Steven Pinker: ‘Putin’s invasion won’t lead to a return to the age of warring civilisation’
To his wife’s annoyance, Steven Pinker arrives at airports as late as possible. “I have a pathological fear of being early,” says the psychologist. But, at the age of 68, he has not given up on his ability to change this irrational habit. “I do recalibrate.”
This is Pinker’s message to all of us: that being more rational in our decisions would make us happier. We can recalibrate, because reports of our irrationality have been grossly exaggerated. Behavioural economics — whose findings of biased decisions have won several Nobel Prizes — needs a corrective. “I don’t sign on to the most pessimistic conclusion which is that humans are inherently irrational.”
In his book Rationality, Pinker argues that, although people struggle with abstract reasoning, we make logical decisions when dilemmas are grounded in everyday terms. After all, “we’re obviously rational in the sense of the world we’ve built. We did invent the vaccines, we did go to the Moon.”
The other challenge comes from threats to human wellbeing. “Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic or Existential Threat,” Pinker wrote in Enlightenment Now (2018). But the world did suffer a plague and now faces existential threats. After Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we stand close — we don’t know how close — to nuclear war, not to mention climate tipping points.
Have the past two years changed Pinker’s outlook? “I certainly recalibrated my subjective probability of the appeal of conquest to political leaders. I thought that had gone the way of human sacrifice and slave auctions,” he says, his tone soft-spoken and curious.
“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine changed the data. So far in terms of battle deaths per year, it’s not on track to undo the progress that’s been made since the Eighties. But it could if it escalates.” (Russia’s use of a tactical nuclear weapon “may not” in itself reverse the trend, even though it would be “truly horrific”.)
Pinker argues that history still bends towards reason. “Putin really is anachronistic. He’s pushing against an enormous current . . . The forces that did reduce war are still in operation, although they were not strong enough to deter Putin.” The international response may deter other despots. “I suspect that the invasion won’t lead to a return to the age of warring civilisation.”
Raised in a Jewish community in Montreal, Pinker was an atheist by the age of thirteen. He made his name in linguistics before branching out into questions of human progress. His work has rubbed against that of linguist Noam Chomsky, whose hard-left views on politics sometimes seem impermeable to reason. “Forget about it. For all of his brilliance, early on in his life he signed on to a demonological theory of history,” laughs Pinker. “That’s the last thing he’ll give up.”
Meanwhile, the tech world has spawned hyper-rationality. Effective altruism asks how humans can do the most good, including by donating most of their salary to charity. Its offshoot, long-termism, argues we should maximise the wellbeing of those who haven’t been born. What does Pinker make of it? “They’ve jumped the shark. I was a pretty strong advocate of effective altruism when it came to, ‘Should you donate your charitable dollar to malarial bednets or drilling wells?’ When it came to ‘Let’s prioritise how to stop AI from turning us into paper clips, or maximise the chance that we can upload our connectome [the synaptic wiring diagram of the cortex] to the cloud and create trillions of consciousnesses’, I think it’s not so rational.”
Pinker’s worries are climate change and nuclear war. He is pro-nuclear power now and pro-nuclear disarmament [one day]. In Rationality, he points out that the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl, killed roughly as many people as die from coal emissions every day. Meanwhile, as recently as 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly suggested disarmament. The geopolitics has changed, but countries could reduce the risks of nuclear war, for example by agreeing ‘no first strike’ policies.
“If we are complacent about climate change and nuclear weapons stability, terrible things could happen,” Pinker says. “Our only choice is to deal with them as rationally as we can.” I leave him, thinking that he’s more fair-minded and less reassuring than I’d imagined. I also worry that he is again running late.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Henry Mance
