Natural Science Forum / Biology / Biology / April 2008

Post-modernism and romanticism were major movements and excellent
places to start a critique on theories of human nature and instinct.
Whatever boundries that confined Pinker to begin with these two
movements is probably not for sales mainly. But please point out what
you specifically agree or disagree with. If you have read the entire
book it seems like you would see that he covers about everyone in his
"dogmas-R-us" approach; Marx to Frued to....

- Post/Modernism is Based on False Theory of Human Psychology, Beauty
is Dirty Word

ONCE WE RECOGNIZE what modernism and postmodernism have done to the
elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall
become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of
human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most
vaunted ability-stripping away pretense-to themselves. And they take
all the fun out of art!

Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in
perceptual experience is a learned social construction.

Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical
structure of the world. It also colors our visual experience with
universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer
calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as
young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain
one. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones,
and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating
narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.

When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate
them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not
take a stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of
art at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with
them and what effect they hope to have on us (as we saw in Chapter
12). Of course, people can be taken in by a clever liar, but they are
not trapped in a false world of words and images and in need of rescue
by postmodernist artists.

Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge
another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for
status, especially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the
psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its
appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the
dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things,
entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance
is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial
turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has
documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation,
and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is
fully exploited. Attention then turns to the style itself, at which
point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this
cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes
from the desire for attention on the part of the artists.

...In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became
desperate because of the economies of mass production and the
affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios,
records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary
people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself
as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their
ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The
problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it
is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer
prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it
had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As
Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the
point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out
of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be
beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could
have beautiful things.

One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the
senses. On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and
lightweight...elite art could no longer be appreciated without a
support team of critics and theoreticians.

...Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other
works exist only to illustrate the text...the theory upstaged the
subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself.
Postmodernist scholars...distrust the demand for "linguistic
transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world more
radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-
market commodity...

As with so many ideas in social science, the centrality of language is
taken to extremes in deconstructionism, postmodernism, and other
relativist doctrines. The writings of oracles like Jacques Derrida are
studded with such aphorisms as "No escape from language is possible,"
"Text is self-referential," "Language is power," and "There is nothing
outside the text." Similarly, J. Hillis Miller wrote that "language is
not an instrument or tool in man's hands, a submissive means of
thinking. Language rather thinks man and his 'world'... if he will
allow it to do so." The prize for the most extreme statement must go
to Roland Barthes, who declared, "Man does not exist prior to
language, either as a species or as an individual."

The ancestry of these ideas is said to be from linguistics, though
most linguists believe that deconstructionists have gone off the deep
end. The original observation was that many words are defined in part
by their relationship to other words. For example, he is defined by
its contrast with I, you, they, and she, and big makes sense only as
the opposite of little. And if you look up words in a dictionary, they
are defined by other words, which are defined by still other words,
until the circle is completed when you get back to a definition
containing the original word. Therefore, say the deconstructionists,
language is a self-contained system in which words have no necessary
connection to reality. And since language is an arbitrary instrument,
not a medium for communicating thoughts or describing reality, the
powerful can use it to manipulate and oppress others. This leads in
turn to an agitation for linguistic reforms: neologisms like co or na
that would serve as gender-neutral pronouns, a succession of new terms
for racial minorities, and a rejection of standards of clarity in
criticism and scholarship (for if language is no longer a window onto
thought but the very stuff of thought, the metaphor of "clarity" no
longer applies).

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...

Inborn human desires are a nuisance to those with Utopian and
totalitarian visions, which often amount to the same thing. What
stands in the way of most Utopias is not pestilence and drought but
human behavior. So Utopians have to think of ways to control behavior,
and when propaganda doesn't do the trick, more emphatic techniques are
tried. The Marxist Utopians of the twentieth century, as we saw,
needed a tabula rasa free of selfishness and family ties and used
totalitarian measures to scrape the tablets clean or start over with
new ones. As Bertolt Brecht said of the East German government, "If
the people did not do better the government would dismiss the people
and elect a new one." Political philosophers and historians who have
recently "reflected on our ravaged century," such as Isaiah Berlin,
Kenneth Minogue, Robert Conquest, Jonathan Glover, James Scott, and
Daniel Chirot, have pointed to Utopian dreams as a major cause of
twentieth-century nightmares. For that matter, Wordsworth's
revolutionary France, "thrilled with joy" while human nature was "born
again," turned out to be no picnic either.

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." In Le Corbusier's
Utopia, planners would begin with a "clean tablecloth" (sound
familiar?) and mastermind all buildings and public spaces to service
"human needs." They had a minimalist conception of those needs: each
person was thought to require a fixed amount of air, heat, light, and
space for eating, sleeping, working, commuting, and a few other
activities. It did not occur to Le Corbusier that intimate gatherings
with family and friends might be a human need, so he proposed large
communal dining halls to replace kitchens. Also missing from his list
of needs was the desire to socialize in small groups in public places,
so he planned his cities around freeways, large buildings, and vast
open plazas, with no squares or crossroads in which people would feel
comfortable hanging out to schmooze. Homes were "machines for living,"
free of archaic inefficiencies like gardens and ornamentation, and
thus were efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing
projects.

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. Authoritarian High Modernism also led
to the "urban renewal" projects in many American cities during the
1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises,
and empty windswept plazas...

The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://alumweb.mit.edu/opendoor/200205/pinker.shtml

http://www.meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=pinker&topic=goodwogod

- The Noble Savage - Romanticism

THE BLANK SLATE is often accompanied by two other doctrines, which
have also attained a sacred status in modern intellectual life. My
label for the first of the two is commonly attributed to the
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), though it really comes
from John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, published in 1670:

I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The concept of the noble savage was inspired by European colonists'
discovery of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and (later)
Oceania. It captures the belief that humans in their natural state are
selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed,
anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization. In 1755
Rousseau wrote:

So many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel,
and requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed; whereas
nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state, when
placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and
the pernicious good sense of civilized man....

The more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we shall be that
it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and
that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident,
which, for the public good, should never have happened. The example of
the savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems to
confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this
condition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior
improvements have been so many steps, in appearance towards the
perfection of individuals, but in fact towards the decrepitness of the
species.

First among the authors that Rousseau had in mind was Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), who had presented a very different picture:

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common
power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is
called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man....

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit
thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no
navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no
commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things
as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no
account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst
of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of
man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes believed that people could escape this hellish existence only
by surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He
called it a leviathan, the Hebrew word for a monstrous sea creature
subdued by Yahweh at the dawn of creation.

Much depends on which of these armchair anthropologists is correct. If
people are noble savages, then a domineering leviathan is unnecessary.
Indeed, by forcing people to delineate private property for the state
to recognize-property they might otherwise have shared-the leviathan
creates the very greed and belligerence it is designed to control. A
happy society would be our birthright; all we would need to do is
eliminate the institutional barriers that keep it from us. If, in
contrast, people are naturally nasty, the best we can hope for is an
uneasy truce enforced by police and the army. The two theories have
implications for private life as well. Every child is born a savage
(that is, uncivilized), so if savages are naturally gentle,
childrearing is a matter of providing children with opportunities to
develop their potential, and evil people are products of a society
that has corrupted them. If savages are naturally nasty, then
childrearing is an arena of discipline and conflict, and evil people
are showing a dark side that was insufficiently tamed.

The actual writings of philosophers are always more complex than the
theories they come to symbolize in the textbooks. In reality, the
views of Hobbes and Rousseau are not that far apart. Rousseau, like
Hobbes, believed (incorrectly) that savages were solitary, without
ties of love or loyalty, and without any industry or art (and he may
have out-Hobbes'd Hobbes in claiming they did not even have language).
Hobbes envisioned-indeed, literally drew-his leviathan as an
embodiment of the collective will, which was vested in it by a kind of
social contract; Rousseau's most famous work is called The Social
Contract, and in it he calls on people to subordinate their interests
to a "general will."

Nonetheless, Hobbes and Rousseau limned contrasting pictures of the
state of nature that have inspired thinkers in the centuries since. No
one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble
Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect
for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural
childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of
authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the
understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our
institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.

The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://alumweb.mit.edu/opendoor/200205/pinker.shtml

come on sociobiologists, you thoughts you could assault the
humanities, as if rousseau were the only one to have done tabula
rasa... come on chaps prove me wrong, say you've lived 50 years with
seinfeld's mom and consider detective monk the very paradigm of
enlightenment. come on, ejaculate all that pinker panky bluff.