In this episode, Dr. Stephen Pinker talks about his new book, Enlightenment Now, and why he believes that the world is getting worse and worse as a result of a cognitive bias feeding a "statistical illusion" that doesn't allow us to see what's happening in the world outside of our own perception of the facts. Dr. Pinker is a two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Harvard College Professor of Psychology, and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching, and books. He's been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People and one of Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers. His books include The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Blank Slate, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is the author of The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which is a New York Times bestseller that has been a number one bestseller for seven weeks in the past week, and is on track to be number one for another week. He's also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and The New Yorker, and a frequent contributor to Slate. Dr. Steven Pinker has been featured in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Globe and Mail, and has been interviewed by Time Magazine, and many other publications, including The New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic. and the New York Review of Books. He is a frequent guest on CNN and NPR, and he is one of the most influential people on the planet. Listen to this episode of Daily Wire Plus, wherever you get your news and information. Subscribe to stay up to date with the latest in today s trending topics. If you're struggling with anxiety, depression, or stress, insomnia, or a little bit of everything else, you can find Dr. Jordan Peterson's newest podcast on Daily Wire plus on your favorite streaming platform. . Subscribe today using the hashtag on social media: and to get notified when new episodes of the show drops on your favourite podcast platform so you don't miss it! , and more! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on PodcastOne Subscribe on Podchannels Subscribe on PODCAST Subscribe on Spare Spaceship or wherever else you re listening to your favorite podcast on the pod is listening to the latest episode of the podcast?
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00:01:27.400It's a great pleasure today of being able to sit down and talk to Dr. Stephen Pinker of Harvard University, who's just written a new book.
00:01:35.860He's written many books, but this is the newest one.
00:01:38.900It's called Enlightenment Now, and it's a New York Times bestseller for seven weeks, so that's a great accomplishment.
00:01:47.080And Dr. Pinker has indicated to me that it's doing better than his other books have, and they've also done very well, so that's really something.
00:01:58.140So, Stephen Pinker is the Harvard College professor of psychology at Harvard University.
00:02:03.800He's a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching, and books.
00:02:10.180He's been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People and one of Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers.
00:02:18.540His books include The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Blank Slate, and The Sense of Style.
00:02:29.160And so I'm welcoming Dr. Pinker, obviously, and I'd like him to start by telling us about the book itself,
00:02:37.460and then we'll talk about broader issues and about the other books he's written and that sort of thing.
00:02:41.280Well, the book's subtitle is The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
00:02:49.500And I'll begin with the progress, because that was the epiphany that, more than anything, inspired the book.
00:02:56.240I'd written a previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, when I was surprised to come across
00:03:00.660data sets showing that many measures of violence had declined over the course of history.
00:03:05.820I was stunned to see a graph that showed the rates of homicide from England and other Western European countries from the 1300s to the 20th century,
00:03:16.160showing a decline of anywhere from 35 to 50 in the chances of getting murdered.
00:03:23.580When I called attention to this fact in a blog post, I then got correspondence from historians, from international relations scholars,
00:03:33.280from sociologists, saying, you know, you could have mentioned other declines, another decline of violence.
00:03:38.200And one war scholar showed me that the rate of death in war had plummeted.
00:03:43.320Another showed me that rates of domestic violence had gone down.
00:03:48.520Still another that rates of child abuse had gone down.
00:03:52.020And I realized at the time that there was an important story here that had to be told,
00:03:56.920that these different declines of violence ought to be presented to the world in between a single pair of covers,
00:04:03.300just because it did seem to be something of a pattern.
00:04:06.180And as a psychologist, it opened up the challenge of how to explain it.
00:04:09.440First of all, how to explain the fact that there is so much violence in human affairs,
00:04:15.520but also the fact that it can be brought down.
00:04:18.220Well, I had a similar set of epiphanies that led to the writing of Enlightenment Now,
00:04:21.520when after Better Angels was published, I started to come across data showing that other aspects of human well-being had improved.
00:04:29.920The rate of extreme poverty had plummeted by about 50% just in three decades and now stands at less than 10%.
00:04:37.520Life expectancy has been increasing all over the world, including the poorest parts of the world.
00:04:43.240The number of kids going to school has increased, including girls.
00:04:48.440More than 90% of people under the age of 25 on the planet are literate now.
00:12:33.520But it's more than that because in intellectual life, in large parts of academia, among commentators and pundits, there is an ideology of decline.
00:12:47.000It goes back to the 19th century, part of the counter-enlightenment that arose as a reaction to enlightenment hopes for progress and rationality.
00:12:56.960That said that holds that society is, Western civilization is teetering on the brink or circling the drain and it's going to collapse any time now.
00:13:08.960And it's up to the intellectuals and commentators to point out how decadent and degenerate society is.
00:13:19.780And to people like that, news about progress comes almost as an affront.
00:13:23.940The reaction is, hey, we've been warning all of you about how society is on the verge of collapse.
00:13:31.680Don't come around and tell us that everything's going fine.
00:13:36.540Yeah, you identify a lot of that with the romantic types like Rousseau.
00:13:40.260And when I was reading, I wondered, too, there's a powerful Marxist narrative that's run its course for about 130 years, too, that's predicated on the idea that there is an oppressed class and an oppressor class.
00:13:56.180And that narrative seems also to thrive on or to be affronted by the idea that the current system might be producing benefits across the board.
00:14:07.540I think you do, in fact, in one part of the book, ask about whether or not these benefits are only accruing, for example, to the rich.
00:14:14.740And that doesn't seem to be the case as far as the data indicate.
00:14:20.440Quite the contrary, the most dramatic improvements have been at the bottom among the extreme poor, where the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty has fallen over the last couple of centuries from probably around 90 percent to less than 10 percent.
00:14:37.360And the United Nations has set as one of its millennium development goals to eliminate extreme poverty everywhere by the year 2030.
00:14:45.220That's probably too optimistic, but the fact that it can be set as a plausible aspiration is itself astonishing.
00:14:54.320Well, I know the UN had set as one of its millennial goals the halving of absolute poverty between 2000 and 2015, and that was accomplished by 2012.
00:15:38.440And you're right that there is a pretty strong, that there are critiques of progress both from the left and from the right, but from the left, there is a kind of contempt for institutions like markets, like liberal democracy, that deserve a lot of the credit for the progress that we've made, and that lead to, at least in the academic left, a despising of the very idea of progress.
00:16:06.900And I found that the only political faction is actually sympathetic to progress are the libertarians.
00:16:13.000There have been a number of rational optimist books in the last decade by people like Matt Ridley and Ron Bailey and Johan Norberg that had an overlapping mission to the one that I took on in Enlightenment now, namely documenting progress.
00:16:31.880But both from the academic left and from the political right, there has been a contempt for the notion of progress for their different reasons.
00:16:42.540I mean, in academia, it goes back to the Romantics, to Rousseau, as you mentioned, but also to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the existentialists, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School.
00:16:54.460And large swaths of the academic humanities actually detest the Enlightenment, ironically enough, by no means all of them.
00:17:05.480Yeah, well, the question there, I guess, in part, is why?
00:17:09.860I mean, one of the things that really struck me as I've gone through this material over the last years is that this is really good news.
00:17:16.880Particularly, it doesn't really matter whether you're on the left or the right.
00:17:20.680If you're on the left, you think that the fact that the poorest of the poor are being lifted out of their abject, absolute abject misery at a rate that's just, I don't think you could hope for a faster improvement, no matter how optimistic you were.
00:17:35.780And then on the right, of course, the fact that the benefits of liberal democracy, let's say, and free markets are driving this in large part, you'd think would also be a cause for celebration.
00:17:47.760So there's the, you talked about the availability heuristic and some of the role that the press might be playing, the fact that negative events stand out.
00:17:56.900We can also see negative events all over the world now.
00:17:59.580So, and we can't think of all over the world, whenever you hear about a negative event, it's as if it's happening next door and is a threat.
00:18:10.320So, the breadth of our news is exaggerated and the coverage is exaggerated.
00:18:16.200But there still seems to me to be this mystery at the bottom of all this, which is in the face of such radically good news,
00:18:23.340why is there such an insistence that the system is corrupt, that we're going to hell in a handbasket and that, you know, human beings are a cancer on the planet and everything is heading towards the apocalypse?
00:18:34.720It's so deep and it doesn't seem to be moved by the facts much.
00:18:42.000I kind of think sometimes that it's a hangover from the Cold War, you know, that was so deeply pessimistic for so long.
00:18:52.980Certainly as a psychological syndrome, it goes back at least to the Old Testament prophets who combined kind of social criticism with foretelling an apocalyptic disaster.
00:19:06.700So, that syndrome, that combination of moral scolding with predictions of doom is something that our species quite naturally falls into.
00:19:16.320Part of it is, frankly, a certain amount of interprofessional competition that society has various elites.
00:19:26.500There's the politicians, the business people, the military, the religious elites, the academics, the journalists.
00:19:32.460They're always kind of competing for status.
00:19:35.300And since intellectuals don't deserve a whole lot of credit for getting society to run, for putting food in the stores and keeping the peace and protecting the streets,
00:19:47.820it's very easy to look down on other societal elites, on government, on business, and to say, well, you guys are all failing and we're the ones who are morally refined enough to point it out.
00:20:01.900So, I wouldn't put down just sheer human competitiveness.
00:20:45.500And you talked about the astonishing decline in global poverty.
00:20:49.380And part of that story is it did not come about through massive redistribution, which for many people on the left was the only route to lifting up the poor,
00:21:02.520Now, there have been, of course, adjustments, even shocks.
00:21:06.940The fact that China and India and Bangladesh and Indonesia have risen out of poverty came in part at the expense of manufacturing jobs in the United States.
00:21:18.700That's not exactly what people meant by redistribution.
00:21:21.400And it literally isn't redistribution of resources, although it is a shaking up of the economies of many, many nations.
00:21:28.060But this massive increase in the wealth of Asian countries did not come because resources were shipped from the wealthy West to the impoverished East.
00:21:40.400So that's also a threat to the doctrine itself, a direct threat.
00:21:44.520The fact that wealth is being produced and it's being distributed to people at the low end means that, implies that, that redistributive philosophy is likely in error.
00:21:56.300And you can understand why that might be regarded as a catastrophic threat, particularly to people on the radical left.
00:22:02.740Well, certainly, certainly for, for radical notions of redistribution.
00:22:05.960But at the same time, the more limited kinds of redistribution that have, that are ubiquitous in wealthy countries.
00:22:14.300I have a graph showing that the amount, the proportion of GDP allocated to social spending skyrocketed in the 20th century from about 1% to about 22% in every developed country.
00:22:28.540And thanks to spending on the poor, on children, on the sick, on the unlucky, rates of absolute poverty have fallen in wealthy countries.
00:22:39.060So not only has the developing world become wealthier, and not directly at the expense of the developed world, but within the developed world, thanks to some amount of social spending, I guess you could call it redistribution, even as inequality has risen, poverty has not.
00:23:06.280And one of the things he did was an empirical analysis of left versus right-wing governments, I think across the 20th century, but it might have gone farther back than that, to see if there was any difference in the Gini coefficient across the classes of government.
00:23:19.460And what he found was that there was no difference whatsoever, and he makes a fairly strong case that the only redistributive techniques that work are pestilence and war, essentially, and that's because they knock everyone down to zero.
00:23:33.220But you're making a different case, like an incremental case in some sense, which is that governments, perhaps regardless of their ideological proclivities in the 20th centuries, as they've become more wealthy, they have incrementally devoted a larger part of their resources to incremental improvements in, you might think about it as investment in the future, rather than redistribution, or investment in social capital, education, and
00:24:03.200health care, and those sorts of things.
00:24:08.100It's a combination of investment in public goods, because, of course, the whole society is better off if everyone's educated.
00:24:14.780Also, insurance, people support a safety net.
00:24:19.100That's the most popular euphemism for social spending, because you never know whether it's going to be you or your mother or your brother who's going to be in need in the lottery of misfortune.
00:24:34.000The modern conscience won't allow the little match girl to freeze to death, or the jodes to bury grandpa by the side of Route 66.
00:24:43.060And so I think social spending has been pushed along by all three.
00:24:47.240In some countries, it probably has reduced the Gini coefficient.
00:24:51.160In Western European countries, which have a more aggressive system of taxation than the United States or Canada.
00:24:58.520But more important than the Gini distribution is that it's reduced the number of people living in poverty, which I argue is a morally relevant measure in any case.
00:25:06.900Yeah, well, those things are complicated, because obviously, you want to raise people out of abject poverty.
00:25:12.580I mean, that's a zero-argument proposition, and that seems to be happening very rapidly.
00:25:18.700The question after that, I suppose, is to what degree does the remaining degree of inequality that's generated by productive capitalist systems also constitute a social threat?
00:25:29.480Because there is evidence, I think it was reviewed best in the spirit level, that as inequality increases, rates of male homicide, for example, increase, and all sorts of other negative measures.
00:25:40.240So there's some weird interaction between raising absolute levels of wealth and ensuring that inequality doesn't, I don't know, exceed some hypothetical optimum that needs to be considered in social policy.
00:25:55.760I cite some skeptical reanalyses of the data in the spirit level.
00:26:02.980And probably absolute prosperity matters more than inequality in determining social health, such as happiness, crime, other kinds of social pathologies like drug addictions.
00:26:28.580And so it takes a little bit of statistical wizardry to tie them apart.
00:26:36.120And my reading of the literature is that it's actually prosperity that is more important than inequality.
00:26:41.580But also, and this is a point that in the psychological literature was emphasized by Christina Starmans and Paul Bloom,
00:26:50.800that what people sometimes think of as an aversion to inequality, to people having different amounts, is actually an aversion to unfairness.
00:27:08.980People, if they sense that the system is basically fair, that either greater effort, talent, or even luck result in an unequal distribution,
00:27:20.700an impartial lottery, for example, they're okay with that.
00:27:23.540It's cheating that really gets underage.
00:27:25.080Yeah, and people are really good at remembering cheating and recognizing it as well.
00:27:29.100Yeah, so okay, so there's something we could talk about for a minute, because, you know, there's political, what do you call, rumblings about the fact that
00:27:40.980I think a lot of this is generated by the radical left types, particularly on the campuses, that the system is rigged,
00:27:47.880and that it's an oppressive patriarchy, and that the reason that people are at the top is because they play power games.
00:27:53.500And, you know, it's this, my sense is that the control is that we're ethnic or racial or gendered groups,
00:28:01.140and we're competing in the Marxist manner, and those who win have won because of oppression.
00:28:05.500But I know the literature on the relationship between individual differences and long-term life success in the Western world,
00:28:14.020and the literature is actually very clear.
00:28:16.540So intelligence seems to account for about 20% of the variance in long-term life success.
00:28:22.060And then trait conscientiousness accounts for perhaps another maybe 10% to 15%.
00:28:27.860And then there are smaller contributions of emotional stability and also of trait openness,
00:28:34.440which seems to be a good predictor of entrepreneurial ability.
00:28:37.060So it looks like in the West that you can attribute about 40% to 50% of the variance.
00:28:42.780Maybe that's a little high, but it's not a radical overestimate.
00:28:46.460To the sorts of individual differences that are associated with productivity,
00:28:50.420because increases in IQ, higher IQ, and higher conscientiousness definitely make people more productive.
00:28:56.420It seems to me that you can use that as an index of the genuinely meritocratic nature of a culture,
00:29:04.760and also as an index of its willingness to engage in fair play.
00:29:09.200Because you'd expect, if your culture is aimed at productivity,
00:29:13.760and it turns out that the most productive people are, in fact, differentially rewarded,
00:29:20.640that seems to me to be a reasonable index of the success of the society.
00:29:25.040Now, that data still leaves 50% to 60% of the variance unexplained.
00:29:29.200And so you can, in there, you can include racism and prejudice and the tyranny of the system and blind luck and physical health,
00:29:38.040and all the arbitrary and random events that make up, that determine whether someone is successful or fails in life.
00:29:44.500But it does seem to me to provide a metric saying that not only is our society crazily productive,
00:29:50.540and reasonably good at distributing the spoils, even though there's still some inequality,
00:29:55.920but that a fair bit of the inequality is actually generated as a consequence of differences in genuine productivity.
00:30:56.460One could also ask another question is whether the rewards that go to the talented are necessarily in sectors that lead to what we might call productivity in the sense of increasing societal wealth.
00:31:10.800And an argument can be made that there's some misallocation of intellectual resources, that we have, that the economy is too driven by finance, that there are too many lawsuits, the legal system is to each other.
00:31:26.740And so we're underestimated by intellectuals.
00:31:29.480This does still leave a place for criticizing a number of the ways in which our economy is set up.
00:31:38.460Yes, and we were talking about why, despite the fact that a fair bit of the variance or a third to a half of the variance in life success is taken up by, let's say, individual attributes, there's still room for a systemic critique that's valid.
00:31:54.780Yeah, one of the pathologies of intellectual life that I wrote about in the blank slate about the denial of human nature was that in polite company in intellectual circles, the amount of life success determined by inherent and largely heritable psychological traits has to be zero.
00:32:16.540I mean, that's just the only acceptable position, and you and I know it's not zero.
00:32:24.220Well, also, let me interject for one sec.
00:32:26.780I'm also, there's a fairness element there, but the other thing is, it seems to me that that's extraordinarily self-serving of people, too, because, you know, if you get together with a group of Harvard professors, for example,
00:32:39.420it's pretty obvious that their innate intelligence is one of the factors that determined their success.
00:32:44.800And to deny the fact that heritable differences make a difference means perhaps to act as an avatar of a social justice orientation, but equally to deny the role of the benefits of chance in your own success and to therefore lack a certain degree of humility that you might otherwise be required to have.
00:33:06.900So it's not all, and I'm not claiming that you were implying this at all, but it's not all in the service of higher social ideals that people deny the contribution of heritable components, for example, the birth lottery.
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00:36:18.380Unfortunately, the video just froze, and after you said, I'm not saying you claimed this, you suddenly froze on the screen.
00:36:26.300So I wonder if you could just repeat the talk after I'm not saying you're claiming this.
00:36:30.220Sure, well, it's just, it seems self-serving for people who are particularly bright, for example, to not be grateful for the fact that they won the genetic lottery in that manner, and insufficiently humble to not note the role of that arbitrary chance in determining their success.
00:36:53.500I mean, it's not like they don't deserve their success because of that, but claiming a certain degree of biological determinism doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, even though it can be read that way, because it makes you very sensitive to your own good fortune if you think it through carefully.
00:37:12.560In fact, successful people are the winners of at least three lotteries.
00:37:16.260One of them that you mentioned, of course, is the genetic lottery, the fact that some people were born with greater intelligence and conscientiousness and openness to experience.
00:37:26.920Another is that there's a second lottery in human development that is not strictly genetic, but it is, in a sense, constitutional or developmental.
00:37:37.420The fact that, and I consider this one of the most profound discoveries in the history of psychology, that correlations between identical twins rear together are generally on the order of 0.5, and they share not only their genome, but the vast amount of their environments, their parents, their neighborhoods, their older sibs, their younger sibs, the number of books in the house, the number of guns in the house, the number of TVs in the house.
00:38:06.660Identical twins correlate quite highly, but no one near perfectly, which means that there is a second lottery that has to do either with just the way the brain congeals during development, which can't be specified down to the last synapse by the genes, and perhaps by chance life events, which might leave unpredictable traces that we can't document or systematically understand.
00:38:33.540Then, of course, there's the third lottery of what happens to you in your profession.
00:38:53.880All that having been said, and you're absolutely right, we have to acknowledge the non-zero role of hereditary temperament and talent, the non-zero role of chance, and that still leaves a big chunk of the variance that could be due to systemic features of the system that perhaps ought to be changed.
00:39:15.480There's just no doubt that the wealthy gain the system, particularly in the United States, in a number of ways that don't work to the benefit of society at large.
00:39:24.940There are also aspects of the system that are perhaps fair but irrational.
00:39:29.460The fact that so much of our intellectual talent now gets sucked into finance.
00:39:34.220Now, of course, we do need a financial sector, and it's good that there are smart people in it.
00:39:38.940But having a lot of our brainpower devoted to figuring out how to act on financial information a microsecond faster than one's competitors is probably not the best use of our society's intellectual capital.
00:39:53.480Likewise, there's no doubt that we have far too much brainpower invested in the legal system, in corporations suing each other, in patent trolling, and in other not-so-productive uses.
00:40:05.800Yeah, well, the funny thing is, too, though, that there's an ineradical amount of pathology in a system in some sense.
00:40:15.520I mean, one of the things that struck me quite hard, for example, is that if you look at the creativity curves across the lifespan, they match the criminality curves almost perfectly.
00:40:28.860And one of the things that made me think when I was doing that research was so that as young men become more antisocial, they also become more creative, even though those things might not be correlated, but they do map on top of one another.
00:40:40.460And I was thinking, in a society like the United States, which has a fair degree of criminality, but also a fair degree of creativity, we have no idea how loose the system has to be so that malfeasance can thrive, so that it can also be simultaneously loose enough so that creativity can thrive.
00:40:58.620Right? Because you might think, if you were optimistic, that you could tighten up the system and get rid of the criminal behavior without adding a totalitarian layer to the system that would also simultaneously demolish, you know, individual variability and creativity.
00:41:12.660We just, our models just aren't sophisticated enough to tease such things apart.
00:41:20.660There, I mean, I do agree with you that there's a certain amount of risk-taking or young men on the make that might underlie both criminality and productive creativity.
00:41:31.660But over the course of history, I think one of the accomplishments of civilization and indeed of enlightenment-driven progress is that we have managed to tease them apart.
00:41:42.660Just two examples are the fact that the rate of homicide plunged by a factor of about 35 from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.
00:41:50.660And that includes the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, all of the advances of the 20th century.
00:41:57.660So just as people were not stabbing each other in wars over insults, they were also coming up on the theory of evolution and the atomic theory of matter.
00:42:06.660And then again, in the 1990s, when the rate of violent crime in the United States fell by half,
00:42:12.660and there were also declines in Canada and Britain and other Western countries,
00:42:16.660this certainly was not a time of economic stagnation or technology.
00:42:22.660I guess then the question starts to become is, how in the world did those things get teased apart so that we are able to regulate antisocial behavior without simultaneously making things excessively rigid and regulated and totalitarian?
00:42:38.660Maybe it's part of that same incremental process that you detailed out at the beginning of our talk.
00:42:42.660You know, another thing that struck me about your book that was quite interesting, I thought, was that you list the names of a very large number of totally unsung heroes.
00:42:51.660You know, those are people, and we have a very interesting table near the beginning, where you list, I think about 10 names, maybe 12, of people who've saved between hundreds of billions and billions of lives with their scientific, with their incremental scientific productivity.
00:43:08.660And yet those are people that are by no means household names.
00:43:12.660That's another place where things don't make the news.
00:43:15.660And it's funny how our moral crediting, our awarding of moral brownie points doesn't quite correlate with how much good people do.
00:43:29.660I mean, it often doesn't at all correlate.
00:43:32.660And the case of the inventors of synthetic fertilizer, of vaccines, of chlorination of public water supplies, of the green revolution in agriculture, are pretty much unknown.
00:43:45.660And they've literally saved billions of lives, whereas various reformers and prophets and agitators are pretty well known, a number of certainly people who are sainted by the Roman Catholic Church, who have to perform a miracle that might result in saving one life.
00:44:04.660Of course, in fact, it did not, because miracles don't happen.
00:44:08.660But the fact that that definition of saint has nothing to do with saving lives on scales of millions or billions, just shows how the human moral sense is not really well calibrated to morality as we would defend it by our message.
00:44:24.660Yeah, well, I think it was Stalin who said something like, a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.
00:44:33.660He actually didn't say it, but it's conventionally attributed to him.
00:44:44.660I guess maybe the same thing plays in reverse, say, is that the saving of a single life has a narrative punch, and the incremental savings of a hundred million lives, especially through prevention, that's another problem, right?
00:44:57.660Because prevention isn't dramatic, because the terrible thing merely doesn't happen.
00:45:03.660I rather cheekily wrote an article on the human moral sense that began with, who do you think is most morally praiseworthy, Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norman Borlaug?
00:45:16.660And this was before Gates's pivot from computer technology to philanthropy was well known.
00:45:24.660And I set it up as a bit of a trick question, because, of course, everyone would say Mother Teresa.
00:45:28.660Even in our field, in discussions of moral psychology, whenever a speaker has to pull out of the air an example of a particularly moral person, Mother Teresa is the stereotype.
00:45:39.660Even though if you ask people, well, what exactly did she accomplish?
00:45:44.660How many sick people did she actually cure?
00:45:48.660It's very hard to come up with her actual accomplishment.
00:45:51.660Whereas Bill Gates has already been credited with saving perhaps a hundred million lives through his efforts to eliminate infectious disease in the developing world.
00:46:00.660And Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fomenting the Green Revolution, probably saved a billion lives.
00:46:10.660Selective breeding of hybrid crops that required less fertilizer that could be grown twice a year, less water, higher yields, less susceptibility to disease, which turned countries like Mexico and India from basket cases to exporters of food in less than a decade.
00:46:29.660Right. You'd think that would be a story that everyone in elementary and junior high school would learn because it's such a remarkable, it's an absolutely remarkable story.
00:46:38.660And no one, I mean, I don't know what percentage of people would know his name, Burlog's name, but I don't imagine it's, it's, I suspect it's in the low percentages, if that.
00:46:49.660I think, and there may have been a change, I seem to recall, although I hate to begin any sentence with when I was young, in my day, but we did read heroic biographies of medical pioneers, like Banting, the discoverer of insulin and Pasteur, and Thomas Edison.
00:47:10.660And I don't know if that kind of heroic biography of the innovator, of the inventor, of the scientist, is as common in children's education nowadays.
00:47:20.660Yeah, I suspect, I strongly suspect not.
00:47:22.660It certainly wouldn't be in Canada, given the tilt that our education system has taken.
00:47:27.660So, all right, so a couple of, a couple of broader questions again, if you don't mind.
00:47:33.660You have a whole corpus of work, and, and there are recurrent themes in some sense, one of them being, things are getting better in ways that we really don't know.
00:47:44.660And what are you, what, if you could have what you wanted with regards to the impact of your books, what, what would you want that impact to be?
00:47:54.660And also, what do you think, like, one of the things I've done on Twitter recently, because I'm trying to figure out how to use Twitter, is to tilt my tweets towards people like humanprogress.org, someone you cite in your introduction, and people who are purveying information, while including yourself, by the way, who are purveying information about how much better things are getting.
00:48:15.660So, what impact would you like to have your books have, and how do you see that playing out psychologically and politically?
00:48:21.660And what do you think people who are listening now, say, could do practically to get the good news out, so to speak?
00:48:29.660Yeah, certainly, intellectual life should be more data-driven, but you shouldn't be allowed to say, talk about any purported trend based on an event that happened yesterday or this year.
00:48:43.660Because trend means change over time, and in so many areas, we really do have data, and it's just irresponsible not to cite those data.
00:48:52.660Particularly since they have become increasingly available through websites like Our World in Data and Keep in Progress.
00:48:59.660So, I'd like to see a replacement of ideological debate, which so much of our current debate is.
00:49:09.660It's whether the right or the left is more saintly, moral, praiseworthy, correct, and more, well, let's look at the data.
00:49:19.660Chances are that neither an off-the-shelf position of the left nor an off-the-shelf position of the right is likely to have it all figured out.
00:49:47.660And stepping back even farther, I would like to see a greater integration of the insights and mindset of the science into social and cultural affairs.
00:50:00.660As we talked about earlier in the conversation, this very idea is often met with horror.
00:50:26.660And a horror at the thought that ideas about human nature from science, from evolutionary psychology, from behavioral genetics, from social and personality and cognitive psychology,
00:50:40.660might be brought to bear on our understanding of society, of justice, of art, literature, and fiction.
00:50:49.660Quite contrary to the mindset of the Enlightenment, where all of the Enlightenment philosophers were pretty serious psychologists.
00:50:58.660I mean, the field didn't exist at the time, so they weren't called that.
00:51:01.660But they mined the observations from travelers and missionaries and explorers about the ways of other cultures.
00:51:12.660They relied on their own observations and common sense.
00:51:15.660They tapped into what brain science existed at the time.
00:51:18.660So it's hardly a radical idea that our understanding of art and culture and society should be informed by our understanding of human nature.
00:51:28.660But now that the disciplines have become so professionalized and they're housed in different buildings on campus
00:51:33.660and they're rivals for money from the dean, there's great hostility to the old Enlightenment idea of consilience.
00:52:17.660Studies of philology, of classical grammar, of texts now blend into statistical studies of corpora, of laboratory studies of speech and language processing.
00:52:31.660And where the science ends off and the humanities begins, no one even talks about it.
00:52:36.660Well, the science can also really change your mind.
00:52:40.660Like, I've looked at individual differences in relationship to political belief.
00:52:44.660And so, I've learned three things from doing that that I think are revolutionary, have been revolutionary for me.
00:52:51.660So, the first is that liberal lefty types are characterized by higher trade openness and lower conscientiousness,
00:53:28.660And so, there's that nice polarity dynamic.
00:53:31.660And then there's also the urgent idea that the reason that openness and conscientiousness unite to predict political behavior is because of borders.
00:53:41.660So, open people like the borders between concepts to be fluid, so that there's information exchange.
00:53:47.660And they're not orderly, the liberal types, because they're not conscientious.
00:53:51.660And so, they don't see any utility in keeping things categorically distinct.
00:53:54.660Whereas the conservatives are afraid of the contamination of things because of the movement of information.
00:54:00.660And they like to see the borders between things to ensure that that's the case.
00:54:05.660So, the reason that openness and conscientiousness stack together as predictors of political behavior seems to be because of two fundamentally different attitudes towards borders,
00:54:17.660all the way from the conceptual to the political.
00:54:20.660So, the right-wingers think, well, borders are good because that stops contamination.
00:54:24.660And contamination is a real problem, and a deathly problem often.
00:54:28.660And the liberal lefty types think, no, no, we want as much information to flow as possible.
00:54:32.660And both of those perspectives are valid and need to be discussed.
00:54:37.660Then the other thing I learned from the empirical data was that orderliness, which is the part of conscientiousness that predicts conservatism,
00:54:45.660is associated with disgust sensitivity.
00:54:48.660And so, that feeds that desire to maintain borders so that there's no cross-contamination.
00:54:54.660That's associated with what's been called the behavioral immune system.
00:54:58.660And so, those are actually quite revolutionary ideas from the perspective of political theory.
00:55:02.660You know, that the political belief is temperamentally determined.
00:55:06.660That the reason that the two temperamental traits determine political belief is because of a difference in attitude,
00:55:12.660fundamental difference in attitude towards the borders between things.
00:55:15.660That you can make a case for open and closed borders on evolutionary grounds.
00:55:20.660And that there's an association between conservatism and disgust.
00:55:24.660Which, to me, shed tremendous light, for example, on the motivations of Hitler, who is an extraordinarily orderly person.
00:55:30.660And who used disgust-oriented language all the time when he was formulating his policies of extermination.
00:55:36.660So, those are revolutionary contributions of individual difference science to political theory.
00:55:42.660It's all driven by hard data, statistically derived.
01:04:42.660Another one was the discovery of the New World, that there were entire civilizations, entire world,
01:04:50.660literally worlds in their sense, that had been unknown, and that the knowledge base that had been part of Western civilization for millennia was radically incomplete.
01:05:04.660And technologically, I suspect that the greater exchange of ideas and people was a contributor.
01:05:11.660Just prior to the Enlightenment, the second half of the 18th century,
01:05:16.660there was a massive growth in the efficiency of printing, the printing press itself.
01:05:23.660But it was the democratization of books and pamphlets, the rise of literacy, and the movement of people.
01:05:31.660It became easier for heretics and radicals to jump ship and move to where things were cooler,
01:05:40.660if things got too uncomfortable where they were.
01:05:43.660And it's amazing how many of the Enlightenment thinkers were persecuted for their beliefs.
01:05:47.660They were threatened with imprisonment or death.
01:05:50.660Many of them ended up in Holland or Paris or London or jumped around to wherever they had the greatest freedom.
01:05:56.660But also just the sheer kind of precursor of the web today, the fact that a pamphlet could be introduced
01:06:04.660and within a few months it would be translated into a dozen European languages and smuggled in.
01:06:12.660So the exchange of ideas, I think, helped to accelerate the Enlightenment.
01:06:19.660Although since it only happened once in human history, we can never really know for sure why it happened when it did.
01:07:18.660You've been very generous with your time.
01:07:20.660I appreciate the conversation very much.
01:07:23.660I'm going to close by showing your book again, Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now,
01:07:29.660which is tearing up the bestseller charts and which is a guide to proper and intelligent optimism in the 21st century.
01:07:37.660And maybe I'd ask you just in closing, what do you think there are things that individuals, what do you think individuals should be particularly optimistic about right now?
01:07:46.660And what do you think individuals could do to spread the message that things are getting better and that we can solve our problems?
01:07:54.660Yeah, the fact that there are new efforts to transcend political divisions and find out what works, to depoliticize and rationalize problems like poverty, like climate change, like war and peace, like crime.
01:08:17.660Those are very much worth supporting, that there are organizations like apolitical.
01:08:22.660There are NGOs that try to monitor the state of the world.
01:08:30.660There's just the general application of rationality to solve our problems that is responsible for the progress that we've enjoyed in the past.
01:08:37.660And if there's going to be progress ahead of us, we'll be responsible for what we'll enjoy in the future.
01:08:42.660All right. Well, I would like to close too by mentioning to everyone who's listening that, you know, things are getting better.
01:08:54.660They're getting better because people are facing problems and actually trying to solve them.
01:08:58.660They're doing micro analysis of the problems, breaking them down into their constituent elements, being humble enough to use incremental solutions to solve them and to address them at a high level of resolution instead of a low level of or a low resolution level of ideological debate.
01:09:14.660And it's really working. And I would, what would we say, encourage people to pick up Dr. Pinker's book because the world is getting better and we should know it and we should be happy about it and we should continue to foster that development in every way that we can.
01:09:29.660And I think this is an excellent, this book is an excellent contribution to that effort as well as your other books like our better, better angels, better, better angels of our nature.
01:09:41.660So thank you very much for spending the time with me today and for talking with me. It was a pleasure to meet you.
01:09:47.660Thanks so much. Thanks for having me, Jordan. The pleasure was mine.