The world in 2025 must be a maddening place for the liberal centre. These vanguards of common sense are forced to play witness, powerless as norms are torn down all around them. Donald Trump has personally taken a sledgehammer to conservative politeness codes: he has undermined the shibboleths of the state, stacked the courts in his favour, and introduced a rhetoric of violence into the common lexicon. Meanwhile, the left has allowed itself to become shackled by unpopular luxury beliefs: abolishing the police, opening the borders, the corruption of female-only spaces. Everyone has gone mad. If they just used their brains they would see the universe as clearly as we do.
This is how psychologist, public intellectual and author of chipper books about the human condition, Steven Pinker (who has just published When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows), ventriloquised it to me. And these are not mere aberrations, he intimates: the current political climate, as described by Pinker, is exactly where you end up when society stops robustly defending so-called Enlightenment Values. That is – reason, science, humanism and progress. In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now Pinker codifies these “cognitively unnatural” principles; handwrings over the threat posed to them by religious fundamentalism, political correctness and postmodernism; and argues they are the staunchest redoubt to the “cosmic inclination toward chaos, deterioration, decay, and conflict.”
So far, so lofty. A cynic would call him pious. Instead, what I found in the man – as we spoke in a windowless room in Fitzrovia – was someone driven to distraction by the liquid rationality coursing through his veins; trading a faith in the divine for the higher, matter-of-fact power of data; permanently agog at the unreasonable maniacs around him. If you were to burst him with a pin, I suspect he might explode into a shower of Excel spreadsheets. Pinker – who has taught at Harvard since 2003 – has been publishing popular academic books since the mid-90s. One imagines some of them have made him very rich. But it is hard to think of the now-71 year old as having an adolescence and a middle-age, not because he isn’t spry, lucid and energetic (he bears all three traits in unusually high measure). But because I cannot help but think he just spawned on stage one day at a Ted Conference, shock of curly white hair and all.
And so, here is a public academic suffering from “an ailment of excessive clear sightedness” (as Martin Amis once wrote of Graham Greene). His political styling – a staunch defender of pre-Trump status-quo, centrist liberalism, faith in the so-called Abundance Agenda, belief in the power of technology to improve the world, disinterest in the strictures of “woke”, vice-like defence of scientific rationality, and abiding trust in the idea that there is always an “optimal” answer – makes him catnip to the Davos class. In fact, his 2011 treatise (I suspect he would hate the word) The Better Angels of Our Nature – in which he marshalled vast amounts of data to prove violence had actually declined across human history – was on Mark Zuckerberg’s Davos reading list. Bill Gates, meanwhile, described Enlightenment Now as his “new favourite book of all time.” Were you to believe in a deep super-state, you would probably suspect Pinker was part of it.
He is extraordinarily likeable but his rhetoric is curiously unromantic. Progress, he tells me, is neither a force nor a direction, “it is simply the aggregate dividend of people solving problems, scientifically, technologically, in policy and in governance.” You wouldn’t put it on a teatowel. He refers to the president, and clarifies “as in, someone who presides.” He frets over whether he is predisposed to optimism, because it could “distort” his ability to interpret reality. And he is so moved by a particular Bertrand Russell line he says it in full, twice, over our hour-long conversation: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it true.” “That’s not banal!” Pinker jumps in after quoting. I never said it was, but one gets the sense he was defensive because he’s been told that before. Nevertheless, within the highly technocratic idiolect – delivered at a clip with steady eye contact only the really well-adjusted can maintain – is an undeniable charm, the source of which is hard to precisely locate.
Whatever it is, it’s not thanks to an easy or casual conversational mode. At every turn our conversation was hedged: “that’s a subjective interpretation” he caveats; “I feel confident” – no! He self-corrects, “reasonably confident”; “that part is speculation”, he is cautious for me to note; “for reasons I cannot completely explain” he begins a sentence. This is the inverse of the rhetorical bombast of a populist, or even a garden-variety politician. Superlatives are rare, or perhaps entirely absent. He presumably has human instincts like everyone else, but you have to wonder whether he’s ever done anything as base as making a snap judgement. Nothing is certain to Pinker until the evidence says so. And even then, I am not so sure. This makes it hard to derive headlines from what he says, which I suspect is intentional. The resulting spectacle is a confident intellectual making a series of highly asterixed remarks.
For someone so unwilling to indulge in absolutisms, Donald Trump almost gets him there. He talks to me about “the counter Enlightenment trends we are observing in American politics” and Trump’s total subversion of the Protestant ethics that used to cohere the nation’s social fabric. Where is it coming from? The answer, as you might suspect by now, is complicated, he says: a confluence of unique and random historical factors plus the personality of the individual man. But “there are reasons to think” a lot of it might be associated with the observable decline in literacy across the rich West. This is a well-indexed trend, and Pinker can provide his own data: he has not adjusted the level of reading he demands from his students, but students complain more now about workload than they did before. And, he detects a diminished appetite for “abstract thinking” among them.
Though, for all the talk of counter-Enlightenment trends, Pinker is at pains to stress that the world isn’t backsliding into the dark ages; there has just been a light, directionally concerning, shift. “Despite the setbacks of the last 15 years, I don’t think the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever. Liberalism is on a back heel, but there are still liberals.” Who are the liberals that might be able to wrest the West back from the iconoclastic populists Pinker holds in such deep contempt? “It’s probably not Gavin Newsom, it’s probably not Pete Buttigieg,” he says matter-of-factly. And then, as I have come to expect of him at this point, neglects to provide a positive answer.
When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Steven Pinker and his wife, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, filmed themselves dancing in their home. But, the respite from this man – one who represents the inverse of everything Pinker believes in – was brief. The second election of Trump in 2024 “flabbergasted” Pinker. He cites Trump’s first election, in 2016, as the moment that events seemed to spin out of coherence. Not even Pinker’s voluminous talent and erudition – nor that of his fellow liberal peers – could reckon with these cosmic forces. I found Pinker someone reluctant to give a straight answer on small questions; no matter all that data, fame and institutional support. Perhaps we should not be surprised that he doesn’t have any answer to the big ones.
In spite of his steadfast aversion to Trump and his robust defence of liberal centrism, Pinker told the Guardian in 2021 that he was not an ideologue. I put it to him now. “I am the last person to judge,” he caveated, of course. But “I try not to be” – it’s “almost by definition” a negative term; “I don’t think anyone would take ideologue as a compliment” he goes on. He tries to keep his assessments of reality free from an agenda, though accepts that he inevitably will fail sometimes. And, “it’s not that I don’t have values, it’s not like I am a person without moral convictions,” he adds. I am left scratching my head: Pinker has identifiable faith in science and reason, and observable distaste for those who fail to venerate both. I suspect we might need to put this one down to a semantic distinction.
[Further reading: Gore Vidal: American prophet]
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