Blank Slate
As I sat down tonight to write my 102 words, I couldn’t find a topic. A couple of ideas came to mind, but they were either too personal or too boring. When it came to something interesting to write about, my mind was a blank slate.
That phrase came to mind as I considered my plight, and I was reminded that I have a book with that title, by Steven Pinker. He is a world-famous scientist and scientific communicator in various fields. He is best known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology.
Whatever your thoughts on macroevolution (the Big Bang and all that), there is no denying that the world around us is evolving and adapting to changes in the environment. Pinker believes that humans are born with certain psychological traits that developed in response to the circumstances that existed as mankind moved from the caves to the cities, and that they are innate and immutable.
The contrary philosophy is the idea that a human is a blank slate when it is born, and what we call “human nature” is just the rules that society imprints on us during our formative years. Therefore, if there’s something you don’t like about human nature, you just change society so that it doesn’t imprint that trait on people.
You can see how your position on this issue defines your politics. If people are who they are, and they can’t be changed, then you should accept that and develop a society that does the best job possible of channeling the less desirable traits into something not too destructive to that society. Sort of like capitalism channeling greed into industry and service.
If people are infinitely malleable, then we can just fix people, and then we can all live together in perfect harmony and equality. Think of the New Soviet Man.
Obviously I agree with Pinker on this point. There are many others on which I disagree with him, but I try very hard to evaluate ideas without passing judgment on the person who had them. The fact that I find myself so often agreeing with certain people across a wide range of issues probably means that I fail miserably in that effort.