Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Dangerous Ideas

Take a look at some of the questions below, all of which come from this article by Steven Pinker, who teaches at Harvard:

"Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?"

"Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?"

"Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?"

"Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?"

"Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?"

"Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?"

"Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?"

"Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?"

"Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?"

"Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?"

When you read all of Pinker's article, you'll see that he's doing more here than just providing interesting questions to discuss on road-trips or at nerdy get-togethers. (Honestly, I can see my friends and I spending lots of time talking about these, but I am not sure how many of us would boldly debate them in a more academic setting). Instead, he wants us to think about why we respond to so-called "dangerous ideas" the way we do, and how we should respond to them.

I was particularly impressed by his comments about academia (towards the end). He points to the Harvard debacle over Larry Summer's simply raising a question about gender differences as a prime example of academics' close-mindedness towards ideas they find threatening or unpleasant.

"Tragically, there are few signs that the debates will happen in the place where we might most expect it: academia. Though academics owe the extraordinary perquisite of tenure to the ideal of encouraging free inquiry and the evaluation of unpopular ideas, all too often academics are the first to try to quash them. The most famous recent example is the outburst of fury and disinformation that resulted when Harvard president Lawrence Summers gave a measured analysis of the multiple causes of women's underrepresentation in science and math departments in elite universities and tentatively broached the possibility that discrimination and hidden barriers were not the only cause."

A really smart article--well worth reading.

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