As profoundly boring as biological essentialism is, some people are very into it. The ones that are honest about it are easy to spot. It can be harder to identify those that cultivate a careful aura of plausible deniability and then go about building the rest of their career. By hiding their philosophy, they gain access to institutions and platforms, allowing them to pave the way for other useful idiots and convince the next generation that Science Says™ some humans are better than others. The networks manufacturing credibility for their theory of eugenics are not shallow. They run deep, across decades, built by people that devote themselves consistently and continuously to the promotion of hereditarian philosophies. Welcome to Box of Rocks #6 — Foundations.
For someone who has made a career out of observing patterns in language and how it is used, Steven Pinker sure has trouble figuring out when he is deep in conversation with a racist. Richard Hanania was recently outed as the vitriolic blogger Richard Hoste by journalist Christian Mathias. Hanania retired Hoste when billionaires and the donor-advised funds that cater to them launched him up out of the white supremacist media cesspool and into the mainstream. By 2021 Hanania was a rising star being published in the NYT and Washington Post as he pushed out substacks focused on IQ and eugenics — of course Pinker had to sit down with him for 90 minutes to talk about rationality.
In Hanania’s introduction, he credits Pinker’s The Blank Slate with cementing the idea that basic algebra had crowned nature the victor over nurture. In fact, he positions Pinker as the stalwart, steadfast champion of the idea that cognitive and intellectual traits are genetically determined. I would tend to agree.
In 2006, Pinker asked Edge.org’s membership “What is your most dangerous idea?” Pinker’s own answer — that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments — is yet another example of his affinity for hereditarian ideas. It holds the door open for those like Charles Murray and Henry Harpending who argue for a universal human hierarchy, and protects those like Larry Summers who take advantage of it.
If you didn’t know the exact wording of Pinker’s response, it might be difficult to find this fifteen year old commentary, and rather than citing Pinker directly you might instead end up writing an essay on the highlights of his 30 year history of supporting hereditarian researchers and research. Its obscurity is due to a technical snafu — while the original page linking Pinker to this answer was hosted and archived on Edge.org until 2019, his answer didn’t carry over in the organization’s website refresh July 2011 (no doubt a disappointment to the team promoting the release of The Better Angels of our Nature in October of that year). Eventually Pinker’s answer resurfaced, although without any identifying information about the author, and today it is the only anonymous answer on the list.
Eminently rational, of course, to decouple from such controversial statements and minimize their chance of impacting your career or shrinking your influence. Pinker, in fact, says this directly in his conversation with Hanania, suggesting that heterodox thinkers “wait until you have tenure before you express your most outrageous opinions.” It is very similar to the advice that apparently has to be given to younger right wing operatives not to join edgy group chats that use the n-word and mirrors advice once given to Stanford’s conservative law students as they consider public service: “Basically, it’s best not to put your politics in writing, especially not in an email. Political views are what you bring up in an interview when you KNOW you have it in common.” Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex (now Astral Codex Ten) followed the same model, publicly walking the line of respectability while privately stating that his goal was to court reactionaries by mainstreaming hereditarian philosophies and human biodiversity (original leak, transcript). And of course, this is the rule Hanania himself has followed as he has journeyed from pseudo-anonymous, rabid white supremacist to being a respected pundit, all while still soft-pedaling the same concepts in less alarming language.
Secure in their shared appreciation for hereditarianism, Hanania and Pinker are able to explore other topics during their conversation too. They recognize that social clubs and third spaces have all but vanished from public life, and that conspiracy feeds the need for connection. At one point Pinker and Hanania suggest that the problem is not that people *can’t* be logical, it’s that they *choose not to be logical* until they have some skin in the game.
They get so fucking close here. Pinker knows that rationality is relative. He highlights the fact that it is goal-oriented, even noting that different goals require different paths of action that may compete with one another. He recognizes that there can be trade-offs between long term and short term goals and that some goals may be incompatible in zero sum interactions. And then, satisfied with these surface level observations, the conversation moves on.
Most of our interactions are not zero sum though. A rational choice is not defined solely by the goal in question, it is defined by the individual making the choice, the values they hold and the world they live in. There are as many ways to make that choice as there are people. The skin Pinker has in the game — funding, respect, legacy, influence — is mad money, fun to have and frustrating to lose. There are those who are playing for their lives, putting the rent money, this month’s groceries, their dignity, their happiness, their humanity on the table every single day. The skin you have in the game — sometimes very, very literally — changes what you are willing to risk and how you play.
Hanania and Pinker put their monopoly money on the table and lurch into a lament for the state of the discourse, poisoned as it has been by the “Great Awokening.” The two discuss how the “mob” (other members of his profession) “came after Pinker” (wrote a letter), and they laugh at the inanity of the attempt. Pinker alludes to recordings of him using racial slurs (in his capacity as a linguist, of course). He seems a bit surprised that no one has dug them up yet. That’s the sort of thing that, in his opinion, could have actually gotten him canceled.
The good news is that, elsewhere in the interview, Pinker concedes the argument to the “woke.” Congratulations, everyone, the biological determinists, ”race realists”, and IQ researchers have been silenced. No one will ever publish in Intelligence or Personal and Individual Differences again, Mankind Quarterly has gone under, OpenPsych is no longer and Aporia magazine can close its doors. Glad we’re finished with that chapter. Folks like Hanania can now invest all the time they used to repeatedly, consistently, interminably parrot debunked “science” about race and IQ into a new hobby.
If only.
When Hanania remarks that “You’d think that the side with science on its side would at least see things move in its direction.” Pinker responds with sympathy. Specifically, sympathy for “people promoting, advancing, especially certain taboo hypotheses such as innate racial differences.” It is almost a perfect echo of his Edge.org answer, where he notes with concern that “proponents of ethnic and racial differences have been targets of censorship, violence, and [quelle horreur!] comparisons to Nazis.” Pinker worries that others that do not have his privilege — Haidt, Duarte, Jussim, Tetlock — are being silenced not for being wrong, but for being right.
For two kindred spirits in conversation, there is no need to define the sides of this discussion, no need to articulate the positions that could be correct. For the rest of us, Hanania’s side “with science on its side,” of course, is the hereditarian insistence that “groups of people” can be categorized and ranked according to a universal human hierarchy. The position that could be correct, the one Pinker is afraid will not be heard, is that there is a universal human hierarchy, and that groups can be assigned to that hierarchy on the basis of their genes. The window to discuss genetic and evolutionary influences on our emotions and thoughts and behaviors is closing, Pinker sighs. “It has to be all racism all the time. That’s the only permissible explanation for ethnic differences.”
At least in 2006 Pinker made the effort to note that “The underlying fear, that reports of group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless.” He doesn’t do much to address this concern in the next fifteen years, though. Despite his fondness for Bayesian reasoning, evaluating ideas in the face of evidence, Pinker hasn’t paid much mind to critiques of his philosophy or scholarship, much less academic critiques of the datasets underpinning research he cites or competing statistical methods that would falsify his work. Pinker remains as certain as he ever was — more certain perhaps — of the hereditarian premise that groups of people can be classified, statistically, as distinct populations that differ in their mean talents and temperaments.
As long as Pinker has a healthy network of backchannels, he can maintain the plausible deniability that is the hallmark of his career. After choosing the concepts to launder through the lens of a respected pundit, email and private messages allow Pinker to follow his own advice and participate in discussions and disseminate concepts he wouldn’t benefit from sharing publicly. In one example, his “grandstudent” Emily Willoughby let the folks at OpenPsych know that she had shared with Pinker an article written by a self-identified hereditarian employed at Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research that attempting to assign genetic bases to IQ differences between nations and races. Per her comment, he had thought it was interesting enough to share within his network. (You may remember Willoughby from the backlash against her nazi dinosaur art, her biased Wikipedia editing to remove sources critical of hereditarians, and a cozy relationship with OpenPsych founder Emil Kirkegaard. In that same post, eight years before being spotlighted, Willoughby spends some time telling Kirkegaard how important his work is, saying that she wouldn’t send her IQ scores and genome to just anyone.)
It’s not just Pinker’s students who send him information relevant to his interest in hereditarian researchers and research. It has been fairly well reported that Pinker cites Steve Sailer, organizer of the Human Biodiversity (h-bd) group that connected Charles Murray, Henry Harpending, Rushton and others in the early ’00s. While most famously called out by Malcom Gladwell in 2009, Pinker published Sailer’s argument that Iraqis are too inbred to manage democracy in his 2004 anthology of best science writing, cited it again in a 2007 article for The New Republic, and cited a 2004 VDARE article of Sailer’s in Better Angels, one that highlighted the observations of fellow HBD member Frank Salter. In a 2009 comment, Sailer shares with confidence that, “Pinker, however, has long been moving away from 1992-style ‘era of evolutionary adaptation’ evolutionary psychology toward Gregory Cochran-style ‘continuing evolution.’” In 2016, a reader asks if Pinker reads Sailer’s blog, and Sailer uses those citations as proof that he does.
The truth is, Sailer probably has a far simpler way of knowing that Pinker is reading his work. In early 1999, when Sailer’s resume was limited to Conservative movie reviewer and VDARE columnist, Steven Pinker, an endowed professor of Brain and Cognitive Scientists at MIT, was already in an email chain discussing the “special problem that Black people have with 3D-to-2D translation“ along with Geoffrey Miller, J Michael Bailey (of recent rapid onset gender dysphoria retraction fame), and J.P. Rushton of the explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund. A few months later, many of these addressees would join the Human Biodiversity (h-bd) group, with Sailer proudly adding “the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals” to his resume. By the end of the next year, when the group was sending a few hundred messages per month, Sailer went on to share a private message that hadn’t made it into the group chat: a discussion of Al Gore’s lisp from “a best selling cognitive scientist / linguist / evolutionary psychologist.”
Continuous, cautious, plausible deniability is a career move that has unequivocally paid off for Pinker. The slur has been contextualized and buried in YouTube’s slushpile, the edgy Edge.org answer has been stripped of attribution, and it is entirely possible some other best-selling cognitive scientist/linguist/evolutionary psychologist was particularly interested in telling Steve Sailer about the “hissy ‘s’” as an exaggerated, feminine pattern of speech. As he notes in his interview with Hanania, Pinker has tenure and a slew of people willing to defend him in the public sphere. I doubt anything in this essay is news to him, even if it comes as a surprise to some of his readers. The box of rocks has always suited Steven Pinker just fine.
Post Script
After being exposed, Hanania is declaring that he no longer believes that the source of racial disparities don’t matter, critics are pointing out that he is still sharing the same “race science” he did as Hoste with nicer words, and eugenics advocates are stating unequivocally that the source of racial disparities absolutely does matter and that Hakania is lying. There are undoubtedly more denials/apologies/assurances of goodwill still to come and I’ll be keeping a close eye on the foundations that are revealed in the process.
For the rock collectors out there:
