Professor Steven Pinker on Humanism and Campuses

*Transcript edited for readability.*
*Link to video interview here.*
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and PhD from Harvard. Johnstone is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard; he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, teaching, and books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. His twelfth book, published in 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So we are here again with Professor Steven Pinker, one of the most prominent humanists around, particularly around the exhaustive research you do on various topics, dispelling myths around increasing violence–the fact that violence is declining. Things of this nature. Some of the recent news that has popped up has been about how students feel on campus about wanting to be able to speak more freely. This is probably more particularly prominent in the American context with the First Amendment there. What are your reflections over the last decade on campuses where there has been pushback to bolder speech around issues that might be either new or perennial controversies?
Professor Steven Pinker: Well, the pushback is very recent, and there is a very strong feeling among American university students that you have to watch what you say, that you cannot speak your mind, and you never know when you might commit racism, that you might commit some political sin and be cancelled, what used to be called excommunicated. The universities have not done a good job of fostering an environment of free speech. There are often student orientations in which they are warned about how they can commit a microaggression if asked somewhere, “Where are you from?” That can be considered a form of subtle racism. If you say, “Oh, you speak very well,” that can be a form of racism. So, they are often terrified. I am not even talking about controversial political or scientific opinions. I am talking about ordinary interactions where they feel like they must walk on eggshells. This leads to the paradox that many American university students in their dorms are in adolescent heaven. Their peers surround them. They are constantly invited and given opportunities for socializing and recreation. They eat with each other, but they say they are lonely. How can this be?
We have reason to believe that in adolescents and young adults. There is an increased risk of anxiety and depression, given that social interaction is one of the most important elixirs for mental health. Why is this possible? I suspect that the fact that interactions are so policed and so guarded means that social opportunities for interaction, far from being opportunities to relax, kick back, and laugh together, are more sources of anxiety. Particularly when a lot of it is done on social media, where you have to worry about being mobbed in real-time, anything you say can be dug up decades later by offence archaeologists and used to cancel you retroactively. None of this even gets to the expression of opinions on political, social, or scientific issues.
Jacobsen: Right, I like that. I like that step back from touching on social dynamics.
Pinker: A lot of social media technologies, too. I suspect, and we do know there are cases, a famous or notorious case at Harvard where a student was admitted and then the admissions office rescinded his admission when one of his social enemies uncovered a late-night chat when he was 15 years old in which he was throwing around racist terms to be transgressive. That he and his friends would be “bad boys.” Harvard withdrew the admissions offer. So you have to worry not about what you might say in an op-ed or a paper where you are formulating your opinions, but when you are kicking back in a chat room. It might come back years later to ruin your life.
Jacobsen: So that will not lead to conversation, whether it be social or intellectual. There will be some people who, in response, will say, “Good, they got their comeuppance for the things they have done.” I am sure you live and work in that world. What happens in those contexts?
Pinker: One quick note that one of the side effects is the epidemic of mental health problems, together with the cases in which that general attitude of censorship and cancellation leads to entire societies adopting the wrong policies or being in the dark as to major issues, such as the effects of, say, school closures and masking during COVID, where there appears to be tremendous harm on a generation of children losing out on a year or two of education based on what turns out to be a very trivial risk of their degree of harm. At a time when it was considered taboo to criticize policies of masking children during school closures and widespread shutdowns, bringing it up would lead to massive condemnation. If there had been a greater commitment to free speech and people not being punished for their opinions, realizing that these policies are harmful may have come sooner.
Jacobsen: People will probably consider this a largely academic phenomenon outside of the social media landscape. People from more ordinary backgrounds working blue-collar jobs and do not necessarily need higher education for their pursuits might think, “It is a humanistic thing that we should generally care about, but why should I, as a blue-collar person, necessarily care about this?”
Pinker: Well, partly because many blue-collar people are on social media, but also, what happens in academia does not stay in academia. About 10 or 15 years ago, people argued, “Who cares what kids get taught or what censorship regimes are implemented in academia? When students enter the real world, they will find they cannot escape this nonsense.” What we know happens is that the whole generation brought the regime of cancel culture into the workplace, so, publishing houses, newspapers, nonprofits, and artistic organizations are being torn apart by the regime of cancel culture, microaggressions, and constant accusations of racism because they have been exported from universities, including blue-collar people being fired from their jobs because of some accidental offence–precisely because the culture of the universities was then taken into the workplace and government and nonprofits.
Jacobsen: So, eventually, this does not only chill academic life; it also chills general culture.
Pinker: Yes, well, it is a chill in that the culture of academia is often brought into other institutions by the graduates of universities as they take positions of power. However, when it comes to societies making collective decisions based on an academic consensus, it can often be the wrong consensus if academia is churning out falsehoods because ideas cannot be criticized. I mentioned the effect of school closures and masking children. However, the other example is even the origin of SARS-CoV-2, where it was considered to be racist to suggest that the virus might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan. We do not know that that is true, but it is not implausible; it might very well have happened.
If it is true, it would have a major implication that we have got to ramp up lab security drastically, perhaps not do gain-of-function studies of the kind that could have created this virus, on pain of suffering from another catastrophic pandemic if we do not learn the lesson. So, that is a case in which what academics decide can affect the world’s fate. Another example would be the effectiveness of policing. If there is reason to think that after the George Floyd demonstrations and the riots of 2020, the idea that police do not matter or that there is an epidemic of shooting by racist cops may have led to withdrawals of policing that then caused the violent crime, if that understanding of an epidemic of racist shootings had been put into context in the first place, they knew that there are not that many shootings of unarmed African-Americans by cops, that this was a false conclusion. Journalism has as much a role in this as academia, but journalism has also developed a regime of cancel culture, where heterodox opinions are often firing offences. If the nationwide consensus is distorted, society will adopt policies that worsen it. Finally, one other thing, and I will turn it back to you, is that even when the academic consensus is almost certainly correct, as in the case of, say, human-induced climate change, if scientists, government officials, and scientific societies have forfeited their credibility by ostentatiously punishing dissenters, leading to the impression that they are their cult, we could blow off their recommendation because if anyone disagreed, they would be cancelled. So it is another cult, it is another priesthood, it is another political faction. The scientific consensus loses credibility if it comes from a culture known for intolerance of dissent.
Jacobsen: We could probably iterate that across domains, whether it is the combat over creationism, or vaccines causing autism, and things of this nature.
Pinker: Yes, so if the scientific consensus tries to debunk it, then no one has enough scientific competence to review everything scientists say perfectly. Some of the acceptance of the findings of science has to be committed trust; these are people who know what they are doing. They have means of distinguishing true from false hypotheses. If something they believed were false, it would be self-correcting. If you undercut that assumption, then people will blow off what scientists say. Scientists themselves are surprisingly oblivious to this possibility. Many scientific societies churn out a woke boilerplate, branding themselves as being on the hard political left and cultural left, with no appreciation that this may alienate the people who are not on the left or in the center who do not care but perceive science as another faction.
Jacobsen: What areas are incursions of what is called something like woke ideology or wokeness into academic and empirical findings or before the empirical findings impact a lot of academic and professional life? So, at the highest level, where people are tenured professors, it is an ideological strain pushing against proper consideration of the evidence.
Pinker: It is worse in the humanities than in the social sciences, worse in the social sciences than in science and engineering. Although, those are generalizations. Probably worst of all, the branches of humanities and social science that are sometimes denigrated as grievance studies are often departments of women and gender studies or studies devoted to particular ethnic groups. Some of the social sciences are worse than others. For example, cultural anthropology is a lost cause. There has been such ideological capture. Most of my field, psychology, is not nearly that bad. Although, there are strains there. Sociology is divided; there is a branch of more quantitative sociology, verging into economics, that is pretty empirically oriented, but then there is another far more ideological part. Even the hard sciences, particularly the scientific societies, have plenty of wokeness, even though the actual lab scientists may be more neutral or empirically oriented. However, the societies themselves tend to be “woker” than their members.
Jacobsen: Why are societies more likely to be captured than individuals?
Pinker: Yes, it is a good question, partly because of the selection of who goes into societies and institutions. If your heart and soul want to do science, you will be in the lab, getting your hands dirty with data. If your motivation is more political, verbal, or ideological, you will try to become a magazine’s editor or a society’s spokesperson. There is a tendency for institutions to drift leftward. Robert Conquest, the historian, is sometimes credited with a law that states that any institution that is not constitutionally right-wing becomes left-wing. You can see the drift that has happened to many institutions recently. They have not become left-wing in the economic quasi-Marxist sense but “woke” in the sense of identitarian politics, seeing culture and history as a zero-sum struggle among racial and sexual groups. A kind of intolerant identitarian politics has captured several societies with well-defined intellectual goals. It has happened to the ACLU, the American Humanist Association, and Planned Parenthood.
So, selection is part of it. Another part may be the belief that the way to change the world is through the imposition of verbally articulated philosophies, as opposed to a bottom-up approach of experimentation, data gathering, entrepreneurship, trying things out, and seeing what happens. The top-down approach is much more likely to start with a predefined narrative and to try to impose that narrative. There may be something more pleasant to institutions in this approach.
To a more left-wing mindset. To elaborate on that a little bit, this comes from Thomas Sowell. Some systems achieve order spontaneously and in a distributed fashion, market economies being the most obvious example—the invisible hand. No planner decides how many size eight shoes to make or where to sell them. The millions of people making choices proliferate information in markets, and the system becomes intelligent, with no one articulating exactly why. The evolution of a language works that way; a culture with its norms and mores works that way. There is a kind of sympathy for these distributed systems that are more on the right, and historically, there are many exceptions. However, on the left, there is more of an articulation of foundational principles, which is a good theory. Therefore, you are more likely to try to change things by joining an institution that can pass resolutions and implement verbally articulated policies. Conversely, on the right, people will go into business, try to invent things, and hope the invention will take off as part of this more distributed, bottom-up approach.
Jacobsen: Do you think the general humanistic approach is akin to an evidence-based moral philosophy where you work bottom-up and then formulate the principles of your ethics from that, rather than top-down, as you might find in divine command theory?
Pinker: There is some affinity in that humanism starts from the flourishing and suffering of individuals. When that is your ultimate good, instead of implementing scriptures or carrying out some grand historical dialectic or privileging some salient polity or entity like a nation, or a tribe, then, if you are a humanist, you see the point of a society, a religion, and so on, is what will leave those people better off.
My pleasure, thanks for the time to talk to you, Scott.
Jacobsen: Excellent. Take care. Bye.
—
Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash
2 replies on “Professor Steven Pinker on Humanism and Campuses”
Great points!
It’s interesting to see Pinker resorting to COVID scam as an illustration of free speech failure.
“offence archaeologists” – priceless!
Great Article, in particular I like this phrase by Pinker as it goes to the dangers of wokeness and the cancelling and in the end lack of rational and logical thought allowed or promoted.
“Many scientific societies churn out a woke boilerplate, branding themselves as being on the hard political left and cultural left, with no appreciation that this may alienate the people who are not on the left or in the center who do not care but perceive science as another faction.”