Steven Pinker is Half-Right on Education

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker is a standout contributor to our national dialogue. When Pinker talks, people listen. What he says about Harvard’s once-in-a-generation review of its course structure is important.

And what he says tells us a lot about our intellectual elite and the way they experience the world—and more crucially how they impress their opinions on the rest of us.

Pinker looks at the university’s “Report of the Committee on General Education” and finds a couple of problems. First of all he doesn’t like the tone of the committee’s approach to Science and Technology, and secondly he doesn’t like the approach to Reason and Faith.

On Science and Technology he worries about the introduction:

“Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative.”

Well yes, life-saving medicines and nuclear weapons, “and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers.”

To Pinker, the committee is missing the point.

Missing from the report is a sensitivity to the ennobling nature of knowledge: to the inherent value, with consequences too far-reaching to enumerate, of understanding how the world works. For one thing, it is a remarkable fact that we have come to understand as much as we do about the natural world: the history of the universe and our planet, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life.

Exactly, Dr. Pinker. The knowledge we have gathered in the last couple of centuries about the natural world is nothing short of miraculous. And the more we know, the more mysterious the universe appears.

But Pinker is also worried about the juxtaposition of Reason and Faith.

[T]he juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith — believing something without good reasons to do so — has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these.

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Religion is an important force, to be sure, but so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization.

Oh dear, Dr. Pinker. The reason that reason and faith are juxtaposed is because they are a Yin and Yang: the “Is” and the “Ought,” the facts and the meaning of the facts.

It’s all very well to amass a pile of facts about the world, but what do they mean? And what do we do about it? Faith or Religion is the process by which we breathe meaning into facts and form a judgment about “what is to be done.”

In fact, we can never “know” what is to be done. Everything about the future is uncertain, and that uncertainty is encapsulated in the findings of Kant that we cannot prove the existence of God, nor can we prove the non-existence of God. Similarly in the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel came up with his incompleteness theorem that states that the consistency of the axioms (the givens) in a system cannot be proved within the system.

That means that in order to prove the validity of the axioms of a system you must build a bigger system that tests the axioms of the smaller system. And so on.

Humans have come up with an ingenious system to deal with this radical uncertainty: Faith. We live out our lives on faith, assuming that certain things are true even though we can’t prove them to be true.

And even more radically, we have faith in reason. Why should reason and the application of reason in science be absolutely true? All we know is that reason works, provided it is confirmed by experiment, in all the science we have done thus far.

Reason is a very human tool for living in the world. How do we know that it is universal? We don’t. We just have faith in it.