Taboos - Pinker on Summers

Pinker on Summers-Hopkins in TNR: cognitive science superstar Steven Pinker, who was recruited away from MIT to Harvard shortly after Nancy Hopkins' feminist putsch, writes in the The New Republic (not online; excerpt via American Scene):

What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair -- the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology.

The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo--the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them--is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense. In 2000, he reported asking university students their opinions of unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to buy and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the highest-bidding parents. He found that most of his respondents did not even try to refute the proposals but expressed shock and outrage at having been asked to entertain them. They refused to consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them. Sound familiar?

Back in 2000, John Entine published Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About, a title that seemed like a clever idea at the time: obviously, American intellectuals aren't in favor of taboos on expression, so this will encourage the book to be widely discussed. Right? Instead, the intellectual community took one look at the title and dropped the book like it had cooties.