Pinker keeps up attack on dismal academia

 Steven Pinker ... "Follow reason!". Photo by Rose Lincoln / Harvard University (CC by 2.0)   

Steven Pinker's latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, contains some useful insider observations on the academic mindset. Though he is a professor at Harvard, he despairs that much of value can come from an environment where independent, critical thinking is held up to be the central value, but where capitulation to what is a fashionable ideology is the norm. 

This blog has given a lot of attention to what comes across from many instances within academia of a blinkered habitus, that is, a practice or disposition often widespread in a shared environment. See here, here and here.

As the Economist reports, in his book, "he deals with today’s attacks on reason from anti-vax conspiracy theorists on the right and social-justice warriors on the left". 

But Pinker is especially unrelenting in the criticism of his peers that he has mounted in previous books. This time he is moved to declare:

Modern universities—oddly enough, given that their mission is to evaluate ideas—have been at the forefront of finding ways to suppress opinions, including disinviting and drowning out speakers, removing controversial teachers from the classroom, revoking offers of jobs and support, expunging contentious articles from archives, and classifying differences of opinion as punishable harassment and discrimination. 

He himself was the victim of an attempt to condemn and block his work, with The Economist reporting "A personal attack [...] last year, with a vicious and shoddy campaign demanding that the Linguistic Society of America cancel him." 

He finds that one of the major causes of this state of affairs is that his peers have rejected the capacity of humans to employ reason, which he referes to as rationality.  

Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups. These movements have an air of sophistication about them, implying that Western philosophy and science are provincial, old-fashioned, naïve to the diversity of ways of knowing found across periods and cultures. 

Here is why he calls it a mindset that is "fashionable":

For decades, Hollywood screenplays and rock-song lyrics have equated joy and freedom with an escape from reason. “A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free,” said Zorba the Greek. "Stop Making Sense," advised Talking Heads; “Let’s go crazy,” adjured the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.  

As for a definition of rationality, Pinker acknowledges the difficulty of being precise, but explains it this way:

A definition that is more or less faithful to the way the word is used is “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” Knowledge in turn is standardly defined as “justified true belief.” We would not credit someone with being rational if they acted on beliefs that were known to be false, such as looking for their keys in a place they knew the keys could not be, or if those beliefs could not be justified—if they came, say, from a drug-induced vision or a hallucinated voice rather than observation of the world or inference from some other true belief.

The value of Pinker's Rationality is not that it persuades as to what the truth is but how to to find it. He has the slogan: Follow reason! 

Now, arguments for truth, objectivity, and reason may stick in the craw, because they seem dangerously arrogant: “Who the hell are you to claim to have the absolute truth?” But that’s not what the case for rationality is about. The psychologist David Myers has said that the essence of monotheistic belief is: (1) There is a God and (2) it’s not me (and it’s also not you). The secular equivalent is: (1) There is objective truth and (2) I don’t know it (and neither do you). The same epistemic humility applies to the rationality that leads to truth. Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained. But the conviction that they are out there licenses us to develop rules we can all abide by that allow us to approach the truth collectively in ways that are impossible for any of us individually. 

For example, using reason, "we reach the moon, invent smartphones, and extinguish smallpox":

The cooperativeness of the world when we apply reason to it is a strong indication that rationality really does get at objective truths. 

The confidence in our capacities, the willingness to employ them in a cooperative spirit for the common good, all of which was recognised over millennia, has now dissipated as various streams of philosophical thought and associated moral myopia unite to engender an ideological view of the world and of human qualities rather than engage in truth-distilling debate.

That is why it is a disappointed Pinker who reports that the institutions of learning that he is most familiar with are severely emaciated through an unwillingness to "follow reason". From a review of Rationality in the  New Statesman:

One of his big themes in recent years has been the decline of free speech in American academia. In Rationality, he complains about “the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation”.

That does ring true when we note the uniform character of the clientele at leading universities:

A Harvard Crimson survey of the incoming Harvard Class of 2025 revealed that 87% of the class voted for Joe Biden, compared to 6.7% for Howie Hawkins and 6.3% for Donald Trump. [Source]

And, to digress a little, that statistic offers The Babylon Bee an opportunity to mock the moral superiority felt by those who are carrying the left's banner in the culture war of its own making:

Man Who Agrees With The Media, Universities, Corporations, And Hollywood Thinks He's Part Of The Resistance

The Guardian's reviewer of Rationality points out that Pinker is dedicated to defending reason and objectivity in public discourse:

Since Enlightenment Now came out in early 2018, Pinker has been engaged in almost unceasing conflict with what he considers his many intellectual enemies, who include intellectuals (“intellectuals hate progress”), progressives (“intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress”), and universities full of progressive intellectuals (a “suffocating leftwing monoculture”). He has also taken aim at postmodernism (“defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness”)... 

That reviewer provides some evidence that supports Pinker's view of the gaps in orthodox beliefs arising from dubious research:  

Joe Henrich, the chair of evolutionary biology at Harvard, and several of his colleagues [...] have criticised behavioural scientists for routinely publishing “broad claims about human psychology and behaviour” based only on samples from WEIRD societies. [Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic]

However, Pinker himself comes in for criticism for academic misconduct. From the Guardian review:

[...] a recurring theme of the criticisms is that he’s not always careful with the data (“shockingly shoddy”, is how the historians Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale have put it). 

A deeper problem, critics say, is Pinker’s faith in data to reveal the truth. Yes, it would be great to just rely on the data, they argue, but data is interpretive all the way down, shaped by what is collected, how it’s collected and for what purpose. That’s a problem Pinker acknowledges in Enlightenment Now, but never fully reckons with. “When you really dig not only into the facts but into his own sources, it’s fully ideological,” [Nicolas] Guilhot, the intellectual historian, told me.

It may be that Pinker sees himself offering fresh findings to the public in the search for truth, findings that those entrapped by academic orthodoxy would be too afraid of the cultural backlash to present. His response to the allegations he misused data is given here. 

To continue with the Guardian review, an insight into his wish to encounter the diversity of views available is given in these terms:

“Unlike a lot of academics, I actually have conservative and libertarian friends,” he said. “They sometimes ask me, ‘Why should we trust climate science when anyone with an opposing view would be cancelled?’ I disagree about the climate science, but it’s otherwise a good point.”

He went on: “The reason these organisations are so important is that a lot of repression comes from a small number of activists. Even if they’re not a majority view, a radical minority can become a repressive regime.” In Better Angels, he continued, he wrote about this dynamic of the “spiral of silence”, which led to witch-hunts, the Inquisition, the French Revolution, Stalinism and Nazi Germany. He also compared what he sees as the intellectual bankruptcy of woke orthodoxy to the folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes. “It takes a little boy to point it out,” he said.

As well as displaying moral courage, following reason can be a tall order because it is no longer modelled for the younger generation in academic or public discourse. Therefore, as the Economist points out: 

Since Mr Pinker cannot simply argue for reason, fully seven of the book’s 11 chapters instead set out a rationalist’s catechism—a primer of formal logic, probability, causation and so forth. In these passages he justifies reason by showing what it can do, using games and logical puzzles.

Indeed, we do have to learn to think clearly. And we have to keep our emotions in check, while watching where our prejudices lie. Delusion and illusion are part of our reality, and so is sin. The irrationality of the period leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, for example, can be put down largely to the contagion of greed that took hold of the higher echelons of the corporate world. However, Pinker, as an enthusiastic atheist, would probably reject that reading and posit the mere lack of logic.  

That being said, Pinker points out that to be rational takes a moral stance, and he makes the timely argument that the human is a rational being and that by sharing the results of science and the growing wealth of knowledge, everyone will benefit as we arrive at the truth that allows us to better understand ourselves or cope with the various predicaments of our existence here on planet Earth.

From what the reviewers of Rationality demonstrate, he succeeds in that argument. 

However, this post has highlighted Pinker's - and the reviewers' - dismay at the dismal state of thinking in scientific circles, among public intellectuals (of which he is one, of course), and especially among the denizens of academia. What seems to stirs his blood is the use of society's intellectual firepower to merely further an ideological cause with all the manipulation of information that goes with it, rather than to exercise the heretofore celebrated scepticism that made university life so vibrant and public discourse so interesting and productive.

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