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An F in Humanities for Steven Pinker

There's an interesting but sad review in the 11/25/02 New Yorker of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Sad because I enjoyed Pinker's lay introduction to modern linguistics, The Language Instinct, but apparently when he tries to apply his thinking to broader domains he reveals himself not only as a philistine but as a sloppy scholar.

Pinker's book is ostensibly a cognitive scientist's refutation of certain errors which have plagued much of western thought since the Enlightenment. Says reviewer Louis Menand,

Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it intereferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will).

Fair enough; a soundly scientific look at these ideas would be a welcome tonic. But unless Menand is doing a hatchet job, Pinker's book isn't it. Instead it is a crotchety collection of pet modern and postmodern peeves bolstered by allegedly universal arguments from the "new science" of evolutionary psychology, and too often marred by a culturally tone-deaf misunderstanding of the thoughts and works he is trying to comment on.

Not only does Pinker egregiously misquote Virginia Woolf and fall for an ignorant right-wing interpretation of pomo whipping boy art like "Piss Christ" and Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary", but he fails to detect the irony in Komar & Melamid's satirical project of using polling to come up with various versions of the perfect painting. Apparently Pinker is utterly serious in his effort to show how natural selection produces a preference for landscapes with deer, greenery, water and George Washington. (I suppose Darwin is also responsible for the perfect country and western song's requirement for references to Mama, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk.)

Which brings up another question: if Pinker is this far off base about the psychology of art, is his linguistics much better? I don't know, but I do recall his disdain (mentioned in The Language Instinct and repeated in a talk I heard him give at Rice) for particular curiosities of particular languages. Can one be a good linguist without being interested in the beautiful surface features of languages? Maybe. But can one be a good cultural critic without being interested in the beautiful surface features of culture? I doubt it seriously.

He fails to detect the irony in Komar and Melamid? How is that possible? That's like being unable to detect the patriotism in Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech. A complete cultural deafness.

I've always thought that linguists who don't study languages are a little like English majors who don't read.

Rereading the above, I think I may have been slightly inaccurate at Pinker's expense -- perhaps he knows that Komar and Melamid are satirical, Menand doesn't say, but he does treat their work as serious by trying to support it with ev-psych theory.

At the same time, I weakened Menand's punch by implying that Pinker's greatest failure is one of aesthetic taste, whereas Menand offers a more substantive critique of Pinker's thinking as well.

So you should probably just ignore my yammering and go read the review already.

What Pat said. For me, one of the worst aspects of Chomskyism is its destruction of the linguistic tradition of field research and, more generally, studying as wide a variety of languages as possible. (I'm also pretty sure it's wrong, but that's a lesser sin.)

It is rather obvious that though Komar and Melamid are being sarcastic in their project presentation their respondents are being sincere. Thus the above two are in actuality supporting Pinkers position.