The Blank Slate Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

The Blank Slate - Essay Example The most important chapter in this book is Part IV â€Å"Know Thyself†, Chapter 12 In Touch With Reality and Chapter 13 Out of Our Depths. One of the highlights discussed in these two chapters is about discrimination. According to Steven Pinker, â€Å"Mental images are not really images at all, but instead consist of complicated opinions, positions, doubts, and passionately held convictions, rooted in experience and amendable by argument, by more experience, or by coercion. Our mental images of black men, white judges, the press, and so on do not take the form of pictures of the kind that you can hang up (or â€Å"deconstruct†) on a museum wall.... Hitler did not hate Jews because there were pictures of swarthy Semites with big noses imprinted on his cerebellum; racism does not exist in America because the picture of O. J. Simpson on the cover of Time is too dark. The view that visual clichà ©s shape beliefs is both too pessimistic, in that it supposes that people are helplessly imprisoned by received stereotypes, and too optimistic, in that it supposes that if you could change the images you could change the beliefs†(Pinker 217). ... Pinker supported this view by saying that it is only man himself who is building a wall or division among others. The human desire within him creates the conflict because in his mind, he knows what is right from wrong. We think, feel and learn from our daily experiences as we continue to explore life. This conclusion may be drawn in correlation from this statement, â€Å"Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts†(Pinker 72). Man only draws out a concept based on the images he sees. This conventional formulation of conclusion based onl y on the physical attributes to embody the holistic essence of a person is also known as stereotyping. We should not look only at the physical aspect of things or persons that are presented before us. What we may see outside may be false or misleading. We should dig deeper and use our minds to decipher a concept as we look beyond what is only seen on the outside, but also on the inside. To support this impression, Pinker stated that â€Å"Also, people's ability to set aside stereotypes when judging an individual is accomplished by their conscious, deliberate reasoning. When people are distracted or put under pressure to respond quickly, they are more likely to judge that a member of an ethnic group has all