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Damn you, Gary Stix! I was just about to head off on a vacation when my old Scientific American buddy sent me an email command: “Attack, John!” Gary’s email linked to a New Republic essay by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: “Science is Not Your Enemy,” snidely subtitled, “An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians.”
I like and respect Pinker. But a more accurate title for his condescending essay would have been, “Kicking the Humanities When They’re Down.”
He harangues humanities folks—whom I’ll call Humists–for resenting science’s increasing intrusion into their intellectual territory. According to Pinker, Humists should be “delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences,” which have become “indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.”
Pinker faults Humists for accusing scientists of “scientism,” which could be defined as excessive trust in science. Attempting rhetorical jujitsu, Pinker suggests that science, because it is such a uniquely self-critical and successful generator of knowledge, deserves all our trust. Hence scientism...
I like and respect Pinker. But a more accurate title for his condescending essay would have been, “Kicking the Humanities When They’re Down.”
He harangues humanities folks—whom I’ll call Humists–for resenting science’s increasing intrusion into their intellectual territory. According to Pinker, Humists should be “delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences,” which have become “indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.”
Pinker faults Humists for accusing scientists of “scientism,” which could be defined as excessive trust in science. Attempting rhetorical jujitsu, Pinker suggests that science, because it is such a uniquely self-critical and successful generator of knowledge, deserves all our trust. Hence scientism...