Contents

The Blank Slate - Pinker, Stephen The Bell Curve - Herrnstein, R. J.; Murray, C. Philisophical Virtues & Psychological Strengths - Cessario, Titus, & Vitz

Book Reports

Really just notes and summaries of various books I've read in the past. Some written while reading, others in retrospect. Summaries here are just that—my best way of parsing and understanding what I've read. While many of these books have influenced my thinking, nothing here is to be construed as my personal belief. These are organized in the order I wrote them, not necessarily the order I read them in, and certainly not alphabetically by title or author.

The Blank Slate -- Pinker, Stephen -- Read:August 2023

Key Points

Addresses three common modern myths about human nature, gives their origins in philosophy and the social sciences, and provides evidence to prove their false pretenses

  1. The Blank Slate
  2. The Ghost in the Machine
  3. The Noble Savage

The Blank Slate

This idea is that the human mind has no inherent structures and that all ideas, behaviors and patterns are learned—thus there is no real "human nature" besides one's culture and upbringing.

The Ghost in the Machine

This idea traces its origins to Descartes.

The Noble Savage

This idea traces its roots to anthropology and ethnography—Victorian England recognizing the beauty (and strangeness) of its new African colonies.

Miscellaneous Ideas

Pinker assuages the fears of modernists who believe that if the doctrine of the blank slate is repudiated, then human rights abuses would abound

In his chapter addressing the consequences of these ideas on childrearing and parenting, Pinker looks at the genetic heritability of behavior and personality traits. He makes the case that nature is far more important than nurture—about 50% of variation in behavior vs about 25%—in determining what behaviors a child maintains into adulthood.

What Didn't Stick

Pinker spends a fair bit of time in the book addressing the specific fears of modernists should the "trinity" of modernist ideas be repudiated. I cannot specifically remember these concerns; however, I recall that Pinker does a fine job of demonstrating that the good is best served by recognizing the reality of human nature.
He also addresses, in the final part of the book, the consequences of these ideas on several hot-button issues, such as politics and crime. These chapters didn't stand out to me as much as the chapter addressing the issues of parenting and childrearing

The Bell Curve -- R. J. Herrnstein & C. Murray -- Read:April 2023

Key Points

In this book, Herrnstein and Murray attempt to lay out the demographic landscape of the United States, and show how intelligence is—above all other isolated factors—the most important determining factor in predicting life outcomes. They set out with a view to show that many of America's ills—crime, inequality—can be explained in simple differences in IQ between outcomes and populations. As the 21st century goes on, the average American IQ is decreasing, which bodes poorly for the future of the nation.

Emergence of Cognitive Elite

After the industrial revolution, and with increasing opportunities for social mobility during the 20th century, it became possible for those from lower classes—and immigrant communities—to achieve economic and academic success through hard work. Suddenly, it was no longer dynasties of industry captains and robber barons who could find themselves in positions of wealth and influence, but those from modest roots who were industrious and intelligent.
In this process, what can be observed is a new kind of economic dynasty. Not just one governed by the rules of nepotism—but where the children of successful businessmen and entrepreneurs could see themselves taking the business over and generating further and greater capital themselves. This gets to the idea of the book—that the makings of an economically successful person are to be traced to that lineage—not through nepotism, but through genetically inherited intelligence. These successful people—doctors, lawyers, CEOs, professors, military generals—are overwhelmingly represented in the upper echelons of the intelligence distribution.

Effects of Intelligence on Life Outcomes

The authors then look at a longitudinal section of Americans—all self-identified as white—to see how intelligence—as contrasted with other factors often suggested to be relevant—correlates with certain life outcomes. Those are:

With very few exceptions, the authors demonstrate how individual intelligence is the single largest predictor of positive outcomes within these categories.

The Effect of Race

Moving on, the authors look at how differences in average population IQ affect the differences in outcomes between populations. It's important to note, often IQ tests are criticized for being culturally biased, meaning that those outside of the majority would be placed in an unfair position as regards language and literacy, as well as familiarity with cultural terms. However, even when these things are controlled for—as in tests which do not reflect verbal intelligence, or those in which the test is catered to a specific cultural milieu, the distribution is identical.
The conclusion that the authors come to is, essentially, that cognitive differences in racial populations—not racism or bias—account for the disparities in outcomes between populations.

Miscellaneous Ideas

In part of the book, the authors make an experiment. If people with IQs under 103 were randomly deleted from the total national population pool until the average IQ became 103, then high school dropouts, men prevented from working by health problems, children not living with either parent, males ever interviewed in jail, persons below the poverty line, children in poverty for the first 3 years of life, women ever on welfare, women who became chronic welfare recipients, and children born out of wedlock, would all decrease in frequency by more than 15%, and as much as 25%. Similarly, if you did the same experiment, but deleted people until you reached a population average of 97, each of those outcomes would increase by a factor of anywhere from 8% to 18%.
The national IQ is dropping - with immigration from non-white countries making up the majority of the causes for the shift.

What Didn't Stick

I think the authors talk about the consequences of their research and the implications of it for policy in the future. However, as the book was written in 1994, I'm not sure everything has played out like they might have expected. The rapid increase in "smart" technology has—in some ways I think—made up for the cognitive shortcomings of the average American, and maybe even some of the very stupid ones. They certainly did not have the foresight of the internet's massive takeover of world culture.

Philisophical Virtues & Psychological Strengths -- Cessario, Titus, & Vitz -- Read:December 2023

Key Points

This one is going to be very difficult to summarize, but I'm going to try to lay out just those ideas that made sense to me and have helped my thinking. This book is an attempt to synthesize ideas from Classical, Thomist, and Catholic philosophy (metaphysics) into a format that can be applicable in a mental health treatment setting. It begins from the precepts that man needs most what is conducive to his flourishing as man, and that mental health—seen from the perspective of human un-flourishing—can be best served from this philosophical perspective.

Developing Classical Philosophy

It makes sense to draw the lines in philosophical development from the ancients (Aristotle) to the medievals (St. Thomas Aquinas) to the moderns (Emmanuel Kant) as a way of understanding the anthropology laid out by these thinkers—and the doctrine expounded by the Catholic Church.

Aristotle—matter and form

Plato described the human as a rational soul embodied in a passionate animal. The soul sits in the realm of ideas—the divine world, where the body sits in the empirical world—that which can be observed and described. However, this seems to imply a dualist philosophy, where the body is lesser—subservient to the soul. It invites the ghost in the machine fallacy.
Aristotle attempted to clarify this by his description of matter and form. The body is the matter that the man is made from, and the soul is that image in which the body is formed. All living things have a body (matter) and soul (form)—what distinguishes humans from animals then is the rational faculty (nous).

Thomas Aquinas—passionate animal and rational soul

Human beings, along with animals possess a "sense appetite" wherein the organism is able to take in information from the world and act upon it. Both humans and animals desire what is perceived by the senses as good, while shunning that which is perceived as evil. Humans, however, possess a faculty beyond mere input and response, we are capable of abstracting phenomena out of the particular into a general notion, which allow us to compare instances of a phenomena with other instances. Additionally, we are able to reflexively make a judgment about our own judgments—this leads to the development of virtue.
Expounding on the Aristotelian logic, Aquinas makes the case that as the matter exists for the sake of form, so too does the body exist for the sake of the soul. However, given the bounded nature of the body and soul (matter and form), then both must cooperate for either to flourish. The passions (emotions) move us towards those goods that sustain both body and soul—and thus, the passions (seated in the body) can cooperate with the rationality (seated in the soul) for the higher flourishing of both.
Virtue, then, is that inculcated cooperation between passion and reason. Unlike the Stoics, who sought to subordinate the passions to the rationality in order to achieve virtue, it is likened to a lion tamer who shows off his animals toothless and declawed. It is the taming of the passions—bringing them into line and into cooperation with the reason that is true virtue.
Since the sense appetite originates in the lower animal-like nature, it is capable of resisting reason (out of its quasi-autonomous nature), thus it is in need of perfection. "Since virtue perfects human acts, it follows that the sensitive appetite acts as a goad to virtue. That is, the sensitive appetite gives rise to acts of virtue as from a principle or source." The passions—in a way—call forth the individual to pursue mastery over them, thus making them more perfectly human. They are—with perfection—invited up to enjoy the higher place of reason.

Kant—moral duty

The 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant takes a different view of virtue. He, like the Stoics, sees the exercise of virtue as reason taking dominion over the passions. To be truly virtuous to Kant, is to do the right thing—as guided by reason, with complete disregard to the emotions.

Kant's philosophical anthropology recognizes both the free nature of the human being (as subject obedient to reason) as well as a determined object of natures laws. That man sees himself both as I—the subject of free action, as well as me, the subject operating in the objective world. "Self-consciousness and freedom exist in potentia in the human being. But they become actual only when realized as objects of their own awareness... Entäusserung—is an objective order among subjects, who are subjects only because of the objective order that preserves and enhances their freedom." This is cultural context.

Miscellaneous Ideas

In all, the book does well to bridge the gap—or at least to begin building the bridge—between classical philosophy (as it relates to the flourishing of the human person) and clinical psychology. Perhaps psychologists can develop new frameworks for treatment which look at the totality of the human being—body and soul, passionate and rational—to better serve the needs of their clients, and bring them back into an ordered reality.
I think these ideas would synthesize well with Frankl's logotherapy—wherein the recognition of the reality of suffering is combined with the cultivation of virtue (when one attempts to perfect his passions, the unfortunate state of the world that they are in is revealed more clearly AND when one recognizes that they are in a state out from the fallen world they can better analyze their passions and how they may be contributing to that fallenness).