Garden of Daisies

Some Books from the Break (on Human Nature)

January 9th, 2008

I just finished Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.  I had high expectations, I’ll admit.  It was recommended to me, in my second year of university, during a heated debate.  A few people were trying to dash my naive hopes for progress in humanity by flouting about ideas to do with self-interest and greed etc. etc. and I was grasping at trying to communicate that while I could appreciate those aspects of our humanity I felt that we had evolved the ability to understand these parts of ourselves, their pros and cons, and the possibility of growing away from the damaging ones…or something.  And the one individual present who was sympathetic to my underdeveloped ideas pointed me toward this book as a place where these ideas were explored. 

Sure enough The Blank Slate is a powerful argument for the reality of Human Nature, and the role it plays in the dark side of what people are capable of, but Pinker makes it clear that he points these things out not to justify them but to encourage us to learn about them so that we can better prevent crime and inhumane acts etc.  It’s good.  It just often left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  It was almost as if while Pinker kept claiming to feel that the exposition of his ideas would mean progress, the connections couldn’t be followed through in his writing.  Perhaps because despite all the work he pulled together he was working exclusively through a Western philosophical framework and that seemed to limit his ability to build on human universals he was uncovering.*  

All-in-all worth the read though. Another thing I read was The Embodied Mind and it was really wonderful.  It was difficult to get through at times, simply because of the density of the material, but left me with a fantastic taste in my mouth.  It too was deeply concerned with elements of human nature but was more invested in the experience of rising above it (through Buddhist-esque* meditation etc).   Which brings me to a quotation I found in the Blank Slate from The African Queen in which Katherine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”   

*There are rough allusions here to something which could be taken as simply deferring to Eastern philosophy with no justification aside from its being ‘exotic’, but that is not what I mean to be doing.  There is a sense in which I feel like incorporating some Eastern philosophy will be necessary to dig us out of the moralistic and spiritual hole that secular science has been digging us into.  Particularly research in Human Nature is revealing more and more about the impermanence of human life and that our notion of a ’self’ emerges from activity in the body.   While someone like Pinker may not mean this as a spiritually defeating idea, for alot of Westerners it has to be–Judaeo-Christianity simply hasn’t prepared us for anything like it.  In order to deal with it looking to traditions like Buddhism which deal actively with the impermanence and illusion of the self may be deeply helpful.  

Entry Filed under: Spirituality/Religion, Cognitive Science, On My Bookshelf, Psychology