Steven Pinker on the Arts and Parenting

"The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty." - Barnett Newman

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Steven Pinker chalks it up to the blank slate (TED Talk)

"Look at what is common to the world's cultures, you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world's 6000 odd cultures. The anthropologist Donald Brown has tried to list them all and they range from aesthetics, affection and age statuses all the way down to wielding weapons, whether attempts to control the color white and a worldview.

... [On genetics and mental wiring] My favorite example is of a pair of twins, one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany. The other was brought up a Jewish family in Trinidad. When they walked into the lab in Minnesota they were wearing identical Navy blue shirts with epaulettes. Both of them like to dip buttered toast in coffee. Both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists. Both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after. And both of them like to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump.

Now, the story might seem too good to be true but when you administer batteries of psychological tests you get the same results: namely identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities...

There're a number of political reasons why have people found it congenial. The foremost is that if we're blank slates by definition we are equal because zero equals zero equals zero. But if something is written on the slate some people could have more than others and according to this line of thinking that would justify discrimination and inequality. Another political fear of human nature is that if we were blank slates we can perfect mankind. The age-old dream of the perfectability of our species through social engineering. Whereas if we're born with certain instincts perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence.

Well in the book I argue that these are in fact non sequiturs. And just to make a long story short first of all. The concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness. And so when Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal", he did not mean "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are clones".

[Ed: For some reason, I keep remembering this line as "all men are born the same". Keywords: "all men are born equal", "the same"]

Rather that all men are equal in terms of their rights and that every person ought to be treated as an individual and not prejudged by the statistics of particular groups that they may belong to.

Also, even if we weren't born with certain ignoble motives they don't automatically lead to ignoble behavior. That is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts and some of them can inhibit others.

... There were certain risks in taking on these subjects. When I wrote a first draft of the book I circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments and here's some of the reactions that I got.

"Better get a security camera for your house"
"Don't expect to get any more awards, job offers or positions in scholarly societies."
"Tell your publisher not to list hometown in your author bio"
"Do you have tenure?"

... What has happened to people who've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences. There are many cases, some of which I talk about in the book, of people who have been slandered, called Nazis, physically assaulted, threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings.

And you never know when you're going to come across one of these booby traps. My favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left handers. Who published some data showing that left handers are, on average more susceptible to disease, more prone to accidents, and have a shorter lifespan... Well, pretty soon they were barraged with enraged letters, death threats, ban on the topic in a number of scientific journals coming from irate left handers and their advocates. And they were literally afraid to open their mail because the venom and vituperation...

What I wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the eighty-odd reviews... See if you can guess which two topics, I would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90% of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews.

It's not violence and war. It's not race, it's not gender. It's not Marxist, it's not Nazism. They are the Arts. And parenting.

... Start with the arts. I know that among the long list of human universals that I presented few slides ago are Art.

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we consider the arts. Visual arts, decoration of surfaces and bodies appears to be a human universal. Telling stories, music, dance, poetry - found in all cultures and many of the motifs and themes that give us pleasure in the arts can be found and all human societies.

A preference for symmetrical forms, the use of repetition and variation. Even things as specific as the fact that in poetry all over the world you have lines that are very close to three seconds long separated by pauses.

Now, on the other hand, in the second half of the twentieth century the arts are frequently said to be in decline... Well in fact the arts are not in decline... by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent. By any economic standard the the demand for art of all forms is skyrocketing... The only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres.

One of them is in elite art since the 1930s. Say the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras where most of the repertory is before 1930. Or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums.

In literary criticism and analysis probably forty or fifty years ago literary critics were kind of a cultural hero. Now they're kind of a national joke.

... Well, here's a a diagnosis. They didn't ask me that by their own admission they need all the help that that they can. And I would like to suggest that it's not a coincidence that this supposed decline in the elite arts and criticism occurred in the same point in history in which there was a widespread denial of human nature.

A famous quotation can be found, if you look at the web you can find it in literally scores of English course syllabuses. "In or about December 1910, Human Nature changed." A paraphrase of a quote by Virginia Woolf... It's used now as a way of saying that all of the forms of appreciation of art that were in place for centuries or millennia, in the twentieth century were discarded.

That beauty and pleasure in art, probably a human universal, were began to be considered saccharine or kitsch or commercial. Barnett Newman had a famous quote that "The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty", which is considered bourgeois or tacky.

Indeed in movements of modernism and post-modernism, there was visual art without beauty, literature without narrative and plot, poetry without meter and rhyme, architecture and planning without ornament, human scale, green space, natural light. Music without melody and rhythm, and criticism without clarity, attention to aesthetics and insight into the human condition.

Let me just give you an example to back up that last statement. Here there're one of the most famous literary English scholars of our time is the Berkeley professor Judith Butler.

And here is that an example of one of her analyses.

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects"

Well, you get the idea. This is one sentence...

Well, the argument in the Blank Slate is that elite art and criticism in the twentieth century, although not the arts in general, have disdained beauty, pleasure, clarity, insight and style. People are staying away from elite art and criticism.

... We have all been subject to the advice of the parenting-industrial complex... Well here's some sobering facts about parenting. Most studies of parenting on which this advice is based are useless.

They're useless because they don't control for heritability. They measure some correlation between what parents do, how the children turn out and assume a causal relation - that the parenting shaped the child.

Parents who talk a lot to their kids have kids who grew up to be articulate. Parents who spank their kids have kids who grew up to be violent... Very few of them control for the possibility that parents pass on genes for, that increase the chances a child will be articulate or violent and so on. Until the studies are being done with adoptive children, who provide an environment but not genes to their kids, we have no way of knowing knowing whether these conclusions are valid.

The genetically controlled studies have some sobering results. Identical twins or any siblings who are separated at birth are no less similar than if they had grown up together. Everything that happens to you in a given home over all of those years appears to leave no permanent stamp on your personality or intellect.

A complementary finding from a completely different methodology is that adopted siblings reared together - the mirror image of identical twins reared apart - they share their parents, their home, their neighborhood. Don't share their genes, end up not similar at all. 2 different bodies of research with a similar finding.

What it suggests is that children are shaped not by their parents over the long run, but in part, only in part, by their genes. In part by their culture - the culture of the country at large and the children's own culture, namely their peer group.

And to a very large extent - larger than most people are prepared to acknowledge - by chance. Chance events in the wiring of the brain in utero. Chance events as you live your life... I think that the sciences of human nature: behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, are going to increasingly, in the years to come, upset various dogmas, careers and deeply held political belief systems, and that presents us with a choice.

The choice is whether certain facts about humans or topics are to be considered taboos, forbidden knowledge, things where we shouldn't go there because no good can come from it, or to explore them honestly.

I have my own answer to that question which comes from a great artist of the nineteenth century Anton Chekhov, who said "Man will become better when you show him what he is like." And I think that the argument can't be put any more eloquently than that."


(The above is corrected from the Everyzing version)

I just discovered that the podcast is shortened from the original, hurr hurr.


Addendum: "death of beauty"