Steven Pinker

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Speaker 30:21

Uh

Presenter0:33

My castaway this week is the cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker. An author and Harvard professor, he's been named by Time magazine as one of the world's one hundred most influential scientists and thinkers. The psychology of violence and where language comes from are just two of his specialist subjects. Bill Gates is officially a fan. The man who sends him hate mail related to his work on irregular verbs is not. It would seem that whenever he publishes yet another best selling book, controversy is never far behind. His recent contention that we live in an unusually peaceful time drew opprobrium from many quarters. Born and brought up in Montreal, his parents encouraged vigorous debate around the dinner table. Indeed, it was his mother's interest in the psychology of language and linguistics that sparked his own.

Presenter1:23

He says, I appreciate what my parents did for me beyond words, not in making me what I am, but in my view of what's important in life, what I think about and cherish. Now, isn't that an interesting quote, Stephen Pinker? Because it would seem contrary to so much of your pronouncements. You almost seem in that quote to be subscribing to the notion of nurture over nature, as what is central to your life and your personality.

Steven Pinker1:50

I don't believe that nature and nurture are alternatives. I just believe that nature can't be ignored in understanding nurture. I don't think my parents shaped my personality or my intellect other than by conceiving me, but I do think they gave me a lot of content and subject matter to think about.

Presenter2:06

And what about I mean, you are a a very influential scientist, you're also a very controversial scientist. How does that sit with you? Do the two comfortably go together?

Steven Pinker2:16

I never think that I'm going to be controversial. The opinions that I express always seem perfectly obvious to me when they occur to me. But controversy is what advances ideas, so I don't mind being controversial. I don't aim to be controversial. I just throw out the idea that strikes me as most explanatory and best supported by the evidence. And if other people disagree, we'll see how well the idea survives. Is it impossible?

Presenter2:39

Important to you that you're communicating your ideas and your research to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, rather than just twenty or thirty people.

Steven Pinker2:47

Absolutely. People are interested, and it's irresponsible, I think, of academics to keep the fruits of research up in the Ivory Tower.

Presenter2:56

You travel the world, you're a professor at Harvard, you're writing all of these well-received books, how do you actually relax?

Steven Pinker3:03

With photography, with bicycling. You have a tan pleasure. That's rather a romantic thing. It is. It's it's the ultimate form of togetherness. Uh it has the advantage that you can keep up a conversation the entire way and neither rider is waiting for the other one to catch up at the top of a hill.

Presenter3:05

You have a term pleasure.

Presenter3:17

Neat. Um, you're eight today then. Has it been tricky to get it down to eight?

Steven Pinker3:21

Oh, it was uh agonizing. And I I suffered from a a syndrome that uh I christened Desert Island Disc remorse. That is you you pare it down to eight and you think, Oh, no, maybe I should have included eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen instead of the first five.

Presenter3:35

You're not the only person to have suffered this condition, I can tell you. Um tell us about the first one that we're going to hear this morning.

Steven Pinker3:40

Eric Clapton performing further on up the road at the last waltz concert, the Swan Song of the Band. It captures the camaraderie of musicians on stage. A few seconds into the song, Eric Clapton's guitar falls off its strap and he yells out Rob

Steven Pinker3:57

And without missing a beat, you have Robbie Robertson playing a guitar solo. And this also marked, I think, a turning point in popular music. I think a great rock and roll renaissance of the 60s and early 70s kind of met its end around the time of the last waltz concert.

Speaker 14:24

Someone's gonna hurt you like it hurt me. But I've wrong up the road. Baby, just you wait and see.

Speaker 34:33

Reap just what you sow.

Speaker 34:36

That I'm saying is true.

Presenter4:40

That was Eric Clapton and the band and further on up the road. So, Stephen Pinger, you seem to express yourself always in conversation in these beautifully formed and rather perfect sentences. Is that what it's like inside your head?

Steven Pinker4:50

Is that

Steven Pinker4:52

Definitely not. No, it's a it's a a blooming buzzing confusion, as William James might put it. I have an obsessional streak, so I always have to be thinking about something.

Presenter5:01

Domestically are you obsessional? I mean, do your towels all have to face the same way, and are your shoes in a row?

Steven Pinker5:06

I don't alphabetize my shirts.

Presenter5:07

Okay. When you're writing, how do you go about writing? What's your process?

Steven Pinker5:12

I it's intense. I like to carve out blocks of time where I can work morning, noon and night, seven days a week for as long as I can. I'll get exercise and I'll spend time with my wife Rebecca, but aside from that, I become something of a misanthrope.

Presenter5:27

Your views about the roles of genes in the formation of who we are caused a considerable stir. Can you encapsulate for listeners what your argument then is?

Steven Pinker5:38

Yes, it's that the mind is not a blank slate. This does not mean that culture is unimportant, it doesn't mean that socialization is unimportant, it doesn't mean that learning is unimportant, but we do it because we have got a nature that makes us pay attention to certain things in the environment and not others, that makes us learn certain things easily and other things with great difficulty. So you can't understand learning and culture and socialization without understanding the innate parts of human nature that make culture possible. In this regard, I was strongly influenced by my former colleague at MIT, Noam Chomsky, who proposed a framework for understanding language that was very much along the lines that I've argued for culture. Namely, no child can be born with the rules or vocabulary of a particular language. Obviously, Japanese babies don't have genes for the Japanese language. On the other hand, our house pets don't learn language, exposed to the very same input, and that suggests that there is some kind of wiring of the brain that makes it possible for a baby, but not a cat or a chimpanzee, to learn language.

Presenter6:40

You have said that a phrase like we holded the baby rabbits that maybe a three-year-old might say tells us a lot about how we form language.

Steven Pinker6:48

Yeah, I spent a good part of my professional life studying errors like he sticked it and he teared the paper. What they show is that children right from the get-go are not memorizing what they hear from their parents, but are extracting the mental equivalent of rules of grammar, like add ED to form the past tense. If they just said walked and talked, then they could have memorized those forms from their parents. But if they say sticked and tared and holded, it shows that they must have extracted the rule.

Presenter7:16

I mentioned in the introduction the person who sent you hate mail on the subject of irregular verbs. Um what did he feel so passionately you were getting wrong?

Steven Pinker7:19

Molecular verbs.

Steven Pinker7:23

People have strong opinions on what is the correct form when it comes to irregular verbs. I use the past tense form snuck as the past tense of sneak. I don't think there's anything odd about it, but anyone older than me feels that this is kind of slang or cutesy. But the language is changing, and I think the ne at least in in America, the next generation is going to have no problem with snuck whatsoever.

Presenter7:45

Time for music. It's your second disc What are we gonna hear, Steven Pinker?

Steven Pinker7:48

Der Alter Bulger. This is a terrific example of klezmer music, the music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, and a lot of people associate it with the infectious dance rhythms of a Jewish wedding.

Presenter8:59

Dear Altar Bulgar, the Andy Stepman Kletzmer Orchestra with Itzak Perlman on violin there. So, Steven Pinker, you've said that you picked your parents wisely. Tell me about your parents.

Steven Pinker9:09

My father, Harry Pinker, trained as a lawyer, but did not practise immediately. He sold clothing throughout the province of Quebec, although later in life he went back and opened a law practice. Also was an active real estate landlord and investor.

Presenter9:27

So he was in business. And why di having gained his law degree, which of course is hard work, why did he not initially practise, do you think?

Steven Pinker9:33

I think he had trouble as a young man with no connections establishing a law practice. But I think also in the community in which he grew up what really counted was being your own boss and having your own small business. This is what it meant to be a man.

Presenter9:43

Pants

Presenter9:47

And to be a Jewish man, it was important you said there that he didn't have connections. You know, he wasn't welcomed into the golf club to play around with somebody who might say, Well, you want to set up and practice with this man who I'll introduce you to?

Steven Pinker9:56

Yes, that would be an understatement. Yes, that's right.

Presenter9:57

Yes, that's right. Was he aware of anti-Semitism or do you think it was just a a background noise and he was busy with his life?

Steven Pinker10:03

It was a background noise. In Montreal there was a very vibrant English speaking Jewish community, which was a minority within the English speaking community, which was a minority within the French speaking province, which was a minority within the predominantly English speaking country of Canada.

Presenter10:17

Now you've described your mother and the talk about damning with faint praise you've described her as a competent parent.

Steven Pinker10:23

Oh.

Steven Pinker10:24

Cosmically unjust. She was a spectacular parent. Both of my parents were loving and supportive. I mean, we did have debates. Some of them were influential in my worldview, such as the debate that I lost over whether if the police ever went on strike, people would continue to coexist peacefully or whether all hell would break loose. And as a 14-year-old romantic anarchist, I thought that the police were obsolete. People were naturally peaceful and cooperative. And sure enough, the police did go on strike. And within a few hours, there was widespread looting, rioting, not one but two murders, until by 2 p.m. the government had to call in the Mounties to restore order. So, as so often happens, the parents are right, the child is wrong. But I did learn something that later affected my view of human nature and political theory.

Presenter11:16

And you became an atheist when you were thirteen. Why was that?

Steven Pinker11:19

I don't have a clear memory of becoming an atheist. I don't think I ever had a distinct belief in God. What was much more important was the traditions, the community, the awareness of the Holocaust, the awareness of Israel. And God, you know, it was a part of it, but not a major part. And I think as soon as I started just thinking for myself, there was just no room for God. There was just no evidence for Him.

Presenter11:42

Now I read a quote from you which tickled me so much. You said you were very good at Yiddlish, which is Yiddish Yiddish in English. That you know you would incorporate Yiddish words. These tremendous I mean, I was thinking about your father being in the we would say schmutter business here. I don't know how you say it.

Steven Pinker11:47

Yeah.

Steven Pinker11:55

It's wonderful to hear that in a Scottish accent.

Presenter11:57

I'm probably singing.

Steven Pinker11:58

No, no, that's wonderful. Shmata literally means rag. Yes, rag. It's an irreverent term for the garment industry. And these are words that to various extents are incorporated into American and to a lesser extent British English. Chutzpe, schmendrick for a kind of a hapless, ineffectual person. Zlub kind of related to slob. Kvetch to complain or whine. So I think I probably have a vocabulary of several hundred English words.

Presenter12:00

Yes, rag.

Presenter12:21

Yeah.

Presenter12:25

I'm going to ask you to write some of them down. They're so sensational. It's time for some music. We must fit it in, Steven Pinker. We're on your third.

Steven Pinker12:31

Elvis Costello, God's comic, and this is I guess my my atheist song. The musician begins the song, I Wish You Had Known Me While I Was Alive, and he narrates his encounter with the Almighty.

Presenter12:46

I wish you'd know.

Speaker 112:48

Me when I

Presenter12:48

I was alive.

Presenter12:51

I was full.

Speaker 112:53

Running barely

Speaker 112:56

The crowd would hoot and holler them all.

Speaker 113:01

Uh

Presenter13:01

I wore a drunk's red nose for applause

Presenter13:06

Ah yes, there was a comical priest with a

Speaker 113:11

Joke for the flock and I hand up your fleece

Presenter13:15

That was Elvis Costello and God's Comics. So, Stephen Pinker, you uh make your living then, of course, as an academic and a writer, as we know. Was it clear to you while you were at school that that was going to be the path?

Steven Pinker13:26

No, it was my first year of college. I realized that psychology was for me. I wanted to be a teacher from much earlier in high school. And college I earned money by tutoring high school kids in algebra and geometry and calculus and and science. I taught Sunday school in college as a way of earning money. And I think when I was a high school senior and I said, I want to think for a living as well as teach and and my mother said you want to be in a university.

Presenter13:53

Right. Um, there is a marvellous photo of you appearing on the Canadian equivalent of University Challenge. I I think it's called Reach for the Top, you know that programme was. Was that the highlight of your school career?

Steven Pinker14:02

Certainly the highlight of my high school career by a long shot. We won the Montreal Championship, and so we were high school heroes. I specialized in identifying rock songs and in doing real time math calculations.

Presenter14:16

And apart from the kudos, did it help you get the girls?

Steven Pinker14:17

Hurt.

Steven Pinker14:19

Uh yes. Yeah, it was uh it was the equivalent of being the quarterback on the football team.

Presenter14:20

Yeah, it's

Presenter14:23

Your mother then she she was a young mother. It it strikes me just looking at h her C V and so far as I know it that you were beginning to study. Would it have been around about the same time as your mother? You were sort of students at the same time as it was.

Steven Pinker14:35

So my mother had me when she was uh twenty. She got married at nineteen. She was pregnant with me when she got her bachelor's degree.

Presenter14:38

Yeah.

Steven Pinker14:41

But just bringing up children, though it gave her enormous joy, it wasn't enough. She had three children.

Presenter14:45

She had three children.

Steven Pinker14:46

Three children. So I have uh a sister, Susan, who's three years younger, and a brother, Rob, who's twelve years younger. And in the seventies she went back to school getting a master's degree in counseling. And so we did overlap at McGill University. She was in the School of Education, I was in Arts and Sciences.

Presenter15:01

Now, in a wide sense, you, your mother, and your sister sort of all ended up in the same field.

Steven Pinker15:08

In a way, although very different aspects of psychology, because I'm an experimental psychologist, a basic researcher. My mother was trained as a counselor, later became vice principal of a high school. My sister originally was a child psychologist, now is a journalist and an author. So both of them, my sister with children, my mother with adolescents, would deal with people with their psychological problems. I'm completely incapable of advising anyone on their personal life problems.

Presenter15:09

Yeah.

Presenter15:35

Your mother was given the wonderful nickname of Pink the Shrink, isn't that right?

Steven Pinker15:39

One of her that's right, one of the students at the high school while she was still a counselor before she was vice principal. Let's have some more music then, Steven Pinker.

Presenter15:45

Reported we Yeah.

Steven Pinker15:46

Can I hear you?

Presenter15:46

Yeah.

Steven Pinker15:46

John Coltrane Ole, this was actually from an old Spanish Civil War song, Venga Haleo, which he then completely transformed, giving rise to a kind of cool, eerie feeling.

Presenter16:58

That was John Coltrane and Ole. So, Steven Pinker, would it be fair to say your first big book then was The Language Instinct. That was published in nineteen ninety four and it got uh a lot of attention, a very successful science book. What do you think the key is to writing science that can be understood by, well, you know, somebody like me who's not a scientist?

Steven Pinker17:17

It's overcoming the curse of knowledge, as it's sometimes called. That is, when you know something, it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine what it's like not to know it. But a terrible sin of academics when they try to reach a larger audience is to condescend. The best advice I got on writing was from an editor who told me, Don't assume that you're writing for your image of a truck driver or a chicken plucker. Assume that you're writing for your college roommate, someone who is as intelligent and as curious as you are, but just chose to go into a different line of work.

Presenter17:49

We touched a little on this at the beginning, but let's just get in among it a bit more and roll our sleeves up. This idea that language is so woven into what makes humans human. In terms of your conclusions, what are the headlines of the things that you believe you have found out from your research?

Steven Pinker18:07

I'm interested in the problem of how children acquire language, which is kind of a miracle of the natural world. Without giving kids lessons or homework or feedback, just engaging them in conversation, they end up as pretty competent speakers by the time they're three. How do they do that? How do you go from hearing a bunch of sentences in context to extracting the grammatical rules that allow you to produce and understand sentences that you've never heard before? Well, children are equipped, I would say, selected by the evolutionary process to acquire the code that we call language, namely they memorize vast numbers of words and the combinatorial rules of grammar that assemble words and bits of words into larger combinations. And that's what allows us to convey an infinite number of new ideas.

Presenter18:09

Right.

Presenter18:55

And, yes, of course, grammar and the rules of grammar are fixed and never ever changed, but we know that language is not fixed and is always changing. Does that matter?

Steven Pinker19:04

It sure does matter. Language is uh the original wiki. It emerges organically from people speaking with each other, and it's bound to change.

Presenter19:12

Is it the case then that in fifteen and twenty years' time our kids will be talking much more in sort of text speech? Because that's what people say. Well, of course, we're losing the skill of grammar and language now because everybody's talking to each other in one hundred and forty characters.

Steven Pinker19:25

Yes, no, no, no, I think that that's uh that's nonsense, that kind of fear. Remember 100 years ago people were communicating with telegrams and they charged by the word, so you had to leave out the prepositions and the articles and the little grammatical words, but English didn't lose its prepositions and articles as a result. So we have a particular kind of English that we use in tweets in the same way that our grandparents had a particular kind of English that they used in their telegrams. Part of being a language user is commanding a number of different registers appropriate to the audience.

Presenter19:53

It's time for your fifth choice of the morning. Stephen, tell us about what we're going to hear now.

Steven Pinker19:57

The Neville Brothers Yellow Moon. We're going to hear the mellifluous voice of Aaron Neville articulating one of the great human concerns that this man has been dumped by his woman and he is pleading with the moon to tell him where his ex-girlfriend is, reminding me of Ambrose Bierce's definition of to pray, namely to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Speaker 320:27

Wanna keep peeping in my window

Speaker 320:34

Mmm, do you know something?

Speaker 320:38

You know something that I don't know

Speaker 320:46

Did you see my heart be?

Speaker 320:49

Walking down them railroad tracks

Presenter20:52

That was Yellow Moon from the Neville Brothers, a song about heartbreak there, Stephen Pinker. You yourself are married now for the third time. You met your wife because of an irregular verb, which hardly sounds very romantic. Explain to me what happened.

Steven Pinker21:05

It was tremendously romantic.

Steven Pinker21:07

I wrote a book on the improbable topic of irregular verbs, and in it I talked about the fact that when English offers writers a choice between an irregular or a regular form, dreamed and dreamt, dived and dove, often poets, lyricists, novelists prefer the irregular. And I gave, as an example, a novel, The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind by Rebecca Goldstein, which included the unusual participle stritten. Rebecca picked up the book in a bookstore, looked in the index not for her own name, but for Stephen Jay Gould. But right above Gould was Goldstein, saw that I had cited her and contacted me. We had tea together. Then a magazine invited me to engage in a dialogue with a novelist, and I chose Rebecca. However, at the end of our marvelous four-hour dialogue, the editor of the magazine came in, looked at the tape, and said, Oh, I'm sorry, but the tape recorder didn't work. Would you consider doing it again? And the rest was history.

Presenter22:07

You're right, that is very romantic. And so you are stepfather to Rebecca's now two grown daughters. You don't have children of your own. How much of your knowledge as a scientist do you bring into the home? Do you think, well, I see that's a bit of her mother in her, the way she expresses that?

Steven Pinker22:08

Take it.

Steven Pinker22:19

I think my interest in human nature permeates all of my thoughts. I'll question a theory from academia if it seems to contradict life as I live it. I sometimes try to uh apply grand lessons of human nature to my own decisions, insofar as anyone can consciously guide their own lives based on what they know. But I certainly try.

Presenter22:25

Yeah.

Presenter22:41

You have said that we are, as parents, overrated as shapers of values. Does that mean we're off the hook then with our kids? Does that mean that we can pretty much let them just play on the X Box or eat the sugary seeds?

Steven Pinker22:54

No, so c parents certainly control the happiness and well-being of their children, the skills that the children grow up with. Also how they treat their children is going to affect the nature of their relationship with them, just as the way you treat your spouse affects the quality of the relationship with your spouse. Now, only a newlywed believes that you can shape the personality of your spouse. But that doesn't mean you don't have to worry about how you treat them. Obviously, it it matters how you treat them, and so it matters how you treat your children.

Presenter23:22

And if we have a kid who is a lazy kid, we should just think, well, that's temperament, and we shouldn't fight it.

Steven Pinker23:28

To a certain extent. That is, I don't think we should try to shape children into our image of the kind of child that we want to have. But of course temperament and talent always occupies a range, and clearly children should be encouraged to accomplish the maximum within the range that nature gave them.

Presenter23:45

Now the controversy surrounding your assertions, of course, is that you are heading towards or maybe are thoroughly in the camp of a sort of biological determinism, you know, that the the stupid are stupid, that the poor are poor, that the bad are bad, and you know, that's just the way it is.

Steven Pinker23:59

Absolutely not, and that partly comes from the mistaken equation of the environment with the parents. The parents aren't the entirety of the child's environment, and they may not even be the most important part in terms of lasting impressions. There's also the peer culture, and then of course the culture as a whole. Any time there's immigration and kids successfully assimilate, they're obviously affected by their environment, but the environment they're affected by is not the parental environment, but the culture as a whole. Also, there's an enormous role for chance in the development of individuals. My two favorite statistics that are relevant to the role of different shapers of children are that identical twins separated at birth are highly correlated in their personality and intelligence. That tells us that genes matter. But identical twins reared together are similar but not perfectly correlated, even though they share both their genes and their environment. And what that's telling us is that there is also an enormous role of chance.

Presenter24:54

Now, of course, Stephen, th this is not a round table discussion, and we don't have other scientists here contending that what you're saying is absolutely wrong. But there are scientists who do that. There are people who'd say that they entirely disagree with you and that they have the empirical evidence to prove the opposite of what you're saying. Do you understand why other scientists get so upset with you?

Steven Pinker25:11

Oh, yes, and I wrote a I wrote a book about that. For one thing, I think that a lot of the scientists who claim that they have evidence against the importance of genes just don't look at data that take genes into account. If you simply look at correlations between biological parents and their biological offspring, then you don't know whether you're looking at effects of genes or parenting.

Presenter25:30

Do you quite like having a right good old, as we would call it in Britain, ding dong?

Steven Pinker25:33

No, I it it it gets to me and and I get upset when I get a scathing review. For me the pleasure comes from insight, from a simple idea that explains diverse phenomena. The controversy comes when other people don't think that it explains the phenomena or just don't think that the explanation is correct.

Presenter25:51

On that note, we shall turn to the music then. We're on uh your sixth piece.

Steven Pinker25:55

Leonard Cohen, I'm Your Man. Leonard Cohen grew up in the community that I grew up in, was a contemporary of my mother's, and wrote the the romantic song I'm Your Man, which uh Rebecca insists that I sing to her every Valentine's Day.

Speaker 126:10

If you want a lover.

Speaker 126:13

I'll do anything you ask me to.

Speaker 126:20

And if you want another kind of love.

Speaker 126:26

I'll wear a mask for you.

Speaker 126:31

If you want a partner take my hand or If you wanna strike me down in anger

Presenter26:41

That was Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man, and you said going into that, Stephen Pinker, that your wife Rebecca makes you sing that each Valentine's Day. Are you a good singer? No. Uh

Steven Pinker26:49

Yeah.

Presenter26:50

So even greater proof of your love than that you're willing to sing it for her. Let's talk a little bit more, then, about this job you have of illuminating human nature, as you've called it.

Steven Pinker26:52

You're willing

Presenter26:59

One of your more recent books is The Better Angels of Our Nature, and there are, I think, eight hundred and forty one densely printed pages arguing the case that we live in a much more gentle, happy, and unviolent society than we ever did.

Steven Pinker27:15

That's what the numbers tell us. That is, if you get your impression of how violent the world is from the news, the watch word if it bleeds, it leads, it's going to be radically distorted because news is stuff that happens. It's not stuff that doesn't happen. It's a fact about human psychology that we tend to estimate probability by how easily we can remember examples. This is the so-called availability heuristic discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which will therefore be distorted if instead of consuming statistics you consume gory events. So, what I do is try to tell my story in graphs: graphs of war over time, graphs of homicide over time, graphs of rape over time, and all of them show a bumpy but downward trajectory.

Presenter28:00

Um your book, arguing against the idea that we're a blank slate, and your most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, some reviewers say that they entirely contradict each other.

Steven Pinker28:09

Yes, and that really is missing the point of the blank slate. One of the reasons that people want humans to be a blank slate is that they fear that if we have any inborn tendencies that are nasty and brutish, then that scuppers all hope for social progress. Why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and will just screw it up no matter what you do? I argued back then that that was a non-sequitur, because human nature is complex. So even if we do have some motives that lead us to violence or oppression, we also have parts of human nature that can push back against it. We've got empathy, we have self-control, we have language, we have reason. The better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln called them, which can, through the right social institutions like the rule of law and democracy, get the upper hand.

Presenter28:57

Let's have some music. We're on your seventh choice of the morning, Steven Pinker. Tell us what we're going to hear now.

Steven Pinker29:02

Jimi Hendrix Machine Gun. This is one of the great anti-war songs from the 1960s. Unlike a lot of the anti-war songs, it's not sentimental or treakly, but actually rather harrowing, in which both the guitar and the drum riffs replicate the sound of a machine gun. And part of a real change in history of an anti-war movement that succeeded in ending a war as the war was going on, one of the episodes of the transition away from war that I write about in Better Angels.

Presenter29:47

Yeah.

Presenter29:47

Yeah.

Speaker 329:47

Uh

Presenter29:47

Uh

Speaker 329:48

Uh

Presenter29:48

Uh

Speaker 329:48

Uh

Speaker 329:53

Uh

Presenter30:00

Jimmy Hendricks with Machine Gun. I wonder, Stephen Pinker, what characteristics do you think that you inherited from your parents?

Steven Pinker30:08

Oh, I think I inherited a good nature from my father, although knowing that humans are prone to self-deception, people should take what I say about myself with a grain of salt,'cause I'm the last person to judge. So with that caveat, here's what I what I pride in myself. Both my parents are highly uh verbal and articulate. My mother is intellectually voracious, reads constantly, loves ideas for their own sake.

Presenter30:33

Does she argue with you about your ideas?

Steven Pinker30:35

Yes. I send my drafts of uh book chapters to anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen people, and my mother being one of them.

Presenter30:43

When you think about all the books you've written and you think of all the work you've done as an academic, what would you like your legacy to be?

Steven Pinker30:50

To reintroduce the topic of human nature as a central concern of all of the human sciences, and also I think to get people to step back and reflect on the way we live our lives. And the greatest gratification I get from readers who write to me is not so much you've convinced me that this idea is right or wrong, but rather I never realized you could ask these questions, that you could treat human behavior as an intellectual problem to be pondered.

Presenter31:17

As you know, Stephen, I'm going to maroon you on this desert island in the middle of nowhere. How will your emotions be then? How will you cope with your days?

Steven Pinker31:26

Well, uh like I'm I assume all of your castaways, uh intense loneliness and uh longing and nostalgia. Although, on the other hand, I am a loner and uh I do

Steven Pinker31:35

Treasure

Steven Pinker31:36

long periods of time in solitude and in contemplation.

Presenter31:40

It's time for your final disc then. What are we gonna hear?

Steven Pinker31:42

Sarah Von Lullaby of Birdland, a quite remarkable display of singing virtuosity, but also a kind of linguistic virtuosity. This is the great lost art form of scat singing, in which nonsense syllables are put to music, and it's the aspect of language that has nothing to do with meaning or syntax, but just the pure joy of sound.

Presenter32:04

So baby, do you be your baby doopy doopie?

Presenter32:35

Sha-ba-ba-ba-bi-bi-bi-bi-du-ti-ba-da-ba-ba.

Speaker 132:40

Beyond beautiful ba dea.

Speaker 332:45

Uh

Presenter32:48

Da da da da. Yeah.

Presenter32:50

Sarah Vaughan with Lullaby of Birdland. So, Stephen, we get to the point then where I'm going to give you the books. You get the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible, or if you'd prefer the Torah.

Steven Pinker33:15

Uh I I'll pick the Bible'cause then I get the Torah for free.

Presenter33:18

And uh you get to take another book of your own.

Steven Pinker33:21

As a student of language, it has to be the Oxford English Dictionary. Not only is it big, it would keep me busy for a long time, but it captures the history of the English language.

Presenter33:29

Right, it's yours then. And um also a luxury for the island. What will your luxury be?

Steven Pinker33:33

I think that would be a carbon fiber bicycle. Not only would it get me around the island, but a bicycle is a triumph of engineering. You've got combined the biomechanical efficiency of muscle, which has been honed by a billion years of evolution, with the one thing that evolution could not produce, namely a wheel.

Presenter33:36

Yeah.

Presenter33:51

Right, it's yours then. And if you had to save just one disk from the waves, which one would it be?

Steven Pinker33:56

I think it would have to be Eric Clapton with the band further on up the road.

Presenter33:59

Okay, that's yours. Steven Pinker, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Steven Pinker34:03

Thank you.

Presenter34:39

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.