Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker during his Herald interview with Simon Wilson.
The free-speech advocate, Trump antagonist and outspoken Harvard social scientist speaks to Simon Wilson ahead of his visit to New Zealand in February.
We were only a few minutes in when he used the word “fascist”. Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist, self-professed liberal democrat and a man who has said he likes to “line up” mainstream beliefs and “mow them down”, is not a fan of American President Donald Trump.
Not that he was angry. There he was after lunch on Zoom, in the psych department offices at Harvard, dressed for the fall in a zipped-up cable-knit cardigan. Smiling, charming and saying the quiet bits out loud.
We were talking about Charlie Kirk, the free-speech activist and Trump supporter whose assassination caused so much horror and outrage in September. Pinker had much to say at the time, condemning the killing and also making it clear he did not endorse many of Kirk’s beliefs.
I read him a quote from a speech at Kirk’s memorial service given by Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff.
“We are the storm,” Miller declared, “and our enemies cannot comprehend our strength. Our determination, our resolve, our passion. You have nothing, you are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing, you have no idea the dragon you have awakened.”
What, I asked Pinker, is going on in America?
Miller’s behaviour was not new, he said, and referred to the Mafia, war lords, the American response to Pearl Harbour and protests over the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020.
He called the phenomenon “communal outrage”. It happens “when a member of your group is attacked in a publicly conspicuous arena”. Group leaders can “lash out indiscriminately at ... what is seen to be the perpetrator group”.
“If you accept it lying down, that means you’ve permanently ceded second-class status. You have to lash out in order to show that you’re still formidable.”
He described Charlie Kirk as “a George Floyd of the right”.
So in the wake of Miller’s speech, just how big of a threat is Trump? Pinker said the president was “the antithesis of all the Enlightenment values that I championed in Enlightenment Now”, his 2018 book in which he set out the virtues of reason, science and humanism.
“Instead of progress, he looks backward, beginning with the slogan of his movement, Make America Great Again. He has promoted kooks and crackpots and put them in charge of our famous health research system ... As opposed to an ethic of valuing all humans, he is avowedly nationalistic and jingoistic. He rejects Enlightenment institutions such as the rule of law, free trade, international cooperation. All of the things that ... have made the world measurably a better place.”
Why did Trump think Charlie Kirk was such a great American?
“Because he was on his side. I don’t mean that as a joke. I mean, that is just literally true … he’s just completely tribal and authoritarian. Anything that insults the leader is intolerable and has to be punished and suppressed. Anything that supports him, he’s going to promote, including the crazy conspiracy theories, including the fascists.”
There it was. Fascism. “I use that term not as a term of abuse, but literal fascists. Including ...” He stopped, and didn’t finish the sentence. No names.
But then I asked him which was more important: the slide into Trumpian authoritarianism – what he’d just called fascism – or the free speech disputes he’s been heavily engaged with on American campuses.
Pinker co-chairs a body called the Council for Academic Freedom and, as he told the Guardian recently, he’s “on all the groups”. His answer surprised me.
“Free speech, in a sense, comes first. Because to articulate my comments on populism, on Trump, on the Enlightenment, on authoritarianism, on war and peace, on human nature, on anything, you’ve got to be able to speak in the first place. So there’s a sense in which free speech really is fundamental.”
But is free speech imperilled in America, or is he talking about academic freedom? Or does he think they’re the same thing?
“They’re not exactly the same thing, because a university is ... engineered to be a truth-seeking institution. There have to be standards where you differentiate on the basis of plausibility, evidence, excellence, rigour.”
So his right to publish on linguistics, which is his core field, is different from my right to publish on linguistics?
“Yes.”
Although I can say whatever I like about it?
“That’s exactly right. Free speech is: You don’t put someone in jail based on what they say. Academic freedom is: As long as it meets certain standards of quality, you don’t punish or censor.”
I couldn’t help thinking, no one in America is going to jail for what they say. But we hear about plenty of people plucked off the streets and deported just for being who they are.
PINKER, WHO is 71, is the author of 13 books – several of which have changed the way we think about the world
In 1997, when academic orthodoxy said our upbringing makes us who we are, How the Mind Works reintroduced the importance of genetic makeup. In The Blank Slate (2002), he argued that our natural state is ignorance and conflict. Life is nasty, brutish and short, as Thomas Hobbes said. Hobbes is Pinker’s favourite philosopher.
Enlightenment Now was the second of his books to position the intellectual values of 17th and 18th century Europe as the wellspring of global progress for humanity.
The first was The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, 10 years after 9/11, a time when many people believed the world had become a more violent and lawless place. Pinker used historical data to reveal the trend is to less violence and more justice. Our lives, he said, are better than ever before.
We had mostly been slaves, he argued, but wherever Enlightenment values have taken hold, that has ended. Women are no longer subjugated as chattels; science has greatly improved and expanded our lives; humanism has allowed us to regard each other with respect.
His new book is When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, which is about “common knowledge”.
What’s common knowledge? His example was the Hans Christian Andersen parable The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which a little boy turns private understanding into common knowledge by saying out loud what everyone’s thinking: the emperor has no clothes.
Why did he write this book now? He said it isn’t particularly about now.
“It’s really a book about what makes us tick. Understanding what makes us coordinate, what makes us cooperate, what makes us social, why do we care so much about whether something is public or private, why do we use so much innuendo and euphemism? Why are there bubbles and crashes and bank runs? Why are there revolutions?”
How does Trump relate to common knowledge? He’s often praised for saying the quiet things out loud.
Pinker said it’s not obvious there is common knowledge about Trump, because people are so divided about him. But it was ironic that “for the most mendacious politician in the century, he gets credit for honesty”.
Not that it’s honesty as everyone understands it. Pinker distinguished between Trump “blurting out what he thinks, and what probably a lot of his followers think”, and “objective, vetted truth”.
“But, you know, if you irrationally and indefensibly believe false things because they make your side look good, and you’re not ashamed of that, if you boast about it, that’s a kind of honesty. It’s more like shamelessness, but shamelessness is a kind of honesty.”
What about AI and algorithms? Pinker gives AI a single passing mention in the book and doesn’t consider algorithms at all. Aren’t the new mechanisms of social and mainstream media subverting the idea of common knowledge?
“Algorithms give us what we’re interested in, so I don’t think we can totally blame them,” he said. Also, “The idea that people get converted by falling down rabbit holes turns out to be exaggerated. The fake news, the tall tales, appeal to a fanatical fringe that eagerly consumes it and just seeks out more and more.”
But he did say social media algorithms are “not a good thing”. While it can feel like they enable common knowledge, “it’s not technically true. The algorithm delivers a feed to you.”
Other observers of the way we receive information now – and therefore how Pinker’s common knowledge behaves – have probed much deeper.
On RNZ last Saturday, for example, Carole Cadwalladr argued that AI and the algorithms have overwhelmed us. Cadwalladr is the British journalist who broke the story in 2018 about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data to manipulate elections.
That was bad enough, she said, but it’s much worse now. The tech billionaires she calls the “broligarchy” are close to the US president. Concepts like “disinformation” and “misinformation”, hot topics as recently as the Covid pandemic, are already redundant. Now, there’s a deliberate strategy of “total information chaos”.
We’re a long way from a pompous naked emperor being shamed because some kid lobs a truth bomb into the crowd.
DOES HE ever feel trapped in the culture wars? He laughed.
“I think it’s an impediment to understanding and dealing with reality,” Pinker said. He’d talked earlier about different types of cognitive bias and said he thought “my-side bias” was probably the strongest.
“Anything that your team, your tribe, your coalition, your party advances: you think it’s obviously right, and that the other guys are stupid and evil.”
We got to talking about climate action, which Pinker believes suffers terribly from my-side bias.
“Climate science has, in my view, established its credibility. I think the major conclusions from climate science are right. They’re well argued, they’re supported by evidence. But the problem is that they don’t have to convince me. I’m a liberal, I’m at a university, I’m a scientist. They gotta convince the rest of the country, and they’re not going to do that if they brand themselves as being on the political left.”
It’s about winning trust, he says. Climate scientists “can’t earn people’s trust if they conspicuously brand themselves as aligned with a political tribe [the Democrats] that only a minority of the country belongs to”.
Have climate scientists and the Democrats done that? In the US, especially, isn’t it Trump and the Republican Party that have made climate change such a partisan issue?
I asked Pinker about his “friends on the right” (his term) who tell him they can’t trust climate science because opposing views are cancelled. “It’s a good point,” he has said.
But is it a good point? Those friends are effectively positioning themselves as Galileo standing against the “church” of climate science. I suggested to Pinker that the fossil-fuel industry is the church, insisting on the status quo and sidelining the science, while the climate scientists are Galileo, pointing to a reality the church refuses to accept.
Pinker clarified that he doesn’t think climate scientists are cancelling the doubters. They’re “not suppressing the truth”.
He characterises debates about how to address climate change as “Bill versus Greta”. That’s Bill Gates, who Pinker says is “problem solving”, and Greta Thunberg, who he says wants “conflict”.
“And,” he says, “I’m very much in Bill’s camp.” That shouldn’t be a surprise: he and Gates are close. I asked him to explain.
“You can think of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions as a form of sin,” he says. “A form of evil, a form of aggression by oil companies and billionaires. And that they have to be shamed, demonised, opposed, controlled. I think a more plausible way of thinking about climate change is that energy is good. People crave energy, they always do.”
He added, “To get people to give up energy means [for them to] become more impoverished. It’s an impossible battle ... People aren’t going to voluntarily become poor and countries aren’t going to voluntarily stay poor, like Indonesia and India and China and Bangladesh. It’s just not going to happen.”
But where did he get the idea climate action means people have to “give up energy” or poor countries can’t develop?
The Global South spent much of this year’s COP conference pleading desperately for financial support to speed their transition to renewables, so their growth doesn’t tip the world into catastrophe. The Global North, whose own consumption has brought us to the brink of that catastrophe, largely refused to listen.
What’s the answer? Pinker says it’s “technological innovation”, in which “we develop abundant sources of clean energy that are cheaper than dirty energy”.
I suggested that’s already happened: solar is the cheapest form of energy on the planet.
He says there are problems with supply. “What do you do at night, what do you do when it’s cloudy?”
The answer is batteries, which are now capable of providing reliable energy 24/7.
It felt like Pinker had just picked up the talking points of the fossil-fuel industry: We still use oil and coal, so you can build your windmills and solar panels but we need to keep digging.
He threw in another technology talking point: “a new generation of nuclear, because that is the safest and most abundant carbon-free source of energy”.
Was this Gatesian “problem solving” for the climate? Ahead of this year’s United Nations COP conference, Gates himself revealed he isn’t doing that anymore. He wrote an open letter arguing that climate action should be shelved so other issues could be addressed.
What about Thunberg: Is her aim really “conflict” or is she trying to raise the alarm because the global ecosystem is collapsing? She knows her generation will have to live with it, even if Pinker’s and Gates’ and mine won’t.
“I certainly agree there is some urgency there,” Pinker says. “But the projections that all life is going to go extinct by 2050 are nonsense. I’m arguing with Greta.”
For the record – I’ve checked – Thunberg does not say human life will end by 2050. At this point I was wondering, how’s Pinker at checking his own cognitive biases?
He sees climate change as the concern of a “political minority”, which it isn’t, even in America. He props up the fossil-fuel industry and dismisses the available technology. He blames the left for social inaction and supports the billionaire who wants a new liberal consensus against action.
I quoted the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra’s criticism of Pinker and other public intellectuals: that those who get too close to corporate and political power are “the intellectual servant class”.
“Yeah, no, I think that’s nonsense,” he says.
We turned to the Age of Enlightenment, which was also the Age of Empire. How did Pinker account for the way European empires from the 17th through the 19th centuries were founded on slavery and imperialist conquest?
“Until the Enlightenment,” Pinker says, “slavery was the rule, not the exception. Imperialism was the rule, not the exception.” The Enlightenment produced “the first consistent arguments for universal human rights and against slavery and imperialism”.
“To blame it for exactly what it opposed, I think, is perverse, and it’s ignorant of history. History is the history of empires ... and slavery was practised by every ancient civilisation.”
But aren’t both arguments true? Empires and slavery were always the common lot, as Pinker says, and the 18th century did produce the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Constitution. But reason and science produced technologies that allowed Europe to plunder the world’s resources, with very little humanism practised on indigenous peoples and African slaves.
And where has reason gone, now we know all that conquest has put the planetary ecosystem at risk?
“They had their flaws,” says Pinker. “They were human.”
I WONDERED if he was an optimist. Yes, he says, “but the term is misleading”. He isn’t hoping for the best, he believes things really are working out.
“The main point I make is that if you look at the world through data, you get a different picture than if you look at the world through news.”
News is a “non-random sample of the worst things that happen on any given day, or any given hour”.
“That’s just what news is. I mean, it’s not even necessarily a bias, it’s just that things that happen suddenly enough to be news tend to be bad things. Good things tend to creep up a few percentage points a year, like the decline of extreme poverty, the increase in life expectancy, the increase in literacy.”
We were back with The Better Angels of our Nature. Things are getting better.
But not all the time and not in a straight line. Pinker says there has been a decline in liberal democracy since 2012 and who would doubt it? There are those “kooks and crackpots”, the “crazy conspiracy theories”, the “dragon we have awakened”. The “literal fascists”.
Still, he says, if someone had told him when he was a teenager there would be “more than 40 years without a war in Southeast Asia”, he’d have thought they were “utopian”.
“But, you know, there have been no wars in Southeast Asia, and there’s no headline that announces that. You only see it when you look at the data. The picture is more positive than if you just pay attention to all the things that go wrong.
“Is that optimistic? In one way it is, because it does give us some confidence that our ancestors mitigated or solved some problems. So there’s no reason in principle that we can’t solve the problems facing us now. But we do have to recognise them as problems and try to solve them.”
A Night with Steven Pinker: Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna, February 2, 2026.
Steven Pinker: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage (Allen Lane, $45).
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.