Here are some notes from Pinker's book re the
rejection of human nature's innate features;
............
Pinker Chapter 2:
Boas’s students insisted not just that differences among ethnic groups must be explained in terms of culture but that every aspect of human existence must be explained in terms of culture.
For example, Boas had favored social explanations unless they were disproven, but his student Albert Kroeber favored them regardless of the evidence.
“
Heredity,” he wrote, “
cannot be allowed to have acted any part in history.”27
Instead, the chain of events shaping a people “involves the absolute conditioning of historical events by other historical events.”28
Kroeber did not just deny that social behavior could be explained by
innate properties of minds.
He denied that it could be explained by any properties of minds.
A culture, he wrote, is superorganic—it floats in its own universe, free of the flesh and blood of actual men and women:
- “Civilization is not mental action but a body or stream of products of mental exercise….
Mentality relates to the individual.
The social or cultural, on the other hand, is in its essence non- individual.
Civilization as such begins only where the individual ends.”29
These two Ideas—
the denial of human nature, and the autonomy of culture from individual minds—were also articulated by the founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who had foreshadowed Kroeber’s doctrine of the superorganic mind:
- Every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false….
The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which members would were they isolated….
If we begin with the individual in seeking to explain phenomena, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group….
Individual natures are merely the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms.
Their contribution consists exclusively in very general attitudes, in vague and consequently plastic predispositions.30
And he laid down a law for the social sciences that would be cited often in the century to come:
- “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness.”31
Both psychology and the other social sciences, then, denied that the minds of individual people were important, but they set out in different directions from there.
Psychology [then] banished mental entities like beliefs and desires altogether and replaced them with stimuli and responses.
The other social sciences located beliefs and desires in cultures and societies
rather than in the heads of individual people.
The different social sciences also agreed that the contents of cognition— Ideas, thoughts, plans, and so on—were really phenomena of language, overt behavior that anyone could hear and write down.
(Watson proposed that “thinking” really consisted of teensy movements of the mouth and throat.)
But most of all they shared a dislike of instincts and Evolution.
Prominent social scientists repeatedly declared the slate to be blank:
- Instincts do not create customs; customs create instincts, for the putative instincts of human beings are always learned and never native.
—Ellsworth Faris (1927)32
Cultural phenomena…are in no respect hereditary but are characteristically and without exception acquired.
—George Murdock (1932)33
Man has no nature; what he has is history.
—José Ortega y Gasset (1935)34
With the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless….
Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings.
—Ashley Montagu (1973)35
True, the metaphor of choice was no longer a scraped tablet or white paper.
Durkheim had spoken of “indeterminate material,” some kind of blob that was molded or pounded into shape by culture.
Perhaps the best modern metaphor is Silly Putty, the rubbery stuff that children use both to copy printed matter (like a Blank Slate) and to mold into desired shapes (like indeterminate material).
The malleability metaphor resurfaced in statements by two of Boas’s most famous students: Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the malleability of their original endowment….
The great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.
—Ruth Benedict (1934)36
We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.
—Margaret Mead (1935)37
Others likened the mind to some kind of sieve: Much of what is commonly called “human nature” is merely culture thrown against a screen of nerves, glands, sense organs, muscles, etc.
—Leslie White (1949)38
Or to the raw materials for a factory: Human nature is the rawest, most undifferentiated of raw material.
—Margaret Mead (1928)39
Our Ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous system itself, cultural products—products manufactured, indeed, out of tendencies, capacities, and dispositions with which we were born, but manufactured nonetheless.
—Clifford Geertz (1973)40
Or to an unprogrammed computer: Man is the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside- the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering his behavior.
—Clifford Geertz (1973)41
Or to some other amorphous entity that can have many things done to it: Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self and emotion.
—Richard Shweder (1990)42
The superorganic or group mind also became an article of faith in social science.