I Can't Believe We’re Still Having *This* Debate About Steven Pinker

These are stale arguments, easily refuted

Boston magazine just published an article about Steven Pinker headlined “Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard?” Subheadline: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”

First of all, I don’t get that “but.” It’s not referencing anything! It’s like the original headline was going to be something like “Steven Pinker Wants to Save Harvard,” and then someone changed the headline without changing the subheadline.

Setting aside my overreaction to a minor copy-editing error, this conceit is also a bit much — it’s very magazine-y. No one, including Steven Pinker, thinks Steven Pinker is (single-handedly) going to “save Harvard.” The article is really about a few different things, most of them summed up in the very first paragraph: “His critics call him a cover for racists,” writes author Robert Huber. “He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories.”

Huber doesn’t dive deeply into the idea that Pinker has “dismiss[ed] inconvenient evidence” — he mostly just quotes a couple of academics who have made that claim. So I’m more interested in the (re-re-re-re-)litigation of the idea of Pinker providing cover for or legitimizing bad actors. There’s a very long, involved controversy here that mostly has to do with virulent anger, on the part of a small but loud group of academics, about Pinker’s status as one of the leading public-intellectual debunkers of “blank slatism,” or the idea that all humans are basically the same, and that any differences that emerge are the result of external factors.

I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

So, the argument goes: Without figures like Pinker, who are at best useful idiots and at worst quiet but intentional enablers, the alt-right would have far less intellectual fuel and wouldn’t have gained the power it has gained. Or if they aren’t arguing this, I don’t understand how they could possibly have remained so mad at Pinker for so many years.

But there’s another way of looking at things: Humans have certain hardwired or nearly hardwired tendencies. We’re very good at carving the world into us versus them, for example. Is there a society anywhere that doesn’t do this? There are a million strains of us-versus-them-ism. There are relatively “soft” versions like civic nationalism, in which differences that in other contexts might matter a great deal are overlooked (or partially overlooked) in favor of a big collective identity. That’s America, at its best, though there are obviously also downsides when it comes to xenophobia in times of war, and so on. But civil nationalism is cupcakes and cotton candy compared to the harsher, more evil forms of us-versus-them-ism — racism, Nazism, and so on.