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“In a work of outstanding clarity and sheer brillianceSteven Pinkerbanishes forever fears that a biological understanding of human nature threatens humane values.” —Helena Cronin, author ofThe Ant and The Peacock “A mind blowing, mind openingexpos.Pinker's profoundly positive arguments for the compatibility of biology and humanism are unrivalled for their scope and depth and should be mandatory, if disquieting, reading.” —Patricia Goldman-Rakic, past president of the Society for Neuroscience InThe Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas:the Blank Slate(the mind has no innate traits),the Noble Savage(people are born good and corrupted by society), andthe Ghost in the Machine(each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them. Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history. Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts. Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim:wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small.
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THE BLANK SLATE Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on vision, language, and social relations has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received eight honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and other publications. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”
Praise for The Blank Slate “A brilliant and forceful summary . . . A well-informed and well-written account of [human] limitations, [written with] a graceful interleaving of scientific and literary sources. . . . [This] fine book helps with a task that we all must begin to take seriously . . . Can it be that we have finally grown up?” —Melvin Konner, The American Prospect This is a brilliant book. It is beautifully written, and addresses profound issues with courage and clarity. There is nothing else like it, and it is going to have an impact th