Steven Pinker: Young people sick and tired of being told, 'you can't say that, you can't think that' on campus

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Steven Pinker on human development, economics, academic freedom

Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, discusses driving social, political, and economic progress, promoting academic freedom, and averting war, at FreedomFest in Las Vegas.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and prolific author, has often been described as a cheerleader for science, reason, and humanism. He is often maligned by his critics as a defender of the status quo. Much of his research focuses on slow and steady incremental improvements that have defined rapid human development, both in the United States and globally, over the past century.

His 2018 book, "Enlightenment Now" was famously cited by Bill Gates as "his new favorite book," and became a focal point for global policymakers. As one of the nation's leading public intellectuals, Pinker routinely consults with world political, economic, and scientific leaders.

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He is a fierce defender of liberalism, democracy, and market economies, and believes a variety of forces are conspiring against them: populism of both the right and left, religious fundamentalism, and political correctness, among others. 

He also has emerged as a champion of reasoned, civil debate on college campuses, pushing back against cancel culture, and what he views as a ‘political monoculture’ in academia.

He recently sat down with Fox News Digital in Las Vegas at FreedomFest, for a wide-ranging interview.

Steven Pinker at Dissident Dialogues 2024 (Fox News Photo/Joshua Comins)

Pinker argues that the pessimistic narrative so often portrayed in the political and media realms is grossly inaccurate:

"Well, for one thing, news is about stuff that happens, not stuff that doesn't happen, and stuff that happens suddenly enough to be news is usually bad because bad things can happen all of a sudden. Good things take time to build up…The non-occurrence of things, like, there hasn't been an earthquake, there hasn't been a riot., there hasn't been a famine, there hasn't been a war. There hasn't been a terrorist attack. That's never news. 

If there are more and more days in which nothing bad happens, then we never read about it…A lot of good things build up gradually, and compound over time. People live longer, poverty goes down, more kids go to school worldwide. If there's a 3% increase year after year, when is that going to be news? Never. But it can transform the world, and we're completely unaware of it."

Pinker believes that the populist economic left is missing the mark when it comes to our economic outlook, but also disagrees with the rigid libertarian philosophical opposition to social safety nets and redistribution.

"The people underestimate how big a welfare state we have in the United States. It is smaller than a lot of our affluent democratic peers. And we do have more inequality, after taxes and transfers, than the countries of northern and western Europe or the, former British Commonwealth, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand…The world's countries…at least the affluent democracies, have between 20 and 30% of their GDP redistributed. The United States is at the low end, but it's in the range. 

I think it would be good if more people recognized that, both to counter the populist left narrative that the United States has no redistribution, no social safety net, and also the kind of hardcore libertarian view that you can easily dispense with redistribution, that it's possible to have an affluent democracy without redistribution. Maybe it is possible, but the world has never seen it. So it would be a radical, and never before seen phenomenon."

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Currently, issues involving principles of moral hazard theory are playing a big role in the 2024 election: crime and criminal justice, immigration, and welfare. Pinker counts himself in neither ideological camp, but calls for a fine-tuned approach to setting government policy.

"I think moral hazard has to be taken into account in setting policy, but it can't be taken to an extreme, like…we shouldn't have ambulances that pick up accident victims because then people will drive more recklessly, knowing that they'll be taken to hospitals and then sewn up and patched up…No one can foresee everything. No one can avoid all risk. And so, while recognizing moral hazard, you also have to have some amount of common sense, compassion, and accommodation for bad luck, which will always happen. 

Steven Pinker at Dissident Dialogues 2024 (Fox News Photo/Joshua Comins)

There can be too much welfare, there could be too little welfare….We do have Social Security, and we introduced it for a good reason. All countries have it. Some countries have a little more than, some have a little less. It seems to me that we should compare countries and compare times, compare policies, compare states, use the world as a laboratory to figure out how much regulation, how much redistribution is the optimal amount, neither too much nor too little. 

On the case of crime, I do think that the left has kind of missed the boat in de-policing cities and, going too far to leaving small crimes unpunished, to not taking crime seriously enough. It is an issue that people care a lot about that does flip elections. And I think it is foolish to let lawlessness and anarchy rise in cities. Foolish even for the left to do. Foolish for anyone to do."

Data-driven, empirical approaches are at the heart of Pinker's research and books, and he believes the U.S. could learn a few things from studying its affluent, democratic peers.

"I think our health care system, which has much more privatization than any other affluent democracy, could produce some reform. It seems to be hitting that sour spot of being extraordinarily expensive and not delivering what we want, namely people living longer and kids surviving and so on. 

I think our educational system probably could use more centralization, that having every little hamlet and village have its own school board, and pay for itself with property taxes, probably isn't the way to have the best possible educational system. 

There are probably systems of redistribution that are more efficient than our massive patchwork of bureaucracies. So something more like direct income transfers instead of welfare agencies, might be a way to compensate for the fact that a market economy will not give enough money to many people, but, without creating either disincentives or bureaucratic waste. So there are a lot of cases where it seems the United States, just by simple metrics, is not hitting the optimum."

Pinker is a resolute optimist when it comes to the capacity for Enlightenment values to effect incremental improvements, and believes that the sensible, centrist, data-driven approach he advocates holds out hope for combating increasing political polarization as well:

"Despite polarization, most Americans describe themselves as moderate or centrist. The wings have been gaining in strength, and they hate each other more. But still, the majority of Americans are neither extremely left-wing nor extremely right-wing. [We need] a culture of journalism that focuses more on trends and data and comparisons of states and countries to see what works and what doesn't. Try to make as many decisions as possible based on what the evidence says, as opposed to what our own tribe believes. 

This really isn't the Red Sox versus the Yankees. It's not zero-sum competition. It's what's going to make us richest, it's what's going to make us healthiest, what's going to make us happiest. Let's be humble. Let's try to pretend like we're scientists instead of hockey players. And instead of trying to bash the other person, let's acknowledge that we start out ignorant and try to figure out what works and what doesn't work."

Anti-Israel protesters gather near Washington Square Park in New York City on Friday, May 3, 2024. NYU’s Palestine Solidarity Coalition is hosting the demonstration as campus protests continue to sweep the country. (Rashid Umar Abbasi for Fox News Digital)

As America's college campuses have descended into chaos, and rising intolerance and attacks on freedom of speech appear to be becoming commonplace, Pinker has advocated for viewpoint diversity and an opposition to political monoculture in academia:

"Well, I've tried to push back myself by co-founding the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, with a number of my colleagues, to try to promote academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, that is, you should not have a monoculture where everyone has the same politics, and civil discourse. You shouldn't call each other racists or libtards, or whatever the pejorative is, but try to explore the issues. So we're trying to create that climate. 

We, are pressuring the university to change certain policies…like universities taking political stands. And I think we've succeeded in getting Harvard to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality. We try to stand up for people who are canceled by giving them either, at the very least, moral support, but also pushing back on whatever bureaucratic procedure threatens to punish them. 

We hope to recruit students and there already is a student association of Harvard Undergraduates for Academic Freedom, because, I think, young people are all getting sick and tired of being told that, 'you can't say that, you can't think that' and they themselves are starting to rebel. I think that because a lot of the repressions of speech on campus are so idiotic, people are recoiling, because of the sheer lunacy of it all."

Finally, Pinker addresses using his data-driven, Enlightenment values approach to preventing global conflict.

"Unfortunately, I don't have a solution to how to bring about world peace. But, you know, among them…as best we can, enforce the norm that borders are sacrosanct. They may not be logical. There may be all kinds of injustices behind the lines on the map. On the other hand, they're there. Good fences make good neighbors. If you accept that countries are immortal, boundaries can't be changed by force. That is one of the things that contributes to to peace. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a concert marking his victory in a presidential election and the 10-year anniversary of Crimea's annexation by Russia on Red Square in Moscow, Russia, Monday, March 18, 2024. President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine a decade ago, a move that sent his popularity soaring but was widely denounced as illegal. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Of course, Vladimir Putin doesn't see things that way, but by and large, the rest of the world has, in that most of the wars that we've had over the past few decades have been civil wars. They have not been two uniformed armies of countries, opposing each other. And so the invasion of Ukraine is very much an anachronism, one that we hope will be an anomaly. And it's good that the world is pushing back against that, because the era in which everyone thought that borders were up for grabs was an era of perpetual war. We really don't want to go back to that. 

In general, encouraging trade reduces the likelihood of war, again, not guaranteed, because Russia was happy to take a hit in their economy for the glory of greater Russia. But to the extent that people are more interested in making money than in national glory and greatness, they are less likely to fight stupid wars. 

In general, democracy pushes back against the urge to war, because often it's the leaders who want to go down in history, and they're happy to sacrifice their citizens as cannon fodder. Whereas if the people decide, they're less likely to be dragged into wars.

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Generally, international organizations, as idiotic as the United Nations often is, and no question that it is, still, it's probably been better to have it than not to have it, because there are means of resolving disputes short of going to war. It is a club that countries want to belong to, and that countries, once they belong, they don't go out of existence. There are peacekeeping forces, which again, don't always work, but they work more often than not. So it's good to have a referee get in between the brawling hockey players, even if they're weaker than the players, they can sometimes convince them to disengage. 

None of these are guarantees to world peace, but each one can contribute, and they probably collectively are responsible for the fact that we didn't have World War Three despite a lot of scares. Hopefully, the overall trend, which goes up and down and we're in a little bit of an upward uptick, but hopefully it'll resume the trajectory downward."