Pinker's Place

A war against the prevailing social and cultural modern myth.

I have nothing but agreement for his treatment of the Arts. Part of my course involves learning about medern artists: Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Michel Basquiat (a nigger), Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, etc. Utter trash masquerading as quality and being taught to the children around me as something worth learning, even imitating.

Words like "trite" and "insipid" are used to dismiss beauty, while ugliness, thoughtlessness and meaningless works are seen to be "challenging" or "inventive".

Consider Basquiat's Ignorant Art:
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Rauschenberg's Goat:
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A tutor will tell you that one should find meaning in these works oneself, but I think that the meaning should first be there for me to interpret, and not to invent in place of these artist's nihilistic destruction of the meaning of Art, as has been undertaken above.

Jeez, that is crap!!!
All it takes is a vague reference to popular topics, like gender or race or pollution and ambiguity to make it more than what it is....plus a good agent and a marketing firm to sell the insinuation for more than what it is.

Warhol is a source of amusement for me. He's like this modern icon, mainly because of his lifestyle and infamy, and when I look at what is called his "art" it baffles me.
How such tripe be sold as art at all?

But more than about art if you noticed in the part where he makes a joke about how his peers commented after reading his book, he implies how systemic mechanisms ensure that nothing outside the acceptable is written.
His peers warn him that he will not receive awards, tenure or advance his career.

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A bit of pandering to the current socioeconomic and cultural structures to a crowd evidently infected with modern popular myths, but still very good.
What stood out in the end was his reluctance or inability to answer the woman who asked how modern methods of physical manipulation can affect gene selection.

He becomes defensive - crossing his hands before him - when confronted with that woman and her question on parenting. Perhaps apprehension given the delicate subject matter...a sense that he is walking on egg-shells when faced with a passive-aggressive question.

His response to the racial question was inadequate. He failed to account for race mixing to explain this 3% increase in I.Q. scores.
In effect he contradicts his own thesis by stating simply that "he does not think so" when it comes to the divergence of racial intellectual qualities.
If there is no Blank Slate then what exactly is being written in the human genome if the mind is unaffected by environment?

He then somewhat skirts away form the "social policies" question, as the questioner is suffering from liberalism and implies that what has just be described by Pinker should be corrected or that something must be done about it.

pinker is a good scientist. his book, "the blank slate," contained just enough essential information to lead us forward, without going beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable in mainstream research.

i felt a little bad when he got drawn into the "worship scientists" world. i hope he's recovering well.

I'm sure he will return to the flock soon, sweetheart.

Nothing like a black sheep to make the milky white ones feel a bit bad about their own fluffy wooliness.

anyway, what do you think the most important concepts were in the blank slate?

On the one hand he'd like to see a world with less moralizing and on the other hand he acknowledges the need for a 'Leviathan', something to keep people in check, something they all fear as to make them behave among each other.

So when he talks about less moralizing, what he means is having all the moralizing be done by the Leviathan as to minimize disruptions within the whole society.

So, genetically, what is selected for in that scenario is a feminine domination of the masculine part. The masculine serves the feminine agenda of the individual. So the rational qualities are to serve the feminine needs.

Listening to Napoleon Chagnon and his studies on the Yanomamo - There was one part where he tells the story about a guy from that tribe who returned from a bigger city and which impressed him most was the law and order which was enforced. So he wanted to have such things for his tribe as well, as to minimize the conflict among his clansmen.

And that made me think about, why and how did we construct the laws which we have today? How did that all get started? Because I think it's a certain level of intelligence and awareness, a thinking which goes beyond the immediate which is required to get that off the ground. Naturally, in the beginning of such an endeavor there would have to be some form of master-morality in place. Individuals who are self-aware enough about their particular strengths and who are thinking beyond the immediate are required to get such a thing started, when there is no prior Leviathan in place.

Intuitively (because I'd like it to be true, but perhaps there is actually something to it) I think that slave-morality cannot get such a Leviathan phenomenon started. And at the beginning it is not a Leviathan because it is genetic. The individuals do innately cooperate and create their culture which is due to their innate genetics capable of organizing in such and such a way as to grow big enough to eventually grow into a civilization, something which is not genetic but where the Leviathan which was created over time, now, keeps the individuals in check, whether they are innately made for cooperation in that way or not. As genetic selection pressure is absent, the genetics deteriorate and the Leviathan becomes increasingly a phenomenon which is not anchored in the individuals. If one were to remove the social order, they'd fail to pick up the pieces and re-create the organism on their own. Some Leviathan, somewhere, needs to be in place to re-colonize an area which has lost its civilizational structure. (If the genetics in place are incapable of forming it again on their own).

And slave-morality, as an example, is the 'Virus' (from Satyr) which has infested the Leviathan and therefore all individuals are dependent on the Leviathan for their identity, their self, or at least those who choose to be so. Slave-morality does eventually become a genetic phenomenon as well by selecting character traits accordingly. That, which is valued.

Slaughtz wrote:

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Pinker, like most modern scientists, are futurists and progressives and/or transhumanists and espouse a loyalty to ideals of equality in order to justify that which they think truly matters which is the reduction of conflict and artificial succession of human evolution. You read his The Better Angels of Our Nature, he makes a case for much the same sociopolitical values, even feminization, as he does in this book which i probably wont read.

For them, the "future of humanity" must reach its logical conclusion in a sterilized homogeneous environment for no other reason than because THAT is where it is going, ergo, they devoutly believe THAT is what works so it must, scientifically, be given our support. It is like Huxley's controller in Brave New World, who explains that the society must be kept asleep and brain dead, because that is the logical formula for utopianism.