Abstract
This chapter examines Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate to demonstrate how the new brain sciences are often shaped by an academic effort to discredit the social sciences and replace them with a new form of social Darwinism. Moreover, this reaction against other academic disciplines mirrors an attempt to formulate a science-based conservative backlash against postmodern social movements, welfare state policies, and progressive parenting. We shall see that this political discourse is presented in the form of a value-free scientific theory, which itself attempts to deny the importance of culture, language, and history. In short, new brain sciences tend to posit that all other social science and humanities disciplines are not only misleading but also dangerous because they are not based on empirical facts. Just as psychoanalysis has been criticized for not being scientific, I will argue that evolutionary psychology attempts to eliminate the Freudian conceptions of the unconscious and sexuality in order to reimagine a new mode of neoliberal social Darwinism.
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Notes
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Samuels, R. (2017). The Backlash Politics of Evolutionary Psychology: Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate . In: Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71891-0_3
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