Steven Pinker’s performative paean to physicalism
I recently started listening to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on audiobook, after Arnold Kling referenced it positively in his Substack. I had heard good things about it and Steven Pinker in the past and thought I’d give it a try. I got about 10% through, really not even out of the background material when I had to give it up. From what I understand the main point of the book is valuable - a defense of intrinsic human nature, and an explanation of why rationalist social engineering schemes like communism tend to fail so miserably. They try to reimagine humanity without accounting for our stubborn and intrinsic nature. From the intro, it seems like the book is a rebuttal to philosophers and psychologists like Rousseau and the behaviorists of the 20th century. Pinker says there is something intrinsic within humanity that can’t just be overwritten by force, by society, by training, or by social engineering in a quest for utopia. I think he has a positive spin on it, that by understa