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 understanding and working with human nature rather than against it, we can bring out the best in us and create a better future. (Or something like that - I could be wrong because I didn’t get very far.)

The book starts off for some reason with a lengthy exposition of Pinker’s metaphysical worldview. There is no God, no Creator. Evolution is the origin of life. Christianity is just mythology plus the systematic oppression of women. There is no soul - no “ghost in the machine.” Our mind, perception, consciousness, and sense of self are just the result of neurons moving chemicals around, the changing of physical states within our brain. Pinker is a skillful writer and The Blank Slate contains the most forceful and persuasive description of the physicalist worldview that I have encountered. Pinker calls it reductive materialism and somewhat comically claims he is not quite sure what is meant by “reductive” other than some kind of slur. Pinker doesn’t get into the counter-arguments, such as that evolution really doesn’t have an explanation for the origins of life and that many people (myself included) have had religious experiences that aren’t easily explained by reductive materialism. 

Pinker might argue that religious experience is just a chemical quirk of the brain’s wiring, perhaps a mutation selected for because of religion’s tendency to bring people together evolutionarily adaptive ways, such as leading to success in pre-modern warfare and increasing family size. Speaking of which, I had made it through Pinker’s explanation of his physicalist worldview in hopes of getting to the real meat of his social sciences arguments, but at the end of his materialist intro he indicated that he was now going to talk about evolutionary psychology. I couldn’t take it anymore and turned off the audiobook, switching to William McNeil’s The Pursuit of Power. I have written before of my distaste for evolutionary psychology, a flexible pseudoscience useful for its ability to provide the skilled storyteller with a ready-made explanation for any proposition in the social sciences.

I don’t want to get into the weeds on Pinker’s arguments for physicalism, but I do want to give my thoughts on a higher-order question: why did Pinker need to start The Blank Slate with an in-your-face blast of atheism, including a ludicrously shallow dismissal of Christianity? From his introduction, it seems like Rousseau and the behaviorists get the brunt of the substance of Pinker’s arguments, and they are all also opponents of Christianity. Atheism itself doesn’t provide a supporting argument for Pinker’s thesis. Rather, I think it is the opposite. Pinker is worried that his advocacy for an innate human nature will be seen as right-leaning, and maybe even aligned with the religious right, which of course would be academic suicide in the 21st century. Hence the need to prove to his center-left secular audience that he is on their team by means of random put-downs of Christianity and ardent paeans to reductive materialism before getting to the real meat of his arguments. It’s sad and annoying and I just couldn’t take it anymore, no matter how much I might or might not have agreed with Pinker’s real purpose in The Blank Slate. 

That and evolutionary psychology. I have to think that in 100 years people will look back and shake their heads that smart people like Pinker used to take it seriously.