Claire Conger

Do Pollyannas get canceled?

Steven Pinker, in his 2002 tomb The Blank Slate, tells the story of a Harvard psychology professor’s being canceled—in 1971! when social media were leaflets and landlines. The professor’s sin was to posit that, without our societal structure of race and class, talent and intelligence would sort people and the ensuing stratifications would be self-perpetuating. Talented and intelligent people would be able to make more money and live in more exclusive neighborhoods; they would select each other for marriage, send their offspring to good schools, and their talented and intelligent children would follow in their prosperous footsteps. This idea was misconstrued as racist, and the professor found himself not only with lectures canceled, but threatened physically. Chanting mobs would not let him speak.

The professor’s idea describes a meritocracy, exactly what we pretend our society is. So why the fuss? Was it because the name of the article in which his idea was published bore the hot-button title “IQ,” no doubt chosen by an editor with an eye toward sales? Who in this story was making assumptions about race and intelligence?

In college, our game theory teacher gave us a paper to read titled “Sorting and Mixing, Race and Sex” and he challenged us to play this game: Make a checkerboard and using, say, nickles and dimes, arrange them however you like. Now, make up some rule, any rule, about the coins’ arrangement, then move the coins accordingly. You find that the coins segregate. The paper, it turns out, is available on the web. It was written by Thomas Schelling and and included in his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, published 1978. Mr. Schelling won the Nobel prize in 2005. No such accolades for the psychology professor.

Mr. Schelling, an economist, posits a correlation between segregation and “a great many macro-phenomena, like depression and inflation, that do not reflect any universal desire for lower incomes or higher prices. The same applies to bank failures and market crashes. What goes on in the ‘hearts and minds’ of small savers has little to do with whether or not they cause a depression. The hearts and minds and motives and habits of millions of people who participate in a segregated society may or may not bear close correspondence with the massive results that collectively they can generate.” (pages 140-141 Micromotives and Macrobehavior) He says, in essence, that we’re doomed to be segregated, and he wasn’t canceled.

Mr. Pinker mentions Ms. Schelling, briefly, as a political scientist, in his (Pinker’s) discussion of Hobbesian traps and people forming groups in fear they’ll be outnumbered. “Since one man’s containment is another man’s encirclement, this can send the spiral of danger upward.” (pages 322-323 The Blank Slate).

Mr. Schelling died, at 95, in 2016. I wonder if he would have maintained such a generous view of humankind had he lived through the recent rise in “populism” and witnessed the white-supremacist mob storm the U.S. capitol.