A Battle Already Won

In 2002, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker published The Blank Slate. The book was a frontal assault on the theory that humans are born as blank slates, shaped entirely by environment and education. It became a bestseller, and Pinker was portrayed as a champion of “science” defeating “ideology.”

But here’s the strange part: the enemy Pinker claimed to defeat had been dead for decades.

Behaviorist psychology—the academic foundation of the blank slate—had been pushed out of the mainstream after Noam Chomsky demolished Skinner in 1959. The cognitive revolution came in the 1970s. Behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology established themselves in the 1990s. Declaring “the blank slate is wrong” in 2002 was like giving an anti-communist speech after the Cold War ended. Academically, the fight was already over.

So why shoot a dead enemy? Well, dead enemies don’t shoot back. That makes them convenient opponents.

A Recurring Pattern

This isn’t unique to the blank slate debate. The same pattern repeats across academia.

Take psychoanalysis. The conflicts between Freudians and Jungians, between Lacanians and ego psychologists, were fierce through the mid-twentieth century. But meanwhile, cognitive psychology and neuroscience were rising, pushing psychoanalysis out of mainstream science. While psychoanalysts argued about the “true unconscious,” others were scanning brains with fMRI.

Literary theory followed suit. In the 1980s and 90s, debates between deconstructionists, postmodernists, and new historicists heated up the humanities. “What is a text?” and “Is the author dead?” dominated conferences. Ironically, this coincided exactly with declining enrollment in literature departments and cratering job prospects for humanities majors. While scholars fought fiercely over the nature of texts, people stopped reading texts altogether.

Macroeconomics saw something similar with the New Keynesian versus New Classical debate. For decades, both sides built sophisticated mathematical models arguing over government intervention versus free markets. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, both sides failed to predict it. “What does your debate have to do with reality?” became the cynical response, and economics shifted toward micro-level causal inference and behavioral economics.

The pattern is clear: external influence declines while internal debates intensify—or already-settled debates get resurrected.

Why Resurrect Dead Enemies

A few hypotheses.

First, it’s performance for an audience. The enemy must look formidable for victory to feel dramatic. When Pinker warns that “the blank slate remains a dangerous ideology,” readers feel tension and buy the book. Who would read “Actually, this debate ended 30 years ago”? You have to resurrect dead enemies like zombies to create content. And dead enemies can’t fight back. They’re the perfect opponents.

Second, it’s resource competition. For academics, attention equals resources: grants, students, faculty positions, media exposure—all of it depends on attention. When an entire field is declining, you need to project the impression that “we’re fighting an important battle” to claim what’s left of the pie. Quiet research gets ignored, but framing things as “A versus B: The Great Debate” brings media coverage and speaking invitations.

Third, it’s niche market strategy. STEM now occupies the real frontier of science, and most people can’t follow it. Few understand the technical details of machine learning papers or genomics research. But questions like “What is human nature?” or “Are we slaves to our genes?” are intuitively accessible and politically provocative. To package science for mass consumption, resurrecting settled debates works.

The Alibi of Remnants

To justify shooting dead enemies, you need to claim “remnants remain.” Do they?

Pinker argued that blank-slate assumptions still operate outside academia—that sentiments like “all children have equal potential” and “gaps are caused by environment” persist in education policy and political discourse. Fair point. But this is more political rhetoric than academic argument. When asked to name researchers who seriously argue “humans are born as complete blank slates” within academia, specific names are hard to find.

This raises the problem of defining remnants. Few people advocate “strong blank slatism,” but many worry that “emphasizing genetic differences could be used to justify discrimination.” Are they remnants? Pinker’s side says yes. The other side responds: “We never advocated the blank slate—we’re just cautious about political misuse.”

But here’s the crucial distinction: remnants existing and remnants being meaningful are different things.

Consider flat-earthers. In recent years, they’ve made headlines on YouTube and Netflix documentaries. They clearly exist, in substantial numbers, with loud voices. They have communities and conferences. But does their existence mean “the spherical Earth is still under debate”? Obviously not.

If a scientist wrote a 500-page book seriously refuting flat-earth theory and claimed “the flat-earth threat still exists in academia,” that wouldn’t be academic debate. It would be public education—or content business. The existence of remnants doesn’t prove a debate’s validity.

The same logic applies to the blank slate. People making strong environmentalist claims on social media doesn’t mean “the blank slate debate is academically alive.” Twitter users bashing evolutionary psychology is a completely different matter from blank-slate theorists remaining in academia.

The criteria for meaningful remnants are clear: Do they publish in field journals? Are they taken seriously at mainstream conferences? Are they reflected in university curricula? By these standards, most “remnants” are academically meaningless noise.

Yet those who shoot dead enemies deliberately blur this distinction. They need to frame popular noise as academic threat to make their own work seem important.

Survival Strategy of Declining Fields

A more cynical interpretation: fighting dead enemies might itself be a symptom of a field’s decline.

Truly vibrant fields debate the future. They fight over new discoveries, new methodologies, new questions. They don’t fight ghosts of the past. Needing to resurrect dead enemies because no living ones exist might mean the field has no interesting debates left.

Physicists don’t write bestsellers claiming “Newtonian mechanics is wrong.” They have real unsolved problems—quantum gravity, dark matter, the multiverse. Fields that need to dramatically repackage already-answered questions might have stopped generating new ones.

And this decline isn’t just about individual fields. It’s part of a larger shift.

Research funding concentrates in engineering and life sciences. Students choose majors that lead to jobs. Media attention goes to AI, climate change, drug development. Philosophical debates about human nature, theoretical explorations of textual meaning, macro-level interpretations of social phenomena—all these are losing ground.

In this context, framing like “blank slate versus science” or “deconstructionism versus tradition” becomes a survival strategy. Signaling “we’re still fighting important battles.” Struggling to survive in the attention economy.

Is the Debate You’re Watching Real?

Next time you hear about a heated debate in some field, ask these questions.

Is the opponent still alive? Are they actual researchers publishing in journals, presenting at conferences, teaching at universities? Or is it a dead theory resurrected like a zombie?

If remnants exist, are they meaningful? Is it a position taken seriously in academia, or popular noise packaged as academic threat?

And are those leading the debate fighting for genuine intellectual progress, or just trying to capture attention in an age of irrelevance?

The gunfire aimed at dead enemies is loud. But sometimes that loudness is meant to hide the absence of living ones.

That said, one caveat is needed before applying this framework at 100%.

The Epsilon I’m Leaving Behind

In reinforcement learning, there’s a strategy called epsilon-greedy. Most of the time, you pick the best-known option, but with small probability ε, you explore randomly. Why? Because what you believe is best might not actually be best. Stop exploring entirely, and you might never find a better answer.

This essay’s argument needs an epsilon of reservation too.

If you reduce every “fight with dead enemies” to attention-seeking performance, you’ll cynically dismiss genuinely important debates. The claim that fields outside STEM are “becoming irrelevant” might just reflect intensified capitalist utility standards—not that those questions have become meaningless. Questions about human nature, textual meaning, and social structures are still worth asking.

And sometimes supposedly dead enemies really do come back. Intellectual history has cases where once-discarded ideas were revived in new contexts. Closing the door with 100% certainty blocks even that possibility.

So apply this essay’s framework 95% of the time, but keep 5% doubt. An epsilon’s worth.

So You’ve Read This Far

If you’ve read this far, you might have noticed.

This essay is doing exactly the same thing.

I set up “zombie debates in academia” as an enemy, created a structure exposing their false consciousness, and captured your attention. Just as Pinker summoned the blank slate as a zombie, I summoned Pinker as one. I’m attacking a book from 2002 in the 2020s.

A truly active blogger discovers new topics—not criticizing 20-year-old popular science books while pretending at meta-insight. Someone could say that.

The struggle to survive in the attention economy operates even in essays criticizing it. Probably no one is free from this irony.

The fact that you read this essay to the end is the proof.

In the age of the attention economy, we need eyes that distinguish real fights from performances. Including this one.

That said, The Blank Slate is a fun read. Recommended.