The Observer, March 18, 2005
Volume XXXVII, Issue 21
Pinker inaugurates lecture series
Dr. Steven Pinker, a psycho-logist at Harvard University, presented the first address of Case's new Distinguished Lecture series Monday in Severance Hall. His talk, "The Blank Slate," began at 4 p.m.
The title was a reference to Pinker's 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and a large portion of his lecture Monday was spent considering reasons why some people oppose theories of human nature.
Pinker began by summarizing four existing views of human nature. "Everyone has a theory of human nature," Pinker said. "Everyone has to anticipate how people will react to their surroundings. That means that all of us needs theories, implicit or explicit, about what makes people tick."
The oldest theories of human nature came from religion, Pinker said, but he said that new interpretations are needed in the modern world. "Today no scientifically-literate person can believe that the events narrated in the book of Genesis actually took place," he said. "That means that there's been a need for a new theory of human nature…. The secular theory of human nature is rooted in three doctrines, each of which can be associated with a dead white European male."
Secular doctrines, as discussed by Pinker, are the "blank slate" theory expressed by John Locke, the "noble savage" theory advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the "ghost in the machine" theory of René Descartes.
The blank slate theory takes its name from the idea that the mind at birth is empty of ideas, like a clean sheet of paper or an empty chalkboard, and is filled in by a person's experiences. Aside from proposing a new hypothesis, the theory also had repercussions in the moral and political domains.
"It implied that dogmas, such as the divine right of kings, could not be treated as self-evident truths… but rather had to be justified by experiences," Pinker said. "It undermined hereditary royalty and aristocracy. Who could claim noble behavior or wisdom or virtue if their mind had started out as blank as everyone else's?"
Blank-slate thinking, Pinker said, has continued to be a widespread belief into the 20th century, even though all three secular viewpoints have been threatened by findings in a variety of disciplines.
"There's been a widespread fear and loathing of ideas of human nature, both from the left and from the right," he said.
In general, Pinker said, people choose to avoid specific theories of human nature instead favoring the blank slate model because of four fears: the fear of inequality, the fear of imperfectability, the fear of determinism, and the fear of nihilism. He put these fears down to misunderstandings in the subject matter rather than to consequences of any given theory, and cautioned that fear of our own innate nature should not keep us from studying it or theorizing about it.
"I think that even if there are dangers in too strong a version of human nature, there are also dangers in denying human nature. For this reason we should study things objectively, without trying to put a moral thumb on either side of the scale."
In discussing each of the four fears, Pinker noted that fear of theories of human nature that do not assume a common starting ground, as the blank slate model does, arises because these other theories cannot guarantee equality or a chance to improve our nature, for example.
"Grounding values in the blank slate is a mistake," Pinker said. "It's a mistake because it makes our values hostages to fortune, implying that any day terrible discoveries would make them obsolete. And it's a mistake because it conceals the downsides of denying human nature."
The lecture concluded with a number of questions from the audience. A reception in the lobby of Severance Hall rounded out the program.
Originally from Montreal, Pinker received a bachelor's degree in experimental psycho-logy from McGill University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1979. He spent 21 years teaching at MIT before becoming the Johnstone Professor of Psychology back at Harvard in 2003.
His research has concentrated on language and cognition, particularly visual cognition and language development in children.
Pinker's appearance at Case on Monday was as the first speaker in the Distinguished Lecture series. The series was developed in response to an idea from the faculty, "who came forward last year and suggested that we start an annual major lecture with an internationally-renowned scholar," univer-sity president Edward Hundert said.
Next year's speaker will be Jared Diamond, Ph.D., a professor at UCLA and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. The date for his lecture has been announced as March 1, 2006.
