{"id":4436,"date":"2015-07-10T17:25:31","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T22:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4436"},"modified":"2015-07-10T17:25:31","modified_gmt":"2015-07-10T22:25:31","slug":"historical-artifacts-of-the-blank-slate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2015\/07\/10\/human-nature\/historical-artifacts-of-the-blank-slate\/","title":{"rendered":"Historical Artifacts of the Blank Slate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/James_Boswell\">James Boswell<\/a>, who wrote the famous biography of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Samuel_Johnson\">Dr. Johnson<\/a>, recounts in his <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/Boswell_s_London_Journal_1762_1763.html?id=C6dd3DSM2FYC\">journal<\/a> a conversation with a man who trusted nothing about history except the mere occurrence of\u00a0such widely witnessed and\u00a0notorious events as great battles.\u00a0 Similar thoughts have probably occurred to anyone who has lived through historical events and was paying attention.\u00a0 I have lived through several in my own lifetime that I interpret a great deal differently than the versions that appear in the standard histories.\u00a0 In other cases there are profound differences of opinion among the writers of history themselves.\u00a0 The most striking example in my own experience is the Blank Slate affair.\u00a0 In my opinion it was the greatest scientific debacle ever, and yet little has been written about it.\u00a0 The best known historical account is <a href=\"http:\/\/stevenpinker.com\/\">Steven Pinker&#8217;s<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Blank_Slate\"><em> The Blank Slate<\/em><\/a>, a deeply flawed bowdlerization of reality.\u00a0 There are many possible reasons for the lack of a reliable account of what happened.\u00a0 Perhaps the academics one would normally consider most qualified to write on the subject are too ashamed to talk about it.\u00a0 It was, after all, a remarkable failure of the &#8220;science&#8221; they represent, and which they\u00a0loudly insist everyone else must trust and defer to.\u00a0\u00a0An honest history must also reveal\u00a0the role their &#8220;tribe&#8221; played in actively promoting and bitterly\u00a0defending an absurd fantasy for a period of more than half a century.\u00a0 Fortunately, a great deal of source material exists that\u00a0isn&#8217;t quite in step with the &#8220;official&#8221; version of the affair, which tends to gloss over these inconvenient truths.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Official&#8221; versions of the history of the Blank Slate, including Pinker&#8217;s,\u00a0typically run\u00a0more or less as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A wave of progressive ideology swept the world in the early 20th century, characterized by rapidly changing attitudes about race and sex.\u00a0 Accounts of behavior based on innate biological traits that were perceived as immutable stood in the way of the progressive ideal of equality.\u00a0 As a result, theories of behavior were reformulated to eliminate whatever could be construed as condoning\u00a0racism and sexism.\u00a0 Innate explanations were dropped in favor of purely cultural accounts of human behavior.\u00a0 The result was the Blank Slate.<\/li>\n<li>The Blank Slate orthodoxy controlled the behavioral sciences until the 1970&#8217;s.\u00a0 Only then did cracks begin to appear in the fa\u00e7ade.\u00a0 However, nothing of any real significance happened until 1975, when <a href=\"http:\/\/eowilsonfoundation.org\/\">E. O. Wilson<\/a> published <em><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/Sociobiology.html?id=Q9ofvKZAmpEC\">Sociobiology<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Only then did the debate begin in earnest.<\/li>\n<li>Wilson and his supporters were subjected to furious attacks, motivated more by politics than science.\u00a0 Gradually, however, they gained the upper hand.\u00a0 As Pinker put it, &#8220;&#8230;sociobiology did not, as (Marshall) Sahlins\u00a0had predicted, turn out to be a passing fad.\u00a0 The title of Alcock&#8217;s 2001 book <em>The Triumph of Sociobiology<\/em> says it all.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>No doubt this version of &#8220;history&#8221; is comforting to academic practitioners of the behavioral sciences.\u00a0 It elevates one of their own, E. O. Wilson, into the role of the knight in shining armor who slew the Blank Slate dragon.\u00a0 It includes a happy ending, in which science was recued and put back\u00a0on track by the scientists themselves.\u00a0 It is also complete nonsense.\u00a0 Everything of any significance about human nature in the\u00a0meager treatment it received in <em>Sociobiology<\/em>, which was devoted mainly to Wilson&#8217;s study of ants and other fauna,\u00a0as well as in his\u00a0<em>On Human Nature<\/em>, published three years later, is completely derivative\u00a0from works that had appeared through the 1960&#8217;s.\u00a0 They were written by the likes of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, Desmond Morris, Lionel Tiger, Hans Hass, and, most prominently of all, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertardrey.com\/\">Robert Ardrey<\/a>.\u00a0 Their books were widely read and extremely influential.\u00a0 As a result, by the end of the 60&#8217;s, the Blank Slate was a dead man walking.\u00a0 By the beginning of the 1970&#8217;s the only question remaining was how long it would take the dead man to fall.\u00a0 In fact, it was a slow tumble.\u00a0 The grip of the Blank Slate in academia and much of the public media wasn&#8217;t finally broken until the turn of the century, and one still hears its death rattle occasionally even today.\u00a0 However, there\u00a0can be\u00a0no real question about who was actually responsible for its demise.\u00a0 The relevant historical source material is there in abundance for anyone who takes the trouble to look for it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve written about Pinker&#8217;s specious reasons for dismissing the earlier work of Lorenz and Ardrey in an <a href=\"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/09\/30\/good-and-evil\/pinker-ardrey-lorenz-and-the-blank-slate\/\">earlier post<\/a>.\u00a0 There can be little doubt that he knew the truth, but simply chose to ignore it.\u00a0 For example, he mentions reading <em>Man and Aggression<\/em>, a collection of Blank Slater essays edited by Ashley Montagu and aimed mostly at Ardrey and Lorenz.\u00a0 Published in 1968, it is one of the more important pieces of historical source material on the subject.\u00a0 One of the essayists Geoffrey Gorer, psychologist, former patron of George Orwell, and prominent public intellectual at the time, wrote as follows:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Almost without question, Robert Ardrey is today the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature, and the most skilled populariser of the findings of paleo-anthropologists, ethologists, and biological experimenters\u2026 He is a skilled writer, with a lively command of English prose, a pretty turn of wit, and a dramatist\u2019s skill in exposition; he is also a good reporter, with the reporter\u2019s eye for the significant detail, the striking visual impression. He has taken a look at nearly all the current work in Africa of paleo-anthropologists and ethologists; time and again, a couple of his paragraphs can make vivid a site, such as the Olduvai Gorge, which has been merely a name in a hundred articles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>\u2026he does not distort his authorities beyond what is inevitable in any selection and condensation\u2026 even those familiar with most of the literature are likely to find descriptions of research they had hitherto ignored, particularly in The Territorial Imperative, with its bibliography of 245 items.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As noted above, there&#8217;s no need to take Gorer&#8217;s word for it.\u00a0 The historical evidence is there.\u00a0 Ardrey&#8217;s\u00a0significance and the derivative nature of Wilson&#8217;s\u00a0comments on human nature\u00a0was certainly no secret to the rest of the Blank Slaters.\u00a0 In their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/archives\/1975\/nov\/13\/against-sociobiology\/\">mobbing attack on <em>Sociobiology<\/em><\/a> in the New York Review of Books they wrote,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>From Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase \u201csurvival of the fittest,\u201d to Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and now E. O. Wilson, we have seen proclaimed the primacy of natural selection in determining most important characteristics of human behavior.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In fact, the lay public was far ahead of these &#8220;scientists.&#8221;\u00a0 Ardrey&#8217;s work may not have seen the light of day in the academic journals, but it had been prominently featured throughout the 60&#8217;s and early 70&#8217;s\u00a0in such popular\u00a0magazines as <em>Life<\/em> and <em>Time<\/em>, in many of the more &#8220;high brow&#8221; venues, such as the <em>Saturday Review<\/em>, and even in the &#8220;respectable&#8221; articles that lent redeeming social value to <em>Playboy<\/em> and\u00a0<em>Penthouse<\/em>.\u00a0 By the time <em>Sociobiology<\/em> finally appeared, the Blank Slaters were largely engaged in a drawn out\u00a0process of bamboozling themselves, with a predictable conclusion.<\/p>\n<p>A typical example of these numerous\u00a0&#8220;Ardrey tracks&#8221; appeared in the February 1972 issue of <em>Encounter<\/em> magazine.\u00a0 Entitled &#8220;4-Dimensional Man,&#8221; it was concerned not with group selection, Pinker&#8217;s bogus excuse for dismissing the entire corpus of Ardrey&#8217;s work, not with &#8220;hydraulic theory,&#8221; which he used to drop Konrad Lorenz down the memory hole, but with the common theme of all Ardrey&#8217;s work; the reality of human nature.\u00a0 The &#8220;4th dimension&#8221; Ardrey referred to was, of course, mankind&#8217;s evolutionary past.\u00a0 As he put it,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For some decades now, certain areas of our most popular sciences have dedicated their efforts to the proposition that man is three-dimensional, owing nothing of his behavior, his thoughts, his actions to anything but present circumstances of his environment, as experienced within his lifetime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ardrey was hardly unaware of the tactics of\u00a0bullying and vilification the Blank Slaters used to silence their enemies.\u00a0 He had been one of their prominent targets long before Wilson was similarly &#8220;martyred.&#8221;\u00a0 Noting the obsolescence of the term &#8220;instinct,&#8221; when applied to human beings and other higher animals he wrote,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00a0Instinct &#8211; inherited behavioral patterns perfected in our evolutionary experience &#8211; enter as a factor in the human equation, or they do not.\u00a0 The environmentalist insists they do not and (in the best tradition once suggested by Maslow) is not above reinforcing his arguments with the insinuation or direct observation that those who disagree with him are reactionaries, Social Darwinists, fascists, and probably racists to boot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He continues with a pithy description of the Blank Slate orthodoxy:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The environmentalists have the advantage of widespread academic control, widespread influence over educated thought and organs of opinion, but the disadvantage of sometimes stunning displays of ignorance concerning new facts of biological life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>and notes that, by that time, they already had an intimation of their coming demise:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Something is panicking the three-dimensionals, and how well I know!\u00a0 In their defenses against the intruder they resort too frequently to self-righteousness, to unprofessional misquotation, and (as I have earlier suggested) to the upside-down McCarthyism of charging right-wing political guilt.\u00a0 I find it difficult to believe that I have dedicated the last fifteen years of a quite profitable writing career to the fascinations of evolution simply to prove somebody&#8217;s political leanings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Things haven&#8217;t changed much, have they?\u00a0 The same, hackneyed tactics still feature prominently in the arsenal of latter day &#8220;progressives.&#8221;\u00a0 Today they serve mainly as an admission of intellectual sterility.\u00a0 Ardrey&#8217;s article ends on a prophetic note:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The controversy will not end for a long, long while.\u00a0 But the fatal pessimism of the environmentalist rests without doubt on the failure of changes in environment to alter significantly the nature of man.\u00a0 And the optimism of the evolutionists rests on man the inheritor, the four-dimensional animal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ardrey was not optimistic because he believed in a changeless status quo enforced by rigid\u00a0human instincts.\u00a0 Rather, he hoped that by &#8220;comprehending ourselves&#8221; we would enable\u00a0&#8220;new illuminations of human complexities and civilization&#8217;s paradoxes,&#8221; adding that no such human progress would be possible,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;if we regard the baby born as a fresh blackboard, on which any Skinnerite may sign his name.\u00a0 He is a being born with many a propensity for evil or for good, inheritances maladaptive or overwhelmingly adaptive to present circumstance.\u00a0 But we must first try to understand him.\u00a0 That surely is the intellectual objective of developing evolutionary thought.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>All this was written long before the appearance of<em> Sociobiology<\/em>, and yet today, even as thinly disguised versions of his hypotheses of the hunting transition\u00a0from ape to man, human territoriality,\u00a0ingroup-outgroup behavior, etc.,\u00a0turn up ever more frequently in the academic literature as\u00a0&#8220;original work,&#8221; Ardrey is treated as a pariah.\u00a0 After all, he was a &#8220;mere playwright,&#8221; and\u00a0how much could\u00a0such playwrights as Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw, not to mention Ardrey,\u00a0possibly know about human nature? \u00a0I am no disciple of Ardrey&#8217;s, nor do I consider him infallible.\u00a0 Indeed, unlike so many others, he was quick to admit his own mistakes.\u00a0 I do, however, feel a certain sense of unease when I see lies and half-truths tarted up as &#8220;history.&#8221;\u00a0 I will therefore continue to insist that Ardrey was the\u00a0most influential and effective opponent of the Blank Slate.\u00a0 The historical source material demonstrating that truth is there in abundance.\u00a0 Perhaps some day a historian of more than common integrity will collect it and write a history of the Blank Slate debacle the way it was, instead of the way academic apologists wish it had been.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/travel-2005.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-4440\" src=\"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/travel-2005.jpg\" alt=\"travel-2005\" width=\"524\" height=\"700\" srcset=\"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/travel-2005.jpg 524w, https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/travel-2005-225x300.jpg 225w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 524px) 85vw, 524px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"twttr_buttons\"><div class=\"twttr_twitter\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?text=Historical+Artifacts+of+the+Blank+Slate\" class=\"twitter-share-button\" data-via=\"\" data-hashtags=\"\"  data-size=\"default\" data-url=\"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2015\/07\/10\/human-nature\/historical-artifacts-of-the-blank-slate\/\"  data-related=\"\" target=\"_blank\">Tweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>James Boswell, who wrote the famous biography of Dr. Johnson, recounts in his journal a conversation with a man who trusted nothing about history except the mere occurrence of\u00a0such widely witnessed and\u00a0notorious events as great battles.\u00a0 Similar thoughts have probably occurred to anyone who has lived through historical events and was paying attention.\u00a0 I have &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2015\/07\/10\/human-nature\/historical-artifacts-of-the-blank-slate\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Historical Artifacts of the Blank Slate&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46,101,181,105,28,135,198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amity-enmity-complex","category-anthropology","category-blank-slate","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-human-nature","category-ingroups-and-outgroups","category-robert-ardrey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-19y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4436"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4441,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions\/4441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}