Steven Pinker Peddles Rhetorical Bullcrap

I learned of Steven Pinker around the turn of the century after Pinker wrote The Blank Slate. He shot to pop culture fame. I took a look and thought: he's paraphrasing Judith Rich Harris among many others--fine if it were fascinating paraphrasing, but The Blank Slate was stupendously boring, at least it should be to the well-informed. Judith Rich Harris remained in comparative obscurity. In most bookstores, the mom and dad sections are riddled with the nurture assumptions of helicopter parenting while The Nurture Assumption remains difficult to find. Psychologists still publish multitudes of studies each year as if genes do not exist.

Imagine my surprise when I found out Pinker wrote, The Sense of Style, a writing guide--also stupendously soporific.

Pinker gained more fame with The Better Angels of Our Nature, based on a small sample fallacy of human history.

But those books had many good points.

Pinker's newest work, Enlightenment Now, is more poorly reasoned. It is filled with multitudes of slurs, straw person attacks, and false cause claims while plowing rhetorical ground Greg Easterbrook and many others previously covered. It contains few good points.

It promotes misleading, feel good buzzwords and catch phrases--"sympathy," "optimism," "cosmopolitanism," "classical liberalism," "liberal democracy"--that those who treat politics as infotainment relish. Cosmopolitanism is a euphemism for hedonism and totalitarian rule by remote billionaires, who despise us. Classical liberalism is a feel good phrase for a 19th Century egoism, also known as robber baronism or laissez faire economics. Today liberal democracy is a euphemism for ruling groups deciding among themselves what they will do to the rest of us, often Randian neoconservatism and third way militarism. Liberal democracy meant something different 70 years ago, but as Pinker knows, the meanings of words change with time. Upbeat rhetoric doesn't turn Randian neoconservatism beneficial. Sympathy is compassion minus the urge to help. Many times compassion is misplaced. Sometimes it is well-placed, but sympathy is a vapid substitute.

Pinker claims life is much better now than a few decades ago and provides statistics on that point, but provides no evidence that his ethical and political prescriptions were a cause of those improvements. Technology, high Chinese IQs, people who oppose Pinker's prescriptions, and other factors were far more important.

Pinker invokes "moral sense," which is about as accurate as saying chemistry sense. The field of ethics is not a sense. For many enlightenment figures, reason was mainly a buzzword. The same can be said for Pinker. The casual reader will likely come away from Enlightenment Now with little idea of what reason is. According to Pinker's acknowledgements, dozens of intellectuals helped Pinker with Enlightenment Now. I bet none of them said, "Hey, Professor Pinker. We have a problem here. Your slurs and irrelevancies aren't acts of reason." The individuals who benefit most from contemporary rule seem constitutionally incapable or unwilling to see and fix its flaws. So where is their "moral sense?"

Pinker warns us about numerous sorts of "extremists." But he doesn't warn us about his own glib fanaticism. Russia, China, and the West are all run by optimistic, cosmopolitan globalists despite the fact that elites like to call any globalism that conflicts with their own "nationalism," yet they are marching toward war. Studies have suggested that optimism and opportunism are two of the leading causes of unjust wars. Neoconservatism and classical liberalism are partly driven by optimism and opportunism. Books on wars are loaded with ridiculously optimistic military assessments of self and enemies, leading to disasters. Social scientists have also noticed the dangers of optimism. Pinker describes himself as "more libertarian than authoritarian," but that is a false dichotomy. Because in the long run, libertarianism leads to authoritarian rule by the likes of Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers despite libertarian writers sometimes emphasizing civil liberties.

Pinker claims to oppose tribalism, yet he politically allies himself with the most tribalistic force on contemporary Earth, that is, multiculturalism, including Islam. Pinker opposes the blank slate as a scientific matter but supports politics based in large part on egoism and blank slates. I doubt Pinker thinks he can browbeat nonwhites out of egoism and ethnocentrism. His book is for white individuals, who are already too xenocentric. Pinker claims "more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed." Well, then show us the evidence. The two run together. Greed is excessive self-interest. Humans think their murderous acts of excessive self-interest serve justice. Most humans have lived in tribes. As Napoleon Chagnon's research on tribes suggested, tribal humans fought for an excessive share of resources, especially access to fertile females: "Women! Women! Women! Women!"

More global individuals are more selfish, an apparently unpublished study for reasons I do not know. It appears to have flaws teasing out factors. But the study greatly understates the problem. Most ruling class individuals would not participate in such a study, But we don't have to look far. It is difficult to think of a single ruling class individual having good ethical character. They view others as sexual, financial, and ethnoracial prey. We see it constantly around us: Their idea of compassion is wrecking the jobs, lives, schools, families, and neighborhoods of nonwealthy whites while they benefit from cheaper labor and divide-and-screw politics. A paradigm case for the elite individual of generally horrendous character, who nevertheless thought himself ethically superior because he supported cultural Marxism, was Lyndon Johnson. Johnson stuffed ballots and rigged his way to a World War II medal. His presidency was a disaster of atrocious, Machievellian policies, the most notorious being the 1965 Immigration Act, which was opposed 58 percent to 24 percent by the people. In true low character, self-superior elite fashion Johnson not only signed the bill, but felt compelled to slur the American people as "cruel" for opposing it. Elites use the mass media to propagandize the people into supporting rotten policies and when that fails they do what they want despite democratic opposition.

Pinker criticizes "cynicism about the institutions of modernity." Let's see: Politics dominated by legalized bribery and mass deception. Ditto for national defense. Health care that costs roughly twice what health care costs in other comparatively advanced countries. Education systems devoted to propaganda and debt peonage. A financial, insurance, and real estate sector devoted to ever greater free riding. On the plus side, hard industries and cottage industries are more efficient than ever, but they make up a fraction of the economy.

When the subject is psychology, Pinker appears to somewhat weigh arguments. But as with most individuals, when it comes to ethics and politics, I never get the impression that Pinker sits down and carefully weighs the good points from various sides against each other, which is what we have an ethical duty to do.

Pinker doesn't spew hard demagoguery the way Hitler and Trotsky did. Pinker uses soft demagoguery reminiscent of motivational speakers--many emotively loaded generalities without specific arguments on specific issues. Like other motivators, Pinker's views are vague enough to not offend uninformed readers.

Steven Pinker also produced this essay:

Thomas Hobbes's pithy equation "Reasoning is but reckoning [false with reasoning defined as calculating]" is one of the great ideas in human history [false]. The notion that rationality can be accomplished by the physical process of calculation was vindicated in the 20th century by Turing's thesis that simple machines are capable of implementing any computable function and by models from D. O. Hebb, McCullough and Pitts, and their scientific heirs showing that networks of simplified neurons could achieve comparable feats [faulty measures]. The cognitive feats of the brain can be explained in physical terms: to put it crudely (and critics notwithstanding), we can say that beliefs are a kind of information, thinking a kind of computation [bad definition], and motivation a kind of feedback and control [bad definition].
This is a great idea for two reasons [false]. First, it completes a naturalistic understanding of the universe [false], exorcising occult souls, spirits, and ghosts in the machine [false and straw person]. Just as Darwin made it possible [irrelevant] for a thoughtful observer of the natural world to do without creationism [irrelevant], Turing and others made it possible [irrelevant] for a thoughtful observer of the cognitive world to do without spiritualism [straw person].

Nowhere in that essay does Pinker mention consciousness, that stunning state of being that somehow arises from brain meat. Whether empirically true or not, an overwhelmingly biomechanical explanation of human existence is profoundly dispiriting to most human beings, making it ethically problematic: rah, rah, sis boom bah--you're a bunch of matter-energy in an indifferent universe.

(Steve Sailer calls Pinker "perhaps the finest public intellectual of our time," which tells us something terrible about Sailer's own worldview. Sailer also dismisses The Nurture Assumption because it doesn't devote enough space to teaching how parents can teach vocational skills, pages 328 plus in The Nurture Assumption, though the book is about personality traits. A listing of vocational skills parents teach would be banal.)

Pinker's arguments don't pull us from unethical chasms, they push us closer to them.