If you ever thought Steven Pinker was a member of the liberal intelligentsia, think again. That was his carefully maintained facade, an illusion built on his politeness and careful speech, but underneath it all, he really is a kind of troglodyte with regressive views. Like so many right-wing podcasters, he’s been hiding behind free speech absolutism; whenever some horrid troll says something that ought to get them slapped down hard, here comes little Stevie, the Harvard professor, to defend them with a shout of “Free Speech!”
He’s had a long history of playing this gambit, and it’s starting to catch up with him. Virginia Heffernan lays out all the evidence, prompted by yet another book from the man. It must be hard on him to see his legacy dissolve.
But something’s not right. Pinker’s off his cognitive game. He’s admittedly had a hard stretch over the past few years, during which his reputation has sustained slow-rolling but significant damage. His glory days – from The Language Instinct in 1994 to his selection by Time magazine as a top evo-psych influencer in 2004 – may simply be behind him now. And though Bill Gates, Joe Rogan, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson and other masters of the manosphere continue to look up to him, Pinker’s also at the centre of a cyclone of academic catastrophes.
For one, he’s still smarting from a six-year-old petition that tried in vain to get him removed from a linguistics association for alleged racist statements. “In the old days,” he said of cancellation culture on a recent podcast, “there were public hangings, public crucifixions, burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures.”
There’s the weak point of all those “free speech” claims. It’s really ‘free speech for me, not for thee’ if, when someone exercises their free speech to accuse him of racism, why, that’s comparable to a public crucifixion in his mind. These days he’s remarkably busy, since so many of his friends have done so many odious things, and he has to race around defending them all while trying not to muss his hair.
In his hard-won role as a public intellectual, Pinker has taken it upon himself to defend the freedom of anti-woke darlings to say and do whatever they want. These include the British philosopher and alleged sex pest Colin McGinn, the American academic fraud Marc Hauser, and the American “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who ignited the media campaign against Professor Jason Arday.
Notably, too, Pinker worked with his friend Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer, on the legal defence of their associate, the eugenicist and child rapist Jeffrey Epstein.
And now his intellectual child, evolutionary psychology, is in trouble.
And if stumping for the outlaw brotherhood weren’t taxing enough, Pinker’s domain of study has quietly collapsed. Evolutionary psychology, which he pioneered, came under a cloud after the exposure of its iffy methodology (in which its claims can’t be disproven), and controversies over race science (in which racial hierarchies are biological) and rape apologetics (in which rape is a reproductive strategy). Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED, yes, PED), where Pinker was a regular, closed ignominiously in 2021.
News of the death of evolutionary psychology may be premature — that collection of ugly misinterpretations of science is remarkably resilient, drawing as it does on the never-ending wellspring of racism and sexism. I wouldn’t count it out just yet, even if I do wish it would truly go away. I don’t think Pinker is the knight in shining armor who will rescue it. His reputation is finally being tarnished.
In 2019, Pinker’s reputation took its biggest hit when his clandestine ties to Epstein surfaced. It seemed that Epstein had hosted Pinker on his jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express, and the men appeared in friendly photos together. Part of their relationship was Pinker’s starring role at Edge, a masculinist network of billionaires and academics that Epstein bankrolled and used to advance his plans for a master race. (I was a lesser light in Edge; that story is told here.)
Then there’s something darker: the evidence that Pinker helped Dershowitz with Epstein’s legal defence in 2007 – and did so knowingly, as was recently reported by the anthropologist Cathryn Townsend in Liberal Currents. (Pinker says he didn’t know which of Dershowitz’s clients he was helping.) Then in 2015 he tweeted out Dershowitz’s defence of Epstein and the former Prince Andrew.
Follow that link to the story of Edge — I was also a lesser light in that community, and wasn’t involved long enough to perceive how dark and evil that group was. But wow, did I ever dodge a bullet there.
He can’t help himself. He tends to ally himself with the worst people who are eventually exposed, and he’s left holding a bag of excuses.
Pinker, who never met an anti-woke campaign he didn’t like, recently joined the crusade of “race realist” Cofnas against Arday, the onetime Cambridge sociologist and suspected plagiarist who died last month. On X, Pinker grieved not over Arday’s presumed suicide but the fact that he and Cofnas had been been “tarred” with charges of racism for their attacks on him.
Metaphors that turn speech acts into medieval torture have become Pinker’s stock-in trade. For a man whose academic field was built largely on faulty studies (a devastating 2015 study found that more than half of psychology studies could not be replicated) to ignore the intellectual fraud in his circle and lash out at people like Arday for bad scholarship – well, psychologists used to call that projection, but Lord knows if those studies hold up.
Heffernan does not recommend Pinker’s latest book.
Skip the new book. The once-sharp Pinker has trouble landing a point these days, and it’s even a little worrying to see a don of his stature reduced this way. Pinker already blocks me on X for pointing out his ties to Epstein, so I’m sure he won’t see this piece and fear me as a hangman. (See “Free Speech Crusader Blocking Anyone Mentioning His Epstein Ties.”) But if he does, I will be careful not to say something violent. You read this piece, Professor? Perhaps you felt your blood pressure rise…
Thanks for the suggestion, but reading anything by Pinker has not been on my to-do list for many years. I will skip it. I’m not at all interested in anything by an Epstein apologist.
Are any of his books worth reading? Somebody gave me Enlightenment now and The Fourth Chimpanzee. I haven’t read either yet.
@1: Better Angels of Our Nature has been strongly criticized by historians, and Enlightenment Now is apparently even worse. Since he’s using history as data to make his argument, that’s pretty damning. And I liked the former at the time (my copy is even autographed!) — it gave me a little hope that the long moral arc of the universe just might bend, however painfully slowly, towards justice).
I really liked Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994). That was well within his professional wheelhouse. But when I read The Blank Slate (2004), I thought he was getting polemical and strawmannish (if strawmannish isn’t a word yet, it should be), and I gave up on reading Pinker. I also enjoyed some early stuff from his wife Rebecca Goldstein.
submoron @ # 1: … The Fourth Chimpanzee…?
No such title showed up in my brief searches, w/ & w/out Pinker’s name.
Confusion perhaps with the Third Chimpanzee (1991) by Jared Diamond?
Cancel culture is one of those “Woke 1.0” fads that overplayed its hand and thankfully fell out of style after academia tried using it for the sake of Israel and, later, for people who said bad words about Charlie Kirk. People outside of academia and corporate America utterly loathe it — at this point it’s just backfiring and creating more public interest in its targets (e.g. Hasan Piker).
Normally I would say Pinker will do just fine weathering the storm, but he hasn’t tried to stay relevant for a while. Obscurity will probably get him before an anemic cancel culture does.
Erp @ 5. Thankyou Erp! It was in a pile of books in a dark corner and I saw it next to The Language instinct. I should have used a torch for some light. Mea culpa.
Honestly, a lot of things we do tend to use history to describe them, especially in psychology. This is kind of the problem with psychology as a discipline in general – it relies on examining behavior, almost entirely, while not having an explanation for “how” that behavior arises. Its descriptive, not explanative, in a bloody lot of cases. Still, you can get useful results out of descriptions of behavior, and descriptions of outcomes from trying to adjust that behavior. And, to be clear, there is “some” overlap with biology, in which you can get explanative results, as in, “If X is present, or absent, it can cause Y behavior(s).”, its just.. not an exact thing, and you can get wildly different outcomes, depending on the individual, in reaction to such. So… in simplest terms, I never thought there was any real problem with evolutionary psychology “in principle”, and it could provide real explanative results, eventually. The problem with it was almost always, from the beginning, Pinker, and the people trying to explain multilayer, complex, complicated behaviors, with wildly different sources, but similar characteristics, using one f-ing gene. For example – is the behavior of pack predators the “same” as that of animals living in family groups, or are these convergent, and able to adapt into an overlapping coexistence, that would otherwise not be plausible? We don’t really know, but I am sure some idiot in Pinker’s circle, if they where not so bloody busy trying to excuse misogyny, would have come up with some single gene for it….
Best comparison I can come up with, from my own experience, would be trying to reverse engineer and operating system, and its behaviors, based on observation of how the file system stores porn and right wing rants on physical media, and declaring that the explanation has something to do with a single system call, which totally explains the behavior of how all those “specific” files ended up on their own drives. Silly things like a) the entire rest of the OS, b) the internet, or c) external input – i.e, them writing the bullshit, and surfing porn sites, being somehow “incidental” to how it got there.
Its not that the idea of looking at genetics was bad… just that it became very quickly obvious that they had narrowed its focus so far that their arguments rapidly started sounding like the flat earther I saw a vid on a bit ago, who argued that his utter misunderstanding of how freaking maps work, or get created, meant that humans had not been around to create them, but that, somehow, their “accuracy” was all due to them having been created by gods, and… uh, at that point he completely lost me, since how “we” got them from the gods, if gods made the maps… yeah, no, still getting headache trying to comprehend his nonsense, but.. yeah, same feeling reading Pinker’s idiocy.
The closer you look at Pinker and his scholarship, the worse he looks.
A lot of his books are mostly quote mining, misquoting, making stuff up, logical fallacies, dubious sources, and a lot of pointless insults.
After a while, you realize you have better ways to spend your time and write him off as a kook and fraud.
Data.
There is a lot but this is one example.
If you look up Pinker’s references, most of the time they don’t say what he says they say.
This isn’t scholarship, it is Fox NoNews level propaganda.
I lost interest in evo psych at least a decade ago because there wasn’t anything there worth paying attention to.
In principle it could explain things because we are products of genes and environment.
It hasn’t worked yet.
The problem with evo psych is that human behavior is very flexible so it explains nothing.
A lot of human behavior is shaped by upbringing, learning, and cultural environment, not genetics.
We don’t even know what the limits are to human behavioral and cultural flexibility.
Hmm…
Heffernan’s article contains a lot that’s interesting, and pretty damning of “Edge” but also this:
Which is, to put it politely, a load of crap. They are simply a problem-solving technique in computer science, which sometimes works well, and sometimes doesn’t. Heffernan should be more careful not to make silly pronouncements in areas where she knows nothing.
The sad thing is that the New York Times (cf. https://archive.ph/xzo9c) cites Pinker as having stated that he was “voted off” the Epstein island, whereas in the article you linked (and where there is also mention of a Virginia Giuffre reference to a “Professor Stephen”, who was almost certainly mentioned only in speech, for otherwise his second name would have been given, where she claimed that she was forced to mate with him) Pinker claims to never have entered Epstein’s island.
The disappointment (if the accusation is true) would be bitter. I must have listened to half a dozen YouTube speeches of the guy, including one on good science writing.
The one glimmer of hope is that Pinker argued against starvation and reduced healthcare as proposed by Epstein.
I’m not sure how to judge this case. For one thing, nothing is quite proved yet, though it looks dim. For another, if the speculation is true, what were the circumstances? How old was Giuffre at the time? Could Pinker have known about her age? Or her suffering in her position? Did she propose the mating in that encounter after being asked to do so by Epstein?
Since I’m having a nasty cold, I’ve taken the time of watching one of his recent interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zhK8X2zGes
I’m not ready to judge the man by one possible mistake (that due to age he’s unlikely to re-commit).
He still seems to fit the bill for liberal intelligentsia as far as I can tell.
#11: I agree. Unfortunately, the association of a group of racist pedophiles with a legitimate computational technique is poisoning that field — another harm that these guys have done.
No.
We, meaning PZ Myers and almost all of Pharyngula and Freethoughtblogs are part of the liberal intelligentsia.
Pinker is not one of us!!!
He is at best a pretender and falls more into the category of fake scholar and fake neoliberal.
He is like Richard Dawkins, right on one or two things and wrong on a whole lot more.
Crediting Pinker with founding evolutionary psychology is a little problematic — the basic concepts were developed in the 1970s, when Pinker was still a student, and Donald Symons is usually cited as the originator of the field, esp his book The Evolution of Human Sexuality — and some historians, of course, trace the roots of Evo Psy to sociobiology by 1975. As far as I recall, Pinker didn’t start working on anything that would count as evolutionary psychology until 1990. Just a quibble….
Wow. Naked well-poisoning right there. Informative.
“anti-woke” is enough of a label for me.
#6 Beholder if that was your way of saying that shaming does not work on the rich & powerful , yes we know. It is not necessarily a good thing.
I guess I gotta do something to dissuade Pinker’s bulldog from linking the OP, but he might be out of commission due to cataract surgery today and maybe a few more. Been there. All I gotta say for PSA purposes is keep an eye out for posterior vitreous detachment a few years down the road and subsequent concerns of retinal involvement.
As for Punker, I wish Gould was still alive. He was the bogey of that set given exaptation and spandrels threw too much complexity into ev psych theorizing to take the field all that seriously. No wonder Gould was demonized and Pinker became more a polemicist than serious intellectual. His wife had interesting stuff to say on PBS Closer to Truth, but that show wound up being itself way too close to Epstein and became too much religiously oriented woo for me to continue watching. Sad stuff.
There was actually some Templeton funded free will stuff from FSU (I think) that was worthwhile.
Also that dingbats like Pinker and Coyne posed as knowledgable on Critical Theory while not knowing Habermas from Benhabib from Marcuse is a travesty. They bought Lindsay and Rufo hook, line, and sinker and conflated Frankfurt school with French pomo like the ignorant pseudointellectual slobs they are. They personify the right wing pipeline perfectly.
Also the thing I was expecting that didn’t happen. Weird ass PVD ocular anomalies instead. A scary ring of light in the periphery. This could still be next:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24737-posterior-capsular-opacification
Also called secondary cataract. Fun stuff.