Steven Pinker: They're trying to cancel me

hello and welcome this is lockdown TV from unheard comm so large Suede's of America and the UK may still be in lockdown but fee politics is carrying on and in fact the canceled brigades are out in force and one of the latest targets is Professor Steven Pinker who joins us from Cape Cod in the u.s. dr. Pinker hello well and so you are evolutionary psychologist a famous writer and let's start with the first event of this past seven days which is that um some people seem to have tried to get a letter going that calls for you to not be dismissed but receive some kind of sense here for previous comments what actually happened I am letter circulated that was submitted to the linguistic Society of America which is the main or a scholarly Organization for linguists demanding that my fellow status be rescinded fellow being their honorific category of my fancy schmancy bigshot linguists and then I'd be taken off their list of people for the media to consult when they have questions about language it was there was there several hundred names on it very few of them were well no linguists means that I recognized two of them that were turned out to be fraudulent signatures but they took exception to five tweets or quotes that they had found some upon the very next issue of race and policing in the United States where I had to tweeted an article from the New York Times suggesting that the problem with American police shootings is the police sheet to many people and not not that that african-americans are singled out holding constant number of encounters with the police there was a kind of chain of contaminations where I tweeted a op-ed by an American a New York Times columnist David Brooks who was defending a writer at Google who had been fired for talking about sex differences in occupational interests I had they found a passage in my book the better angels of our nature on that one my book on the history and psychology of violence where I described what American cities were like in the 70s and 80s during our fight our ultra high crime years a kind of picture that was recently made vivid in the movie Joker where when American chrome really hadn't gone through the roof and I had described a vigilante as being mild mannered which is how he was described in the press but this was a as if it's shooting of five mothers was thereby justified anyway there's some call it offends archaeology where they've dug their various tweets and quotes and interpret them as dog whistles Oh urban violence supposedly was a dog whistle of that was anti african-american although it was of course intended to refer to urban violence we all phenomenon anyway so fortunately the contrary to a number of fears that I had been canceled the linguistic Society of America and folded to being being the demands of the outrage the LSA has not taken any action I'd be very surprised if they do and and I have not been canceled from my situations that I know of so it sounds like it was a little bit of a either incompetent or half-hearted hit job but it's certainly a shot across the bow isn't it I mean you know I don't know whether it's more like to kind of McCarthyite error or Salem witch trials but that the atmosphere is getting very fraught I mean do you feel safe you know I can't complain in the sense that I have a tenured professorship at Harvard so I am relatively safe I do worry about more vulnerable journalists and scientists and artists and writers put it they've been told nice career you got there would be a real shame if something happened to which kind of Sopranos like threat that unlike me who who is in a secure position and they take a shut up and I know that they have we there are cases of junior academics who have been that scholarships revoked because of moms papers that have been retracted not because they are incorrect but because of the reaction that they're likely to arouse so does I I think I have a chilling effect on intellectual and artistic life I'm not betting but I do fear for its effects on me would be intellectual sphere the Republic of ideas in general I mean it even you I guess when you're composing a tweet you are gonna take some additional caution these days because anything you do it's like kind of on on the record deposition do you not feel like you're you're sort of creative ability to communicate as being impinged by having to be so ultra careful well I doubted like yes and I mean just discretion is the better part of a lot of virtues and already I'm careful in the wording of tweets but but yes I've been I've been now please don't notice so the other thing that happened in the past week is that you were one of a large group of signatories to a letter to Harper's Magazine and that laid out some of these concerns around become stifling at atmosphere and the need to protect a free speech and exchange of ideas environment extraordinarily two of the signatories to that letter have already rescinded or retracted their support of it apparently because the reaction was hostile and another one of the matthew Yglesias has been attacked for making someone feel unsafe in in his work environment for signing that I mean what's your reaction to that yes it's a coincidence that the letter was published on in the same week as the letter attacking me I've had to clarify too many sympathetic people oh I'm glad all these people came to your face they were coming to my defense this has been in the works for quite some time and as the kind of the papers know it has a diverse range of signatories including Noam Chomsky not surprising he's been a long-time advocate of free speech his concluding speech that he himself disagrees with to his enormous credit as well as JK Rowling and Malcolm Gladwell bill T Jones salt Salman Rushdie unsurprisingly the the the the word unsafe is actually part of this bizarre intolerant culture that that the letter protests namely people are now claiming to be unsafe if they hear an opinion they disagree with the there's been misunderstanding of the letter as complaining about how the signatories have been treated but as with my case that's missing the point entirely the whole point is the signatories have the security to express these views out of concern for the greater intellectual culture mainly the people who don't have the luxury of speaking out but who are silenced because they correctly anticipate that they could get fired for a heterodox opinion but the the fact that some people retrospectively took their names off because either of the company that they were in it underscores the very need forthe petition namely that the principle of free speech is not free speech for people who agree with me or free speech for me it's free speech for people who disagree with me that's that's what free speech means so let's just think a little bit about the congenita s-- of this way of thinking i mean to what degree do you think that elite institutions universities are responsible for kind of fostering this this way of thinking i mean you're at harvard which is certainly one of those and that that kind of campus environment some reason seems to have been where a lot of this slightly more extreme or illiberal we're thinking has actually really been developed do you think that's true I don't think Harvard itself is the worst but I do think that our university system has steeped several generations of students in a mindset it's vaguely postmodernist very identity politics some flavors of Marxism which basically view the world and society as being in the midst of a war a war between economic elites in Maine classic Marxist version now straight white males in the identity politics version where the to achieve progress power has to be rested from those who are currently wielding it intellectual justification exploration of ideas are simply tools of the powerful and what is essential is not clarity diversity of opinion diagnosing problems testing best solutions but rather solidarity and passion among the oppressed who are overpowered in this in this war and so solidarity is everything descent is threatens that solidarity and therefore has to be stamped out it's a very different mindset from more I would say scientific in the broadest sense perhaps enlightenment ideals that the world is a complex place none of us understands it none of us is missing in Torun fallible we have two Broke possible explanations and through a collective evaluation of truth and falsity we can approach a deeper understanding therefore debate and free speech are essential it's a completely different way of understanding the world and I think the post modernist identity politics cultural version or cultural racial gender version of Marxism is responsible for this mindset and contrary to the narrative that this is a millennial urgent Jentezen problem it is in large part the baby boomer professors who have been steeping generations of students in this mindset for a while so I think that that there is some waiting to be corrected that way let me just try pushing back on on one of those thoughts which is in your you wrote a book in 2018 enlightenment now you're really seen as one of the kind of firm flame holders for enlightenment rationality as the kind of highest principle in terms of thinking well I just want to can't you see the roots of the some of these ideas in precisely that enlightenment emphasis on rationality above everything else I mean this is an idea where you can remake the world two outcomes that you desire through through effort of will and thinking you can remake your body you can remake everything through mind over matter essentially you say how do you respond to the idea that actually it's it's the emphasis on rationality and being able to rethink everything that has actually kind of began in the Enlightenment that is actually kind of reaching its ultimate expression today well I see the really the walk counter council culture and identity politics as a kind of counter enlightenment movement that is not as dangerous as the authoritarian nationalist populism which is they simply because that is a counter enlightenment movement that wields levers of power in a number of countries including my adopted country but there is it is a kind of Rousseau an alternative to enlightenment thinking namely bit there's a little of the people that as opposed to what I consider to be one of the gifts of the Enlightenment is that rationality is a ideal but one that is will always be a struggle because we we humans are not always so rational left to our own devices we are subject to tribalism and magical thinking and authoritarian thinking and self-deception and it's the Enlightenment design institutions such as democratic governance such as scientific debate peer-review free and free speech above all that allows a not so rational species to try to inch its way toward greater rationality we said that that's the interpretation that I argued for did you maybe just to sort of phrase it slightly differently do you think you can see both the ethno-nationalism of the right and this kind of woke fundamentalism of the left that have emerged in the past few years as a kind of rebellion against a world which was insufficiently nourishing to their souls and in which they kept on being told by people such as yourself that they've never had it better by all these provable measures and yet they felt that there were the big things missing so these are kind of these are eruptions from from parts of the human psyche that uh that have been denied by an overly rational world that's quite possible and nourishing the soul isn't high on the agenda of enlightenment goals compared to reducing poverty and illiteracy and hunger and violence and war and then we did forget about nourishing so perhaps and and and there is always a push back that well we need religion to nourish the soul and to which the response is well if just believing in the supernatural things that have probably don't exist the best way to nourish the soul as a can't be nourish our souls by eliminating extreme poverty and putting it into war and discovering how the world works and sharing beauty but yes that has not convinced everyone yeah partly it may be the straights that if people find themselves in and indeed in the case of say the deemed us realized parts of the country that voted for Donald Trump in the case of the generations of college-educated students who find themselves without a professional prospects commensurate to their training they may feel disenfranchised and I mean got the short end of the stick but another part of it is and this is why in my book enlightenment now and the better angels of our nature I had so many graphs documenting in quantitative detail progress that we made but it is a misconception that the world has gotten worse and worse worse but that the developing world has become a misery that terrorism and crime are mortal threats and just to correct the misconception that that the world has gotten worse and worse I had to show data that the view of the world that you get from the news media which focused on a day to day horas can miss the larger picture of reductions in poverty and war over the long term the populist revolutions of the past few years can be seen as empirical proof that large Suede's of the population were not happy with the world as it was and so you didn't really sign up to the idea that it was just getting better and better I think that's true of some but a lot of voting is not so much people responding to their own situation because when it comes down to it even though voting is a civic ideal your vote doesn't change anything that's just a mathematical reality one vote doesn't turn an election so voting is very much a kind of self-expression people are affirming the coalition that they belong to and there's been a great deal of debate in the United States as to whether bit Trump victory was the result of economic dislocation or cultural grievance and they're probably of each least that's the way I interpret the way they don't come down thinking about that letter that you have signed it I mean it's a it's a broad range of names isn't it everyone from Noam Chomsky to yourself to David Brooks to jesse sing go do you think that this is a turning point in this sort of struggle I mean it feels like there's a new coalition forming of people who for many of the past few years have been strongly disagreeing with each other and sort of drawing a line in the sand and saying actually we are going to defend a pluralism and a space to disagree as a more important goal than disagreeing with each other it's very hard to predict whether one event will be a turning point because there's a lot of kind of chaotic socio dynamics as to when our culture turn turns over you know which video will go viral which which fan which fashion so it's I think it will be a contributor and whether it will be a turning point is for people in the future don't talk to the world look back on I what I hope it will be is kind of return to part of a return to sanity similar to what happened after the late 60s and early 70s when also on college campuses there was a there was radical ISM there was Marxism there is anarchism there was calls calls for violent revolution and it did kind of settle down and there was a push back now we're seeing a second wave of that revolutionary fervor but there was a people didn't start coming to their senses as a result of what parties are oh look there's a lot of history the collapse of the Soviet Union part of the because there was pushback from not just the older generation of scholars but from younger ones who were you can convinced of some of the problems so I hope so but I'm not ready to predict it'll happen now and and when you think of the sort of two fronts that you're facing if you're trying to defend kind of enlightenment rationality the liberal work left and then the kind of nationalist right that they're very different aren't they in in character and the kind of critiques they make of the spirit you're trying to defend are very different I wonder at which do you find more of a threat at the moment the right-wing authoritarian nationalism is a downer be more of a threat because they actually pay people power I mean President the United States the president of Brazil the Prime Minister of India and so on so I know it'll be more of a threat and it's been pointed out that there are some cosmically ironic similarities between them in that both of them adhere to a kind of racial identity politics mainly that your prime objectives should be the preeminence of a particular racial or ethnic group that your opinions are determined by being there's the race that you belong to that we're locked in a zero-sum struggle between three races and so there are eerie parallels between those two kinds of the liberal movements and though the right wing version is more I think is the greater threat because they actually do real power but the left wooden version can be as well partly by empowering the right version by just feeding them raw material the more absurd the left part of a spectrum is the more the people in the center might find themselves tipping toward the the right and from there to the extreme right you never want to make Donald Trump write about anything when he denounces counterculture about I said I cancelled culture then you know we're in the uncomfortable situation that may be using something that's true of a real occurrence and that is a way in which the left-wing your liberalism can be dangerous it can also meet people especially when it comes to repressing heterodox opinions and I have seen this happen among not fanatics not not poof's but actually intelligent non-aligned people saying well if there's so much effort to suppress a viewpoint as opposed to refuting with good reasons well gee I must mean or something to it otherwise why we may just repeat it why do I have to fire the person who who articulates it maybe it's like the Jack Nicholson wine and a few good men you can't handle the truth and that's a natural conclusion to be drawn from the repression of speech and as a result bad ideas which could be reviewed it might get a second win precisely because they are being repressed rather than refuted do you think that you're in a culture war dr. Pinker do you think that's what's happening hard to avoid that conclusion I don't like to think so but but I didn't see some some evidence of applicability the term cultural war is several decades old so it's not a new development and it was absolutely present back when I was an undergraduate student in the in the 1970s that those are the seeds of it there were card tables set up in the lobbies of student buildings would be Democratic Front for the Marxist workers socialists United Party often at war with the Marxist Democratic Socialist Workers Party but that was very much a presence and he do some archaeology of the culture in assemblies you see a lot of maoism I was told by one of my professors that Mao had implemented in Utopia in China so there was a lot of radical craziness back then too the thing is that some of the crazies then got tenure and educated they some subsequent generations do you think that the difference really is there there there was an overly oppressive culture to strip away and to fight back on but now you know young students who are trying to be the equivalent of 70s rebel really there's not that much to take away anymore and that they sort of run out of structures to dismantle there is I think there's some of that because there wasn't the equivalent of the war in Vietnam and the Jim Crow segregation and discrimination against the app and Americans there are there's a huge anti-poverty system of redistribution and government theocracy in United States so there aren't be easy targets which may explain why there are the cultivation of finer and finer offense where it is the dog whistles and the pretty minor infractions of left-wing etiquette that that trigger the higher so then we're nearly out of time let me just ask you a final question then which is you are known as they can ultimate optimist the believer in progress looking at the situation you're in and we're in today narrowly escaping a cancellation attempt do you feel as optimistic now as ever yes I try to explain it not really arguing for optimism I'd rather for the progress it's not really not the same thing optimism is a kind of a emotional expectation that things will get better or attempt to look at faith see the glass is half-full the way it is just try to make people aware of quantitative improvements that are invisible in day-to-day journalism that it just is a fact that few people will get killed in war then and there used to be people people are poor people people starve this doesn't mean that everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time that that would be a miracle that and that's not what progress consists of if you really believe in and complete in the principles it's that progress comes when people try to apply their brainpower to solve problems and every once in a while come up with something that works so will you be adding your sense of free freedom as you write that next tweet to one of the measures we should watch out for for your annual state of the world peace I mean it as alongside poverty and all of those other statistics do you think that kind of genuine freedom of expression and latter's the intimidating cancel culture should be added to one of those measures of a healthy society well there has not been progress in recent texts on that front and read but I hope that there will be going going forward and this is not definitely a year in which there's going to be a lot of progressions progress most obviously in deaths from infectious disease but probably also in violent crime not so much a dwarf fortunately so it will be a mixed and mostly negative year when it comes to documented progress okay dr. Pinker thank you so much for that and stay in touch let us know how the the fight against the cancellation goes dr. Steven Pinker joining us from the US telling us about some of the well we called it a culture war and that seems to be what's going on I hope you enjoyed it we certainly did tune in next time

Channel: UnHerd

Views: 247,654

Keywords: Steven Pinker, Woke, Cancel Culture, Freddie Sayers, UnHerd, Linguistics Society of America, Twitter, Gender Issues, Trans, Harvard University

Id: dHMsWdRlGwo

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020