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Back to the Forum Archives Recently a friend has been throwing the phrase "human nature" at me in our conversations. It seems he was reading a book, which he finally offered to me. It is a book by Steven Pinker which he calls "The Blank Slate." It is hard to argue a case until you have looked at the evidence so I began reading the book. Pinker's justification for this tome is what I see as a bizarre invention of his. Namely, the premise that there exists some kind of taboo in the scientific community against discussions of what he calls human nature. He expands on this to imply that there is also a general cultural taboo against these discussions. He creates a strawman bogyman of mislead or conspiring mossback scientists siding with the old church fathers and sternly forbidding honest investigation. From reading his stuff I get that by human nature he means our inherent behavioral characteristics, if any. I personally know of no taboo against discussing inherent human characteristics. There probably is a reluctance to use nonsense phrases in the scientific community. Let's get clear on this phrase, human nature. It has no precise meaning. Respectable scientists would not use it for that reason. Human nature is another of those toss-off media and barroom phrase used by people to explain things they don't understand. I'm sure you have heard them. "You can't change human nature." "You can't argue with human nature." "That's just human nature." Ad infinitum. It is kind of like the phrase common sense in that regard. Another one, usually used by political fools, is common knowledge. When they want to create a phony impression that their lie is generally accepted they often begin with, "It is common knowledge that ...." Pinker also offers another completely false premise about the intellectual and scientific communities. He claims that these communities hold and cling to a notion of the newborn human mind as a blank slate. I don't know what communities he frequents, but it is not the same ones I have read about. The last time I heard the nonsense notion of tabula rasa was from a redneck at Ford Lanes. That's a bowling alley bar I used to frequent. It was in places like that where Jeff Foxworthy got his start. From Britannica 2003 Ultimate Reference Suite we get this: Notice the word empiricists. In this context it means people who hold the view that experience of the senses is the only source of knowledge. This is not the entire scientific community. It is a small sub group. So far as we know, the first person to make this comparison to a blank slate was Aristotle. That was in the fourth century BC. His followers were not whole hog into this theory. They made the distinction that the potential to convert ideas into knowledge was already present in the mind or soul. Later, John Locke and other empericists also took the position that the mind was like a blank paper. Locke, for one, later backed off a bit from that position. Others have picked up on it over time, but no modern thinkers that I know of take it seriously. This notion has been pretty much debunked by the modern humanist psychological community. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, before they were discredited because of experiments into LSD, did some research into the nature of human behavior at Harvard. This was in the 1959-60 time frame. Their findings were not conclusive. However, we should notice that they were unable to account for much of what we call human behavior just due to environmental factors. We are left to wonder about the influence of heredity and or racial memory. These things must remain as possibilities. We know that there are inherited physical characteristics. The ability to bear children is an inherent characteristic of the human female. Eye color, hair color, tendency to baldness, predisposition to certain diseases, these are all inherent characteristics of humans or subgroups of humans. For example, sickle-cell anemia is unique to the black race. High blood pressure and diabetes are more likely in black people. We can be sure these are all inherited physical characteristics. There is no conspiracy to debunk the idea that man may have inherited behavioral characteristics. That humans have inherited characteristics is not in question and has not been in question for a very long time. One only need observe a baby being born to realize that the blank slate notion is nonsense. The child is born with some very clear behavioral characteristics which he quickly demonstrates. The question has always been, what behavior is inherited and what is conditioned. We have not resolved that and we may never resolve it. The notion of inherent behavioral characteristics in humans beings is kind of like the notion of God. How are we going to prove it? There is no useful way to separate the human from the environment which conditions him. There is no taboo and no conspiracy to block investigation. We proceed with caution for very good reasons. We cannot jump to erroneous conclusions and stigmatize entire groups of people with some kind of label. Investigating human behavior is a very slippery slope. People with ulterior motives have done more than enough damage already. It is the last thing we need from the scientific community. There is not enough evidence to say that some races are intellectually or behaviorally different than others. There is no hard evidence whatsoever to support the notion that heredity plays a predominant role in a person's capabilities. Without such evidence, it incumbent upon us to act as though it does not play a role. We must treat each person and especially each child as though he has full genius potential. There is more than enough evidence to conclude that much of our behavior is acquired cultural behavior. We should not confuse acquired cultural behavior with inherited characteristics or with conditioned behavior. This is another reason why the term human nature is not useful. There is no taboo against it. It is simply a meaningless term. It and variations of it have been used to label, stigmatize, smear, and characterize groups of humans since the beginning of time. We hear the phrases every day. "That's just their nature." "Jews are like that." "That's natural for Niggers." Even respected historians fall into it. "Turks are a naturally warlike people." What we can notice in all of this is that operant conditioning is a fact of life. Ivan Pavlov first discover the phenomena of conditioned reflexes and wrote about it in 1926. His book was appropriately called "Conditioned Reflexes." Later, in 1913, J. B. Watson expanded on Pavlov's discoveries and introduced a school of psychology he called behaviorism. He made some rather exaggerated claims for his new science and behaviorism fell into disrespect because of it. Watson, Skinner, and behaviorism are another set of Pinker's bogymen. He and many others have bad mouthed the science. Why is behaviorism so much maligned? Precisely because it is often effectively used as a tool by unscrupulous people. If we can think of Pavlov as the father of behaviorism, Watson must be the midwife who brought it into life. In that scenario, B. F. Skinner becomes the priest who baptized it and made it legitimate. Following that trail of reasoning, the modern behaviorists become the pimps who sold the infant science into a life of prostitution. Then Madison Avenue and our politicians become the johns who prey on her. Now the infant is despised of men. That is common with humans. We often blame the victim. Skinner revived the science of behaviorism simply by separating it. He did not say the mind does not exist. he made no case for a blank slate theory. He did not deny the inner experience or hereditary influences. What he said was, we cannot measure these things, we cannot measure what goes on inside. He was especially careful to delineate his science from the inner experience. The inner experience is by definition subjective. It cannot be measured or quantified and is out of reach of the methods of behaviorism. Behaviorism is about behaviors which can be observed, measured, quantified, and, to some extent, controlled. These ideas of behaviors and conditioned responses are no longer theories. They are scientific methods which work in application. They are used regularly by political hacks and Madison Avenue. One interesting note is how conditioning ceases to work once the victim is aware of what's being done to him. This is why Madison Avenue must scream louder and louder with less and less effect with each iteration. It speaks well for the future of man and for the idea that we are more than our conditioned responses or the experience of our senses. Let us notice that, as man advanced science, beginning with
the Greeks, we have gone down a lot of false trail. However,
we always come back to the hot trail and we probably always will.
For sure, we need to continue investigating these things, but
we need not create bogymen and use nonsense verbiage to do so.
In the meantime, I will continue to believe that we are part
of an ongoing life force. I am convinced we do have some kind
of connection to each other through this force. Jung called this
connection the collective unconscious. There is more to being
human that behaviorism. We are more than separate individuals,
and victims of conditioning events. We are also evolving. Who
can know what we may become?
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