Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University Steven Pinker on Friday will deliver this year's Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award keynote address at the 26th annual Norris and Margery Bendetson Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) symposium.
Pinker is one of nine recipients of this year's Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, an honor that is traditionally presented at the EPIIC symposium to individuals who have demonstrably utilized the values of scholarship, research and teaching in order to solve pressing global issues.
The speech will be followed by an interview with renowned journalist Christopher Lydon, former host of National Public Radio's "The Connection," as well as a question-and-answer session with the audience.
This year's symposium, which runs Wednesday through Sunday, is titled "Conflict in the 21st Century" and will bring together prominent speakers and experts as the culmination of the EPIIC colloquium.
Pinker, a distinguished public intellectual with extensive scientific credentials, forayed into the field of international relations in his new book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" (2011). In the book, he combines political science, game theory, statistical analysis and sociology into a hypothesis that explains the decline of global violence in the second half of the 20th century.
He argues that the development of pacifistic social norms engendered by numerous exogenous factors — such as the development of a powerful state Leviathan that enforces law and the concomitant construction of a positive-sum economy — has made humanity fundamentally more humane and less inclined to resort to violence.
Pinker's keynote speech will serve as one of the major focal points of this year's symposium, according to Institute for Global Leadership Director Sherman Teichman.
"I think this will be one of the pivotal moments of the symposium in terms of the uniqueness of Pinker's argument: has violence declined or not?" Teichman said.
Teichman said that Pinker's multidisciplinary synthesis of various academic fields made him a natural candidate to be the keynote speaker at this year's symposium.
"It's significant that an individual of such great stature is going to deliver the keynote speech," he said.
Graham Starr, a freshman EPIIC student, explained that Pinker's position within the intellectual community, together with the power of his rhetoric, figured prominently in his selection as the keynote speaker.
"He understands what we're doing, and he is the ideal person to be our speaker because he is such a powerful person in ideas and in conveyance and in ideology," Starr said.
"Because he is such a powerful intellectual, he is not only the type of person we could learn a lot from, but also one who could also influence us and influence others to go through this path of understanding conflict and making the world a little better, because I think at the end of the day that's what most people do."
Teichman anticipates that the rapport between Lydon and Pinker will invigorate the symposium with the robust intellectual inquiry and interdisciplinary exchange that are hallmarks of the IGL and its cornerstone EPIIC program.
"Christopher Lydon will be coming in dialogue with Steven Pinker, so we'll have a dialogical moment on the book to keynote this symposium," Teichman said.
Pinker is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and has been named one of "Time Magazine's" 100 most influential scientists and thinkers amongst his numerous accolades. He also holds a spot on "Prospect and Foreign Policy's" prestigious list of the 100 top public intellectuals and has received numerous awards for his work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
EPIIC student Aparna Ramanan hopes that the thought-provoking argument that lies at the core of Pinker's 800-page manifesto will lead to discussion among attendees and influence them to examine and reanalyze the prisms through which they view modern global conflict and pacification. She added that she was interested in probing deeper into the statistical methodology that informed Pinker's conclusion.
"He's talking about the fact that war has decreased, and I think that's a very important assertion to debate and argue about because that changes how we look at the 21st century and conflict within it," Ramanan, a junior, said. "Our class found it a contentious issue and we had a lot of questions about the methodology by which these statements are made. We thought it would be a very noteworthy keynote to address," she said.
