Steven Pinker Has His Reasons
A few years ago, at the Princeton Club in Manhattan, I chanced on a memorable chat with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. His spouse, the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, with whom he was tagging along, had been invited onto a panel to discuss the conflict between religion and science and Einstein’s so-called “God letter,” which was being auctioned at Christie’s. (“The word God is for me,” Einstein wrote, “nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness …”) The panel produced a fascinating discussion, but it was only a prologue to the impromptu one I had afterward with Pinker.
Pinker had recently published Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I was eager to pepper him with questions, mainly on religion, rationality, and evolutionary psychology. I remember I wanted Pinker’s take on something Harvey Whitehouse, one of the founders of the cognitive science of religion, told me in an interview—that my own little enlightenment, of becoming an atheist in college, was probably mostly a product of merely changing my social milieu. I wasn’t so much moved by rational arguments against the ethics and existence of God but by being distanced from my old life and meeting new, non-religious friends.
I recall Pinker almost pouncing on that argument, defending reason’s power to change our minds. He noted that people especially high in “intellectance,” a personality trait now more commonly called “openness to experience,” tend to be more curious, intelligent, and willing to entertain new ideas. I still think that Pinker’s way of seeing things made more sense of my experience in those heady days. I really was, for the first time, trying my best to think things through, and it was exhilarating. We talked until the event staff shelved the wine, and parted ways at a chilly midtown intersection.
Recently Pinker joined me in another conversation, this time on Zoom, to discuss his new book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Reading it, I got the sense that he was at last indulging a yearning to give reason his full and undivided attention. It’s made appearances in his previous books of course. “We are all intuitive physicists, biologists, engineers, psychologists, and mathematicians,” Pinker wrote, over two decades ago, in How the Mind Works. “Thanks to these inborn talents, we outperform robots and have wreaked havoc on the planet.” And more recently, in 2011’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and 2018’s Enlightenment Now, Pinker detailed reason’s role in realizing, via a problem-solving approach to human affairs, the relatively peaceful and prosperous world we now enjoy. Because of the fruits of science and free markets, among other things, Pinker says, we’ve never been less impoverished or plagued by violence—and rationality, he argues, is a big reason why.
Crystallizing the, Pinker alludes, in a pair of sentences toward the end of the book, to both George Orwell and Martin Luther King, Jr. “For all the vulnerabilities of human reason,” Pinker writes, “our picture of the future need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends toward rationality.” The more we know, the more reasonable we tend to become.
