This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

I'm Alex Blaisdell, the author of Pinker's Progress, the celebrity scientist at the

Center of the Culture Wars, published in 2021.

This is the profile of a very public thinker and a darling of the billionaire class confronting

or not a crisis in their picture of the world.

It's about his ways of seeing and habits of mind and how they succeed or fail at making sense of our current conjuncture.

There seems to be a broad consensus that liberalism, the dominant worldview in much of the so-called West, has deep,

possibly fatal flaws. I wanted to understand how Pinker, one of contemporary liberalism's

intellectual tribunes, was responding to those challenges, to think about who and what his wildly

popular ideas are good for. In many ways, Pinker's ideas, particularly his triumphalism about capitalist

democracy and his pearl clutching about wokeism seem even less relevant today than they did five years

ago. But what seems more trenchant than ever, especially in the wake of the latest dump of

Jeffrey Epstein files, are the articles explicit and implicit

critiques of how the intellectual service class operates.

Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism, covering culture,

politics, and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

Pinker's Progress, the celebrity scientist at the center of the culture wars.

By Alex Blastel.

Read by Christopher Ragland. And produced by Esther Opochuggeny.

On a recent afternoon, Stephen Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and best-selling author of

upbeat books about human progress,

...