Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Steven Pinker came to Madison Tuesday to promote his new book, \The Blank Slate,"" which will be released in the fall. Pinker, whose lecture was part of the ""Humanities Without Boundaries"" series, explores the role of genes in behavior and common fears and misconceptions that surround them.
Can you tell me a little bit about your lecture?
It focuses on, namely, why the idea of human nature, or the human mind, having any kind of innate organization is so emotionally and politically and morally colored. Both the left and the right hate the idea that the mind has any sort of structure because of evolution and genetics. And so this new book explores why and how we can confront those fears given that, I think, science is going to show more and more that the brain gets its structure from the genes, which get their structure from evolution.
Your talking about politics struck me as humorous because ""linguaphiles"" like [New York Times columnist] William Safire and [MIT professor] Noam Chomsky are also very politically active. And it seems like you are sort of stepping into the foray. Is there a relationship here?
Certainly what gives Chomsky his political and linguistic convictions, and what gives Safire those two convictions are very different because Safire definitely talks a lot about the psychological aspect of language. I think he came to his interest just because he was a journalist and dealt with words for a living.
But with Chomsky there is a thread. And I actually explore that thread in the new book. Mainly the understanding of language depends on certain conceptions of human nature. And for Chomsky, his romantic anarchist politics have something in common with his linguistic theory, mainly that all people are innately endowed with various creative impulses and that we must rise to our common understanding in the case of language and in the case of politics.
And the way he works it out and justifies a kind of socialist anarchist society in which people don't have to be motivated by profit. ... It's a tenuous thread and Chomsky himself doesn't want to make too big of a deal of it.
In my case I try to keep my politics in this new book a bit of a cipher and I don't try to advance either the left or the right. What I really try to do is explore the connection between different political positions in human nature.
