During an interview aired on Wednesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “Here and Now,” Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker stated that there has been an attack on free speech from the left within academia, including at Harvard, that is due to “a blurring of the moral and the factual,” where the pursuit of objective truth has given way to promoting beliefs that are considered to be the “moral” view.
Pinker stated that there is a narrowing of speech on “many” issues, including “the causes of becoming transgender, the rates of police shooting[s] of people of different races, the existence and origin of sex differences, the possible existence of cultural norm differences between different ethnic groups. Yeah, it’s — I could go on.”
Pinker further pointed to the treatment of Harvard’s Carole Hooven over her statements on biological sex.
Co-host Scott Tong then asked, “As you observe the case of this professor and what happened to her, this — as you see, this chilling effect, how did we get here?”
Pinker answered, “The whole idea that there is a world of objective facts that is separate from our moral commitments is a vital idea. It’s the whole idea behind academia, the search for truth, objective journalism, science. People’s natural attitude is that you should believe things that are morally uplifting, ennobling, and progressive. And the idea that the truth doesn’t care about your moral convictions, and, in fact, if you want to pursue your moral convictions, you ought to find out what is true, that’s something that people have to continually be reminded of. But it’s an idea that constantly has to be reinforced.”
He continued, “And it’s just natural…to think, well, are you against racism or aren’t you? Are you in favor of transgender rights or not? And if you’re in favor of transgender rights, that means that you’ve got to deny that there are two sexes or the sexes have anything to do with biology or if you are against racism, you’ve got to assume that all racial differences in outcomes have to be products of racism, and if you disagree with those factual hypotheses, that must mean you’re a racist or a transphobe. So, there’s a blurring of the moral and the factual, which science always has to push back against, and objective journalism and accurate scholarship in general.”
Later, he added, “Well, there [is] data on where the assaults on free speech come from, from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The attacks from within the university are almost all from the left. The attacks from outside the university are almost all from the right, primarily in states like Florida and Texas.” And that the “MAGA right” does tend to be hostile towards objective journalism and science and that claims about the 2020 election from the right are one example of this among many.
After the discussion turned to former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s congressional testimony, Pinker stated that while Gay was right that there is no rule at Harvard that would punish students for advocating for the genocide of Jews, “Her problem was that Harvard had such a crummy record on free speech in the past, where people were punished for saying much milder things than that, that she seemed utterly hypocritical. How can you defend the right of students to say, let’s kill all the Jews when a student can be punished for saying that there are two sexes?”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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