Categorization enables us to simplify the world sufficiently for us to think and reason about it. However, like the rest of our mental equipment, it isn’t perfect, and can occasionally lead us astray, as when we try to categorize things that are, by their nature, highly individual or original. Our most brilliant thinkers are an example thereof. There are certainly similarities among them, but it can be very misleading to try to label them and fit them into philosophical pigeon holes. To the extent that they are worth reading, they tend to be unique. One cannot understand them or learn anything from them by virtue of the fact that someone includes them in this or that school of thought. It is necessary to read their work.
I ran across a particularly egregious example of the pitfalls of this form of categorization in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. The “blank slate” is the theory that prevailed among psychologists, anthropologists, and other experts in human behavior for much of the 20th century, according to which, for all practical purposes, human behavior and morality are learned, and there is no human nature other than what is acquired via experience and culture. In its modern incarnation the theory was always an absurdity, and belonged more in the realm of ideological narratives such as “scientific” Marxism-Leninism than of science. The “expert” defenders of blank slate orthodoxy in the 60’s and 70’s are better understood as the high priests of a secular religion than as proponents of a scientific hypothesis that turned out to be incorrect. In general, Pinker has done a brilliant job of debunking them and explaining the reasons for their fanatical defense of an idea that had long been palpably ridiculous. His book is well worth reading, although not without its flaws. One of them is the manner in which he lumps some of mankind’s greatest thinkers together with the hidebound ideologues of the “blank slate.”
Pinker shares a vice of the pedants who run philosophy departments in academia, in that he imagines direct chains of thought linking the ideas of highly original and individual thinkers who lived in times utterly different from each other informed by vastly different levels of scientific and general knowledge into neatly arranged systems. Thus, as he tells it, the modern version of the blank slate was invented by John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers. Then Locke begat John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill begat John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, and Watson begat latter day ideologues like Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin. These are strange bedfellows indeed. Let’s consider the case of Mill. Pinker quotes him at length, citing his notion of intuitional philosophy. According to Pinker,
By “intuitional philosophy” Mill was referring to Continental intellectuals who maintained (among other things) that the categories of reason were innate. Mill wanted to attack their theory of psychology at the root to combat what he thought were its conservative social implications. He refined a theory of learning called associationism (previously formulated by Locke) that tried to explain human intelligence without granting it any innate organization. According to this theory, the blank slate is inscribed with sensations, which Locke called “ideas” and modern psychologists call “features.” Ideas that repreatedly appear in succession (such as the redness, roundness, and sweetness of an apple) become associated, so that any one of them can call to mind the others. And similar objects in the world activate overlapping sets of ideas in the mind. For example, after many dogs present themselves to the senses, the features that they share (fur, barking, four legs, and so on) hang together to stand for the category “dog.”
The associationism of Locke and Mill has been recognizable in psychology ever since. It became the core of most models of learning, especially in the approach called behaviorism, which dominated psychology from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Voila! With this trivialization of the ideas of a brilliant thinker, Pinker mashes him into a soup with the likes of Montagu and Lewontin. There’s just one problem. Mill is poles apart from the 60s blank slaters intellectually. Where his mind was open, their minds were nailed down tightly in ideological boxes. Where he was original, they were dogmatists. Where they demonized anyone who disagreed with them, he always admitted the possibility that he could be wrong. Where they were fanatical defenders of the blank slate in its most extreme forms, he freely admitted the possibility of innate predispositions.
How do we know Mill was a brilliant thinker? For one thing, unlike 999 out of 1000 of the “experts” in morality, he, in the words of E. O. Wilson, “laid his cards on the table” when he was discussing it. Unlike so many others who pontificate wisely about morality, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to explain to the rest of us on exactly what basis he presumed to base his claims for the legitimacy of his conclusions regarding why we should do some things but not others. He knew the difference between the subjective nature of morality as it actually exists and morality as a “good-in-itself,” for which he admitted he saw no rational basis. As he put it in Utilitarianism:
The ultimate sanction, therefore, of all morality (external motives apart) being a subjective feeling in our own minds, I see nothing embarrassing to those whose standard is utility, in the question, what is the sanction of that particular standard? We may answer, the same as of all other moral standards – the conscientious feelings of mankind.
Note that by invoking the “conscientious feelings of mankind,” Mill has already distanced himself from the blank slate purists. In the following sentences, he explicitly embraces a theory of human nature of which these moral feelings are a part:
…the feelings exist, a fact in human nature, the reality of which, and the great power with which they are capable of acting on those in whom they have been duly cultivated, are proved by experience. No reason has ever been shown why they may not be cultivated to as great intensity in connection with the utilitarian, as with any other rule of morals.
In other words, Mill’s error was not in rejecting human nature per se, but in assuming that it was more malleable than subsequent research has revealed it to be in reality. Unlike our current “experts” in human behavior, including Pinker, who, having finally rejected the blank slate, remain mesmerized by the chimera of the “good-in-itself,” Mill suffered from no such delusions. In his words,
There is, I am aware, a disposition to believe that a person who sees in moral obligation a transcendental fact, an objective reality belonging to the province of “Things in themselves”, is likely to be more obedient to it than one who believes it to be entirely subjective, having its seat in human consciousness only.
Mill, rejecting transcendental morality himself, notes the obvious fallacy in its claim to superior moral authority:
Does the belief that moral obligation has its seat outside the mind make the feeling of it too strong to be got rid of? The fact is so far otherwise, that all moralists admit and lament the ease wwith which, in the generality of minds, conscience can be silenced or stifled.
As we have already seen in the above, far from embracing the blank slate, Mill states his explicit belief in the existence of human nature. How, then, do Pinker and the rest come up with the idea that he was the great progenitor and godfather of the blank slate. Perhaps from statements like the following:
On the other hand, if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason the less natural.
Note that what Mill is referring to here is not human nature, but “moral feelings,” by which he means emotions, themselves grounded in human nature, in association with an explicit code of moral behavior. Let us allow him to elaborate on this for himself:
…the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it.
But there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment; and this it is which, when once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard, will constitute the strength of the utilitarian morality. This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature.
The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.
The powerful sentiment, and apparently clear perception, which that word (Justice) recalls with a rapidity and certainty resumbling an instinct, have seemed to the majority of thinkers to point to an inherent quality in things; to show that the Just must have an existence in Nature as something absolute – generally distinct from every variety of the Expedient, and, in idea, opposed to it, though (as is commonly acknowledged) never, in the long run, disjoined from it in fact. In the case of this, as of our other moral sentiments, there is no necessary connection between the question of its origin, and that of its binding force. That a feeling is bestowed on us by Nature, does not necessarily legitimate all its promptings. The feeling of justice might be a peculiar instinct, and might yet require, like our other instincts, to be controlled and enlightened by a higher reason.
In other words, far from rejecting innate behavior associated with morality, Mill embraced it. He neither doubted nor rejected the notions of human nature and innate predisposition. It was his misfortune to live just a bit too soon for the full import of Darwin’s great theory to sink in. As a result, he could not imagine the true nature of the moral instincts whose existence he explicitly recognized, nor appreciate the fact that it would be a great deal more difficult than he expected to get them to attach themselves seemlessly to his Utilitarian prescriptions. I firmly believe that, had he been born 20 years later, the truth would have dawned on him.
As for Pinker’s notion that Mill’s ideas were somehow primarily intended to “combat conservative social implications” of the thought of continental intellectuals is similarly far from the truth, and a further bowdlerization of his ideas. He was certainly engaged politically, but with the rather substantial difference from the high priests of the blank slate that his mind was always open to new ideas and new arguments, and he didn’t automatically assume someone was evil and guilty of some terrible political crime simply by virtue of the fact that the person in question disagreed with him.
The best antidote to Pinker’s wooden portrayal of Mill is to read him. As a writer he is clear and easy to understand, the very opposite of the likes of Kant and Hegel. His work is of lasting value today. If he’d known what we now know about morality, he probably would have realized that attempting to link his utilitarian prescriptions to a new moral code wouldn’t work, and would likely be dangerous. On the other hand, the ideas set forth in works like On Liberty and Utilitarianism, divorced of their moralistic trappings, are worth serious consideration as possible means of promoting the happiness and welfare of human beings as individuals in the societies of the future. I vote in favor of giving them a try.
