March 23, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(dramatic music) | |
| Allow me to tell you the classic children's tale of Chicken Little, otherwise known as Henny Penny, | ||
| a story about a young girl named Henny Penny. | ||
| As the tale goes, little Henny was outside one day when an acorn fell from a tree and hit her on the head. | ||
| Because of her naivete and simple mindedness, Henny foolishly began to believe that the sky itself was falling down around her. | ||
| She spent the rest of the day trying to convince others, like Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey, that the sky was most certainly falling and the world was surely coming to an end. | ||
| In most versions of the story, the trip does not end well for Henny and her hysterical friends after they meet the sly Foxy Loxy. | ||
| I don't want to give everything away though, so either read the story for yourself, or check out the classic Season 6 episode of the Golden Girls, in which they reenact the tale. | ||
| I mention Henny and Lucy and Turkey and Foxy not just because they're great names to say, but because it seems that just about everyone is telling us the sky is falling these days. | ||
| Between Trump, Russia and North Korea, we've got about half the country that's in total freak out mode. | ||
| Every day this freak out takes on a new urgency. | ||
| One day the world is ending because America left the Paris Climate Accord, another day it's because of the net neutrality reversal, and another day it's because Trump holds his water glass with two hands. | ||
| This endless hysteria is not only being amplified by the media, but it's actually being poked and prodded by them as well. | ||
| Blue check verified journalists on Twitter who work for news organizations, which really are nothing more than partisan activist outlets, want to keep you clicking on their articles and videos, and they know that the best way to do that is to convince you that not only is the sky falling, but it's going to land directly on your head. | ||
| What if, and just hear me out on this one, this outrage factory is completely wrong and the world isn't coming to an end just yet? | ||
| Crazy, I know. | ||
| But I think that it actually might be true. | ||
| This doesn't mean that things are perfect, but they are pretty damn good. | ||
| This is the position of my guest this week, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. | ||
| Pinker argues, despite our world of perceived horror and chaos, people are living longer, happier, healthier and freer lives right now more than any other time in human history. | ||
| This doesn't mean we don't have work to do, but if we don't stop and smell the roses, we might toss away all the goodness humans have created for the prospect of a utopia that will never appear. | ||
| This is why I'm so proud of the work we've done here on the Rubin Report. | ||
| I truly believe that the conversations we're having are at least some part of the antidote to the craziness right now. | ||
| If those of us who care about enlightenment principles like science, reason, and natural rights can make our voices louder, then this cliff we seem to be about to go off of might just turn into a bridge to a better world. | ||
| Henny Penny's story took a drastic turn when she met Foxy Loxy, who tricked her and her friends to go to his lair. | ||
| Well, in real life, we've got a wolf blitzer in a situation room. | ||
| If the sky is falling, maybe just changing the channel is all we have to do to survive | ||
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the day. | |
| Joining me today is a John Stone family professor in the department of psychology at Harvard | ||
| University as well as a New York Times bestselling author whose new book Enlightenment Now is | ||
| for sale right now. | ||
| Stephen Paker, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I am thrilled to have you here. | ||
| I think I have emailed or called or contacted or pigeon-messaged everyone related to you or that knows you in any way to get you here. | ||
| And here I am. | ||
| And here you are. | ||
| So it worked. | ||
| It goes to prove that a little positivity, I think, can make some things happen. | ||
| So true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| A lot I want to talk to you about. | ||
| I thought before we dive into the book and all the things that you teach and write about and all that, I like hearing a little bit about people's history and where they come from and growing up and all that. | ||
| You are Canadian. | ||
| And I've had a lot of Canadians on lately. | ||
| I find there's something about Canadians in general that I like. | ||
| What is it about Canadians that leads to a certain pleasant disposition? | ||
| Well, we're so reasonable. | ||
| We're so polite. | ||
| Sometimes people say the motto of Canada is peace, order, and good government. | ||
| And it's a country that has been diverse for quite some time. | ||
| Quebec, where I grew up, has an English-speaking community and a French-speaking community. | ||
| And we didn't begin with a revolution, unlike the United States, but we negotiated our way to independence. | ||
| We're part of the British Empire and the British Commonwealth, and kind of have that British reserve and politeness. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So we have some things going for us. | ||
| A couple of things going for us. | ||
| I like to brag, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, at least, until at least all the Americans end up moving up there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If things keep going this way, although I think... We might build a wall. | ||
| Right, you guys may end up building the wall, exactly. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about growing up, your family, what kind of family you grew up in. | ||
| I grew up in the English-speaking section of Montreal. | ||
| Montreal was pretty segregated when I grew up. | ||
| I grew up in the Jewish English-speaking community, which was known for producing, among others, Leonard Cohen, who was a contemporary of my mother's, the author Mordecai Richler, who was a contemporary of my father's, William Shatner, Burt Bacharach. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Saul Bellow spent his childhood in Montreal. | ||
| So it's a small community that has a number of people that we're proud of. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of that? | ||
| I mean, that's a pretty diverse, interesting group of people right there, | ||
| and I'm sure there are others. | ||
| Yeah, it may just be that having many cultural influences many cultural influences both... | ||
| Canada's really dominated by the United States. | ||
| It really is the 800-pound gorilla next door. | ||
| So there's the American influence, the British influence, the French influence. | ||
| Perhaps it's just being in a cosmopolitan, diverse community that helped with that. | ||
| And of course, the Jewish influence. | ||
| Although it was not, I didn't grow up, and none of the people that I mentioned grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community. | ||
| I grew up in a reform temple. | ||
| We didn't take God all that seriously, but we did take Jewish identity seriously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't remember a moment in which I decided, oh, I'm an atheist. | ||
| It just was not a big issue one way or another. | ||
| Do you find that to be sort of a standard thing with most secular Jews? | ||
| I think that's sort of, at least the ones that I've been talking to on this show that I think are sort of out there more, that seems to be a thing that there's an ethnic identity or a cultural identity that's separate from the belief part. | ||
| Absolutely, and I think that's more true of Judaism than it is of, say, Catholicism, where the belief really is stipulated. | ||
| In Judaism, there's a bit of a, kind of, don't ask, don't tell, as long as you obey the laws and rituals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, if you keep the Sabbath, if you have Matzah on Passover, then you're a good Jew, and what you believe is just not as important. | ||
| One rabbi said to my wife, Rebecca Goldstein, another secular Jew, a well-known She's a secular humanist writer. | ||
| When she talked about her novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, a work of fiction, which is kind of the greatness of this novel, she spoke at a Jewish community center. | ||
| And I was a little worried whether there'd be some pushback from the rabbi who introduced her. | ||
| And afterwards he went over and he said, you know, there's nothing in Judaism that says you have to believe in God. | ||
| You just can't believe in more than one of them. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty perfect. | ||
| Do you think there's an inherent problem there, sort of disconnecting God from No, I think even if it really is, well, just for the longevity of it, let's say. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I think that may have been part of the explanation for why, I mean, there's so many secular Jewish intellectuals kind of immersed in argument, disputation, particularly about morals and ethics, | ||
| but it was all argument, disputation. It wasn't a catechism that you had to recite. | ||
| It wasn't a set of beliefs that you have to have. So there was a tradition of disputation. That's | ||
| what the rabbis were famous for, the pill-pull, the hair-splitting, and maybe that was | ||
| a contributor as well. | ||
| But I went to public schools. | ||
| In fact, when you go to public schools in Quebec, in my childhood, you went to Protestant schools, because it was divided along religious lines. | ||
| There were Protestant schools and Catholic schools. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Protestant meant un-Catholic, basically, everyone else, including the Muslims and the Jews and the Chinese and so on. | ||
| There's a bizarre system. | ||
| Yeah, how patently unconstitutional in this country. | ||
| I actually got a pretty serious Protestant religious education. | ||
| I sang hymns, we said the Lord's Prayer every day, I learned about the life of Jesus. | ||
| So they had the Jews and the Muslims and everyone else getting a Protestant school. | ||
| At one point, I think I was eight or nine, we didn't even belong to a temple, I said to my mother, one of my friends said that Jews aren't supposed to believe in Jesus. | ||
| Should I not believe in Jesus anymore? | ||
| She sent me to Hebrew school so fast I made my head spin. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| My teachers, because they couldn't hire Catholic teachers either, Virtually everyone in Quebec, among the Francophone community, are Catholics. | ||
| So they actually hired Algerian and Tunisian and Moroccan Jews to teach French to the Jewish and Protestant kids of Montreal. | ||
| The Protestant kids of Montreal did not learn French from native Quebecois. | ||
| We learned it from Egyptian and Tunisian immigrants. | ||
| That's how bizarre it was. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I know the subject of your next book. | ||
| I mean, it sounds like there's just so much richness just in that, or at least there's a little comedy in there. | ||
| It sounds like your family was kind of on the intellectual side, or at least that the community was in general. | ||
| Well, Red House was full of books and magazines. | ||
| My father had a law degree but didn't practice when I was a child. | ||
| I had a little bit of real estate, did sales before starting a law practice, pretty late in life. | ||
| My mother was, like most mothers of the 50s and 60s, a homemaker, but then found a career when she was kind of getting bored, became a guidance counselor and then a vice principal of a high school. | ||
| And my mother, Rosalind Pinker, very intellectual, an intense reader, knows everything. | ||
| Intellectually very engaged. | ||
| Yeah, and my sister, Susan, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has written a couple of books, one on sex differences, one on face-to-face contact. | ||
| My brother, Rob, has worked for the Canadian government for several decades as a policy analyst and an administrator. | ||
| So how much of the intellectual pursuits that you all have do you think is biological versus just learned experience? | ||
| This is one of the themes that keeps coming up around these conversations. | ||
| And it was a topic of my book, The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature. | ||
| The blank slate being the metaphor that I argued became dominant in intellectual life, largely for political reasons. | ||
| Can you explain that a little bit for the people that don't know the book? | ||
| Yeah, so The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature, just was re-released in 2016 with an afterward, was about the idea that there is no such thing as human nature, that we are blank slates written on by our parents, by culture, by education, and that there's no innate human traits or ways of learning and thinking. | ||
| You can program a human however you want. | ||
| And I argue that it was popular in the 20th century for political reasons, one of them being that it seems like the ultimate way to achieve equality. | ||
| If we're all zero, then zero equals zero equals zero, so we all have to be equal. | ||
| I argue this is a mistake in the book, that equality is really a legal and moral principle to treat everyone equally. | ||
| It's not really the belief that we're all clones, we're all blank slates. | ||
| And a lot of the book tried to both lay out the science of human nature, but also to explore the political and emotional and moral baggage and coloring, and to try to clarify it. | ||
| And so the difference between equality of treatment and equality of our biological endowment was a major thing. That also of course | ||
| enters into discussion of sex differences, where one of the reasons that | ||
| certain intellectual factions, certain | ||
| parts of feminism want to deny that there are any sex differences. | ||
| They think, well, that will make it impossible to discriminate because there's nothing to discriminate among. | ||
| We're all born exactly the same. | ||
| And I argue that's a big, big mistake. | ||
| First of all, there is a lot of evidence that men and women aren't identical in all traits. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm not a scientist, but I think there is a lot of evidence on that. | ||
| Yeah, I think anyone who's had a son and a daughter, anyone who's been in a heterosexual relationship, anyone who's listened to gossip about anyone talking about anyone else, yeah, men and women are really not exactly the same. | ||
| But I think the myth that they're the same was introduced for political purposes. | ||
| Namely, that would make discrimination irrational because there's nothing to discriminate on. | ||
| And I argue that that's just an error in logic. | ||
| I strongly believe in gender equity, that no one should be prejudged because they're a man or a woman, partly because of a scientific fact that there's huge overlap between the sexes in any trait you want to look at, so you can't predict an individual's traits just knowing that they're a man or a woman. | ||
| But the policy, we should be fair, doesn't require the false belief that we're the same, that we're distinguishable. | ||
| What's the best? | ||
| Have you heard any argument for that belief that you thought made any sense? | ||
| For which belief? | ||
| For the idea that these genders are equal. | ||
| Because you must hear this from other academics, right? | ||
| I mean, we know that some of this stuff is being taught at schools. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's no doubt that there's enormous overlap. | ||
| There's no doubt. | ||
| And some of the differences between the sexes are pretty small and subtle. | ||
| So in say mathematical ability, which was one of the most controversial claims | ||
| about sex differences, it led to a huge firestorm when Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, | ||
| mentioned that differences between the sexes might explain why the number of engineering professors | ||
| at Harvard and MIT wasn't 50/50 down the line male/female. | ||
| This is very much like the James Damore situation with Google. | ||
| It is exactly, it's almost a replay of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it isn't easy. | ||
| In fact, it would be hard to say that men or women are better at math in general. | ||
| You have to even drill down to certain sub-components, like mentally rotating three-dimensional objects that men are clearly better at. | ||
| But women are better at word problems in arithmetic and math. | ||
| So some of the pushback is that, in fact, the science is often complicated. | ||
| You can't make a sweeping across-the-board generalization. | ||
| Yeah, and the other kind of pushback for people who defend the blank slate is, well, yeah, that's true of 2002 when your book came out, but society is changing, and more women are consuming porn, and more women are having multiple sexual partners, and maybe the differences, say, in sexuality aren't due to human nature, but just due to our culture at a particular moment that may become obsolete. | ||
| In fact, that seems incredibly dangerous to me, to view it that way. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| Although, you know, you could, in some ways, it's actually highly progressive and even correct, because you could have said, you know, 70 years ago, women don't want to go into the professions. | ||
| They want to stay home with the kids and housework, and that's what makes them complete and satisfied and happy, and they'll be all neurotic and anxious if they start to become lawyers | ||
| and doctors. | ||
| And we know from the course of history that that's not true, that as soon as the doors opened, | ||
| women did pour through the doors. | ||
| And so that would be an example where too strong a claim of biological differences would have been refuted | ||
| by the facts of history. | ||
| So it's not a slam dunk. | ||
| I mean, it is something that has to be examined on a case-by-case basis. | ||
| Are you shocked at how difficult it is to talk about all of this without getting yourself, | ||
| yourself or any of the people that talk about it, into hot water? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the amount of nuance that you have to go through here, as I can see you're quite well versed at, you're probably the best at it, it's a lot to make sure that somebody can't pinpoint that one line that then they're gonna just, you know, drag you for. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| Well, and the reason that I wrote the blank slate was, it wasn't so much, so I have a chapter on gender, but the point wasn't just to review the literature on gender differences, it was also to say, okay, so what how does it matter for our public debates? | ||
| And I also documented in the book how, even when the book first came out, | ||
| there was a history of people being deplatformed and shouted down and called all kinds of nasty names | ||
| for the view that were not blank slates. | ||
| And I said, well, look, this is based on. | ||
| on emotion, based on bad politics, not based on the facts. | ||
| So I kind of, I don't know if I want to say defended myself, but I laid out all | ||
| of these political controversies so I wasn't blundering into it naive. That | ||
| was actually the subject of the book. | ||
| Sometimes, though, that can't fully defend you, though, right? | ||
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No, it can't. | |
| And in fact, both Larry Summers and Jamie Demore, they almost could have taken their speeches, and in the case of Larry Summers, partly did, from the chapter on gender in the book. | ||
| So I managed to escape some trouble that people who then repeated the arguments got into trouble for. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting. | ||
| You sort of laid out a case beforehand to defend yourself. | ||
| You did like sort of a preemptive strike. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Where someone, both of those guys, I know James personally and he's been in here, where it's like he sort of stumbled into this thing and then the reaction, the way it sort of, it just becomes this bigger beast that you end up fighting when you were just really trying to talk about science. | ||
| Well, the science, I wasn't just talking about the science because I was talking about First the science, then what are the political and moral implications, which I thought got confused, feeding back on people trying to shoehorn the science into a politically correct position because they were kind of lazy when it came to the politics. | ||
| Obviously I don't believe in discrimination against anyone, but the point being that having that belief doesn't mean that you have to insist that we're blank slates. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I made that argument for other controversies around human nature, like do we have any violent impulses? | ||
| Where there's a kind of political argument for a different reason. | ||
| Many people think, well, if we're innately violent, then we're kind of doomed to war forever, and if you try to reduce war, you're just some romantic peacenik, and it's hopeless, and war is in human nature. | ||
| Therefore, since war is bad, and if we're violent, then we'll always have war, we can't be violent. | ||
| I mean, that too is illogical. | ||
| We do have violent impulses. | ||
| I think that's pretty clear. | ||
| But it's not all we have. | ||
| We also have the faculty of self-control. | ||
| We also have empathy. | ||
| We have cognitive processes of problem-solving, so we can figure out how we can reduce war. | ||
| We've got moral norms, they're just certain things you don't do. | ||
| And the fact that part of us is violent doesn't mean we're doomed to violence, because part of us pushes back on the violence. | ||
| I cite a statistic that three-quarters of men and 60% of women at least once have had a homicidal fantasy. | ||
| They've imagined killing someone they don't like. | ||
| Three-quarters of men and 60% of women? | ||
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| When I introduce this fact in lecture and I say, well, what does this tell us about human nature? | ||
| It tells us that three quarters of men are liars. | ||
| But I point out, this doesn't mean that trying to increase peace is futile, because there are other parts of human nature we can work with. | ||
| And of course, that was what led to my more recent book, Better Angels of Our Nature, that said not only is it possible, it's happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But again, it's kind of the nexus between the political, on the one hand, and the scientific, on the other, that I was exploring. | ||
| And I talked about how the people who thought they were advocates of peace tried to squash all evidence that people have violent impulses because it was just politically too uncomfortable. | ||
| And I said, first of all, distorting the science is never a good idea. | ||
| And if you're clear about the politics, then the science doesn't even mean that we've got to accept war. | ||
| Yeah, so for someone that sort of insulated themselves from some of this, because you were doing the work beforehand, which is actually a pretty brilliant tactic, are you afraid that the hard sciences are going to be hit by all of this identity politics stuff in a bigger way than we're seeing right now when it comes to gender or race or any of these issues? | ||
| Not in so much the hard sciences, but the social sciences. | ||
| Well, we know the social sciences. | ||
| Yeah, have been hit. | ||
| Yeah, but you don't fear that it's gonna come for the hard sciences too? | ||
| Well, there may be some, Aspects of genetics and brain science that are feeling the political pressure. | ||
| The neuroscience of sex differences for example. | ||
| Certainly the genetics of intelligence and personality have felt that political pressure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of my collaborators and former students, James Lee, presented a paper where he was part of a consortium that, for the first time, identified a number of genes that were linked to intelligence. | ||
| I mean, there's no IQ gene, but there are hundreds, many, probably thousands of genes that could bump your IQ up by a fraction of a point, up or down. | ||
| And they made some of the first really hard replicable discoveries because there are a lot of bogus | ||
| discoveries in the past but theirs was really solid and there was there was | ||
| pretty big pushback including from the president of the Society saying this is this is fascist and this is | ||
| unacceptable So there was some pushback and this was this was genetics. | ||
| Yeah, so So what do you make of the people that focus on race and IQ? | ||
| I've had Stefan Molyneux here. | ||
| I don't know if you know who he is, but he really focuses on that. | ||
| And what I wanted to know from him really was not necessarily I think it's an excellent question and it's one that torments me. | ||
| the focus on that. | ||
| To me, that's the part I'm more concerned about. | ||
| I think it's an excellent question. | ||
| And it's one that torments me. | ||
| I mean, on the one hand, you could make the argument, well, we should not be afraid of the truth. | ||
| And for that matter, a vigorous exploration of the genetics of racial differences | ||
| might show that there are no genetic differences relevant to personality or intelligence. | ||
| And that would give racism a really decisive blow. | ||
| But on the other hand, you never know that before you look. | ||
| You can't count on that. | ||
| Of course, if you do science, you've got to be prepared for any possibility. | ||
| There is, I think, a legitimate question of whether we really should be getting to the bottom of this. | ||
| It's an argument that actually goes back to my old MIT colleague, Noam Chomsky, way back in the 1970s. | ||
| We can't insist that the truth be one way or another, because that's just contrary to the whole spirit of science. | ||
| But we don't have to ask every question. | ||
| A lot of questions that are scientifically pretty minor, they could have socially damaging consequences. | ||
| So let's put them really low on the list. | ||
| And he suggested that race and IQ, for example, should not be of interest in a society that treats people as individuals, because then it's just like a correlation between any two traits. | ||
| And that we should just be a low priority and something we should ignore. | ||
| Now that's a little bit, I think it ignores the fact that there are people who already are dividing humans by race and measuring the outcomes. | ||
| and attributing it to poverty or racism. | ||
| And then you kind of say, well, gee, as long as we're raising the question at all, | ||
| shouldn't we look at all the hypotheses? | ||
| It might even be an argument for just downplaying race in general. | ||
| Instead of dividing us up by race and obsessively measuring the differences, | ||
| look at things like class and income, 'cause that's really what matters more. | ||
| And just not make everything a racial issue in the first place, so that whether the racial issue is from biology kind of fades in importance. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned the nexus of politics and science. | ||
| I really like that phrase, because I think of so many of the conversations I'm having here, it seems to me that politics and science are really just linked all the time. | ||
| It explains why So many people want to talk to you and why they want to talk to the Weinstein Brothers and Sam Harris and so many other people. | ||
| Are you a little concerned that it's becoming so political? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, part of it is that what I'm doing and what some of your other guests have been doing is to try to depoliticize some of the scientific issues. | ||
| And that's certainly what I try to do in the blank slate. | ||
| Or clarify what the political issues are. | ||
| Yeah, but it's almost impossible these days, right? | ||
| It is becoming a little bit, well, the landscape is really diverse and divided. | ||
| I mean, there are the identity politicians and the social justice warriors and the political correctness police who are kind of making things as political as possible. | ||
| I mean, they've been around for a long time. | ||
| When I was a student in the 70s, there were plenty of people who were Shouting things like fascists don't have the right to speak, or chanting mobs that shut down my Harvard colleague E.O. | ||
| Wilson when he published Sociobiology. | ||
| So this isn't a new thing. | ||
| And there are certainly constituencies that are totally open to depoliticizing the science and considering the politics on its own terms. | ||
| But on the other hand, there is a fringe that appears to be more radical than ever. | ||
| Yeah, how do you decide how much weight that fringe has? | ||
| That seems to be one of the themes these days. | ||
| It seems to be very hard to tell. | ||
| Is this just this small group that's screaming a lot, or has it truly infected not only a ton of the millennial generation and a huge swath of young people, but that also it does seem to be creeping up or creeping down, depending on which way you look at it, a ton of academics at universities and all sorts of other people that actually have power. | ||
| Well, I think the academics have been distorted for quite some time, and this is an idea that's been pushed by Jonathan Haidt, Philip Tetlock, José Duarte, Charlotte Stern. | ||
| They had a pretty widely discussed article that the title something like | ||
| viewpoint diversity will help social science. | ||
| Where they gave a number of cases, some of which I had discussed in the blank slate | ||
| of how just the questions that psychologists ask, the items they put on their questionnaires, | ||
| the way they frame issues, just clearly has a left wing bias | ||
| that they argued that if there were also conservatives in more of them in psych departments, | ||
| then they would have pointed out, "Hey, your questionnaire is flawed." | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that the actual quality of the science would improve. | ||
| And to the credit of my field of psychology, a paper was published in a journal where there were 30 commentaries. | ||
| So 30 people had a chance to go after them, or teams. | ||
| And there was disagreement, but it was very respectful. | ||
| They weren't called any nasty names. | ||
| And it was a really good debate. | ||
| But the question that you asked about how, is this, are the totally illiberal and radical movements, the ones that just shout down speakers, sometimes physically assault them, Is that the whole millennial generation or is that just an increasingly vocal fringe? | ||
| My mind was changed just a couple of days ago when I read an article in Fox about a new study, Sam Harris had sent it to me, saying that actually support for free speech is increasing, including... I saw the article. | ||
| You saw the article? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was kind of surprised, I wasn't totally shocked. | ||
| At least my experience at Harvard is that the students are, all the ones that I've interacted with, admittedly a biased sample, but they are perfectly supportive of debate, free speech, openness. | ||
| So it's interesting, so I mentioned right before we started that I spoke at Harvard through the Open Campus Initiative. | ||
| Yes, right. | ||
| And it was a wonderful group, and it was clear that they were politically diverse and all the other diversity that everyone likes, but that I don't care about that much. | ||
| But afterwards, we went to a dinner, and there were about 30 or 40 kids. | ||
| I was with Brett Weinstein, actually. | ||
| And I asked them, like, what do you guys, are you guys okay saying what you think? | ||
| And do you think it's gonna hurt your grades or hurt your friendship? | ||
| And virtually everyone said yes. | ||
| So I'm still struggling with this, because I did read. | ||
| They said yes, that it would either hurt them or they've lost friends. | ||
| I sense most of them were kind of libertarian-ish, kind of live and let live. | ||
| But certainly not all of them. | ||
| But virtually everyone at the table said that they either were afraid to say certain things to friends or certainly to professors. | ||
| So that's why when I read the articles like that at Vox and I go to these campuses and I hear this consistently, it's just hard to grade. | ||
| And that's exactly why I'm posing the question to you. | ||
| It's just hard to pin it. | ||
| This article was eye-opening. | ||
| It went against the narrative that the millennial generation are a bunch of snowflakes, they're a bunch of cultural revolutionaries, warriors. | ||
| It's just that there certainly is that faction, but it may not Have you thought at all about how much social media is a piece of this puzzle? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| Nowadays, everything is blamed on social media. | ||
| It's kind of like the role of El Nino in the 1990s. | ||
| Whatever happened, you blame it on El Nino. | ||
| That was on MySpace. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| A lot of this, I think, predated social media. | ||
| I think that cable news networks had a role, Fox News in particular, because it was so politicized in a way that no previous network really had been. | ||
| And there are studies showing that when a town gets Fox News, and you can do the natural experiment because some towns got it before others just because the way cable companies offer different packages for no particular reason, you could tell the towns that got Fox News became more polarized and shifted to the right. | ||
| So it really did have a causal effect. | ||
| That's one case where it's not just correlational. | ||
| Yeah, so you had a strange moment about a month or two ago, about two months ago now, where you said something to the effect of, someone asked you a question at a panel about the alt-right, and in effect you said, I don't want to put words in your mouth. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| Well, this wasn't the Open Campus Initiative. | ||
| Oh, it was! | ||
| They were the ones that sponsored the event. | ||
| So I know this is a good group of people you were sitting with. | ||
| It was, and the topic of the event was, did political correctness help elect Trump? | ||
| It was held almost on the anniversary of the 16th election, and I suggest that I thought it did, in part because when you have certain ideas that are just not discussable, On campus, and you've got a savvy, interconnected community, as the original alt-right were. | ||
| A lot of people associate alt-right with the torch-carrying skinheads, but what I had in mind was the term as it originally applied to internet discussion groups. | ||
| And that the danger of restricting debate on campus, of making certain ideas taboo, is that when smart people do stumble upon them, then they People, number one, are completely alienated from the mainstream intellectual life because they think, well, this is a truth that they can't handle. | ||
| What other truths can't they handle? | ||
| And since the ideas never get expressed, the kind of pushback and contextualization and counter-arguments, the kind of thing that you want for any idea, never happens. | ||
| And within this like-minded community, They sometimes jump to the most extreme conclusions. | ||
| So it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So an example being gender differences. | ||
| If it's taboo even to mention the possibility that men and women differ, then you stumble across some pretty good scientific evidence that they do. | ||
| Then you might be like Milo Yiannopoulos saying, oh, we should have fewer women in medical school because they're just going to drop out and have babies. | ||
| I mean, that's a totally idiotic idea. | ||
| But the reason that he could put forward an idiotic idea is that since the whole existence of sex difference was never discussed, no one ever said that's an idiotic idea. | ||
| And likewise, and there are a number of other facts that are kind of undiscussable that you can take to extreme conclusions if you're not challenged, whereas if you bring them out into the open, then you can put them into perspective. | ||
| Sunlight is the best disinfectant. | ||
| In many cases it is. | ||
| Another example is that rates of crime differ between blacks and whites. | ||
| Now, that's a fact that's almost undiscussable, but just go to FBI.gov, look up, they break down rates of crime by age, by race, by state, and there it is. | ||
| Now, if you have never even noticed that, Then you can say, oh gee, I wonder if African-Americans are innately more violent than whites. | ||
| That's completely wrong, because we know that no two ethnic groups ever have the same crime rate, and they can shift over time. | ||
| It used to be the Irish that had sky-high rates of violence compared to non-Irish, and we know that that vanished over time, and the black-white difference might as well. | ||
| But that second fact, namely Ethnic and racial differences are ubiquitous and they can change with time. | ||
| We'll never even get mentioned if the mere fact that there is a difference is unmentionable in the first place. | ||
| So that was my argument. | ||
| I gave some other examples. | ||
| Anyway, then there was a doctored film clip on some alt-right sites saying, oh see Pinker is saying that the alt-right is correct. | ||
| Whereas I was actually saying, how can we starve the alt-right? | ||
| We're feeding them inadvertently. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You were basically, I mean, just for the layman that's watching this, I mean, you were basically saying, allow for more information so that those bad ideas won't be able to flourish. | ||
| I mean, that was the sort of 101 version. | ||
| That was the whole point, exactly. | ||
| And then it was edited to leave out that part. | ||
| And then the kind of regressive left picked up on it to also suggest that I was sympathetic to the alt-right, which is the most bizarre Attribution you could imagine. | ||
| Indeed, Enlightenment now has a whole chapter on why the alt-right has gone off the rails. | ||
| Unfortunately, this misconception, after about a day, was corrected both in the New York Times and in the Guardian in England. | ||
| They came to my defense and set things right. | ||
| But it was a bizarre episode of how, as the Times put it, social media makes you stupid. | ||
| Yeah, precisely. | ||
| All right, so I do want to spend our whole second half talking about the book, but very quickly, just when you dealt with that whole thing, I mean, I remember reading it, and I think there was something, in an odd way, I think the reaction between, as you said, the regressive left and the alt-right, that they were sort of teaming up on you against it. | ||
| I thought it was, in a weird way, even though I know it probably personally for you was no fun, and you probably had all sorts of people saying terrible things to you, and all of that. | ||
| That I thought, if anyone has read any of Stephen's books, or even remotely knows what this guy is doing, that I think, I don't know what you consider yourself politically, you strike me as sort of just an old school liberal, I don't want to, you can counter that if you... I'm pretty centrist, moderate, I have sympathies to different policies, but yeah, I'm pretty eclectic and centrist. | ||
| Yeah, so that basically, I thought, this guy is so obviously just decent, and coming at this from a scientific perspective, that if this is what they're gonna do, where you say one line, this is going to, I mean, really, my feeling was it could destroy the fabric of society, really, if we just start picking off everybody. | ||
| And I've seen a lot of instances of this. | ||
| When I've talked to Damore, or I've talked to Brett Weinstein, or Lindsey Shepard from Laurier up in Canada, and a few others, But I thought yours was just such an example of, this is so ridiculous. | ||
| So perhaps there was a nice pushback to it. | ||
| Maybe, and that was exactly the New York Times response. | ||
| I mean, that's why they titled the op-ed by Jesse Singel, How Social Media Makes Us Stupid. | ||
| All right, let's talk about the book right here in front of me, Enlightenment Now. | ||
| I've been kicking around this phrase on Twitter that's caught a little traction, that we are now in the enlightenment, because it seems like we're in this endless stream of constant stupidity. | ||
| And some of it seems social media related, and we touched a little bit on that in part one. | ||
| And when I'm saying it, I'm saying it a little tongue-in-cheek. | ||
| And actually, this book, is sort of the answer to, I think, what I'm calling the Enlightenment, that there are so many good things happening right now, and it's very hopeful and optimistic, and I always tell people, I'm an optimist, otherwise I couldn't do this, you know what I mean? | ||
| I feel that there's a chance we can make things better. | ||
| So first off, let's just do some 101 stuff here. | ||
| What are Enlightenment values to you? | ||
| Well, I characterize them in the subtitle of the book as reason, science, humanism, and progress. | ||
| Reason that we should analyze our situation, our predicament, using the most rigorous logic that we can, rather than relying on dogma, authority, tradition, scripture. | ||
| Not good for social media? | ||
| Definitely not good for social media. | ||
| Although at least throwing ideas out there is as long as they get evaluated, as long as they get criticized. | ||
| Science, namely that we should test our hypotheses, seek deep explanations. | ||
| It provides us not just with gadgets and cures for disease, although it's important that it does that, but also defines our human condition. | ||
| Concepts from science like evolution, like entropy, like the whole naturalistic world view that the laws of nature do their thing without caring about us. | ||
| These are things that we have to understand as the most basic facts about our existence. | ||
| So science has to be part of our worldview. | ||
| Then humanism is the idea that it's human beings and other sentient animals that deserve our moral concern, as opposed to, say, the glory of the tribe, or carrying out religious dictates, or the faith, or some messianic age. | ||
| that it's just do people live long, healthy, happy, stimulating lives? | ||
| That's what we should care about. | ||
| And progress is that if we use reason and science to make people better off, | ||
| well, maybe we can gradually succeed. | ||
| Yeah, so it's funny, when I was reading this, and the only word that like dinged a little something in my | ||
| head was progress. | ||
| And I think it's partly because of the way progressives have used progress. | ||
| That progress in and of itself, you want to progress meaning have more and more opportunity for people, more and more equality for people. | ||
| I think that's a far cry from what I think the progressives are doing right now because that's the most subjective one of any of those terms, right? | ||
| Well, I have the wisecrack that progressives hate progress. | ||
| If you look at the people who've denied that we've made progress, it's often the people who politically label themselves as progressive who can't stand the idea that we've made progress because they want to say that every aspect of our current society and institutions is corrupt and racist and controlled by the 1% and everything is getting worse and worse and worse. | ||
| Ironically, because the whole point of being a progressive, presumably, is that progressive activism is not a waste of time, but it actually It brings benefits, which it actually has, I argue. | ||
| Is that sort of the catch-22 of progress in general, that you have to acknowledge it, but in a weird way you need to not acknowledge it to keep furthering it? | ||
| Yeah, so there is an optimum amount. | ||
| One has to keep in mind the two ideas, that we've made progress, but we've got huge challenges ahead of us. | ||
| Just a very simple example. | ||
| Extreme poverty, the bare minimum that you need to feed your family, has been falling. | ||
| And that's got to be an example of progress. | ||
| A couple of hundred years ago, you could say that probably 90% of humanity lived in extreme poverty. | ||
| Now it's less than 10%. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| A lot of that happened just in the last 30 years. | ||
| But another way of stating the same fact is that 730 million people live in extreme poverty. | ||
| Now, that's the same fact. | ||
| 10% of 7.3 billion, 730 million, that's an awful lot of miserable people. | ||
| Now those are the same facts described in two different ways, and we've got to be able to think in both ways, and let's try to get it to zero. | ||
| Now that's not a crazy, romantic, utopian, starry-eyed goal. | ||
| That is one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. | ||
| The predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals, for poverty was reached five years ahead of schedule. | ||
| So the new goal, which is to eliminate extreme poverty everywhere by 2030, Probably a little too optimistic, but not completely crazy, and maybe it'll be instead of 0%, maybe it'll be 2%, and maybe it'll be 20-40, but still it's an amazing aspiration in the first place. | ||
| Yeah, how much of this do you think, and this a little bit gets back to the blank slate, but how much of this do you think the way you view progress, whether the acknowledgement of progress or that you sort of need To feel that we've made no progress to kind of fuel yourself. | ||
| How much of that do you think is just hardwired in the way we look at the world? | ||
| I think some of it comes from certain cognitive biases. | ||
| One of them being the availability heuristic, discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. | ||
| The human mind generally estimates probability and risk by calling examples from memory. | ||
| If you've just seen a tornado on the news, then you think that tornadoes are a major cause of death. | ||
| And the fact that falls off ladders kill many more people than tornadoes doesn't register because those don't make the news. | ||
| And we don't naturally calibrate for how many opportunities there are for bad things to happen, how big the world is, how many people there are. | ||
| We just remember the examples and that's what drives our intuitions. | ||
| And when you have the news media reporting everything that goes wrong everywhere, then you can come away with the impression that the world is falling apart. | ||
| Parts of the world that aren't falling apart just never make the news. | ||
| I think that's one. | ||
| We are, I think, tuned to dwell on the negative, probably because bad things can hurt you a lot more than good things can help you, so there is something adaptive in a natural environment to be on the lookout for what can kill you. | ||
| So that's just a survival instinct? | ||
| I think that's just part of the survival instinct. | ||
| There are other things too, like there's always implicit competition between different elites in society. | ||
| the academics, the journalists, the politicians, the business people, the religious, the military. | ||
| You know, they're all different kind of power centers and they all kind of compete with each other | ||
| for prestige and influence. | ||
| And if you say society is declining, it's corrupt, it's a mess, it's horrible, | ||
| kind of a way of each one of these groups can kind of feel superior to the others. | ||
| The academics could say, look what the businessmen are doing to the country | ||
| and the businessmen can say, look what the politicians are doing to the country | ||
| and the challengers can say, look what the incumbents are doing. | ||
| And so it's kind of a backhanded way of social one-upmanship. | ||
| Yeah, do you sense that right now we're at a unique position | ||
| to bring back more enlightenment values? | ||
| It seems to me that because of Trump, because of social media, that just everything is sort of upside down right now. | ||
| This, again, has been a theme with a bunch of my guests, that everything is sort of on the table, and that there's great opportunity. | ||
| We don't know which way it's gonna go, but there's great opportunity for good ideas. | ||
| There's a great opportunity for bad ideas. | ||
| Obviously, I know which way we're both hoping this is gonna go. | ||
| But do you think that we actually are in a unique moment right now? | ||
| I know everyone always thinks that. | ||
| They're always in a unique moment. | ||
| They're always in a unique moment, yeah. | ||
| But do you think there's something unique right now? | ||
| Well, there's kind of an inequality of reason, maybe growing, that at the top, there's so many areas in which we've become so much more rational and reasonable, like evidence-based medicine. | ||
| It used to be your doctor had a hunch and operated on you, gave you a drug, and there's no reason to think that it would actually work. | ||
| Therapies are evaluated in big studies. | ||
| And data-driven policing. | ||
| One of the reasons that the crime rate went down so dramatically starting in the 90s is that the police started to gather block-by-block data on where the violence was occurring. | ||
| They'd kind of collapse on those areas like a ton of bricks, make sure that one gang member that just suffered an injury wouldn't be roaring for revenge, saying, you know, we're watching you. | ||
| And that really drove down the rate of crime by a lot. | ||
| In sports, sabermetrics and moneyball, much more rational analysis. | ||
| There's the effect of altruism movement. | ||
| How can we allocate charity and volunteering so it actually does good as opposed to just giving people a warm glow. | ||
| All of these areas. | ||
| But at the same time, you get these nutball conspiracy theories and the fake news. | ||
| and the politicized denial of science such as vaccine safety and climate change. | ||
| So the question is how do we let the standards of rationality, I hate to use the word trickle down, | ||
| but make it so that it's kind of second nature for everyone to just not think in certain ways | ||
| because they've just been proven to be obviously ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, how do you do it? | ||
| I mean, I think that's a good... So I may not be the one to change a whole society. | ||
| I do it by appealing to the kind of people who watch this show, the kind of people who read my books, in the hopes that it will kind of spread out from there. | ||
| And we know it's not that it can't happen. | ||
| There are certain bad ideas that at one point are taken seriously and then they just drop off and no one talks about them ever again. | ||
| In my lifetime, when I was a kid, there was a debate over racial segregation. | ||
| You know, should black students be admitted to the University of Mississippi? | ||
| I mean, you just couldn't have that debate anymore, even among the farthest right of the right. | ||
| That's just no longer an issue. | ||
| Should women be allowed to work? | ||
| And in earlier decades and centuries it was, you know, slavery or women's suffrage and superstitions like, you know, alchemy or human sacrifice. | ||
| So it's not hopeless that sometimes what happens is that at any given time there's a range of reasonableness. | ||
| But that that center drifts, so that some things that were at the tail end of ridiculousness, even the conspiracy theory mongers and the most benighted can no longer take it seriously. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| How much of this is just sort of our, or the discussion around all this, is just about our lack of patience? | ||
| Because actually, when the publisher sent me the book, I said, Enlightenment Now, and as you can see, you guys have the font now, it's bigger than Enlightenment, and I thought that That was kind of interesting, because we live in a time of immediate reaction to everything, and selfies and likes, and people just don't have patience anymore, attention spans are incredibly short, that we want more now, but some of these things are just the long game. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's exactly right. | ||
| We also have amnesia for how things were not so long ago. | ||
| That's a point that I make repeatedly. | ||
| Even though there's a horrific war going on now in Syria, but we forget some of the horrific wars that were going on in the 80s and 90s. | ||
| What can we do to stop that amnesia? | ||
| Because I think that's a big part of this. | ||
| Yeah, and I think the culture of journalism should put events of the day into some context. | ||
| I don't mean going back, you know, hundreds of years to the American Revolution, but even just, you know, what it was like in the 1990s, what it was like in the 80s. | ||
| Likewise with the economy, people are so nostalgic for the early areas with strong unions and predictable wages and factory jobs. | ||
| But, you know, that was also the era of Double-digit inflation. | ||
| 18% inflation. | ||
| If you could pay the rent this year, you didn't know whether you could pay it next year because the rent could go up. | ||
| And you kind of forget about those days. | ||
| Long lines around the block to get gasoline. | ||
| The fear that we'd run out of heating oil and we'd freeze in the winter. | ||
| High rates of poverty among elderly people that have been brought down by Social Security. | ||
| So, our commentary should look back, not ancient history, but recent history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are some of the other things that are hopeful right now? | ||
| Are there other markers in society or in science or politics? | ||
| Are there any other trends that you're seeing right now that you think are leading us to some positive places? | ||
| Well, often you get pleasant surprises when you actually look at trends instead of headlines. | ||
| And you and I were talking just off camera about a recent survey that showed that contrary to the fears of a millennial generation being intolerant of free speech, and for that matter the society as a whole, and especially university campuses, if you actually, according to this new study anyway, if you actually plot the data, we ask people, should people who are espousing controversial beliefs at least be able to say them, it's actually been going up. | ||
| It's higher among the college educated than the less college educated. | ||
| It spans a range of controversial positions. | ||
| It's true for millennials as well as baby boomers. | ||
| And so what I myself even experienced as a kind of dread and foreboding about a whole generation | ||
| being intolerant of competing views turns out to be probably overblown. | ||
| There are a lot of examples like that. | ||
| And there are other positive developments. | ||
| I mean, the high school students protesting are ridiculous gun safety laws. | ||
| That kind of something that we couldn't have predicted so recently. | ||
| The Me Too movement has had a lot of excesses and I think there's much to criticize. | ||
| On the other hand, it's not okay for women to be preyed upon by their bosses and that has suddenly become an issue and probably the society will, on the whole, change for the better because of it. | ||
| I wasn't planning on going here, but since you mentioned it, what would be Humanistic, enlightened way of looking at guns right now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, some of it, a lot, it has to start with with good data, because a lot of our stereotypes of just, you know, maybe right, maybe wrong, you know, on the right, they believe you have concealed carry laws, then that will reduce crime. | ||
| On the left, there's if we control guns, that will reduce homicide. | ||
| So we've got to be humble and We'll try to get as many studies as possible to know what will really make a difference and what won't. | ||
| But in general, the idea that we're better off if we individually are not the judge, jury, and executioner. | ||
| One of the great advances of civilization was that you outsource justice to a disinterested third party, namely the court system, the police, and that the idea that safety comes from individuals Defending their interests with guns will, in fact, almost certainly has led to high rates of violence. | ||
| Do you fear, though, that we often give too much power to the state? | ||
| I mean, I think in some areas we do, but I think the idea that people should have guns | ||
| so that they should resist the government, you know, the kind of David Koresh and Idaho cults, | ||
| that is a terrible idea. | ||
| The idea that we should resist the government with guns. | ||
| I mean, that's what they do in Congo, that's what they do in Somalia. | ||
| We have this thing called democracy. | ||
| So if the government becomes too repressive, we speak out against it, we vote, we petition, | ||
| we form organizations. | ||
| The idea that we're gonna shoot back at the police, I mean, that's nuts. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think of the state of our democracy in general? | ||
| Because I think we're breaking off into these different factions now where, I mean, I think some people genuinely think that, you know, this hashtag resistance, that we're under this horrific authoritarian regime, and we don't even have to get into Trump specifically if you don't want, but what do you think of just sort of the The systems that are in place, the branches of government, all of the documents that founded this. | ||
| Are they doing all right at the moment? | ||
| So-so. | ||
| By any standards of world history, we live in fantastic freedom. | ||
| I could say that Trump is a moron, and he's a fascist, and I don't have to worry about being put in jail. | ||
| That's something not to take for granted. | ||
| If I said the equivalent in Turkey, I wouldn't be put in jail, or in Venezuela. | ||
| Is that a little bit of the short memory on some of these things and why you need to know history? | ||
| Because I think that all the time. | ||
| I see these guys all over Twitter. | ||
| Late night comedians, it's amazing. | ||
| You can say whatever you want. | ||
| You really can. | ||
| And we should not take that for granted. | ||
| It's partly history, but also partly comparisons across countries. | ||
| And in history, remembering fascism and communism, and looking at regions today like Turkey and Venezuela and Russia. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| What's not so healthy is things like gerrymandering, that obviously is a subversion of democracy. | ||
| The effects of lobbying and campaign contributions from the wealthiest, that can't be a good idea. | ||
| The fact that our elections drag on for a year and depend so much on cash is a problem. | ||
| And there are government bureaucracies that have gotten too big and too many regulations that don't actually do anything beneficial. | ||
| I don't think that means that's a call for just reducing regulation with a meat cleaver, because some regulations really have done good. | ||
| We've got cleaner air. | ||
| We've got less poverty. | ||
| But we should at least analyze what government programs are cost effective and which ones are just a nuisance and a drag. | ||
| Yeah, and even having that conversation then gets people crazed. | ||
| Personally, I come from it from a little more of a libertarian perspective and I would usually say that these days we've got people like Elon Musk that can get us to Mars and that can help clean the environment and green energy and all of those things. | ||
| Where I know there's just another set of people that think, well, we just can't leave it to the industrialists. | ||
| We have to leave it to the government. | ||
| That's at least a place where we can have some respectful disagreement. | ||
| That's a great place to be. | ||
| That's the conversation we should be having. | ||
| My view is that there has to be a mix of policy and regulation and private enterprise and | ||
| with all of the creativity and innovation and bottom-up diversity. | ||
| So an example would be, one thing that the government can do and that private industry | ||
| can't do is put a price on carbon emissions. | ||
| This is a position that both left-wing and right-wing economists favor. | ||
| But having done that, then the private sector can come up with a technology to reduce CO2 | ||
| and it shouldn't be up to the government to say this company is the one that we're going | ||
| to support. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's where the free market really does a better job. | ||
| But having that discussion, and I think libertarians deserve credit for raising an issue that people | ||
| on the left just don't even think of. | ||
| Like, just because you have good intentions and you have a program with a goal of achieving some good, doesn't mean it's gonna work. | ||
| It might just be a total waste of money. | ||
| Well, that's what I think so much of it is. | ||
| It sounds good. | ||
| It all sounds good. | ||
| We want the government to do all these things. | ||
| And then we know that in practice, often, although you've laid out a case for some of these things that actually do work, cleaner air. | ||
| I mean, look, we're in Los Angeles. | ||
| The air is cleaner. | ||
| It really had a lot to do with the government, for sure, so I absolutely acknowledge that. | ||
| But to me, it seems like so much of it feels like, it sounds good, let's just sort of hand it to the government, and then you end up creating a whole series of other problems, from fiscal things to all sorts of other things. | ||
| Yeah, I think actually in some ways liberals have been their own worst enemy in not being willing to have that conversation and almost like the platform is if you support government programs you're a good person and if you oppose them you're a bad person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas the discussion really should be which government programs make us better off, repay their costs, clean up the air, reduce poverty, which ones are you know boondoggles or bureaucracies and that way even the people who are liberals could at least have some ammunition and say, well, don't kill that program. | ||
| It actually works. | ||
| And I have in the book a graph of the environmental quality since the EPA was initiated in 1970 by Richard Nixon, as it turns out. | ||
| And the population has increased by 40 percent. | ||
| GDP increased by two and a half. | ||
| We've driven twice as many miles, but air pollution has been reduced by 60 percent. | ||
| So, and that almost certainly wouldn't have just happened with market innovation, because no one individually has an incentive to not pollute. | ||
| That's the kind of thing where governments can make a difference. | ||
| Likewise, poverty. | ||
| There are certain measures, like the earned income tax credit, which is a kind of negative income tax, where almost everyone, right and left, who examines it says that's a government program that really worked. | ||
| It's kind of cheap. | ||
| It's automatic. | ||
| And it really did reduce poverty in the lower middle class and working poor. | ||
| And we need to have that discussion so that the liberals, for that matter, can say, well, this program works, don't cut it. | ||
| But even they have kind of disarmed often on the evidentiary debate and just made it moralistic. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's what so many of us that I would include in this new group. | ||
| Have you heard this phrase, intellectual dark web? | ||
| I have heard it, yes. | ||
| Has this come across your desk yet? | ||
| I googled it. | ||
| You googled it? | ||
| I mean, do you sort of catch what, I mean, I think that, I don't know who's to say what it is or who is in it or whatever, but it strikes me that you're sort of one of the people that's right there. | ||
| Just people that are all coming together because we're just trying to get a little bit of the answers here, which really is what this is about. | ||
| Yeah, and the way Jonathan Haidt calls it is viewpoint diversity. | ||
| It's not pushing a particular ideology, but it's getting a set of ideas out there that have to struggle. | ||
| They don't get a pass, the whole point of Is there a piece of America right now, or I guess we could say this in the West in general, that our freedoms have gotten so good, actually, that we can't really figure out what's bad? | ||
| So, for example, during the whole debate over the football players kneeling for the anthem, I was watching people, and everyone's just screaming about everything, and half the people hate Trump, half the people say the football players are anti-American, and half the people turn it on the owners of the teams. | ||
| But I tried to lay out a case that actually the entire thing worked the way it was supposed to in a free society. | ||
| He said something, but he didn't, whether you agree with what he said or not, about mocking the players, he didn't try to pass a law about it. | ||
| So he exercised his free speech. | ||
| It's important to recognize that he has that right too. | ||
| If he had tried to pass a law, that's a different thing. | ||
| The players could either kneel or not kneel. | ||
| They might have to deal with the repercussions of that. | ||
| The owners could decide whether they wanted to keep those players on their teams or not. | ||
| The fans could decide if they wanted to not buy jerseys or not, or not attend games or not. | ||
| But to me, it was actually Like a puzzle of freedom actually working. | ||
| And yet every day for months, people were screaming that this is, you know, that this is the tyrannical regime and everything's so horrible. | ||
| Does that sort of jive with you? | ||
| That we've gotten to a place where we don't, our freedoms are so great that we're making these mountains out of things that are important to talk about, but... | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a good analysis. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a way of appreciating what other countries would die for. | ||
| I mean, you just couldn't have that, you know, football players or soccer players kneeling, you know, in Turkey to protest government policy. | ||
| I mean, they'd be in jail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Turkey, one of our allies. | ||
| It depends how you want to use air quotes. | ||
| Yeah, but yes, I think that's a really good point, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so before we finish up here, give me a few more things to just feel hopeful about, because I think that really is what you're trying to show people, that there's so much goodness right now, and let's not lose that. | ||
| Yeah, well, here's some heartening facts. | ||
| The Flynn effect, that IQ scores have been rising by three points a decade for almost a century, something that, I know, incredible as it may sound, this is a really well-established fact. | ||
| I'm gonna have to dive into that one a little bit. | ||
| I spend too much time on Twitter. | ||
| Certainly the fact that extreme poverty has been plummeting, I think, is one of the greatest things that's ever happened. | ||
| I mean, literally from 75% reduction just in 30 years in global rate of extreme poverty. | ||
| And the rise of literacy. | ||
| 90% of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write. | ||
| And there's almost perfect parity now between girls and boys. | ||
| That's encouraging. | ||
| Diseases, infectious diseases, are in decline. | ||
| Malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea. | ||
| And we vanquish smallpox, just sent it off into ancient history. | ||
| It's no longer a disease. | ||
| We may do the same thing with polio, with guinea worm. | ||
| There's terrific progress being made. | ||
| And values of toleration and what I think we all agree are progressive values such as toleration of homosexuality, of women's equality, of the right to get a divorce, of Political participation. | ||
| Those have, believe it or not, all been in gradual increase in every part of the world. | ||
| Even in the most politically backward part of the world, namely the Middle East and North Africa, there's been an increase with, especially when you compare generations, when the younger generations are much more open and sympathetic to liberal values than the older generation. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| reactionary than they really are. | ||
| People say, well, I'm kind of progressive, but everyone around me, they're all a bunch of reactionaries. | ||
| There's a huge gap in how tolerant people really are and in how tolerant they think everyone else is. | ||
| Yeah, it's really interesting. | ||
| All right, so in summation, we should feel good about the future, but we have to fight for it, right? | ||
| We should recognize what we're in danger of losing. | ||
| We should recognize what we've accomplished as a kind of impetus to do more. | ||
| Stephen Pinker, it's been an absolute pleasure. | ||
| Thank you for doing this. | ||
| Pleasure's mine. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| And for more on Stephen, check out his new book, Enlightenment Now! |
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