In a world seemingly beset by problems, Steven Pinker has made a career out of focusing on the positive. For the past decade, the Harvard professor turned celebrity intellectual has been spreading the good news about human progress. Pinker has written two bestsellers on the subject and won the praise of thinkers and commentators from Bill Gates to Joe Rogan. His message? Things are getting better. Progress is not inevitable, but the trends are good. Even though it may not always seem like it, the world is more peaceful, prosperous and happy than even just a few decades ago.
Steven Pinker has spent years documenting human progress, and right now he’s worried we may be backsliding.
Not in any of the big areas. The overall trends on crime and life expectancy haven’t all of a sudden reversed. Nor is humanity primed to descend into a second Dark Age. Rather, the not-so-newfound concern of Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology hits far closer to home. In the last several years, Pinker has become increasingly concerned about a wave of illiberalism, particularly on college campuses.
I spoke to Pinker this past summer after he and several dozen other writers and intellectuals released “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” The letter decried “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
Nowhere is this ideology more widespread than in the halls of America’s colleges and universities. And Pinker has been among the loudest voices pushing back.