It seems to me that Dr. Pinker can certainly be called a materialist, at least in the sense that he is vigorously (I would even suggest zealously) committed to physical, observable, recordable, replicable mechanisms as his means of explanation for human nature, and by extension, behavior. However, in another sense, Dr. Pinker is startlingly neglectful of another sort of materialism, namely the conditions under which people live, die, think about killing each other, and indeed sometimes do kill each other. I believe this is a mistake, and will use three small examples that I hope will show that while starting with the genes is fine, Dr. Pinker does not yet have the full answer. I believe this matters, precisely because the vast majority of efforts to improve the lives of the poor and oppressed have revolved around improving the material aspects of people's lives and not using CRISPR to nip and tuck genetic code to get rid of that obnoxious arthritis or pesky homicidal rage.
Addition is a lying cheat?
For starters, let us grant a totalizing evolutionary view of human nature as a starting place. Pinker points--and quite persuasively--that there appear to be innate structures in the brain that kick start our guileless selves into being. Among these is a “number sense that allows us to grasp quantity of number” and presumably then gives rise to the ability to do addition, multiplication, and if you're both fortunate and slightly masochistic, multivariable vector calculus. But does this number sense ever break down? If so, might there be other ways in which internal neurological structures betray us?
In George Orwell’s timeless, if melodramatic parable about the silk fisted seductions of totalitarianism, 1984, the culmination of protagonist Winston’s confinement in the Ministry of Love is intense physical and psychological torture during which his grasp of reality becomes more and more tenuous, until he begins to lose track of what numbers mean and eventually capitulates to the tyrannically inane mantra, 2+2=5. Does this literary allusion prove anything? No, it does not. However, I would like use it to suggest that extreme duress can and does have its way with us, and is not the consequence of biological determinism.
If social engineering is a waste of time, why does it work?
I hold that what we might call “cultural conditioning” is the very small, but continuous erosion of the biological determinism proposed by Pinker by means of societally induced duress of one kind or another. I will venture to offer one further point of interest, as relates to his point about social engineering.
Pinker offers the very enticing view of a world free from the kinds of totalitarian social engineering that he holds the blank slate implicitly encourages. However, it seems to me that if we really were utterly creatures of biology, then social engineering, totalitarian or not, wouldn’t work. So why does it seem to be disturbingly effective? Or at the very least, why do the people who try it think it works. To harp upon a well worn example, why do so many SS officers attest to the ways in which they were brainwashed in Hitler Youth, trained and molded to believe in the cult of Der Fuhrer absolutely. It shouldn't be discounted that these officers had significant legal reasons to claim they were brainwashed, but not for nothing does the FBI call exit interviews with people who have survived Doomsday Cults “deprogramming”
Systemic Racism and Co.
Stepping back even further from the extreme case of 1984, there are many features of modern life that make a case for something other than our genes influencing behavior. Dr. Pinker talks about how we are evolutionarily hotwired to like our packets of sugar and grease, but says nothing about how contrived social structures like food deserts foist the sugar and grease upon poor citizens in inner cities across America. Moreover, systemic ghettoization of black and hispanic neighborhoods, often limiting access to education, transportation, and job prospects have a meaningful impact on societal and personal outcomes in virtually every study on the topic. The social engineering may be neither explicitly totalitarian, nor even entirely purposeful (though this is a subject of rich debate), but again, its effects seem undeniable. We are more than the sum of our genes.
I think Pinker is on to something, and perhaps biological determinism is the place we start when we are nothing but recently born pink and brown monkeys. However, the material world has its way with us in the end. Human constructions have their way with us in the end. If this is true, then changing the material conditions of our world (hopefully in the direction of greater egalitarianism) can change things for the better. Call me naive (I’ve been called worse), but count me on the side of Latour in the Science Wars.
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