Pinker Pinged

Steven Pinker on loving irregular verbs and living in the least violent century

Author of a dozen books,owner of a single-spaced 18-page resume,reputation of a world-class scientist,Steven Pinker can leave one marvelling at the scope and achievements of a single life. Known for his rock-star looks despite his shock of greying hair,Pinker has written defining books on language and human instincts,which have impressed and divided the scientific community over the last two decades. In different shifts,he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 21 years and now teaches at the department of psychology at the University of Harvard.

In India to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival,the Canada-born American citizen hopes to squeeze the most out of his three-day visit,plotting trips to the old city with camera in hand. The 57-year-old is attentive even after a much-delayed transatlantic flight and half-a-days wait at the Delhi airport. Even with jet lag and exhaustion squat in his eyes,he is like Robert Plant at the end of a long world tour. Sitting beside a heater at a haveli-turned-hotel,he absorbs the folk singer with his sarangi,the mirrored panels and the western tourists being waited upon and says with a smile,This hotel completely panders to the western idea of India.

He was named among the 100 most influential people by Time magazine and called wunderkind by The Washington Post,but Pinker remains a professor at heart. He knows how to string out complex processes into simple ideas. He has mastered this during his Psychology 101 lectures to swathes of undergraduate students. If teaching blends into his writing,conveying his excitement in his field,it also allows him to explain complicated ideas to the intellectually curious. Its true of my readers and my students, he says,I dont assume prior knowledge.

The Language Instinct 1994,written for a general audience,introduced different aspects of language; How the Mind Works 1997 further elaborated on this. In 2002,he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,which studied different dimensions of human nature. His most recent book,The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined 2011,explains the decline in violence through history.

I write intensively when in writing mode, he says. I find it a lot of effort to stop thinking and to come back to it. If Ive the structure of a book,I can work better on a comprehensive whole. So he works seven days a week and till 3 in the morning when he is writing a book.

He has often found answers to the big questions by probing the smaller components. He spent 20 years studying regular and irregular verbs,which resulted in Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language 1999. In a 2000 Harvard article,he writes,I like the irregular verbs of English,all 180 of them,because of what they tell us about the history of the language and the human minds that have perpetuated it. For him,irregular verbs like break/broke vs regular verbs like walk/walked,which cant be generated by rules,tap into our mental dictionary,showing that words can be idiosyncratic and flexible. Verbs,hence,throw light on two topics dear to him rules and memory.

India,which has 500 languages and which is home to two major language families,Dravidian and Indo-European,is an unbelievable laboratory,he says,India has a record of its history in its language.

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Pinker,who is a doctor of philosophy in experimental psychology,uses a psychologists lens on language,seeing language and thought as two separate entities. Does he feel at odds at a literature festival where authors often say,I dont know what I think until I write? He replies,I suspect if writers introspect about the goals of writing,theyd agree that language and thought are not the same thing, adding,I am married to a novelist Rebecca Goldstein,so I can say I know from second-hand experience.

In his most recent work,Better Angels,he illustrates changes in violent behaviour by showing how governance,literacy and cosmopolitanism influence human nature. Better angels refer to human qualities like empathy and fairness which at times succeed in suppressing our inner demons of revenge,sadism,etc. He concludes that the 21st century has been the least violent century. With the help of a single research assistant,he collected large amounts of data for a 700-page tome,to prove tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century,that the murder rate in medieval Europe was more than 30 times what it is today. The history of violence and the psychology of violence were the two aspects that led to this book, says Pinker.

He has had a fair number of detractors. But this book has been violently attacked as a comfort blanket for the smug Andrew Brown in the Guardian. John Gray in Prospect elaborates,While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics his argument that violence is on the way out does not,in the end,rest on scientific investigation. Pinker admits reading all the reviews of his work,even if they trouble him or surprise him with their distortions,or if he feels they are the ramblings of a furious man proved wrong. It is important to be reviewed by peers, he says,you need to make sure you are not full of s.

He is presently working on a style manual for the 21st century and attempting to see if he can write a small book. It will be an updated Strunk and White, he says,with a laugh,referring to the iconic The Elements of Style,which has flogged students,writers and editors into keeping to the straight and narrow path of grammar and language since 1918. It is a wonderful book but it is obsolete, he says,leaning back in his chair for the first time. Split infinitives need to retire and new verbs like ping and pinged must be allowed to breathe freely.