presents a more-or-less reasonable summary of why scientists might think that human violence can be illuminated by evolution. But then he casually slips in some outrageous non sequiturs (“an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility” “we cannot be blamed”), as if the scientists had no choice but to believe those, too. He concludes his essay:

  In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered…, and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel…. Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately, shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise.18

  The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a stand in favor of genocide!

  WHAT ABOUT THE third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine? The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can collectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle’s description of Descartes’s dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.

  Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in discussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which they dedicated to Friedrich Engels (“who got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted”). In it they wrote, “As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy.”19 In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they “share a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just—a socialist—society” and see their “critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society.”20 At one point they frame their disagreement with “reductionism” as follows:

  Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the… revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of
human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous.21

  Lewontin and Rose’s commitment to the “dialectical” approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. 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.22 The very act of separating them in one’s mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, “supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment.” That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are “ontologically coterminous”—not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.

  Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the “determinists” with the declaration “We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing”23—presumably echoing Marx’s statement that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” But Rose never explains who the “we” is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.