Oh wow, this review of Steven Pinker's latest book, but more importantly of his career, is a thing of beauty. And just in time for Steven Pinker's 72nd birthday.
Written by Virginia Heffernan, it highlights Pinker's strongest trait: trying to have things both ways.
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.”
That petition must have hit extremely hard. After all, to liken it to a crucifixion is not a very Steven Pinker thing to do. Generally he considers it prudish wokeism to complain that words are “toxic” or “violent.” Like many American academics, he believes that speech, no matter how bullying or racist or cruel, can never be criminal. Just last year he tweeted: “Speech is not violence. Violence is not speech.”
I assume she said it ironically, but in any case, it is a very Pinker thing to do: smugly proclaim that when the "woke" are bothered by language they are silly - but when he is on the receiving end of negative verbiage, it's the equivalent of a public crucifixion.
I wrote about Pinker, and his friend, the equally logic-challenged Anna Krylov, displaying this hypocrisy five years ago:
But then Krylov asks rhetorically:Do words have life and power of their own? Can they really cause injury? Do they carry hidden messages? The ideology claims so and encourages us all to be on the constant lookout...Do words carry hidden messages? You tell me, Krylov - what does it mean to use the same word for renaming a science term as you use to describe murder?And if words don't cause injury, why is Krylov making such a big issue out of renaming science terms?Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect.11 In some schools,33,34 physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology10,12,15 calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum...Who does it harm if Newton's Laws are called "the three fundamental laws of physics"? Certainly not Newton, who died almost 300 years ago. But a few paragraphs later, Krylov leaves no doubt that she believes that changing a term is a cataclysmic event:The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society - the free and uncensored exchange of ideas and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.Do words have life and power of their own? Which is it Krylov, are words lifeless and powerless, or does using different words to indicate Newton's Laws mean OUR FUTURE IS AT STAKE?It's clear what Krylov means by "the free and uncensored exchange of ideas" - she means only ideas she agrees with. When others merely proposed a new approach to science terminology, she called that an example of "cancel culture."Krylov appears to be having it both ways, in the Steven Pinker tradition and Pinker echos her in the tweet I shared in Part 1: "...she exposes the primitive word magic of language-cancellers: that words have dreadful powers, independent of usage, convention & context."Krylov and Pinker scoff at the dreadful power of words, yet agree that swapping out words is an existential threat.
