LETTERS: Another view
To the Editor:
The Ol' Editor makes a good point in his 1/1/03 "Poor Country Cousins" about Rep. Tom Osborne's (R-Neb.) small "action grants" which may be relevant to Jerry Plett's letter about Harper's landfill.
An MIT psychologist has recently published a new book, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature." Much like the findings of conservative think tanks of the past 30 years in response to our university social ideologues, he says our founders' vision of human nature on which our political system is based (the "tragic or constrained vision") is more consistent with the evidence of the past 50 years of the "cognitive sciences of human nature" than is the "utopian or unconstrained vision" which arose significantly in the last half of the 20th century.
Not surprisingly, our founders' vision was informed not by history alone but also by the old religious saints and theologians who had no utopian delusions about a sweet human nature. Surprisingly, however, the results of cognitive science since the 1950s seem to compliment much of this older religious view of human nature. Yet many of the doctrines of the 1960s cultural revolution were utopian. One was the notion that government bureaucracies can be trusted while the private sector cannot. Yet the research shows that if uniform laws put private competitors on an equal footing of attainable environmental standards, they are more likely to be motivated by self-interest in the total outcome than is human nature within a governmental bureaucracy involved in an (often moralized) ideological approach, in personal power, and other human motives not constrained by business competition.
A similar response by human nature has been noted since some of our religious denominations, rejecting the wisdom of the old saints and theologians, "went with the flow" of the utopian vision based upon three modern dogmas about human nature: the blank slate (no permanent human nature), the noble savage (no selfish or evil instincts — merely corrupted by culture), the ghost in the machine (the unfettered "we" that can choose "non-corrupting social arrangement" — the engineering, not of checks and balances upon human nature, but its bogus re-engineering).
Three of the solid findings about human nature everywhere are:
1. "The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society."
2. "The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and freedom."
3. "The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contribution to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented."
In this regard there is reason to think since our landfill experience and technology is improving markedly, and as the cost of good esthetics is an affordable and required component, many metro areas are finding it advantageous to keep their landfills as a local economical private and competitive asset. These are as valuable as any other human enterprise and more necessary than some.
A fourth characteristic of human nature also may apply: "the biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank cleanliness, and beauty!"
In any case, the content of Steven Pinker's new book seems to be far more consistent with the history of American progress, with the life and dynamism of our founding documents, with the past development of the heartland, with the neo-conservative elements of our cultural wars, and with the best of religious principles. Who said methodological materialism's science was the foe of religion?
Could this alleged conflict, too, just be more of that 60s/70s pop cultural utopian or unconstrained "flapdoodle" — except for a few "ideological dogmatists" in both realms whose "pipes nor philosophy held water." The words "religion" and "science" are both hot button words often used to denote anything or nothing.
These findings of some 50 years of the "cognitive sciences of human nature:" seem to be generally consistent with most of the old "Christian, classical, and liberal virtues" of American civilization and its founding documents, Pinker seems to be saying, regardless our periodic delusions of sweetness and grandeur.
Harold Slater
Albuquerque, N.M.
