Steven Pinker illustrates the main idea of his latest popular science book with a joke from the Soviet Union.
A political dissident stands in a Moscow train station, handing out leaflets to passersby. When KGB officers come to arrest him, they discover that the papers are blank. “What’s the meaning of this?” they ask, to which the man replies: “What is there to write? It’s so obvious!”
Just like the little boy who pointed out his emperor was naked, Pinker concludes, turning private knowledge into common knowledge can have a “mind-blowing” effect. Being a skilful practitioner of this publishing genre, he duly expands his single insight into an overarching theory about humanity itself.
In a nutshell, he argues that all our interactions are driven by the same “co-ordination games”, guessing what people know, whether they know you know, and so on. We strive to create mutual understandings that will exposé scandals, sustain marriages or keep organisations running smoothly, but a society without any polite fictions would be quite unbearable.
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A Harvard psychology professor who counts Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg as fans, Pinker delivers his case much like a sprightly college lecture. Quotes from Friends and Curb Your Enthusiasm are sprinkled throughout his explanations of how common knowledge decides election results and fuels cryptocurrency bubbles.
Pinker’s chief focus, however, is on everyday relationships. He pokes gentle fun at our hypocritical “social paradoxes”, which include “we try to gain status by not caring about status” and “we rebel against conformity in the same way as everyone else”. His most revealing chapters explore why we use innuendo such as “Netflix and chill” when suggesting sex (it allows “plausible deniability”) and the role of body language in spreading information (eye contact for five seconds usually means romance or murder – you have been warned).
Despite Pinker’s obvious erudition, this isn’t one of his most satisfying works. It is glaringly padded out with repetitive logic puzzles, often employing charts and diagrams to prove some banal principle. As a result, When Everyone Knows ... ends up feeling like 100 pages of clever and original material stretched into a volume three times that length.
If the aim of popular science is to make you see the world differently, then this book succeeds – but Pinker’s common knowledge paradigm could do with a little more self-awareness.
