Steven Pinker of The Blank Slate fame, weighs in on the nature and temptation of "dangerous ideas" in the latest must-read for visitors to the Island. Not too surprisingly, he likes them. Among the questions we should not be afraid to ask, says Pinker, are:
* Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?
* Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
* Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?
An excerpt , from his essay, which is the introduction to a series on dangerous ideas from The Edge, to whet your appetite:
If today people dismiss the part about God creating the Earth in six days, tomorrow they'll dismiss the part about "Thou shalt not kill." In progressive circles, the fear is that if people ever were to acknowledge any differences between races, sexes or individuals, they would feel justified in discrimination or oppression. Other dangerous ideas set off fears that people will neglect or abuse their children, become indifferent to the environment, devalue human life, accept violence and prematurely resign themselves to social problems that could be solved with sufficient commitment and optimism.
All these outcomes, needless to say, would be deplorable. But none of them actually follows from the supposedly dangerous idea.
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Would it be irrational for an insurance company to charge different rates on the basis of race? This is only true when one is dealing with individuals. Once one is dealing with aggregates, it'd make perfect sense to discriminate, wouldn't it?
The great question asker has recourse to the easy, utterly vague and undefined! (As Orr pointed out, he did this quite a bit in the Blank Slate, as well.) How about some tough questions for Steven Pinker: What do you mean by "decency?" Where does it come from? What keeps it in force? Why does it so often seem not to be in force? What factors lead as from one "decency state" to another? How do moral systems work? Can a challenge to one part of a moral system threaten or unpredictably alter the whole?
In this great big world of ours, torn by stupid wars, ethnic strife, murder and unspeakable brutality . . . in this great world of ours, how great a problem is the "ideology . . . that humans are blank slates and that social problems can be handled only through government programs that especially redress the perfidy of European males?"
Here's a dangerous idea for Pinker: "The radical feminists will never love you. Get over it. Move on." There is no way on dog's green earth that radical feminism (and associated isms) constitutes a counterpart to jingoism and religious sectarianism! Get a grip!