Top Quotes: “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” — Steven Pinker

“If the patient’s left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they see (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. Sigmund Freud inmodestly wrote that humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naive self-love: the discovery that our world is not the center of the celestial spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we were not specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.”

“Many of the traits affected by genes are far from noble. Peychologists have discovered that our personalities differ in five major ways: we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected. Most of the 18,000 adjectives for personality traits in an unabridged dictionary can be tied to one of these five dimensions, including such sins and flaws as being aimless, careless, conforming, impatient, narrow, rude, self-pitying, selfish, suspicious, uncooperative, and undependable. All five of the major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes. The unfortunate wretch who is introverted, neurotic, narrow, selfish, and undependable is probably that way in part because of his genes, and so, most likely, are the rest of us who have tendencies in any of those directions as compared with our fellows.

It’s not just unpleasant temperaments that are partly heritable, but actual behavior with real consequences. Study after study has shown that a willingness to commit antisocial acts, including lying, stealing, starting fights, and destroying property, is partly heritable (though like all heritable traits it is exercised more in some environments than in others).”

“Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written lanaguge only by the sweat of their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention.”

“In the early 1970s the New York Times Magazine reported the discovery of the “gentle Tasaday” of the Philippine rainforest, a people with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons. The Tasaday turned out to be local farmers dressed in leaves for a photo opportunity so that cronies of Ferdinand Marcos could set aside their “homeland” as a preserve and enjoy exclusive mineral and logging rights.”

“Together with robots and chimpanzees, people with autism remind us that cultural learning is possible only because neurologically normal people have innate equipment to accomplish it.”

“American public health officials were slow to acknowledge that smoking causes cancer because it was the Nazis who had originally established the link.”

“The ideology of the Blank Slate helps explain some of the features that were unique to the Marxist states:

• If people do not differ in psychological traits like talent or drive, then anyone who is better off must be avaricious or larcenous. Massive killing of kulaks and “rich” or “bourgeois” peasants was a feature of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
• If the mind is structureless at birth and shaped by its experience, a society that wants the right kind of minds must control the experience (‘It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written’). Twentieth-century Marxist states were not just dictatorships but totalitarian dictatorships. They tried to control every aspect of life: childrearing, education, clothing, entertainment, architecture, the arts, even food and sex. Authors in the Soviet Union were enjoined to become “engineers of human souls.” In China and Cambodia, mandatory communal dining halls, same-sex adult dormitories, and the separation of children from parents were recurring (and de-tested) experiments.”

“Cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians.”

“Twentieth-century Marxism was part of a larger intellectual current that has been called Authoritarian High Modernism: the conceit that planners could redesign society from the top down using “scientific” principles. The architect Le Corbusier, for example, argued that urban planners should not be fettered by traditions and tastes, since they only perpetuated the overcrowded chaos of the cities of his day. “We must build places where mankind will be reborn,” he wrote. “Each man will live in an ordered relation to the whole.” In Le Corbusier’s utopia, planners would begin with a “clean tablecloth” (sound familiar?) and mastermind all buildings and public spaces to service “human needs.” They had a minimalist conception of those needs: each person was thought to require a fixed amount of air, heat, light, and space for eating, sleeping, working, commuting, and a few other activities. It did not occur to Le Corbusier that intimate gatherings with family and friends might be a human need, so he proposed large communal dining halls to replace kitchens. Also missing from his list of needs was the desire to socialize in small groups in public places, so he planned his cities around freeways, large buildings, and vast open plazas, with no squares or crossroads in which people would feel comfortable hanging out to schmooze. Homes were “machines for living, free of archaic inefficiencies like gardens and ornamentation, and thus were efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing projects.

Le Corbusier was frustrated in his aspiration to flatten Paris, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro and rebuild them according to his scientific principles. But in the 1950s he was given carte blanche to design Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab, and one of his disciples was given a clean tablecloth for Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Today, both cities are notorious as uninviting wastelands detested by the civil servants who live in them. Authoritarian High Modernism also led to the “urban renewal” projects in many American cities during the 1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, and empty windswept plazas.”

“In a 1975 dialogue, Simone de Beauvoir said: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.””

“Dutch treat is understood as a slur on contemporary Netherlanders. (In fact, it is one of many idioms in which Dutch means “ersatz,” such as Dutch oven, Dutch door, Dutch uncle, Dutch courage, and Dutch auction, the remnants of a long-forgotten rivalry between the English and the Dutch.)”

“Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.”

“The wild ancestor of carrots was a thin, bitter white root; the ancestor of corn had an inch-long, easily shattered cob with a few small, rock-hard kernels.”

“Natural flavors — defined by one food scientist as “a flavor that’s been derived with an out-of-date technology” — are often chemically indistinguishable from their artificial counterparts, and when they are distinguishable, sometimes the natural flavor is the more dangerous one. When “natural” almond flavor, benzaldehyde, is derived from peach pits, it is accompanied by traces of cyanide; when it is synthesized as an “artificial flavor,” it is not.”

“Petroleum used to be just a contaminant of water wells; then it became a source of fuel, replacing the declining supply of whale oil.”

“When college students are given descriptions of people and asked to rate their character, they judge that a person who eats cheeseburgers and milkshakes is less nice and considerate than a person who eats chicken and salad!”

“Children are violent well before they have been infected by war toys or cultural stereotypes. The most violent age is not adolescence but toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half the boys just past the age of two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting, and kicking. As the author pointed out, “Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.”

Violence continues to preoccupy the mind throughout life. According to independent surveys in several countries by the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss, more than 80 percent of women and 90 percent of men fantasize about killing people they don’t like, especially romantic rivals, stepparents, and people who have humiliated them in public.”

“At 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order.”

“Canada may be more peaceable than its neighbor in part because its government outraced its people to the land. Unlike the United States, where settlers fanned out over a vast two-dimensional landscape with innumerable nooks and crannies, the habitable portion of Canada is a one-dimensional ribbon along the American border without remote frontiers and enclaves in which cultures of honor could fester. According to the Canadian studies scholar Desmond Morton, “Our west expanded in an orderly, peaceful fashion, with the police arriving before the settlers.””

“FEMINISM IS OFTEN derided because of the arguments of its lunatic fringe — for example, that all intercourse is rape, that all women should be lesbians, or that only 10 percent of the population should be allowed to be male.’”

“We know that tall men on average are promoted in their jobs more rapidly than short men, and that attractive people on average are more assertive than unattractive ones. (In one experiment, subjects undergoing a fake interview had to cool their heels when the interviewer was called out of the room by a staged interruption. The plain-looking subjects waited nine minutes before complaining; the attractive ones waited three minutes and twenty seconds.) Presumably people defer to tall and good-looking people, and that makes them more successful and entitled.”

“In his book The Myth of the First Three Years, the cognitive neuroscience expert Jon Bruer showed that there was no science behind these astonishing claims. No psychologist has ever documented a critical period for cognitive or language development that ends at three. And though depriving an animal of stimulation (by sewing an eye shut or keeping it in a barren cage) may hurt its brain growth, there is no evidence that providing extra stimulation (beyond what the organism would encounter in its normal habitat) enhances its brain growth.”

“Concerns about fatherlessness may not be ill founded, but the problem may be the absence of fathers from all the families in a neighborhood rather than the absence of a father from an individual family. These fatherless children lack access to other families in which an adult. male is present, and worse, they have access to packs of single men, whose values trickle down to their own peer groups.”

“Babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one.”