The Blank Slate and the Heresy of Galileo
The premise of the book I’m reading right now is one I consider to be blindingly obvious, but the book is nonetheless both fascinating and enlightening in a way that I expect will change significantly how I think about many important social and political issues. The book is Stephen Pinker’s 2002 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. I picked it up mostly because I was so impressed by his 2011 book on the history of human violence.
I am not disappointed. Before I talk about the main premise of the book, though, I’ll get into the other part of my essay’s title, “The Heresy of Galileo”. Pinker alludes to it in the book, because both Galileo’s heresy and the ideas Pinker discusses were met with similar reactions, and for much the same reason. So it’s worth a brief look at Galileo’s case to illuminate the modern one.
Galileo, of course, was an astronomer. His observations of the night sky showed him that Copernicus’ observation that the Earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa, was absolutely right. So, he published on this scientific, factual topic. But far from being a dry question of interest only to academics, heliocentrism had deep moral, religious and political implications. Not only did it call into question certain biblical passages, but it denied the moral organization of the universe and man’s place within it.
At the time, the official conception of the universe was that it was organized hierarchically, as a series of concentric spheres. Highest and purest was the celestial sphere, inhabited by God. Below that were spheres occupied by angels who were responsible (among other duties) for moving the sun, stars and planets around. Below that was the lower and less-pure Earth, whose inhabitants are also hierarchically organized with mankind on top and beasts, birds, fishes and insects — in that order — below. Within mankind there was also a hierarchy, with the pope at the top, followed by kings, archbishops, bishops, etc., on down to merchants, serfs and slaves. Below the Earth were nine spheres inhabited by demons, with the lowest and center most sphere inhabited by Lucifer.
This conception of the universe supported the political organization of the world, justified its hierarchical morality and was the dogma taught by the Catholic church, which at the time was in the throes of a titanic struggle against the relatively recently-emerged Protestantism. For a scientist to come along and argue that the universe was not, in actual fact, organized that way threatened to undermine the whole system.
To start with, any assertion that Catholic doctrine was wrong, in any degree, was Protestantism. Around the time Galileo was hauled into the Inquisition, the Catholic/Protestant battle of ideas erupted into the 30 Years War’ which would kill more than 10% of the population of Europe. But it wasn’t just a question of whether religious doctrine was inerrant, Galileo’s scientific observation undermined the social order. The intensely-stratified structure had long been explained by the idea that it was dictated by and deeply analogous to the structure of the universe. This notion of the celestial spheres came from Aristotle and had been firmly and thoroughly integrated into Catholic dogma by Saint Thomas Aquinas, so these ideas were old and the binding between social and universal hierarchies was firmly established. If the universe isn’t a hierarchy of spheres, then there’s no difference between a slave and a king, or so it appeared at the time.
So, Galileo’s scientific observation threatened the entire social and political establishment. The establishment did not respond kindly.
Science has driven a radical reconceptualization of society at other times, of course. Charles Darwin’s bombshell rocked the world as least as much as Galileo’s, and that leads us to The Blank Slate.
The “blank slate” is the notion that human beings are, in deep and important ways, all identical clean slates at birth. It’s a nature vs. nurture argument, and it claims that nurture, not nature, is the sole origin of human behavior. We are who we are and do what we do because of what we’re taught, not because of our biology.
The nature vs nurture question has a whole continuum of possible answers. On one end, we have total biological determinism, which argues that our behavior depends solely on our genetically-determined biology, that culture, education and free will are all irrelevant. On the other end we have the blank slate, which argues that human behavior is completely unrelated to biology, except around the most “impure” bits: eating, excreting, and reproduction — though much of the way we do those is socially determined as well.
This seems, on its face, like a complicated and tricky but purely scientific question. And it seems supremely obvious and logical to me that the answer to the nature vs nurture question is: both. Both nature and nurture contribute in varying amounts and in varying ways. So, it makes sense that we have scientific fields of study — neurology, sociobiology, behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, etc. — that attempt to tease apart the contributions of both to give us a better understanding of human nature.
But… anyone who thinks that delving into the details of human nature, how it works, and how it evolved, isn’t fraught with social, political and moral implications is extraordinarily naive. And indeed in this case, social, political and moral implications, plus a healthy dose of some horrific history arising in part from Darwin’s contribution to this debate, have made it very difficult for scientists to research and publish on the topic without receiving a firestorm of criticism.
The reason is that, like Catholicism and the geocentric worldview, powerful institutional forces have tied themselves and their moral perspective to specific ideas about the answer to the nature/nurture question, and they did it before science had a chance to figure out what reality is (not that science has yet done more than scratch the surface of this deep and complex question). And the idea to which much of the establishment was wedded was the pure nurture, “blank slate” idea.
It’s pretty easy to see why that is, because the blank slate can be the basis for a powerful moral perspective. If all humans are essentially identical when they enter the world, then there can be no moral basis for racism or sexism, or any of the horrors that such ideas have engendered, such as genocide. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, people sought a powerful argument against what they saw as the social implications of Darwinism, and found it in the blank slate, in the idea that we are all the same.
Indeed, we are all the same, in far more ways than we differ. Genetically, humans are a very homogeneous species, far more than others. For example, there is much more genetic diversity in the chimpanzee population than there is in the human population, in spite of the fact that there are many, many more of us.
But increasingly, science is showing us that we also innately differ, that genetics influence much more than morphology: eye color, hair color, skin color, height, the shape of your nose, etc. An individual’s genes can influence (though not dictate) intellectual ability and even behavior. Our social structures are shaped by genetic imperatives, which in turn were shaped by biological evolution, though there’s at least as much memetic evolution involved as well.
Further, it seems clear to me that we can only be better off by understanding more about what makes us tick. The knowledge should enable us to build better social structures which work with human nature, rather than against it. It should make our attempts to address all sorts of social problems more effective and thereby make our lives better. Knowledge is power, and self-knowledge is perhaps the most powerful sort of knowledge.
But what does this do to the moral and political arguments that are made on the basis of a scientific belief in the reality of the blank slate? It destroys those arguments, and the reaction, from both left and right, to the idea that the blank slate may not be correct has been intensely negative. By “negative” I mean blacklisting, personal attacks up to and including death threats, that sort of thing. Being a scientist engaged in these fields has not been a job for the faint-hearted.
On the left, evidence of innate difference destroys the blank slate-based arguments for egalitarianism. Predictably, many on the left have reacted as though discoveries of differences are arguments against egalitarianism and even for racism, eugenics and genocide. Any hint that people might not all be exactly the same is taken to mean that genocide is A-OK, just as any hint that the universe might not be geocentric was taken to mean that slaves were no different from kings.
On the right, especially but not exclusively the religious right, the blank slate coupled with the notion of a soul implies that free will exists, that people are responsible for their own actions. The idea that there are biological differences that result in tendencies toward different behaviors means that perhaps this argument can no longer be used to justify a deep belief in personal responsibility. Any hint that people might not all be exactly the same is taken to mean that people have no souls and are not responsible for their actions.
On both sides, there’s a fallacy at work. Both sides are essentially assuming that if we negate the blank slate theory, we’re also negating the logical consequences of that theory. But logic doesn’t work that way. Destroying an argument doesn’t prove that the conclusion is wrong, it only proves that the argument is wrong. There certainly can be other, correct, arguments that lead to the same conclusion. Or at least a similar one.
We can still value egalitarianism and decry racism, sexism, etc., while admitting that people do have inherent differences. Essentially, we need to separate the moral argument from the scientific one. We can agree that society should do everything possible to ensure that social structures don’t provide unfair advantages, that although outcomes will differ based on intrinsic differences, society should ensure equality of opportunity. Indeed, we can go a step further and agree that where reasonable accommodations of differences can increase equality of outcomes, we should make those accommodations, too. Ideally, we wish to enable all people to realize their fullest potential, whatever that may be, and even to help them extend that potential wherever and however it’s possible.
At the same time, we can still believe in the value of personal responsibility. We’re learning things about how our brains work that show that our view of our decisionmaking process isn’t really correct, but we shouldn’t take that to mean that we don’t make decisions, or that teaching of moral values is irrelevant. We have far too much evidence to the contrary. Nurture clearly does matter, and teaching people to accept responsibility for their own actions is clearly crucial both to enabling them to realize their own potential and to creating a society that we want to live in.
Just as acceptance that geocentrism was wrong ultimately enabled tremendous human progress, so will acceptance that the blank slate is wrong. We just need to accompany the acceptance that people do have inherent differences with the moral notion that it’s okay for us to have differences, and that it’s to our collective advantage to understand and embrace those differences. And, of course, that it is immoral to exploit those differences to the detriment of some, or to try to shape human society or evolution to favor some over others.
John Rawls’ theory of social justice is, I think, the best approach yet devised to decide how we should structure society in the face of the fact that people are different and situations are different. It’s really a sort of elaboration of Kant’s notion of the Categorical Imperative, that we should only act in a given way if we’d like all people to act in that way, though note that this notion also assumes a blank slate. Rawls encourages us to put ourselves in the position of a soul that is going to be born into a human body (note that this argument doesn’t depend on belief in souls; it’s just a useful hypothetical) and which has the opportunity to work in a committee that will define the social “contract” in force during the soul’s lifetime. Crucially, the soul has no way to predict or control what sort of body it will be born into. Gender, social class, genetic heritage; all are effectively random, and it’s as likely to be born into the least-advantaged body as the most.
In that conception, what sort of social organization would you design? Clearly you would not pick one that seriously limited any class of people based on the accident of their birth, because you just might be born as one of those people. You would not pick one with a forced leveling of individual outcomes, either, because you might be born with great potential and that would limit your opportunity and because such structures tend to limit economic growth and thereby harm everyone. Instead, you’d pick something that attempts to balance fairness and opportunity, creating artificial barriers for none. And you’d pick one that exploited all available knowledge to enable maximum opportunity for the fullest self-realization of every individual, not one that restricted the growth of knowledge arbitrarily in an attempt to prop up bad arguments for good ideas.
