Title:
How the Mind Works
Author:
Steven Pinker
Publisher:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1997
ISBN
0-393-04535-8

The City of God, A Brief History of Time, The New World Order, The Descent of Man: All titles of books that make extravagant promises. Just like How the Mind Works, they examine ideas that are basic to human existence. Such a book, when it fails, is quickly forgotten. When they succeed, books like this may become canonized in the literature of their time.

I don't know if How the Mind Works deserves canonization. However, any comprehensive explanation of the human mind that doesn't resort to mystical baloney or pseudo scientific mumbo jumbo deserves respect, in the very least.

About three years ago I read Pinker's The Language Instinct. That book made a compelling argument for language as a human instinct, a behavior that is built into the human brain. Pinker assembled evidence from many fields of knowledge to support his argument. He also speculated on the nature of other human behaviors.

In How the Mind Works, Pinker advances his theories about the nature of the human mind. His premise is simple: human beings evolved, therefore the human mind must reflect design and structure to suit human cognitive tasks that might be common among the hunter gatherer people that pretty much topped out human evolution. Pinker dismisses critics of this approach by pointing out what Dennett says (Darwin's Dangerous Idea) regarding evolution and design: the suitability of an evolved organ for a given purpose can only be examined in the light of that purpose, which is why reverse engineering the design of such an organ makes sense even though we may only be guessing at its evolutionary history.

From that premise, Pinker leaps into the fray. From the miracle of human vision, to the annoyances of human emotions, Pinker lays the human mind open to examination, pointing out the bits that make things work, and parading out the current thinking on why those particular bits are found in the mind. From his narrative, the mind unfolds not as a simple machine that we might dismiss with contempt, but as a superbly engineered miracle which served our ancestors in their struggle for survival.

More than once Pinker's examination makes clear that modern technology and modern society have carried the human mind far from the realm of its evolution. Pinker points out the weaknesses inherent in a stone age mind that tries to deal with boardroom meetings and space shuttle flights. He even suggests that some arenas of thought may never be accessible to the human mind. The tools we've invented, writing, formal education, and law, made our journey into the twentieth century possible. Pinker doesn't attempt to predict what will happen in the future, but his description of the human mind's accomplishments and limitations make it clear that coming as far as we have was not at all guaranteed in the dawn of the human species.

One remarkable idea that Pinker wants us to consider is that human behavior, as designed by nature, doesn't have to be right behavior. Pinker points out repeatedly, in particular when considering such issues as human violence and prejudice, that having a mind that has evolved to exhibit such behaviors doesn't make the behavior right. Pinker writes that his description of the design of the human mind is a scientific issue. Right and wrong are ethical issues, and science cannot make ethical decisions.

The distinction is an important one. This is a time when social Darwinism in various guises is raising its head, and the establishment's backlash against the ethics of social Darwinism encompasses attacks of valid scientific enquiries. Politically motivated distortions of science in the Soviet Union held back their biological sciences for decades, only now allowing some scientists to break free from the shackles of ideological mistakes. In a similar vein, people who abhor violence and prejudice seek to literally outlaw certain views of the human mind. Pinker points out that finding that the human mind makes violence and prejudice possible doesn't make violence and prejudice ethical. If it turns out that the human mind evolved to do violence, then it behooves us to examine the behavior to understand it, and to prevent it where possible.

How the Mind Works lives up to its extravagant promise, and engages the reader in an exploration of internal as well as external vistas.