The Venus Flytrap - Blank Slate Quotes

Quotes from
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

"The denial of human nature has not just corrupted the world of critics and intellectuals but has done harm to the lives of real people.... It has distorted the choices faced by mothers as they try to balance their lives, and multiplied the anguish of parents whose children haven't turned out the way they hoped.... The romantic notion that all evil is a product of society has justified the release of dangerous psychopaths who promptly murdered innocent people. And the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history." (pp. 14-15)

"Identical twins are far more similar than fraternal twins, whether they are raised apart or together; identical twins raised apart are highly similar; biological siblings, whether raised together or apart, are far more similar than adoptive siblings.... Skeptics have offered alternative explanations that try to push the effects of the genes to zero — they suggest that identical twins separated at birth may have been placed in similar adoptive homes, that they may have contacted each other before being tested, that they look alike and hence may have been treated alike, and that they shared a womb in addition to their genes. But as we shall see in the chapter on children, these explanations have all been tested and rejected." (p. 56)

"Many of the traits affected by genes are far from noble.... 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." (pp. 58-59)

"The mind was forged in Darwinian competition, and an inert medium would have been outperformed by rivals outfitted with high technology — with acute perceptual systems, savvy problem-solvers, cunning strategists, and sensitive feedback circuits. Worse still, if our minds were truly malleable they would be easily manipulated by our rivals, who could mold or condition us into serving their needs rather than our own. A malleable mind would quickly be selected out." (p. 62)

"it is the doctrine of the Noble Savage that has been most mercilessly debunked by the new evolutionary thinking. A thoroughly noble anything is an unlikely product of natural selection.... Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong. To begin with, the stories of tribes out there somewhere who have never heard of violence turn out to be urban legends. Margaret Mead's descriptions of peace-loving New Guineans and sexually nonchalant Samoans were based on perfunctory research and turned out to be almost perversely wrong. As the anthropologist Derek Freeman later documented, Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding night, a young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping, and the family of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer.... Anthropologists and historians have also been counting bodies.... The archaeologist Lawrence Keeley has summarized the proportion of male deaths caused by war in a number of societies for which data are available. The first eight bars, which range from almost 10 percent to almost 60 percent, come from indigenous peoples in South America and New Guinea. The nearly invisible bar at the bottom represents the United States and Europe in the twentieth century and includes the statistics from two world wars." (pp. 63-64)

"Discoveries of how the brain changes with experience do not show that learning is more powerful than we thought, that the brain can be dramatically reshaped by its input, or that the genes do not shape the brain. Indeed, demonstrations of the plasticity of the brain are less radical than they first appear: the supposedly plastic regions of cortex are doing pretty much the same thing they would have been doing if they had never been altered. And the most recent discoveries on brain development have refuted the idea that the brain is largely plastic." (p. 88)

"The new realization that government-sponsored mass murder can come from an anti-innatist belief system as easily as from an innatist one upends the postwar understanding that biological approaches to behavior are uniquely sinister. An accurate appraisal of the cause of state genocides must look for beliefs common to Nazism and Marxism that launched them on their parallel trajectories, and for the beliefs specific to Marxism that led to the unique atrocities committed in its name. A new wave of historians and philosophers is doing exactly that. Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. "The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary," wrote Marx; "the will to create mankind anew" is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. They also shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disaster." (p. 145)

"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.... 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." (p. 146)

"Critics of Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity pointed out that no one doubts that behavior can be controlled; putting a gun to someone's head or threatening him with torture are time-honored techniques. Even Skinner's preferred method of operant conditioning required starving the organism to 80 percent of its free-feeding weight and confining it to a box where schedules of reinforcement were carefully controlled. The issue is not whether we can change human behavior, but at what cost. Since we are not just products of our environments, there will be costs.... Sometimes we may choose to impose suffering to control behavior, as when we punish people who cause avoidable suffering in others. But we cannot pretend that we can reshape behavior without infringing in some way on other people's freedom and happiness. Human nature is the reason we do not surrender our freedom to behavioral engineers." (pp. 155-156)

"It's not just behaviorists and Stalinists who forgot that a denial of human nature may have costs in freedom and happiness. 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."... 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." (pp. 156-157)

"Like all conspiracy theories, the idea that language is a prisonhouse denigrates its subject by overestimating its power. Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another, and we can co-opt it in many ways to help our thoughts along. But it is not the same as thought, not the only thing that separates humans from other animals, not the basis of all culture, and not an inescapable prisonhouse, an obligatory agreement, the limits of our world, or the determiner of what is imaginable." (p. 187)

"Like words, images are salient tokens of our mental lives. And like words, images are said to have an insidious power over our consciousness, presumably because they are inscribed directly onto a blank slate. In postmodernist and relativist thinking, images are held to shape our view of reality, or to be our view of reality, or to be reality itself. This is especially true of images representing celebrities, politicians, women, and AHANAs. And as with language, the scientific study of imagery shows that the fear is misplaced." (p. 191)

"Progressive educational practice, for its part, is based on the Noble Savage. As A. S. Neill wrote in his influential book Summerhill, "A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing."... In the method of reading instruction known as Whole Language, children are not taught which letter goes with which sound but are immersed in a book-rich environment where reading skills are expected to blossom spontaneously. In the philosophy of mathematics instruction known as constructivism, children are not drilled with arithmetic tables but are enjoined to rediscover mathematical truths themselves by solving problems in groups. Both methods fare badly when students' learning is assessed objectively, but advocates of the methods tend to disdain standardized testing." (p. 197-198)

"In the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, self-contained communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up throughout the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by religious ideology after a median of twenty years. The Israeli kibbutzim, originally galvanized by socialism and Zionism, steadily dismantled their collectivist philosophy over the decades. It was undermined by their members‘ desire to live with their families, to own their own clothing, and to keep small luxuries or sums of money acquired outside the kibbutz. And the kibbutzim were dragged down by inefficiencies because of the free-rider problem — they were, in the words of one kibbutznik, a "paradise for parasites."" (p. 226)

"The romantic notion that all malefactors are depraved on accounta they're deprived has worn thin among experts and laypeople alike... Psychopaths, as far as we know, cannot be "cured." Indeed, the psychologist Marnie Rice has shown that certain harebrained ideas for therapy, such as boosting their self-esteem and teaching them social skills, can make them even more dangerous." (p. 230-231)

"In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits.... In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?'; I dream things that never were and ask 'why not?'"... The new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life." (pp. 249-255)

"Finally, sharing a placenta can make identical twins more different, not just more similar (since one twin can crowd out the other), which is why studies have shown little or no consistent effect of sharing a placenta. But even if it were to make them more similar, the inflation of heritability would be modest. As the behavioral geneticist Matt McGue noted . of a recent mathematical model that tried to use prenatal effects to push down heritability estimates as much as possible, "That the IQ debate now centers on whether IQ is 50% or 70% heritable is a remarkable indication of how the nature-nurture debate has shifted over the past two decades."" (p. 322)

"First, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up together or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins are no more similar than one would expect from the effects of their shared genes. As with the First Law, the sheer consistency of the outcome across three completely different methods (comparisons of identical with fraternal twins, of siblings raised together with siblings raised apart, of adoptive siblings with biological siblings) emboldens one to conclude that the pattern is real. Whatever experiences siblings share by growing up in the same home makes little or no difference in the kind of people they turn out to be." (p. 325)

"But surely the advice is grounded in research on children's development? Yes, from the many useless studies that show a correlation between the behavior of parents and the behavior of their biological children and conclude that the parenting shaped the child.... The parents of an affectionate child may return that affection and thereby act differently from the parents of a child who squirms and wipes off his parents' kisses. The parents of a quiet, spacey child might feel they are talking to a wall and jabber at him less.... A correlation between parents and children does not mean that parents affect children; it could mean that children affect parents, that genes affect both parents and children, or both.... Perhaps what misled those eighteen federal agencies into thinking they were getting their 25 million dollars worth was the positive way the researchers phrased their findings: good relationships with parents exert a protective effect. Expressed in a different (but equally accurate) way, the results sound less interesting: adolescents who don't get along well with their parents are more likely to use drugs or engage in risky sex. The results sound still less interesting expressed this way: adolescents who use drugs or engage in risky sex don't get along well with their parents." (pp. 329-330)