Steven Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, and public intellectual. His work spans language acquisition, the architecture of the mind, the evidence for an evolved human nature, the long history of violence, the conditions for reasoned thought, and the structure of shared social knowledge. Over four decades he carried the cognitive revolution from the laboratory to a wide reading public, and he became one of the most visible interpreters of how the sciences of mind bear on the largest questions about human conduct and human history. He writes for specialists and for general readers in roughly equal measure, and he holds the Johnstone Family Professorship of Psychology at Harvard University.
Pinker grew up in Montreal, Quebec, in the city’s English-speaking Jewish community. His father, Harry Pinker (1928-2015), worked as a salesman, a small landlord, a manufacturer’s representative, and a lawyer. His mother, Roslyn “Rose” Wiesenfeld Pinker (1934-2023), began as a homemaker and later served as a guidance counselor and vice-principal at Bialik High School in Montreal. His grandparents had emigrated from Poland and Romania in the 1920s and set up a small necktie factory in the city. His younger sister, Susan Pinker (b. 1957), became a psychologist, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect. His younger brother, Robert, works as a policy analyst for the Canadian government. Pinker has described the argumentative habits of the community he grew up in as a spur to his own critical bent. He adopted atheism in his early teens and has at times called himself a cultural Jew.
He took a Diploma of College Studies at Dawson College in 1971 and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology at McGill University in 1976. At McGill he encountered the work of Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985), whose account of neural assemblies and learning shaped much of postwar neuroscience. Pinker then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn (b. 1948), a leading student of mental imagery and visual cognition. His dissertation work on visual representation set themes that later joined his interest in language.
A postdoctoral year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology followed the doctorate. Pinker held a one-year assistant professorship at Harvard in 1980-81 and a second at Stanford University in 1981-82. In 1982 he joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he stayed for twenty-one years. He co-directed the Center for Cognitive Science from 1985 to 1994, became a full professor in 1989, and directed the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience from 1994 to 1999, with a sabbatical year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995-96. In 2003 he returned to Harvard as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, and he held the additional title of Harvard College Professor from 2008 to 2013 in recognition of his teaching.
Pinker came up as a representative of the cognitive revolution, the movement that displaced behaviorism’s focus on observable response with the study of internal computation and representation. He drew on the theory of universal grammar associated with Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), on evolutionary biology, on information theory, and on early artificial intelligence, and he assembled from these sources a picture of the mind as a set of specialized computational systems shaped by natural selection to solve recurring adaptive problems.
His first sustained research concerned how children learn language. In Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) he asked how children build a grammar from input that is partial and full of error. He arguments, with Chomsky, for an innate language faculty, and he held that children construct grammatical systems rather than copy adult speech. These technical arguments reached a broad audience in The Language Instinct (1994), among the defining popular science books of its decade. Pinker presented language not as a cultural artifact on the order of writing or arithmetic but as a biological adaptation that develops in children along a regular course. He gathered evidence from linguistics, developmental psychology, anthropology, genetics, and neuroscience to support the claim that language belongs to human nature.
During the 1990s Pinker entered one of the central disputes in cognitive science. Connectionist researchers held that a single associative network could account for the whole of language learning, including the inflection of verbs. Pinker advanced a dual-route account in Words and Rules (1999). On his model the mind generates regular forms such as “walked” through symbolic grammatical rules and retrieves irregular forms such as “went” and “brought” from associative memory. The mind uses both systems at once. The debate over rules and networks became a defining controversy of the field, and it placed Pinker among the leading defenders of symbolic approaches to cognition. He pursued the empirical side of the question in collaborative work with the linguist Alan Prince on the inflection of regular and irregular verbs.
His broad synthesis appeared in How the Mind Works (1997), which treated perception, emotion, family life, sexuality, art, humor, religion, and consciousness through the lens of evolutionary psychology. Pinker argued that the mind comprises many specialized adaptations that evolved to meet challenges faced by ancestral humans, and the book carried that program to millions of readers. It made the case that much of human conduct has deep evolutionary roots, and it became a standard popular reference for the field.
His most contested book, The Blank Slate (2002), took aim at three assumptions he traced through twentieth-century thought: that the mind begins empty, that culture alone fixes behavior, and that human nature can be reshaped without limit. Drawing on genetics, neuroscience, behavior genetics, and anthropology, Pinker argued that inherited dispositions operate alongside learning and culture. He held that an account of what humans are does not license social inequality or political resignation, and that institutions work better when they are built with evolved psychology in view rather than against it.
The book drew heavy fire. Critics charged Pinker with biological reductionism and with slighting culture and historical contingency. He answered by separating descriptive claims about human nature from moral and political conclusions: a statement about what people are tells us nothing on its own about what they ought to do or become. The line between description and prescription became a recurring theme in his replies to critics across his career.
His most prominent scientific opponent in these years was the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). Gould attacked evolutionary psychology for spinning speculative and untestable stories about the adaptive origins of mental traits. Pinker defended the field on the ground that many psychological capacities show signs of functional design and that hypotheses about their origins can be tested against comparative data, developmental evidence, genetics, neuroscience, and anthropology. Their exchange became a reference point in the larger argument over evolutionary accounts of the mind.
From the 2010s Pinker turned from the structure of human nature to the trajectory of human history. In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) he marshaled evidence from archaeology, criminology, history, and political science for the claim that violence has fallen across the long run. Homicide, war, torture, and domestic abuse have all declined over centuries, he argued, against a widespread public sense that the world grows more dangerous. He credited the decline to stronger states, expanding commerce, literacy, cosmopolitan contact, a widening circle of empathy, and the spread of Enlightenment ideas about reason and universal rights.
He extended the argument in Enlightenment Now (2018), which held that humanity has made large gains in health, longevity, education, wealth, democracy, and knowledge through institutions grounded in reason, science, and humanism. He stressed that progress is neither automatic nor guaranteed, and he located its source in liberal institutions that can correct their own errors. The book found a wide readership and drew sharp criticism, both for its handling of historical causation and for the politics some readers heard in it.
Pinker then took up the psychology of reasoning. In Rationality (2021), based on a Harvard course, he examined logic, probability, statistics, Bayesian inference, and causal reasoning as tools that help people overcome cognitive bias and choose well. He argued that individuals reason imperfectly on their own, and that institutions such as science, a free press, democratic deliberation, and markets supply the error-correcting structure that individuals lack.
He also brought cognitive science to bear on writing. In The Sense of Style (2014) he set aside much traditional prescriptive grammar in favor of advice rooted in linguistics and psychology. He traced a great deal of bad prose to what he called the curse of knowledge, the difficulty a writer has in imagining a reader who does not already know what the writer knows. Clear writing, on this account, demands the hard mental work of recovering the reader’s ignorance.
His most recent major book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life (2025), takes up common knowledge in the technical sense: not information that many people hold, but information that everyone knows that everyone else holds, in an open-ended regress of mutual awareness. Pinker argues that this recursive form of shared knowledge underwrites social coordination across a wide range of cases, among them financial markets, political authority, diplomacy, etiquette, and ordinary conversation. He draws on psychology, economics, game theory, philosophy, and linguistics, and the book continues his long effort to connect the science of mind to the organization of social life.
Across his career Pinker has argued for reason, scientific inquiry, and liberal democracy as the institutions best able to find and fix error, and he has held that evidence should take precedence over ideology in social questions. These commitments led him into the politics of higher education. He has argued that an intolerant climate took hold on parts of the academic left, and he helped found the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to resist what he described as a spread of censorship at universities. In 2021 he joined the founding advisers of the University of Austin, an institution created to promote open inquiry and intellectual diversity. He chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018, and he has served on editorial and advisory boards for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Psychological Association, and the Linguistic Society of America. He writes often for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Time, and The Free Press on language, the mind, education, free speech, artificial intelligence, and contemporary cultural argument.
His public positions have drawn controversy from several directions. In January 2005 he defended remarks by Harvard’s then-president Lawrence Summers (b. 1954) on the sources of the gender gap in mathematics and science, and in a public debate with the psychologist Elizabeth Spelke he argued that biological differences in average temperament and aptitude, interacting with socialization and bias, help account for differences in representation at elite levels. In 2020 an open letter signed by hundreds of academics asked the Linguistic Society of America to remove Pinker from its lists of fellows and media experts, charging that his public statements minimized racist and sexist harm; the letter cited several of his posts on social media. Pinker replied that the campaign threatened younger and less protected scholars and amounted to a regime of intimidation in the realm of ideas. The society took no action against him.
In December 2024 Pinker resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation after the foundation retracted an article by the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne (b. 1949) that defended a binary account of biological sex. Pinker charged that the organization had abandoned reasoned inquiry and taken on the features of a creed, with its own dogma and heretics. Coyne and Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) resigned in the same days, and the foundation then dissolved its honorary board. In June 2025 Pinker drew criticism for an appearance on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for what they call human biodiversity, which critics describe as a relabeling of older claims about racial hierarchy. Researchers and commentators argued that his participation lent legitimacy to the outlet; Pinker’s defenders cast the episode as another instance of his readiness to discuss contested questions in venues others avoid. The Aporia appearance fit a longer pattern of criticism over his proximity to advocates of race-linked theories of intelligence, a charge he has rejected while maintaining his commitment to colorblind equality and open debate.
Pinker has exchanged ideas, in agreement and in dispute, with many of the leading thinkers of his generation, among them Daniel Dennett (1942-2024), Richard Dawkins, Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021), Jared Diamond (b. 1937), and Noam Chomsky. He owes a deep debt to Chomsky’s linguistics and has broken sharply with Chomsky’s politics, while keeping his regard for the older man’s foundational work.
His scientific work has won wide recognition. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences for 2022. His research drew the Early Career Award and the Boyd McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice, for How the Mind Works in 1998 and for The Blank Slate in 2003, and he has received honorary doctorates from universities in several countries. Time named him among the hundred most influential people in the world, and Foreign Policy and Prospect have placed him on their lists of leading global thinkers.
Pinker is an avid cyclist and has expressed sympathy for effective altruism and its stress on evidence in the service of human welfare. He married the psychologist Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and divorced in 1992, and he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and divorced in 2006. Since 2007 he has been married to the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (b. 1950). They divide their time between the Boston area and Truro, Massachusetts. Through the marriage he became stepfather to the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.
Pinker’s standing rests on his range and on his reach. He has drawn psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, philosophy, economics, and history into connected accounts of human conduct and human history, and he has written those accounts for readers far outside his field. Whether the subject is the acquisition of grammar, the decline of violence, the discipline of reasoning, or the architecture of shared knowledge, he returns to a single conviction: the careful use of scientific method offers the surest path to self-understanding and to the improvement of human life. Few scholars of his time have done as much to shape the public standing of cognitive science, and few have argued as persistently for reason and free inquiry as the load-bearing values of a decent society.
What Steven Pinker Means by Reason
The slide goes up and the line comes down. It starts high on the left, in the centuries of feud and pogrom and the breaking wheel, and it falls across the screen toward the present, where it runs near the floor. Pinker stands beside it with a laser pointer. His hair catches the stage light, silver and curled. He favors cowboy boots and has ridden a bicycle to the hall. He reads the good news in the even voice of a man who sees it from a long way off and knows it will hold. “The numbers are not in dispute,” he says. The room is full of people who came on airplanes and will sleep in clean beds, and they believe him, and they are right to. Homicide has fallen. Death in childhood has fallen. The line is real.
Watch what the line does for the man beside it.
Pinker took God out of his life at thirteen and never put Him back. No soul, then. No country past the grave, no reunion, no ledger kept by anyone who loves him. A man in that position has to find another author for the story, because the alternative is to admit the story has no author and goes nowhere and adds to nothing. Pinker found his author in the species. The falling line is providence without a provider. It says history has a direction, that the suffering on the left of the graph buys the safety on the right, that a life spent charting the descent counts toward something larger than the life. His name rides the line. That is the closest thing to forever a man can have once he has closed the older door.
Behind the curls and the level voice sit two fears, and the line answers both. One is the old animal fear, the grave with nothing after it. The other is the fear that the line could turn and climb again, that the dark he charts on the left could come back over the right. His grandparents left Poland and Romania in the 1920s and built a small necktie factory in Montreal, and the century that followed showed the whole world what the climb looks like. So the descending curve is not only data. It is a wall against two deaths, his own and the world’s.
Reason is the name he gives the thing that builds the wall. By reason he means the impersonal procedure, the method that corrects the gut and the tribe, the discipline that lets a man be right against his own side and know it. His book on the subject carries the word as its title, Rationality, and the argument of Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature is one argument: reason, worked through institutions over centuries, is what bent the line down, and only reason keeps it down. To Pinker reason is salvation with no church. It is the way up and the way out.
A sacred value holds its weight only at home. Carry the word into another man’s world and it changes weight, because each world makes a different thing holy and hands reason a different rank. Pinker hears one music in the word. Others hear something else, and each of them is answering the same two fears with a different wall.
Take the man whose son is dead.
He is at his kitchen table. There is a photograph held to the refrigerator by a magnet shaped like a sunflower, and a casserole on the counter that a neighbor brought and that he will not eat. He has heard the good news. Someone who meant well has told him that fewer young men die now than in any year of the old wars, that the trend is his friend, that history is on the side of life. To him it is an insult with a graph attached. His son is not a rate. The boy was the whole of a world, and the world is over, and no curve drawn across other people’s children touches the one fact in the room. In this man’s order the dead stay with us because we grieve them and name them and refuse to hand them to the aggregate. The refusal is the rite. Reason that files the boy under a falling line is the breaking of the one rite that holds the floor up under him. Same word. To him it is the enemy.
Here is the heart of it. Pinker’s defense against the grave runs through the aggregate, and the father’s runs through the particular, and the aggregate is built by erasing the particular. The two men cannot share the word. They are not arguing about the data. They are defending two ways of refusing death, and each way unmakes the other.
Take the sergeant at the forward base.
War is Pinker’s great unreason, the thing on the left of the graph, and good riddance to it. The sergeant has met the reasoning that frightens him, and it wears a tie and sits far from the fire. It prices men. It runs the model and publishes that casualties are down and calls the falling number progress. The holy thing on the base is none of that. It is the bond, the man beside you, the death that one man dies so another man lives. No model prices it, and a model that tried would prove it did not understand what it was looking at. To the sergeant reason is the cold voice that spends the sacred and totals the spending and presents the total as good news. The word names the thing that betrays his dead.
Take the preacher under the tent.
To Pinker reason is the lamp that burns off superstition and leaves a clean room. To the preacher reason is the serpent’s own line. Ye shall be as gods. The faculty that makes a man his own final authority is the first sin in a lab coat, the oldest pride with new credentials. Pinker offers the falling curve and then, at the end of it, the grave and nothing. The preacher offers Him and life without end. The same faculty is the road out of the dark to one man and the road down into it to the other, and they are not confused about each other. Each sees the other’s salvation as the other’s damnation.
Take the monk in the zendo.
Pinker holds reason as the crown of the animal, the thinking that frees us. The monk has spent thirty years learning that the thinking, ranking, narrating mind is the veil over the real, and that the work of a life is to set it down and let it go quiet. Pinker’s salvation keeps the self running inside the project. The monk’s salvation is the self seen through and dropped. To exalt reason, in the monk’s world, is to polish the bars of the cage and call the shine a window.
Take the man on the trading floor.
Pinker holds reason as disinterested, the servant of truth wherever it leads. On the floor reason is edge. It is the model that beats the tape, thought bent to the number on the screen, and a reason that served no advantage would strike the trader as a man leaving money on the table for the pleasure of it. His world makes the score holy, and the score is kept in money, and reason that does not pay is decoration.
Even the poet has his version. Explain the rainbow and Pinker loses nothing; he gains a second beauty, the beauty of the cause. Explain it to the poet and the rainbow goes gray, and the graying is the one murder his world forbids. John Keats (1795-1821) called it unweaving the rainbow. He meant that the cold faculty, turned on the bright thing, kills it. Pinker would say the bright thing survives the knowing and shines brighter for it. Both men are telling the truth about their own worlds.
So there is no neutral reason waiting above all these men to settle their quarrel. There is Pinker’s reason, which is the god of his world wearing the mask of no-god, and there is the father’s grief and the sergeant’s bond and the preacher’s God and the monk’s silence and the trader’s score, and each of them ranks reason where its own holy thing leaves room for it. The man on the stage cannot see this. He thinks he is offering the one tool every world needs. He is offering the local deity of one world and is puzzled, every time, when another world declines it.
The sharpest knives do not come from the worlds he expects. The preacher and the sergeant he can name and hold at arm’s length. The cut that draws blood comes from inside his own house. In 2020 hundreds of fellow academics signed a letter asking the linguists’ society to strike his name from its rolls. In 2024 he quit a board he had served for twenty years after it pulled an essay on the sexes, and in 2025 critics said he had carried reason onto the wrong stage and handed it to the wrong men. To these people Pinker is the heretic. He took the holy word and gave it to the enemy. They worship his god and have tried him for treason against it.
Becker saw this coming a long way off. The bloodiest wars run between the nearest worlds, because the close rival threatens the absolute claim in a way the distant stranger never can. The preacher and the scientist can leave each other be. Two men who both worship reason and disagree about whom it serves will fight to the wall, because each is the living proof that the other’s god can be read another way, and a god that can be read another way is not yet a god.
The tell came when they pulled the essay. Pinker resigned and wrote that the body had become “the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics.” The great disenchanter, cornered, reached for the oldest vocabulary on earth. He did not say they were mistaken. He said they were a church. A man defends an altar in the language of altars, even a man whose life’s work is the explaining-away of altars, and the reach for the word blasphemy is the proof that something holy is under attack. The holy thing is reason, and reason is his.
Read him forward on three lines.
Watch where he puts death. He keeps it in the aggregate and out of the particular, because the falling curve is his whole wall against the grave, and the single grave pulls a brick from the wall. He answers the bereaved with the trend. He loses them every time, and he does not see why, because to see why he would have to feel the one death the curve cannot hold, and the curve exists so that he never has to.
Watch his words when the project is hit. The even voice breaks and the sacred vocabulary comes up, religion and dogma and heresy, and that is where the hero system shows through the science. The man is steadiest discussing other men’s faiths and least steady defending his own, which he does not call a faith.
Watch the house of reason from the inside. The next assault on Pinker comes not from the altar he expects but from men who claim his own god and name him the apostate. That is the war he is least armed for, because to fight it he would have to grant that there is an altar in the house worth fighting over, and the grant is the one thing his world cannot spend. So he rides on, even-voiced, beside the falling line, and tells the room the numbers are not in dispute, and the room believes him, and the men in the other worlds put down the word he hands them and pick up their own.
Steven Pinker and the Party of Reason
Steven Pinker tells a clean story about himself. He follows reason. He follows the evidence. He holds the positions a careful man holds once he sets the tribe aside and lets the data speak, and he stays willing to be right against his own side. The positions hang together because reason hangs together. That is the story, and he tells it well, in Rationality and Enlightenment Now and in a steady column from the front of the educated press.
David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie Haselton offer a different account of where a man’s positions come from. In “Strange Bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems,” forthcoming in Psychological Inquiry, they argue that belief systems do not grow from abstract values such as equality or tolerance or reason. They grow from alliances. A man chooses allies, supports them in their fights, opposes their rivals, and his beliefs assemble themselves around those loyalties. The thread that ties a set of positions together is seldom a principle. It is a coalition. On this account reason is not the engine. Reason is one of the tags a man flies to mark which side he is on, the way the paper treats markers and identities as devices that sort the likeminded and broadcast commitment.
Run Pinker through that account and the clean story bends.
Start with the choosing of allies. Pinsof and his coauthors hold that men pick allies by similarity, by transitivity, and by interdependence, and that the choices then snowball into a structure that looks principled from inside and accidental from outside. Pinker’s coalition is easy to name. It is the heterodox center: the New Atheists, the defenders of free inquiry on campus, the founders and friends of the University of Austin, the writers gathered at The Free Press, the part of Silicon Valley that prizes IQ and contrarianism, the readers who fear the activist academy. The tags that sort this set are the words Pinker has made his own. Reason. Evidence. The Enlightenment. Biology is real. Sex is binary. Colorblind equality. A man who speaks these words is reading the marker, and the marker says which cluster he belongs to before any argument begins.
Transitivity does the rest, and the paper states the rule in the old proverbs: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Watch the Freedom From Religion Foundation in December 2024. The biologist Jerry Coyne, a friend and a fellow New Atheist, writes an essay on the sexes. The foundation pulls it. Pinker resigns within days. He does not litigate the biology in public, on the merits, the way his story would predict. He sides with his ally against the body that struck his ally, and Richard Dawkins follows the same line on the same day. The enemy of his friend became his enemy overnight. Watch the other direction in June 2025, when Pinker sits for the podcast of Aporia, an outlet built around race-linked theories of intelligence, and voices agreement with Charles Murray (b. 1943) on family breakdown. Murray and the milieu around Steve Sailer’s old human-biodiversity list are not mainstream science. They are fellow targets of the same rival, the censorious left, and that shared rivalry pulls them inside the circle. The paper names this pattern directly when it discusses the New Atheists, Murray, and the Sailer list. Transitivity, not the evidence on heritability, predicts who gets the benefit of Pinker’s time.
Interdependence holds the cluster together once it forms. The coalition trades benefits. Blurbs, platforms, mutual citation, the standing column, the advisory seat at a new university, the invitation to the next stage at Davos. Each member is more valuable to the others for staying loyal, and loyalty pays in attention and position. None of this requires a cynical Pinker. The paper insists the alliance systems run in everyone, below awareness, and feel from inside like simple agreement among reasonable people.
The second half of Alliance Theory concerns how a man supports his allies once chosen, through what the authors call propagandistic biases. Three of them map onto Pinker without strain.
The first is the perpetrator bias, the rationalizing of an ally’s transgression. When Coyne writes that trans women are more likely to be predators, or when an outlet built on race science books a Harvard name, the ally’s act gets recast as a minor lapse, a brave inquiry, a man only following the science. The same act by a rival gets the full weight. The paper predicts this exactly: men extend to their allies the same excuses perpetrators extend to themselves.
The second is the victim bias, and Pinker offers a clean specimen. He is a tenured professor at Harvard with bestsellers, a column, and a chair, and he casts himself and his heterodox friends as the censored, the intimidated, the embattled. When hundreds of academics signed a 2020 letter asking the linguists’ society to strike his name, he answered that younger and less protected scholars faced a regime of intimidation that narrows the theater of ideas. The paper notes that victim claims sit badly with the older idea that bias exists to flatter the self, because a victim claim advertises weakness. They make sense as calls for reinforcement. Pinker’s alarm at his own persecution, voiced from a position of high security, reads as a summons to the coalition, and competitive victimhood is the paper’s term for two sides each insisting it suffers the greater wrong.
The third is the attributional bias, the habit of crediting an ally’s standing to inner worth and a rival’s to inner fault. Pinker attributes his own side’s positions to reason and courage, qualities of character, and his rivals’ positions to fanaticism, tribalism, and the failure to think. The sharpest version is what the authors call the linguistic attributional bias, the bending of word choice toward allies. Pinker’s lexicon does the work in plain sight. His side gets reason, evidence, Enlightenment, free inquiry, heterodoxy. His rivals get dogma, mob, moral panic, intimidation, and, in the resignation letter, a body that has become “the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics.” The behaviors he describes are the same on both sides, the drawing of moral lines and the policing of speech. The words split by ally status.
The paper’s strongest move is a test, and the test transfers. Hold the value fixed, swap the group, and see whether the value holds or bends toward the coalition.
Take free inquiry. Pinker treats censorship as the great campus sin. When the censored party is an ally, a heterodox professor, a friend whose essay got pulled, the alarm runs hot and the language reaches for the mob and the inquisition. When the censored party is a rival, an activist scholar shouted down from the other direction, the same social pressure reads to him as the rot to be resisted rather than as the rival’s own expression. The paper’s finding is that both sides favor protecting their allies’ speech and restricting their rivals’, and that neither side is the free-speech party in general. Pinker’s commitment, swapped across groups, leans toward the people his coalition wants heard.
Take following the evidence. On vaccines, on climate, on the long fall of violence, Pinker defers to mainstream consensus, and those consensus findings happen to flatter the story of progress through liberal institutions that his coalition prizes. On race and intelligence he lends his time and his Harvard name to outlets and figures who sit against that same consensus. The instruction “defer to the best science” does not predict both choices. Ally status predicts both. The heterodox coalition reads the race-and-IQ contrarian as a fellow traveler hunted by the shared enemy, so the contrarian draws sympathy that the structural sociologist, a rival, never gets.
Take the line between description and prescription, the is and the ought, which Pinker has guarded for forty years. Against a rival who moves from a fact about inequality to a demand to redistribute or dismantle, Pinker raises the firewall and reminds the rival that no ought follows from an is. For his own side he walks from a description, liberal institutions lowered violence and raised welfare, to a prescription, defend those institutions and resist their critics, and the firewall comes down. The boundary holds where it costs a rival and softens where it serves the coalition.
Set these beside one another and the strange bedfellows appear, which is the paper’s title and its point. Pinker is a universalist liberal who now shares a coalition with the populist right that his earlier self had little to do with, because both sides face the same campus rival. He is a defender of scientific consensus who lends standing to men contesting consensus on the one topic where his coalition feels besieged. He is the scourge of censorship who quit a board and named his former allies heretics the week they censored his friend. A principle does not generate this set. A network of loyalties does.
Underneath all of it sits the move the paper saves for last, the masquerade. Politics dresses as morality, the authors write, because casting your side as the good side draws in third parties and frees your allies to strike. Pinker performs a finer version. His politics dresses as epistemology. He does not say his coalition should win. He says reason should win, and presents his coalition as reason’s party. That frame is the most powerful recruiting tool an intellectual can hold, because it offers the undecided a way to join a side while believing he has joined no side, only the truth. The paper observes that each camp calls itself the reasonable one and calls the other the church, and that both labels are mobilization rather than diagnosis. Pinker says his rivals are a religion and he is reason. His rivals say he is ideology in a lab coat. Alliance Theory reads these as mirror images, two war cries, neither of them the thing that actually moved the men who shout them.
The paper ends without a sneer, and the Pinker reading has to end the same way to stay honest to the frame. Motivated reasoning, the authors say, is not a defect so much as a signal of loyalty, and ideological belief may be as deep in us as friendship. The biases run in everyone, symmetrically, across every line. So this is not a charge against Pinker alone. The academics who signed the letter against him ran the same alliance psychology. The writers who call him a race-science launderer run it too. So does the reader, and so does the man writing this. Pinker’s distinction is not that he escaped the pattern. His distinction is that he wears it in the finest available costume, and the costume is stitched from the one value the theory says is never the driver.
Read him forward on three lines. Watch the group, not the value: when he reaches for reason or free inquiry or the evidence, ask first who is helped and who is hurt by the reaching, and the principle will resolve into a roster. Watch the words: the split between his glossary for allies and his glossary for rivals is the alliance showing through the argument, and the reach for blasphemy and heresy marks the spots where a loyalty is under attack. And watch the masquerade hold or break: the day Pinker spends his reason against an ally and for a rival, on a question where it costs his coalition something real, is the day the costume comes off and the value underneath, if there is one, can be measured.
If David Pinsof is right, Pinker’s entire brand of optimistic techno-liberalism is a massive masking operation. He frames the current dominance of his own political and intellectual class as a universal civilizational triumph, translating a highly successful coalitional victory into a neutral victory for human reason.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker demonstrates that violence of all forms—warfare, homicide, torture, and domestic abuse—has plummeted over centuries. He credits this pacification to historical engines like the “Leviathan” (the state monopoly on force), commerce (which turns zero-sum raids into positive-sum trade), and the “Escalator of Reason” (the expansion of human empathy through literacy and education).
From Pinsof’s perspective, this pacification is not an abstract triumph of human empathy over ignorance. It is a description of a highly successful, long-term resource consolidation by a dominant coalition.
The state monopoly on force did not emerge because human primates had a sudden, rational realization that killing each other was inefficient; it emerged because powerful rulers crushed their local rivals, secured their turf, and built judicial and administrative apparatuses to police internal cheaters. By framing this brutal, centralized lockdown as a benevolent civilizational shift toward “better angels,” Pinker’s theory serves a protective function. It makes the absolute power and stability of the modern state look like an objective moral achievement rather than the spoils of an entrenched ruling class.
In Enlightenment Now, Pinker defends the ideals of the Enlightenment—reason, science, humanism, and progress—against what he views as irrational, backward-looking populist movements on both the political Left and Right. He treats populism and nationalism as cognitive glitches—an outbreak of tribal psychology and media-fueled pessimism that ignores the clear, data-driven reality of human progress.
Pinsof’s logic shows that this defense is a classic coalitional counter-raid wrapped in the language of science. The working-class populists Pinker mocks are not suffering from an analytical error or an ideological virus. They are acting completely rationally to protect their local labor markets, borders, and cultural status from a globalized, cosmopolitan establishment that has used its technocratic leverage to outsource industrial jobs and devalue local communities.
Pinker uses his charts and progress metrics as rocks to throw at these political enemies. By framing political resistance to globalism as a simple failure to look at the statistics, he avoids acknowledging his rivals’ actual grievances, ensuring that his own tribe—the secular, university-educated elite—retains the supreme moral high ground and the final word over policy.
A central pillar of Pinker’s worldview is that education, intelligence, and cognitive flexibility expand the “circle of empathy,” allowing humans to treat out-groups with universal dignity. He argues that as a society becomes more educated, it naturally abandons zero-sum tribal fighting in favor of cooperative, positive-sum problem-solving.
Under Pinsof’s frame, this “Escalator of Reason” is a luxury belief and a highly effective sorting tool. Mastering the style of abstract, data-driven, context-free reasoning that Pinker champions requires immense social capital and elite university credentials.
Primate groups do not navigate the world through dispassionate statistical analysis; they navigate it through local loyalties and zero-sum competitions for resources. By branding his own class’s cognitive style as the ultimate endpoint of human evolution, Pinker creates a permanent justification for their rule. If global crises are complex management problems that can only be solved by data science and elite institutional design, then the public is completely dependent on the Harvard clerisy to steer the ship. Pinker did not write his manifestos to change the underlying Darwinian reality of human nature; he constructed the most sophisticated, chart-filled telescope available to study the global hole, ensuring that the progressive technocrat remains firmly seated at the absolute apex of the institutional hierarchy.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology demolishes the historical optimism and evolutionary psychology of Steven Pinker.
Mearsheimer’s realism cuts through Pinker’s data and evolutionary framework, transforming his era of peace into a dangerous, temporary illusion.
Pinker places immense structural weight on what he calls the “Long Peace”—the unprecedented period since the end of World War II where great powers have not fought one another directly. He attributes this shift to a moral evolution in human consciousness, where state leaders have gradually come to view war as obsolete, irrational, and counterproductive.
If Mearsheimer is right, Pinker mistakes the temporary balance of power for a permanent moral awakening. The absence of direct war between great powers since 1945 was not driven by the spread of Enlightenment text or a rejection of violence. It was driven by the structural reality of a bipolar international system, followed by a brief unipolar moment, both frozen into place by the terrifying material reality of nuclear deterrence.
States did not stop fighting because their “better angels” won; they stopped because the distribution of material power made direct conflict an existential risk. The peaceful cosmopolitan order Pinker celebrates is an artificial byproduct of American hegemony. The moment that hegemony contracts and multi-polar anarchy returns, the thin veneer of rational cosmopolitanism is dropped, and great powers will re-mobilize for raw relative power competition.
Pinker’s evolutionary model argues that humanity can gradually expand its “inner circle” of empathy. He claims that through literacy, commerce, and global travel, humans can overcome their primitive, localized tribal instincts and extend moral concern to the entire human race, treating the global population as a single cosmopolitan community.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology reveals that the human animal cannot expand its circle of empathy to include the entire world. Humans are hardwired to form bounded, exclusionary groups to survive in an environment with no sovereign referee. Independent reason and universal empathy rank last among human faculties, falling far behind the unreflective drive to protect the immediate group.
The cosmopolitan empathy Pinker documents among global elites is a luxury product of high security and material abundance. The intense value infusion an individual receives during childhood socialization hardwires the brain for blind group loyalty long before independent reason can develop. You cannot expand the circle to everyone because an in-group requires an out-group to exist. The permanent reality of human nature is group competition, meaning Pinker’s global neighborhood is an anthropological mirage.
In Enlightenment Now, Pinker positions science and reason as autonomous, progressive forces that naturally civilize human relations by replacing dogma and tribal superstition with objective data and shared problem-solving.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences counters that science and independent reason do not operate as neutral, sovereign forces above human conflict. In a competitive, anarchic world, technological innovation, data collection, and scientific inquiry are instantly captured and used by the dominant state vehicle or domestic elite coalitions to maximize their relative power, protect their material assets, and manage their reputations.
The universalist language of science is frequently weaponized as an ideological standard to enforce conformity within an alliance or to police the behavior of external rivals. Pinker treats reason as an escape hatch from human nature, but realism shows it is the most sophisticated instrument the human animal uses to wage its permanent struggle for survival.
