The Realist Vision
By • 2/12/07 |
Previous articles on The Inverted World have established that the age we live in suffers from two fundamental illusions: race denial and the “whites as cancer” myth. In this article, we will begin to investigate the reasons for these illusions. Why does the West refuse to accept the evidence for the reality of racial differences? And why does it regard the white race as the cause of the world’s evil, when in fact it is the race of compassion and accomplishment?
To get a grasp on these questions, we must first recognize that race denial does not exist in isolation. Our age’s hostility to the idea of innate racial differences is part of its broader hostility to the very idea of innateness. The Lawrence Summers case made clear that American cultural elites are almost as horrified by the idea of innate sex differences as innate race differences. MIT psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2002 book The Blank Slate
Since the 1960s, practioners of the sub-discipline of the human sciences known originally as “sociobiology” and later as “evolutionary psychology,” such as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, David Buss, and Steven Pinker himself, have been arguing for the existence of an innate human nature. Evolutionary psychology is a complex and wide-ranging field that will be covered in detail in future articles. In rough summary, however, evolutionary psychologists believe that human nature evolved to enable individuals to produce as many offspring as possible in the pre-state environments in which humans have spent the majority of their history. Evolutionary psychology is substantially consistent with a common-sensical, tradititional view of human nature. Its proponents believe that the sexes are naturally different: men are more prone than women to all forms of competitive behavior, whereas women are more interested in child-rearing. Men also evolved to seek out more sexual partners than women since promiscuity enables the former, but not the latter, to produce more children1. Evolutionary psychologists argue that warfare and other forms of violence are innate human behaviors that become activated under the right conditions; the fact that violence is rife in primitive societies puts this claim on strong ground2.
Above all, in this view, man is an egoistic creature. Although they do account for man’s genuine altruism, evolutionary psychologists believe man’s instincts evolved to assure the individual’s own survival and those of his offspring first and foremost. This fundamental necessity inevitably leads to competition among men.
Although evolutionary psychologists focus on human universals rather than on racial differences, the mainstream academy and society at large have heaped on them the same kind of abuse that race realist scholars have suffered, as Pinker makes clear in a chapter aptly called “Fear and Loathing.” His compilation of insults against sociobiologists include the familiar accusations of Nazism, flagrant misrepresentations, and low blows3.
Pinker traces the roots of the hostility to the idea of innateness to the Enlightenment. One of the key ideas that emerged in this period was the Blank Slate theory of mind: generally attributed to the 17th century philosopher John Locke, this view posits that humans are born without any innate ideas or behaviors. Rather, it is experience alone that forms their character. As Locke said:
Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? … Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.
Locke’s theory of the Blank Slate is one of the cornerstones of modernity and is essential to his political philosophy, which is the origin of the liberal democracies that govern the West today. People who come into the world as Blank Slates are not subject to an order decreed by God that requires they obey kings. Nor is there any essential difference between aristocrats and commoners: all come into the world equally blank and unformed. The Blank Slate leaves people free to choose their own governance based on the lessons of experience.
If freedom was one promise of the Blank Slate, perfectibility was another. For if we are all born Blank Slates, everything that we dislike about our nature can be corrected. All the disruptive forces of life—greed, lust for power, violence—, none of these are intrinsic to our nature. Rather, they are taught to us by experience.
Consequently, the Enlightenment also gave rise to the idea that it was modern societies that inculcated egoism, competition, and violence into a nature that had originally been free of them. Originally, man had been a “Noble Savage” who lived peacefully and happily in a state of nature. The figure with whom the ideas of the Noble Savage and the state of nature are most identified is Rousseau, who wrote that “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau postulated a time before the birth of modern society when men lived in harmony.
The example of savages, most of whom have been found in this state, seems to prove that men were meant to remain in it, that it is the real youth of the world, and that all subsequent advances have been apparently so many steps towards the perfection of the individual, but in reality towards the decrepitude of the species.
For Pinker, the theory of the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage is at the root of the modern age. It is fundamental to Marxism, for example. For Marx, there was no innate human nature; rather, it was society that instilled a nature in human beings. As he wrote, “All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.”4 The modern humanities and most of the social sciences are heavily influenced by Marx and preach the same social determinism. The founders of anthropology believed in the Blank Slate. Ashley Montagu said:
Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings.5
Margaret Mead said: “Human nature is the rawest, most undifferentiated of raw material.”6
Today’s pop psychology, which blames our unattractive behaviors on childhood trauma, is another product of the Blank Slate/Noble Savage worldview.
Pinker gives so many juicy examples of the absurdities to which the Blank Slate/Noble Savage worldview drives people that I must quote several. Hillary Clinton attributed her husband’s infidelities to childhood trauma:
He was so young, barely 4, when he was scarred by abuse that he can’t even take it out and look at it. There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother. A psychologist once told me that for a boy being in the middle of two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one.7
When Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, journalist Alfie Kohn blamed American culture: “We have a cultural addiction to competition in this country. We’re taught in classrooms and playing fields that other people are obstacles to our success.”8
The headline of a 1998 Boston Globe article breathlessly announced, “Girls Appear to Be Closing Aggression Gap with Boys.” The body of the article revealed, however, that the gap was not going to go away soon: girls committed murder at one-tenth the rate of boys.9
Another Boston Globe article could almost have been penned by Rousseau:
I would submit that the world native Americans knew was more stable, happier, and less barbaric than our society today… . there were no employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown, crime nearly non-existent. What warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter. While there were hard times, life was, for the most part stable and predictable. 10
And so forth. The writer of this article would be surprised to learn that Chippewa Indians in the early 19th century were more than five times more likely to die from inter-tribal warfare than 20th-century Germans and Russians from the World Wars.11
Its promise of freedom and perfectibility makes the Blank Slate/Noble Savage worldview highly attractive. Pinker aptly entitles it the “Utopian Vision,”12 as its holders believe that by transforming social institutions, we can achieve heaven on earth. In suggesting human freedom and perfectibility are limited, evolutionary psychology and race realism strike at the core of the Utopian Vision. If our personalities and abilities are largely decided by our genetic makeup before we are even born, we have little ability to choose who we are. Furthermore, if violence and selfishness are innate human tendencies, changing social institutions will not get rid of them. Nor will social engineering turn us all into intelligent and high-minded model citizens; nor will it make the races equal in abilities and behavior.
Pinker calls innatist views of human nature the “Tragic Vision,” but this name is excessively gloomy and negative. A better name is the “Realist Vision.” Partisans of the Realist Vision do not wish to spread woe and sorrow among their fellow men; rather, they aim to bring society into its maturity. Just as recognizing his limitations is an essential part of the individual’s transition from adolescence to adulthood, so a society as a whole has not achieved maturity until it recognizes the limitations on its ability to shape human nature.
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- See David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1994. ↑
- See Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999). ↑
- Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
- Quoted in Pinker, p. 155. ↑
- Quoted in Pinker, p. 24. ↑
- Quoted in Pinker, p. 25. ↑
- Quoted in Pinker, p. 179. ↑
- Quoted in Pinker, p. 309. ↑
- Quoted in Pinker, p. 339. ↑
- Quoted in Pinker, p. 12. ↑
- Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 89. ↑
- Pinker, 287ff. ↑
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It is certainly true that the concept of race is anathema to marxists, as the linked article below, and the quote from it, show.
Its author has not done his homework. The arguments he uses are old enough to have whiskers on them.
The joke is that these same socialists insist that the term ‘class’ has a precise meaning, despite the many different definitions of it which are floating around.
<snip>
“Race, then, is not a scientific concept. Even those who see it as the linchpin of their politics cannot offer manageable definitions of it or workable guidelines as to how particular people should be categorised. The fact is that we are all human beings, with broadly similar abilities and characteristics, distinguished in various superficial ways such as eye colour and blood group, and divided now along the destructive lines of class and nationality. In the future Socialist commonwealth, questions of race and ancestry will be a thing of the past, like money, passports and national anthems.”
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/feb07/page6.html
By on 2/13/07 at 12:24 pm
“Some people just have an incapacity to see the world outside of their own, largely untested, opinions. Its rather pathetic.” —MensaRefugee
I think it was Plato who said: (paraphrasing)
“The masses of people are incurably ignorant.”
By on 2/13/07 at 12:51 pm
“For Pinker, the theory of the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage is at the root of the modern age. It is fundamental to Marxism, for example. For Marx, there was no innate human nature; rather, it was society that instilled a nature in human beings.”
Some of Marx’s writings would shock the PC-crowd. His ‘On the Jewish Question’ is regarded by many as an anti-semitic tract, and in his private correspondence he referred to his opponent Lasalle as “A Jewish N*****”. He had this to say about him “It is perfectly obvious from the shape of his head and the way that his hair grows that he is descended from the negroes who joined Moses on the journey out of Egypt, unless perhaps his mother or grandmother had relations with a n*****.” (Quoted by Leopold Schwarzkild in “The Red Prussian”).
It makes one wonder what Marx really thought about race.
By on 2/14/07 at 6:28 am
IMO, the “Blank Slate” is bunk! Humans are born with a savage nature; it’s encoded in our DNA.
It is the legal framework that has been created, formulated, and practiced by civilized societies that function to constrain our savage nature. A legal structure - be it religious or secular - serves as the basis/underpinnings of a functional society. Without a coherent set of legal and moral restraints, innate human nature will inevitably take-over and barbarism would soon be the norm.
Rousseau had it backwards!
PS, Great article Realist.
By on 2/15/07 at 9:10 am
MensaRefugee,
Pinker days he derived his account of the Utopian and Tragic Visions from the Sowell book you mention.
By on 2/15/07 at 8:43 pm
Really? Very interesting..
I never finished a Pinker book, tried reading the Blank Slate and “How the Mind Works” but he writes in such a meandering way, eternally pandering to the politically correct that it gets irritating for other kinds of people.
By on 2/16/07 at 6:28 pm
“In suggesting human freedom and perfectibility are limited, evolutionary psychology and race realism strike at the core of the Utopian Vision. If our personalities and abilities are largely decided by our genetic makeup before we are even born, we have little ability to choose who we are. Furthermore, if violence and selfishness are innate human tendencies, changing social institutions will not get rid of them. Nor will social engineering turn us all into intelligent and high-minded model citizens; nor will it make the races equal in abilities and behavior.”
A very pertinent point!
In fact, much of recent human history shows that fostering an “elite,” determined to make life “better” through social engineering can have consequences and body counts of terrifying proportions. One could begin to hold, that freedoms and political power always at odds with each other regardless of legal protections designed to “balance” this competition out, are of little value when humans face environmental stressors that tap into the more base of innate survival instincts. When the veneer of civilization is challenged by repressing these instincts to the point of critical mass, orgies of violence and destruction tend to be the result; this is particularly true, when the perceived repressive “old elite order” is swept from power by a new one drawn from the frenzied masses who feel repressed or betrayed. Hence, the experiences of Czarist Russia and Weimar Germany at the hands of the Bolsheviks and Nazis respectively.
If one holds that the interaction between innate genetic personality/psychological characteristics and environmental factors occurs at a 50/50 balance, then this does become more understandable. Reductionism from either end of the spectrum, simply cannot explain why humans act (be it as groups or individuals) from situation to situation. This holds true for example, right down to such basic relationships as friendship or romantic pairings. In either such groupings, the individuals involved will react within both inherent temperamental and learned operant styles; this even holds true for individuals who are highly disordered, such as borderlines or anti-socials. Indeed, this is dependent on such inherent characteristics as intelligence, or aggressiveness versus passivity, but the situation or environment will influence these overtime.
By this, we see why someone highly driven but of average intelligence (IQ 100) might go very far, while someone of superior intelligence (IQ 130 or above) might do nothing productive with their lives if highly passive and circumstances foster this inertia. To an extent, this does work with groups of people; hence we see why for example, Westernized European based societies are more dynamic than Westernized Asian societies in some respects, and self-destructively reckless in others. Simply compare the attitudes toward technological innovation and application versus immigration policies, of both groups.
In the end, failure to recognize (or repress) this relationship holds the potential for disaster, particularly when it leads to a quest for societal perfection beholden to ideological tenets based on these false or fraudulent assumptions. Or put another way, this is how the USSR and Third Reich came about early to mid century, and the “New” South Africa has materialized and the generalized morbidity of Multiculturalism has infected all the major nations of the West more recently!
By on 2/17/07 at 12:04 pm
To Bud White, regarding:
“Brilliant insights! Please keep posting here.”
Just wanted to say thanks and also to apologize, for being so late in my response to you!
This was an excellent article and it did play to some of my educational/professional strengths. So I will take your compliment as intended, but also with a touch of humility in noting this point.
In time, I hope to be posting here at IW with a greater frequency than I do now!
Or put another way, I am not going anywhere and in fact should become more regular in time!
All the best,
John PM!
By on 2/22/07 at 7:11 pm
Excellent article. I was familiar with Pinker, but not to the extent he was helping our fellow race realists make the case. This is good to know.
By on 2/27/07 at 3:03 pm
Bud said:
“Without a coherent set of legal and moral restraints, innate human nature will inevitably take-over and barbarism would soon be the norm.”
This might be true, in fact it is true with other races such as blacks, but it is not true with whites.
Whites have a natural moral restraint going back as far as history…the laws came after. Yes whites have done barbaric things…but moral codes and laws came about from their nature, not the other way around. Laws and moral codes did not make white people the way they are. Contrast this with the average black of Sub-Saharan Africa where no amount of laws, or moral codes will provide any restraint from their barbarism.
Barbarism is not and has never been “the norm” amongst even the most early white cultures…but it has been and still is amongst Negro Africans and any even casual observation proves this. In other words, barbarism in white culture is the exception, and even in ancient white history it stands out. Whereas barbarism among blacks is the rule and long lasting peace, advanced civilization and culture is the exception…if you can find any example of it at all…there is no example of it this century in Africa nor anywhere else blacks exist, and that is with trillions spent to placate their relentless demands for “equality” with white people. They will never have equality with whites and “what whites have” because they are not white.
This is nature and whites have been struggling with the nature of blacks for many decades now trying to placate the naturally impatient African Negro, trying to understand their minds and quick to violence natures, giving them welfare to “keep them happy”…because, just as they threatened to do in the 60’s unless Johnson pushed through Great Society welfare programs. Whites who protested giving billions of their hard earned dollars to millions of ignorant, shiftless, lazy Negroes were given a not so veiled ultimatum from so called black “civil rights” hustlers “give us you r money now in taxes and keep us st bay, or deal with our crime and violence if you don’t.” Of course blacks got the welfare and they still commit the vast majority of violent crimes…but it would be some multiple of what it is now, something on the level of Zimbabwe, if they weren’t given welfare. Of course we are increasing their breeding by doing this, so it has been no good for whites and their future. No other people have been so extorted as average middle class whites that have to put up with blacks because of the egalitarian laws of created by whites who never have to deal with the everyday nightmare of living in close proximity to large numbers of blacks. The wealthy white liberals who pushed for and helped these laws get passed don’t have to deal with the everyday consequences of the laws they support politically or socially…if they did, the laws would be changed overnight.
But…now, all whites are feeling the effects and consequences of living in close proximity to blacks…there are fewer and fewer places for whites to hide now…our backs are against the wall
In the African Negro temperament, savagery and barbarism is the common everyday rule and long lasting peace and humane behavior is the exception. Almost a polar opposite. It might be we are talking about degree’s and amounts, but I don’t think it’s that simple. There is simply an innate, deeply encoded, common behavior that is easily observable in whites. In blacks that common behavior is a tendency for rash, hostility and quick to anger temperaments. This is true no matter where blacks are in the world, as the same behaviors are common among blacks whether they be in Americas inner cities or The Congo.
By on 9/28/08 at 5:02 am
Thomas Sowell’s book “A conflict of Visions” covers the same ground from a humanistic perspective. This rift between those who think all that is good is stable (and therefore one can put ones effort into improving the world) and others who believe the present world is one of trade offs (the happiness we have today is in precarious balance and should not be messed with without good reason) is a rift that is centuries old.
Among the earlier statesmen and philosophers, the Blank Slaters were epitomized by Condorcet, and the Conservatives by Edmund Burke.
Condorcet was an avid supporter of the French Revolution, even when the new French regime threw him in prison for a long long time.
Some people just have an incapacity to see the world outside of their own, largely untested, opinions. Its rather pathetic.
By MensaRefugee on 2/13/07 at 10:15 am