Politics of Human Nature, Part III
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Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
Have you read any of Steven Pinker’s books which deal with human nature? If so, would you recommend his work?
Pinker is one or another brand of cognitive psychologist. It is a field that has much to offer, but the psychologists themselves are often prisoners of convention when they step outside the narrow range of their research interests. Pinker, according to interviews and comments on his extremely self-important website, thinks every day and in every way Enlightenment rationality is making us more prosperous, peaceful, and happy. It’s a dandy little world for the hair-cut needing Pinker, who, by the way, does not have the good sense to know that it is not in the best of taste for non-Christians coming from a different religious tradition to borrow the word “gospel” to describe their own work.