Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Steven Pinker on the radical left, Jordan Peterson, Chomsky, and Sam Harris

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

What you're seeing is un-edited, raw footage for the imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid (http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com). Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film made. Every dollar helps tremendously. The conversation is between Curt Jaimungal, Peter Glinos, and Steven Pinker.

It really is a terrible idea to try to change the meaning so that people can't even get certain thoughts across. So if you ask, is it possible for a white, powerless, unemployed, working class person in a poor southern or Appalachian town to have derogatory opinions about African-Americans. And you say, oh, no, no, no, you can't ask if he's racist because racist means that you have to have power. Hi, Professor. It's a pleasure to meet you. Nice to meet you.

I'm Kurt Jaimungal, the director. This is Peter, and he's helping me tag team this interview. Okay, very good. Pleasure to meet you. Nice to meet you. Okay, so is it all right if we just get right into the questions? Let's go. Starting off, I want to know, what is the left? We have to define the left, and I would like you to give its defining traits, its characteristics.

the left and I would like you to give its defining traits, its characteristics. It's hard to give a definition because political ideology is turning to tribes. And so people affiliate with those in the group they like to interact with, that they value morally. And nowadays, especially in the United States, it's harder and harder to discern a common intellectual thread behind the left and the right. We see that especially in the right, where you have pro-Russian, anti-free trade right-wingers boggling the mind of anyone who was a right-winger even 10 years ago. Also, the left has switched in a number of its affiliations, but I would use it informally in the way that people tend to identify those who are sympathetic with socialism, those who tend to be, at least

in American politics, more likely to be the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. There are a number of positions that go with it, but they can often be blurred as the coalitions themselves recoalesce. Would you identify with or do you identify with someone who's on the left? No, I certainly don't identify with the right. And most people would identify me based on my positions as center left in terms of, I believe in a graduated income tax I believe in regulations on environmental dispoliation I agree I'm in favor of social programs like welfare and medicine on the other hand I also

believe in the importance of markets I believe in the primacy of free speech and individual rights. I believe that policing is an important component of reduction of violence, which is not a popular view on the left. So I have an eclectic mix, which I examine on an issue-by-iss issue basis and evaluate in terms of my best reading of the evidence. I try not to fall into an ideology on the right or the left. There seems to be a considerable overlap recognizing these differences. In your opinion, when does the left go too far? In, let's see, a number of ways, especially the contemporary left has tended to gravitate toward identity politics, toward seeing debate and analysis of social issues in terms of

the relative power of different ethnic groups and races and seeing social progress in terms of rectifying an imbalance between whites and blacks or men and women, as opposed to recognizing discrimination that has occurred but striving toward a society in which people are evaluated based on their individual rights and their individual merits. So identity politics and with it a relativistic epistemology that says that your opinions are determined by your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your handicap status, as opposed to their internal consistency and support by evidence. I think there's far too much hostility to markets and to capitalism on the left, just given the historical and contemporary record of which societies one would want to

live in. North Korea versus South Korea, West Germany versus East Germany, Venezuela versus Uruguay, for example. Let's see. Uruguay, for example. Let's see, well those are, oh, I think the, as I mentioned before, the hostility among the left to rule of law and law enforcement is inconsistent with their role of policing in reducing violent crime. That would be another issue that the left, I think,

has lost touch with facts. The importance of market economies in elevating societies from extreme poverty, the fact that global extreme poverty has declined by 75% in the last 30 years, largely because of liberalization of market economies in countries like China and Vietnam and India. So those are a number of issues in which I think the left has gone off the tracks. But certainly the contemporary American right is far worse. the Trumpist right in denigrating international agreements and norms, which are increasingly going to be necessary to confront global challenges like climate change, the hostility to any form of regulation, even ones that would be justified by a market-friendly mindset, such as pricing harm to the environment,

which even if you're a staunch capitalist, you realize the market itself will not take care of. The indifference to the plight of people who can't contribute enough to a market economy to support a decent way of life, the indifference to the poor, to the sick, to the elderly, and therefore a rather ideological opposition to all forms of government assistance to the needy. We just know, again, there's nothing that dictates that you have to be hostile to social programs if you're sympathetic to markets because it's just a basic analysis of markets that they don't provide for the poor. So unless you just

are happy to let the poor starve and die of disease, you have to have markets, you have to have mechanisms that the market doesn't provide. And this is hardly radical, even if you are a free market libertarian. Sorry, you've done some work with the Heterodox Academy, right? Yes, that's right. I gave the keynote at their last meeting, for example. Have you seen the rise of the campus left? Do you see it as becoming more extreme in the past few years? Can you give some examples of that if you do see it as becoming more extreme?

Yeah, I think it has, although, as I said in my address, contra Billy Joel, we did start the fire. We, the baby boomers. And there were episodes of intolerance and shutting down of free speech when I was an undergraduate a number of decades ago.

But I think there is an increase in the number of speakers who are disaffected, who are shouting down with loud protests, sometimes physical altercations, with setting of fire alarms. And we also know just by surveys of the political affiliation of professors that they are drifting rather sharply to the left. In many humanities departments, there are more Marxists than there are people who identify as conservatives. Why do you think that is?

and there are people who identify as conservatives. Why do you think that is? Some of it is because of an increase in social and residential segregation, that people with higher amounts of education live with other people who are just like them, and people particularly on college campuses or in large cities and people who are more conservative tend to be more in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas partly because academia has some I think some pathologies in terms of people hiring people like themselves and so that once there was a generation that got tenure

in many departments, they replicated themselves, hired people with the same political outlook. So those are a couple of the reasons. There's also a natural, I think, affinity among intellectuals for more liberal positions. Some of it justified. It was often liberals and leftists who were at the forefront of social movements whose achievements we now take for granted and that we now enjoy, such as racial equality, gender equality, and gay rights.

So some degree of liberal tilt may not be a good thing, but when it comes to stifling disagreement and debate, it can become pathological. Recognizing that universities are not structured in a totalitarian fashion and that there still are orthodoxies in universities and taboos, some of which you have touched on. Do you believe that universities follow a propaganda model or would you not go that far? I wouldn't go that far, no. I mean, I think there are tendencies in some disciplines and some departments toward replicating

particular ideologies. But on the other hand, a lot of members of the heterodox Academy are our university professors. A lot of the responses to campus suppression come from campuses. So it is not it is not totalitarian, it is not a propaganda factory. You had mentioned variance by discipline in terms of how ideological these disciplines become, that there's a variance. What explains this variance? Why are certain disciplines more ideological, let's say, than others? This is purely speculative, but I think disciplines that are closer to the sciences tend to be a little less ideological because there is at least a commitment and sometimes the reality of holding your beliefs to empirical

account to see which of your beliefs survive empirical tests. Whereas in disciplines where that is not a norm or an ideal or an aspiration, there can be more just sheer force of personality, charisma, rhetoric that can preserve certain beliefs against possible falsification. I remember you were talking about the effects of political correctness in the form of a backlash, a rise of the right, like a counter position. And you already mentioned that the right seems to pose a greater threat right now. Can you talk about that relationship? Why is it that, why is it, is it necessary that when the left gets too out of hand, then the right does something similar? That's not exactly the

argument. It's more that when opinions get suppressed, then people who might even be reasonable seeing the opinion suppressed suspect that the academia or whatever form it is can't handle the truth. That if they can't show why a position is wrong, why it's incoherent, why it is contradicted by the facts, that they just shut it up completely. They suspect, well, there must be something to that idea, because if there's something wrong with it, they could just show what was wrong. We wouldn't have to squelch it. And so they can retreat to their own bubbles where much more extreme and dogmatic and categorical and unsettled versions of the hypothesis can fester, unopposed by people who might be more conversant with the data and the counterarguments. So there can be a kind of malign mirror image of campus orthodoxy in alt-right orthodoxy.

And by the way, the reason that I think that the right is worse is because they have power. I mean, they're the senators, they're the governors, they're the president. And so the right-wing orthodoxy is much more dangerous than professors and students shutting out speakers in universities. But they can feed each other where So let me just be concrete. There are, on universities, there is often a hostility and a lack of comprehension of market economies. Now, in reality, there's no such thing as a market economy that does not have regulation and social transfers redistribution. That's just the libertarian fantasy of a perfect anarcho-capitalist free market country where the government does nothing but enforce contracts and prevent the use of force. It does not exist, and there are probably good reasons why it doesn't exist.

There are a number of reasons why it's not viable. But because often those on campus assume then get a hardline libertarian rebound where in a lot of the American right there's hostility to all regulation, hostility to all redistribution, often resulting in the gutting of completely justifiable mechanisms of regulation or social programs out of a reaction to the uncritical hostility to capitalism on the campus left. So I think it's unhealthy when you have such a lack of nuance, a lack of compromise, a lack of discussion, and you get polarized extremes.

And we're seeing that in politics on the one hand, universities on the other. Let's get into some cognitive science. I remember you were suggesting that we have some leeway or some elasticity in our brain for what we categorize as an in-group versus an out-group, obviously, because none of us were around each other a million years ago or 10,000 years ago. obviously, because none of us were around each other a million years ago or 10,000 years ago, but that identity politics somehow undermines it or takes advantage of it in a negative manner. Can you explain? Well, there is one of the core beliefs of the alt-right, of the Bannon,annon Breitbart Trump version of modern nationalism is that we are hardwired to fall into tribes that the idea of a

global civilization of transnational organizations is utopian is futile because we evolved as tribal creatures. Now I think we do have tribal instincts, but what counts as a tribe is highly elastic. It's certainly not a race, because in our evolutionary ancestry we would seldom have encountered a person of another race, so we certainly couldn't have built-in hostility to other races. Probably is tied much more to some notion of coalition or clan, people who are on a side who might have some fictive relatedness that makes them seem like one brothers or like families.

But the idea that this coincides with a modern nation-state, with the United States of America or France, is, I think, anachronistic. We have multiple tribal affiliations. We're loyal to our university, to our sports team, to our state or province, to our country, and that it's not that we categorize ourselves as belonging to one and only one tribe equals nation which is locked in zero-sum competition with other nations. And that is the basis of Trumpist foreign policy.

Okay. For our viewers, for the people watching this, can you define the Enlightenment broadly speaking? What are the values of the Enlightenment? Well, there's no official definition because there were like opening and closing ceremonies, there was no membership card, so there really is no definition. It's a term that's loosely applied as a movement to a number of thinkers typically in the second half or second two-thirds of the 18th century, primarily in England, Scotland, America, and Germany. It tends to include an embrace of science, a skepticism toward religion and scripture, an emphasis on the power of reason and of human rights. When I refer to Enlightenment

ideals, I spell it out in the subtitle of my book, namely Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Now, I don't claim that that is the correct definition of the Enlightenment. I don't care what the correct definition is. There isn't one. I wrote a defense of reason, science, humanism, and progress. I used Enlightenment as a loose label for it. I could have also called it secular humanism. I could have called it cosmopolitan liberalism.

Enlightenment ideals were catchier, but nothing is at stake over whether the term is correct. In that case, let us dive into some of these ideas, particularly progress and humanism. To start, I think it's fair to say that the term progress is very long and diverse history, history philosophy. In the interest of synchronizing our metric, we'd like to touch on the similarities and differences of your view of progress and its previous historical usage. For example, the philosopher of progress Hegel believed that material substance conformed to a sort of set inevitable ideological track, and that this was how history worked, a sort of unfolding of material on a set course of ideas, and that this was inevitable. But this seems to

conflict with your view of progress. Would you agree? Absolutely, yeah. When I think of progress, it's not that. Where does your view of progress differ? Not that. It is also… Where does your view of progress differ? First of all, I deny that there exists a force, a dynamic, a dialectic that we can call progress. The human condition does not have progress built in. Quite the contrary, the universe is indifferent to us, it kind of grinds us down, both the forces of entropy, the natural growth of disorder, and the process of evolution, which is a competitive process

where the various germs and parasites and pathogens and pestilence organisms and spoilage organisms are always trying to do us in, eat away at our well-being. And the only way that progress happens in the teeth of all of these forces pushing against it is the extent to which humans use ingenuity, that is their understanding of how the world works, and they deploy it in the service of improving human well-being. Human well-being would include health, happiness, prosperity, freedom, stimulation, social ties,

the kind of things that people like and want. To the extent that the kind of things that people like and want improve over the course of time, that's progress. What makes it possible is humans solving problems, deploying their understanding of the world to make other humans better off. Thank you. We're just trying to make sure that our viewers understand how your view of progress differs from let's say the traditional view of progress.

That's extremely important because people often confuse them. And indeed, the notion that I have of progress is actually a rather simple and boring one. Mainly, if people live longer, that's progress. If people are less likely to be murdered, that's progress. If women can do what they want to do, that's progress. So the Enlightenment thinkers in the early Enlightenment tied technological progress to ideological progress, arguing that the two go hand in hand. Would you also agree to that assumption? Not necessarily, because it depends on what the technologies are deployed to do.

are deployed to do. Nuclear weapons, for example, are a technological tool to force, but not an example of progress because they're designed to kill people instead of making them better off. Antibiotics, on the other hand, vaccination, antiretrovirals, those are examples of progress because they also involve human ingenuity, but in order to make people happier and healthier and longer-lived. So the progress technology only drives progress when it's deployed in the service of humanism and that's why crucially in my subtitle I had humanism as one of the ideals. Without it scientific advances don't necessarily lead to progress.

advances don't necessarily lead to progress. Thank you. We find with the Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin, he believes that these two should also not be equated, that technological progress and ideological progress can be leagues apart. When looking at the West, do you find that this is the case? Or do you find that when you look at Western societies, that their technological progress does match their ideological progress? Sorry about that. I don't know if you're, I hope you're editing this.

So it's going online unedited. Okay. So it'll be, it'll be unbuttoned. I mean, sometimes, not always. And it's important to distinguish Enlightenment ideals with Western ideals. The Enlightenment, a lot of the ideals originated in the West. All ideas have to originate somewhere, but they're not the same thing. And in the West, there's been furious opposition to Enlightenment ideals in counter-Enlightenment, in Romantic militarism, in Romantic nationalism. So West and Enlightenment are definitely not the same thing. And within the West, there have been many examples of progress, often driven by science and technology, or by philosophy and human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's hard even to call that Western.

Most of it was written by some Western thinkers, and it was pushed by Eleanor Roosevelt, but with the opposition of many forces within the West. The United States was very squeamish, for example, about signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because there was Jim Crow, there was racial segregation. Britain was uneasy about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because they still had their colonies, whereas a number of eastern countries were happy to sign on. Ethiopia and Africa, a number of Muslim majority countries were happy to sign on. So is universal human rights a

Western concept? Well somewhat and somewhat not. Understanding that it varies in the way it's been, that Enlightenment ideas have been adopted, would you still say that the genesis of the Enlightenment is a equally European phenomena? No. Some of the parallel ideas originated in other parts of the world, in India, in Ethiopia. There was a hermit living in a cave in Ethiopia named Jacob,, independently came up

with a number of the enlightenment themes like skepticism of scripture and human rights. More recently, in the family of ideas that I think most of us would want to promote. There were ideas that distinctly came from the East, such as Gandhi's concept of nonviolent resistance, such as restorative justice and Ubuntu from South Africa. So the family of ideas that center around using knowledge to advance human well-being. They can come from anywhere. If we dilute the Enlightenment down to just sort of these universal ideas as opposed to a specific European movement, do we run the risk of sort of

decaffeinating it into just the kind of core essence of human beings that seeks freedom? Is it still the Enlightenment? Well, yes and no. So no in terms of capital E, Enlightenment, if by that you want to use the word to refer to the family of ideas that originated in certain figures in the second half of the 18th century. But words often have multiple meanings. There are far fewer words in the English language than there are concepts. And so we can distinguish the Enlightenment referring to a historical period and movement from Enlightenment ideals, namely reason and science and humanism, and just as long as we're clear which of them we're referring to when we use the word enlightenment.

Would you attribute the polygenesis of these enlightenment ideas as a reflection of our human nature, that human beings want freedom, seek rationality universally, and this is why it's a polygenesis? To some extent. The thing is that we all want freedom for ourselves. The idea that we ought to promote freedom for everyone may not be so hardwired into human nature, but it might be universal nonetheless with a combination of features of human rationality and self-interest, just the logical necessity that you can't coherently say that only my rights count because I'm me and you're not. Logic doesn't recognize me versus you. So when you have certain human intuitions, such as our own desire for health and happiness for ourselves and our families, but then sharpened or hardened in the crucible of debate and discussion with people who are unlike us, then the requirement of logical consistency paired with the desire for freedom and well-being will push in the

direction of universal human well-being. Namely, as soon as I'm in conversation with you, I can't say, well, only my happiness counts because I'm me and you're not, and hope for you to continue the conversation. If we're gonna come to any kind of agreement, it's gonna have to be, well, if I value my freedom, I've got to acknowledge your desire for your freedom,

so let's come up with a social arrangement that gives us the maximum amount of freedom consistent with our not impinging on each other's freedom. We come up with a social contract. That's not exactly human nature, that a single person thinking up how the world would work would never come up with that, or probably wouldn't. But with human nature in the combination of discourse, debate, holding other people to account, ferreting out logical inconsistencies, can, I think, will push in the direction of humanism and

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human beings didn't choose to have they sort of transcend our conscious choice and are ascribed into our natures is it something that's therefore beyond humanism in the sense that human beings control the the instincts that cause them to be enlightened. They are because of maybe evolution, larger historical factors, and that we just kind of play along in this role. I think they're natural in the sense that as people start to interact with larger and larger universes of discourse, with more people who are unlike themselves. And as they learn from historical mistakes, as they see what works and what doesn't, I think that will be a force that pushes them in the direction of universal humanism, although

it's far from determined. Because ideals and norms and institutions like checks and balances, liberal democracy, peer review, scientific communities, free speech, those are not inevitable. They're not even particularly natural. They are optimal in the sense that if we seek to improve our condition, those are the mechanisms that will allow us to do it. And I think it's for that reason that you do see some, you do see progress empirically. There seems to be a historical movement toward abolishing slavery and human sacrifice

and discriminatory laws and practices and cruel practices, not even, not inevitable, not monotonic, but unmistakable. And I think it's the combination of human interests and the inherent impartiality or objectivity of reason when and where you do apply it. As soon as you get committed to reason, you're forced along certain tracks. Let's say this is a sort of game theory scenario, right? Where, like you said, my recognizing of your rights and your recognizing my rights lead to an optimal sort of superordinate situation.

Are the rules that make that superordinate situation or optimal game we should be playing determined by human beings? Or are human beings players in a game where the rules, those rules are beyond us? And if they are beyond us, is it still fair to say that human beings are the greatest determiners of their destiny, that that there's still humanism or are these rules transhuman? Yeah, I tend to think they are transhuman in that any rational self-interested species would be forced to them in the limit, as discourse proceeds over time. They are thought up by humans. They then constrain humans.

So for example, I love the idea of peer review in science, and I hate the experience of getting reviews of my own without manuscripts back. Because like all scientists, I think, idiots, what have you missed the point? Why do you want me to mess up my beautiful paper? On the other hand, stepping back, I realize as much as I hate the reviews that I get, at a meta level, I sign on to the whole idea of peer review, knowing simultaneously that I'm right

about everything that I say, and that as a human being, I couldn't possibly be right about everything that I say, and that as a human being I couldn't possibly be right about everything that I say. So we do have to live with that dual consciousness as the combination, probably, of our evolutionarily shaped human nature, which is to believe that we're always right and noble, and the conclusion that we're forced to in discussion with others, in acknowledgement of history, that yeah, everyone thinks they're right. They can't all be right. They're wrong.

I'm not a superman. I'm not a deity. I can't be any less fallible than everyone else that I see. Therefore, I'm going to submit to those rules. So it doesn't come naturally, but it's something that we can fall into given debate, given experience, given awareness of history.

Fukuyama wrote about the end of history, which is essentially claiming that liberalism is the undisputed champion of the world but then there's alexander alexander dugan who says no there's a multiplicity of other options viable options do you see there being another option to enlightenment to enlightenment values well um there's no viable alternative to reason certainly if as soon as you start to argue that there might be we've lost the argument because you've appealed to reason. Or conversely, if you reject reason, there's no reason for anyone to take the argument seriously because you confess there's no good reason to believe it.

So I don't think there's an alternative to reason. I don't think there's an alternative to humanism other than that you could argue for, you could impose it in your view by brute force, but then again you're not providing an argument that it is viable or justifiable. For the same reason I don't think there's an alternative to science. Now, these are normative arguments. This is what we ought to strive for. If you interpret Fukuyama's making historical argument that societies will inevitably go in that direction, it's not clear that he himself would have argued that, but that certainly isn't true. You can certainly have societies devolving into dictatorship and other

forms of authoritarianism. In terms of the direction that the world has taken, I think it's easy to blow off Fukuyama, and he did set himself up for easy refutation. There are umpteen articles that announce the return of history with the rise of authoritarian capitalism in China or nationalist populism in Russia and that of the United States. On the other hand, in Fukuyama's defense, the number of democracies has increased since he published that article in 1989, and not just in the Eastern Europe, but in Latin America, in East Asia, in Africa. And even with the backlashes, it's not clear in the future how many countries are going to model themselves on, say, Putin's Russia. It seems unlikely.

So end of history, it was a gimmick. I mean, even Fukuyama probably didn't really mean the end. He certainly didn't mean history in terms of stuff no longer happening. I mean, he meant conflict over major systems of national organization. But in terms of whether, say, France is going to become more like China in 50 years, or China is going to become more like France, it's not clear. But if I had to bet on one or the other, I'd say China would become more like France. Okay, speaking on this is-ought divide, have you read Sam Harris's Moral Landscape?

And if so, what do you think about it? Yeah, I tend to be sympathetic with Harris's argument in Moral Landscape. It is a statement of humanism. He may have stated some aspects of it more strongly than I would, but he claims that, in a nutshell, to oversimplify that what is moral is an empirical matter, a matter of what makes people best off. And if you interpret that as saying that it is just an empirical matter, that there is no philosophical grounding to it, then I think that would go too far.

It's not clear whether Sam himself would insist on that. Is a view of progress compatible with postmodernism, a sort of anti-grand narrative ideology? Depends on what aspect of postmodernism you're referring to. There may be, within postmodernism, the idea that when power imbalances get rectified, when people of color and women wrest power from white males, that would be a kind of progress. But certainly the notion that there's been a long history of progress which could continue driven by science and universal human rights.

I think probably most postmodernists wouldn't sign on to that. I'm not sure whether I would call that a grand narrative. If people try to solve problems, occasionally they succeed. If their solutions accumulate, then life can get better for more and more people. Is that a grand narrative? It doesn't sound so grand to me, but it is something that I would defend. Okay, while we're irritating the postmodernists, there's progressive nations, then that means that there's non-progressive nations or even perhaps backwards nations.

Does this mean that some cultures are better than others? Well, it means they're better than others in some ways. So I think, for example, a culture in which women have equality is better in that regard, in which girls are kept out of school, women are forced to marry, and prevented from driving and voting. So yeah, I think a society that executes homosexuals is morally inferior to one that has equal rights. So yeah, I think if you, it sounds more radical than it is, but if you have any moral standards whatsoever, societies differ in the degree to which they implement them. And at least in those regards, those practices of those societies are superior. It doesn't mean that the people are superior. It doesn't mean that any

individual has more inherent moral value than any other one. But in terms of cultures, practices, habits, yeah. How could you maintain the opposite if you had any commitment to what is moral? Okay, I know you got to go. so Peter's going to ask one question, then if I have time, I'll just ask one more. Okay. What is the cause of this progress that you've observed in your writings? At what expense did we obtain it? When one looks at the history, it's tempting to say that

because of colonialism, slavery, child labor in factories, that this was sort of the price we enlightened societies paid for their advancement. What would you say to that claim? Child labor certainly vastly predates the Enlightenment. That was just the default. You sent your children to work on the farm. If I may, very briefly, to specify, when we mentioned child labor,

specifically in the English textile industry from which the Industrial Revolution sort of, let's say, sparked, there was a recruitment for orphans, small children with nimble fingers that could work threading machines. These are the specific child laborers referring to. Yeah. Okay. No, fair enough.

Yeah. There were, there were, well, there were clearly a number of harms that coincide with, say with the industrial revolution. And if we could go back in time and make arguments then that we appreciate now, then one could imagine an alternative history that would have had the advantages of industrialization without the harms.

Certainly colonial exploitation way antedated the Enlightenment, beginning with Columbus and Cortes and Pizarro. That was way before the Enlightenment. In fact, it's kind of what empires did throughout history, is they conquered and exploited their subjugated population. So I would not say that those are certainly a necessary accompaniment of Enlightenment values. But more generally, nothing occurs with only benefits. Especially in hindsight, there's a lot that ought to have unfolded differently. In terms of the necessary price that was paid, certainly harm to the environment was an accompaniment

of industrialization that we still have not dealt with in the case of greenhouse gas emissions. And the next stage in anything we'd want to call progress is to enjoy the advances that energy capture has brought while rectifying and undoing the harm that we've done to the environment. If I may just press on your answer to a degree, understanding that

these, let's say, perils and evils predate the Enlightenment, is it still possible that they were a huge contributing factor for the success of enlightened societies who made, let's say, the most efficient use of these perils? Well, to some extent. So for example, the growth in economies in the 19th century, especially the first half of the 19th century, partly exploited slave labor, particularly in the United States, although of course it was the 19th century in which slavery was, for the first time in history, abolished in country after country. But yes, the more general answer is that as history unfolded there were harms that accompanied the benefits.

Were they necessary? I don't think so, but since history only unfolded once, we'll never know for sure. That is, if enlightenment were applied more consistently and the rights and interests of people of indigenous populations, populations in Africa and Asia were taken into account, if the universal human rights really was universal, could we have had an industrial revolution and expansion of rights that truly was universal? I think that could have happened. It didn't happen to the extent that it should have. Universal human rights have to wait at least a century, maybe 150 years. And that is the way the history unfolded, yes. Okay, the last question. You can choose between one of these two.

Do you feel like some of the new atheists feel that Jordan Peterson is causing harm to the Enlightenment project by making religion more palatable? So that's question number one. You can choose that. Or what are your thoughts on Noam Chomsky? I know he has some disagreements with you, and I wanted to know if you've read them

and if you could outline to our audience what they are and then your responses to that. So you can choose between those two well um jordan peterson is a i think probably by his own uh mission in many ways a counter-enlightenment uh thinker so uh including his sympathy to to religion his skepticism about progress um so uh so yes i don't i don't think I would identify him, despite his intellectual independence, he was willing to challenge authority, he is not what you would call a defender of the Enlightenment project. In terms of Chomsky, I think he has a, being an anarchist himself, necessarily has a romantic vision of life in a state of nature before the onset of government and civilization. The data pretty much universally show that there were higher rates of violence in pre-state societies than in state societies.

This would include the biggest analysis done so far, that came out after I finished Better Angels of Our Nature by Jose Maria Gomez and his collaborators, where they accumulated every datum that they could come across on rates of violence in bands tribes chiefdoms and states and in Across their hundreds of societies They show unequivocally that rates of violence are lower in state societies than in tribal societies so I think that No one tends to deny that it goes against his anarchist sensibilities,

but that's what the data suggests. If you look at them in their entirety, instead of cherry-picking a few peaceful societies, which undoubtedly exist, and I have celebrated the fact that societies have become more peaceful over time, but they did not start out peaceful. Thank you so much, Time.

I appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, and sorry for the interruptions. Thank you very much. No worries. Have a great day. Thank you, you too. Bye. Yes, can you hear me? Yes, great to see you again. Thank you for doing this on such short notice. Thanks, John.

Where are you, by the way? Now I'm at home because it's actually my wedding anniversary. I got married one year ago. Hey, congratulations. Thank you so much. But actually, the next question is where is home? Oh, Toronto, Toronto. I thought you meant where?

Okay, I'm going to be in Toronto in a couple of weeks. Okay, cool. It was just there. But anyway, yes, Toronto. I thought you meant where? Okay, I'm going to be in Toronto in a couple of weeks. Okay, cool. It's just there. But anyway, yes, okay. Okay, okay, so the question is, as a linguist, what do you make of the redefinition of words, primarily, at least as far as my research has shown, by the campus left, by the Griebus studies, or the radical left, or whatever they're called, such as racism, which is the old definition of racism plus power, or violence, which now incorporates speech, not physical violence, or what constitutes a Nazi.

Because they may say, well, words change all the time. We're just changing words. This is just par for the course. So I want to know what you think about that. It's true that words change all the time, but it's an organic, bottom-up, viral process. It's not something that an interest group can engineer. First of all, because you've got to get buy-in from several hundred million English speakers, and unless you're a language totalitarian despot, you can't order people how to speak.

Some things catch on in processes that no one quite understands. And certainly, if it's in the service of an agenda, then there's going to be a lot of obvious resistance. If I'm Coca-Cola and I say, well, I'm legislating from now on, the word water will mean Coca-Cola. So every time you order water at a restaurant, we're going to serve you Coca-Cola and bill you for it. And you say, wait a sec, that's not what water means. And I say, well, look, words change all the time. You say, no, wait a second. That's just sheer manipulation. That's not going to work. And it should not work. And I'd say the same thing for an interest group trying to redefine words as people ordinarily understand them, which is the,

but in any case, the only way in which language changes anyway. I can speak with some authority here, being the chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. And when I ask my colleagues at the dictionary, how do you guys decide what the official meaning of words is? And they say, well, we pay attention to the way people use language. So it's not as if any authority, even a dictionary board, can legislate language. So it's not as if any authority, even a dictionary board, can legislate language. And in the case of words like racism, it really is a terrible idea to Appalachian town to have derogatory opinions about African-Americans. And you say, oh, no, no, no, you can't ask if he's

racist because racist means that you have to have power. Well, you can't even ask the question. have to have power? Well, you can't even ask the question. And similarly, to say that it is impossible for an African American to have bigoted thoughts about Asians or whites, or for Asians to have bigoted thoughts about African Americans if they happen to be powerless. Well, the only point of language is to get thoughts across, to communicate. If you try to jigger words so that certain thoughts are impossible or difficult to express, then you just made it impossible to get knowledge and clarity about the state of the world. Let's say it would be true of violence. Metaphors are great. We can talk about anything in a metaphorical sense.

But you really do want to make a distinction between someone saying mean things on Twitter and someone putting a bullet in your head or a knife between your ribs. And to say that, well, you're not allowed to use words that distinguish those. If you use the word violence to refer to physical violence, it has to apply to verbal violence as well. Well, how are you going to say even the thought that I just said, that I just expressed, namely that there is a big difference between being murdered and being insulted? Or in the case of my own research, that there's been an enormous decline in the occurrence of physical violence.

Has there been a decline or increase or no change in the amount of insult? Well, that's an interesting question, but it is a separate question. And the point of language is we can pose that question or any other question. That's the beauty and power of language and the idea of trying to engineer it in a way that advances a particular theory or agenda or political ideology at the expense of just being able to share our ideas is a bad idea. Bad idea because it makes it hard to get clarity, get knowledge, get understanding, but it also excludes people from the discourse in an age in which we're getting more polarized than ever, more and more people not only disagree with others but think that they are stupid and evil. Since not everyone

can be infallible and omniscient and correct about everything, there's got to be room for a respectful disagreement. Trying to engineer language to make that impossible is a pernicious idea. Okay, that's pretty much it. Has it ever worked where an organization or someone from the top down imposed a certain word and then it became part of the dictionary because people had to use it? There certainly are changes. For example, the title Ms. as opposed to the former Ms. and Mrs. There was a campaign in the 1970s, it wasn't from any organization, but that Ms. and Mrs. should be dropped and they should be replaced by Ms.

I mean, that was for a particular political agenda, and it carried the day, partly because it did not, it actually increased the utility of language. There are a lot of times when I don't know if a woman is married or not, and I don't care, and I shouldn't be, the language shouldn't force me to decide. It kind of gets in the way of communication. Together, of course, with conveying the attitude that a woman's marital status is an essential part of her identity, but that is not true of men. And there have also been changes in words like Negro, which was a perfectly acceptable word in the 1960s. Martin Luther King referred to Negroes. We have the United Negro College Fund. That was replaced by Black, which has been partly superseded by African American.

And other terms for politically and emotionally charged concepts, like crippled, or people that we would now call disabled. And in between, they were handicapped. So there is that kind of, I've called it a euphemism treadmill, where one term replaces another. Again, there's no one who really legislates it. It is a grassroots phenomenon that catches on. There again, there is no particular harm to clarity of communication. If you call someone African American or you call them black, you're conveying the same concepts.

There's a change in attitude. So it is possible for terms to change, but those are ones where there was nothing particularly tendentious and nothing that particularly impeded communication or in fact impeded it at all. Okay. Thank you so much. communication or in fact repeated at all. Okay thank you so much I appreciate your time I appreciate something like 16 hour turnaround from when you received the request for this. My pleasure Curt and happy anniversary I hope you're going to celebrate well tonight. Thank you so much

any tips I know that you've been married for quite some time. I believe you've been married for a while. Yes. Too many times. More than once. But the, well, as a place to celebrate, I know this is incredibly touristy, but when I go to Toronto, I go up to the top of the CN Tower. It's not the best food in the world, and there are a lot of tourists there, but the view really is spectacular. I just meant marriage tips, not places to go in the world and a lot of tourists there but uh the view really is uh spectacular so that's why i just meant marriage tips not places to go for the anniversary event

oh well uh i don't know if i have anything else for now other than uh you know you're not going to get your way all the time uh the other person is not uh perfect and you and neither are you. That's one of the ground rules. But you've got to be a team that lots of people in life are going to oppose you, attack you, undermine you. But when you get home, you've got to have the solidarity and loyalty and support of your spouse, of course, working both ways. Okay. Thank you so much. That's it. Have a great day and a great weekend. Appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thank you.