Icelander said:

Everything becomes hollow once you see the inside of it.

Kind of a major generalization here don't cha think? I certainly don't feel that way about everything. Although I guess the mystery is in what you can't see inside of.

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How about if I punched you in the face, would that be an illusion

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The right brain is however, submerged beneath the words, and is responsible for giving birth to them. Any word it expresses is a profound conveyance of truth, as it is grasping for anything, anything at all to describe the ineffable. And it often uses the language that it has already been given, but its understanding of the words and the contexts are a bit different.

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I love this idea of a place 'beneath the words'

I have every bit of respect for the tools we use to communicate, but it can get frustrating to have that distance from true experience. We toss vague representations at each other all day- how does anyone manage to understand each other?

To have the time and energy for a true experience, for a luxurious communion with whatever moves us or gives us pleasure- that's something I'm grateful for.

God, the ideas bouncing around here sometimes get me kinda excited

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EDGE: What about implications for other fields?

PINKER: The blank slate has had an enormous influence in far-flung fields. One example is architecture and urban planning. The 20th century saw the rise of a movement that has been called "authoritarian high modernism," which was contemporaneous with the ascendance of the blank slate. City planners believed that people's taste for green space, for ornament, for people-watching, for cozy places for intimate social gatherings, were just social constructions. They were archaic historical artifacts that were getting in the way of the orderly design of cities, and should be ignored by planners designing optimal cities according to so-called scientific principles.

Le Corbusier was the clearest example. He and other planners had a minimalist conception of human nature. A human being needs so many cubic of air per day, a temperature within a certain range, so many gallons of water, and so many square feet in which to sleep and work. Houses became "machines for living," and cities were designed around the most efficient way to satisfy this short list of needs, namely freeways, huge rectangular concrete housing projects, and open plazas. In extreme cases this led to the wastelands of planned cities like Brasilia; in milder cases it gave us the so-called urban renewal projects in American cities and the dreary high rises in the Soviet Union and English council flats. Ornamentation, human scale, green space, gardens, and comfortable social meeting places were written out of the cities because the planners had a theory of human nature that omitted human aesthetic and social needs.

Another example is the arts. In the 20th century, modernism and post-modernism took over, and their practitioners disdained beauty as bourgeois, saccharine, and lightweight. Art was deliberately made incomprehensible or ugly or shocking—again, on the assumption that people's tastes for attractive faces, landscapes, colors, and so on were reversible social constructions. This also led to an exaggeration of the dynamic of social status that has always been part of the arts. The elite arts used to be aligned with the economic and political aristocracy. They involved displays of sumptuosity and the flaunting of rare and precious skills that only the idle rich could cultivate. But now that any schmo can afford a Mozart CD or can go to a free museum, artists had to figure out new ways to differentiate themselves from the rabble. And so art became baffling and uninterpretable without acquaintance with arcane theory.

By their own admission, the humanities programs in universities, and institutions that promote new works of elite art, are in crisis. People are staying away in droves. I don't think it takes an Einstein to figure out why. By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, plot and narrative and character in fiction, the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience—the people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification rather than social one-upmanship. Today there are movements in the arts to reintroduce beauty and narrative and melody and other basic human pleasures. And they are considered radical extremists!

EDGE: Why do people still treat art and literary critics as the wisest and most relevant intellectuals? In terms of literature, why is it that in the leading cultural magazines, you can still find a lot more of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Bloomsbury, than discussions about the issues you and other scientists are raising?

PINKER: One reason for the canonization of artists is a quirk of our moral sense. Many studies show that people hallucinate moral virtue in other people who are high in status—people who are good-looking, or powerful, or well-connected, or artistically or athletically talented. Status and virtue are cross-wired in the human brain. We see it in language, where words like "noble" and "ugly" have two meanings. "Noble" can mean high in status or morally virtuous; "ugly" can mean physically unattractive or morally despicable. The deification of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. are obvious examples. I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. Anyone else having some claim to insights into the human condition is seen as a philistine, and possibly as immoral if they are seen as debunking the pretensions of those in the arts and the humanities.

To be fair, there are other strands of the arts and humanities, sometimes brushed aside in the 20th century, that resonate quite well with the arguments that I've been making. Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. The aesthetic and emotional reactions that we have to works of art depend on how our brain is put together. Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. And the insights we hope to take away from great works of art depend on their ability to explore the eternal conflicts in the human condition, like those between men and women, self and society, parent and child, sibling and sibling, and friend and friend. Some theoreticians of literature have suggested that we appreciate tragedy and great works of fiction because they explore the permutations and combinations of human conflict—and these are just the themes that scientific fields like evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics and social psychology try to illuminate.

EDGE: So what do you see as the appropriate role for art?

PINKER: Good heavens, that's not for me to weigh in on! The most I can do is suggest ways in which the sciences of mind might pipe in with insights that could complement those of scholars in the humanities. Linguistics can help poetics and rhetoric; perception science can be useful for the analysis of music and the visual arts; cognitive science has a role to play in the analysis of literature and cinema; evolutionary psychology can shed light on esthetics. And more generally, the sciences of mind can reinforce the idea that there really is an enduring human nature that great art can appeal to.

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