CNN interview.
This guy is getting some serious exposure.
Steven Pinker: The eternal optimist
(CNN) - In the week that I interview the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker in his office at Harvard, police release the agonizing recordings of emergency calls made during the Sandy Hook school shootings. In Yemen, a suicide attack on the defense ministry kills more than 50 people. An American teacher is shot dead as he goes jogging in Libya. Several people are killed in riots between political factions in Thailand, and peacekeepers have to be dispatched to the Central African Republic.
In short, it's not hard to find anecdotes that seem to contradict a guiding principle behind much of Pinker's work -- which is that science and human reason are, slowly but unmistakably, making the world a better place.
Repeatedly during our conversation, I seek to puncture the silver-haired professor's quietly relentless optimism. If the ongoing tolls of war and violence can't do it, what about the prevalence in America of unscientific beliefs about the origins of life? Or the devastating potential impacts of climate change, paired with the news -- also released in the week we meet -- that 23% Americans don't believe it's happening, up seven percentage points in just eight months?
I try. But it proves far from easy.
Human nature
At first glance Pinker's implacable optimism, though in keeping with his sunny demeanour and stereotypically Canadian friendliness, presents a puzzle. His stellar career -- which includes two Pulitzer Prize nominations for his books How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature (2002) -- has been defined, above all, by support for the fraught notion of human nature: the contention that genetic predispositions account in hugely significant ways for how we think, feel and act, why we behave towards others as we do, and why we excel in certain areas rather than others.
This has frequently drawn Pinker into controversy -- as in 2005, when he offered a defense of Larry Summers, then Harvard's President, who had suggested that the under-representation of women in science and maths careers might be down to innate sex differences.
"The possibility that men and women might differ for reasons other than socialization, expectations, hidden biases and barriers is very close to an absolute taboo," Pinker tells me. He faults books such as Lean In, by Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for not entertaining the notion that men and women might not have "identical life desires." But he also insists that taking the possibility of such differences seriously need not lend any justification to policies or prejudices that exclude women from positions of expertise or power.
"Even if there are sex differences, they're differences in the means of two overlapping populations, so for any [stereotypically female] trait you care to name, there'll be many men who are more extreme than most women, and vice versa. So as a matter of both efficiency and of fairness, you should treat every individual as an individual, and not prejudge them."
It is generally assumed that anyone who takes human nature seriously will be a fatalist, and probably politically conservative. If we're pre-wired to be how we are, the reasoning goes, we might as well accept it and give up on hopes of any change. One way of interpreting Pinker's most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is as an 800-page doorstopper of a riposte to this idea. Not only can we change, but when it comes to arguably the most important measure of improvement -- the violence we inflict on each other -- we actually have changed, to an almost incredible degree.
"I had very often come across the objection that if human nature exists -- including some ugly motives like revenge, dominance, greed and lust -- then that would imply it's pointless to try to improve the human condition, because humans are innately depraved," says the 59-year-old, whose distinctive appearance -- today he is sporting black cowboy boots -- frequently gets him stopped in the street. "Or there's an alternative objection: that we ought to improve our lot, and therefore, it cannot be the case that human nature exists."
Pinker puts all this down to "a fear that acknowledging human nature would subvert any attempt to improve the human condition." Better Angels argues that this is a misunderstanding of what human nature means. It shouldn't be identified with a certain set of behaviors; rather, we have a complex variety of predispositions, violent and peaceful, that can be activated in different ways by different environments. The book's title, drawn from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address, is "a poetic allusion to the parts of human nature that can overcome the nastier parts," he explains.
But Better Angels is notable above all for the sheer weight of evidence it amasses, culled from forensic archeology, government statistics, town records, and studies by "atrocitologists" of historical genocides and other mass killings. The book demonstrates that homicides, calculated as a proportion of the world's population at any given point, have plummeted; when you look at the numbers this way, World War II wasn't the worst single atrocity in history, but more like the tenth.
Pinker dwells, in sometimes unnerving detail, on horrifying methods of torture once considered routine. "The Heretic's Fork had a pair of sharp spikes at each end," he writes, in what is definitely not the most appalling passage. "One end was propped under the victim's jaw and the other at the base of his neck, so that as his muscles became exhausted he would impale himself in both places."
"Human nature or no human nature," Pinker says, "it's just a brute fact that we don't throw virgins into volcanoes any more. We don't execute people for shoplifting a cabbage. And we used to."
....more
Steven Pinker: 'We don't throw virgins into volcanoes any more' - CNN.com
