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Contrarian Steven Pinker: the celebrity scientist at the centre of the culture wars

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021...lture-wars

EXCERPTS: . . . In The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, he gathered copious amounts of data to show that violence had declined across human history, in large part because of the emergence of markets and states. Understandably, the book struck a chord with people who move markets and run states.

[...] Steven Pinker’s positive spin on the world has brought him into the orbit of many powerful people. On his phone, under the heading Politicians, he keeps a list of the two dozen or so heads of state, royalty and other leaders who have asked him for an audience.

[...] In the eyes of his critics, this stance has made Pinker the world’s most prominent defender of the status quo. At a time of rising inequality and ecological catastrophe, his prescription for the world – do basically the same thing we have been doing, just a bit better – can seem perverse. To less optimistic observers, the existence of billionaires such as Gates – he and seven other men own as much wealth as the planet’s poorest 3.5 billion people, according to a recent Oxfam estimate – indicates a profound rot in the current arrangements of civilisation.

The writer Pankaj Mishra has called Pinker a member of the “intellectual service class”, which shuffles about justifying the positions and soothing the moral sensitivities of society’s winners. Nicolas Guilhot, a professor of intellectual history at the European University Institute, believes that Pinker is fighting a somewhat desperate rearguard action on behalf of neoliberalism against an encroaching army of detractors across the political spectrum. Pinker’s books, and their support from the likes of Zuckerberg, Clinton and Gates, are a reaction, Guilhot told me, “from people who are aware that they’ve lost a lot of ground”.

[...] By the time of The Blank Slate, which came out in 2002, Pinker was positioning his work as an attack on what he considered the three central dogmas of the “intellectual establishment” in academia and the media – that there is no such thing as human nature, that our minds are somehow separate from our bodies, and that people are born good. By contrast, he held that quite a number of traits are universally human, that the mind is an information processing system running on the unique hardware of the brain, and that, whatever good we’re capable of, the basic condition of humanity, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, his favourite political philosopher, is a war of each against all.

Those first popular books irked their fair share of reviewers and academics, especially on the left, who feared that Pinker’s debatable scientific interpretations had unsavoury political implications. But the real turning point in his career arrived in 2007, in the form of a simple question: “What are you optimistic about?” The prompt was part of an annual symposium for the website Edge, run by Pinker’s literary agent, Brockman. Pinker’s 678-word answer was that violence had declined across human history, an argument he expanded over the next four years into the 696-page book Better Angels. “A large swathe of our intellectual culture is loth to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and western society,” Pinker wrote in the book.

Around the same time that he was researching violence, Pinker was beginning to see himself as having a particular role to play in public life – not just as a talented explainer of science, or even a critic of intellectual orthodoxies, but as someone who could stand athwart the stupidification of public discourse. “I came out of the closet as a defender of reason and objectivity,” Pinker told the Times. The major result of this decloseting was Enlightenment Now, which he described to me as his “theory of everything, or almost everything, or at least a lot”. In the book, he argues that, along with liberalism, the Enlightenment gave rise to three main values – reason, science and humanism – that led to the massive improvements he charts in the human condition. These improvements were not only material but moral, as people began to expand their circle of moral concern to those beyond their own family, tribe, nation or species. It was his wife, he said, who convinced him that these values were “worth singling out and defending”.

Since Enlightenment Now came out, in early 2018, Pinker has been engaged in almost unceasing conflict with what he considers his many intellectual enemies, who include intellectuals (“intellectuals hate progress”), progressives (“intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress”), and universities full of progressive intellectuals (a “suffocating leftwing monoculture”). He has also taken aim at postmodernism (“defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness”), a stretch of the green movement running all the way from Al Gore to the Unabomber (“quasi-religious ideology … laced with misanthropy”), contemporary identity politics (“an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values”), and the many people who “lack the conceptual tools to ascertain whether progress has taken place or not”. In these conflicts, Pinker sometimes presents himself as the lone contrarian in a sea of irrationality. He has written in the past that arguments that are “completely reasonable to me, yet blazingly controversial to everyone else” are “the story of my life”.

[...] Pinker is not only a scientific showman; he is also a willing guinea pig. By his own admission, he does not shy away from self-revelation. He has an MRI scan of a sagittal section of his brain on his website, and has had his genome sequenced and posted online, along with his medical history (basal cell skin cancer, 1995; Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, 2010; blood type, O+). According to genetic tests published in 2012, he shares significant amounts of DNA with his longtime friend the Harvard law professor and Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and with the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, with whom he also shares significant parts of his worldview.

[...] Everything, of course, is not amazing. Pinker knows this, but many of his critics say he hasn’t grasped quite how much is going wrong. His data shows that many bad things, from global poverty to racism and sexism, have declined, but a recurring theme of the criticisms is that he’s not always careful with the data (“shockingly shoddy,” is how the historians Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale have put it). Pinker has attempted to address some of these criticisms in a 10,000-word defence of Enlightenment Now in the rightwing publication Quillette.

A deeper problem, critics say, is Pinker’s faith in data to reveal the truth. Yes, it would be great to just rely on the data, they argue, but data is interpretive all the way down, shaped by what is collected, how it’s collected and for what purpose. That’s a problem Pinker acknowledges in Enlightenment Now, but never fully reckons with. “When you really dig not only into the facts but into his own sources, it’s fully ideological,” Guilhot, the intellectual historian, told me. Several critics have also argued that it’s cruel to ask people to see themselves as data points along a rising trend line, especially if they happen to be among the many people the trends haven’t lifted up. Others say that progress rarely comes from the cheerleaders of the status quo; it comes from radicals organising against the powers that be. Many point out that, whatever the data may show, the really important question is not how much better the world has become, but how much better it could still be.

[...] Although the controversies Pinker generates have intensified, it’s not because his basic view of the world has changed. What has changed is the world. The same defence of capitalism and liberal democracy that animates much of Enlightenment Now can be found, in miniature, in The Blank State, though between them stand the financial crisis, the migrant crisis, the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of social media and authoritarian populism, and numerous increasingly alarming reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At the same time, over the past decade or so, a greater diversity of people have entered academia and public discourse, and have challenged opinions that were once considered acceptable. “There’s a huge reckoning happening,” Saini said.

It’s hard not to see Pinker’s latest book, Rationality, which walks readers through various cognitive biases, as a response to his critics – particularly those who lacked “the conceptual tools to ascertain whether progress has taken place or not”. In Enlightenment Now, Pinker recommends “cognitive debiasing” programmes as part of a strategy of countering irrationality in the world; Rationality reads like the centrepiece of the curriculum. If only everyone were capable of reasoning properly, Pinker sometimes seems to imply, then our endless political arguments would not occupy so much of public life. Instead of being consumed by conflict, we would be busily problem-solving. “I think the issue that a lot of people have with Pinker is that, for someone who is so exercised about other people’s biases and lack of rationality and logic, he sometimes feels a little reluctant to question his own,” Saini said.

Pinker’s methods sometimes seem cynical, but I never got the sense that he was anything less than sincere. [...] Pinker and I had planned to go up to Harvard to see his office, which he hadn’t entered since the start of the pandemic, nearly a year and a half earlier. Before we left, I asked to see a pair of black caiman-leather cowboy boots he had custom made for him by the legendary bootmaker Lee Miller, part of his signature look at public events. (“He told me he likes cowboy boots because it’s the only way a man can get away with wearing high heels,” Pinker’s friend the biologist Jerry Coyne told me. “He likes mostly reptile boots, I think.”) Pinker showed me the boots, but opted to wear a pair of driving loafers designed by Nicolas Sarkozy’s son Louis, for whom Pinker is a celebrity model... (MORE - missing details)
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