Steven Pinker, the illustrious Canadian-American professor of psychology at Harvard, is in the UK at the moment. Surely you know Pinker, the global opinionator with the luxurious white mane and the wise demeanour of an American founding father, maybe Thomas Jefferson. Tonight he’s flexing his mind and mane at the Quays Theatre in Salford, where he will expand on “The New Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage”.
This is new material from his 13th book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, which was published this month in the UK. The book, which popularizes the 1969 work of the philosopher David Lewis, uses the concept of “common knowledge” to shed light on everything from financial panics to authoritarianism. It’s already hit the front tables of Heathrow’s bookstores. It will surely sell well.
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.”
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 British “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 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 2014.
Along the way, many of the psychological studies that informed pop non-fiction, including some of Pinker’s about how violence is in decline, have come into question. Prompt a chatbot on famous psych research – from the marshmallow test to how barbaric our sexual fantasies are to what happens when prophecies fail – and chances are good the study is equivocal, hinky or debunked. Many in Pinker’s circle have further been exposed as frauds, abusers and worse (see the Edge Institute). Others have curdled into nutty manfluencers (see the “intellectual dark web”).
Hypothetical signatories to unnamed petitions keep him up at night. His enemies have been promoted to crucifiers
After evo-psych’s unravelling, Pinker was at least able to pivot. He dropped that subspecialty like a wet rag and now claims broader dominion: linguistics, moral philosophy, world history, gender studies, sociology, economics, and of course cognitive science. Though his formal training is in experimental psychology, he never fails to insist that his wheelhouse is simply science – the harder the better. “Physics envy”, the neurosis among academics whose fields are accused of being “soft”, is strong in Pinker. He takes pains to condemn the “softer social sciences” – he doesn’t name them, but surely they’re dumb and woke – and, naturally, the humanities, for “political correctness”. The American subtitle of When Everyone Knows… mentions “the mysteries of money, power, and everyday life”. But in the UK Pinker is peddling thoughts that are allegedly evidence-based and peer-reviewed. The subtitle has become “the science of harmony, hypocrisy and outrage”.
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.
Screenshot of post on Twitter (now X), January 2015
Like so many other men in the Epstein circle, Pinker has rushed to distance himself from that whole sordid nightmare. But if he’s in denial about his past, that past nonetheless bleeds through the new book’s thank-yous.
For a man whose field was built largely on faulty studies to ignore intellectual fraud in his circle and lash out at people like Arday – well, psychologists used to call that projection
The legendary literary critic Marjorie Garber, Pinker’s colleague at Harvard, believes a book’s acknowledgements express an author’s unconscious fears and desires. In the credits to When Everyone Knows…, Pinker thanks “my friend” John Brockman, the Edge capo; Hauser, the Edge member famous for research fraud; and Lawrence Summers, the disgraced former economist and Epstein associate. The name Jeffrey Epstein is notably absent. “Jeffrey Epstein” thus becomes a poltergeist in the new book, an unwanted blush or erection that, though unmentioned, can’t be fully concealed.
It can’t be easy for Pinker to repress his complicity in such deep depravity. This could be why irritable, neurotic outbursts mar chapters of When Everyone Knows…, such as “The Department of Social Relations”, in which he tries to concentrate on game theory but can’t contain his rage at woke “mobs” and vicious “cancel culture”.
On X, he has bemoaned the “degeneration” of nearly all major science journals into “woke agitprop.” In the book, he slags off nearly all periodicals in the humanities, dismissing “forums named after venerable British universities and periodicals whose names are permutations of New York, London, Review, Literary, Books, and Times.” Speech of any kind really seems to get on his nerves these days.
And then there are spasms of aggression toward his readers, whom he imagines as irredeemably prudish. In another chapter, “The Canceling Instinct,” he lashes out with a monotonous string of third-rail questions he’s been trotting out to shock the bourgeoisie since 2006. ”Do men have an innate motive to rape?” he asks. “Are average differences in intelligence between ethnic groups heritable?” Pinker then prods his readers to tremble with excitement.
“Perhaps you are appalled,” he writes. “Perhaps you felt your blood pressure rise.” Do I turn you on, ye woke virgins?
Steven Pinker. Photo: Brooks Kraft LLC/ Getty
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.
Thus Pinker, for all his efforts to hold on to the dais, now seems to inhabit a kind of scholarly demi-monde. He allies himself with fringe figures, and not just Cofnas. In January, he’s slated to promote his book at a private-equity-sponsored livestream called, what else, “Defend the West”. On the docket with him are alleged sex abuser Michael Shermer, a member of Donald Trump’s UFO task force. There’s also Yaron Brook, chair of the Ayn Rand Institute and Islam’s most tireless detractor.
In defending the west, Pinker seems to think he’s now sitting with the cool kids, the anti-woke avant-garde. But in When Everyone Knows… he struggles to keep the intellectual whip hand. As he expresses near-bottomless anxiety about early wokeism, such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, its dated memes are unexpectedly given new force. Seen through the lens of Pinker’s fear, the basic insights of feminism, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory come off as freshly formidable. Hypothetical signatories to unnamed petitions keep him up at night. His enemies (once carping libs without tenure, usually women) have been promoted to crucifiers who’ve nailed heroes of the Enlightenment, like Pinker himself, to the cross. Exposure to public censure evidently changes a man.
Freedom of speech is the founding principle of the western Enlightenment, which Pinker has made it his life’s work to glorify. When speech acts like petitions superseded the barbaric violence of “the old days” – wasn’t this exactly the civilisational progress Pinker celebrated in his 2011 bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature?
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…
Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic who writes regularly for The New Republic. Her podcast and newsletter, Magic + Loss, can be found on Substack