The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker - PREFACE (part 5) | Текст песни

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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
by Steven Pinker

PREFACE (part 5)
Nor does acknowledging human nature have the political implications so many fear. It does not, for example, require one to abandon feminism, or to accept current levels of inequality or violence, or to treat morality as a fiction. For the most part I will try not to advocate particular policies or to advance the agenda of the political left or right. I believe that controversies about policy almost always involve tradeoffs between competing values, and that science is equipped to identify the tradeoffs but not to resolve them.

Many of these tradeoffs, I will show, arise from features of human nature, and by clarifying them I hope to make our collective choices, whatever they are, better informed. If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs.

Why is it important to sort this all out? The refusal to acknowledge human nature is like the Victorians’ embarrassment about sex, only worse: it distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse, and our day-today lives. Logicians tell us that a single contradiction can corrupt a set of statements and allow falsehoods to proliferate through it. The dogma that human nature does not exist, in the face of evidence from science and common sense that it does, is just such a corrupting influence.

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