So what is the Enlightenment view of human nature against which the Dark Enlightenment sets itself? Here we seem to have pretty strong agreement that it is the blank slate view of human nature that is not only wrong but disastrously so. (Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is required reading for anyone delving into these waters.) The blank slate was originally an entirely epistemological notion; it was the claim that knowledge came from the senses and that there were no innate ideas in Descartes’ sense. Restricted to this sphere it was relatively unproblematic and it is a view I share. But in the late 19th and 20th century the notion of the blank slate was extended way beyond its merely epistemological origins to encompass the entirety of human psychology. It is this expansion that the Dark Enlightenment sets itself against.

It is illuminating to understand how communism claimed it was the rational conclusion of the blank slate. Communism held that human nature is entirely malleable and that education and propaganda can shape people in any way desired. Communists held that people were so malleable that, say, parents’ affection for their children could be educated away and children could be happily abandoned to be brought up by the state, or that people’s self-interest could be overcome through education, and so people could work not for their own interests but for the benefit of the state, or that people could be educated out of their desire for material goods, and so on. The communist views were actually quite reasonable given blank slate equalism. For example, I seem remember reading somewhere that Trotsky claimed that there would be a Leonardo Da Vinci on every street corner after the revolution, and why not? If everyone is equal then inequality must be the result of social conditions. If there could be one Leonardo Da Vinci why can’t everyone be a Leonardo Da Vinci if we are all equal and society is perfected?

The official socially-approved lesson from the fall of communism is that it fell because it failed to see that people are naturally self-interested. Even uber-Lefty Peter Singer in his book Darwinian Left concedes that a political system can not require that people act against their self-interest. This is the view of the neo-liberalism that has reigned for the last 30 years: blank slate + self-interest. Neo-liberals of the right and left generally believe in the blank slate in all areas except that people are naturally materially self-interested.