Because I know everyone LOVES to be naturalized.
"Everyone has a theory of human nature" according to Pinker in the opening statement of The Blank Slate (Blank 1). Right away he is entering the larger market. He's got a point, there are a lot of theories of human nature out there in the marketplace. And a lot of ways of how we talk about them in the linguistic marketplace. Pinker has his stock in a large share of the market. So the situation is a little different from other extremist B.S. out there but I think any form of human nature is a load of ptooey as my grandma would say.
As Carl and Robin say though in closing, it is critical to see "the way this text locates its writer and readers in relation to others in culture, to certain ideological positions and to particular ways of using language to draw absolute boundaries between groups and to establish a coherent, political self"(Beyond 232). Pinker has his politics slyly hidden and his ideological positions flaunted.
Pinker positions himself as a "scientifically literate person" who does not "believe that the events narrated in the book of Genesis actually took place" (Blank 1). He disenfranchises right away the religious community. Though minimally, the "strategy of condescension" is at display here. Pinker walks into the boundaries of the religious territory by using the notion of free will. Which all stems back to sin and adam and eve, the origin of the construction of free will. He uses the "strategy of condescension" through out, and even more effectively, when he is debunking the fears of the Blank Slate i.e. inequality, imperfectability, determinism and especially nihilism. By the time Pinker is addressing the fears, and once again especially nihilism, Pinker has most of the readers entrapped, fixed upon the logos of the argument and totally forgetting the ethos and (your) pathos. The reader forgets by that time that Pinker isn't a deity and is only a psychologist; we forget to be critical of Pinker's credibility and presence. And Pinker exploits that finely. His credibility is tricky because he is the head of the psychology department of Harvard but he walks right into many more domains than just psychology in this essay. When he does, he's on an Apollo mission, he stakes a lot of ground with the flag of science.
You wouldn't want to get into a discussion with Pinker about how human nature is B.S. by trying to disprove it with more, nuance scientific data. Much like as Carl and Robin claim it wouldn't do you any good to do that with an extremist environmental conservative. These are rhetorical issues. Which Carl and Robin explicate very well in Beyond the Realm of Reason.
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