Steven Pinker at The New School

Went to hear a public debate between Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and psychiatrist and Holocaust scholar Robert J. Lifton in the "Public Voices" series at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village on March 23rd. The public debate concerned the argument of Pinker's latest book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It was prompted by an exchange of letters between Lifton and Pinker in the New York Times, which can be found here.

I had never seen Pinker in the flesh before. I had only watched him in a video, where he was accused by his interviewer, author Robert Wright, of having "Kenny G hair." At Princeton in 2006-7 I had come to know his daughter-in-law, Yael Goldstein (daughter of author Rebecca Goldstein), a Harvard graduate and the author of Overture (also titled The Passion of Tasha Darsky). I had started to read one of his other books, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, some years before, but had stopped because it seemed to present a complete caricature of Locke and the empiricists.


I knew about Pinker's book because of a review by Peter Singer in the New York Times. I did not expect Pinker to be as sharp and critical as he was of objections to his argument. His argument is that acts of lethal violence, that is, killings (it is more difficult to get hard data on torture and cruelty, he stated), have steadily declined over the last thousand years, and that people are less violent than they used to be. The audience's sympathy seemed to be with Lifton, who argued that the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the threat of a nuclear holocaust amounted to a greater level of lethal violence than at any time in human history. Nevertheless, there was little that Lifton could muster by way of an objection to Pinker's statistics about the decline of lethal violence, including the facts that there has not been a nuclear war and that killing in war has become more surgical. Even if Pinker didn't seem to emote in the right way, his argument survived.

The entire debate was recorded and can be watched on YouTube. There you may be able to see that Pinker wears black Texan cowboy boots.

Afterwards I bought a copy of the book and hung around to say hello to him and to get him to sign my copy.