If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
Interpretation
Values like peace and equality must be defended from unfounded psychological claims.
In this quote, Steven Pinker emphasizes the importance of protecting foundational values such as peace and equality from being undermined by psychological assertions that lack evidentiary support. He argues that in order to uphold commitments to truth and science, we must ensure that our understanding of human psychology does not cloud or distort these critical values, which are essential for a just society.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate on the importance of scientific integrity in promoting social values.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
Time will discover everything to posterity; it is a babbler, and speaks even when no question is put.
Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.
The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance.
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