Yes, it’s true, there are a lot of leftover Blank Slaters around.\u00a0 They live on in the hermetically sealed halls of academia as sort of a light echo of the Marxist supernova.\u00a0 Still, I count myself lucky to have witnessed the smashing of the absurd\u00a0orthodoxy they once imposed on the behavioral sciences.\u00a0 Few people pay any attention to them anymore outside of their own\u00a0echo chambers.\u00a0 That makes it all the more refreshing to see shoots of new life sprouting in the once desiccated wasteland of cultural anthropology.<\/p>\n
Consider, for example, the work of anthropologist Joe Henrich<\/a>, currently a professor of psychology and economics at the University of British Columbia.\u00a0 As a young graduate student in 1995, Henrich landed in Peru and began studying the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live by hunting and small-scale farming.\u00a0 In the process, he turned up some very interesting data on the importance of culture in human affairs.\u00a0 As noted in an article entitled, We Aren’t the World<\/em><\/a>, that appeared recently in the Pacific Standard<\/em>,<\/p>\n While the setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich\u2019s research was not. Rather than practice traditional ethnography, he decided to run a behavioral experiment that had been developed by economists. Henrich used a \u201cgame\u201d\u2014along the lines of the famous prisoner\u2019s dilemma<\/a>\u2014to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery\u2014the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The particular game that Henrich used was the Ultimatum Game<\/a> (click on the hyperlink for a description), and as the data accumulated, it revealed some rather profound behavioral differences between the Machiguenga and the average North American or European.\u00a0 Again quoting from the Pacific Standard article,<\/p>\n To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. \u201cIt just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,\u201d says Henrich. \u201cThey just didn\u2019t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Obviously, “the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring” was not the most parsimonious explanation for this “anomaly.”\u00a0 It was, of course, culture.\u00a0 As Henrich and his collaborators continued their research,<\/p>\n …they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic. The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn\u2019t because they had differently evolved brains.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As they say, read the whole thing.\u00a0 I find stories like this tremendously encouraging.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 In none of Henrich’s papers that I have looked at to date is there any suggestion that anyone who disagrees with him is either a racist or a fascist.\u00a0 In none of them do I detect that he has an ideological ax to grind.\u00a0 In none of them do I detect an implicit rejection of anything smacking of evolutionary psychology.\u00a0 Quite the contrary!\u00a0 In a conversation <\/a>with an interviewer from Edge.org, for example, Henrich explicitly embraces human nature, suggesting that its evolution was driven by culture.\u00a0 For example, from the interview,<\/p>\n Another area that we’ve worked on is social status. Early work on human status just took humans to have a kind of status that stems from non-human status. Chimps, other primates, have dominant status. The assumption for a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status, but if you apply this gene-culture co-evolutionary thinking, the idea that culture is one of the major selection pressures in human evolution, you come up with this idea that there might be a second kind of status. We call this status prestige.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n and,<\/p>\n A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin and to invest in long-term close relationships, but it’s crucial for making a large-scale society run. Corruption, things like hiring your brother-in-law and feathering the nest of your close friends and relatives is what really tears down and makes complex societies not work very well. In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I love that reference to “evolved instincts.”\u00a0 Back in the day the Blank Slaters used to dismiss anyone who used the term “instinct” in connection with humans as a troglodyte.\u00a0 “Instincts” were for insects.\u00a0 Humans\u00a0might (but almost certainly did not) have\u00a0“predispositions.”\u00a0 Politicians and debaters are familiar with the gambit.\u00a0 It’s basically a form of intellectual one-upmanship.\u00a0 Of course, neither then or now was anyone ever confused by the use of the term “instinct.”\u00a0 Everyone knew perfectly well in the heyday of the Blank Slate what those who used it were talking about, just as they do now in the context of Henrich’s interview.\u00a0 The pecksniffery associated with its use was more or less\u00a0equivalent to\u00a0a physicist striking intellectual poses because someone he disagreed with used the term “work” or “power” in a matter different from\u00a0their definitions in\u00a0scientific textbooks.<\/p>\n In short, the work published by Henrich et. al.<\/em> does not appear to conform to some ideological party line in the interest of some future utopia.\u00a0 It’s intent does not appear to be the enabling of pious poses by the authors as “saviors” of indigenous people.\u00a0 One actually suspects they have written it because it is what they have observed and believe to be the truth!<\/p>\n This sort of work is not only very refreshing, but very necessary.\u00a0 Science advances by way of hypotheses, or what some have called “just so stories.”\u00a0 Truth is approached by the relentless criticism and testing of these\u00a0“just so stories.”\u00a0 The\u00a0havoc wrought in the field of\u00a0cultural anthropology and many of the other behavioral sciences by the zealots of failed secular religions\u00a0destroyed their credibility, greatly impairing their usefulness as a source of criticism and testing for the\u00a0hypotheses of evolutionary psychology, which have been proliferating in such abundance of late.\u00a0 Work like this may eventually restore some semblance of balance.\u00a0 It’s high time.\u00a0 There is no form of knowledge more important to our species than self-knowledge.\u00a0 It is not hyperbole to say that our survival may depend on it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n