Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/steven-pinker-hobbes-pangloss/
Interesting essay! I have a few points. First, I dislike Pinker, too. I started reading his _How the Mind Works_ awhile back. I got past his idiotic self-defense against critics from the left (including S.J. Gould, if I remember correctly) and got to his description of "how the mind works," which was simply silly. If people are like computers, Dr. Pinker, why can't computers think? Second, I started reading his _the Blank Slate_ book (this time while at the bookstore, not spending any money) and discovered that the title of the book is based on either Pinker's dishonesty or his inability to read. He elides the most important parts of his long passage from J.J Rousseau. Despite a long academic tradition that says otherwise, the latter did not praise the "noble savage." In fact, people in Rousseau's "state of nature" are totally inhuman (as we know humanity). Among other things, they lack personal names! (along with houses and clothes.) In many ways, Rousseau's description of the "state of nature" is a critique or even a parody of previous theorizing along those lines, especially Locke's vision. Locke illegitimately brought private property rights into the "state of nature" while Hobbes assumed that it was like the worst phases of the English Civil War, as he interpreted it. In other ways, his discussion of the "state of nature" is about describing what distinguishes people from the beasts (what's called "philosophical anthropology"). The key thing is the human capacity for self-improvement (which is different from "perfectibility," something else that Rousseau is wrongly said to have believed in). Rousseau's ideal was not the "savage" but the person who lives in a small city or town (such as Geneva, where he grew up), much like the way the ancient Athenian thinkers and their many followers valued the polis. Rousseau is sometimes seen as a critic of civilization. But he wasn't against it as much as he saw it (as he knew it) as going too far. And his view of humanity was not that we are naturally altruistic but instead that we follow two principles "prior to reason," i.e., (a) self-preservation and improvement of our individual welfare and (b) a natural aversion to seeing other beings, especially beings like ourselves, suffer or perish. Given these principles, it's impossible for people to be "blank slates." What Rousseau did believe -- as I read him -- is that people are influenced by the societies and cultures we live in. But that doesn't say that everything "written on" our slates comes from society or culture. In today's terms, I'd guess you'd say that some of the stuff on our slates -- such as the two principles -- comes from genetics. (All of this is based on Rousseau's _Discourse on the Origin of Inequality_, this last being from the Preface.) Third, in Pinker's story (as Louis summarizes it), "primitive" (meaning preliterate?) society seems to be same as the Hobbesian war of each against all. This is nonsense, as Louis points out. Individual people lived in tightly-bound bands, clans, and tribes, not in Hobbesian chaos of individual vs. individual. (Reading the _Leviathan_, I imagined Hobbes huddling alone in his house, holding a gun.) They were part of seamless webs of kinship relations and obligations, etc. If there were wars, it was almost always between groups and only when conditions of scarcity were dire, other powers invaded (etc.) Fourth, whatever one thinks of Jared Diamond, I think it's inaccurate to call him a "sociobiologist" even though he does apply Darwinian theory at times (see his _Why Is Sex Fun?_). His big book (_Guns, Germs, and Steel_) isn't sociobiology, nor is his lesser big book (_Collapse_). Sociobiology involves genetic determinism. Usually it involves Dawkins stuff about the genetic basis for altruism, yadda yadda. If I had to label these two books, I'd call them historical sociology or anthropology. Maybe not very good, since Diamond was never trained in either of those fields and has never transcended the "rich country" mindset, but they don't involve genetic determinism. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
