In Our Time - Human Nature

Episode Date: November 7, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the vexing issue of human nature. Some argue that we are born as blank slates and our natures are defined by upbringing, experience, culture and the ideas of our time. Others believe that human nature is innate and pre-destined, regardless of time and place. Is there really such a thing as human nature? And, if there is, can it be changed? Does the truth about human nature mean we should stop striving for progress, or should it give us cause for optimism? How important is the human race in the wider scheme of things? With Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre of Cognitive Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Janet Radcliffe Richards, Philosopher, Reader in Bioethics, University College London; John Gray, Professor of European Thought, London School of Economics.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on In Our Time this week, we'll be discussing nothing less than human nature. Some argue that we're born as blank slates,

and our natures are defined by upbringing, experience, culture and the ideas of our time. Others believe that some of the essential figurations of human beings, human nature are innate and predestined, regardless of time and place. And there are others who believe that human nature's uniqueness is debatable. Is there really such a thing as human nature? And if there is, can it be changed? Does the truth about human nature mean we should stop striving for progress,

or should it give us cause for optimism? And how important is the human race in the wider scheme of things? Joining me to discuss these questions are Stephen Pinker, Professor of Psychology, and Director of the Centre of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author most recently of the blank slate. Janet Ratcliffe Richards, philosopher,

reader in biotics at University College London, and author of Human Nature after Darwin, and John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, an author, most recently, of Straw Dogs. Let's start at the very beginning, Stephen Pinker. What do you understand by the term human nature? It's the set of emotions and learning abilities

and ways of conceptualizing the way, world that are common to all humans and that allow us to learn and make culture. So all of us have similar natures, whatever sort of person we are, wherever we're born, whatever time, background, opportunities and so on. That's more or less what I would call human nature is what we all have in common. And an acknowledgement of human nature is simply that there is a long list that goes in that category, that it's not negligible. Although you say that very straightforwardly and people will cotton on to

that immediately. There has been an argument for many centuries about where human nature comes from, what it really is, how it should be more closely defined. Can you give us some idea over the passage of those arguments? Certainly in modern intellectual life in, say, Britain and the United States,

there is the creationists, the people who derive their beliefs about human beings from religion. Then many people influenced by 20th century social science believe in a kind of blank slate, namely that human nature really doesn't have much to it other than a few simple

drives like hunger, thirst, and sex. I think it was Ortega I. Gassett who said, man has no nature. He only has a history, perhaps the clearest statement of the doctrine of the blank slate. Does the idea of the noble savage still linger? Do you think there's the idea of Leviathan as man-armed, solitary, mean, nasty, brutish, and short, our life is? Do you think that still lingers? In thought? Absolutely does. I think. think there is a widespread belief in the noble savage, the idea that were it not for corrupting social institutions, people would be inherently peaceable and unselfish. You see it, for example, in repeated declarations that violence is learned behavior. Now, that's not totally wrong. Obviously,

the prevalence of violence varies from time to time and place to place in ways that have nothing to do with genetics. But on the other hand, one would think that something about our nature would help us understand why violence occurs when it occurs. Nonetheless, this statement is repeated by scientific, social, scientific, cultural organizations all the time. You see it in the conduct of research, the fact that many studies look at correlations between what parents do and how their children turn out and simply assume that there's a causal relation, that parenting caused the effects in children, without even testing for the possibility that the correlations could be due to shared genes.

Perhaps one of the reasons that parents who spank their children have children who grew up to be violent is that nowadays more violent people are more likely to spank their children, their children are likely to inherit their genes. Among those genes may be those that predispose them to violence in their turn. A tiny fraction of studies at least tries to rule that out and compare these two, but the vast majority of studies won't even look at the genes as a hypothesis. let alone show that it's wrong. So what I want to say at this stage, before we move on,

is that we are talking about intellectual disputes, very much, very fierce in many cases, but we are also talking about the way that massive societies conduct their society, because if we believe in the blank slate theory of human nature, then we educate millions and millions of children one way, and we look at society one way. If we believe in the power of genetic inheritance,

we educate and look at society in another way. So these ideas actually sort of, jet out into society and encompass a great deal of social behavior and social policy. John Great, do you agree with what Stephen Pinker says? And what would you add to it? My starting point is very similar to Stephen Pinker's. I take it as given that we are animals. Although science doesn't give a completely fixed picture of the world,

that's one of its most well-corroborated findings. The only real question is how similar or how similar, or how different we are in our natures and our behavior from other animals. That's the only question. We are animals. So if we start that way, I think we'll be more open-minded than much social and political thought. And for that matter, as Stephen has pointed out, much scientific research has been over the last few decades, to the possibility that a great deal of our behavior is hardwired or is susceptible to some kinds of genetic explanations.

After all, that's true of other animals. no one has a blank slate for you about cats or dogs or horses or gorillas or dolphins. No one says that the behaviours of these different creatures are to be explained largely by the types of zoo you find them in or the types of wilderness in which they live. We take for granted in respect of these other animals, partly because we have learned from Darwin how they came to be the way they are by natural selection. that a great deal of their life arises from a nature which is both common in a lot of important respects and also fairly constant, at least in short-run periods.

A leopard is a leopard as a leopard. A leopards. Leopards don't change their spots, although I may mention that a philosopher whom I shall not name 20 years ago told me in all seriousness that he persuaded his cat to become a vegan. To which I responded, your arguments must have been extraordinarily, compelling. It's no more possible for human beings to radically alter their nature, short of almost unimaginable techniques of cloning and genetic and engineering, to become wholly peaceful to think up with our earlier discussion, than it is for cats to become vegans. Cats are

predators. They don't become vegans. They can behave in different ways in different circumstances. A loved cat or a cat which has affection for a human being, we're broadly speaking, other things being equal, tend to trust that human being. Whereas a cat that's been badly treated will behave differently. But there's a commonality of relatively constant needs, emotions, dispositions and traits. That is simply there in us, as there is in other animals. Then where does that take humanity, our unique humanity? One would be open to the possibility,

and what one would conclude would depend upon actual empirical research and looking at the facts, but one would be more open than many scientific researchers and social and political theories have been not only for the last few decades, but I really think for the last few hundred years, to the possibility that we're less different from other animals than our culture, both our traditional Christian culture and even some types of humanism, which have emerged, in my view, from that Christian background, have assumed that there's more commonality and less difference.

It's an empirical question. We shouldn't study it in an open-minded, empirical way, but one would be open to that possibility. And that would mean, I think, that some of the more radical political projects that emerged not only from the Enlightenment, but also from streams of thought, which in some respects were against the Enlightenment, like as aspects of Nazism were, but which imagined a fundamental change in human beings. The Maoists thought that human beings could be collectivized, would lose their familial and individualistic instincts, sort of the early founders of the Kibbutzim, some of them at least. Marx also believes that these visions which certainly were widely held

and to some extent I agree with Stephen Pinker are still in some contexts held would begin to look much less plausible it would be like saying that other species will behave completely differently than they've ever done before or radically differently if you put them in different types of zoo

even the worst tyrant with the greatest amount of power Stalin had an awful lot of power Mao had an awful lot of power people in Russia and China today, though in some ways damaged or traumatized by that experience, are still recognizably the human beings that existed during and before those great experiments. Janet Dracliff Richards, what does Darwin bring to the table here? I know he's been mentioned by Stephen Pinker and so, but what would evolutionary Darwinism bring to this argument about human nature

and the difference of human beings and the importance, if any, of the difference? Well, the important, certainly, but what is the quality of the difference? I think the interesting thing about trying to understand a Darwinian account of human nature is that you have to go back to understanding what kind of thing you're claiming to know when you know about human nature. And one of the great problems is, and this I think is a theme in the background of both Stevens and John's books, is that a great many presuppositions from previous kinds of concept of the world have been mistakenly carried over into Darwinian thinking

and people have got the wrong idea of what claims about human nature mean. For instance. Well, if you look back at an Aristotelian view of the world, the world had an order, but it wasn't just a scientific natural order. It also had a moral order built into it. It had an order in the way things were supposed to be and you could disrupt this order by doing something which something of your nature was not supposed to, and then you would get chaos until the order came back again.

Now, the early ideas of evolution, such as were held by Darwin's grandfather, were of progress, as it were, to higher and higher states on a kind of Aristotelian chain of being. The important thing about Darwinian view of the world is that this explained how evolution could happen, but it didn't mean that things were getting better and better. And to understand the nature of something in the Darwinian sense is not to understand how it ought to behave or what its natural places. And one of the things which most distorts

the discussion of human nature in Darwinian terms is that so many people presume that if you say, for instance, men are by nature different from women and men are polygamous and women have a different kind of strategy, they think you're saying that this is how people ought to behave and it justifies it. And this is a matter of importing presuppositions from non-Darwinian, anti-Darwinian views of the world into Darwinism. And it means it's a total confusion in discussions of human nature

because what you mean by a claim about human nature is different according to what you're presupposing about the nature of the world. That was very clear. Could you elaborate it, though, on the example that you passed by, It didn't pass by, just lay on the table and move on in that contribution. We talked about the difference between men and women as a difference of is, but we interpret it as a difference of ought. Yes, that's exactly what it is,

because in a lot of previous views of the world, if you take the Aristotelian view where there was just a harmonious cosmos, where things occasionally got out of place and then had to struggle to get back, the natural state of things was order and harmony. Then you go into the rather different tradition, which is also mixed up in Christianity with the Aristotelian, which is that of a creator God who ordained how things should be and gives a kind of morality that if you understand how God intended things to be,

you can then do your bit for making the world a harmonious place. So if you believe in a creator God, for instance, who made men this way and women this way, you could see that from understanding that men were this kind of creature and women of that kind of creature, you could see how they were supposed to live in a harmonious thing. family. James Fitz-James-James Stephen, for instance, who was one of Mills' opponents in the 19th century, said that men and women can no more have different interests than can different

parts of the same body. Now, what a Darwinian says is that men and women can have very different interests, both reproductively and individually, and indeed, they're going even further and saying different parts of the body can, as it were, have different interests. The Darwinian view is that there is no natural harmony, there is no aught built into things. We have to supply the aughts and we have to understand the raw materials in order to make the best of what we can, but it's not given us by nature. So if we say that men, for instance, may have some basic instinct to rape when they're sexually unsuccessful, which is one of the theories put forward recently, this does not for a moment imply that we ought to allow men to rape. It just means that

we have to work much harder than we thought to work out how to stop them raping. Well, those are very strong contributions. Before we move on, could I ask each of you, not quite that length, because there's a bit more ground I'd like to cover here, informing an opinion on human nature, are we obliged to make a choice between nature and nurture? And if so, what's the balance here, Stephen Fink. Very clearly we shouldn't and can't choose between nature and nurture.

what we call nurture, namely the effects of parenting, peer influence, culture, the society at large, don't happen by magic. They're not a kind of gas that we inhale or a bacterium that bores its way in. They're possible to begin with because of certain innate faculties that we have to learn in certain ways, to conceptualize the world in certain ways. Language, I think, is the clearest example. There's no question about whether we learn language or not. we clearly aren't born with Japanese or Swahili. We have to learn the details of the language.

On the other hand, if we didn't have a brain that was equipped to learn language, then we wouldn't have either language. If you compare, say, how a parrot learns when exposed to language and how a child learns when exposed to language, you realize that it's the wrong question of whether there's learning or not. There is learning in both cases. In one case, there's an attempt to mimic the sound. In another case, there's the ability to chop up the stream.

of sound into nouns and verbs and subjects and objects and abstract rules that allow them to be recombined to produce new sentences. So nurture and the environment can never be written off. The only point is that to understand them properly, you have to understand the innate learning mechanisms that allow culture to be created and transmitted. Do we get very far by saying it's both? I mean, is it more decisive? John Gray, well, you're waving on. Do you want to come? I didn't follow the established order all the time. you come in. I think one of the problems here is that people will try to answer this in a kind of sweeping quantitative way. And I think that's another of the things that comes from the wrong way of thinking

about it with the idea that there's a natural way for things to grow. And the question is how much you can distort them or change them. But if you start asking it again in this Darwinian background, the question is not how much of each is which. It's what changes to the environment would have what effects on individuals. And once you start focusing it on the individual questions, as you do in any other area of science, you say what do you have to do to this piece of iron to turn it into stainless steel or what?

You don't say, is iron changeable or not? The question is which things will change it in which ways? And it's just the same with human beings. It's a question of which environmental influences will have which effects. But what strength has the environment on this piece of iron? if it doesn't want to be a piece of steel, as it were, John Gregg. Well, I think I agree with what Stephen and Janet have said that we can't think of nature and nurture as mutually exclusive alternatives

because all the possibilities and limitations of nature, of nurture, are given us by biological facts about the human animal, that we are not born fully equipped for life, that we have a long infancy, that in those, that period were very heavily dependent on our, our parents, their biological facts. But still, I think in order to find out why, after all, it's an historical and a cultural fact that this is an intensely controversial, emotive and explosive issue.

Why? I think the reason is that one of the chief explanation of this is that underlying this, so to speak, purely intellectual issue, almost of value-free science, are other issues which connect. back to views of human beings in which you explain how they are the way they are by looking to the way they would be if they were completely realized or perfect. This was the theory to which Janet referred to final causes

which I think in the 18th century was satirized by someone that said the final cause of the human nose was snuff. In other words, a final cause is that sort of condition of perfection or complete realization to which we're all moving. Now, Darwin completely shoves that whole set of thinking, that all kind of thinking about human beings, out of the window. And you agree with that? It should be out of the window.

It should be removed entirely, and the whole basis of our thinking should be different. And I think then, as it were, the reason we have this explosive controversy now is that the view of human beings, partly inherited from Christianity and partly inherited from pre-Darwinian secular thought. Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment. It is one in which human beings have a freedom, in Christianity at least, denied to other animals. They have free will. They have immortal souls. They have possibilities of choice. Other animals don't have. And in the Enlightenment, or many Enlightenment thinkers,

not by no means all, there are some like Voltaire or Hume who take a more moderate view, but in some Enlightenment thinkers, at least, human beings and the human species as a whole is regarded as, so to speak, a vast reservoir of possibilities for improvement and increased progress. Whereas, although no single set of policies ever follows from this Darwinian view of human beings,

it does have indirect consequences, some of which limit the possibilities of progress. Perhaps in one sentence I can illustrate that, in the 30s there was a exchange of letters between Freud and Einstein. Now Freud had a theory different from Darwin's and it may have been largely exploded now of a death instinct side by side with a thanatos and eros. But what was interesting to me in reading this exchange was that Einstein took something like the classical version of the more optimistic strand in the Enlightenment about war.

and he said, if we can get the conditions changed in the world, we'll never have any more wars. Freud replied, well, if we can get conditions right in the world, we might diminish the possibilities of war, or we can reduce the damage that war inflates. But some of the causes of war are such that no change in the environments in which people, the human animal, will live, will altogether remove the risk of war or the savagery of war when it occurs. And that, I think, is illustrative. Freud in that respect, though not appealing to Darwin, was, I think, invoking a more Darwinian view than Einstein.

Can I just ask you before one thing? You've done a lot of work on twins. And it seems to me from what I've read of what you've done on twins, the argument for nature is overwhelmingly stronger than the argument for Nurtje. Is that a wrong interpretation of what you've done? It just seems enormously to do with nature. You split the twins, one's brought up in a middle-class Australia, others brought up in local working-class England.

And they meet at 35 and they're wearing the same dress, trousers, so they got married to the same person, they got the same choice. That sort of thing. Now, that suggests a very powerful influence of nature, doesn't it? It does. I should say that it's not my work, but work that a massive amount of work that comes to very convergent conclusions that I've reviewed. I wouldn't say necessarily that nature,

it says that nature is non-negligible, that it has an enormous effect that can't be written off. However, here's a sobering statistic. We all know about the identical twins separated at birth who are similar in all of these ways. The thing is they are certainly not indistinguishable. Often in personality traits that you measure using psychological tests, the correlations are about 0.5. Now, that's a lot more than zero. It's also a lot less than 100%. what it doesn't.

So it shows that there is something that goes into what makes us what we are that is not just the genes. The astonishing thing, the second shocker from this research, is think back to the identical twins reared together. If they only correlate, say, 0.5, they not only share an heredity, they also share an environment. They had the same set of parents,

same house, same neighborhood, largely the same peer group, same number of televisions in the house, same number of books in the house. But they are not. indistinguishable. That means this is, I think, a true challenge for the science of the mind is how could they be different even though all of the lists of causes that we've all talked about for years are pretty much equated. Now, it could be that trivial differences in experience make a

huge effect. One twin has to get the top bunk bed and one twin has to get the bottom bunk bed. On the other hand, I think it's remarkably unlikely that that could turn one twin into a shy person, Shire and the other one in Boulder. I think that there's an underappreciated role for chance. Chance possibly in the events that all of us encounter uniquely in our lives, but also chance in the wiring up of the brain in utero and in the first couple of years of life. So it might even restore this pre-Darwinian concept of fate, not fate in terms of predestination, but fate in terms of uncontrollable fortune.

Destiny. A kind of destiny not preordained. but something that's beyond your control, beyond your parents' control, beyond your genes control, simply because as powerful as the genes are, they can't possibly determine the wiring diagram of the brain down to the last synapse.

And it's likely that whether a neuron zigs to the left or zags to the right might accumulate to leave a big effect on our personalities. Can we talk very briefly about whether you think it's a blank slate audio or the genetic? idea that leads us to violence and crime. And can we try to use, if we can possibly be specific once or twice here, John Gray, do you think that our culture, cultures, what we are human beings, let's abandon human nature,

and not dream of talking about humanity, but because you think humanity is too big a claim, really, don't you? You think that humanity, you put it on a power with Christianity. It's a self-deluding, self-aggrandizing claim to what we really are. But what we are as human beings, you think. think that we will always tend to violence as cats will always leap on mice. I do, I mean, to begin with, think as you say I do that, the broad notion we have of humanity reflects much more the lingering influence of Christianity and other Preet-Owinian ideas

and categories of thought than we allow. But I'd like to make an initial distinction in answering your request in Melbourne between crime and violence. I think it's very important when thinking about these matters to realize how variable and changeable crime is. After all, Oscar Wilde went to jail for being homosexual. If you go back a few, a couple of hundred years, or not even that in some parts of Europe, women were punished for being witches. That was criminal, even though it was in a sense of non-existent activity. So I'm cautious and very skeptical about it. any attempt to explain crime by genetic considerations,

particularly for the simple fact that what is criminal and what is not is just too variable. However, we can have a kind of an operational idea of what it means to be violent, which we can, I think, attach, make quite substantive there. And I think in that sense, what we have to say is not what some Enlightenment humanists say, which is they say things like, well, violent behavior is simply one part of the human repertoire, like making music or making love or praying, and it just depends on the circumstances and the environment, whether it comes out or not, because of the back of that is the blank state notion.

It's the notion that if you could get the environment right, there'd be absolutely no temptation to violent behavior or no disposition to it. Everything we know, not only about human biology, and human prehistory, but this is an important point about human history. There's less dispute in some areas, at least, about that, suggests that human beings, shows that human beings are extremely violent animals, not necessarily the most violent of their evolutionary group. I think it was E.O. Wilson who pointed out that there are some baboons

who kill more frequently than they do within their group, that if they had nuclear weapons, we'd have already had the catastrophe. So we're not necessarily the worst, as it were. But we are, historically speaking, a very violent animal. That's hardwired into us. That propensity is strong. So the idea that we can eradicate tendencies to violence or violence from the world by reshaping the environment

is one we should give up. Janet, would you want to come in mind? Well, just on the other hand, that we do know that, for instance, to go back to the male-female differences, we know that in any known society men are more violent than women but we also know that there are tremendous variations between societies because of the kind of environment

they're in and women in some societies are more violent than men in other societies so you always get the sex difference but it doesn't mean that the environment doesn't make any difference it just means that there are different ways of controlling the impulses, different kinds of social pressures and environmental temptations. What conclusions do say anthropologists roer from?

You take issue with anthropologists quite a lot in New York. books, Stephen Kink. What argument do you have with them on this particular subject? Let's stick to violence. Well, anthropologists are, like their subject matter, are divided into warring tribes. So there are many, I rely on the work of anthropologists, but there are,

there's a large camp of anthropologists who say that everything is socially constructed and is relative to the culture, that there are societies out there that are completely peaceable. The more quantitative anthropologists who actually count bodies have, I think, established pretty convincingly that those

are mythical, that in fact, even the most supposedly peaceable societies have homicide rates that are far greater than those of Western democracies. I think the crucial thing, though, not just from anthropologists, but from psychologists, is that even when there are large differences in violent behavior, there's much more commonality in a kind of violent psychology or mindset. And just a few examples. In all cultures, boys engage in more play fighting than girls. Even in the 70s when sex differences were frowned on, the feminist summaries conceded that that's something you see in all societies.

The most violent age in life is the age of two, in which a majority of children kick, bite, and hit. And if you pro-people's fantasies as opposed to their behavior, you say, have you ever fantasized about killing someone that you don't like? and about 80% of men and 60% of women say yes, and many people suspect that the rest are liars. Now, if you take a society like ours, if someone writes something nasty about me,

I don't want to tell you what kind of fantasies that I have. I can guarantee that I will never act on a single one of them. So there is a scope, even if there is a common human nature, and especially if the commonality is manifested more, say, in the behavior of children and in the fantasies of adults than an actual behavior, there is a lever by which a democratic, millierist society can try to at least affect overt behavior, even if they haven't rewritten people's consciousness.

Given your study of bioethics, Janet, how do you approach the idea of setting up systems of morality when we've had Stephen Pinker and John Gray be so adamant and persuasive about the innate continuing, historically proven, and you yourself have joined in, as it were, never-ending violence. Is this, are we just papering over, well, the cracks, isn't the word, the chasms? I mean, is it any more than John Gray might say, a sort of self-aggrandizing way to pretend that we have humanness and humanity,

whereas it's not the end of there, we're just sort of getting by? We have some humanness in humanity, and evolutionary theory explains where we get it from, too. But the interesting thing here is that once you do this... How does it explain that? How does... Evolutionary psychology. Oh, it explains it by saying that you will survive better in...

Quite often you will survive better in groups where you cooperate than if you all seek your own interests. And we know that both on the large scale from the social arrangements we make, but the same sort of thing accounts for natural selection of groups with a good deal of internal altruism to each other. So we understand how we can. and have got the impulses. The interesting thing for ethics here is once you go into this Darwinian world

where the is and the ought really are separate, then you have to start realizing that the inquiry into the ought becomes a totally separate line of inquiry. That is, you can't get it out of the scientific knowledge. You just cease to try to do it. So there's no way in which we ought scientifically to behave. We will behave as we behave. and the ought is to do with laws brought in from the outtart?

Is that what you're saying? It's to do with our understanding, our appreciation, that certain states of the world are better than other states of the world. And when we start trying to pin down what we mean by better, we find we get into all sorts of confusions, which we never realized in the previous ideas about the world we got into because we thought there was just such a thing as all-purpose progress. Now we realize we have to decide between confusions,

conflicting goods. And the question is, how much of this can we do rationally? Now, I wouldn't be in the subject if I didn't think there were a good deal we could do rationally. For instance, to go back to John's idea about animals, I think we actually have made serious moral progress in recognizing that suffering in animals matters. It just objectively matters, just as it does in humans. And to the extent that an animal suffering is equal to a human suffering, objectively speaking they matter exactly as much. Now this is a kind of thing you find by reasoning and it changes the way you start thinking about how to organise society.

How, it's often been thought for a long time in different countries and different times that culture in a narrower sense, knowing about the arts, knowing about philosophy, knowing about science, culture has a civilising influence on one kind. make us better people, might even make us happy people, will get us nearer the truth. Do you think that's true? I think there's something to it. I think I wouldn't put it that simply, but just we have

experienced a decline in many forms of violence in the last 50 years and probably the last thousand years where treating members of other societies as if they were non-human, as if their interests counted for nothing. We have to discount a heck of a lot of wars in the last 50 or six years, for your theory to sort of have any sort of ride at all. It just depends on how many people get killed. And capital punishment is much less common. Beating children is much less common.

Deadly ethnic riots are much less common than they used to be. Pogromse over the last 50 years, according to historians. It probably has many causes, but I think one of them is a kind of cosmopolitan outlook in which you could no longer have what I think of the default mode of human reasoning and sympathy, namely the members of my tribe and village I can empathize with everyone else is less than human, perhaps even extended, as Janet Radcliffe Richards points out, to animals.

Partly because of the lessons of history, if your own jingoistic statements were made previously by some enemy regime that led to disaster, you've got to take a second look at them. If you have realistic fiction or cinema that allows you to project yourself into the daily lives of people from very different times or places. You can't simply massacre them without some kind of twinge. So I think there, even though I don't think that exposing people to literature will make them humane, I think some kind of cosmopolitan awareness through history, through journalism, through literature, cumulatively

might explain what moral progress we have enjoyed. We are looking back in a century where some of the most civilized nations that it is in the cultural sense possible to be, have done the most appalling things in the... in a human sense it is possible to imagine. But you have to distinguish between whether people actually behave in these ways and whether the moral ideals of how they ought to behave are changing. Now there was a time when it was actually the moral ideal

that you only cared about your own group and some people still have that. But the moral idea can change and we can say that these people didn't live up to it. So you have to distinguish between these two kinds of progress. And even in the case of, say, Nazism where it's certainly true that some horrible people were connoisseurs of culture. Certainly music is not going to make you a better person. Certainly bombastic architecture is not going to make you a better person. And it's also true that some forms of inquiry in Nazi Germany were radically suppressed. Certainly science, when many of the best scientists were forced to leave. Philosophy suffered terribly. I don't think there was any kind of

great literature or fiction from that period. So that's why the question, shouldn't be asked of culture in general. But there is a risk here of rerunning Aristotle's mistake. I mean, Aristotle thought that doing philosophy made you better. Aristotle thought that being cultivated made you an all-round good chap, of course, because it was chaps than he was talking about. I tend to think that that's a mistaken way of thinking because the values that art and philosophy and science and music contribute to our lives

need not be moral values. They needn't actually make us better. In other words, if somebody demonstratively proved that science or philosophy or literature hadn't, as it were, made people kinder or less bigoted or less, it wouldn't, to my mind, empty them of value because they give us other things which are of value. Just one kind of cautionary. I don't quite share Stephen's view. I mean, numerically, the 20th century was a time of the greatest mass killing, partly because the technology was greater, but not always. The last big genocide of the 20th century in Rwanda was done with little axes.

and it's also not always true that people who know a great deal about each other can't be driven into the worst types of ethnic conflict. For example, I believe it to be the case that intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims was highest in the whole world in Bosnia before the division. And that longstanding, not recent degree of interpenetration and broke down within five or ten years into a disastrous way. So I think we have to ask ourselves how that's possible. So I'm making two comments. One is let's not run all types of values together and make all the values of the goods of art and science and so on into moral values. They're not.

But the second is let's not kid ourselves about the fragility of the kinds of harmonious or peaceful interaction that human beings can achieve. It can be very profound. If a third almost, I think it was a third, 30 percent or slightly more, of the population in Bosnia was intermarried between these two faiths. They brought up children together, and yet that could disintegrate very quickly. There are obviously deep-seated propensities as well as tragic historical accidents and errors of policy. So, there was deep-seated human propensities.

That makes this possible. Can I close by asking you, if you can briefly, to, and really, let's not try to cheer each other up or anybody else up. Just try to be as strange as you can. Do you really think that this business of us being humane, seeking out for enliqueline, seeking out, maybe on the basis of religions going forward in spirits of inquiry and so. Do you think this in the end adds up to a hill of beings? But there are two beliefs we have to give up. We have to give up the belief in the irreversibility of moral progress.

It's absolutely essential. And a second belief which is more fundamental in which is, as it were, the root of the religion of humanism, is the idea that the growth of knowledge in and of itself somehow carries with it values of freedom or progress or humanity or whatever. It obviously doesn't. Science can be, not just can be, absolutely has been used for the most appalling purposes. So there may be a kind of ultra-chaistan version

of the idea of progress which survives this way of thinking, but it'll be one in which these two very fundamental beliefs will have been abandoned, the belief in irreversibility and the belief that the growth of knowledge is in and of itself, connected with moral and political and social progress. Janet. I think we're up against enormous difficulties. The good thing about the previous views of the world

where the moral was so integrated with the natural was that if you understood your place and did what you could, eventually things were going to be okay. With the Darwinian world, this is just not true. It doesn't mean we can't make things better. It just means we have to think separately about what constitutes being better. Then we have to be utterly,

objective in our understanding of human nature, and we certainly don't go into wishful thinking because that causes trouble. There's a huge limit to what we can achieve, partly because it's so complex and partly because we're just on one tiny planet, and goodness knows how much suffering is going on elsewhere in the universe. But it doesn't mean that it's not worth trying. It's the only thing we can do, and at least we know that it isn't all our fault. It isn't that we, through our fallen nature, have disrupted what was naturally good. It's that we're born into a moral chaos and all we can do is try and make things better. Finally, Stephen Pinker.

Yes. Because we know that some aspects of moral progress have occurred, I think it's incumbent on us to figure out how we got to be so lucky. What was the trick? I don't think we necessarily realized it at the time. We might be able to find it only in retrospect. But some things work. Democracy works better than totalitarianism. A democratically controlled police force works better than a roving militia.

and I think I would like to see historians devote more attention to trying to diagnose, at least after the fact, and test the ideas by making predictions about what does work. And we clearly are up against a default human nature that isn't going to bring about peace and harmony by itself. But we have a lot of societal, political, institutional gadgets that seem to work better than the alternative some of the time. That's a limited assessment of progress, but it's a limited assessment of progress, but it's, it's more than a hill of beans. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, Stephen Pinker.

Thank you, Janet Rutcliff-Ritchard, and thank you to John Gray. And thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com. Thank you, UK, forward slash Radio 4.