Steven Pinker at Dartmouth: A Review

On Monday, April 11, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker delivered a presentation on his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now, explaining why, despite reports to the contrary and a difficult several years, the world is getting better all the time.

Before his presentation could begin, Professor Sonu Bedi, Director of the Ethics Institute, delivered a lengthy and comprehensive introduction to Pinker’s work. Am I the only one that didn’t realize we had an “Ethics Institute” at Dartmouth? To Bedi’s credit, he definitely earned the audience’s attention for the duration of his introduction as the Ethics Institute’s lecture series was postponed for two whole years due to Dartmouth’s strict COVID-19 policies.

Bedi began by expressing his appreciation for the Dorsett Foundation, which sponsored Pinker’s presentation. Apparently, Burt Dorsett ‘53 was either a successful businessman who endowed the fund for the Ethics Institute’s lecture series to reflect his ethical business practices or an unethical businessman with a remorseful conscience. For the record, the author believes Dorsett was surely an upstanding titan of industry, but the counterfactual makes for funnier reading!

Interestingly enough for a talk sponsored by the Ethics Institute, both Bedi and Pinker were proudly unmasked for the duration of the talk while the audience was only permitted inside after donning masks. The asymmetry here warrants some questioning, at the very least. That said, perhaps it was for the best that the audience was masked; approximately half of the heads in the half-filled venue had silver, white, or gray hair, or none whatsoever.

Pinker wasted no time delving right into the meat of his talk by enumerating profound, perennial questions of how one ought to live the good life while dismissing extremist, reactionary, and dogmatic ideologies which claim to address them. In their stead, Pinker called for “a positive defense and an explicit commitment to”: reason over intuition; science over mysticism; humanism, which Pinker defined as the alleviation of human suffering and the promotion of flourishing in this world, not the next; and progress, which he defined as knowledge and sympathy being applied to humanism. 

Pinker, in an unwitting instance of political-incorrectness, displayed a collection of almost entirely white and male Enlightenment thinkers in a slide of his presentation. I guess Pinker didn’t get the memo that the veneration of such people is emblematic of Western chauvinism, sexism, racism, and is otherwise problematic.

Undeterred, Pinker went straight for the jugular of his would-be naysayers in the Academy: “Intellectuals hate progress. And intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress” (italics my own, but, if Pinker were writing the statement he spoke, I’m certain he would have underlined, bolded, or italicized the same word I have). 

Demonstrating his commitment to science, Pinker asserted that human wellbeing can be measured and empirically tested by the following barometers: life expectancy, child mortality, deaths by famine, poverty (showing the famous “hockey stick” graph of real GDP/capita that skyrockets following the industrial revolution), and deaths in battle. Pinker then presented the audience a deluge of data which I’ll summarize here:

• Poverty decreased from 90% 200 years ago to 9% in the present day
• Battle deaths declined from 22/100k in 1950 to 1/100k in 2021
• Implicit and explicit racial prejudice from whites towards blacks in the U.S. have declined markedly in the 21st century

(Pinker also cited “compensatory” measures such as affirmative action as being a boon to social justice. Notably, Pinker did not present any data regarding racist attitudes from blacks towards whites–I guess he did get the memo that such bigotry isn’t considered real racism anymore–or between any other set of racial groups)

• Literacy has increased markedly such that 90% of the world under 25 years of age can read and write
• Work hours have declined dramatically, allowing both men and women to enjoy more leisure time and time with their children, much to the disbelief of 1950s conservative romanticists, I’m sure. 

(Pinker qualified this progress by noting that men have enjoyed a disproportionate share of the increase in leisure time due to women spending more time taking care of progeny–apparently spending time with one’s kids is the opposite of relaxing)

• Life satisfaction has increased as peoples the world over have become more affluent and suicide rates have precipitiously declinedf in most places

(Pinker was sure to note that these two measures have plateaued in the United States)

So, according to Pinker, things are looking up! So why all the bad news? Pinker proffers a combination of essentially two explanations. First, the nature of cognition results in our ingrained negativity bias being directed towards a non-random, similarly-biased sample of news stories, resulting in a positive feedback loop of perverse financial incentives and fear porn. Second, referencing Hobbes but, in the author’s humble opinion, echoing Robert Nozick’s essay, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”, Pinker attributed part of the doomsaying to status competition between elites who benefit from exaggerating problems while positioning themselves as the only sufficiently-educated technocrats to resolve them. In fact, Pinker quite courageously and sardonically derided such pretenses of his fellow academics. Props to Pinker!

Far from being Pollyanna about the future, Pinker genuflected at the commonplace altars of climate change, calling for the decarbonization of the global economy, and COVID-19. To his credit, Pinker implored the audience to place a premium on accuracy in confronting the problems that face us rather than indulging in an orgy of “fact-free pessimism.”

Despite saying he meant in no way to diminish the suffering caused by the Coronavirus, Pinker did immediately transition to contrasting deaths attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic to the plague of Justinian, the Black Death, the colonization of the Americas, smallpox, Spanish Flu, and HIV AIDS. To further bolster his optimistic view of the future, Pinker highlighted the expeditious invention of COVID-19 vaccines and the administration of 11 billion doses in 2 years. Seemingly hedging his bets and placating his critics, Pinker made sure to lament how vaccination rates are “deplorably low in some countries, including our own.”

Acknowledging Putin’s immoral invasion of Ukraine, Pinker said he wouldn’t attempt to answer whether or not Russian aggression threatens the The Long Peace that mankind has benefited from since 1945. Without a hint of irony or self-recognition, Pinker immediately hazarded an answer to the query he just said he couldn’t possibly address: the refusal of the U.S. and E.U. to engage in direct warfare with Russian forces to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine, a a sovereign country, somehow maintains the conditions important to maintaining the Long Peace… this argument was met with zero pushback from the audience. Pinker concluded that sharp power and sanctions would be sufficient to deter continued Russian aggression. At the time of writing, the Ukrainians are still waiting with bated breath for such not-so-sharp power to halt Russian troops from marching on their soil, destroying their cities, and killing their people.

Thus concluded the lecture portion of Pinker’s presentation.

The lively Q&A that followed included the following questions:

• What about the U.S.’s high rates of incarceration?
  • Pinker responded that, while America does incarcerate too many for too long, the incarceration rates are an overzealous response to the crisis of the 1960s crime boom. After some hand-waving, Pinker concluded that gun ownership is to blame for high rates of violent crime. A curious claim to make in NH: a constitutional-carry state and second only to Maine for the lowest rate of violent crime in the nation.
• Is the U.S. an outlier in terms of progress?
  • If his answer is any indicator, Pinker can certainly not be accused of jingoism. Pinker stated that “we punch below our wealth,” “no way near the front of the pack,” “we have nothing to be proud of,” and, in a rare instance of national pride, “we’re O.K.” Apparently, the American Constitution’s robust protection of natural rights cannot be empirically measured and, therefore, is of no meaning whatsoever in comparing the human flourishing of our residents to those of other nations. 
• Is the decline of globalization a threat to progress?
  • While recognizing the fragility of global supply chains and the negative distributional effects of trade on America’s manufacturers, Pinker rejected a populist backlash to globalization and claimed that the elimination of tax havens should solve the problem of lacking funds to redistribute. 
• Is peace unnatural?
  • In attempting to demonstrate his wokeness, Pinker accidentally engaged in wrongspeak by lamenting that “one of the two genders” seems to find war fun. 
• Is religion incompatible with reason? (likely asked by a budding theologian from The Apologia)
  • Pinker was careful to delineate prosocial religious practices from unreasoned theological principles. Pinker seemed not to recognize that first principles, theistic or otherwise, cannot be deduced but must be intuited. For example, Pinker himself takes humanism as better than masochism a priori, i.e., as a postulate or an axiom. The author–an atheist–agrees with Pinker, but laments the cognitive dissonance implicit in Pinker’s patronizing treatment of fideists. 
• What keeps you up at night?
  • Despite appearing well-rested and energetic, Pinker must not be catching too many Z’s. First and foremost, Pinker specified the existential threat of climate change as disrupting his sheep-counting, then moved onto the war in Ukraine, the lack of commitment to liberal democracy and “cosmopolitanism,” and an over-abundance of woke-ism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. 

One of Pinker’s concluding remarks, and I am not paraphrasing here, was that “young people are having less sex!” Had there been more Dartmouth students in the audience rather than geriatric townspeople, this comment might have engendered uproarious laughter, jeers, and snickers. Unfortunately, the Big Green was underrepresented in the audience and, much to the chagrin of the writer, no such response occurred.