The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

  One is that the real medium of artists, whatever their genre, is human mental representations. Oil paint, moving limbs, and printed words cannot penetrate the brain directly. They trigger a cascade of neural events that begin with the sense organs and culminate in thoughts, emotions, and memories. Cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, which map out the cascade, offer a wealth of information to anyone who wants to understand how artists achieve their effects. Vision research can illuminate painting and sculpture.68 Psycho-acoustics and linguistics can enrich the study of music.69 Linguistics can give insight on poetry, metaphor, and literary style.70 Mental imagery research helps to explain the techniques of narrative prose.71 The theory of mind (intuitive psychology) can shed light on our ability to entertain fictional worlds.72 The study of visual attention and short-term memory can help explain the experience of cinema.73 And evolutionary aesthetics can help explain the feelings of beauty and pleasure that can accompany all of these acts of perception.74

  Ironically, the early modernist painters were avid consumers of perception research. It may have been introduced to them by Gertrude Stein, who studied psychology with William James at Harvard and conducted research on visual attention under his supervision.75 The Bauhaus designers and artists, too, were appreciators of perceptual psychology, particularly the contemporary Gestalt school.76 But the consilience was lost as the two cultures drifted apart, and only recently have they begun to come back together. I predict that the application of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to the arts will become a growth area in criticism and scholarship.

  The other point of contact may be more important still. Ultimately what draws us to a work of art is not just the sensory experience of the medium but its emotional content and insight into the human condition. And these tap into the timeless tragedies of our biological predicament: our mortality, our finite knowledge and wisdom, the differences among us, and our conflicts of interest with friends, neighbors, relatives, and lovers. All are topics of the sciences of human nature.

  The idea that art should reflect the perennial and universal qualities of the human species is not new. Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays, comments on the lasting appeal of that great intuitive psychologist:

  Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.

  Today we may be seeing a new convergence of explorations of the human condition by artists and scientists—not because scientists are trying to take over the humanities, but because artists and humanists are beginning to look to the sciences, or at least to the scientific mindset that sees us as a species with a complex psychological endowment. In explaining this connection I cannot hope to compete with the words of the artists themselves, and I will conclude with the overtures of three fine novelists.

  Iris Murdoch, haunted by the origins of the moral sense, comments on its endurance in fiction:

  We make, in many respects though not in all, the same kinds of moral judgments as the Greeks did, and we recognize good or decent people in times and literatures remote from our own. Patroclus, Antigone, Cordelia, Mr. Knightley, Alyosha. Patroclus’ invariable kindness. Cordelia’s truthfulness. Alyosha telling his father not to be afraid of hell. It is just as important that Patroclus should be kind to the captive women as that Emma should be kind to Miss Bates, and we feel this importance in an immediate and natural way in both cases in spite of the fact that nearly three thousand years divide the writers. And this, when one reflects on it, is a remarkable testimony to the existence of a single durable human nature.77

  A. S. Byatt, asked by the editors of the New York Times Magazine for the best narrative of the millennium, picked the story of Scheherazade:

  The stories in “The Thousand and One Nights”… are stories about storytelling without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and death and money and food and other human necessities. Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentences of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles, and ends.78

  John Updike, also asked for reflections at the turn of the millennium, commented on the future of his own profession. “A writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true,” he wrote, and “the unit of truth, at least for a fiction writer, is the human animal, belonging to the species Homo sapiens, unchanged for at least 100,000 years.”

  Evolution moves more slowly than history, and much slower than the technology of recent centuries; surely sociobiology, surprisingly maligned in some scientific quarters, performs a useful service in investigating what traits are innate and which are acquired. What kind of cultural software can our evolved hard-wiring support? Fiction, in its groping way, is drawn to those moments of discomfort when society asks more than its individual members can, or wish to, provide. Ordinary people experiencing friction on the page is what warms our hands and hearts as we write….

  To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

  So conflicted and ingenious a creature makes an endlessly interesting focus for the meditations of fiction. It seems to me true that Homo sapiens will never settle into any utopia so complacently as to relax all its conflicts and erase all its perversity-breeding neediness.79

  Literature has three voices, wrote the scholar Robert Storey: those of the author, the audience, and the species.80 These novelists are reminding us of the voice of the species, an essential constituent of all the arts, and a fitting theme with which to wrap up my own story.

  PART VI

  THE VOICE OF THE SPECIES

  The Blank Slate was an attractive vision. It promised to make racism, sexism, and class prejudice factually untenable. It appeared to be a bulwark against the kind of thinking that led to ethnic genocide. It aimed to prevent people from slipping into a premature fatalism about preventable social ills. It put a spotlight on the treatment of children, indigenous peoples, and the underclass. The Blank Slate thus became part of a secular faith and appeared to constitute the common decency of our age.

  But the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering. Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of “a government of laws and not of men.” It blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions.

  The Blank Slate is not some ideal that we should all hope and pray is true. No, it is an anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity, our inherent interests, and our individual preferences. Though it has pretensions of celebrating our potential, it does the opposite, because our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully c
omplex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet.

  Regardless of its good and bad effects, the Blank Slate is an empirical hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and must be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is true. The modern sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution are increasingly showing that it is not true. The result is a rearguard effort to salvage the Blank Slate by disfiguring science and intellectual life: denying the possibility of objectivity and truth, dumbing down issues into dichotomies, replacing facts and logic with political posturing.

  The Blank Slate became so entrenched in intellectual life that the prospect of doing without it can be deeply unsettling. In topics from childrearing to sexuality, from natural foods to violence, ideas that seemed immoral even to question turn out to be not just questionable but probably wrong. Even people with no ideological ax to grind can feel a sense of vertigo when they learn of such taboos being broken: “O brave new world that has such people in it!” Is science leading to a place where prejudice is all right, where children may be neglected, where Machiavellianism is accepted, where inequality and violence are met with resignation, where people are treated like machines?

  Not at all! By unhandcuffing widely shared values from moribund factual dogmas, the rationale for those values can only become clearer. We understand why we condemn prejudice, cruelty to children, and violence against women, and can focus our efforts on how to implement the goals we value most. We thereby protect those goals against the upheavals of factual understanding that science perennially delivers.

  Abandoning the Blank Slate, in any case, is not as radical as it might first appear. True, it is a revolution in many sectors of modern intellectual life. But except for a few intellectuals who have let their theories get the better of them, it is not a revolution in the world views of most people. I suspect that few people really believe, deep down, that boys and girls are interchangeable, that all differences in intelligence come from the environment, that parents can micromanage the personalities of their children, that humans are born free of selfish tendencies, or that appealing stories, melodies, and faces are arbitrary social constructions. Margaret Mead, an icon of twentieth-century egalitari-anism, told her daughter that she credited her own intellectual talent to her genes, and I can confirm that such split personalities are common among academics.1 Scholars who publicly deny that intelligence is a meaningful concept treat it as anything but meaningless in their professional lives. Those who argue that gender differences are a reversible social construction do not treat them that way in their advice to their daughters, their dealings with the opposite sex, and their unguarded gossip, humor, and reflections on their lives.

  Acknowledging human nature does not mean overturning our personal world views, and I would have nothing to suggest as a replacement if it did. It means only taking intellectual life out of its parallel universe and reuniting it with science and, when it is borne out by science, with common sense. The alternative is to make intellectual life increasingly irrelevant to human affairs, to turn intellectuals into hypocrites, and to turn everyone else into anti-intellectuals.

  Scientists and public intellectuals are not the only people who have pondered how the mind works. We are all psychologists, and some people, without the benefit of credentials, are great psychologists. Among them are poets and novelists, whose business, as we saw in the preceding chapter, is to create “just representations of general nature.” Paradoxically, in today’s intellectual climate novelists may have a clearer mandate than scientists to speak the truth about human nature. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives happily ever after. Life is nothing like that, we note, and we look to the arts for edification about the painful dilemmas of the human condition.

  Yet when it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz! “Pessimism” is considered a legitimate criticism of observations of human nature, and people expect theories to be a source of sentimental uplift. “Shakespeare had no conscience; neither do I,” said George Bernard Shaw. This was not a confession of psychopathy but an affirmation of a good playwright’s obligation to take every character’s point of view seriously. Scientists of human behavior have the same obligation, and it does not require them to turn off their consciences in the spheres in which they must be exercised.

  Poets and novelists have made many of the points of this book with greater wit and power than any academic scribbler could hope to do. They allow me to conclude the book by revisiting some of its main themes without merely repeating them. What follows are five vignettes from literature that capture, for me, some of the morals of the sciences of human nature. They underscore that the discoveries of those sciences should be faced not with fear and loathing but with the balance and discernment we use when we reflect on human nature in the rest of our lives.

  The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

  For—put them side by side—

  The one the other will contain

  With ease—and you—beside—

  The Brain is deeper than the sea—

  For—hold them—Blue to Blue—

  The one the other will absorb—

  As Sponges—Buckets—do—

  The Brain is just the weight of God—

  For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—

  And they will differ—if they do—

  As Syllable from Sound—

  The first two verses of Emily Dickinson’s “The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky” express the grandeur in the view of the mind as consisting in the activity of the brain.2 Here and in her other poems, Dickinson refers to “the brain,” not “the soul” or even “the mind,” as if to remind her readers that the seat of our thought and experience is a hunk of matter. Yes, science is, in a sense, “reducing” us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three-pound organ. But what an organ! In its staggering complexity, its explosive combinatorial computation, and its limitless ability to imagine real and hypothetical worlds, the brain, truly, is wider than the sky. The poem itself proves it. Simply to understand the comparison in each verse, the brain of the reader must contain the sky and absorb the sea and visualize each one at the same scale as the brain itself.

  The enigmatic final verse, with its startling image of God and the brain being hefted like cabbages, has puzzled readers since the poem was published. Some read it as creationism (God made the brain), others as atheism (the brain thought up God). The simile with phonology—sound is a seamless continuum, a syllable is a demarcated unit of it—suggests a kind of pantheism: God is everywhere and nowhere, and every brain incarnates a finite measure of divinity. The loophole “if they do” suggests mysticism—the brain and God may somehow be the same thing—and, of course, agnosticism. The ambiguity is surely intentional, and I doubt that anyone could defend a single interpretation as the correct one.

  I like to read the verse as suggesting that the mind, in contemplating its place in the cosmos, at some point reaches its own limitations and runs into puzzles that seem to belong in a separate, divine realm. Free will and subjective experience, for example, are alien to our concept of causation and feel like a divine spark inside us. Morality and meaning seem to inhere in a reality that exists independent of our judgments. But that separateness may be the illusion of a brain that makes it impossible for us not to think they are separate from us. Ultimately we have no way of knowing, because we are our brains and have no way of stepping outside them to check. But if we are thereby trapped, it is a trap that we can hardly bemoan, for it is wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and perhaps as weighty as God.

  KURT VONNEGUT’S STORY “Harrison Bergeron” is as transparent as Dickinson’s poem is cryptic. Here is how it begins:

  The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better
looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.3

  The Handicapper General enforces equality by neutralizing any inherited (hence undeserved) asset. Intelligent people have to wear radios in their ears tuned to a government transmitter that sends out a sharp noise every twenty seconds (such as the sound of a milk bottle struck with a ball-peen hammer) to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of their brains. Ballerinas are laden with bags of birdshot and their faces are hidden by masks so that no one can feel bad at seeing someone prettier or more graceful than they. Newscasters are selected for their speech impediments. The hero of the story is a multiply gifted teenager forced to wear headphones, thick wavy glasses, three hundred pounds of scrap iron, and black caps on half his teeth. The story is about his ill-fated rebellion.

  Subtle it is not, but “Harrison Bergeron” is a witty reductio of an all too common fallacy. The ideal of political equality is not a guarantee that people are innately indistinguishable. It is a policy to treat people in certain spheres (justice, education, politics) on the basis of their individual merits rather than the statistics of any group they belong to. And it is a policy to recognize inalienable rights in all people by virtue of the fact that they are sentient human beings. Policies that insist that people be identical in their outcomes must impose costs on humans who, like all living things, vary in their biological endowment. Since talents by definition are rare, and can be fully realized only in rare circumstances, it is easier to achieve forced equality by lowering the top (and thereby depriving everyone of the fruits of people’s talents) than by raising the bottom. In Vonnegut’s America of 2081 the desire for equality of outcome is played out as a farce, but in the twentieth century it frequently led to real crimes against humanity, and in our own society the entire issue is often a taboo.