The Soul of Steven Pinker

It is not entirely a straw man that he is attacking. For a long time now, especially among educators, there has, in fact, been an influential school of thought at war with the very idea of human nature. Everything is determined by nurture, environment, and social conditioning, they say. Then there is the reaction launched by Edward O. Wilson with his 1975 book Sociobiology, arguing along with such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, that nature is trump. Pushed out of the argument because it is so impossibly incorrect is The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argued that IQ and other factors crucial to social success are genetically determined and are unequally distributed among racial groups. But the opponents of natural determinism lump Wilson, Dawkins, and Herrnstein and Murray together as the enemies of equality and the commitment to make the world a much better place by the achievement of social justice.

Now comes along Steven Pinker, a psychologist of language at M.I.T., with a new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking). Pinker is telegenic and articulate—some say facile—and Maclean’s, the magazine of Canadian identity, describes him as “endearingly Canadian; polite, soft-spoken, attentive to what others say.” Pinker, who comes down on the side of Wilson and Co., says, quite rightly, that proponents of the blank slate approach are sometimes prone to implicitly totalitarian plans of social engineering aimed at imposing equality. Equality, he says, is a moral and political idea, not a scientific reality, and again he is right about that. Human beings, and especially human minds, are not equal; they come with innate, genetically formed abilities and behavioral tendencies. The conclusion drawn by Professor Pinker is that a child’s life is shaped by natural endowments (genes), family experience, peer groups, and chance happenings. That seems a rather modest payoff for so much ratiocination and scientific huffing and puffing.

What all the major parties to this academic contest have in common is that they are thoroughgoing materialists. Prof. Pinker, for instance, may be “polite, soft-spoken, and attentive to what others say,” except when it comes to others—from Plato to Aquinas and from Kierkegaard to Polanyi—who think that human beings are more than matter. The suggestion of anything beyond the reach of his neuroscience”the soul, for instance”is derisively dismissed as the myth of “the Ghost in the machine,” a myth abandoned by all but “the religious right.” It is, in fact, such dogmatic and vulgar materialism that requires a blind leap of faith. Both the blank slatists and the nature determinists typically assume that those unwilling to make that leap are beyond the pale of rational discourse.

A Different Fundamentalism

Of course, they do not really believe that their ideas are exhaustively explained either by neurological synapses or by environmental conditioning. They write books, give lectures, and appear on talk shows contending that they really do have ideas that are, well, true—just as though there is reason, or soul, or even a ghost in the machine. When asked why we should take their ideas seriously if they are no more than the predetermined products of genes or conditioning, they are inclined to respond, “It is an interesting paradox, isn’t it?” No, it isn’t. It is simply the incoherent nonsense that follows from a fundamentalist leap of faith into dogmatic materialism.

This does not mean there is nothing to learn from reading books such as The Blank Slate. There is much that is useful to know about both natural endowments and environmental influences. We are, after all, embodied souls or, as some prefer, ensouled bodies, and are created for society. We may be instructed by a skilled anatomist who dissects the sexual organs or the brain, while politely declining to believe him when he asserts that that is all there is to sex or to thinking. Likewise, we may be grateful for insights into environmental influences without believing that they adequately explain our lives as we know our lives by living.

To understand ourselves as creatures rather than products, as persons possessed of reason and related to the infinite, simply makes more sense of more things that we cannot help but know are true. Among the problems with materialist fundamentalism, apart from its implausibility, is that it is so very boring. That being said, prepare to see Steven Pinker on a forthcoming talk show, responding when challenged (if he is challenged) with, “It is an interesting paradox, isn’t it?” At which point you may say to the screen, ever so politely, “No, Prof. Pinker. It is neither interesting nor a paradox.” You might want to follow that with a prayer for the soul that his belief system prevents him from recognizing that he has.