Product Description

In this title, Steven Pinker makes explicit the argument which has been a backdrop to his previous books and many other popular science titles. He argues that much of our social commentary, conventional wisdom, and academic orthodoxy is wrongly rooted in the doctrines of the noble savage (civilisation is the source of human corruption) and the blank slate (the mind has no innate structure; all thoughts and feelings seep into our heads from surrounding culture). He explores the impact of these notions on our attitudes to sexuality, ideology, political correctness and the arts, and insists that we need to be more honest about human nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182525 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In The Blank Slate, the bestselling author Steven Pinker produces his most polemical and convincing attack upon the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. Pinker's previous books The Language Instinctand How the Mind Works have already attracted huge praise and controversy in arguing that language and cognition are natural rather than cultural. In The Blank Slate he refines and extends his arguments.

The book is aimed at "people who wonder where the taboo against human nature came from", and promises to explain "the moral, emotional and political colorings of the concept of human nature in modern life". For Pinker, the belief that we are all born as "blank slates" upon which culture places its decisive imprint is not only wrong but dangerous. He persuasively argues that "the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history". This is all very well, but at over 500 pages it can also be daunting for the general reader, as Pinker takes on all-comers, from biologists and sociologists to a dizzying array of classical thinkers from Calvin and Hobbes to Marx and Dawkins. The sections on gender will undoubtedly inflame many feminist writers (the most persuasive of which Pinker sadly neglects to discuss), and the criticisms of modern art are flimsy, but The Blank Slate is an impressive and sustained broadside that cannot be ignored. -–Jerry Brotton

Review
Pinker challenges conventional wisdom that our thoughts and feelings seep into our heads from the surrounding culture.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful & Essential Reading
This profound book examines 3 doctrines: The Blank Slate (no human nature), The Noble Savage (no selfish or evil instincts), and The Ghost in the Machine (independent existence of the mind from the body/brain).
Steven Pinker elegantly presents the evidence against these views, sometimes in concise and quite overwhelmingly devastating lists.
In a small way this subject matter is similar to J.Diamond's 'The 3rd Chimpanzee' or E.O. Wilson's 'Consilience'- showing that we are imperfect products of evolution, limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority.
If this were all the book was about it would still be fascinating reading. Fortunately however, Pinker has gone two steps further, thus making this book a landmark in the Nature/Nurture debate.
Firstly he explains that the reason why so many people (Postmodernists, Marxists, Gender Feminists etc) want to believe in these 3 doctrines is based on fears of inequality, determinism, imperfectability, and nihilism. He examines each of these fears and demonstrates that they are based on a poverty of understanding of human nature (the 3 doctrines), a myriad of fallacies and non sequiturs, a lack of understanding of ethics, and moralistic self-displays.
Secondly, in agreement with Chekhov's 'Man will become better when you show him what he is like', Pinker gives powerful and sensible arguments how an accurate understanding of human nature would aid in the reduction of violence & oppression and increase human happiness. They are a real and timely intellectual treat, brimming with positive potential of application.
For those new to evolutionary psychology I would recommend that they first read Pinker's 'How the Mind Works' or Robert Wright's 'The Moral Animal'.
It would be an understatement to say that this book is eye-opening. I would regard this book as essential reading to those that think that the Greek's advice 'Know thyself' is sage.

Pinker's Best Yet
This is Pinker's best book to date. He's no great original thinker, but what he does superbly well is to clarify and summarise. There's no hidden ideology here: the author sets out to present as clearly as he can what he sees as the current state of research into the nature/nurture evolutionary psychology debate, and there is simply no escaping the fact that nature is vitally important. Not only is current scientific research showing this, but it's also common sense. The extraordinary thing is how strong the resistance is to this obvious fact, largely from the academic left, who have adopted the Blank Slate doctrine that human nature doesn't exist (pace Marx - consciousness doesn't determine society: society determines consciousness), and like to accuse all those who disagree as fascists. As Pinker points out, there is absolutely no reason why the left should have to saddle itself with this absurd doctrine; after all, if your aim is to improve society, the basic starting point should be to establish exactly what material you're working with. And it should hardly need emphasising at this point in history that those societies which have based themselves on the notion of an infinitely malleable human nature have been uniformly totalitarian. So not only is this book an excellent guide to contemporary scientific thinking on human pyschology, it's also a powerful work of popular philosophy, and a wake-up call to the left. As Peter Singer and others have stated, the left needs to abandon its disastrous alliance with Marxism, and start looking at Darwin instead.

Amusing, rigorous, and concrete.
I would recommend this book to everybody for many reasons, of which the following are just a few. All the books by Pinker have in common several features that make them real treasures: on the stylistic side, they are clear, very well written, easy to understand, entertaining, and often genuinely amusing. On the methodological side, they always offer plenty of evidence for each theory they propose, both by offering an exhaustive bibliography, and by calling the attention to simple facts of everyday life that by themselves support those theories. On the content side, they speak about basic facts of everyday life, always succeeding in shedding a new light on them, and building bridges between topics at first sight unrelated. The most rewardful experience I owe to these books is reading one page of any of them, and finding myself on the next day, one hundred times throughout the day, remarking things I never noted before, and surprised of how my vision of the world had changed: in the words of E. Drew, I "live more intensely for the reading of it". All this was true of the three previous books I read - 'The language instinct', 'How the mind works', and 'Words and rules'. But it is even more true in the case of 'The blank slate', which deals with an intrinsically more general topic.