Steven Pinker has a very odd definition of the word "dangerous." He writes an article in The Chicago Sun Times in which he lists twenty two questions that he calls dangerous ideas, the sort of thing to get your blood pressure up.
Well, a good antidote for high blood pressure is laughter and Denyse O'Leary's answers to Pinker's dangerous questions offer some of that.
The fact of the matter is that there are indeed dangerous ideas, but they're dangerous because they transgress materialist or PC orthodoxies and are liable to get you fired, shunned, or otherwise hated by the keepers of the materialist dogmas at our colleges, universities, and newsrooms.
Here are a few (In fairness, Pinker does give more general variants of #1 and #5):
- IQ, like other human attributes, is racially linked.
- The structure of the cosmos is best explained in terms of intentional engineering.
- Homosexuality is a perversion of human sexuality.
- Abortion is murder.
- On average, men are better at math/science than women.
- Global warming is a hoax.
- We are succeeding in Iraq.
- Purposeless processes cannot account for the attributes of living things.
I'm not arguing here that any of the above are true, only that it's much more dangerous to espouse them in some settings, especially the academy, than it is to voice most of the ideas that Pinker lists.
RLC