[Buddha-l] Re: S. Pinker

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 16:43 -0400, Bshmr at aol.com wrote:

> I started 'No Blank Slate'. Pinker lectures or pontificates. His
> endorsement of Hobbes is over the top -- Hobbes is a pet peeve.

You may have a different version of this book than the one I am reading.
Or perhaps you set the book down prematurely. Pinker hardly endorses
Hobbes. He outlines his views, to be sure, but he also offers a
convincing critique of them. I do not find Pinker's style pontifical. It
is occasionally professorial (for Pinker is a professor), but as someone
who have heard many a professor profess, I must say I find Pinker's
professorial style more readable and engaging than most.

His principal task is to show that 20th century (and the first year or
two of the 21st) academia has been dominated by three ideologies. He
calls these The Blank Slate doctrine (attributable to Locke and Hobbes
but later endorsed by Watson and Skinner and numerous other
psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists), the Ghost in the
Machine doctrine (attributable to Descartes but later endorsed by a
variety of philosophers and psychologists and famously attacked by
Gilbert Ryle and others) and the Noble Savage myth (most famously
endorsed by Rousseau but later taken up by Margaret Mead and a raft of
other romantic anthropologists).

At the risk of oversimplification, the Blank Slate doctrine holds that
ALL our personality and traits and intellectual capacities are
culturally conditioned rather than genetically inherited. The Ghost in
the Machine doctrine holds that consciousness and emotional states are
in no way reducible to physiological events but have a causal history
that makes consciousness a sui generis reality that interacts with but
does not derive from the material world. The Noble Savage myth is a
predisposition to believe that human beings are inherently
"good" (harmonious, co-operative, peaceful, generous etc) and are
spoiled only by such things as social conditioning, legal systems,
Republicans and the like. While Pinker speaks of the Noble Savage
doctrine by abundant references to Western philosophers and
academicians, one could also find numerous references to it in the
writings of some Confucians (most famously Mengzi), some Taoists (Laozi
and Zhuangzi) and a number of East Asian Buddhists.

What I find stimulating about Pinker's treatment is that he presents all
of these perspectives in a way that makes them seem plausible, even
attractive. Then he carefully and convincingly shows why each one is
untenable. He argues that no individual is born a blank slate just
waiting to be conditioned by society; that it is all but impossible to
defend the view that consciousness can have any existence independent of
a neuronal network with billions of cells and trillions of connections;
and that no individual human being and no collection of human beings is,
or can be, uniformly noble, harmonious, benevolent etc.

Pinker's views would be, I think, challenging, in quite a good way, for
people whose thinking has been conditioned by classical Buddhist dogma.
While no Buddhist that I know of has ever endorsed anything quite like
the Blank Slate theory (since that would be entirely inconsistent with
any doctrine of karma), most Buddhists who take rebirth seriously are
committed to some version of the Ghost in the Machine doctrine, and many
East Asian and tantric Buddhists follow some version of the Noble Savage
myth (although it is usually called something more like the notion of
Innate or Aboriginal Enlightenment). So the challenge for a Western
Buddhist might be to imagine a way of presenting Buddhist practices in a
way that does not commit one to holding on to some version of either the
Ghost in the Machine or the Noble Savage (or aboriginally enlightened
everyman).

-- 
Richard Hayes