Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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I'm Jonathan Kay.

My guest this week is Stephen Pinker,

a widely known professor of psychology at Harvard University

and the author of over a dozen books.

He's also been named to Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.

In recent years, Professor Pinker has added another more informal distinction to his resume. There is perhaps no public intellectual

anywhere in the world who regularly succeeds in driving progressive critics baddie.

And on the surface it's hard to explain why because Stephen Pinker's

views aren't all that conservative. Rather his recent books have stood up for mainstream concepts

like the scientific method and freedom of speech.

This includes his 2018 bestseller Enlightenment Now, the case for reason, science, and humanism.

Some of you listeners who've been with the Colette podcast since the beginning may remember his 2019 appearance on this show when he talked about the reaction to that book.

What really seems to have irked many of Pinker's critics is that he refuses to proclaim Western civilization of failure,

even as many of his fellow academics have been gnashing their teeth over Donald Trump and what they describe as the general malignance of the society

over which he presided.

And in the last few weeks history seems to be repeating itself with the release of Pinker's

...