{"id":25974,"date":"2020-02-20T10:29:41","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T18:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=25974"},"modified":"2020-02-20T10:29:41","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T18:29:41","slug":"pinker-the-stinker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/pinker-the-stinker\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinker The Stinker"},"content":{"rendered":"

FYI,\u00a0 the title has nothing to do with my post, it just came in my head so I decided to go with it :)!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"Steven Pinker, Ph.D., is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. In his book, Enlightenment Now<\/em>, he lays out his argument for why the Enlightenment, reason, and humanism, aka progress, is suitable for all people. For Pinker, reason is the answer or at least the way to understand all things while faith\/religious notions should be rejected as a source for framing human life. Pinker writes, \u201cForemost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insidious that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them to, dan you have committed yourself to reason, into holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.\u201d[1]<\/a> On the surface, Pinker is very convincing as he provides mountains of data to support his argument for how science and reason have made the world better. My issue as well as others[2]<\/a> is that Pinker dismisses the honest critiques of Enlightenment, his data is derived to fit his narrative, and he diminishes the value that faith plays in the lives of millions of people. For instance, he writes,<\/p>\n

[W]e must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct. The traditional causes of belief\u2013 faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, hermeneutic parsing of text, the glow of subjective certainty\u2013 are generators of error, it should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. Instead, our beliefs about empirical propositions should be calibrated by their fit into the world.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"Nicholas Maxwell, in his review of Pinker, sums up well the many issues of his stating:<\/p>\n

This is in many ways a terrific book, from which I have learnt much. But it is also deeply flawed. Science and reason are at the heart of the book, but the conceptions that Steven Pinker defends are damagingly irrational. And these defective conceptions of science and reason, as a result of being associated with the Enlightenment Programme for the past two or three centuries, have been responsible, in part, for the genesis of the global problems we now suffer from, and our current inability to deal with them properly. [3]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Depending on who the source is the many problems Maxwell refers to are traced back to religious understandings, the Enlightenment, Modernity, or Post-modernity. The bigger question I am left wrestling with becomes is their room for both the “brain” and the “body.” Another way I could say this is can the head and the heart, thinking, and emotions work together, especially for leaders.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of our reading Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership, Pathology in Everyday Life, where <\/em>Kets de Vries employs both. He writes:<\/p>\n

Mindless neuroscience is not going to be the answer to understand the functioning of the human mind. We might hope that neuroscience will not turn out to be an explanatory fad. That being said, in the years to come, neuroscience could evolve in such a way as to yield solid predictions about how genetics and brain conditions, and all of their complex aggregates and interactions, can influence a specific individual\u2019s specific choices at particular times.[4]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But he also writes about emotions, specifically empathy saying,<\/p>\n

Empathy is a key dimension of emotional intelligence, that is, the ability to recognize our emotions, understand what they\u2019re telling us, and to realize how they affect people around us. It\u2019s a core component in every human relationship \u2013 a cornerstone of interpersonal effectiveness. Empathy helps us understand the unspoken elements of our communication with others. It enables us to be more effective at collaboration and finding solutions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For me, as far as leadership goes, this means we must allow leadership to include both the brain and body because, at the end of the day, it is a relationship involving human beings, not a transaction of commodities.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

———<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Pinker, Steven, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress<\/em> (New York, New York: Viking, an Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018), 8.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Gopnik, Alison. \u201cWhen Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough.\u201d The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, March 17, 2018. https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2018\/04\/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now\/554054\/. Also see this link: https:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/en\/transformation\/steven-pinker-s-ideas-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why\/<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Maxwell, N. “We Need Progress in Ideas about How to Achieve Progress: Steven Pinker: Enlightenment NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. UK: Allen Lane, 2018, 556pp, \u00a325.” Metascience, 2018, Metascience , 27 (2) Pp. 347-350. (2018).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Kets de Vries, Manfred F. R.\u00a0Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership: Leadership Pathology in Everyday Life<\/em>. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 5.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FYI,\u00a0 the title has nothing to do with my post, it just came in my head so I decided to go with it :)! Steven Pinker, Ph.D., is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. In his book, Enlightenment Now, he lays out his argument for why the Enlightenment, reason, and humanism, aka […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":117,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[1340,1791,1541,1790],"class_list":["post-25974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama","tag-dminlgp-9","tag-enlightenment-now","tag-spirit-led-leadership","tag-steve-pinker","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/117"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25974"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25978,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25974\/revisions\/25978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}