The Blank Slate (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One of the persistent fears I’ve had when writing is that I’m merely stating the obvious. However, I’ve learned that what is obvious to me is by no means so to others and so I tell myself I’m not just engaging in a pointless exercise. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I hope Ethical Enterprise may become a forum for robust discussion, but the point of view I begin with is that when attempting to live well, work well and get the most out of coexistence, we must first look to what kind of creatures we are. In other words, it is only by understanding human nature that we can gain insight into the conditions of human motivation, cooperation and productivity. Could anything be more obvious? And yet, so much recent scholarship and conventional wisdom has been dedicated to denying that proposition.
Scholar Steven Pinker wrote The Blank Slate (2003) to call attention to what he called “the modern denial of human nature. The title indicates one of three influential myths or metaphors he tackles in the work: the idea of “tabula rasa,” from John Locke, that people are born without innate ideas. The second myth is of the “noble savage” — an idea inspired by European colonists’ contact with indigenous people of other continents and prominent in the thought of Rousseau, that sees greater moral purity of people in a more “natural” state. The third myth Pinker adduces is the “ghost in the machine,” exemplified by the mind/body dualism of Descartes. These three metaphors underlie a tremendous repository of error among intellectuals and the general public they influence, Pinker asserts:
The denial of human nature has spread beyond the academy and has led to a disconnect between intellectual life and common sense. I first had the idea of writing this book when I started a collection of astonishing claims from pundits and social critics about the malleability of the human psyche: that little boys quarrel and fight because they are encouraged to do so; that children enjoy sweets because their parents use them as a reward for eating vegetables; that teenagers get the idea to compete in looks and fashion from spelling bees and academic prizes; that men think the goal of sex is an orgasm because of the way they were socialized. The problem is not just that these claims are preposterous but that the writers did not acknowledge they were saying things that common sense might call into question. This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety. That mentality cannot coexist with an esteem for the truth, and I believe it is responsible for some of the unfortunate trends in recent intellectual life. One trend is a stated contempt among many scholars for the concepts of truth, logic and evidence. Another is a hypocritical divide between what intellectuals say in public and what they really believe. A third is the inevitable reaction: a culture of “politically incorrect” shock jocks who revel in anti-intellectualism and bigotry, emboldened by the knowledge that the intellectual establishment has forfeited claims to credibility in the eyes of the public.
Pinker’s view rang true to me. When I was at college in the 1990s, the great theme in the philosophy department was the “failure of the Enlightenment project.” This was explained as the error of educated European males of the 18th century to think that their reason provided them with a “view from nowhere.” There is no such view, the argument proceeded, because every view is culturally conditioned. Every view is a view from somewhere in particular and not universally correct for everywhere. Thus the philosophers of the Enlightenment labored under a colossal error, as would anyone making comparable claim for a privileged view. Truth itself is merely a cultural construct, went the argument, and no culture has grounds for the superiority of its view over any other.
Like any error, this one owes its force to being at least partly true: there’s no denying that every view is culturally conditioned, and the degree to which culture colors our notion of what is real is practically unfathomable. The power of that insight masks the fundamental incoherence of the relativist position: it fails to meet its own criterion; it asks us to believe that there is no privileged view — except the view that there is no privileged view.
The “Enlightenment failure” critique also has appeal as a criticism not of the Enlightenment as a whole, but as a critique of Rationalism, which mistakes thought as consisting in pure reason and overestimates reason’s power to apprehend the subtlety of the universe. But the Enlightenment also featured robust critics of rationalism, such as David Hume and Edmund Burke.
However in the face of these objections, it’s still fair to ask how any particular view can be privileged. How can any view escape the particularity of culture? In answer, I would reply first that the culturally relativist position tends to look at culture as monolithic and impermeable: east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet. In fact, culture is eminently permeable. There are many ideas shared across cultures. On the other hand, it’s also true there are also systems of belief and conduct that are incompatible with others and thus resist interpenetration. Cultural relativists insist that we must respect these disagreements. And no doubt often we should. But it is strange that they enjoin us to judge never, while they always judge our judging; they are anti-colonialist in their tolerance but imperialistically intolerant at any efforts to compare the merits of a given view. Why should we not be able to discriminate between two equally intelligible views that might have more or less to recommend them relative to each other?
Absolute truth about ethical matters, along with others, may be beyond our reach. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do a better or worse job of apprehending the world as it really is, or that there can be no rational basis for judging one ethical practice better than another.
It’s incontrovertible that every view is conditioned by culture, but it is also conditioned by human biology. However widely we diverge in the ways we understand the universe, we understand it as humans. In the first place, dialogue is possible because of a shared human capacity for observing the world and reasoning. In the work of Thomas Reid (1710 –1796), founder of the philosophical Scottish School of Common Sense, this sensus communis is the shared epistemological capacity that makes any philosophical discourse possible. Immanuel Kant later affirmed this notion of common sense as,
“…the idea of a sense shared, i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account, in our thought, of everyone else’s way of presenting, in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general”
So we have the ability to talk about ethical matters based on a universal human capacity of understanding and speech, and we can observe the efficacy of moral practices in terms of human thriving. Sam Harris advocated such an approach in his 2011 book “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.” The title is a metaphor for the possibility of their being many peaks and valleys in human performance rather than a single peak representing the only right way of conduct. People live in different physical and cultural environments, and within those constraints they may do a better or worse job of managing the tension between the group and the individual or between individuals, viewed from a universal perspective based in human nature.
I’m not convinced that science can determine human values, but it can at least describe the effects of different moral practices on the human organism. Some practices may fail to support a higher level of social organization; others may achieve order but while being unnecessarily counterproductive to individual development.
