A letter I'm sending to the New York Review of Books in response to a review.

Darwinian Storytelling

By H. Allen Orr

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker
Viking, 509 pp., $27.95


Dear Editor,

The last section of H. Allen Orr's review of Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" suffers from a particularly sloppy logical move which brings down the tone of an otherwise lucid, rigorous review.

Orr wishes to chide Pinker for his reductionist politics and shallow idea of history. Fair enough. Orr also claims that the idea of the tabula rasa is dead, and Pinker is kicking a dead horse. And this is fair. (He does disingenuously pretend that no one holds to the idea at all any more; or perhaps he really thinks so -- if so, Professor Orr should leave the biology quad more often.)

Then suddenly, with no warning, toward the end of his review, Orr rushes to the aid of the tabula rasa idea (which no one believes anyway) -- and why? Because it has had some good _ethical_ consequences. He muses, "if [Pinker's anti-blank slate] views had held from the time of Locke . . . [would] the liberal ethic Pinker reflexively reaches for be there?"

Orr goes on to let us know that he thinks the tabula rasa idea is actually synonymous with liberal values _in_general_. He even decides to call them "Blank Slate liberal values", to coin a phrase in his last sentence. And he leaves off the review with the very strong implication that we simply can't do without the tabula rasa, because that would be to abandon our values.

This is simply absurd. Using the same fallacy, any person of faith can argue the existence of God, on the strange claim that without a strong belief in God throughout many of the cultures and times of human history, would love and charity be there at all? Without Jesus Christ, would "the liberal ethic Pinker [err, Orr] reflexively reaches for be there?"

The idea of God may or may not correspond to something, but the ethical consequences of believing in God have no bearing whatsoever on the validity of the idea. The idea of the tabula rasa, unlike the idea of God, happens to admit evidence -- and the evidence is getting very clear. Pinker's book is, as Orr points out, kicking a dead horse (though it's one that many nonscientists in the humanities do still ride.) It's weird that Orr thinks that to save western ethics he, too, needs to saddle up that utopian pony for one last turn around the grounds. This is hardly the way to argue with the Pinkerites, or with anyone else, for that matter.