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I’m asking students around the country: Who are your heroes? There’s always a long pause after I ask. But eventually one of the students suggested Steven Pinker. Another chimed in Jonathan Haidt. There was general nodding around the table.

Both men are psychology professors, at Harvard and N.Y.U., who bravely stand against what can be the smothering orthodoxy that inhibits thought on campus, but not from the familiar conservative position.

One way Pinker does it is by refusing to be pessimistic.

In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard University psychologist and famed intellect Steven Pinker argues humans are now living in the most peaceful era in the history of our species.

there is plenty of evidence supporting Pinker’s claim. Most scholars agree the percentage of people who die violent war-related deaths has plummeted through history; and that proportionally violent deaths decline as populations become increasingly large and organized, or move from “nonstate” status—such as hunter–gatherer societies—to fully fledged “states.”

the percentage of a population suffering violent war-related deaths—fatalities due to intentional conflict between differing communities—does decrease as a population grows. At the same time, though, the absolute numbers increase more than would be expected from just population growth.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry with a detailed critique of the A.P.A. guidelines.“The report is blinkered by two dogmas. One is the doctrine of the blank slate” that rejects biological and genetic factors, Pinker wrote, adding thatThe word “testosterone” appears nowhere in the report, and the possibility that men and women’s personalities differ for biological reasons is unsayable and unthinkable.The other dogma, Pinker argued,is that repressing emotions is bad and expressing them is good — a folk theory with roots in romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood, but which is contradicted by a large literature showing that people with greater self-control, particularly those who repress anger rather than “venting,” lead healthier lives: they get better grades, have fewer eating disorders, drink less, have fewer psychosomatic aches and pains, are less depressed, anxious, phobic, and paranoid, have higher self-esteem, are more conscientious, have better relationships with their families, have more stable friendships, are less likely to have sex they regretted, are less likely to imagine themselves cheating in a monogamous relationship.

In Pinker’s view, the A.P.A. guidelines fail to recognize thata huge and centuries-long change in Western history, starting from the Middle Ages, was a “Civilizing Process” in which the ideal of manhood changed from a macho willingness to retaliate violently to an insult to the ability to exert self-control, dignity, reserve, and duty. It’s the culture of the gentleman, the man of dignity and quiet strength, the mensch. The romantic 1960s ethic of self-expression and escape from inhibitions weakened that ethic, and the A.P.A. report seems to be trying to administer the coup de grâce.

Pinker suggested rather thatOne could argue that what today’s men need is more encouragement to enhance one side of the masculine virtues — the dignity, responsibility, self-control, and self-reliance — while inhibiting others, such as machismo, violence, and drive for dominance.

Not only are the values that the left takes for granted heatedly disputed in many sections of the country, the way many Democratic partisans assert that their values supplant or transcend traditional beliefs serves to mobilize the right.

liberal democracy’s allowance of these things inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions — about a third of most western populations lean toward authoritarianism — and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.

“Libertarians and/non-authoritarians,” Stenner writes,are likewise aroused and activated under these conditions, and move toward positions of greater racial, moral and political tolerance as a result. Which increases political polarization of the two camps, which further increases normative threat, and so it goes on. This is what I mean by the core elements of liberal democracy creating conditions that inevitably undermine it.

In an era of polarizing ideologies, Professor Pinker, a linguist and social psychologist, is tough to pin down. He is a big supporter of Democrats, and donated heavily to former President Barack Obama, but he has denounced what he sees as the close-mindedness of heavily liberal American universities. He likes to publicly entertain ideas outside the academic mainstream, including the question of innate differences between the sexes and among different ethnic and racial groups. And he has suggested that the political left’s insistence that certain subjects are off limits contributed to the rise of the alt-right.

“I have a mind-set that the world is a complex place we are trying to understand,” he said. “There is an inherent value to free speech, because no one knows the solution to problems a priori.”

He described his critics as “speech police” who “have trolled through my writings to find offensive lines and adjectives.”

D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.

the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.

Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.

the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years

Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II.

the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.

Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)

He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.

What’s behind all this good news?The most overarching explanation would be that the Enlightenment worked. The idea that if we — we being humanity — set ourselves the goal of improving well-being, if we try to figure out how the world works using reason and science, every once in a while we can succeed.

You have argued that there is such a thing as human nature. Do you think we can transcend it?Part of human nature allows us to control the other part of our human nature. Even though humans tend to be unreasonable, it can’t be the case that we’re incapable of reason — otherwise, you’d never be able to make the argument that we’re being unreasonable. Even if we tend to backslide to irrationality, that doesn’t mean we should indulge that when we are deliberating how to run a society.

I was surprised by how much interest there’s been from centrist politicians, who are desperate for a coherent narrative to defend centrist liberalism, cosmopolitanism, open society, from the threats both by populists and by the hard left. I think there is a hunger for a coherent worldview that isn’t just the status quo, the un-Trumpism. We can do better than that. We ought to use reason and science to enhance human well-being.

news outlets and social media are crackling with a debate over the value of free speech vs. the rooting out of systemic bias.

It’s past time we stopped attaching labels such as “liberal” or “progressive” to a movement that is anything but.

whether I agree with anything Pinker says — whether any of us do, really — is beside the point. What struck me most, reading about the coordinated attack on his integrity, is something Pinker said in his own defense.

one thing, at least, has gotten better. More than 1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty—so many, so fast, that the world might be able to declare, within a decade, the end of this most miserable form of deprivation. “The global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history,” Jim Yong Kim, a former president of the World Bank, recently argued. “This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time.”

Or perhaps not. In an acidic rebuke to world leaders, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, argues that the effort to end global poverty has failed. More people live in deprivation now than two decades ago. “We squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston wrote in his last report.

The pessimistic argument is a hard one to make when looking at the raw, headline numbers. The global extreme-poverty rate fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015; the number of poor people dropped from 2 billion to 700 million. But Alston believes that by focusing only on those numbers, the world is deluding itself.

the thing that struck me about the presidents’ answers wasn’t their legal insufficiency, but rather their stunning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the presidents’ understanding of the law, that has created a campus crisis.

If Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn had chosen to model their policies after the First Amendment, many of the presidents’ controversial answers would be largely correct. When it comes to prohibiting speech, even the most vile forms of speech, context matters. A lot.

For example, surprising though it may be, the First Amendment does largely protect calls for violence. In case after case, the Supreme Court has held that in the absence of an actual, immediate threat — such as an incitement to violence — the government cannot punish a person who advocates violence. And no, there is not even a genocide exception to this rule.

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.

In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

In April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure had risen to 38 percent.

Over the same period, the share of Democrats who voiced little or no confidence rose much less and from a smaller base line — to 13 percent from 9 percent.

“Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech, write in their 2022 article “From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science.” But the data “do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science.”

Sacks makes three points: that “new” atheists lack the gravitas of old ones, that religion is the only reliable source of morality, so that without faith the world would crumble, and that a plurality of faiths is a bulwark against religious “fundamentalists,” whom he sees as not religious at all.

it’s simply not true that we haven’t grappled with those “real issues.” It’s just that they don’t upset most of us as much as Sacks thinks they should

Holocaust? Really? And did the Christian ethic prevent that? Indeed, much of the Holocaust was the inevitable working-out of a Christian animus against Jews, a reflection of the eternal Jewish status as killers of Christ.

women’s rise to economic dominance within the middle class continues

What isn’t changing is that top leadership positions remain overwhelmingly filled by men. “As the 99 percent has become steadily pinker, the 1 percent has remained an all-boys club,”

We live in a hollow patriarchy: the edifice is patriarchal, while the majority of its occupants approach egalitarianism. This generates strange paradoxes. Even women with servants and powerful jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars feel that they have an institutional disadvantage. And they’re right. Women in the upper reaches of power are limited in ways that men simply are not.

While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that's to be expected. Serious "deep attention" reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century

From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books. In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."

much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of "the reading class" beyond what may be its natural limits.

the public has become more adverse to the use of force by government. The most obvious example, he wrote in response to my email inquiry, is war

Pinker cited 13 other examples in support of his position that people have become less tolerant of violence, including “concern over police violence. During the 1960s race riots, police would kill dozens of young black men in a single night, but the public barely noticed”; “Capital punishment is on the way out”; “Domestic violence (e.g., wife-beating) used to be a joke (as in Jackie Gleason’s “One of these days, Alice – Pow! Right in the kisser”), now it is an abomination”; “Corporal punishment (strapping and paddling) are on their way out of American schools”; “Bullying in the playground, once thought to be a normal or even desirable feature of boyhood, has become a national issue”; and “American football may soon be revolutionized by concern about concussions.”

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at N.Y.U., noted in an email that for liberals, “compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.” Conservatives, in contrast, “believe more in ‘just deserts’ and making criminals pay.”

This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism.

Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Anton took issue with an article I wrote for this magazine in which I described Trump as reminiscent of Plato’s description of a tyrant emerging out of a decadent democracy and argued that we should do what we could to stop him.