Steven Pinker on the Tragic vs Utopian Vision of Human Nature

Typology

Michael Shermer:

"In his 2002 magisterial analysis of human nature, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker re-labels Sowell’s constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature as the Tragic Vision (conservative) and the Utopian Vision (liberal). The distinct Left-Right divide consistently cleaves the (respectively) Utopian Vision and Tragic Vision along numerous specific contests, such as the size of the government (big versus small), the amount of taxation (high versus low), trade (fair versus free), healthcare (universal versus individual), environment (protect it versus leave it alone), crime (caused by social injustice versus caused by criminal minds), the constitution (judicial activism for social justice versus strict constructionism for original intent), and many others.

Pinker’s “utopian” descriptor for Sowell’s “unconstrained” vision is apt, since in the original Greek utopia literally means “no place.” An unconstrained utopian vision of human nature holds that custom, law, and traditional institutions are sources of inequality and injustice and should therefore be heavily regulated and constantly modified from the top down; it holds that society can be engineered through government programs to release the natural unselfishness and altruism within people; it deems physical and intellectual differences largely to be the result of unjust and unfair social systems that can be re-engineered through social planning, and therefore people can be shuffled across socioeconomic classes that were artificially created through unfair and unjust political, economic, and social systems inherited from history. Such a vision exists in literally No Place.

Although some liberals embrace just such an unconstrained vision of human nature, most understand that human behavior is at least partially constrained—especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences who are aware of the research in behavior genetics—so the debate between left-of-center liberals and right-of-center conservatives turns on degrees of constraint. By contrast, woke illiberals — as I shall call liberals who moved so far to the authoritarian left that they are nearly indistinguishable from the authoritarian right — are full-on blank slaters, unconstrained visionaries, and utopian dreamers with no purchase on the reality of human nature, or what, in my book The Believing Brain, I called a Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects — morally, physically, and intellectually — then you hold a Realistic Vision of our nature. In keeping with the research from behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, let’s put a number on that constraint at 40 to 50 percent. In the Realistic Vision, human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures—our better angels and our inner demons, in Pinker’s description."

(https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/why-i-am-no-longer-woke)