Pinker Propaganda II: The Re-Pinkening
The guy just won’t stop.
Well, I’m back, for some reason.
Since I took you in-depth into the deceitful rhetoric of one Daniel King, many events have transpired. Before we do a dismantling of the recent Telegraph piece on “The man who refused to be cancelled,” let’s review the events, shall we?
A Timeline, or, How The Fuck Did We Get Here?
(1) After receiving the letter, the LSA issued a non-answer statement, which did not mention the letter at all, nor did it come down on one side or the other, but the phrase “It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression” made certain deceitful racists jump for joy:
(2) Several linguists wrote to the LSA to alert them to the fact that their placeholder statement was serving as another arrow in Pinker’s quiver of misinformation; some back-and-forth communication ensued.
(3) Pinker and his staunch ally John McWhorter decided during this time to dedicate a lot of tweets to claims that “classical liberals” in the tradition of “Locke & Hume” (???) feared losing their jobs because they’d be judged for not being leftist enough. Pinker posted a lot and RTed a lot about “cancel culture” and how it’s ruining everything. That’s probably not part of a concerted bad-faith campaign to tie the letter to a larger conversation about free speech, though, is it? Nah, maybe they just care a lot about people being able to talk politics at work without getting criticized.
(4) A meme circled around academic Twitter, lampooning Pinker for this laughable claim:
(5) The LSA issued another statement, affirming that they had not rebuffed the letter at all, and in fact were taking down their list of media experts and trying to create a process for ensuring that their fellows and media contacts reflected their values.
(6) Making no reference at all to the LSA statement or the media contacts list, Pinker tweeted the Telegraph article, then compiled all the articles supporting him in one helpful list on his website, tweeting about it as well as claiming that he’d received over 200 personal messages of support.
For someone who is no longer a media contact for the LSA, that’s a lot of headlines declaring his victory over “cancel culture.”
You may notice some bastions of quality journalism there such as Jerry Coyne’s blog, “Why Evolution is True”, or the ironically named reason.com, which appeals to right-wing losers’ belief that they have anything more than a grade-school understanding of logic so they can justify their own racism and misogyny. You will also see that respected outlets like the New York Times and Mother Jones have willingly participated in Pinker’s war on linguists.
For a gorgeous rebuttal of the NYT piece, check out Todd Snider’s post.
For a sassy-as-fuck rebuttal of the Mother Jones one, here’s mine.
For another sassy rebuttal of Coyne’s post, I present a hastily-written Twitter thread.
You may also notice that there is only one linguist on the list. Interesting that she’s the only one (other than McWhorter) publicly supporting Pinker, and that she knows him personally, as she admits in her Medium post. That post contains quite a few factual issues and makes some personal jabs at the letter writers, which is unfortunate. The rest of them are not linguists and therefore have no business at all weighing in on the question of whether Pinker is a good representative of linguistics. But they all decided they were qualified for some godforsaken reason, so here we are.
So now you’re caught up. What’s this latest nonsense?
Tim Stanley is the latest in a line of sycophantic clowns hoping to gain some clout by suckling at the teat of the “cancel culture” king.
While at least the NY Times piece hand-waved at the letter signatories (while still not giving them a voice), this piece is horrifically one-sided and largely veers off-topic. Nevertheless, I shall attempt a rebuttal.
The header image clearly demonstrates the intended message: Pinker is an intellectual giant, beset by the clueless masses who wish to hamper his freedoms with their stupid keyboard warrior antics. It tries to deny the fact that the actual situation is that a critical mass of linguists has reviewed the body of Pinker’s work and found his communications to be anti-linguistics, anti-history, and anti-social. This is within our rights to do, and it is within our rights to make decisions about his legitimacy as a representative of our field.
That should be the end of the discussion, but unfortunately, ol’ Tim has some bullshit to peddle.
“Steven Pinker, the celebrated social psychologist and linguist…”
Pinker is, of course, officially a cognitive scientist (although it’s been a long time since he’s written much about brains that wasn’t a defense of shitty race science). He only makes claims to be a linguist when it suits him, such as when he wants to sell copies of The Language Instinct. Sometimes he denies being a linguist altogether; maybe he thinks he’s better than linguistics. Either way, “celebrated social psychologist and linguist” is just way off the mark.
“…believes we are threatened by ‘ a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas’ — otherwise known as ‘cancel culture’. He should know. It came for him.”
No one who decries cancel culture is ever able to come up with a coherent definition for it, and that’s because to them, a definition is not important. It’s indicative of a greater sense that facts are whatever they say they are, and they should not be beholden to some external standard of consistency.
If you ask Pinker, it’s cancel culture whenever something happens that he doesn’t like, e.g., when Bari Weiss quits the NYT in a self-righteous huff (he had a lot of feelings about this), or when a group of linguists asks their own academic association to stop directing media inquiries to a person who lies about social science, history, and philosophy all the time. It’s not cancel culture when Weiss tries to get people fired because she doesn’t like their tone, nor is it cancel culture when established linguists tell their subordinates not to sign that LSA letter because it will hurt their prospects in the job market. Shh, don’t ask why, just take his word on this. He’s a journalist, after all.
The idea that the LSA letter “constricts the theatre of ideas” — Pinker’s words — is a whole other can of rhetorical worms. It is interesting that Pinker thinks the most relevant metaphor in this case is the theatre; of course he believes that’s what academic inquiry is. He is a celebrity and a salesman. He’s not actually interested in good ideas, only sellable ones. It’s facile and totally untrue to say that the signatories want to narrow the band of acceptable ideas. The letter points to the various ways Pinker himself has distracted from or outright denied the findings of linguistic research. Multiple rebuttals of his books demonstrate how he’s done the same thing to history and philosophy. If anyone is trying to erase new ideas, it’s Pinker. Removing him from the LSA lists might not actually change his life much, but at least it means the LSA will no longer be endorsing his very real practice of constricting the dissemination of ideas.
“Several hundred academics, mostly graduate students and lecturers, recently signed a letter….”
It was more than 620, actually. And they were of all levels of professional achievement in various industries. Way to downplay their importance, all while copying Pinker’s favored method of ad hominem attack against the signatories.
Several of the signatories were themselves LSA honored fellows, and several more are members of the LSA’s executive committee. Pretending that it’s just a bunch of nobodies is more than anything an indictment of Pinker’s lack of involvement in the field: if he doesn’t know who they are, it’s because he doesn’t know who’s doing linguistics.
“…asking for Pinker to be removed from the list of distinguished fellows at the Linguistic Society of America…”
Interesting that he only lists one of the two demands. Interesting that the demand he doesn’t mention is the one that was successful. Interesting that Pinker has also adopted this tactic. So many interesting things.
Hey, at least he called the LSA by the right name, unlike some people:
“…an assault on his reputation that could have had a chilling effect on his field of study.”
What a truly horrific thing! His reputation? Assaulted? Heavens!
The metaphor of “assault” here is working overtime. Can you think of a more disingenuous way to characterize a letter from a group of scientists to their academic organization asking them to please delete a name off of two lists?
And how laughable it is to suggest that this letter would have a chilling effect on his field of study (which is what exactly, philosophy for the intellectually lazy? Fake history? I don’t know). Still waiting for evidence that any linguists who don’t have a popular podcast, a job at an ivy league institution, and a fellowship at a conservative think tank are actually worried about having their jobs threatened for not supporting the letter.
Here are some things that absolutely did happen. I am keeping this part anonymous because I don’t want to put those involved in the line of fire for harassers (as the signatories have been). Perhaps you will accuse me of making it up, which is fine. At least I am giving some details, rather than McWhorter’s vague accusations (he won’t even name one of the opinions people are scared of being judged for!)
Some people wanted to sign the letter but didn’t out of fear that they’d be blacklisted professionally. They were told by senior linguists that this was a likelihood. Some of those people told the letter’s authors this, and guess what the authors said? You’ll never work in this town again? Fuck no. They said, “We completely understand, we do not judge you for making the prudent choice. Don’t worry.”
Chilling effect? Fuck off.
“The accusations sound terrible; the evidence was thin.”
For a review of why the evidence was absolutely NOT thin, please refer to the first half of my other piece on this issue. Perhaps the letter didn’t state the evidence as clearly as it should, but those six items were more than enough evidence to show that Pinker routinely lies about science and denies the existence of relevant linguistic research. He continues to deny the existence of dog whistles (calling them “hallucinated”) when the very definition of a dog whistle is that it’s plausibly deniable by its speaker, something that’s been demonstrated over and over again in peer-reviewed linguistic research.
“The letter quoted just six tweets dating back to 2014 and two words from a book he wrote in 2011 — a classic example of “offence archaeology”, digging through someone’s past to find something, no matter how small, to use against them.”
In my other post, I explain why six tweets and a book passage are just the tip of the iceberg, and why it’s unnecessary for the letter to include a hundred of Pinker’s bogus claims when their point is made with the six. I’m not going to repeat myself here.
The very idea of “offence archaeology” is inflammatory nonsense. Imagine thinking that someone saying something horrible several years ago, something they never addressed or apologized for, should just be let go and ignored? What kind of gaslighting bullshit is that?
“Often the aim isn’t just to prove a person wrong but to get them sacked — to take their career as a scalp”
What does trying to get someone fired have to do with this situation? Nothing. Nobody is asking Harvard to fire Pinker, although he’s certainly demonstrated that the doesn’t deserve the job. His name is on two lists (well, it was). We wanted his name taken off those lists. That’s all. Using a broad generalization such as “often the aim…” is a way to imply that we’re after his job without directly claiming it. Gross and misleading.
And of course someone who is willing to go to bat for Pinker would use a scalping metaphor. FUCK. YOU.
[paragraph about Katie Hopkins and Alastair Stewart for some fucking reason]
This paragraph is an appeal to “both sides,” a transparent attempt to pretend Stanley is being fair. It’s bullshit, and we see right through it.
Stanley is here talking about how some people really DO deserve to get canceled. Of course, neither of the people in his examples actually got canceled at all: one continues to spout nonsense and the other quit of his own volition.
[paragraph about Lionel Shriver and Roger Scruton for some completely unimaginable reason]
He’s trying to say here that sometimes we on the left try to ruin the prospects of the insufficiently woke out of revenge for Brexit or the election of Trump. For this claim he gives absolutely zero actual material or logical support, and the whole paragraph is an embarrassing mess. If it had come across my desk as a middle school writing instructor, I would have told the student to rewrite it completely, with better evidence.
“Increasingly, however, cancelling has taken on the appearance of an internecine conflict on the Left…”
This is a transparent parroting of right-wing pundits’ claim that the left is eating itself. Pinker has used it before, too, back in 2016. This is a strategy commonly employed by people who routinely confuse left and right with Democrat and Republican. Just because Pinker dislikes Trump, doesn’t mean that he’s immune to right-wing garbage. In fact, he regularly peddles it. If enough people in that echo chamber repeat the same baseless truism, maybe it will come true and they won’t ever have to come up with cogent arguments?
Any time two people who identify as progressives disagree, this tired metaphor comes trotting out of the barn. People somehow want complete ideological conformity from their enemies, which is totally unrealistic and extremely limiting.
“…JK Rowling, for example, would insist she is all for transgender rights, yet has been sucked into an epic online battle with trans-rights campaigners for whom she is not righteous enough.”
Fucking yikes, dude. Why would you take Rowling’s word for it that she is “all for transgender rights” when she’s put all her words and money toward denying those rights? What kind of unmitigated prolapsed asshole do you have to be to take her side over the people she viciously attacks?
I’m not going to waste your time and mind arguing that Rowling is a raging transphobe. If you need a summary, here’s a Vanity Fair piece about it.
[paragraph about Bari Weiss]
This paragraph attempts to describe the self-canceling of Bari Weiss, suggesting that she was a victim of mob justice and that her situation is evidence that “intellectual curiosity has become a liability” and that “ideas that could be articulated a few years ago could not get someone ‘in serious trouble, if not fired.’”
Obviously this is disingenuous. It takes Weiss’ random whining as gospel and ignores the facts, as has become a pattern for Stanley. Pinker has a history of posting in favor of Weiss, so it makes sense that this piece, which is clearly just a mouthpiece for Pinker, would bring her up.
The idea that Weiss or Pinker or any of these jokers have anything to do with “intellectual curiosity” comes from a fundamental lie. They are all deeply invested in maintaining the status quo. Pinker’s last two books boil down to the thesis statement, “Everything is going great! Things are getting better! Don’t worry about agitating for things to improve, that’s silly!” There’s a reason he’s often jokingly referred to as a Pangloss.
Pinker is deeply uninterested in intellectual curiosity, as is demonstrated by the fact that he parrots deeply flawed and largely debunked right-wing talking points disguised as evolutionary science. He also demonstrates this abject disinterest whenever he tweets random garbage musings that run counter to the tenets of linguistic science.
The idea that the Left wants to get you in trouble for “ideas that could be articulated a few years ago” is equally bullshit. One of the disgusting things about language pedantry and race science, both of which Pinker is being criticized for, is that it manages to repackage itself every few years as something else. None of these ideas are new. None of these ideas are interesting. None of them are true.
Saying to Pinker, “Fuck off, you wiry haired charlatan, nobody wants to hear your recycled unscientific hackery” is not the same thing as saying, “I don’t want to engage with your new and challenging ideas!” Because his ideas are not new, or challenging. And we’re sick of having to parry them over and over again when we could be focusing on actual new ideas.
And that’s it! That’s the end of the piece! It was supposed to be about Pinker but he was barely even mentioned in the last half. Instead it became a broader indictment of “cancel culture” despite never even considering that it might be useful to have an idea of what cancel culture is.
Stanley and his ilk are busily typing away, clouding the discourse with whataboutisms, generalizations, and outright lies. While the LSA letter has been somewhat successful in getting its requests granted, Pinker continues to use the blog posts, articles, and tweets of his allies to convince the world that he is not in fact full of shit, and that he’s winning the war against cancel culture. In doing so, he’s vilifying the very people he claims to represent: linguists.
