Science Quote by Steven Pinker

Pinker is taking a scalpel to the prestige economy that surrounds culture. The target isn’t art so much as the pious aura that accumulates around certain kinds of art - “elite” arts and humanities - and then gets mistaken for evidence of moral or intellectual elevation. By framing it as “confusion,” he implies the hierarchy isn’t simply defended out of snobbery; it’s internalized. The people most invested in the status ladder (intellectuals and artists) come to believe their own mythology.

The sentence is doing a quiet double move. On the surface, it’s a plea for epistemic clarity: don’t confuse personal reverence with objective rank. Underneath, it’s a critique of a gatekeeping system that converts taste into authority. “Higher, exalted” reads like Pinker deliberately echoing quasi-religious language, casting elite culture as a secular priesthood with its own sacred objects and rituals. That choice matters: it suggests the humanities can function less as inquiry and more as consecration, policing who counts as “cultured” in the first place.

The scientific voice is part of the persuasion. Pinker’s broader project often treats human behavior - including cultural behavior - as explainable in terms of incentives, cognitive biases, and social signaling. In that context, reverence for “exalted” art looks less like transcendence and more like a status technology. The sting is that the illusion isn’t imposed from outside; it’s cherished from within.