Steven Pinker: evaluation

Transcript context

…If I could just interject on this, given this campaign season and also what you can, say, see on Twitter if you look for it, do you think public speech is now evolving to become less polite? In America? It’s possible. I don’t think that the Trumpism shows that our attitudes have changed, that we’re becoming more misogynistic or racist. You can do some Google searches that are quicker than Gallup or Pew polls to track some of these changes. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown that, for example, if you Google for various racist or sexist terms that are used in jokes, you get a pretty good barometer of racism that people may not be willing to admit to in public. If you do that, you don’t see a sudden U‑turn in the popularity of racist jokes in the last, say, six months. I think it is more a question of people who kept their attitudes to themselves now feeling that they’re allowed to get away with it, that some of the taboos have been broken. Whether they will reassert themselves with the decline of Trump, we don’t know. I kind of hope so. I think there is a benign taboo against overtly racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language. There are ugly attitudes, and there always will be: there is a benevolent hypocrisy and taboo where there are certain things that you just don’t say in public because that does legitimate them. They can be threatened. We saw that with taboo words for sexuality starting in the ’60s. Words that you could not say in print or on the airwaves are now common. That could happen with racist and homophobic terms. I hope not. Too early to tell. Next question.…

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