Is Steven Pinker A Bad Guy Like Charles Murray?
"Boston Magazine" wonders why Pinker deigns to debate Murray on religion, when Murray co-wrote "The Bell Curve."
For the longest time, I’ve been pointing out that the dominant mode of intellectual discourse in the 21st Century resembles that of six-year-old boys watching pro wrestling. The crucial question is:
Who are the Good Guys and who the Bad Guys?
And then everything inevitably follows from there. The Good Guys are, of course, right on any and all questions, while the Bad Guys must be wrong about everything.
Steven Pinker, however, is interesting because he has tiptoed along the precipice of Bad Guydom offering a vast assortment of Bad Guy facts and logic. But he’s so impressive that the conventional wisdom has been that deep down he must be a Good Guy.
Well, at least so far …
From Boston Magazine:
Longform
Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard?
But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?
By Robert Huber· 4/12/2026, 7:00 a.m.
Steven Pinker is one of the most famous—and divisive—academics in America. A cognitive psychologist at Harvard, he’s spent five decades writing about how we think, picking fights with the left, and wading into culture wars that most professors avoid. Bill Gates calls him a favorite writer. His critics call him a cover for racists. He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories. He’s also, right now, one of the loudest voices pushing Harvard to change.
My introduction to him, though, was surprisingly gentle.
The past few years, Pinker has turned his attention to what’s happening at Harvard itself—a lack of academic freedom, the monoculture he sees taking over, and the groupthink undermining research and education. What first caught my eye was something he wrote for the Boston Globe in 2024, on how Harvard had been handling student protests over the war in Gaza. Pinker wrote about teaching Sunday school as a young man, leading students through moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer. Now, he said, he found himself “wishing that my august institution taught its students this skill.”
Which demands a pointed question: If Harvard isn’t teaching students to think through hard problems for themselves, what, exactly, is the mission of the university?
This struck me as bold, since Pinker draws a paycheck from Harvard, but even more to the point, it seemed quite reasonable. And calm. Also, right at the heart of what we need to figure out about higher education.
It gets immediately complicated, however, given that a lot of people, including President Donald Trump, have been asking the same questions in a much harsher way. Trump has had a great deal to say about our elite universities, especially Harvard, and none of it is good. This has put Pinker in a bind between the woke and Trump. Between indoctrination from the left and whatever the Trump administration is. So Pinker has written not just about the monoculture at Harvard, but, lately, about the fallout if the Trump administration is able to drastically cut the school’s federal funding. …
But Pinker’s critics—and there are many, especially in academia—argue that he’s guilty of exactly what he decries: my-side bias, ideological blinders, a willingness to engage with far-right figures in ways that give them legitimacy. …
But there’s another question, one that goes to the core of what he’s all about, as Pinker tries to change the culture at Harvard: Is he the right guy for the job? …
It quickly becomes obvious that the world comes alive for Pinker when it can be studied, understood, and explained. For a long time, he was mystified about why his father, who’d grown up dirt poor in Montreal after his parents emigrated from Poland in the 1920s, didn’t use his law degree, instead supporting his family by selling clothing in small Quebec towns; Pinker’s father himself never explained why. But then Pinker discovered the research of Thomas Sowell, a conservative economist and social theorist, on how ethnic groups often cultivate particular expertise over time and take it wherever they end up; for Pinker’s father, the Jewish cultural capital of commerce and finance—or, specifically, the garment industry—developed over centuries became the sure thing in order to move on from a childhood so destitute that a neighbor had to knit him mittens to survive a Montreal winter, since his parents couldn’t afford to buy them.
Sowell’s research, Pinker says, “actually helped me understand my own upbringing.” His research pushed against “the dominant mode of explanation that says the only differences among ethnic groups is how they’re treated from the outside, in terms of racism and prejudice. He argued that the traits within a culture matter as well.” With that, Pinker’s father wasn’t a victim of his circumstances, but part of a cultural tradition.
… In The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker argued against a prevailing orthodoxy that we’re born without any innate characteristics, shaped entirely by environment and culture. Instead, he made the case that genetics plays a significant role in how our minds work and who we become. … And The Blank Slate has gotten Pinker criticized over the idea that biology is destiny, which leads into dangerous territory: racial differences, eugenics, the question of who gets to define human nature and why.
Biology as destiny is not what Pinker seems to be up to in The Blank Slate. In a nutshell, he argues that there are genetic differences between people, and that acknowledging this is not inherently a bad or dangerous thing; rather, it’s something to be understood. When he made this argument nearly 25 years ago, it was highly controversial. It still is.
In The Blank Slate, Pinker had three central beefs with academic orthodoxy. First: [the conventional wisdom among academics] that human nature does not exist. Second: that our minds and bodies exist apart from each other. Third: that we are born innately good. …
“I thought that the moral emotions had crept into the science, distorting the way scientists could do and report their research,” Pinker says. “And so the major goal of the book was to drive a wedge between them, so that if, for example, you thought that there were differences between men and women, that did not imply that you were against equal rights for women or condoning prejudice and harassment of women.”
Pinker’s frustration comes through in The Blank Slate—a sense that we’ve gotten human nature wrong. I read a passage to him from the book:
“The blank slate has also served as a sacred scripture for political and ethical beliefs. According to the doctrine, any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution, but from differences in their experiences. Change the experiences—by reforming parenting, education, the media, and social rewards—and you can change the person.”
I say to Pinker: “You’re close to take-no-prisoners territory there, don’t you think?”
“It’s provocative,” he says, and thinks for a moment. “I am after, just relentlessly after, clarity. I just want the idea to be as identifiable, visible, clear, understandable as possible.”
In the preface of The Blank Slate, Pinker quotes Anton Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” I ask him whether that underpins what, when all is said and done, he believes he’s really about.
“I probably should have used that as an epigraph,” he says, pleased that we land on something so direct and simple. “If there’s a kind of moral passion behind my work, that would capture it.”
And now, Pinker says, The Blank Slate feels newly relevant:
“The idea that political and moral equality require sameness, which is one of the fallacies that I tried to expose, has come back with a vengeance in wokeness,” he says. And that winds him up a bit: “The idea that there is no such thing as biological sex, that sex is an arbitrary label assigned at birth, like a first name, or the bad biology that would say sex is a continuum—these are meant as ways to safeguard, but weren’t something I conceived of when writing The Blank Slate. If they were, I would have put them in there.”
But why take this sort of thing on, given the risk?
The Blank Slate was much praised for opening up the nature-nurture debate—it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but it also garnered some now-wait-a-minute reviews that sometimes attacked Pinker for oversimplifying things. …
This isn’t for the faint-hearted, being a lightning rod, especially given the past decade’s atmosphere. In late 2017, for instance, during a panel discussion at Harvard about free speech, Pinker said, “Political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be—I wouldn’t want to say ‘persuadable,’ but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs. The often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right: Internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way.” Pinker was actually arguing that by shutting down debate, the left was pushing smart, contrarian people toward the alt-right—not because the alt-right was correct, but because it was the only place willing to engage certain questions.
Still, the right had a field day. Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer ran a headline that read, in part: “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” The left hammered Pinker for giving ammunition to extremists, regardless of his intent.
And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.
Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve in 1994, which linked IQ differences among races to genetics, has since cited The Blank Slate to support his views. Last year, Pinker appeared on the Aporia Podcast, an outlet that supports a revival of race science. In 2024, the Guardian reported that one of Aporia’s cofounders, Matthew Frost, once said that he’d been recruiting mainstream writers to give the podcast “legitimacy via association.” Pinker gave them an hour. After the Guardian chastised him for appearing on Aporia, Pinker told the newspaper he only agreed to be interviewed after the outlet “attacked” his views on human progress. He also said he believes it is vital to persuade audiences one disagrees with, which is why he appears in media with diverse political orientations.
Pinker likes to say he manages his “controversy portfolio carefully.” But that means the trouble he might get into—not the trouble he creates for others by lending his credibility to people like Murray, with whom he engages rather than dismisses. Late last year, he and Murray had a back-and-forth in the Wall Street Journal about Murray’s views on “terminal lucidity” proving the existence of the soul; Pinker, ever skeptical of faith, chastised Murray for reaching beyond the data. But the debate itself was the point: Whether Pinker won the argument didn’t really matter—Murray got the platform, a serious intellectual exchange with a Harvard cognitive scientist.
How can you tell who are the Bad Guys? For example, it would likely seem to an objective observer who has read them at length and met them that Steven Pinker and Charles Murray are strikingly similar human beings.
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