Steven Pinker's book claims people are happier and healthier than ever before

Spending an hour with the Canadian cognitive scientist Steven Pinker turns out to be a kind of cerebral marathon. So fertile is his intellect that he can talk cogently without pausing on any question he’s asked, from gendered brains and bogus academic ideologies to what’s wrong with Google.

Now 64 and still sporting his trademark curly mane — silvery white these days — he’s just flown into London from Harvard, where he is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, to publicise the paperback of his latest book, Enlightenment Now. His thesis is that the values of science, humanism and reason, which have their roots in the Enlightenment, have been responsible for the greatest strides in human progress, and will continue to be so, but only as long as they are upheld in the face of mounting challenges posed by nationalism, religion and populism.

Using data from hundreds of studies, he shows that people are healthier, wealthier and happier than ever before, in spite of the popular notion promoted by the media that an apocalypse brought on by climate change, nuclear war, cyber espionage or some other horror is imminent. In the past two centuries, he says, the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has dropped from 90 per cent to under 10 per cent; life expectancy and literacy are at an all-time high; there are fewer wars between countries, fewer murders, less child labour and slavery… the list goes on.

A bestseller like Pinker’s other popular science titles — he’s written over half a dozen — the book has also attracted criticism. But he’s used to that. He was roundly attacked for The Blank Slate, his bestseller of 2002, in which he argued that evolutionary psychology and our genes play a significantly larger part in shaping our personalities than our upbringing. Though still hotly debated, the latest findings in genetic research about traits for everything from IQ to caffeine consumption support his findings. As with evolutionary psychology: “Whether we’ve made progress or not is an empirical question. That’s why I make my case in a hundred graphs.” But people love to reject data, he says, especially when it doesn’t suit their intellectual ideologies.

Judging from the waves of political correctness rampaging through academia, I ask whether he thinks these intellectual ideologies of egalitarianism and identity politics are becoming more strident. Barely a week seems to pass without another academic getting sacked for saying something considered offensive, usually about gender. “Yes. Ironically, it’s because the children of the Sixties, the baby boomers, are now in charge of the universities and publishing houses, and they’re getting to indulge their radicalism, abetted by some of the moralistic energy of the millennials and Generation Zeds.” It’s spreading into companies too. Take Google, “which is doing itself no favours with its corporate culture in which expressing an unpopular opinion is a fireable offence,” he says, citing James Damore, who was sacked from the company in 2017 for saying almost exactly what he himself has been saying for years: that the differences between men and women’s brains may incline them to choose one profession over another. “Damore may have said it a little clumsily but it is largely supported by the data. How do you like to spend your time? What interests you? These are big in terms of life priorities and affect career choice. We should also remember that in sex differences there are overlapping statistical distributions and that a disparity between men and women in any occupation is not in itself proof of discrimination, although it’s often treated that way, as is the assumption that if discrimination were to evaporate, you’d have an exact 50/50 split in every profession, which is preposterous.”

Pinker suggests that handing out fake CVs and changing the sex of the job applicant to see how they are evaluated would be more worthwhile than looking at quotas. A recent study at Cornell showed that in virtually every academic discipline apart from economics, women are more likely to land a job interview than men. “There’s unquestionably now discrimination against white men,” he says.

He also rails against what he calls “brainless” multiculturism. “That is, we will demonise and attack anyone who’s opposed to women’s equality or homosexuality, unless they’re Muslim, because it’s part of their culture, and then we can’t say anything about it.”

So how does he manage to get away with saying such things? “I certainly wouldn’t express the opinions I have, were it not for tenure, which does protect people like me who express heterodox opinions, so I don’t have to worry about being fired,” comes the rather surprising answer. He talks about “inoculating” his students against “certain fallacies”. “I talk about sex differences, heritability of intelligence and personality, about the universality of violent impulses and the fallacies of equating empirical generalisations with moral precepts; I lecture about the naturalistic fallacy that ‘is’ implies ‘ought’, and the moralistic fallacy that ‘ought’ implies ‘is’. I’ve got away with it because I take the controversies head on.”

He says he is often grouped together with the hard Right in the backlash against the prevailing academic ideologies, which “is absurd”, he says, “since I was one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest supporters among the Harvard faculty. This more reasonable backlash comes from people who want to defend classic liberal values such as free speech, open enquiry and judging ideas and people on merit rather than ancestry. It is also evident in the rise of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web: channels like Quillette and the Joe Rogan Experience, for thoughtful people who feel alienated from mainstream journalistic and intellectual culture to express their views”.

These are just some of the themes of his next book, Don’t Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage and Taboo, due out in 2022, in which he looks at the psychology behind “social media mobbing, bubbles, crashes, conspicuous outrage and the madness of crowds.” But he doesn’t sound gloomy; far from it. “After all, some parts of human nature can overcome the shortcomings of others.”

Enlightenment Now is out now in paperback (Penguin, £12.99)