The Blank Slate, The Noble Savage And The Ghost In The Machine
Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate has caused a shift in the idea of human condition. It is safe to say that Pinker is unconvinced that there has been such a drastic intellectual transformation. Human nature, he says, is 'a modern taboo'. It’s the thing 'that distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse and our day-to-day lives. Not only are 'claims about human nature less dangerous than many people think', Pinker argues, but 'the denial of human nature can be more dangerous than people think.'
The 'modern denial of human nature', he argues, can be explained from his three ideas - the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine. According to the Blank Slate perspective, human infants are born with empty heads and …show more content…
To say someone is responsible for their actions is to say that they possess a function in the brain system that can respond to events deal with punishment. To invoke the 'self', Pinker suggests, is to reintroduce the ghost into the machine. We cannot point to a 'self' in the way that we can point to a neuron. But that does not mean that neurons have a reality, and selves do.
“The new sciences of human nature”, Pinker calls it. Science has revealed family ties, community, and the broadness of violence, dominance and ethnocentrism. It has shown human nature to be fixed, human beings to be flawed and human politics held back the human psyche. Pinker suggests, we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss. The best we can do is to trade off one cost against another. Evolutionary psychology has certainly thrown light on many aspects of human behavior. But it has not revealed humans to be ethnocentric or selfish, nor are that crime and poverty aspects of the human condition. It is not the science of human nature that has undermined utopian visions. Some can argue it is the political demise of utopianism. In The Blank Slate Pinker discusses need for the human condition to not be one over the other but we need both nature and nurture to fully understand the human
The 'modern denial of human nature', he argues, can be explained from his three ideas - the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine. According to the Blank Slate perspective, human infants are born with empty heads and …show more content…
To say someone is responsible for their actions is to say that they possess a function in the brain system that can respond to events deal with punishment. To invoke the 'self', Pinker suggests, is to reintroduce the ghost into the machine. We cannot point to a 'self' in the way that we can point to a neuron. But that does not mean that neurons have a reality, and selves do.
“The new sciences of human nature”, Pinker calls it. Science has revealed family ties, community, and the broadness of violence, dominance and ethnocentrism. It has shown human nature to be fixed, human beings to be flawed and human politics held back the human psyche. Pinker suggests, we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss. The best we can do is to trade off one cost against another. Evolutionary psychology has certainly thrown light on many aspects of human behavior. But it has not revealed humans to be ethnocentric or selfish, nor are that crime and poverty aspects of the human condition. It is not the science of human nature that has undermined utopian visions. Some can argue it is the political demise of utopianism. In The Blank Slate Pinker discusses need for the human condition to not be one over the other but we need both nature and nurture to fully understand the human