Steven Pinker’s new book shows how it has become a contradictory figure

When everyone knows that everyone knows
Steven Pinker (Allen Lane (United Kingdom); Scribner (United States) on September 23)

Steven Pinker’s new book perfectly sums up how much he has become a contradictory figure. A large part is a clear and fascinating explanation of a major psychological phenomenon. But then he starts to tell you what he thinks about current affairs.

Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard University who wrote a series of popular science books. A bit like Words and rulesare rooted in his own research and is a good reading. Others venture further, as The best angels of our natureWho maintains that there has been a long -term drop in violence in human societies.

The books of the latter category have become massive bestsellers, but they were also launched by criticism arguing that Pinker is far from its depth. In The best angels of our natureE, he had to face the obvious exception to the tendency to decline violence: the 20th century, which saw two world wars, the Holocaust and much more. To remedy this, he selected statistics with previous centuries has seen higher mortality rates, and also proposed that the 20th century was a historic luck, said who met with strong criticism.

So I approached Pinker’s latest book with a certain distrust. What side of him would be exposed: the thoughtful psychologist, or the too confident expertise? Both, it turns out. Its subject is “public notoriety”: things that everyone knows and, above all, we all know that everyone knows it. It perfectly illustrates its importance through Hans Christian Andersen The new clothes of the emperorin which a child innocently underlines – and correctly – that the emperor is naked. As Pinker writes, “he didn’t say to anyone whatever they already knew”, but he added to their knowledge, making sure that “they now knew that everyone knew what they knew”. It was enough for the crowd to start laughing.

Public notoriety can be a transformer. Pinker imagines an oppressed population and an authoritarian government. If enough people protest, the regime will fall, regardless of the number of firearms. But it is difficult to start: if no one joins your protest, you can be massacred. You know that the government is horrible, but does everyone? And do they know that everyone knows? It is only with public notoriety that people can descend with confidence in the street.

The first seven chapters develop this idea in detail, using examples of game theory and psychology. Pinker is a graceful and clear writer, and he does a good job to guide readers through various tangled logical puzzles, even using cartoons and a famous exchange of Friends (“They don’t know we know they know we know!”).

Sometimes it does asinine aside. He notices, for example, that a logical puzzle was published for the first time “in the early 1950s politically innocent”, which is a bizarre way to describe the era of the second red fear. However, these are minor troubles.

But then, in chapter eight, which traces the psychological roots to “cancel culture”, everything goes in hell. His argument is that the cancellation of culture is a form of censorship, motivated by “the desire to prevent the ideas of becoming of public notoriety”. It could be OK if people believe in private that an ethnic group is less than another, he suggests, but if it became public notoriety, this would lead to discrimination. Hence the desire to suppress those who publicly share such feelings.

There could be something in Pinker’s analysis of what pushes people to cancel, but it is impossible to say it because his discussion on the cancellation of culture is so poor. All its examples come from the liberal left, but the right also cancels: this was the fate of the chicks (formerly the dixie chicks), which opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And he never considers the cases of people canceled for real damages, which is similar to writing on the criminal justice system by telling only stories about the false layers of justice.

The last chapter covers the way we decide to keep something semi-private or make it common. Pinker concludes that it depends on the details. Thank goodness, you are here, Steven. When he sticks to psychological research, he is fascinating. It is a shame that he wanders out of the course.

Michael Marshall is a writer based in Devon, in the United Kingdom,

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