The Daily Stoic - Steven Pinker on the Pursuit of Rationality | Never Wish Away A Minute of Your Life

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to author Steven Pinker about his new book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, the importance of pursuing effective altruism, the responsibility of institutions to protect the common good, and more.Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. Pinker is also the author of eight books and was named in Time's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today" in 2004.List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal.KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com.SimpliSafe just launched their new Wireless Outdoor Security Camera. Get the new SimpliSafe Wireless Outdoor Security Camera, visit https://simplisafe.com/stoic. What’s more, SimpliSafe is celebrating this new camera by offering 20% off your entire new system and your first month of monitoring service FREE, when you enroll in Interactive Monitoring. Again that’s https://simplisafe.com/stoic.Uprising Food have cracked the code on healthy bread. Only 2 net carbs per serving, 6 grams of protein and 9 grams of fiber. They cover paleo, to clean keto, to simple low carb, to high fiber, to dairy free to grain free lifestyle. Uprising Food is offering our listeners ten dollars off the starter bundle. that includes two superfood cubes and four pack of freedom chips to try! go to uprisingfood.com/stoic and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcasts early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season

Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Never wish away a minute of your life. You want this to be over, right? When can this end, when can life go back to normal? We've said this a million times to ourselves, not just during the pandemic, but countless times in ordinary circumstances.

When we were excited for Christmas to come already, when we waited for a friend who called ahead to say that they'd be late, while we were listening to that boring lecture. In his book, Travels with Epicurus, the writer Daniel Klein recalls a formative moment. I remember one long ago evening he said on an overcrowded train to Philadelphia, hearing a young woman moan to her mother. God, I wish we were there already. Her white-haired mother replied eloquently, darling, never wish away a minute of your life.

Remember what Seneca, Epicurus' rival and secret fan would say, life is in short, we just waste it. We waste it wishing for things to be otherwise. We wasted it waiting for it to be over. We waste it by ignoring what's in front of us. We waste it by resenting, complaining, rejecting. Now is now. Can never be anything else. Now is your life. Live it. Love it. That's all you can do. You won't get anything else. You won't get another moment. Never wish away a minute of your life. It's a gift. Should you choose to accept it. To me, this is what that exercise of Memento Mori is about. It's why I carry that

Memento Mori coin in my pocket. I've got it sitting on my desktop as well. Memento Mori, you can leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. You can check that out in the Daily Stoke Store, we have a necklace and a segment ring as well, and a poster can check that out in the Daily Stoke store. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday, welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I feel like at the core of stoicism is this pursuit of rationality. The stoics believe that our rational mind

was the mind we were aspiring to live by. So why the Stokes talk about logic. This is why the Stokes talk about really taking your impressions, putting them up to the test, thinking through them, not just reacting emotionally, instinctively, reactively. And in fact, when people think of the Stokes as being emotionless, I don't think that's it at all. I think what the Stoics tried to do is not make decisions or take actions based on the heat of an emotion. So, Stoic might get angry, but their rational mind allows them to think through in that

space between the stimulus and responses, Viktor Frankl talks about, to not take action based on their temper, that almost never gets you the outcome that you want. In fact, Athena Doris recommends this to the emperor Augustus. He says, look, before you get angry, you should repeat all the letters of the alphabet to yourself. And he's saying this, and Senka is writing about it later in his book on anger because angry rulers looking at the evidence we see rarely make for good rulers. So at the core of stoicism is this idea of rationality and that's why today's guest, the one and only Stephen Pinker and his new book rationality, what it is, why it seems so scarce and why it matters. Is someone I very much wanted to talk to. This new book is great, I read it, I really enjoyed it.

We talked about that in the interview. We also talked about his book, The Language Instinct, his book, The Blank Slate, and most famously, and most provocatively, and more recent, his book Better Angels, is about the decline of violence and the progress we've made as a species. Look, I love the Stokes, I love writing about the Stokes. I would not want, I would not have wanted to live in Marcus Aurelius' room.

Not, and as I've talked about COVID before, COVID's very serious. I'd much rather live today when we have the remedies to deal with COVID than in Marcus Aurelius' time, when they were lighting incense, hoping to keep away the intonine plague. So we have a really fascinating conversation, and Stephen Pinker is the top of the top, as far as his field goes. He's a two-time fuel-it-surprise finalist, one of times most 100 influential people in the world, foreign policies, 100 global thinkers, sold a bazillion books. He manages to take really complicated difficult even one might say boring topics and make them not just accessible but fascinating. And I think does so in a way that allows you to apply that allows you to apply it to your

actual life. So I was so excited and honored to talk to the one and only Stephen Pinker. He's a professor of psychology at Harvard, music lover. We nerd out about the band a little bit towards the end. Anyways, here is my interview with Stephen Pinker talking philosophy, rationality, self-improvement, and the progress of the human species. So I lug this this guardian profile of you. I, I could have, I could have left it, but I didn't. I was not, it was not a good use of three days of my time.

Why, why not? Well, he presented a lot of things, totally chopped at a context. Well, he presented a lot of things totally chopped out of context. He kind of, I think, I thought, you know, snooped around my apartment, my office, out on my private memorabilia, and then kind of presented as if I was some kind of, you know, narcissist for displaying it. And it was kind of none of his business in the first place. I there was a cast snooped around for any dirt that he could find and I know from a number of former student city contacted that they spoke to him at length and none of that made it into the interview.

So it was it was a general's an adversarial profile. I knew that that was possible because 25 years ago I had read Janet Malcolm's famous essay on how journalists like to cozy up to their subjects and pretend to be friends, but then often, often write highly compromising articles. So I was prepared for. I mean, you know, a lot of people like, like you, I don't know if you were being sarcastic or not, but a lot of people said, oh, great profile. You came off so well. And perhaps that is the impression I'm being overly sensitive. No, no, I actually did think it was largely positive, but isn't it interesting when you

are the subject of how the news is made? And then I think there's something, I think, was the gal amnesia effect. You see how the news is made when it pertains to you or something you're an expert about. And then you go back to consuming the news as if it wasn't made with a similarly misleading or fundamentally flawed process, right? Like speaking of rationality,

if our understanding of the world is dependent on the news media, and then you just experienced how the news media works, it does shake your understanding of the world a little bit. Yeah, it does. And that is like there is a kind of insight that you get from being a subject of a media profile. And I remember the first time I was in a documentary many years ago, it gave me a new appreciation

for how films are made. I just seeing it through different eyes, knowing how the process works. And it was a good experience experience because even dramas and fiction, just knowing how the cuts must be selected from a much larger recording process, what choices a director makes gives you a new set of eyes with which to view the whole medium. Yeah, that's one interesting argument I've heard for why public trust in the media is at an all time low. Now that effectively, we are all content creators of some kind. Everyone sort of understands how these algorithms work to a certain degree or

where understands the incentives that are operating under content creators because we've experienced in our own Facebook feeds or Twitter feeds. We, the illusion of the sacredness of the media or its sort of flawless methodologies has fallen away, and that's partly why we don't trust the media as much. Yeah, that could be. Although I suspect the bigger factor is the polarization that sure everyone hates the media that they think are giving unfair coverage to the people

they hate. Okay, you have an interesting study in this book where you show, I think it's gun control and then sort of the pre-suppositions you bring to it determines how you read that data. Well, it is the, it's an example of the my side bias, which is one of the most pervasive of all of the cognitive biases. It affects people regardless of their intelligence. It affects people on both sides of the political spectrum. But yes, the clearest illustrations are that if you present a policy proposal, and you say it comes from a Democrat,

then the Democrats think it's a great idea to the Republicans. I think it's stupid and vice versa. Or if you present the results from a study that tests some policy intervention favored by the left to right. Each side will think that the data support the position that they believed all along, even with the same data. And sometimes even more so if they are highly numerous, it does not protect them from

interpreting data in a way that they prefer a priori. Yeah, and I want to talk about all that. I don't want to spend too much time on the media, but it did strike me that if rationality is always hard, and I think it always has been hard, it's got to be more difficult in a time where, and you quote, Steve Bannon, you know, flooding the zone with shit. It's got to be harder to be rational when the zone is flooded with with shit, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, sort of whoever you are, whatever you're trying to study, having to wade through misinformation and disinformation and just plainly lots of information, it makes sort of a timeless struggle more difficult, I suspect.

I think that's right. And I think it's exacerbated by the huge amount of editorializing, supporting your own point of view. Right. You can get that, you know, the dubious form of pleasure or satisfaction from seeing the empty article that attacks your enemies or ratifies the justice of your side. And we have not all of it is fake news, but a lot of it is all too much fun to read and I think can reinforce people in their credit system. Yeah, and maybe the solution to the problem is just everyone should consume a lot less contemporaneous information. I mean, there's something about a three or 400 page book

or in some of your books are much longer than that if I remember the blank slate and better angels. But I think there is something more conducive to rationality when you are reading a long form, sort of analog argument as opposed to reading a thing that's been reduced down to 240 characters or a thousand words that you're reading on your phone as you're being besieged by ads or, you know,

there's a rabbit hole you could go down at any time. I think we need sort of quiet, dedicated space to explore big ideas. Like, if we had these cognitive biases, we need room to sort of override them, so to speak, and perhaps the sort of technology and the medium with which most people get their information is not conducive to that. Yeah, there is that. But traded off against the fact that there is so much information available, so much bad information, but so much good information, even for just a discerning consumer of editorials, of reporting, of explanatory articles in the sciences, I said, I'm going to find myself despairing

at the lack of time to read all the things that clearly are high quality and interest me. So it's a kind of a perverse byproduct of one beneficial aspect of the internet, namely that there just is so much interesting stuff around. And so the shorter articles and the ones now with the actual reading time posted at the top of the article, you address the problem only so many hours in the day and there's some optimal trade-off between breadth and depth. But you're right, there's some arguments that can only be pursued in book length. I obviously believe that,

otherwise I wouldn't write these books. No, they're not fun. They're not fun to do. They're not fun to do. I hope they're fun to read. And certainly, what I have avoided, even though I do have a Twitter account, it's got more followers than I thought would be possible, but I avoid the style of Twitter commentary of just issuing a snarky pronouncement on all of the events and other articles that cross your screen. I use it as a virtually always will link to some article that expresses the argument in adequate depth and length. So I consider my tweets to be like the taglines published under the headline of a magazine article. This is what this is about. This is

why you might be interested in reading it, but the substance of what I'm trying to communicate is contained in the longer article, and not always a book, but a long enough article that it isn't the 240 characters. But I feel like even some of the instances where some of the things you've said have been controversial,

but then anyone that publishes on the internet and says like, here, look, here's all the evidence for what I believe. You sort of get people go, I've seen enough. I saw the headline. I have my opinion formed already. And I'm like, I get this with my books. I wrote a book a few years ago called ego is the enemy, not the Freudian ego, but the sort of the colloquial ego. And people, I'll get emails, people go, well, I haven't read your book, but here's why. Yeah, for sure. Yes. And is there anything more egotistical than knowing that I'm wrong before you have read it?

But that's what people do. We have our instantaneous reaction to things, and we go, that's enough. True enough. And there is an art form of Twitter snark and sarcasm where you have a piffy comment that usually snide that puts down or just misses or demonizes some other commentator. Sure. And it's that style that probably doesn't lead to enlightenment. Well, I've always felt like the straw man, the sort of Twitter response to better angels

was an odd one because you have this, it's a beautiful book, it's very long. But there's this sort of straw man that what you're saying is that humanity is just getting better and therefore we don't have to do anything, that progress is sort of preordained or people will try to go, well, what about this bad thing? How does that fit into your argument? But I always felt that what your argument was in that book was that the reason things

are better is that a lot of hard work and effort and changes has gone into making them better. And that while we are the errors to that tradition, it could also stop at any moment as well. That's exactly right. And I continue to be amazed at exactly those two responses, neither. But both of which seem to be really elementary malinders of thinking, but that are surprisingly complex. The one is, well, how can you say things are declined? Bad stuff happens. Well, yeah, but those are totally compatible.

The name we bad stuff happens, but in the past, even more bad stuff happened. That is, it's the decline is not the same as a disappearance, to say that X is less than Y is not the same as saying that X is zero. So there's that. Strange inability to even conceptualize the concept of progress. Then we think things can get better without being perfect.

And the other one that you correctly identified, which is surprisingly commonplace, is things got better. Oceasing, they got better by themselves. Well, no, that doesn't follow. Things can get better not because they got better by themselves, but because people try to make them better, and if an indicationly succeeded. And the implication being, if we want things to get better still,

we should figure out what worked in the past so we can do more of it now. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years

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I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I wanna know. So I asked my mom about it.

These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members,

you can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Yeah, and you obviously talk a lot specifically about violence and reduction and the sort of changes we made as a society that did that. But I thought was really interesting about the new book rationality is and I didn't quite feel that till I got towards the end and you say it explicitly, but you could almost argue that this book is a

prequel to better angels because you're sort of making the argument that of all of the things that have produced the progress and thus the decrease in violence, Rationality was the first thing, that almost all of these movements or changes began with some sort of either rational breakthrough or rational discovery or a rational argument, like, hey, no human should own another human, that's wrong, that really rationality is necessary but not sufficient for progress of the human species. Yeah, and it was a surprise in writing, better angels, how often a moral movement, a movement

toward greater social justice, at least temporarily originated with an argument. Argument for something that today we would think needs no argument. Like, we really have to argue why you shouldn't burn heretics of the stake. And the answer is, people did. And those are, fortunately those arguments came. It's harder to prove that they were a cause in the sense that if no one had actually written that viral pamphlet, the progress would have been delayed by another century. But it's not implausible given the chain of events.

It doesn't mean that every improvement was conceptualized and argued for. In the better angels I talked about, for example, the decline of tribal reading and feuding and then blood feuds, the decline of medieval brigandage and homicide and deaths from jostling and other conflicts among medieval mice, some of which was, may have been a byproduct

of the consolidation of kingdoms and states, where, I mean, there was some thought that went into it, namely, it's a nuisance for emperors and kings if they're subjects of fighting each other, just as it's nuisance for farmers, if it was livestock fight each other. He doesn't kill what they are arguing just about and it's just a dead loss for him.

But the fact that it did benefit the peasants if they stopped killing each other as much, it wasn't what was in the mind of the kings and amperors, but it was a somewhat happy byproduct. But those are, I mean, that can't happen, that is that beneficial historical trends can be not undesigned or unintended consequences of other motives. But many of the ones that were proudest of,

that we think of as genuine moral progress, did not just begin with people spontaneously assembling and pushing for the great justice. It did originate with someone formulating the argument. What sort of like all clichés were probably an original quote at some point, right? Somebody came up with that phrasing, and oftentimes, you can trace a certain cliché

back to some person. It's always, you joke about Albert Einstein. It's always Albert Einstein or Mark Twain or someone. But occasionally, Yogi Berra or Groucho Marx. Yeah, but it's like somebody said it at some point, meaning like somebody had the idea, but that also makes me think, you know, of this idea of the great man of history theory, the idea that like somebody again made the argument at some point, right? So Thomas Jefferson makes the argument that we're all created equally, puts it in a document document and it does fundamentally change the direction

of humanity. It's not a totally original thought, but he manages to phrase it and support the argument as such that it convinces other people to go along with it. And that's that's a that rational, the ability to rationally do that. maybe we understate the importance of that. That's right, and Jefferson is an excellent example because of course he and he himself was a flawed man to put him mildly and the country did not live according to his principles. That was precisely almost to the word

what Martin Luther King and his famous speech after the March on Washington, namely this country issued a check. It was so far it's a bad check. We're here to cash it. Namely that all men are created equal thing. Remember that? You promised we're here to hold your feet to the fire to force you to make good on it. So the idea outlived the original implementation. It was there to appeal to and it did have an effect. I think, by the way, the general influence of arguments on history, not so much as great man,

but I think it was, who said, was it Victor Hugo? There's nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Yes. And in case of Jefferson, of course, there's that statue of him in Washington and he's on the, the $10 bill.

No, what did, what, see, I'm not, you see on our currency? He is, I figure. At the point, I haven't seen cash in so long. I've never got to. Right. Anyway, he's, you know, everyone knows who Thomas Jefferson is. But the thing is it wasn't about him. It was about the idea. And there are movements where the idea having been boosted in the, the kind of intellectual marketplace of ideas, people may not remember who originally formulated the idea takes on a life of its own. And in the case of feminism, for example, I cite the

first English feminist Mary Astel who co-opting one of John Locke's arguments for why we shouldn't have slavery or absolute monarchy. She said, well, Jesus, there's a good argument against monarchy. She said, well, Jesus, there's a good argument against slavery in the country. Why should it be slavery in the home? If it's not good for a man to be under the arbitrary whim of a king, why is it okay for a woman to be under the arbitrary whim of her husband or father? And the idea did catch on, but we don't call it asterisums. And we don't, you know, kind of march around with posters of Mary Asteris. It's kind of, I don't want to say it's irrelevant that she made it. She deserves enormous credits, but what counts is not that,

this particular woman said it, but that it was a good idea. Someone had to have said it, that she was the one. Yeah, it's almost as if, like, in the way that, obviously, someone invents the hammer or the wheel or some early man invents a tool. And then that tool, history is people applying that tool in different contexts to solve different problems or building on it or tweaking on it.

These ideas are almost like the building blocks of our collective progress and someone saying, hey, you shouldn't be able to do this to white people. Hey, you shouldn't be able to do this to black people. Either, hey, you actually shouldn't be able to do this to people at all. You know, men or women, you shouldn't be able to do it to people in different countries. And we're sort of, it's like we're constantly applying or extrapolating out the, I don't know what the word is, but the tell-offs of the tool into different contexts and getting different results out of it. That's exactly right. The

philosopher Peter Singer called it the expanding circle back in the, book in the late 70s, defending socio-biology. And of course, the next logical step is, well, why stop at Homo sapiens? Other animals are sentient to, and many of the arguments that we make against torture and slavery for other races should be extended of a species. That is, there is a kind of self-expansion, I call it moral dark energy, in the notion of respecting interests of ascension beings

that all of the lines that separate ascension beings into categories are at least morally arbitrary. Are there any ideas like that or expand, like if we're thinking about the moral progress we've had versus where is this energy going in the future? Are there areas or ideas or things that you see? I don't want to say as promising, but just almost less judgmental. Where do you see the areas that we're expanding into? Or where do you see the forward progress potentially going?

into or where do you see the forward progress potentially going? The idea behind effective altruism, namely that we try to measure the effects of our interventions and keep the ones that actually do the most good, save the most lives, is a promising idea. And it is a relatively new idea, like go and measure and see if what you're doing actually benefits the people you want to. And ranking it in comparison to other interventions, like that this charity has an ROI of X and this charity has an ROI of Y and yeah. Exactly, and taking into account things that people often forget,

such as if there is a news where the story featuring some pathetic and highly photogenic victims. Of course, it's good to help them, but remember that the very fact that it was menus means that lots of people are rushing to help that little girl or just particular community, and it may be that so many people have seen the news and have been motivated to hit the donate button, but it's kind of the aid organization may have been saturated and you might be better off donating to some movement that does not get the same publicity on a particular day. Sure. But saving lives seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, know one of those days of

which makes it into the papers, but the dollar would be helping saving far more lives. So that's another new idea about beneficence and philanthropy. And another would be to try to explicitly take into account our own biases in order to work around the identifiable victim effect being one of them, namely, we are probably too affected by the photogenic victim in terms of which may subvert the greater goal of helping as many people as possible. But also our vulnerability to the availability bias, which is that we estimate

the probability by how easily examples come to mind. The news feeds the availability bias, because that's kind of what it is. It's an availability machine. And it may be that solutions to big problems, including climate change, including safety and terrorism might be hidden from us because we glum too easily onto a gory image from headlines that morning, as opposed to the underlying reality as revealed in data.

Yeah, I know it's not exactly new and I know it's sort of a boogie man for some people so it kind of becomes almost fundamentally irrational the response. But it also strikes me that some of the reckoning or conversation we're having with what they're calling critical race theory, again, I think a relatively bad name, but the idea that there are locking or interrelated forms of oppression or injustice that just one's intent on a given action is not the whole story that there could be legacies of issues or different, against structural or systemic issues. So, again, the thing might have started with good intentions, but the outcome is fundamentally unjust because it doesn't address for preceding inputs.

That strikes me as a relatively innovative or new way of thinking about injustice and progress. I'm curious what your thoughts are. Yeah, I tend to have a more critical view of critical race theory and critical theory in general. The problem with the movement is that by seeking to demonize that is trying to root out racism, highly loaded and emotional and condemnatory term for what might be unplanned outcomes, it can easily turn into a hunt for villains instead of an attempt to understand cause and effect. And it may also misapply energy for a reform to rooting out ever more subtle forms of racist. Because it really, by using the term racism

for any kind of racial discrepancy, it's a movement that basically attempts to demonize who are the bad guys, they may not realize they're bad, but we should all condemn them. Whereas some of the discrepancies might be the unplanned results of social and historical forces where there isn't a bad guy now, there may have been bad guys two and in 50 years ago or 100 years ago, but kind of doing this moral reckoning may not be the way to achieve real equality

and to reduce poverty and crime and incarceration for vulnerable minorities like African Americans. The, there's a saying that I have quoted in the better angels of our nature from the great pacifist statistician, Lewis Fry Richardson, who responded to the cliche to understand is to forgive. And he said, well, maybe, maybe not, but to condemn too much is to understand too little. If what you're always doing is trying to root out racists

to shame, you may be oblivious to what is really happening and therefore point to the wrong causes and therefore be impudent in actually trying to improve the lives of the people that you're hoping to benefit. Yeah, it's a tricky thing because I think it's sort of political execution has been counterproductive at best sloppy or outright flawed at worst. But the idea to sort of go to what you're saying, that to me it strikes me as a kernel of value and the idea that there could be injustice

without a bad guy, right? Like that strikes me as an insight as far as how we understand history, how we understand systems, how we understand moving what we should try to do or build going forward. The idea that a racist is not always a bad boogeyman, but that there could be racist ideas or structures or systems in place that no one would choose, but because they are legacies of other things, we have them. That strikes me as an idea of as having some value. I think the idea, I agree, the idea is absolutely has value.

A little call it racist, which is a condemnatory term, it's a vile thing to be a racist, but to identify policy structures laws that disadvantage African Americans as racist means that you are saying that there's a bad guy. And in practice, that's exactly what's happened. People get canceled, even for discussing the tenets of critical race theory. If you disagree with his dogma, that makes you a racist.

Now, a racist is a vile thing to be. Right. The fact that these accusations are being level-iving rather recklessly, not only is unfair to its targets who may be legitimately disagreeing with some dogma. But of course, as we know, history has taught it. That leads to a reaction, such as the election of Donald Trump, from people who are saying, I'm sick and tired of being called a racist. I'm not a racist, and I'm not going to vote for a party that keeps demonizing and calls me a deplorable.

Well, no, I think as a linguist, the idea that the language with which you describe the idea is so powerful and has an impact on whether it will be successful or not. It's like you can contrast Black Lives Matter, which is effectively a perfect political slogan because there is no article, you're like even the all-life matter argument sort of puts you in a trap. Contrast that would say the defund the police argument. You know, like the the the the language that a group decides to use or the way it decides to communicate an idea. Again, critical race theory doesn't sound even if it's not being blown up on Fox News

as with bad faith, it still doesn't sound something like something you'd want to subject your children to. It just sounds bad. It's ominous and scary at worst, unexciting and boring at best. The language with which we use to describe these ideas, I guess that says we're irrational that the language matters, but the language does matter. It does. I think a year or 18 months ago, no one would have had any associations to critical race theory.

It's something that's some high-falutin academic idea why should we care? Right, people have correctly, at least approximately correctly, know that there is some very new approach and idea, often being forced on them in schools and workplaces, involving collective guilt, involving deliberate segregation by race, and they need a name for it to say that critical race theory is this an abstract academic doctrine only debated in graduate seminars.

It's actually a little disingenuous because these are quite distinctive and radical ideas. They do historically and intellectually originate from critical race theory. Obviously, once they're implemented, they're not going to reproduce all of the abstract theoretical foundations. But you need to call it something and that's kind of what it is. And the case of defund the police, it's another case in which there,

I think it's kind of different because you don't have to be in the know to and have it explained to you. Quite well, perhaps quite the opposite. There, the explanation is, oh, defund the police, it doesn't mean defund the police. Right. Oh, great. Thanks.

First, get the slogan out there. Nearly, which of course, nearly cost the Democrats the election. This is an election that everyone thought was going to be a blowout. It was almost went the other way. And there are some, we don't know for sure, but there's some pretty good data that fears about defunding the police and similar policies, scared a number of people on offense,

not voting for Biden. And just because he himself, of course, did not support that policy. Sure. So in the way that we can have these kind of positive feedback groups with an idea being then spread through society, does it, and that seems to be the cycle that we've been on for about 2,000 years, we sort of have been the rationality

and enlightenment has been taking us in a positive direction, largely because of the sort of extrapolations of the ideas that we're talking about, whether it's pre-speech or freedom of association or freedom of religion or equal rights or any of these inventions, and they were inventions, although obviously some people think they come to us from God, but somebody decided that that that was what God wanted and communicated it. Do you think it's equally possible to get in a negative feedback loop, like could could sort of anti-enlightenment values or you know something like I don't know I don't want to put too much on critical race theory, but let's say you get a different set of ideas and then those begin to extrapolate and let's say they're fundamentally irrational or fundamentally anti-progress, could it go the other direction?

Oh, you bet. And it has. Well, the heyday of Marxism in the middle decades of the 20th century, Marxism originated, you know, this was highly theoretical. That's why intellectuals loved it. You've been debated in graduate seminars and probe what Marx really meant, the young Marx and the old Marx and all the different offshoots of Marxism and different versions and Gramsci and the way it was incorporated into critical theory and postmodernism kind of all too intellectually rich. But it did pull people into a rapid hole and it led to horrific consequences. One sign of any use, you might take a step back. There are people who say, well, rationality is

totally overrated. Yeah, you've got the enlightenment, but then you also have fascism, which had its theoreticians. You also have communism. Now, one, here's what I think is a crucial difference. Probably, we take a good historian to establish this firmly. But I suspect that any movement that kills its critics or fires or shuts them up, that's probably a sign that this is a decadent intellectual movement that's not gonna lead to something good. And the thing about the, at least the strands of the enlightenment that I would be prepared to celebrate

is that they developed in liberal democracies that did have freedom of the press, and free speech, and open criticism and debate. So if some idea was disastrous, then someone could say so without being sent to the gulag or shot in the back of the neck or canceled. And that when you have a movement that says, you may not criticize it, it is evil to criticize this set of ideas.

That's when you know it's vulnerable to getting locked into error because no one can point out the error. Sure. And people are afraid to even come close to pointing out the error. Exactly, right. Yeah. So how does that work then?

Intention was something that you talk about in rationality, which is that sort of rationality is a public good that our sort of rational system is a public good. And what do you do then when you have, and my first book was about sort of medium manipulation and I was looking quite heavily at the sort of the turn of the 19th century and the early 20th century when you have the yellow press.

A lot of people were writing and Upton Sinclair did it most interestingly. That like, that these, in the same way that the trusts were sort of poisoned in our food supply with industrialization. So too was the media sort of poisoning our sort of public sphere. What do we what is your thought today when yeah rationality is important these enlightenment values are important, but then we are held hostage effectively by anti-rational movements who are poisoning that sphere, whether it's the social media networks that enable it,

or it's the anti-vaxxer, the people who are, I don't even wanna say acting in bad faith because you talk about pizza gate in the book. I'm not sure they're operating on a level where they know that this is wrong and you're just dealing with the consequences of toxic irrationality effectively. Yes and indeed, you're right that some of them aren't acting in bad faith and that they sincerely believe the nonsense and the harmful ideas that they're propagating. It's off at their kind of cynical manipulators,

but rather that they're all too firmly entrenched in their beliefs. Yeah, there's no easy solution because on the one hand, we want only kind of corrected beneficial ideas out there. But none of us is an angel who's capable of always knowing which ideas are corrected, which ones are beneficial, which is why we need a, you know, as the cliche has at the market, a marketplace of ideas, while we need freedom of the press and free speech so that when there are flaws, someone else can point them out. How do you prevent, but then how do you prevent the emergence of an idea that's popular and wrong or popular and harmful. Part of the

answer is you have the opening, the ability, the freedom to point out what's wrong with ideas. You try to spread a culture of critical thinking, not to be confused with critical theory, ultra-mindedness of a evidence-oriented mindset, set of values like when the facts change, I change my mind, you know, what do you do? Media literacy in school, how not to believe something just as you saw it on the internet,

or for that matter, read it in the necessarily in the mainstream media too, because they sometimes get things wrong. What are the tools that will allow you at the end of the day to evaluate ideas? Now what I've said is, this is what we should aim for. In a democracy, we really don't have a guaranteed way of making sure that the popular idea is the correct idea. We probably never will absolutely, but we've steered in that direction. I think part of the answer to be a little less vague is that this is an argument that has been advanced by Jonathan Rauschen who spoke the Constitution of Knowledge,

and which I make in some other different words, which is that what cognitive psychology has told us, and which many of astute observers of human nature have noted before that, is we are all subject to fallacies and biases, particularly favoring the sacred beliefs of our own coalition and demonizing the others. On the other hand, we have done better. Science really is better than superstition.

Liberal democracy really is better than hereditary monarchy. We, how do we do it, despite the fact that we're made out of Crooked Timber? Well, we have institutions that are explicitly committed to moving us in the direction of the truth, and that have mechanisms and rules and norms that push us in that direction. And examples being, say, scientific societies that allow, that have peer review and open criticism and empirical testing, liberal democracy with its freedom of the press and political debate, government agencies that are committed to accurate record keeping and that themselves check for error, responsible journalism.

You talked about yellow journalism, which you have written about. But of course, we, and someone say we still live in an era of yellow journalism. But it's probably, I think you'd agree it's better. Much better. It's better, yeah, it's better. Why is it better?

And Rauch talks about that as a journalist himself. Well, the journalistic institutions, around the 1920s kind of realized they got to get the house in order. What we today call fake news, and these sort of credulous stories about, you know, sea monsters, and do headed babies, and they please themselves effectively. They please themselves exactly. And they instituted codes of ethics and newspapers had hierarchies of editing and fact checking to try to weed out all of these errors that left left to our own devices. We make them all of us.

And so it's the institution that is our hope. And these are institutions that have to have certain mechanisms, certain, first of all, overarching commitments. They have to be designed with the goal we should aim for objective truth. Granted, none of us ever has it. None of us ever knows that we have it. But let's strive for it.

And here are ways that we can use, capitalize on the fact that people, even if they're irrational themselves, they're not so bad at pointing out the irrationalities of other people's beliefs. Let's capitalize on that kind of adversarial nature to have adversarial proceedings in court system peer review in science. The, as James Madison put it in the design of the American Constitution with his checks and balances, that was an ambition counter-and-dition. So these are the kind of mechanisms

that are best hope for attaining rationality and give them, and none of us by ourselves can do it. No, I think that's very well said. And it goes to your point like somebody obviously created those institutions at some point, right? So those are, you know, forms of progress. But it may be think about the role of institutions. I was at a dinner.

I may have told the story in the podcast before, but I was at a dinner with a with a, a Trump cabinet official and a bunch of Republicans a few months ago, people, I, I happen to disagree with, but I, I like spending time with people I disagree with. And, you know, they were talking about the, the very real concerns about Facebook banning the president of the United States. And they said, you know, I don't know if you want these private institutions banning your politicians. And I was like, look, I agree. There are real concerns here. This is not a great precedent. But the reason that Facebook, a private, you know, a digital company had to do that is because you and your

party at every step of the way failed to do your institutional duty, right? Like the point of political parties at the state level, at the national level, the point of conventions, the point of all these groups is that at some point along the line, you would have hoped that one of them would have said, this is insane. This person is not at all remotely qualified or to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

And you didn't do that. And that's why eventually coming out of an insurrection, Facebook had to ban this person. And so I think your point that institutions, while not firmly governmental, do you have an obligation to protect this common good? And perhaps the tragedy of our rational commons is that those institutions have not been doing their job. Well, there's a lot of truth in that, but it does then raise the issue

of who gets to decide on what criteria that say institutions of a particular political party has failed, and therefore we must step in. If you would want to open the door, say, to if Facebook or Twitter leaned right and someone said, well, we're going to ban Joe Biden and the problem is that you Democrats didn't do your job in preventing this change of the risk of villain Joe Biden from attending a presidency. So I think the way I would put it, I mean, it doesn't contradict what you said, but it might kind of address the problem of, who decides in what way, how do you prevent these platforms from not themselves becoming political weapons. Is in the case of Trump, what they did point to, and what they should point to even

more strongly, it's not that Trump is a man menace and he's an evil stude or whatever. But rather, we do have a line that we can't cross on our platform, namely advocating the violent overthrow of the government or advocating violence in general. So he crossed that line. He happened to be a Republican. If a Democrat crossed that line, we would do the same thing. This isn't, this is one of the perhaps

legitimate carve-outs for restricting speech. And indeed, First Amendment jurisprudence recognizes certain, certain, certain circumscribed areas and advocating violence, particularly if it's advocating violence to overthrow a democratic government, could be one of those zones where that's, you know, in general, we don't want to police speech, but there's certain places you can't go, at least you can't go on our platform. With the irony, though, of the democratic institutions, although the democratic arm certainly has extremists,

you know, you look at the 20 or whatever candidates that ran in 2020, and the institutions actually did select and select until the most moderate of all of those candidates was ultimately sort of put to the fore. And so it strikes me as, you know, one of the problems of the Democratic Party right now is that at the highest level, it's moderate, but then at the lower levels, it's less moderate

and the inability to bridge this gap is why they can't pass legislation. But the purpose to me of these institutions, and maybe it's the point of also grammar and manners and all the things you talked about in your books, it's to moderate these, what the ancients would have called passions of the human species end of the human mind. Quite so, exactly. And I guess one could argue that the all the complicated, clanky, group Goldberg, and corruptible primary process resulted in something that was not bad, and outcome. And in democratic governance, not bad is pretty good.

Because as John Mueller, a political scientist, there's influence, Neil Watt, Lord of Book, called a sadly obscure book called Democracy Capitalism in Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, the illusion being to the Prairie Home Companion, the town of Lake Wobbygone with a grocery store whose model was, it was called Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery

and it's model is if you can't get it here, you probably don't need it. And what Mueller argued is that democracy, and he also argued about capitalism, has these horrible flaws, but it's kind of pretty good, especially compared to the alternatives. So if we have an outcome in governance run by human beings with all their flaws, that's kind of pretty good, not bad, okay, could be worse. That might be the best that we could humanly hope for, and that when we seek something

that's perfect, then we're liable to become totalitarians. Yeah, and if you look at COVID, it's like we did really bad in some areas and really good in other areas, and it kind of washed out to like, I don't wanna say middle of the pack, but if we had been more in the government, or if we've been more enabled in certain areas,

the bad things might have been worse, and if we had less power in other areas, the bad things might have been worse. And if we had less power in other areas, the outcomes might also have been worse. So it's kind of like, what was the Churchill line about how it's the least bad system? It's the worst form of government except for all the others. Yeah, I've been trying. Yeah. In case of COVID, I mean, you know, the question is, how do we kind of assess how we're doing to know what our reform should be. In the case of COVID, certainly comparing rates across states, across countries,

evaluating as openly as possible, well, what did work in the end and what didn't? Given that at the outset, we were kind of ignorant about everything. We tried various things. Let's go to the data and see what work better than others. And in the case of the United States, I think the case could be made. It was not even not bad. It was bad in the sense that we can look at other countries and see

that they did better. So I just mean like you could argue the sort of containment of the virus we did, So I just mean like you could argue the sort of containment of the virus we did, the worst of the development world of the developed world, and then as far as addressing and then preventing the, let's call it, it's if you sort of the prevention of the virus or containment of the virus, pre-vaccine, post-vaccine, and then of course now the logistics of executing the vaccine. But, but certain things we did better than average and other things we did much worse than average. Well, developing rolling off the vaccines,

we did pretty well, but then of course, well, we know what's happened since. Erasionality inserts itself. It indeed it does. And a number of things went wrong. I mean, it really should have been under control by now. But... Well, that's one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelis, who was also writing during the Antonin Plague. He says there's sort of two types of plagues. There's the one that can take

your life, which as we understand, he probably did die of the Antonin Plague. But he's like, the worst one is the one that destroys your character that sort of affects you as a person. And it does strike me when you look at, you know, some of these people that say things on the internet or some of these, you know, the videos are sufficient. You go, oh, this person caught something else. It's not COVID, but it's worse. Yes.

Well, and my friend, that was a random, normal, notable, called, I think's worse. Yes, well, and my friend, that was Fernando Norman, wrote a book called I think Mental Immunity, where he pushes very hard the analogy between virulent pathogens and virulent ideas and a lot of functioning physiological immune system and a kind of cognitive immune system.

So two last questions to bring us back to where we started about the Guardian piece. You noted something that I have found in my own experiences, which is that my books have sold disproportionately well in the UK also. Why is that? Are they just more philosophical over there? Or is it a different media culture, a different bookstore culture? What do you think it is? Is it a different media culture, a different bookstore culture? What do you think it is? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know whether it's more word-friendly, literate, intellectual culture, where you get, perhaps because of one beneficial byproduct of a class system that had a lot of downsides,

is that a certain prestige did accrue to being articulate, knowledgeable. It could be, or it could be more geographical, London is the kind of has, and is the kind of has, it's the golden of New York, Boston, LA, Bay Area, all world into one, namely, right, that the politicians, finance people, the academics, the literary interracalicals, all kind of rub shoulders, they go to the same parties, whereas in the United States, we got, you know, Finance, New York, Entertainment, and Hollywood, academia, and Boston, and so on. And it's not just that those are different cities, but they're geographically hundreds or thousands of miles apart. And so they each have their own media market as well. So I just found that the UK is a bit more old school. It's like you're more famous in the UK than you are in the US even if you sold

fewer books because media is so much more concentrated and there's less competition. Interesting. And there are, there are still, I think because of the BBC, media channels that, I don't want to say everyone, but that a lot of people listen to. So everyone, well, I don't, yeah, everyone, a lot of people tuned in to start the week and to, you know, night news. And there's a still more concentrated media landscape than what happened in the United States. It might be what the US market was like 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.

Yeah. Interesting. All right, last thing. So you're a fan of the band? Yeah, oh, my goodness, yes. And you're a fellow, fellow Canadians? Yeah, oh, my goodness. Yes. And fellow fellow Canadians for the fight of them. Yes. So by modern standard, this is my trick, trick question said

facetiously, but by modern standards, isn't the night they drove old Dixie down an act of cultural appropriation. It sure is. It's actually got pretty, you know, dopey lyrics. If you actually listen to them. If the bells were ringing, you would say else. What bells? During a military defeat. I think like a lot of rock songs, you don't want to look at the lyrics to carefully,

singing those songs. Yeah. Well, it is. And culture is appropriation. And all of culture is a pastiche, a greatest hits collection. The insular provincial parochial parts of the world don't develop great culture because it's the same old stuff concentrated and recycled. Great art always picks and chooses from the best of the cultural tradition. It kind of sits at the confluence, catchment area,

of a huge number of ideas and motifs and themes. And the band is actually a great example because they were so eclectic. They played so many instruments. They were influenced by so many genres and music. They both are propated left, right, and centered. Well, no, and I love that as an example because it's like, yeah, if I told you a Canadian band, and I think the lead singer is an Indigenous person writer, he's, I'm forgetting his name, but Robbie Robertson? Yeah. Well, Robbie Robertson, he is, well, it may be a good example. He was the

the main songwriter and the kind of the ringleader of the band. He was part Indigenous, he was part Jewish, he was part Anglo-Saxon, and that didn't hurt. Right, no. And of course these Canadians were celebrating the great tradition of rural American music, none of which they, except for Levelyn Helm, they experienced themselves. They grew up in rural Ontario, or urban Ontario. What did they know about the music of the Dixie? No, and that's what I, it's like, so you have this Canadian potentially indigenous guy

writing a song about the fall of the American South in the Civil War. That doesn't piss people off the way that, you know, a white person rapping or a black person doing a loving kung fu or something, it doesn't piss us off because it's not actually, the cultural appropriation is not offensive. It's actually a key artistic form of progress, and it's almost always done,

I would say when it's done well, it's just called art, and when it's done bad, it's called bad ours, right? And it would be lost without it. I couldn't agree more. That's a beautifully put. Well, that will wrap up there. Steven, thank you so much. I've loved your books for a very long time,

and this one is very good. And I do hope we can continue to preserve. I hope we can do a better job preserving our rational commons as we have with our environmental commons and natural resources, because it's all we have with our environmental comments and natural resources. Because it's all we have left. Thanks so much, Ryan. A great discussion.

Very deep and probing. I enjoyed speaking with you. It was an honor. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it.

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