Finally some reviews by people who are not Pinker fanboys

After the first onslaught of hyper-ventilating Pinker fanboys praising yet another vacuous Pinker book, slowly but surely people of intellectual heft have been looking at Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" and finding there is no there there. I've already mentioned the New York Times review, which I think is the most effectively anti-Pinker by pointing out his incredibly dismissive take on the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis study.

(Pinker) is especially piqued by those who observe that science was sometimes used to justify monstrous ends, including racism and eugenics. 

In one particularly tortured passage, Pinker goes so far as to downplay the harm of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study — which tracked syphilis in 600 African-American men, many of them poor sharecroppers, withholding information and proper treatment from them — on the grounds that the doctors “did not infect the participants, as many believe.” The study, a “one-time failure to prevent harm to a few dozen people” (as he breezily puts it) “may even have been defensible by the standards of the day.” 

Why do this? Why not simply state that the study is a ghastly stain on the history of medicine? Despite the occasional warning that progress is “hard-won” and “perfect order” isn’t “the natural state of affairs,” Pinker’s book is filled with such fulsome apologias, which inadvertently suggest that the gains of the Enlightenment are so delicate that they require the historical gloss he compulsively provides.

There are quite a few others.

The Nation:

If Pinker had simply made these points, Enlightenment Now would have its uses. But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for “intellectuals” straight out of Breitbart. 

Australia Broadcasting Corporation:

For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers - just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club.

Salon:

In the end, “Enlightenment Now” is an erudite defense of the status quo and an apology for global capitalism (not surprisingly, the second-wealthiest man in the world as of this writing, Bill Gates, has named Pinker’s new book his “new favorite book of all time”). Though Pinker calls himself a classical liberal, by today’s standards it would be more accurate to call him a conservative (by comparison, the modern Republican Party, though labeling itself as conservative, is politically reactionary). 

The Guardian:

I am broadly sympathetic to his worldview. I agree with him that scientific knowledge is a moral imperative, and that we must use it to enhance human welfare. Like him, I’m enthusiastic about technologies that horrify other people, such as fourth-generation nuclear reactors and artificial meat. So I began reading his new book, Enlightenment Now, with excitement. 

I expected something bracing, original, well sourced and well reasoned. Instead, in the area I know best – environmental issues – the alarm began to sound for me when he characterised “the mainstream environmental movement” as “laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens and cancer”. 

Yes, I have come across such views, but they are few and far between. When they are expressed on social media, they are rapidly slapped down by other environmentalists. They are about as far from the environmental mainstream as they are from the humanitarian mainstream.

The Globe and Mail:

Enlightenment Now is a lengthy riposte to what Pinker regards, a bit hysterically, as swelling counter-enlightenment sentiment. He writes a lot about the "Two Cultures," following British author C.P. Snow's diagnosis of the radical split between the hard sciences and the humanities. (As a cognitive psychologist, Pinker is himself a sort-of-scientist; one imagines him donning a lab coat to sneak to into Serious Science Parties to which he was otherwise uninvited.) As Pinker puts it, "the disdain for reason, science, humanism and progress has a long pedigree in elite intellectual and artistic culture." Later, he's even cattier: "Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves 'progressives' really hate progress."

The New Statesman:

To be sure, for Pinker there are no bad Enlightenment ideas. One of the features of the comic-book history of the Enlightenment he presents is that it is innocent of all evil. Accordingly, when despots such as Lenin repeatedly asserted that they engaged in mass killing in order to realise an Enlightenment project – in Lenin’s case, a more far-reaching version of the Jacobin project of re-educating society by the methodical use of terror – they must have been deluded or lying. How could a philosophy of reason possibly be implicated in murderous totalitarianism? Like the faithful who tell you Christianity is “a religion of love” that had nothing to do with the Inquisition, Pinker stipulates that the Enlightenment, by definition, is intrinsically liberal. Modern tyrannies must therefore be products of counter-Enlightenment ideologies – Romanticism, nationalism and the like. Enabling liberals to avoid asking difficult questions about why their values are in retreat, this is a popular view. Assessed in terms of historical evidence, it is also a myth.

So what's Steven Pinker's alt-right gang up to now?

I've pointed out on this blog that the apparent aim of alt-right Claire Lehmann's Quillette is to rebrand Ezra Levant's alt-right views: anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-Left as "centrist."

Here we see Razib Khan promoting the idea that Christina Hoff Sommers and Steven Pinker are "centrists."

To be honest these forays by centrists (Sommers is a registered Democrat with libertarian leanings, similar to Steven Pinker) into the academy are starting to remind me of those ridiculous “debates” that Jews had to have with professional anti-Jews (mostly apostates) in the courts of medieval European monarchs. There were the outward forms of debate, but everyone knew what it was about (since Sommers and Pinker are from Jewish backgrounds perhaps that’s apposite).

In Sommer's case very right-leaning since her primary employer appears to be the Koch brothers via her perch at the American Enterprise Institute. 

Or as this Twitterer observed a couple of years ago:

And Steven Pinker constantly attacks the left, as when he claimed that academia and the media are "radicalizing" the alt-right when it's actually he who is doing just that. Not to mention his good buddies, professional racists Razib Khan and Steve Sailer, who are also pals together as seen recently on Twitter.

I predict that Pinker will continue to lean ever further right, his hereditarian views are much too popular with the right and alt-right to avoid such a fate. 

And Pinker loves anybody who proclaims him brilliant and who promotes his bullshit Blank Slate theories.

Pinker doesn't do a very good job hiding where his real sympathies lie.

As a recent review of Pinker's most recent, "Enlightenment Now" by David A. Bell in The Nation noted:

But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for “intellectuals” straight out of Breitbart.

No big surprise there. Both of Pinker's good buddies Khan and Sailer were identified as leaders of the alt-right in Breitbart by none of than Milo Yiannopoulos.

And they have allies at the New York Times. In addition to Jesse Singal, Pinker fanboy and Razib Khan's buddy, there's Bari Weiss, who wrote a column decrying rude college students as the work of the Left and "Official Antifa" which turned out to be a hoax site. As reported in Mediaite:

New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss — a self-described Iraq War-supporting “outspoken Zionist” — took a narrative from the alt-right in her newest column, and used Tweets from a phony account in order to do it. 

The op-ed, which suggests the political left is intolerant and does not believe in free speech on campus “at all,” used two tweets from a fake “Antifa” account run by online trolls to prove that young leftists were attacking new-right personality Dave Rubin for being anti-LGBTQ, despite the fact that he is gay. 

Weiss wrote the following regarding Rubin’s experience with college activists:

“[Leftists] seem to believe that the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst. Among them: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is married to a man, yet is denounced as an ‘Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist’ and a ‘fascist lieutenant’ for criticizing identity politics.” 

Upon clicking on the links attached to the terms “Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist” and “fascist lieutenant,” readers will find the parody account @OfficialAntifa is behind the claims — not an actual youth leftist organization.

I think it's pretty obvious that the right-wing and alt-right media have decided a good strategy is to promote right-wingers like James Damore and Christian Hoff Sommers at colleges, and when some of the more obnoxious students - or in Damore's case, not even students, just rando outsiders - make a fuss, use this to claim "the left" is intolerant and anti-free speech. My guess is that Weiss didn't realize "OfficialAntifa" was fake because not only is she a lazy, awful journalist, just like Jesse Singal, but in the alt-right online circles she travels in, there's little concern over whether "Official Antifa" is real or not - if they can get away with using fake news to smear their enemies, they'll do it. 

Naturally Weiss identifies Sommers as a "feminist" in spite of the fact that Sommers' entire career has been devoted to attacking feminists. 

And Steven Pinker makes common cause with these freaks. Anybody who knew anything about Sommers' career could have predicted she would be leading the backlash to #metoo. That's what the fucking Koch brothers pay her for.

How alt-right Claire Lehmann celebrates International Women's Day

As befitting a woman who hates feminism - and I suspect almost all other women - Claire Lehmann posts her favorite "intellectual" Camille Paglia, whom Lehmann admires, in part because Paglia said:

"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."

As always with the alt-right, you have to wonder what Bizarro World they come from where everything good is bad and vice-versa.

Sprinter is here

Balto in Central Park

Some years we don't get any Sprinter at all thanks to global warming - I recall 2012 being especially bad on that count. But we are definitely having Sprinter this year. Walking home from my birthday dinner at a restaurant on the UES I could definitely feel that sprinter-y wind and smell that burning-wood smell.

And then the massive snow-storm this week.

Southern Poverty Law Center can have my money

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a national treasure, keeping an eye on the right-wing, alt-right, racists and even male supremacists. I leaned heavily on their reporting in creating the text for my chart on Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections.

And they recently gave the contemptible bile-spewing Koch brothers' hack Christina Hoff Sommers a mention for her MRA connections.

So today when I happened to be flagged down by a canvasser on Amsterdam Avenue asking for money and sign-ups for the SPLC of course I said yes. It was the least I could do. 

And I think we will need them more than ever going forward. The Trump presidency has emboldened racists and alt-right media like Quillette, promoted by celebrities like Steven Pinker are attempting to sneak alt-right attitudes about race into the political mainstream as "centrist."

As a recent Guardian article (I'm so glad they have somebody there very different from the guy who was so entranced by Pinker's twinkling blue eyes), The Unwelcome Revival of 'Race Science' by Gavin Evans notes:

In apartheid South Africa, the idea that each race had its own character, personality traits and intellectual potential was part of the justification for the system of white rule. The subject of race and IQ was similarly politicised in the US, where Jensen’s paper was used to oppose welfare schemes, such as the Head Start programme, which were designed to lift children out of poverty. But the paper met with an immediate and overwhelmingly negative reaction – “an international firestorm,” the New York Times called it 43 years later, in Jensen’s obituary – especially on American university campuses, where academics issued dozens of rebuttals, and students burned him in effigy. 

The recent revival of ideas about race and IQ began with a seemingly benign scientific observation. In 2005, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, began promoting the view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent – first in a lecture to a Jewish studies institute, then in a lengthy article in the liberal American magazine The New Republic the following year. This claim has long been the smiling face of race science; if it is true that Jews are naturally more intelligent, then it’s only logical to say that others are naturally less so. 

The background to Pinker’s essay was a 2005 paper entitled “Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence”, written by a trio of anthropologists at the University of Utah. In their 2005 paper, the anthropologists argued that high IQ scores among Ashkenazi Jews indicated that they evolved to be smarter than anyone else (including other groups of Jews). 

This evolutionary development supposedly took root between 800 and 1650 AD, when Ashkenazis, who primarily lived in Europe, were pushed by antisemitism into money-lending, which was stigmatised among Christians. This rapid evolution was possible, the paper argued, in part because the practice of not marrying outside the Jewish community meant a “very low inward gene flow”. This was also a factor behind the disproportionate prevalence in Ashkenazi Jews of genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s, which the researchers claimed were a byproduct of natural selection for higher intelligence; those carrying the gene variants, or alleles, for these diseases were said to be smarter than the rest. 

Pinker followed this logic in his New Republic article, and elsewhere described the Ashkenazi paper as “thorough and well-argued”. He went on to castigate those who doubted the scientific value of talking about genetic differences between races, and claimed that “personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group and slightly different, on average, between groups”. 

In subsequent years, Nicholas Wade, Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, the increasingly popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and others have all piled in on the Jewish intelligence thesis, using it as ballast for their views that different population groups inherit different mental capacities. Another member of this chorus is the journalist Andrew Sullivan, who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for The Bell Curve in 1994, featuring it prominently in The New Republic, which he edited at the time. He returned to the fray in 2011, using his popular blog, The Dish, to promote the view that population groups had different innate potentials when it came to intelligence.

Although Pinker has consistently denied what the Bell Curve said about African Americans it's clear that he does believe in "race" intelligence with the Ashkenazi bullshit. I think it's likely he believes what the Bell Curve said about blacks, since he's never explained why it is wrong, but he's too cagey a politician to admit it. 

And as my diagram of Pinker's connections demonstrates, he has frequently promoted the work of others who do believe that blacks are innately less intelligent and even, more criminal, than other "races."

And his fanboys worship him and think he can do no wrong. We will have Steven Pinker in part to thank for a racism revival in academia.

Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections

UPDATE 4/20/2018:

This chart & associated discussion has been updated with the addition of Sam Harris. You can see the revised version of the chart here:

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinkers-rightwing-alt-right-and.html 

Click the picture to enlarge.

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros

What are hereditarians?

Although right-wing and alt-right are fairly well-known terms, "hereditarian" is not and requires an explanation.

"Hereditarian" an advocate of the theory that individual differences in human beings can be accounted for primarily on the basis of genetics. 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hereditarian

Although in practice the term most often refers to racial differences, as discussed by Linda Gottfredson:

Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black–White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are “substantially” genetic in origin... 

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005hereditarian-hypothesis.pdf

Other terms which are similar are "evolutionary psychology," "human biodiversity" and "racial realism." Related to these terms is "biosocial criminology."

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His tenth book, to be published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. 

https://stevenpinker.com/biocv

The Blank Slate

Written by Pinker, published in 2002, this is the New Testament to The Bell Curve's Old Testament for hereditarians. 

Although Steven Pinker claims in The Blank Slate that he doesn't agree with the conclusions about black intelligence made in The Bell Curve, he has never to my knowledge explained why, although he agrees with almost every other hereditarian claim, the Bell Curve is wrong about that. 

...Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this... 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2

Quillette

http://quillette.com

Quillette is an online magazine founded by Australian writer and former psychology graduate student Claire Lehmann. The publication has a primary focus on science, news, culture, and politics......The magazine has been praised by the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins, who described it as a "superb online magazine", and has garnered support by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette

Steven Pinker has recommended Quillette articles on Twitter and said about Quillette:

...one of the most stimulating & original new web magazines. 

https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/909489258918027264?lang=en

Quillette has published many hereditarians, some of whom have been interviewed by Stefan Molyneux and republished articles in the white supremacist American Renaissance including Kevin M. Beaver, Brian Boutwell, Ben and Bo Winegard and John P. Wright. 

Steven Pinker is radicalizing the alt-right

Pinker recommended to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers this article in alt-right Quillette entitled Heritability and why Parents (but not Parenting Matter) written by his old buddy Razib Khan and a criminologist, Brian Boutwell.

Brian Boutwell, Ph.D. is Associate Dean for Research and Corporate Partnerships, College for Public Health and Social Justice and Associate Professor Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University, College for Public Health and Social Justice.

The article says in part:

...Criminologists (and psychologists) have been aware for some time that criminal involvement runs in families* and is also heritable (a good portion of that heritability seems to be narrow-sense, though not all; see quillette.com/#comments). The psychologist Robert Krueger and colleagues some years back, provided evidence that humans mate assortatively for antisocial and criminogenic behaviors (put differently, highly antisocial individuals tend to pair off with each other in a non-random fashion).

Does this completely explain the concentration of crime in certain families? No. Can it be safely ignored and assumed to be irrelevant? No. Just as narrow-sense heritability is a puzzle piece that can tell you something about where the distribution of a trait could be headed in a population, it also helps inform the question of why certain traits cluster in families.

Boutwell has authored or co-authored, if my count is correct 24 articles for alt-right Quillette.

Now Pinker declared the Boutwell/Khan piece in Quillette "witty and smart" but he doesn't explain how the "criminal involvement runs in families" theory aligns with why the Irish had high rates of violent crime a hundred years ago, as he discussed in his PC video:

In the case of, say, rates of violent crime, it used to be — go back 100 years, the rate of violent crime among Irish Americans was far higher than among other ethnic groups. That obviously changed. There's no reason that that can't change in the case of current racial differences

Surely if criminality ran in families the Irish would still have high rates of violent crime.

And then there is Australia:

New South Wales, a state in southeast Australia, was founded by the British as a penal colony in 1788. Over the next 80 years, more than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in lieu of being given the death penalty. 

Today, about 20% of Australians are descendants of convicts, including plenty of prominent citizens. 

Wow, Australia must be a hellhole of criminality based on the family crime trait theory. Oops, nope, Australia has lower murder rates than most countries, including England.

So does Pinker agree with the hereditarian explanation about crime or the environmental one? He can't have it both ways, the two are mutually exclusive.

In the PC video Pinker said:

Now, if you've never heard these facts before and you stumble across them, or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions. Such as that women are inferior, that African Americans are naturally violent.

It turns out that Brian Boutwell has come to the "extreme conclusion" that African Americans are naturally less intelligent than whites.

Boutwell is a bit less direct when discussing African American violence but in his interview with alt-right Stefan Molyneux he references a theory by former head of the Pioneer Fund  J. Philippe Ruston's called "Life History" and associates it with "an evolutionary theory of criminal behavior" beginning around 56:30 on the video. Rushton says things like:

The reason why Whites and East Asians have wider hips than Blacks, and so make poorer runners is because they give birth to larger brained babies. During evolution, increasing cranial size meant women had to have a wider pelvis. Further, the hormones that give Blacks an edge at sports makes them restless in school and prone to crime.

Boutwell tries to distance himself from bigots, as he writes in Quillette:

It is true that bigoted people might use data about race and IQ to support nefarious political agendas, buttressing their own prejudices with scientific sounding arguments. However, the way to address this danger is not by distorting previous research or publicly attacking scholars who investigate this issue. Rather, it is by promoting the vision of society that Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated decades ago, one in which people are judged by their actions and the content of their characters and not by the average traits of a group (ethnic, political, religious, or otherwise).

The reality of racial variation cannot be hidden behind a veil of pleasant myths in perpetuity. And if researchers and moralists insist upon a noble lie about human genetic sameness, then they will not be prepared to grapple with the difficult ethical challenges that human variation in a cosmopolitan society presents.

Boutwell refers above to the off-quoted section of King's "I Have A Dream" speech in which he says:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

It's breath-taking the way Boutwell jumps from "not be judged by the color of their skin" to "the reality of racial variation" which means, in practice, claiming black people are genetically less intelligent and more criminal than white people.

So what actually distinguishes Boutwell from a bigot with nefarious political agendas, buttressing his own prejudice with scientific-sounding arguments?

Boutwell's "science" is bad. First because although race means everything to Boutwell and the hereditarians, they have no clear definition of race, and so there is no objective way to determine the "race" of any individual. Although they've learned from alt-right racist Steve Sailer to claim that this is all perfectly fine because we can't expect to have "platonic essences."

They admit to not testing subjects for genetic ancestry.

They don't admit they got lots of their data from racists. Although they did.

And then there's the Northern Superiority Hypothesis that Richard Lynn appears to have dreamed up. I've mentioned Lynn, making claims about Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish intelligence although they are genetically indistinguishable from each other.

And what about nefarious political agendas? Boutwell has no qualms about promoting his theories both via alt-right racist Stefan Molyneux, and by allowing the white supremacist media outlet American Renaissance to republish his work from Quillette.

Apparently there is nothing that a scientific racialist like Brian Boutwell can do that is racist, in his mind, not even making common cause with white supremacists.

So while Steven Pinker is pointing at the media and colleges, claiming they are inadvertently radicalizing the alt-right by denying "the truth" which leads to them over-reacting and believing that blacks are naturally violent, Pinker is sending his Twitter followers directly to people who say the very thing he considers an "extreme conclusion."

It's not the media and the colleges who are radicalizing people, it's Steven Pinker himself. Both by connecting to the work of racialists but also by lending racialists like Boutwell and Khan and Steve Sailer respectability thanks to his own science celebrity.

Steven Pinker & "racial realism"

No matter how drunk and disheveled
the Irish were seen to be, they
were still classified as white.

You can read the transcript from Steven Pinker's "PC" video here, and you can watch the long version of the video here.

He begins:

“The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that 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... comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right. Internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way — who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, the allusion from The Matrix.  

When they are exposed the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses, or in The New York Times, or in respectable media, they are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity. And they're immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions. 

Steven Pinker talks about "true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses, or in the New York Times..."

He said that at a college campus. And when his remarks were criticized he was immediately defended by New York Times.

There are few people who get to express their views in the mainstream media more often than Steven Pinker. As it says on Pinker's blog:

...Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His tenth book, to be published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

So what "true statements" are he suggesting have been suppressed by colleges and the New York Times? This series on evo-psycho bros has focused on race,  so I am quoting only items related to race:

You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Look it up on their website. The homicide rate among African Americans is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European Americans...

Now, if you've never heard these facts before and you stumble across them, or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions. Such as that women are inferior, that African Americans are naturally violent. 

Because for each one of these facts, there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don't license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on.

Number two, the principle of opposition to racism and sexism is not a factual claim that the sexes and races are indistinguishable in every aspect. It's a political and moral commitment to treat people as individuals, as opposed to pre-judging them by the statistics of their group. Third, we know that some of the statistical generalizations about races and sexes change over time, so what is true now may not necessarily be true in 10 or 20 years.

...why you can believe that differences between the races exist, and be very strongly opposed to any form of racism.

In the case of, say, rates of violent crime, it used to be — go back 100 years, the rate of violent crime among Irish Americans was far higher than among other ethnic groups. That obviously changed. There's no reason that that can't change in the case of current racial differences.

These are all reasons why you can believe all of these and not necessarily drift toward extremist positions — in fact, why you can be a progressive, a centrist, a liberal, even a leftist, and believe all of these. Because you're exposed not only to the facts, but how to put them in context.

But worst of all, you're never exposed to the ways of putting these facts into context so that they don't lead to racism...

It appears that Pinker believes the "true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses, or in the New York Times..." concerning race include:

• The homicide rate among African Americans is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European Americans
• Races are not indistinguishable
• Differences between the races exist

And according to Pinker, the homicide rate could potentially be explained by something other than genetics because violence levels among "ethnic groups" can change over time.

As always with proponents of evolutionary psychology, Steven Pinker conflates race with ethnicity whenever he wishes. He compares Irish and African American crime rates, but in the case of African Americans he uses the term "race" and with the Irish he uses "ethnicity." I have demonstrated how astoundingly careless the hereditarians are about distinguishing among race, ethnicity and ancestry.

We don't know the distinct ethnicities of most African Americans thanks to the slave system which brought most of their ancestors to this country. And so their race is conflated with their ethnicity.

But since European Americans can trace their ancestries to distinct ethnic groups their ethnicities - "Irish" and their race "European American" are acknowledged as separate classifications.

African slaves of various ethnicities were thrown together and thanks to sex amongst themselves and rape by white slavers, African Americans have no clear separate ethnic identities. Although perhaps you could make the case that "descendent from the enslaved people of the United States" is its own separate ethnicity.

I think it's inarguable that one of the reasons why the Irish were able to integrate fairly quickly into American society is because, in spite of the fact that the Irish were generally considered drunken slobs unfit for decent society during the early years of massive Irish immigration, they were physically indistinguishable (and it turns out genetically indistinguishable) from the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ruled the United States. The Irish were, as far as I have been able to discover, always considered white. A generation or so after immigration the Irish could easily pass for even the wealthiest WASP.

Obviously that was not the case with African Americans who not only had ethnic features easily distinguishable from WASPs, but had until 1865 been treated like animals and were freed for the most part with no property of their own and had to start their freedom journey from the absolute bottom, with nothing. And roadblocks were constantly thrown in their way.


Occam's razor would indicate that these obvious, indisputable factors are a far more likely explanation for black poverty and related criminal behavior in the United States, a mere five or six generations after Emancipation, rather than a pan-continental genetic tendency to criminality.

Especially when the genetic tendencies are based on evo-psycho theories like the Northern Superiority Hypothesis and the warrior gene. And methodology that ignores genetic testing. And that fact that some data of the hereditarian foundational text The Bell Curve comes from racists.

Those of us who don't agree with hereditarian explanations for human behavior say that it's social conditions that determine the behavior of ethnic groups, as P.Z. Myers pointed out:

If you listen to the whole 8-minute video, what you hear is Pinker first saying that you can’t voice certain facts on campus, then stating those facts (self-refutation, anyone?), then explaining that his facts are more complex than he let on, which is what the college professors he’s blaming already do.

You can't disagree with the hereditarian conclusions about the data and at the same time deny the data exists. 

And as I have discovered in this evo-psycho bro series, there are hereditarians in American colleges right now who are talking about black criminality and intelligence.

I'll talk about that next.

The Better Angels: WE ARE EVO

I remember how surprised I was when I saw Steven Pinker defend himself against the negative review of "Better Angels" in the New Yorker, by calling on Razib Khan. But I shouldn't have been. I knew that Pinker and Khan went back to at least 2006 as I talked about the first time I mentioned Khan on this blog in August 2006.

Here's how Khan began:

My post below defending Steve Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature elicited some responses on twitter. Robert Lee Hotz finds it odd that I defend a book I haven’t read. My logic here is simple: the outline of the argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature has been presented in shorter form. John Gray’s piece doesn’t even address this digest, so I am skeptical that it could address the data which is no doubt strewn across hundreds of pages. It is obviously theoretically possible that The Better Angels of Our Nature is thinner in results than the shorter essays and presentations I’ve seen over the years on the same topic from Pinker, but highly unlikely. If Gray does a disservice to the short form argument, I doubt he is being any fairer to a longer exposition.

Nice way to get out of reading the whole damn book which is over seven hundred pages and full of random trivia that Pinker felt he just had to share, like Keith Moon's deplorable personal life.

I mostly focused on the one chapter and even that was a tiresome chore.

Khan proceeds to mostly review the New Yorker review and finishes with:

I think Pinker’s description of the decline in violence is precise and accurate. As to whether that is sustainable, and his theories for how the description came about, I’m more skeptical. But I’ll get to that when I read the book!

What's interesting though isn't so much what Khan has to say about the book, but rather the fact that he's the only person Pinker mentions in response to the question "Has anyone else replied to Kolbert?" 

I suspect because Pinker knew he could count on Khan, as a member of the evo-psycho brotherhood.

And Pinker returns the favor, as I have been documenting. Most recently by saying:

When (people who gravitate to the alt-right) are exposed the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses, or in The New York Times, or in respectable media, they are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity. And they're immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.

At first glance you assume Pinker is talking about himself - that somehow his true statements have never been voiced in college campuses. But that's clearly wrong. Pinker is speaking freely in the video at Harvard. And Jesse Singal at the New York Times immediately defended Pinker's remarks.

So clearly Steven Pinker has no trouble from academia or the media.

So whose truths are being repressed? We'll talk about that next.

The Better Angels: U MAD?

Elizabeth Kolbert's
New Yorker author portrait
(I added "U Mad?")

Steven Pinker is still angry about Elizabeth Kolbert's review of "The Better Angels" in the New Yorker, "Peace in Our Time," seven years later.

We can see it on display in his now notorious section about the Tuskegee syphilis study in his just-published "Enlightenment Now."

It was brought to my attention in a Twitter argument I saw Angus Johnston have with a Pinkerite.

You see, only people who don't understand what Pinker is saying - or are misrepresenting him - could possibly have complaints about Steven Pinker.

The Serene Master is beyond reproach and the criticisms of ordinary, non-Pinkerite mortals.

The text under discussion, from "Enlightenment Now" quoted by Angus Johnston begins:

At a recent conference, another colleague summed up what she thought was the mixed legacy of science: vaccines for smallpox on the one hand; the Tuskegee syphilis study on the other. In that affair, another bloody shirt in the standard narrative about the evils of science...

I'd be willing to bet that Pinkerite Cathy S has no idea why Pinker uses the term "another bloody shirt" in this context. But thanks to my having been critiquing Better Angels for the past several days, I do.

In his web site on a page about his response to reviews of Better Angels he wrote:

In her final paragraph, Kolbert waves the bloody Norwegian shirt one more time, and informs us, “Hate and madness and cruelty haven't disappeared, and they aren't going to.” No honest reviewer would imply that this is the message of the book.

The first several paragraphs of the Kolbert review discuss the Norwegian holiday camp slaughter by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011 and concludes:

“How long would the Norway gunman have lasted in Texas, or any state where concealed-carry laws are on the books?” Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s oldest son, asked in a widely reprinted opinion piece. “I ran a survey while on a cruise: in Texas, three minutes; in Montana, seven to eight minutes; in Arizona, two minutes; and in Nevada, three to five minutes. . . . There’s a lot of truth in the old adage that, if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will carry guns.” 

Another possible take on Utøya—admittedly not a popular one—is that the whole incident was blown way out of proportion. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” (Viking; $40), Steven Pinker didn’t get a chance to comment on the Utøya shootings, since the volume went to press before the attack took place. Yet the book can be read as a long argument—a seven-hundred-page-long argument—for this last proposition.

She's talking about Pinker's habit of dismissing contemporary acts of violence in order to shore up the thesis of Better Angels.

Speaking of being misrepresented, Kolbert's thoughts on Pinker's claims about violence are repurposed by Pinker into "another bloody shirt in the standard narrative about the evils of science."

It's great for this evo-psycho bro series that Pinker is so obsessed with reviews of "The Better Angels" it makes this section of the series au courant.

It is abundantly clear that Pinker tries to minimize the damage of the Tuskegee atrocity because he can't tolerate the slightest criticism of anything having to do with science. Because Steven Pinker is not rational. He's certainly not much of a scientist with his petty grudge-holding over seven-year-old book reviews.

The author of the Enlightenment Now review in The New York Times had this amusing exchange on Twitter:

Pinker later writes on the same web page about Better Angels:

But aren’t you just being defensive? Authors always think that negative reviews of their book are wrong. Has anyone else replied to Kolbert? 

Razib Khan has a response in the Gene Expression blog on the Discover magazine Web site: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/10/relative-angels-and-absolute-demons/

Pinker points to an evo-psycho/sociobiology/human biodiversity/hereditarian proponent when his book about violence is criticized. I'll talk more about that next.

And before I forget, here's an excellent video by Rebecca Watson with even more criticisms of the book.

The Enlightenment and the rhetorical failure

Just when I had given up on the New Yorker reviewing Pinker's latest book, "Enlightenment Now", the New York Times comes through with the goods.

And the answer to your question Jennifer Szalai: because Pinker is a weenie and an ass.

I can't wait for the bitching and moaning from the evo-psycho bros over this.

Although maybe my favorite part is when she talks about him whining about how "Better Angels" wasn't treated right:

When he published “The Better Angels of Our Nature” in 2011, he believed he unequivocally showed that modernity and liberal Enlightenment values had made people less violent, and so he was taken aback by skeptical reviews that had the temerity to question his research methods or his conclusions. 

“I had thought that a parade of graphs with time on the horizontal axis, body counts or other measures of violence on the vertical, and a line that meandered from the top left to the bottom right would cure audiences” of their delusions and “persuade them that at least in this sphere of well-being the world has made progress,” he recalls near the beginning of “Enlightenment Now.” But Pinker’s inability to “cure audiences” and “persuade them” doesn’t mean he has reconsidered his rhetorical approach; 300 pages after bemoaning those poor souls who read “Better Angels” and weren’t bowled over by his panoply of statistics, Pinker doubles down with still more data. “We have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting the ways in which the world has been getting better,” he writes.

Pinker fanboys have already been bitching at the author. I saw this amusing exchange:

The Better Angels and the War on Drugs

In The Better Angels book, Steve Pinker discards racism and poverty as explanations for black violence.

...the sheer depravity of inner-city violence—toddlers struck by bullets in drive-by shootings, church funerals of teenagers invaded by knife-wielding gangs—could no longer be explained away as an understandable response to racism or poverty.

Marvin Harris made the case that unemployment lead to black poverty. And the data back him up.

Here is the Pew Research Center's statistics on black and white unemployment.

And here is a chart from the US Department of Justice Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980 - 2008. I couldn't find a chart for all violent crime by race, just homicide

The two charts have very different ranges, so I adjusted them to line up according to year, removed the data about whites and added y-axis lines for greater clarity.

The top line is the unemployment rate for blacks. The bottom line is the homicide rate for blacks. It looks like there is some correspondence there especially post-1990: as unemployment dropped, homicide dropped.

Pinker mentions the War on Drugs:

The American imprisonment binge was set off in the 1980s by several developments. Among them were mandatory sentencing laws (such as California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out”), a prison-building boom (in which rural communities that had formerly shouted “Not in my backyard!” now welcomed the economic stimulus), and the War on Drugs (which criminalized possession of small amounts of cocaine and other controlled substances).

As I mentioned earlier in this series, the War on Drugs deliberately targeted blacks and hippies:

One of Richard Nixon's top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper's Magazine.  

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday."You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

According to this Vox article as of 2013 half of all offenders were in for drug-related offenses.

Most of the drug-related prisoners were black. And as Vox points out: "Black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs, even though they're not more likely to use or sell them."

Looks like Nixon won his war against the blacks and the hippies in the end.

Pinker has his doubts about the crime decline and incarceration.

But the case that the incarceration boom led to the crime decline is far from watertight. 161 For one thing, the prison bulge began in the 1980s, but violence did not decline until a decade later. For another, Canada did not go on an imprisonment binge, but its violence rate went down too. These facts don’t disprove the theory that imprisonment mattered, but they force it to make additional assumptions, such as that the effect of imprisonment builds up over time, reaches a critical mass, and spills over national borders.

And he admits:

The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. 

There is an excellent movie, 13th which considers the War on Drugs part of an ongoing program of criminalizing black people. As its Wiki says:

(Ava) DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated in practices since the end of the American Civil War through such actions as criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weigh more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, demonstrating how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

So what is Pinker's answer to the decline in crime? People just started thinking differently:

The Great Crime Decline of the 1990s was part of a change in sensibilities that can fairly be called a recivilizing process. To start with, some of the goofier ideas of the 1960s had lost their appeal. The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun. A greater awareness of rape and sexual abuse made the ethos “If it feels good, do it” seem repugnant rather than liberating. 

In her New Yorker review, Elizabeth Kolbert also pointed out that:

...Pinker names thinking itself as the ultimate pacifier. “One would expect that as collective rationality is honed over the ages, it will progressively whittle away at the shortsighted and hot-blooded impulses toward violence, and force us to treat a greater number of rational agents as we would have them treat us,” 

I've already quoted Marvin Harris on the problem with this approach but it bears repeating:

To insist on the priority of mind in culture is to align one's understanding of socio-cultural phenomena with the anthropological equivalent of pre-Darwinian biology or pre-Newtonian physics. It is to believe in what Freud called "the omnipotence of thought." Such a belief is a form of intellectual infantilism that dishonors our species-given powers of thought. (Cultural Materialism, pp. 59 - 60) 

As I've observed years ago, when devotees of evolutionary psychology (AKA sociobiology) try to explain changes to human culture, which happen in a less-than-evolutionary time span, they get lost.

It appears to me that what happened was, between The Blank Slate, published in 2002 and when The Better Angels of Our Nature was published in 2011, even Pinker had realized how silly it is to try to use evolutionary psychology theories to explain art trends and so had to cast about for something else. He couldn't switch outright to another complete, coherent research strategy because that would negate much of what he had already said in The Blank Slate.

So he used an eclectic hodgepodge of theories that, while they may (but often do not!) explain a single aspect of a cultural phenomenon, don't work to explain an entire system.

The Blank Slate is by far Pinker's most influential book, the New Testament of evolutionary psychology to The Bell Curve's Old Testament. And when Pinker is oppressed by negative reviews, he calls on the evolutionary psychology brotherhood for support. We'll talk about that next.

By the late 1970s the hippies & the blacks were working together, singing about Latinas.

In case you forgot how much alt-right Claire Lehmann hates feminists...

I assume somebody is paying alt-right Claire Lehmann of alt-right Quillette to be such a hateful misogynist, the way the Koch brothers pay Christina Hoff Sommers. I actually hope so, otherwise there is something horribly wrong with Claire Lehmann that she is so obsessed with hating feminism and spewing bile on a daily basis.

Did a feminist kill alt-right Claire Lehmann's father?

And here's Justin Trudeau's ghostwriter Jonathan Kay re-tweeting an attack on Trudeau. Wow Jonathan Kay is an asshole.

And speaking of Christina Hoff Sommers, she's having a meltdown because - I am not kidding - the Southern Poverty Law Center mentioned her once in passing.  Of course an evo-psycho bro, Ben Winegard, likes it.

This is what they said:

 Prominent MRAs also include anti-feminist female voices, such as popular Canadian YouTube personality Karen Straughan, American psychologist Helen Smith, and the former head of a domestic-violence shelter for women, the British Erin Pizzey. Men’s rights issues also overlap with the rhetoric of equity feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers, who give a mainstream and respectable face to some MRA concerns.

But you know how Koch brothers hacks like to be drama queens.

Apparently it surprises Sommers that in spite of her spending her entire career on wingnut welfare spewing bile against women, she has somehow not become a beloved and respected public intellectual. Poor Christina Hoff Sommers! I'm sure she's crying all the way to the bank.

The Better Angels & Why Nothing Works

Unlike most of the evo-psycho bros discussed in this series, Steven Pinker readily admits to the particular difficulties of black people in the United States. In his Better Angels book he writes:

The decivilizing effects hit African American communities particularly hard. They started out with the historical disadvantages of second-class citizenship, which left many young people teetering between respectable and underclass lifestyles just when the new antiestablishment forces were pushing in the wrong direction. They could count on even less protection from the criminal justice system than white Americans because of the combination of old racism among the police and the new indulgence by the judicial system toward crime, of which they were disproportionately the victims. 126 Mistrust of the criminal justice system turned into cynicism and sometimes paranoia, making self-help justice seem the only alternative. 127 

So far so good. But then he switches to the magic of marriage:

On top of these strikes came a feature of African American family life first pointed out by the sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, for which he was initially vilified but eventually vindicated. 128 A large proportion (today a majority) of black children are born out of wedlock, and many grow up without fathers. This trend, already visible in the early 1960s, may have been multiplied by the sexual revolution and yet again by perverse welfare incentives that encouraged young women to “marry the state” instead of the fathers of their children...  All those young men who aren’t bringing up their children are hanging out with one another competing for dominance instead... the women lacked the bargaining power to force the men into a civilized lifestyle. 

As we've seen, although Pinker points to low rates of marriage as the cause of higher violence he can't point to high rates of marriage as the cause of lower violence because marriage rates were higher during the 1960s and then as marriage rates went down, so did crime rates.

Not every social theorist is as feeble as Steven Pinker, although few are as famous as Steven Pinker. In his book "Why Nothing Works" Marvin Harris also discusses the Moynihan theory:

...Lacking a proper “role model,” black youths drop out of school and follow a career of delinquency and crime. Daniel Moynihan used this line of reasoning to reach his controversial conclusion that the way to solve the problems of the inner cities was to concentrate on building stable home lives for ghetto youngsters... but do blacks have such high unemployment rates because they have so many fatherless families or do they have so many fatherless families because they have such high unemployment rates? 

In my view it is unemployment that causes the fatherless family, not the fatherless family that causes unemployment. Numerous anthropological studies have shown that mother-centered, father-absent families occur wherever men have trouble finding steady jobs and women can earn as much as or more than men.  

If men are frequently out of work, and make too little to support a family when they do work, it does not pay for a woman who has an income of her own to commit herself permanently in marriage to one man. She is better off keeping her options open and accepting male consorts in temporary liaisons, letting them live with her when they can make supplementary contributions to the household, and putting them out of the house when they become a burden. 

 Quoted above, Pinker mentions 'perverse welfare incentives that encouraged young women to “marry the state” instead of the fathers of their children.'

In this Harris agrees, but while Pinker just tosses off a half-sentence, Harris goes on for many pages explaining what those perverse welfare incentives are and exactly how they work. As a result of all that analysis Harris realizes that the fatherless issue was not because women were romantically disadvantaged by the sexual revolution, but rather:

...AFDC with all of its penalties and humiliations looms as the best of a lot of bad bargains. Opting for a career as an AFDC mother provides inner-city women with an income that is at least sufficient for renting an apartment. This not only assures them that they will have a place to live, but it gives them a considerable amount of leverage in interpersonal affairs, especially with inner-city men who often lack a place to sleep.  

Since AFDC women are automatically entitled to medicaid, free medical care is an additional inducement for getting on AFDC (although I would not want to include forgone medical bills in calculating AFDC family income the way some economists do as proof that AFDC benefits are set too high—families cannot eat a paid doctor’s bill). 

In a world without stability and assets, AFDC therefore is a kind of nest egg, a vital resource that puts women and motherhood at the center of things. Inner-city men respect women who have this resource; they vie with each other for their favors. And by having children with them the men establish a claim on the shelter which women control...

In spite of what many American conservatives believe, AFDC is not only for black people. As a struggling young single mother I also once received AFDC, and I am from a working class white family with two parents.

In Better Angels, Pinker dismisses the role of unemployment in 1960s violence:

The rebounding of violence in the 1960s defied every expectation. The decade was a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs, not to mention medical advances that made victims more likely to survive being shot or knifed...

But Harris explains that was not the case for blacks concentrated in large cities:

...during and after World War II blacks migrated in unprecedented numbers from farms to cities in search of union-wage factory jobs. 

This was scarcely a voluntary movement since it coincided with the end of the epoch of small farms and with the final stages of the industrialization of agriculture. But it was precisely during this same period that the great shift from goods production to service-and-information production was taking place. 

This resulted in a massive pile-up of unemployed black workers inside the run-down cores of the nation’s largest cities. Why wasn’t this great army of unskilled workers called upon to take part in the explosive expansion of the new information-and-people-processing economy? Because, as we already know, the growth of the service economy coincided with—was predicated upon—the mass conversion of the reserve army of white housewives from baby production and services in the home to the production of services and information away from home...

...Between 1974 and 1977, while the proportion of new jobs acquired by white women in the private sector increased by 72 percent, the proportion acquired by black men decreased by 11 percent. As white women intensify their struggle to achieve parity with males at all levels of the workforce, they are not only dimming the prospects for black males to find dead-end jobs as clerks, secretaries, hot dog vendors, and filling station attendants, but they are rapidly eroding the gains made by black men during the 1960s in good jobs at middle management levels. 

So to sum up Harris's argument:

1. In the 1940s blacks began to migrate to cities in search of jobs.
2. They had to compete with white women who had also begun to search for jobs.
3. Employers preferred the usually better-educated white women to blacks.
4. Black unemployment lead to a dependence on welfare.
5. Welfare's "perverse incentives" made two-parent families impossible.
6. Blacks were less likely to get married.

Unemployment is related to crime. As Harris writes:

I have to take note of a body of scholarly opinion which claims that poverty in general has little to do with the high rate of criminal violence in the United States and therefore that black unemployment and poverty are not sufficient in themselves to account for the extraordinarily high rates of black crime.  

True enough, if one simply compares crime rates by states or cities, those with low per capita incomes do not necessarily have high rates of criminal violence. But the poverty of the black ghetto is different from the poverty of rural whites or of an earlier generation of urban ethnics.  

Unlike the rural poor, inner-city blacks have the opportunity as well as the motive to commit violent crimes. The city is an ideal setting for finding and surprising one’s victims and successfully eluding the police. One can scarcely mug a farmer in a cornfield and expect to get away with it.  

Also, unlike the European immigrants of previous generations, with the passage of time blacks have become more and not less concentrated inside their ghettos. The lesson of the four decades since 1940 is that only a tiny percentage of blacks born in the inner cities will ever earn enough money to participate in the American dream. Under these conditions, the benefits of criminal behavior easily outweigh the risks of getting caught and being sent to jail.  

John Conyers, himself a member of the black congressional caucus, writes: “When survival is at stake, it should not be surprising that criminal activity begins to resemble an opportunity rather than a cost, work rather than deviance, and a possibly profitable undertaking that is superior to a coerced existence directed by welfare bureaucrats.”
For many black youths there is no opposition between crime and a career. Crime is their career. That is the main reason, it seems to me, why 70 percent of blacks who have gone to jail once will go to jail at least once again.

The excellent Rick Burns series on New York explains how blacks became more concentrated inside ghettos, starting with the Depression, then made worse by racist government policies.

From Marvin Harris we get fully-explained, carefully reasoned explanations based on a single coherent research strategy - cultural materialism.

From Steven Pinker we get contradictory tossed-off explanations that use an eclectic mix of cultural materialism, idealism (idealism in the sense that ideas drive culture) and of course sociobiology.

Pinker uses the "young male competition" theory of Daly and Wilson based on work by Napoleon Chagnon, studying the Yanomami - which R. Brian Ferguson demonstrates doesn't even show what Daly and Wilson claims.

Pinker:

Though I am skeptical of theories of parental influence that say that fatherless boys grow up violent because they lack a role model or paternal discipline (Moynihan himself, for example, grew up without a father), widespread fatherlessness can lead to violence for a different reason. 130 All those young men who aren’t bringing up their children are hanging out with one another competing for dominance instead. The mixture was as combustible in the inner city as it had been in the cowboy saloons and mining camps of the Wild West, this time not because there were no women around but because the women lacked the bargaining power to force the men into a civilized lifestyle.

Pinker blames the perverse incentives of the welfare system but then ignores what actually happens in the welfare system and instead falls back on a sociobiology theory about women lacking "bargaining power."

As Harris demonstrated, thanks to the AFDC system it was the women who were reluctant to get married and trade the dependable AFDC income for the undependable income of sometimes unemployed men.

Pinker presents ideas that often don't explain anything and don't fit together as a coherent whole. So eventually he has to give up and fall back on the omnipotence of thought. We'll talk about that next.