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Sep 30, 2025

Editor: I will selectively quote from Mr. Pinker’s 1730 word ‘essay’, but first I will quote from portions of James McGilvray essay.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-32021-6_7

6 Chomsky versus Pinker on Human Nature and Politics

James McGilvray

Introduction:

Differences and justifications The political writings of Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky differ in style, audience, and content. Pinker is a stylist; he wrote a book (2014) advising others how to write. Chomsky’s fact- and irony-rich works demand the reader’s critical participation; they do not try to persuade or charm. Pinker’s work is welcomed by the establishment; Chomsky’s criticism is ignored or rejected. Pinker’s writing expresses few qualms about the social hierarchies, differences in power, capacity to dominate and acquire, and unequal rewards of capitalist economic systems—systems that by their natures and in practice induce considerable disparities in income, power, and wealth. Chomsky is an egalitarian who holds that everyone should have an equal say in economic and political matters that affect them, even suggesting that an ideal system would accord equal reward to all (1981). Pinker declares Chomsky’s egalitarian views naïve. In The Blank State (2004: 302), he says Chomsky’s socioeconomic ideal (anarchosyndicalism) is a romantic notion ‘innocent of modern evolutionary theory with its demonstration of ubiquitous conflicts of genetic interest’. By contrast, the evolutionary psychology Pinker defends (2005) paints a Hobbesian ‘darker view of human nature’. Its hallmarks of competition, distrust, and the pursuit of glory (Pinker, 2002) appear to justify the unequal socioeconomic systems that Chomsky criticizes. Evolutionary psychology can justify only if it offers an objective and universal science of human nature, and it can be universal and objective only if it is a natural science. Chomsky holds that it is not: evolutionary psychology does not qualify as a natural science. It is not that there are no natural sciences of the mind, and in principle of human nature. Chomsky’s science of language is a natural science (Chomsky and McGilvray, 2012: hereafter, C&M). And Chomsky holds that a natural science of human nature might be able to justify anarchosyndicalism (Chomsky, 1970, 1987), although in avery indirect way. I explain how below. Apparently, what seem to be remote academic disagreements over what counts as a natural science of mind are relevant to the justification of economic and political institutions. So I begin by sketching the differences in Pinker’s and Chomsky’s views of how to construct natural sciences of mental systems.

Pinker and Chomsky on the sciences of mind Pinker and Chomsky agree that what makes Homo sapiens distinct (what constitutes our distinct nature) can be traced to our minds and what they provide us in terms of cognitive capacities. They agree too that whatever makes us unique must result from biological evolution. If science is to get a grip on what makes us unique, it must do so by acknowledging that what a biblical tradition calls ‘special creation’1 is a product of biologically based evolutionary change. In other crucial ways, however, they disagree. Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists assume that what they call ‘natural selection’ operates over long time spans, typically involving multiple ‘selected’ mutations resulting in complex mind/brain systems that solve practical (action-related) problems. Organisms (or their genes) supposedly benefit from some mutations because ‘selected’ mutations enhance the capacity to survive and produce progeny in specific environments. The process of mutation and selection yields internal systems with complex ‘designs’: innate computational systems that allow the organism to deal with the relevant problems. Current humans have many internal problem solving systems, some of which remain beneficial in the relevant sense, some not—not because of change in social or natural environments. To find these systems, the evolutionary psychologist focuses on the attitudes, choices, capacities, preferences, and behaviours of contemporary humans, seeking both those that benefit and those that are problematic. They make guesses about which systems were ‘selected’ in some specified environment(s) by guessing what would solve problems posed by that environment, or (now) not. They typically (e.g. Cosmides and Tooby, 2005) conceive of the mind/brain as a computer that ‘runs’ a cluster of more-orless devoted computational programs, each configured to solve a specific kind of environmentally posed problem or problems. Like many other evolutionary psychologists, Pinker (2005) adopts a version of what Fodor (1998a; 1998b) calls a ‘computational theory of mind’. To determine internal programs, they do backward engineering: they try to figure out what design a system/program must have to solve problems well in a specified environment. This strategy is reflected in Pinker and Bloom’s (1990): for them, the language system evolved through improvements in the capacity to communicate linguistically. Given these assumptions and their commitment to the idea that internal systems explain behaviour, it is no surprise that evolutionary psychologists…

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-32021-6_7

(Editor: I was unable to purchace the full text of essay, but not without many attempts to use the Springer system!)

Editor: Mr. Pinker’s 1730 word essay challenges the reader patience, and even her foreberance! The final paragraphs of his essay featuring the American reliance on the everpresent ‘Lone Gunman’, a hold over from Lee Harvey Oswald? The Murder of John Kennedy, as notorious as it was/is , even to this day in American political consciousness. Elided in Pinkers Historical Re-Write, a measure of his political conformity to the Myths of the American National Security States’s political imperatives, insures his politcal viability!

…

Mr. Kirk’s killing is, for all of them, a perfect outrage incident. As an advocate of MAGA willing to take the battle to the enemy, Mr. Kirk was a pre-eminent symbol of the coalition. And his suspected killer, an internet-addled loner with a gun, nonetheless has enough left-adjacent trappings (a transgender partner, some antifascist memes) that he can be mentally fitted into a vast liberal conspiracy. The shooting was an unendurable public offense, which mobilized the coalition to muster its forces, in this case a combination of government muscle and social media shaming mobs, to rectify the affront.

Though communal outrages begin with a standard sequence — conspicuous insult or transgression, viral outrage, mass counterattack — they do not unfold according to a determined script. Some assassinations, like that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., led to a violent aftermath; others, like that of Robert F. Kennedy a few months later, left only sadness. The 2001 terrorist attacks pushed the United States into wars, while the 2004 train bombing in Madrid pulled Spain out of one, and neither caused pogroms against Muslims.

The outcome depends on how the incident is perceived. It may be fanned into flames by outrage entrepreneurs who don’t want to let the crisis go to waste. They frame the victim as a martyr for a humiliated group and the perpetrator as an agent of a threatening one.

In the Kirk case, the counterattack so far has been nonviolent, and we should be wary of throwing around scare words like “fascism” and “civil war.” But history shows that the virulent fury uncorked by a communal outrage incident can set off a cascade of unpredictable and dreadful consequences. Mr. Kirk was the innocent victim of a coldblooded killer, apparently acting alone, who should be held to account by the criminal justice system. Cooler heads on the right must push back against the all-too-human temptation to use it as an opportunity to lash out against their apparent enemies.

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