I recently re-read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and it holds up well. One way to think of the book is as a defense of evolutionary psychology and a survey of its political and philosophical implications. The entire book is worth reading, but here are a few quotes.

p. 143:

Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do. . .

But. . .Individuals are not genetically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of the body except the brain. And though genetic differences betwee races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent. . .

p. 147:

The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive information about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future.)

p. 222-223:

Children don’t have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.

. . .children are equipped with a toolbox of implements for reasoning and learning in particular ways, and those implements must be cleverly recruited to master problems for which they were not designed. . .They cannot learn modern biology until they unlearn intuitive biology, which thinks in terms of vital essences. And they cannot learn evolution until they unlearn intuitive engineering, which attributes design to the intentions of the designer.

I would add that they cannot learn economics until they unlearn intuitive economics, which Pinker suggests is based on what Alan Fiske calls Equality Matching, which is the form of trade that takes place in primitive societies. p. 234:

Fiske contrasts Equality Matching with a very different system called Market Pricing. . .Market Pricing relies on the mathematics of multiplication, division, fractions, and large numbers, together with the social institutions of money, credit, written contracts, and complex divisions of labor. Market Pricing is absent in hunter-gatherer societies, and we know it play no role in our evolutionary history because it relies on technologies like writing, money, and formal mathematics, which appeared only recently. Even today the exchanges carried out by Market Pricing may involve causal chains that are impossible for any individual to grasp in full.

On p. 276, Pinker offers a long list of things that have become moral issues recently, including “big box” stores, oil drilling, Columbus Day, and IQ tests. He writes,

Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste.

It seems to me that when people adopt the psychology of moralization they become intolerant of deviant behavior. I think that this is a big challenge for libertarians these days.

In a chapter on politics, Pinker adapts Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Pinker re-labels them the Tragic Vision vs. Utopian Vision. p. 287:

In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. . .

In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world.

On p. 290, he quotes Michael Oakeshott on the side of the Tragic Vision. “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.” I believe that the quote comes from Rationalism in Politics and other essays.

p. 293-294:

The ideas from evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. . .

My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. . .Among them I would include the following:

• The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance
• The limited scope of communal sharing in groups. . .
• The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurobiological mechanisms that underlie it.
• The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.
• The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems. . .
• The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themsleves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.
• The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.