Steven Pinker Likes You. He Really Likes You.

by Finbarr Curtis

I want to be Steven Pinker’s friend. As a humanist, then, I was relieved when he told me in a much discussed New Republic essay that science was not my enemy. This is good because I did not think science was my enemy.  Just in case there was any confusion, Pinker assures us that he is a big fan of the humanities. Or, at least, he likes what the humanities once were and might be again if humanists could be more like their Englightenment predecessors. As Pinker explains,

These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge? What could they have done with it?

Not to brag, but I have read some of all of these thinkers at some point or another. For this, I can thank my humanistic education. But what puzzles Pinker is why people like me can read such good books and ask such bad questions. He sees an achievement gap between science, which has advanced by leaps and bounds, and the humanities, which have regressed from the Enlightenment to what he calls “postmodernism.”

The fix, then, would be to pick up where the Enlightenment left off. But let’s think for a moment about Pinker’s longing to travel back in time to school our early modern theorists in some freshman science. Take our friend Thomas Hobbes, who Pinker likely has in mind when he bestows the title of evolutionary psychologist on pre-Darwinian thinkers:

They were evolutionary psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms." 

For Pinker, Hobbes’s proto-scientific attempt to describe the state of nature could have gone so much further if he had more empirical data. If he only knew what scientists know today about evolutionary psychology Hobbes could have come up with the political and legal theory that could solve the problems that plague us all. This knowledge would have helped to settle disputes between other heavyweights like Locke and Rousseau, both of whom had their own speculative visions of the state of nature.

Here is where humanists, or at least the kinds of humanists that vex Pinker, are likely to see things differently. From many of us, the states of nature described in Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau tell us less about the early life of the human species and a lot more about the early modern nation states in which these thinkers lived. In this approach, Hobbes's theories about the state of nature can be best understood as the imaginative projections of a guy living in a seventeenth-century England embroiled in civil war.

I Am Applauding the President's Speech on Education Except I'm Doing the Opposite of That

by Finbarr Curtis

Recently, a spate of critiques of the President's speech last month in Buffalo on educational affordability have led off with a diplomatic effort to find common ground over the commitment to lowering college costs.

Like this statement by Rudy Fichtenbaum of the American Association of University Professors:

While we applaud the President for raising concerns over rising tuition and student debt, concerns that we share, we also believe that the President’s proposal will do little to solve the problem and will likely result in a decline in the quality of education offered to working class and middle class students, particularly students of color.

Or this post by Frank Donoghue at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

My reaction to his speech, however, was decidedly mixed. Parts of it resonated emotionally, as it contained, not surprisingly given Obama’s skill as rhetorician, several applause-worthy lines. I couldn’t help come away with the sense though, that the Obama administration doesn’t fully grasp the entire universe of higher education in the U.S., and that his punchiest solutions are ultimately unworkable.

Or another critical response from the Chronicle of Higher Ed from Biddy Martin:

I applaud President Obama for putting the importance of a college education squarely at the center of the national agenda in his speech at the University at Buffalo, and for insisting that students get the education they need regardless of economic circumstances.

I applaud these responses for their rhetorical generosity but I'm going to refrain from applauding the President's support for affordable education because then I would have to applaud for every person in America.  No one likes rising college costs.  Applauding the President's commitment to lowering educational costs is roughly equivalent to saying "I applaud President Reagan's commitment to the broad concept of peace when he named those missiles Peacekeepers."

The reason I am not applauding is that with the exception of the laudable goal of shifting assessments of educational quality away from US News-style ratings, most of the specific proposals are the kinds of things that will either increase college costs or decrease the quality of education.  Not only that, the President's call to put more work into developing measures of educational quality is obviously something that will increase costs because it will require more resources to sustain the administrative oversight that has been one of the larger contributors to rising college costs.

But others have already made this point.  The interesting question to me, then, is not so much why the proposals in the President's speech will not lower college costs but why anyone would believe that they would.  One possible answer to this lies in the President's call to "jumpstart competition between colleges."  This is curious because colleges are already pretty competitive in all sorts of ways.  Indeed, competition among colleges for what are imagined to be the most select pool of undergraduates is one significant source of the explosion of costs.