The Modernist composer Anton Webern predicted that mailmen on their rounds would one day whistle his atonal non-melodies. Three-quarters of a century later I see the following in a 2006 report from the National Academy of Sciences. The report labors under the title Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering:
Women are a small portion of the science and engineering faculty members at research universities, and they typically receive fewer resources and less support than their male colleagues… . It is not lack of talent, but unintentional biases and outmoded institutional structures that are hindering the access and advancement of women.
These two observations have in common a certain view of human nature—a view that, beginning about a century ago, colon- ized large regions of both the arts and the human sciences. That view owed much to German Romanticism, something to Marxism, and something to nineteenth-century technological triumphalism, but it owed even more to base but universal human urges: wishful thinking and the desire for novelty.
That colonization process and its fruits are now coming into perspective. Thanks to Steven Pinker, the greatest human sciences popularizer of our time, the view of human nature that underlies the preposterosities of both Webern’s prediction and Beyond Bias and Barriers has even acquired a name, current among educated non-specialists of all kinds: the Blank Slate principle, harking back to ancient tabula rasa theories.
Our minds and personalities, following this
