Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

48 | HOW THE MIND WORKSreflect not the operation of rational minds that have come to; differentconclusions, but arbitrary cultural products that can be eradicated by reengineeringthe society, "re-educating" those who were tainted by the oldupbringing, and, if necessary, starting afresh with a new generation ofslates that are still blank. ;And sometimes left-wing positions are right because the denial ofhuman nature is wrong. In Hearts and Minds, the 1974 documentaryabout the war in Vietnam, an American officer explains that we cannotapply our moral standards to the Vietnamese because their culture doesnot place a value on individual lives, so they do not suffer as we do whenfamily members are killed. The director plays the quote over footage ofwailing mourners at the funeral of a Vietnamese casualty, reminding usthat the universality of love and grief refutes the officer's horrifying rationalization.For most of this century, guilty mothers have endured inanetheories blaming them for every dysfunction or difference in their children(mixed messages cause schizophrenia, coldness causes autism,domineering causes homosexuality, lack of boundaries causes anorexia,insufficient "motherese" causes language disorders). Menstrual cramps,pregnancy sickness, and childbirth pain have been dismissed as women's"psychological" reactions to cultural expectations, rather than beingtreated as legitimate health issues.sThe foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people havewants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. Ifpeople's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammablebrainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. (Thus it is ironicthat fashionable "liberation" ideologies like those of Michel Foucault andsome academic feminists invoke a socially conditioned "interiorizedauthority," "false consciousness," or "inauthentic preference" to explainaway the inconvenient fact that people enjoy the things that are alleged tooppress them.) A denial of human nature, no less than an emphasis on it,can be warped to serve harmful ends. We should expose whatever ends areharmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.So what about the three supposed implications of an innate humannature? The first "implication"—that an innate human nature^ impliesinnate human differences—is no implication at all. The mental machin-