The idea of the noble savage, that humans are born naturally good, and only the corrupting influence of problematic institutions turns them into selfish and exclusionary people, has made a massive comeback as social justice culture attempts to perfect individuals into paragons of equity and inclusion. In the blank slate, social and individual outcomes are seen purely as pure products of systemic environmental forces. More than two decades after The Blank Slate debuted, the cultural status of these three touchstones has shifted the blank slate, noble savage and ghost in the machine are all ascendant concepts. The ghost in the machine, particularly as repurposed today in service of gender ideology The noble savage view of human nature where society corrupts individuals The blank slate or tabula rasa view of the mind as having no innate traits On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Pinker about where we are today vis-a-vis the book's three major themes: Evolutionary psychologist David Buss stated in a 2003 review that The Blank Slate “ may be the most important book so far published in the 21st century.” Still Pinker’s third most cited publication after The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate shaped a generation of scholars and public intellectuals and influenced 21st-century public discourse to take a more scientifically informed view of both human nature’s biological basis and the inborn psychological traits that undergird the organization of society.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Blank Slate firmly established Pinker as one of the major public intellectuals in 21st-century America it followed earlier works more narrowly focused on his discipline of psycholinguistics, The Language Instinct, Words and Rules and How the Mind Works. Twenty-one years ago, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was published.

Steven pinker's book the blank slate