The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Steven Pinker: Enlightenment Now

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

I spoke with Harvard's Dr. Steven Pinker about the immense improvements in human living conditions that are now happening with amazing speed almost everywhere in the world -- as detailed in his new book, Enlightenment Now! (https://amzn.to/2jDwv7D) -- a careful, clear-headed and data-driven defense of the rational/scientific worldview that helped make such improvement possible). Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard.

Music All right, I have the distinct pleasure today of being able to sit down and talk to Dr. Stephen Baker of Harvard University who's just written a new book. Many, he's written many books, but this is the newest one. It's called Enlightenment Now, and it's New York Times bestseller for seven weeks, so that's a great accomplishment, and Dr. Panker has indicated to me that it's doing better than his other books have, and they've also done very well, so that's really something. So Stephen Baker is the Harvard professor of psychology at Harvard University. He's a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research teaching in books. He's been named

one of Times 100 Most Influential People and one of foreign policies, 100 leading global fakers. His books include the stuff of thought, the better angels of our nature, the blank slate, and the sense of style. And so I'm welcoming Dr. Paker, obviously, and I'd like him to start telling us, to start by telling us about the book itself. And then we'll talk about broader issues and about the other book sees written and that sort of thing. Well the book subtitle is the case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. I'll begin with it with a progress because that was the epiphany that more than anything inspired the book. I've written a previous book, The Better Angels of

Our Nature, when I was surprised to come across data sets showing that many measures of violence had declined over the course of history. I was stunned to see a graph that showed that rates of homicide from England and other Western European countries from the 1300s to the 20th century, showing a decline of anywhere from 35 to 50 in the chances of getting

murdered. When I called attention to this fact in a blog post, I then got correspondence from historians, from international relations scholars, from sociologists saying, you know, you could have mentioned other declines, another decline of violence, and one more scholar showed me that the rate of death and war had plummeted. Another showed me that rates of domestic violence have gone down. Still, another that rates of child abuse have gone down. And I realized at the time that there was an important story here that was, that had to be told, that these different declines of violence ought

to be presented to the world in between a single pair of covers just because it didn't seem to be something of a pattern. And as a psychologist, it opened up the challenge of how to explain it. First of all, how to explain the fact that there's been, that there is so much violence in human affairs, but also the fact that it can be brought down. Well, I had a similar set of epiphanies that led to the writing of Enlightenment now, when after Better Angels was published, I started to come across data showing that other aspects of human well being had improved.

The rate of extreme poverty had plummeted by about 50% just in three decades and now stands less than 10%. Life expectancy has been increasing all over the world, including the poorest parts of the world. The number of kids going to school has increased, including girls, more than 90 percent of people under the age of 25 on the planet are literate now. We have more leisure time. We're safer.

In measure after measure, life has been getting better, and it's not the kind of development that you could learn about reading the papers quite the contrary, because journalism covers what goes wrong, not what goes right. You can easily come away with the impression that the world is getting worse and worse, as a kind of statistical illusion, feeding a cognitive bias, and not realize until you look at data sets, how many ways in which life has improved, including measures like war and crime, which would, what might guess are going in the wrong direction as opposed to the right direction.

Now, I combined that, the other motivation for the book was a set of attacks on the application of science to the traditional domains of the humanities, to history, to the arts, to morality, to language. An effort that I think is quite solubrious, the fact that scientific insights are being brought to bear on Human affairs and how could they not given that Art and society are in a sense Products of our our psychology products of human nature, but in a lot of intellectual life There's a bit of resentment to any application of scientific ideas or the scientific mindset to human affairs. This was first noted by C.P. Snow in his famous lectures and booklet cultures in the late

late 50s, early 1960s. But the conflict was very much with us. I wrote an essay called Science Is Not Your Enemy, which was published in the New Republic in which went published in the New Republic and which went viral. And that was the immediate kickoff for the proposal that ended up living in enlightenment now. I was involved in something of a literary spat with Leon Wieseltyre, an editor of the New Republic, but I quickly realized that two guys having an argument is not enough to plump out a book. And so I had the centerpiece of the book, just be the documentation of a fact that most people

are unaware of, namely that in most measures, life has gotten better over time. Now, as with the better angels of our nature, I didn't want to just present a bunch of graphs, although I didn't present many graphs, but I wanted to explain them. And it seemed to me that if there was any overarching explanation as to why life got better, it's that people in the past

thought that by understanding how the world works, including ourselves, we could try to solve problems, remember what works, drop the failures, and as we accumulate our cultural knowledge, we can improve our well-being. And I attribute that mindset to the enlightenment, the idea that we can use knowledge to improve human well-being. Now, that might sound almost too banal and that trite to be worth defending, but then

I don't think it does. I thought that those ideals very much needed a defense. Yeah, okay. So you're weeding a number of things together. So the first is your discovery that if you look at the data that things are getting better at a rate that's so remarkable that is really nothing short of miraculous. And you produced dozens of graphs showing that in enlightenment. Now, I noticed the same thing about three years ago when I was working for a UN panel on economic sustainability. The original narrative was extremely pessimistic, detailed how we were dispoiling the planet and how everything was getting worse and how we were at each other's throats. And I started to read extremely widely and I found that on measure after measure with some

notable exceptions like oceanic overfishing, we have been doing so staggeringly much better in the last 150 years that you can't believe it. On almost every measure you can imagine, which is exactly what you detail in enlightenment now. And then now that's a secret, let's say, people don't know about it, and that's strange. And then you also associated it with a critique of the enlightenment and scientific rationality. And it seems to me that you're implying, or perhaps you're stating explicitly, that you're stating explicitly that there's a connection between the pessimism and the lack

of knowledge about this and the critique of the enlightenment and rationality. Because there's a question here, if things are getting so much better, and if the news is overwhelming on that front, I mean, some of the things you outline are like the, or that the decreased decreases in starvation, I suppose, are the most remarkable.

And the provision of boundful food, on less and less far-blend, which is not something that people know. So like, if all this is happening, why don't we know about it, and how is it linked to the, how do you think, if at all, it's linked to the critique of enlightenment rationality?

Yeah, one of the reasons is an interaction between the nature of journalism and the nature of cognition namely the news is about what happens not what doesn't happen and a lot of the very beneficial developments consist of things that don't happen, countries that are at peace, that used to be a war. People, kids who are not starving, terrorist attacks that do not happen. You never see a journalist saying I'm reporting live from a country that's been at peace for 40 years, but if a war breaks out, you can be sure that we'll hear about it.

All the more so now that a majority of humanity consists of, on the spot, video journalists, thanks to smartphones. Also, that things can happen quickly. Things can blow up, the worst can start, a massacre can happen, but good things aren't built in a day and they often consist of incremental improvements of a few percentage points a year, that compound, that accumulate,

but that can never make the news because they never happen all of a sudden on a Thursday and October. Together with the cognitive impediments to understanding the state of the world, the fact that news reports memorable events, and we know from the study of the cognition of risk and probability from Daniel Conroman and Amistur's

key, that we tend to assess probability and risk by a shortcut called the availability heuristic. Namely, the easier it is to dredge up an example for memory, to be more likely we think something is. And so people think that tornadoes kill a lot of people, but they don't realize that falling off of ladders kills far more people. I just was when someone falls off a ladder, it doesn't make the news, but when there is a tornado, it does. Do you know that solar power kills more people than nuclear power every year?

I did not know that, but it doesn't surprise me because nuclear power kills no one. I did not know that, but it doesn't surprise me because nuclear power kills no one. But I suppose the installers fall off roots. That's exactly right, installers fall off roots. Yeah, okay, so. So for example. Yeah, exactly. And well, so that's interesting.

So you can imagine that, so good news is, or bad news is sudden, it's dramatic. We're tilted towards the processing of negative information in any case. That's right. We don't naturally compute a ratio between occurrences and non-accurrences, which is, of course, what goes into probability and rational assessment of risk and probability. So there's that.

But it's more than that because in intellectual life, in large parts of academia, in commentators and pundits, there is an ideology of decline. Goes back to the 19th century, part of the counter-enlightenment that arose as a reaction to enlightenment hopes for progress and rationality, that said that the holds that society is Western civilization is tearing on the brink or it's circling on the

circling the drain and it's going to collapse any any time now and it's up to the intellectuals and commentators and to to point out how decadent degenerate society is. And to people like that, New Civil Proctor comes also in a front. The reaction is, hey, we've been warning all of you about how society is on the verge of collapse. Don't come around and tell us that everything's going fine.

What are we gonna do now? Yeah, you identified a lot of that with the romantic types like Rousseau. And when I was reading, I wondered too, there's a powerful Marxist narrative that's run its course for about 130 years, too, that's predicated on the idea that there's an oppressed class and an oppressor class, and that narrative seems also to thrive on or to be affronted by the idea that the current system might be producing benefits across

the board. I think you do in fact in one part of the book ask about whether not these benefits are only accruing for example to the rich and that doesn't seem to be the case as far as the doubt indicate, is that a fairer? Quite the contrary, the most dramatic improvements have been at the bottom among the extreme poor, where the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty has fallen over the last couple of centuries, from probably about 90% to less than 10%. The United Nations has said as one of its millennia development goals to eliminate extreme poverty everywhere by the year 2030.

That's part of it too optimistic that the fact that it can be set as a plausible aspiration is itself astonishing. Well, I know the UN had said as one of its millennial goals, the halving of absolute poverty between 2000 and 2015, and that was accomplished by 2012. Exactly. So, I would say— Yeah, ahead of schedule. Yes, exactly. And that should have been head by—

Every Marxism has a complicated relationship to progress because Marxist doctrine actually does lay out a pathway to progress. Unfortunately, that pathway consists of violet class conflict. It isn't the enlightenment ideal of progress through problem solving, from the prosaic belief that nature throws problems at us. And if we apply brain power, we can gradually

chip away at them. Yeah, fundamentally progress is quite different. And you're right that there is a pretty progress both from the left and from the right, but from the left, there is a kind of contempt for institutions like markets, like liberal democracy, that deserve a lot of the credit for the progress that we've made and that lead to at least in the academic left a despising of the very idea of progress. And I found that the only political faction is actually sympathetic to progress of libertarians. There have been a number of rational optimist books in the last decade by people like Matt Ridley and Ron Bailey and Johann Norberg that do have an overlapping addition to the one that

I took on in the right now, namely documenting progress. But both from the academic left and from the political right, there has been a contempt for the notion of progress for different reasons. In academia, it goes back to the Romantics to Rousseau, as you mentioned, but also to Shokhan Howard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the existentialists, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and the large swaths of the academic humanities actually detest the enlightenment, ironically enough. Now, I know means all of them, but there's a significant faction.

Yeah, well, the question there, I guess, in part is why? I mean, one of the things that really struck me as I've gone through this material over the last years is that this is really good news, particularly, it doesn't really matter whether you're on the left or the right if you're on the left you think that the fact that the poorest of the poor are being lifted out of their abject absolute abject misery at a rate that's just I don't think you could hope for a faster

improvement no matter how optimistic you were and And then on the right, of course, the fact that the benefits of liberal democracy, let's say in free markets are driving this in large part, you'd think would also be a cause for celebration. So you talked about the availability heuristic and some of the role that the press might be playing, the fact that negative events stand out. We can also see negative events all over the world now. So we can't think of all over the world whenever you hear about a negative event.

It's as if it's happening next door and is a threat. So the breadth of our news is exaggerated and the coverage is exaggerated. But there still seems to me to be this mystery at the bottom of all this, which is in the face of such radically good news. Why is there such an insistence that the system is corrupt that we're going to hell in a hand basket and that human beings are cancer on the planet and everything is heading towards the apocalypse. It's so deep and it doesn't seem to be moved by the facts much. I kind of think sometimes that it's a hangover from the Cold War that was so deeply pessimistic for so long. It goes back before the Cold War. Certainly as a psychological syndrome, it goes back at least to the Old Testament prophets who combined a kind of social criticism with fortelling an apocalyptic disaster. So that syndrome, that combination of moral schooling with predictions of doom is something that our species quite naturally falls into. Part of it is, I think, frankly,

a certain amount of interprofessional competition that society has various elites. There's the politicians, the business people, the military, the religious elites, the academics, the journalists, they're always kind of competing for status. And since intellectuals don't deserve a whole lot of credit for getting society to run, for putting food in the stores,

and keeping the peace and protecting the streets, it's very easy to look down on other societal elites, on government, on business, and to say, well, you guys are all failing and we're the ones who are morally refined enough to point it out. So I wouldn't put down just sheer human competitiveness. I'm not the first to say this. I'm one of my favorite explanations of the veneration of the past of golden ages comes

from Thomas Hobbes who said, competition of praise inclined to a reverence of antiquity or men contend with the living, not with the dead. Yeah, it also seems that the, there's a certain amount of resentment that is driving that as well, and that would go along with the status competition, because there's anger, I suppose, if you're a member of an elite group,

to see that your paradigm, let's say, isn't leading the charge forward? That's right, and you talked about the astonishing decline in global poverty. And part of that story is it did not come about through massive redistribution, which for many people on the left was the only route to lifting up the poor, namely to redistribute resources. Now, there have been, of course, adjustments even to shocks. The fact that China and India and Bangladesh and Indonesia have risen out of poverty came in part of the expense of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Yeah, yeah. That's not exactly where people meant by redistribution. And it literally isn't redistribution of resources, although it is a shaking up of the economies of many nations. But this massive increase in the wealth of Asian countries did not come because resources were shipped from the wealthy west to the impoverished east. Right, so that's also a threat to the doctrine itself,

a direct threat, the fact that wealth is being produced and it's being distributed to people at the low end, means that implies that the redistributive philosophy is likely in error. And you can understand why that might be regarded as a catastrophic threat, particularly to people on the radical left. Well, certainly for radical notions of redistribution.

But at the same time, the more limited kinds of redistribution that are ubiquitous in wealthy countries, I have a graph showing that the proportion of GDP allocated to social spending skyrocketed in the 20th century from about 1% to about 22% in every developed country, no exceptions. And thanks to spending on the poor, on children, on the sick, on the on luck, rates of absolute poverty have fallen in wealthy countries. So not only has the developing world become wealthier and not directly expensive of the

developed world, but within the developed world thanks to some amount of social spending, I guess you could call it redistribution, even as inequality has risen, poverty has not. Right. I wonder, I was just reading a book by Walter Chidele, called The Great Leveler. Yeah, very good. Absolutely. It is an excellent book. And one of the things he did was an empirical analysis

of left versus right wing governments, I think across the 20th century, but it might have gone farther back than that, to see if there is any difference in the jenico-efficient across the classes of government. And what he found was that there was no difference whatsoever. He makes a fairly strong case that the only redistributive techniques that work are pestilence and war essentially. And that's because they knock everyone down to zero. But you're making a different case, like an incremental case in some sense, which is that governments

perhaps regardless of their ideological proclivities in the 20th century, as they've become more wealthy, they have incrementally devoted a larger part of their resources to incremental improvements in, you might think about it as investment in the future rather than redistribution or investment in social capital education and health care and those sorts of things that. Well, it's probably some combination. It's a combination of investment in public goods because, of course, the whole society is better off if everyone's educated. Also, insurance, people support safety net. That's the most popular euphemism for social spending because you never know whether it's going to be you or your mother or your brother

who's going to be in need in the lottery and misfortune. And part of it is charity. The modern conscience won't allow the little matchgirl to freeze to death. Right. The joys to Barry grandpa by the side of Route 66. And so I think social spending has been pushed along by all three. It hasn't necessarily, in some countries it probably has reduced the Jenny coefficient in Western European countries which have a more aggressive system of taxation than the

United States or Canada. But more important than the journey distribution is that it's reduced the number of people living in poverty, which I argue is morally relevant measure in any case. Yeah, well those two things are complicated because obviously you want to raise people out of that object poverty. I mean, that's a zero argument proposition

and that seems to be happening very rapidly. The question after that I suppose is to what degree does the remaining degree of inequality that's generated by productive capitalist systems also constitute a social threat because there is evidence, I think it was reviewed best by in the spirit level that as inequality increases rates of male homicide for example increase and all sorts of other negative measures. So there's some weird interaction between raising absolute levels of wealth and ensuring that inequality doesn't,

I don't know, exceed some hypothetical optimum that needs to be considered in social policy. And I cite some skeptical reanalyses of the data in the spirit level. And probably absolute prosperity matters more than inequality and determining social health, including such as happiness, crime, other kinds of social pathologies like drug addictions.

It's not easy to to tease them apart. No, no, definitely not. crime, other kinds of social pathologies like drug addictions. It's not easy to to tease them apart. No, no, definitely not. The countries like Sweden are very egalitarian, but they're also very rich. Right. Like the Netherlands are more lopsided, but they're also very poor.

And so it takes a little bit of statistical wizardry to tie them apart. In my reading of the literature, it's actually prosperity that is more important than inequality. But also, and this is a point that in the psychological literature was emphasized by Christina Starman's and Paul Bloom, that what people sometimes think of as an aversion to inequality, to people having different amounts is actually an aversion to unfairness. inequality, to people having different amounts,

is actually an aversion to unfairness. Right, to injustice. Yeah, but people really infuriates people is that they think that the people at the top have ill-gotten gains. Right, people, if they sense that the system is basically fair that either greater effort, talent, or even luck result in an unequal distribution.

But in impartial lottery, for example, they're okay with that. It's cheating that really gets on you. Yeah, and people are really good at remembering cheating and recognizing it as well and sticking on. Yeah, so, okay, so there's something we can talk about for a minute because, you know, there's a, there's political, what do you call rumblings about the fact that I think a lot of this is generated by the

Radical left types particularly on the campuses that the system is rigged and that it's an oppressive patriarchy and that The reason that people are at the top is because they played power games and you know, it's this my sense is that the constroulness that You know, it's this, my sense is that the control is that we're ethnic or racial or gendered groups and we're competing in the Marxist manner and those who win have won because of oppression. But I know the literature on the relationship between individual, individual differences and long-term life success in the West and the world. And the literature is actually very clear. So intelligence seems to account for about 20% of the variance in long-term life success.

And then trait conscientiousness accounts for perhaps another maybe 10% to 15%. And then there's smaller contributions of emotional stability and also of trait openness, which seems to be a good predictor of entrepreneurial ability. So it looks like in the West that you can attribute about 40 to 50 percent of the variants, maybe that's a little high, but it's not radical over estimate, to the sorts of individual differences that are associated with productivity, because increases in IQ, higher IQ, and higher conscientiousness definitely

make people more productive. It seems to me that you can use that as an index of the genuinely meritocratic nature of a culture and also as an index of its willingness to engage in fair play because you'd expect if your culture is aimed at productivity and it turns out that those are the most, and it turns out that the most productive people are in in fact, differentially rewarded. That seems to me to be a reasonable index of the success of the society.

Now, that data still leaves 50 to 60% of the variance unexplained. And so you can, in there, you can include racism and prejudice and the tyranny of the system and blind luck and physical health and all the arbitrary random events that make up the determined whether someone is successful or fails in life. But it does seem to me to provide a metric saying that not only is our society crazily productive and reasonably good at distributing the spoils, even though there's still some inequality, but that a fair bit of inequality is actually generated as a consequence of differences in genuine productivity. That seemed reasonable to you.

Yeah, I mean, it ought to be obvious and banal, except for the fact that in a lot of intellectual life, the assumption is that the correlation between psychological traits and success is zero. So the fact that it's, you's, let's say it's 40%, let's even say it's 33%. That's a lot higher than most people are willing to acknowledge. And what you said is exactly right,

that leaves more than half of the variance not to be correlated with individual differences. And of course, various inequities could go into that at 50 or 60%. And they're not mutually exclusive. It seems hard. We know that there's a lot of gaming of the system, particularly in the United States, by the wealthy. And that should obviously be eliminated. It's not meritocratic, it's not fair, it's not productive. One could also ask another question is whether the rewards

that go to the talented are necessarily in sectors that lead to what we might call productivity in the sense of increasing societal wealth. An argument can be made that there's some misallocation of intellectual resources that we have, that the economy is too driven by finance, that the too many lawsuits, the legal system is to each other. And so we're estimated by intellectuals.

This does still leave a place for criticizing a number of the ways in which our economy is set up. There's always scope for improvement. Yes, and we were talking about why, despite the fact that a fair bit of the variance or a third to a half of the variance in life success is taken up by, let's say, individual attributes, there's still room for a systemic critique that's valid.

Yeah, one of the pathologies of intellectual life that I wrote about in the blank slate about the denial of human nature was that the in polite company and intellectual circles the amount of life success determined by inherent and largely heritable psychological traits has to be zero. I mean, that's just the only acceptable position, and you and I know it's not zero. Well, also, just to be interject for one sec, I'm also, there's a fairness element there. But the other thing is, it seems to me that that's extremely self-serving of people, too, because, you know, if you get together with a group of Harvard professors, for example, it's pretty obvious that their innate intelligence

is one of the factors that determine their success. And to deny the fact that heritable differences make a difference means perhaps to act as an avatar of a social justice orientation, but equally to deny the role of the benefits of chance in your own success and to therefore lack a certain degree of humility that you might otherwise be required to have. So, it's not all, and I'm not claiming that you were implying this at all, but it's not

all in the service of higher social ideals that people deny the contribution of heritable components, for example, the birth lottery. So. Whoops, we just, okay. Unfortunately, the video just froze. And after you said, I'm not saying you claim this, you suddenly froze on the screen. So I'm wondering if this could be. Yeah, I just, I'm not saying you claim this, you suddenly froze on the screen. So I wonder if it's because of the heat.

Yeah, I just, I'm not saying you're claiming this. Sure. Well, it seems self-serving for people who are particularly bright, for example, to not be grateful for the fact that they won the genetic lottery in that manner. And insufficiently humble, to not note the role of that arbitrary chance in determining their success.

I mean, it's not like they don't deserve their success because of that, but claiming a certain degree of biological determinism doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, even though it can be read that way, because it makes you very sensitive to your own good fortune if you think it through carefully. Oh, absolutely. In fact, successful people are the winners of at least three lotteries. One of them that you mentioned, of course, is the genetic lottery, the fact that some people were born with greater intelligence and conscientiousness and openness to experience. Another is that there's a second lottery in human development that is not strictly genetic,

but it is, in a sense, constitutional or developmental. The fact that I consider this one of the most profound discoveries in the history of psychology, the correlations between identical twins we're together are generally on the order of 0.5 and they share not only their genome, but the vast amount of their environments, their parents, their neighborhoods, their older sips, their younger sips, the number of books in the house, the number of guns in the house, the number of TVs in the house. Yet they're not indistinguishable. Identical twins are correlate quite highly, but no one near perfectly, which means that there is a second lottery that has to do either with just the way the brain congeals during

development, which can't be specified down to the last synapse by the genes, and perhaps by chance life events, which might leave unpredictable traces that we can't document or systematically understand. And of course, there's the third lottery of what happens to you in your profession. Did you bet on the right sector? Did you happen to have a good relationship with the boss? Numerous. That's a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

The right time. So all that having been said, and you're absolutely right, we have to acknowledge the non-zero role of a hereditary, chem-permitant talent, the non-zero role of chance. And that still leaves a big chunk of the variance that could be due to systemic features of the system that perhaps ought to be changed. There's just no doubt that the wealthy gained the system, particularly in the United States in a number of ways that don't work to the benefit of society at large. There are also aspects of the system that are perhaps fair but irrational.

The fact that so much of our intellectual talent now gets sucked into finance. Now of course we do need a financial sector and it's good that there are smart people in it. But having a lot of our brain power devoted to figuring that had to act on financial information and micro-second faster than one's competitors of our brain power devoted to figuring out how to act on financial information, a microsecond faster than one's competitors, is probably not the best use of our society's intellectual

capital. Likewise, a lot of, there's no doubt that we have far too much brain power invested in the legal system, in corporations, suing each other, in patent rolling, and another not so productive uses. Yeah, well, the funny thing is too, though, that there's a neurotic amount of pathology in a system in some sense. I mean, one of the things that struck me quite hard, for example, is that if you look at the creativity curves across the lifespan, they match the criminality curves almost perfectly. And one of the things that made me think

when I was doing that research was, so that as young men become more anti-social, they also become more creative, even though those things might not be correlated, but they do map on top of one another. And we're staking in a society like the United States, which has a fair degree of criminality, but also a fair degree of creativity.

We have no idea how loose the system has to be so that malfeasance can thrive, so that it can also be simultaneously loose enough so that creativity can thrive. Because you might think if you were optimistic that you could tighten up the system and get rid of the criminal behavior, without adding a totalitarian layer to the system that would also simultaneously demolish individual variability and creativity. We just, our models just aren't sophisticated enough to tease such things apart. You know, well, there, I'm not so sure. There, I do agree with you.

There's a certain amount of risk- taking or young men on the make that might underlie both criminality and productive creativity. But over the course of history, I think one of the accomplishments of civilization, and indeed of enlightenment-driven progress, is that we have managed to tease them apart. Just two examples are the fact that the rate of homicide plunged by a factor of about 35 from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. And that includes the scientific revolution,

the industrial revolution, the enlightenment to all of the advances of the 20th century. So just as people were not stabbing each other or as over insults, they were also coming up on the theory of evolution and the atomic theory of matter. And then again, in the 1990s, when the rate of violent crime in the United States fell by half, and there were also declines in Canada and Britain and other Western countries, this certainly was not a time of economic stagnation or technological law.

No, no, fair enough. I guess then the question starts to become is, how in the world did those things get teased apart so that we were able to regulate anti-social behavior without simultaneously making things excessively rigid and regulated totalitarian. We managed it. Maybe it's part of that same incremental process that you detailed out at the beginning of our talk.

You know, another thing that struck me about your book that was quite interesting I thought was that you list the names of a very large number of totally unsung heroes. You know what those are people and we have a very interesting table near the beginning where you list I think about 10 names maybe 12 of people who've saved between hundreds of millions and billions of lives with their scientific scientific, with their incremental scientific productivity. And yet, those are people that are by no means household names.

That's another place where things don't make the news. Yes, absolutely. And it's funny how our moral crediting, our moral, our awarding of moral brownie points, doesn't quite correlate with how much good people do. are more, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are of the green revolution and agriculture are pretty much unknown. And they've literally saved billions of lives, whereas various reformers and prophets and agitators are a pretty well-known number of certainly people who are sainted by the Roman Catholic Church,

who have to perform a miracle that might resolve and result in saving one life. Of course, it in fact did not, because miracles don't happen. But the fact that that definition of saint has nothing to do with saving lives on scales of millions or billions, just shows how human moral sense is not really well calibrated to morality as we would defend it by our best. I think it was Stalin who said something like a single death as a tragedy, but a million deaths

is a statistic. And maybe. He actually didn't say it, but it's a conventionally attributed to him. So that's it. Yeah, well, and for good reason, I mean, I suppose Mao could have said it too. Or exactly.

That's right. I guess maybe the same thing plays in reverse, say, is that the saving of a single life has a narrative punch and the incremental savings of 100 million lives, especially through prevention. That's another problem, right? Because prevention isn't dramatic, because the terrible thing merely doesn't happen.

And that's not it. I rather, cheekily wrote an article on the human moral sense that began with, who do you, who do you think is most morally praiseworthy? Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norma and Borlaug? And this was before Gates's pivot from computer technology to philanthropy was, was well known it was about 10 years ago. And I set it up as a bit of a trick question because of course everyone would say Mother Teresa, even in our field, in discussions of moral psychology, whatever a speaker has to pull out of the air and example of a particularly moral person, Mother Teresa is the stereotype. Even though if you ask people, what exactly did she accomplish?

How many lives did she save? How many sick people did she actually cure? It's very hard to come up with her actual accomplishment, whereas Bill Gates has already been credited with saving perhaps 100 million lives through his efforts to eliminate affection, infectious disease, in the American world. And Norman Borlock, when the Nobel Peace Prize of 1970

for his role in fermentomenting the Green Revolution. Probably saved a billion lives. Right. Elective breeding of hybrid crops that required less fertilizer that could be grown twice a year, less water, higher yields, less susceptibility to disease, which turn countries like Mexico and India from basket cases to ex-orders of food in less than a decade.

Right, you'd think that would be a story that everyone in elementary and junior high school would learn, because it's such a remarkable story. And no one, I mean, I don't know what percentage of people would know his name, Burlong's name, but I don't imagine it's I suspect it's in the low percentages if that. I'm sure that's right. I think there may have been a change. I seem to recall although I hate to begin any sentence with when I was young in my day, but we did read heroic biographies of medical pioneers

like Banting, the discoverer of insulin and pepper and Thomas Edison. And I don't know if that kind of heroic biography of the innovator, of the inventor of the scientist is as common in children's education now. Yeah, I suspect, I strongly suspect not. It certainly wouldn't be in Canada given the tilt that our education system is taken.

So, all right, so a couple of broader questions again, if you don't mind, you have a whole corpus of work and there are recurrent themes in some sense. One of them being things are getting better in ways that we really don't know. And what are you, what, if you could have what you wanted with regards to the impact of your books, what would you want that impact to be? And also, what, what do you think? Like one of the things I've done on Twitter recently, because I've trying to figure out how to use Twitter is to

tilt my tweets towards people like humanpro progress.org, someone you cite in your introduction, and people who are purveying information, including yourself, by the way, who are purveying information about how much better things are getting. And so, what the impact would you like to have your books have? And how do you see that playing out psychologically and politically? And what do you think people who are listening now say could do practically to get the good news out, so to speak? Yeah, certainly intellectual life should be more data driven, but you shouldn't be allowed

to say, talk about any reported trend based on an event that happened yesterday or this year, because trend means change over time and in so many areas we really do have data and it's just irresponsible not to cite those data particularly since they have become increasingly available through websites like our world and data and and human progress. So I'd like to see a replacement of ideological debate which so much of our current debate is, it's whether the right or the left is more saintly, moral, praiseworthy, correct, and more, well, let's look at the data. It's chances are that neither an off-the-shelf position of the left nor an off-the-shelf

position of the right is likely to have it all figured out. No one is on this end or in fallible. These ideologies go back to the French Revolution and they're unlikely to be a font of solutions to complex problems. Let's try to see what works or what doesn't and come up with the mixture of what is most likely to solve our problems. Spoken like a true proponent of the enlightenment. Yeah, I guess. And stepping back even farther, I would like to see a greater integration of the

insights and mindset of the science into social and cultural affairs. As we talked about earlier in the conversation, this very idea is often met with horror. Well, you don't, the humanities types, I suppose, in some sense, aren't very happy with the idea that they'd have to learn statistics. I have a certain amount of sympathy for that perspective, but... Well, there is a horror at the expanding realm of number and data, and a horror at the thought that ideas about human nature from science, from evolutionary psychology, from behavioral genetics, from social and personality and cognitive psychology might be brought to bear on our understanding of society, of justice, of art, of literature, and fiction, quite contrary to the mindset of the Enlightenment, where all of the Enlightenment

fill us off, we're pretty serious psychologists. The field didn't exist at the time, so they weren't called that, but they mined the observations from travelers and missionaries and explorers out the ways of other cultures. They relied on their own observations and common sense. They tapped into what brain science existed at the time. So it's hardly a radical idea that our understanding of art and culture and society should be informed by our understanding of art and culture and society should be informed by our understanding of human nature. But now that the disciplines have become so professionalized

and the house of different buildings on campus and their rivals for money from the dean, there's great hostility to the old enlightenment idea of conciliates. Right. There's often a paranoid fear that this means that the sciences will take over the humanities, which of course is preposterous.

They wouldn't want to, they couldn't be there. No, and I think the sciences can really inform the humanities. And vice versa, yeah. Well, as I've been trained as a scientist, my appreciation for the humanities is actually substantially deepened. So, I've seen here, and indeed, in many fields, this is a Theta-Complete. One of my own fields of linguistics is just taken for granted that no one really cares where the humanities influences end of the scientific ones.

Begin studies of philology, of classical grammar, of texts, now blend into statistical studies of Orbra laboratory studies of speech and language processing. And where the science ends up and they ends off in the humanities begins, no one even talks about it. Well, the science can also really change, can really change your mind. Like, I've looked at individual differences in relationship to political belief. And so, I've learned three things from doing that that I think are revolutionary, have been revolutionary for me.

So the first is that liberal lefty types are characterized by higher trade openness and lower conscientiousness and then conservatives the reverse. And I think, well, that's quite interesting because it puts the liberal left types in the creative entrepreneurial domain because that's characterized by high openness, and it puts the conservative types in the manager on the administrative domain. And so that implies that the liberal left types create new ideas and new enterprises, including entrepreneurial

enterprises, because the data there is fairly solid. Whereas the conservative types manage and administer those enterprises. And so each needs the other. And so there's that nice polarity dynamic. And then there's also a urgent idea that the reason that openness and conscientiousness unite to predict political behavior is because of borders. So open people like the borders between concepts to be fluid so that there's information exchange and They're not orderly the liberal types because they're not conscientious and so they don't see any utility and keeping things categorically distinct, whereas the conservatives are afraid of the contamination of things because of the movement of information and They like to see the borders between things to ensure that that's the case. So the reason that openness and conscientiousness stack together as predictors of political behavior

seems to be because of the, of two fundamentally different attitudes towards borders all the way from the conceptual to the political. So the right wingers think, well, borders are good because that stops contamination and contamination is a real problem and a deathly problem often. And the liberal lefty types think, no, no, we want as much information to flow as possible. And both of those perspectives are valid and need to be discussed. Then the other thing I learned from the American empirical data was that orderliness, which is part of conscientiousness, the predicts conservatism, is associated with disgust sensitivity.

And so that feeds that desire to maintain borders so that there's no cross-contamination. That's associated with what's been called the behavioral immune system. And so those are actually quite revolutionary ideas from the perspective of political theory, you know, that the political belief is temperamentally determined, that the reason that the two temperamental traits determine political belief is because of a difference in attitude, fundamental difference in attitude towards the borders between things,

that you can make a case for open and closed borders on evolutionary grounds, and that there's an association between conservatism and disgust, which, to me, shed tremendous light, for example, on the motivations of Hitler, who is an extraordinarily orderly person, and who used disgust-oriented language

all the time when he was formulating his policies of extermination. So those are revolutionary contributions of individual different science to political theory. It's all driven by hard data statistically to arrive. Well, I agree. And I can sense the kind of paranoid reaction that these claims might have listed

upon some traditional political theorists and thinkers that are you saying that conservative beliefs are nothing but an expression of disgust sensitivity? And of course, it doesn't apply that. These fascinating findings don't say that the earned income tax credit is a good or a bad idea or the power's climate of the courts by themselves. The issue still have to be decided on their merits. In other hand, if you do, if you are aware of your own potential biases, then that is

a source of insight, it's a source of understanding, it could cause you to step back from your own convictions and be more receptive to arguments on both sides. Of course, that would definitely done that for me. But it cannot be helpful, cannot be an important source of insight as to how political debates unfold. Yeah, well, if you know that the liberal left types are necessary for the fostering of new enterprises and the conservatives are necessary to run them, then that certainly indicates why both groups not only are necessary, but are all of mutual benefit. Somebody has to maintain

systems and someone has to expand them. And those things are going to work in opposition to one another because expanding a system often fragments it. So there's going to be tension, but no system can remain static forever. And completely untrammeled transformation throws everything into chaos. So there obviously has to be a dialogue between those two viewpoints. Like, it's like an opponent process issue essentially. Yes, and all of us ought to be more aware, have more insight into how our own psychological particularities might affect the positions that seem to each of us to be obvious.

And that is what they do, right? Because the temperamental variables actually tell you what is self-evident. That's how they operate. And my understanding from the literature that you're citing is that the variance in opinions that is correlated with innate personality differences is also the hardest to get people to give up,

to persuade them off. Yeah, well, no doubt because I think those temperamental differences are like axiomatic values, you know, and they're grounded. And I think they're grounded in the hyperdevelopment of separate circuitry. So it's going to be very, I mean, and I also think that like if you're an introvert, you want to learn to be an extro mean, and I also think that like if you're an introvert, you want to learn to be an extrovert, you have to learn it micro skill by micro skill, right? There's no revolution, there's no revolutionary cognitive transformation that's going to turn you into an extrovert. You can pick up the skills, but it's bit by bit

and it's incremental. And so I think it's the same with political attitudes is you can develop an appreciation for the viewpoint of people who are on the other side of the temperamental divide, but it's an increment by increment advance and it's very, very effortful. But necessary, it's necessary. You know, it's been really useful to me to see where the cognitive sociological, political utility of both political temperaments lies, and why it's so crucially important. I mean, with regards to disgust sensitivity, I mean, you might think, well, that's purely reductionistic with regards to conservative viewpoint, but a lot of people in history have died as a consequence of cross-cultural contamination.

I mean, there are estimates that up to 90%, maybe even 95% of the Native Americans perished because of their exposure to the Spaniards. And so the idea that contamination is a problem when two things that were distinct unite is a truism. And it's a powerful evolutionary force and equally powerful is the observation that well yeah despite that though the benefit of information flow, free information flow and trade is so overwhelming that you can't throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes it's a case where the evolutionary adaptive value of a mode of an emotion is explicable.

And we can also recognize that thanks to advances in science and technology, the emotions themselves are no longer particularly effective defenses against, in this case, infection by pathogens. We have much better ways of protecting ourselves, but we are stuck with these ancient adaptations, which are no longer quite so adaptive, and indeed, the harmful, especially when they're skinned in metaphorically, right to treat other people on the metaphor of contaminants or pathogens.

And you're certainly right, but in Hitler's rhetoric, despite the fact that he is often claimed to have used eugenic ideas to motivate the genocide against the Jews, much more of his language came from mythology and historical archaeology. Oh yeah, it's contempt into the man, you. Yeah. There was a parasites. Parasites exactly. Yeah. Really microbiology, not genetics, that David Gave Hitler is toxic ideas. So I thought we might close by, I have a question for you about your, your derivation of these moral virtues, specifically from the enlightenment. And I'm curious about that because well, first of all, you could make a case that it wasn't so much the enlightenment as it was the,

the specifically the rise of empirical science. And then you could of course have a discussion about how those two things are related. But I'm also curious. I've been reading Ian McGill Chris's book, The Master and his Emissary, and McGill Chris makes a pretty strong case, I would say, that the rationalistic enlightenment values are in some sense a consequence of the articulation of an underlying set of principles that are more metaphoric in nature, more narrative in nature. To case, I also made in my book, Maps of Meaning, into some degree, in 12 rules for life, that the enlightenment project and its rationality is nested inside a deeper web of metaphor and ritual and image that would be associated with longer scale cognitive process, some of which are expressed in religious thinking, but some of which are grounded in not so much rationality as

in motivation and emotion. And I mean, the way your book is structured, and I think the way enlightenment thinkers think, is that there was a miracle of sorts that occurred sometime in the last three to five hundred years, and people woke up and became rational. And then the question is, to what degree was the ground for that awakening prepared by events that weren't the awakening itself, but that we're associated with other processes. And I'm just curious as to what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah, so there's nothing new under the sun, and a good intellectual historian can find the antecedents of any intellectual movement in various precursors. It's hard to, I don't think there's a lot in the enlightenment that can specifically be attributed to religion, particularly Christianity, just based on the fact that it was already around for a thousand years and nothing much happened. So it couldn't be religion itself or Christianity itself, although there are, as you say, there are strands that were carried over, in particular, and this is an insight that I've got from my other half, Rebecca Goldstein,

my wife, who you've appeared on stage with. Right, yes. The point of it that one thing that the Greeks didn't have that Christianity did, was the idea of compassion for the weak and universal human flourishing. You don't really have that for all of the brilliance of ancient Greece. That wasn't a big feat. But the enlightenment, of course, did not spring out of nowhere. If I were to identify the antecedents, what happened prior to the 18th century? It allowed it to unfold then as opposed to a couple of hundred years, earlier or a couple of hundred years later. One of them was the scientific revolution of conventionally located in the 17th century,

which not only provided a paradigm for understanding, namely testing propositions against the empirical world, seeking deeper naturalistic explanations for phenomena, and which, of course, overturned millennia-old dogmas reminding people that their own common sense, their own society's convictions, were fallible. So that was an essential precursor. Another one was the discovery of the new world that there were entire civilizations,

entire world, literally worlds in their sense that had been unknown in that the knowledge base that they had been part of Western civilization for millennia was radically incomplete. And technologically, I suspect that the greater exchange of ideas and people was a contributor. Just prior to the enlightenment, the second half of the 18th century, there was a massive growth in the efficiency of printing. The printing press itself, but it was the democratization of books and pamphlets,

the rise of literacy, and the movement of people. It became easier for heretics and radicals to jump ship and move to where things were cooler, if things got too uncomfortable, where they were. It's amazing how many of the Enlightenment thinkers were persecuted for their beliefs, who were threatened with imprisonment to our death. Many of them ended up in Holland or Paris or London or jumped around to wherever they had made the greatest

freedom. But also just the sheer precursor of the web today, the fact that a pamphlet can be introduced, and within a few months it would be translated into a dozen European languages and smuggle them. So the exchange of ideas I think helped to accelerate the enlightenment. Although since it only happened once in human history, we can never really know for sure why it happened when it did, but those are three good, good guests. Well, and we're in an interesting time now where we can sit

and make a video like this and publish it almost instantaneously and share it with half a million people. I mean, that ability to share ideas rapidly is developing a pace and God only knows what the consequence of that is. We're in a situation now, which has only occurred to me about last year, where the spoken word for the first time in human history has the same reach and longevity as the written word. And it's easier for people to listen.

Audio books are becoming very popular. Lots and lots of people listen to podcasts. I have working class people come to my talks all the time and say, look, I'm sitting in my forklift for three hours a day and I'm doing nothing but listening to podcasts. So that's a really remarkable thing. So I think I'm going to let you go. You've been very generous with your time.

I appreciate the conversation very much. I'm going to close by showing your book again. Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, which is tearing up the bestseller charts, and which is a guide to proper and intelligent optimism in the 21st century. And maybe I'd ask you just in closing, what do you think there are things that individuals? What do you think individuals should be particularly optimistic about right now? And what do you think there are things that individuals, what do you think individuals should be particularly optimistic about right now? And what do you think individuals could do to spread the message that things are getting better and that we can solve our problems? Yeah, the fact that there are new efforts to transcend political divisions and find out what works. transcend political divisions and find out what works. To depoliticize and rationalize problems like poverty,

like climate change, like war and peace, like crime. Those are very much worth supporting that their organizations like a political, there are NGOs that try to monitor the state of the world. There's effective altruism. There's just the general application of rationality to solve our problems. It is responsible for the progress that we've enjoyed in the past, and if there's going to be progress ahead of us, we'll be responsible for what we'll enjoy in the future. All right, well, I'm, I would like to close to by mentioning to everyone who's listening that,

you know, things are getting better. They're getting better because people are facing problems and actually trying to solve them. They're doing microanalysis of the problems, breaking them down into their constituent elements, being humble enough to use incremental solutions to solve them, and to address them at a high level of resolution instead of a low level of, or a low resolution level of ideological debate, and it's really working. And I would, what would we say, encourage people to pick up Dr. Pinkers book, because the world is getting better, and we should know it, and we should be happy about it, and we should know it and we should be happy about it and we should continue to foster that development in every way that we can.

And I think this is an excellent, this book is an excellent contribution to that effort as well as your other books like our the better angels, better angels of our nature. So thank you very much for spending the time with me today and for talking with me. It was a pleasure to meet you. you