TRIGGERnometry - Is This the Death of Harvard? - Steven Pinker

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author and Harvard College Professor. One of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind, he is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker has written many books for general audiences including The Blank Slate (2002), Enlightenment Now (2018) and his most recent, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters - is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WK3JNLT/ Check out more of Steven’s work: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000AQ3GGO/ SPONSOR: Qualia Senolytic. Go to Qualialife.com/TRIG for up to 50% off and use code TRIG at checkout for an additional 15% off.  Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's a bigger gesture with fresh, beautiful flowers arranged to make Mother's Day feel as special as she is. Make Mother's Day feel bigger with double blooms at 1-800flowers.com slash Spotify. That's 1-800flowers.com slash Spotify. We're talking about the decline of enlightenment values. I mean, what's going on? Unless they are championed, people will backslide toward authoritarianism and puritanism, and tribalism. So it would be a mistake to think that universities are just madrasas of hard left indoctrination.

There is that, and it really is a problem. Each campus has a small madras of woke indoctrination. But it's not the entire campus. It's not the entire campus. What we also seem to be talking about is a lack of backbone, to put it bluntly, within university leaders. Oh, unquestionably. Stephen Pinker, it's been a long time coming, the conversation. We're so delighted to have you on the show.

Francis and I, I used to be a stand-up comedian. He still is. Before that, I was a translator. So my entire life, to some extent like yours, has been spent obsessing about words. And it's an interesting time we live in where I feel like increasingly we don't even agree. on what words mean anymore. How did we get here? I'm not sure that it's worse.

I think there was never a time at which I would agree about what every word means. But clearly when you have polarization, political polarization and mutual demonization, people will warp pretty much all of their thought processes to whatever conclusion makes their side look good and the other side looks stupid and evil. I think that's a general phenomenon of human nature.

but it has increased with the negative polarization of the past few years. I guess what I'm getting at is I think, certainly in my lifetime, I don't remember a time when we disagreed about the meaning of the word violence, for example. I don't remember people saying the words of violence 20 years ago. And that seems like a pretty big leap to make. Maybe. I guess I'm always reluctant to compare now with 20 years ago, unless I actually see

quantitative or textual evidence just because I'm so sensitive having written books on friends in history documented by data, which often differ from people's impressions. But since there is a presentist bias, we tend to see the worst in what's happening now. I think the kids are today are no good,

but it was better when I was young. we are wired for nostalgia. So I guess I'd have to be more confident that there really wasn't changed before trying to explain the change. Stephen, there's such an interesting thing you said. We are wired for nostalgia. What does that mean? And what's the psychological basis for that state? Well, there's in general a negativity bias in all of human cognition and emotion.

There are many more words for negative emotions, for positive emotions. criticism tends to sting more than praise elevates. When it comes to memory of the past, it's not that we forget bad things that happen, but we tend to forget how bad they were at the time. We remember the events, but we don't remember the negative affect, whereas the current negative affect is highly salient and we can't get it out of our minds.

And there are other cognitive illusions that give rise to a kind of nostalgia. One of them is that we confuse changes in ourselves with changes in the times. So as our powers fade, our memory fades, we perhaps become more committed to the skills that we have and therefore distrustful of skills in a changing world. We tend to think that things have gotten worse as opposed to were less adapted to a changing world. I think part of it is as well, it's to do with youth, an opt-y-year-old. optimism, that when people were younger, they're naturally more optimistic, whereas people when they get older, are slightly more, shall we say, jaded as it was.

I'm not sure that that's a general phenomenon. And if anything, what we're seeing now is in a wave of almost fatalism among your I doubt of cohorts. They say they're not having children because they don't want to bring kids into a world that's going to where humans are going to go extinct by 2050 because of climate change. You have a younger journalist saying that we're living in a health scheme of inequality and policing when you're head inflation. I had said a great deal of pessimism in the employee cohorts today. You might be right that there's, in general, a generation effect, on top of which there may be a cohort effect,

mainly the current generation of young people has been a pessimistic. And it would also be a period effect, namely everyone is glum nowadays. And what do you put that down to the pessimism of the young? Some people have argued, I think, quite persuasively, that their actual material circumstances of their life are not as good as one would have expected if we believe in this idea that our children must always do better than us. Yeah.

Well, it is debatable because there is, in many ways, the wife of a young person is far richer than, say, 40 or 50 years ago when I could claim to being young, such as access to art and entertainment, such as the cost of travel, such as the cost of food, such as conveniences like the Internet, like streaming music, streaming cinema, on-demand. and more people get on planes that they used to. There are some things that have gotten more expensive over this period, mainly housing, medical care, and education. And, you know, admitted those are big things.

But it's not, and it's certainly not the case that the economic growth from, say, the silent generation to the boomer generation has been replicated in boomer, and Gen X and Gen X to millennial. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that standards have gotten worse. It just means they haven't as increased as steeply. And again, just throw out some other examples. Most people nowadays have air conditioning. When I was a kid, when I was a young adult, I didn't have air conditioning.

When I was a kid used to run through sprinkler to cool off during the summer. But, Stephen, you did live in Canada. So we didn't need it. We still don't have AC in the UK. Okay, no. Not in private. We see it as a work of the devil, you know? Yes.

Well, in the United States, it's pretty much equitous at all socioeconomic levels. Another example is, you know, long-distance telephone calls. That was an exorbitant distance. If a relative called, you'd yell, under the phone, it's long distance. Or if you want to call your girlfriend, then your rent money would evaporate as the pleasant minutes. Oh, I know. I was in a long-distance relationship with. my wife for years before the internet, basically. The internet barely existed. So I know we're

talking about. What you're listing, though, is a series of material factors. Well, talking to your girlfriend isn't a material factor. That's essential than happiness and fulfillment. Well, this is where I was going, because people talk about there being a crisis of meaning and a crisis of purpose. Do you recognize that as a thing that exists? We recognize that people say that. Yes. But I have argued, admittedly, not terribly successfully, that there are enormous opportunities for a medium-and-purpose, namely in improving human well-being on a global scale. That if we made people richer and healthier and longer lives and with better experiences and more knowledgeable, safer, less likely to get killed in wars and genocides and street crime,

What's so meaningless about that? What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? Oh, as an empiricism, just one thing on this. From an empirical perspective, if people are getting richer and safer and yet they feel more, like they're drifting more and they're more alienated and less connected to others, etc., which is the flip side of some of the technological progress that we're going through, wouldn't that be evidence for the fact that perhaps the human condition is incapable of simply, enjoying constant improvement and needs some kind of struggle and fight or whatever that might be?

Well, it is true that we tend to pocket our gains and forget and fail to appreciate them. Even if we do, it's still better than if a child doesn't die before the age of five, as it's compared to dying. And maybe when we recount our fortunes assess our station, we may not credit the fact that our kids to live instead of die, but it's still better. That is life is better than death, even if people sometimes fail to appreciate it. It's not clear that likewise,

if people struggle for a worthy cause, a noble crusade, a holy war, and they die in the millions, well, so much the worse for feeling that you're part of a holy crusade. We're better off with a little bit of, of enemy and arianation, but not disemboweled or beheaded or word to death. I mean, I agree with you on that, David. I'm going to be honest with you.

I don't think there's most to push back on that. But wouldn't you say as well that people need purpose in light? People need a purpose they need, they need something that they're driving towards. Yeah. And it seems with, and again, these are sweeping generalizations, but it seems that young people nowadays, they seem to lack this purpose, they seem to lack a drive, which is where a sense

of nihilism almost comes in. Do you detect that amongst the other, or am I being who is my language hyperbolic? Yes, I think that there's some of that, and I think many of them find meaning in what is I think misleadingly called anti-racism, social justice warfare,

critical social justice theory, wokeism, and so on, that does provide a life meaning and purpose. As John McWhorter put it, anti-racism is our flawed new religion. I think that there is a better source of meaning and purpose, and that is to improve the state of the country and improve the state of the world, to figure out how to mitigate climate change, figure out how to educate core kids more effectively,

figure out how to reduce the number of core kids compared to the number of middle class kids, both in the country and worldwide, to create new forms of cards, to deepen the search for knowledge, to know more about the past, to have more exciting scientific discoveries. There's no shortage of ways of making our lives more meaningful.

And I think part of the reason that people miss these opportunities is the narrative of decline and, that is all too easy to promote, partly because we've lost in our common education, an appreciation of progress, of the fact that, yeah, there's probably some racism now, but you just can't compare it to the era in which three African-Americans were lynched for week after week, year after year, for the era of the Jim Crow's out, say nothing of slavery. But yes, there are awful wars going on now, but they don't compare to the war in Vietnam.

or the Korean War, the Chinese Civil War, that there's street crime now and police shootings, but they were way worse of the 60s in the 70s, if you actually count them. Likewise, domestic terrorism, but not give a violent strife. The institutions that I think younger people tend to take for granted,

which were enormous achievements in human history, like liberal democracy, like the rule of law, like science, are like responsible journalism. It used to be that those were valorized in an education, that those were achievements that we could collectively feel out of. Now their flaws, and of course they have flaws, as does anything human, are so emphasized compared to their gifts

that we don't appreciate the very mechanisms that could allow us to, who are still further. And so you have people without not realizing that the project of human improvement, human progress, the enlightened ideals of knowledge and human well-being are,

they're just not a thing. It doesn't occur to people. Oh, maybe that's a good thing to live for. Maybe I don't have to root out ever more subtle forms of racism, but maybe I can figure out a way to teach reading more effectively or to mitigate climate change

without reversing economic growth. Because one of the most worrying aspects of all of this is people who see, let's see the West as, you know, racist, blah, blah, blah. We know what the tropes are. And it seems to me, it's like looking at a beautiful

house and just going, well, there's a crack here in this wall. And this wall needs redecorating. There's a bit of mold there. And you go, well, that's just life number one. But if number two, all you look at in your life are the things that you don't have, the things that you want, the things that you are lucky. I mean, that is a basic recipe to make yourself incredibly miserable, isn't it?

Oh, absolutely. No, I couldn't agree more, and that we, partly because journalism, by its very nature, is a, by reporting on events, gives you a non-random sample of what's happening in the world. It's easy to destroy something very quickly, for something bad to happen all of a sudden, good things aren't built in a day, and they tend to consist either in bad things that don't happen, the planes that don't crash, the wars that don't happen, the famines that don't happen, or things that pre-bop, that improve by a few percentage points a year, which then compounds, which can transform the world, but no one notices it if they, if their picture of the world comes from,

from journalism, which has to be driven by something that happened at 8 a.m. on Thursday morning. So the reduction in massive reduction of global poverty didn't happen on 8 on a Thursday morning. It happened by a few percentage points in year. And as well, a billion people escape extreme poverty and no one knows about it. Likewise, government is conspicuous when there are failures, but we don't tend to celebrate the peaceful transfer of power. It hasn't been happening for a while. We have to be careful. I'm joking.

I appreciate the jokes. The thing is if those jokes come too quickly, then people can mistake the jokes for the reality. The thing is we did have a peaceful transfer of a coward, ultimately, even in this country, even with that threat. And that is something to keep in mind and to savor. And, you know, I appreciate the wise practice, but as anyone.

I think we should have a sense of humor about everything. But if we're a deep, hook with them, If you don't realize, we should appreciate the fact that under a pretty severe stress test, the system did work. And likewise, in criminal trials, probably most guilty people are found guilty and most innocent people are acquitted. There are probably too many errors of each kind, but it's still better than mob justice and lynched mobs and healing judges. all of the accomplishments of liberal democracy are, I just, I mentioned, they're backgrounded. And so I couldn't really be with you more that if you focus only on the instances of corruption and breakdown and failures, then the attitude can be, well, let's just burn the whole system down

because anything that rises out of the ashes is about doing better than what we have now. And we know from some of those destructive violent revolutions that that could lead to major atrocities. Well, let me try again with the Dumaism narrative from a different perspective, because I really want to stress test what you were saying. Do you think that part of the reason that people in the West in particular are persuaded by some of these arguments is that, comparatively speaking, the West is clearly losing. power, comparative to other rising nations around the world, other blocks of nations. We see Western geopolitical dominance being challenged, whether that's in Ukraine, whether that's in Israel, whether that's in Taiwan, wherever. And so maybe the reason people are fearful of the future, some people who are fearful of the future, is that is not that they think the iPhones aren't fast

enough and the entertainment isn't good enough, but rather they feel that we are losing our top dog status or in the process of it. Yeah. I don't think that top dog status of the West is something to particularly value, particularly economically. So China has, what does it say, four times a population of the United States. Their GDP has to exceed hours if their GDP per capita is worth of a quarter of hours. So I don't think that it's a moral imperative that China be a quarter as prosperous as the United States. I think that it's good if they're as prosperous, which means I'll have four times the GDP. I think what's important is values such as peace and cooperation and knowledge and health and life.

The West has promoted some of the time, but the West has also been the source of a number of atrocities. I think it had defied the West, but we did have, you know, we did have, you know, Gatsyism and fascism, and communism didn't come out of the East and only came out of the West. So the thing to value is, no, I think. The East really took it and they did, they did take it too. I come from the Soviet, so I know. Does that count as, do we, do we don't count that as the West? Oh, I certainly would. You don't know, I would, no.

I guess what, but the thing is, the economic argument, if you, if you, you. you isolated like that, yes, but the argument that I think I would at least put to you is Russia and China are not advocating or promoting the values that you... Well, that is the point. And if they are economically more powerful, that means they're going to be militarily more powerful, which means that the values that Russia and China promotes are going to be the ones that get spread around the world. And isn't that something to be dumerish about? Well, fears fall off or to resist.

The concern and, and dumber show out. So, I think that's a vital distinction. Yeah, because problems are inevitable, and problems don't mean that we're doomed. It means that we can try to mitigate them, realizing that any solution will create new problems. But I think the mindset that if there's a problem, then we're doomed is itself. Well, let's take that back and talk about the concern about the decline of the system. So there is a, there's a, so it's a. So it's not the decline of the West, but it is the decline of enlightenment values that's discerning.

And the question is when, I think a few years ago it might have been plausible. It seems less plausible, but it still can come back. As China gets richer and concerned about getting richer still, it will not get involved in stupid wasteful wars, but just try to make its populace as rich as possible. To the extent that that's their aspiration, I think that would be a good thing. the fear is that that values such as national glory and egemony and dominance just to stoke the ego of an autocratic leader, if those become preeminent, that I think that that isn't the met. I wouldn't couch it as West versus the rest, because the West has done some nasty things too.

I think the West has been source of many humanistic and enlightenment values, but, you know, some have come out of the East as well. It's the values themselves that matter rather than being the predominant of the West. It does a connect to Steven, surely. Statistically, yeah, but they're not the same thing. What I'm saying is if the West is not top dog in the world, the values you care about so much will not be the predominant values of the world. Depends on which Western values, too. I mean, Donald Trump is up.

I suppose Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Well, I do, but they love each other. So there's a sense in which they are part of a promotion of nationalism, of populism, of investing power in a strong charismatic leader as opposed to the democratic process. So it's that idea it concerns me rather than let's make sure that the West predominates. That to the extent that the West is aligned with those values, then as a side effect, there would be better effect.

if the West were dominated. But the dominance itself, and you know, the West hasn't always dominating. We didn't do so well, didn't do so well in Vietnam, didn't do so well in Iraq and Afghanistan. So even the, again, going back to the dangers of nostalgia, the idea that there was an American-led liberal international quarter is a little bit rose glasses-ish, that be I think there is there was more of a rules-based international order but attributing it

to the hegemity of the United States I think maybe a misadribution. Let me just ask one question before you take over from us just to... The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At blinds.com we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly

what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five-star reviews to prove deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now, get up to 50% off with minimum purchase, plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. I'm stress testing what you're saying in the devil's advocate kind of way. It does sound to me a little bit like every time you bring up the fact that the West isn't perfect, you're sort of doing what the woke college students are doing in that they're saying, well, you know, why should we be

happy to live in this country when we've done this and this and in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were both wars I was against, by the way. I'm just saying, I don't think our imperfection are reason enough to not want to maintain the values that the West at its best holds. Yeah, well, I would completely agree with that. You'd agree with. Okay. It's the values that count. And indeed, it would be obtuse to deny that those values are way strong over the West, however you define the West, including gender equality and gay rights and democracy and just anything that we want to venerate as a value. If there's more of it in the United States than in Iran or in Russia or in China.

And so, hooray for us for championing those values. but it's the values rather than the kind of Western sovereignism. Us versus everybody else, got it, exactly. Stephen, we're talking about the decline of enlightened values, and we can see in a lot of academic institutions, particularly I believe that there does seem to be a decline in those values. Why is that? And, I mean, what's going on?

Yeah, there's, you know, I think the values are very unintuitive, and that there's a natural ax-living unless there's a constant effort to keep pushing the rock up the hill. But the Enlightenment ideals of objective knowledge about all intellectual questions, historical, scientific, existential, and so on, of the promoting institutions and values,

even if they sometimes go against your interests, It's the rules that count, not his top dog. At values like free speech ought to be preserved, even for people you disagree with. These are all historically, deeply weird ideas. I think they're excellent ideas. I think we should expect that unless they are championed, people will backslide toward authoritarianism and a puritanism around tribalism. And so we see that backsliding the university.

partly abetted by ideas that became trenched to the university that are all too consistent for these values, such as postmodernism, which says that when it comes to large question if there's no objective truth, there's only claims to power. You know, that's a very easy thought to entertain. That it also, I think there are a number of reasons why the universities were all too fertile ground for some of these illiberal ideas. Like, I like demonizing people for racism, sexism, based on almost hallucinatory infractions. One of them is that a lot of people in academia, I don't really have thought deeply about

the mission of the university and the conditions that are necessary for it to fulfill those missions, such as may we acquiring and transmitting knowledge. You've got a department chair who's a biochemist or an expert on the 19th century Spanish novel. And what we're all doing this for? Why we have universities? Why we should have academic freedom? I don't think they've lit a lot of thought to that.

They do, I think professors do have a conception that there are united racists out there. were superior to them. Our best should be to promote the values of our kind of people. Then you've got a younger generation coming in saying, well, we're even more against racism than you are. And the first reaction is great. Just like us, only were fervent and more committed. A big mistake, big misunderstanding,

because these new ideologies are not never, they're highly illiberal, but because their commonality is a common entity, the right, the less educated, the non-coastal, the guardians of academia gave way the keys, not just academia, but also non-profits and many journalistic institutions. Combined with the fact that part of the playbook of the, the kind of broken surgeons was to take, takeover institutions.

At the under the playbook of intellectuals like Marcusa, who said that I'd like the violent revolution of the proletariat that classical Marxism endorsed, if you have educated people warming their way into universities and nonprofits and scientific societies and newspapers and magazines, that would be the later revolutionists.

revolutionized society, and they have followed that playbook very successfully. I think there is a kind of generational warfare. I remember when you're while I was the own person, we hadn't accomplished anything. They didn't have any status or achievements. But one thing that we could claim is that we were more morally pure to our elders. You were against the Vietnam War, even more than they were. And so there's a natural, tendency, especially what is a perception of a generational honor. And to some extent, the perception is accurate. I think a lot of policies favor incumbent boomers over younger cul-vorts, such as

restrictions on building housing, the United States, the tax detectability of mortgage payments that make incumbent owners privilege compared to younger renters. So there really is an attempt to guard the wealth for the older generations and so there's some justifiable resentment in 900 generations. But instead of being directed at appropriate targets, like policies

that restrict the building and new housing, or universities being able to raise tuition at will by hiring layers of administrators and resisting technologies that might need the delivery of education more efficient. It's easier

to wage generational warfare by claiming meaning that the your elders are racist and trans folks, all the better if that deposes them from their positions, opening up coveted in professionalists' lives. Stephen, you said that, you know, these people who are in charge of the institutions, they may be, for instance, experts in the 19th century Spanish novel,

but they haven't thought that deeply about the role and the purpose of universities. Now, to me, I'm listening to that. Number one, I feel quiet. that angers me a little bit because I'm going, well, you don't understand your job. Well, yes, you think. But especially if it's not just any job, but a job that would seem to, you know,

pay you for intellectualization and analysis and understanding of explicit principles that justify what you do. But you'll find enough of that in academia, I think in part because it's so easily confused with a, a sense of moral and intellectual superiority over the, well, certainly over the unwashed masses, but also over rival elites, over business people and people in tech and people in finance

and people in government. There is, not to be too cynical, but academic and cultural elites do engage in status composition with rival elites. And so to denounce a lot of the world built by rival, O'Eleith can justify dedicating the present and being even or man to blame a stouture for the past. This has been noted for centuries. There is a poet from Thomas Favs

that competition of praise can findeth toward a reverence of antiquity where men contend with the living, not with the dead. And so that's a kind of a somewhat cynical explanation of why people tend to be nostalgic. To romanticize the past is a way of criticizing your current rivals. So that being the case, you've used the words, you know, these ideas have become entrenched.

And we've done, these are not your words, but other people have used them that the Academy is in crisis. Where do you see it? Is the Academy in crisis? And I guess the second question is, if it is in crisis, can it be safe? Yes, right. Well, you know, along... Yes to which other, that's true. I mean, there are crises which can be exaggerated in the sense that probably the majority of what goes on in a university is highly constructive. That is, there are molecular biologists in their labs, and there are scholars in libraries, and there are students writing vapors on the concept of free will

and sliding people into brain scanners to figure out how emotion is processed in the brain, and professors teaching kids about base theorem and statistical decision theory. So none of that generates headlines. So it would be a mistake to think that, universities are just madrasas of hard left indoctrination. There is that, and it really is a problem.

Each campus has a small madrasse of woke indoctrination. But it's not the entire county. It's not the entire campus. There are schools of dentistry, and I don't know how much social justice warfare there is, although maybe it's my own ignorance, because we do know that medical faculties have been subject to a lot of political her indoctrination. But anyway, so that's, so it's important to recognize the crisis, not to exaggerate the

crisis. Universities ought to be reformed. There is an idea that sometimes floated that we've just got to write them off and create startups, startup universities, the University of Austin, we're also college, Hillsdale College. I think it's good for there to be competition that the legacy universities not have a monopoly. A problem that I have with a lot of these startups is that they forget that to be an

educated person in the 21st century, you really do need to understand science. That it just won't do to study Milton and Keats and had Tocqueville and call yourself an educated a person. And science education is done by scientists who need labs. Labs are expensive. It may be equipment in space and buildings and an administrative structure of human subjects, bureaucrats and a grant administration bureaucrats, it's unlikely that we're going to replicate all of that infrastructure currently existing at hundreds of elite universities in small startups

and having a bunch of bright students and having them read 100 great books. I mean, there's some value in that, but that is, in my view, that doesn't lead to an educated person, even if the origin of species is one of those 100 books. Okay, so universities need to be reformed. But you haven't said whether they can be. I like to think of the eternal premise. I like that it can be. I mean, I'm doing my part by having co-founded and being a co-president

to counsel on academic freedom at Harvard. We do certainly have the ear of our pop administrators. We have been pushing back against accesses like requiring diversity statements of job applicants, like universities taking positions on the controversies of their day, therefore prejudicing the debates that take place on university campuses, like enforcing policies of nonviolence, not letting campuses be taken over by factions of militant students. I'm trying to push back against the diversity bureaucracy when their policies are implemented by stealth and never exposed to the light of day,

and advocating viewpoint diversity. That is, even though I probably couldn't have affirmative action for conservatives or quotas, but having there be some awareness with some soft pressure from visitative committees, from principal and deans, that the department should mix it up, is promoting these as ideals

and looking at mechanisms that might actually change things. I'm not getting a clear sense of confidence from you that it's going to be successful, are my misreading you here? It may not. I mean, we've just started, and I think there's been maybe because there is a sense of crisis, the pushback has just started. I think when people ask, what do I think will happen, have we passed in peak woke, as some people put it, the reason it's hard to tell is that they're two opposing forces,

and it's very hard to know which is stronger. On the one hand, once you call attention to the absurdities of being vulnerable forces on campus, the lecturer pushed out because you said that they're biologically their two senses. Transphoid. Exactly. The kind of self-evident silliness of a lot of social justice warfare. And it's called out their academic freedom is on the agenda, something that you can point to. Universities change some of their policies. Presidents are put on notice

that they can't just do the easy thing by acquiescing to the noisy protesters because now there'll be other voices yelling into the other year and not letting them take the easy way out. All of these will push back against these individual forces. On the other hand, pushing for them is the generational gradient. The younger, the cohort, the less committed they are to academic freedom, free speech, Obedo gary, viewpoint, diversity, and so on.

Now, will younger, that is in pause of students, and for that matter, lectures, assistant professors, associate professors, so on, the younger of the cohort, the less what do they are to protect the speech of controversial

professors to endure in use of violence to shut down a supposedly racist speaker and so on. Questions will they take those illiberal attitudes with them as they age or will they kind of see the light as they get older? Because people don't change their mind as much as people like to pretend. I think that is, unfortunately, I think that is true that sort of political attitudes tend to move with the cohorts rather than the outgrown. So on the other hand, it's not complete utter dominance. There are a lot of students

who are sick of being told what they can and can't say, recognize that there is an orthodox seed that sometimes puts them that could disadvantage, including when professors clean to exercise their academic freedom of a classroom by telling students what they can and can't say. That's a source of rebellion that we hope to tap. And I've encouraged students and Harvard to form their own association for academic freedom,

which they have done, students for academic freedom of Harvard, a kind of parallel organizations to our council on academic freedom of Harvard. And I hope they'll probably just make it cool to be in favor of free speech the way it was cool for the boomers in the 60s and 70s. And to, since in any cohort, there are the fanatical true believers

that probably cannot be convinced. They're the people who go with whatever is cool. They're the people who are, for principal reasons, are in favor of liberal open inquiry. And then there are people who just haven't really thought about one way or another. Explicit efforts to promote free thought, the moral values could kind of nibble away at the persuadables, at the ones who've just never

thought about it, even if they can't change the minds of the true believers, that might be unrealistic, but it isn't only true believers. And new babies are being born all the time and eventually turn 18, and their minds are, hopefully are over. And in Sousa, as well, I mean, one of my cousins, who's actually a scientist, he's a geneticist. No, he's not, sorry, virologist. He was at the University of Sussex and he was very progressive He was very well Pronons in the bio

pronouns tattooed on your chest All that nonsense And he was walking through the square at Sussex University And he came upon a group of people wearing balaclavas chanting stock out And saying all the other types

of horrendous things And he looked at them And he just went Oh you're not the good guys And that was and just a complete Volta Fascha as it were because he was just like

you know people who are nice and good and caring rarely turn up for a demonstration against a woman in a balaclava you know yeah so I think there's also there's also had seismic events which changed people's minds yes and that and that is a another front of which this

this effort has to be fought is just the chain of responsibility in a universe diversity. That if there are autonomous bureaucrats who can implement policies that no one ever gets to debate or evaluate that no one's responsible for or no one defends, that's a way in which oppression can creep in, the so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, bureaucracy, which I noticed a little bit like Voltaire's comment on the Holy Roman Empire, which is neither wholly nor roaming nor an empire. This is a bureaucracy that enforces uniformity of opinion,

differential in treatment of designated victim groups and exclusion of any other than disagrees. But a lot of their policies just get implemented by default or by stealth. No dean ever announced that that was the policy of the university. It just happens overnight. So university leaders, the vice-channis, what is, the presidents who are called on to justify policies, who may be held to account by the trustees,

the supervisors, the corporations, the fellows, whoever is their boss, and has their back when they stand up for defensible principles of academic freedom, fires them when they don't. And that could only happen if there's more transparency for how they operate. Those are all fronts, which this fight has to be waged as well.

Because it seems to me what we're talking about here is, look, there's lots of different factors, don't get me wrong. But what we also seem to be talking about is a lack of backbone, to put it bluntly, within university leaders. Oh, questionably. And that's why what are the roles of our council and academic freedom is that we speak into, when activists are yamering into one of you, of a under president, well, we'll ever do the other year.

And so they can't just take the easy way out of breaking the, that the noisy protesters go away. You know, we'll be a pain of the ass too. So that's it, yes. And I think you have exposed it. I think there is a problem, although the university raises a question being, it's the hiring of the university presidents,

I mean, vice chancellors and so on to select for legal people, or is that just the incentive structure that they face as soon as they occupy that chair? I think it's probably a lot of the latter, and so we've got to change what allows them to get ahead so that it's more closely aligned with the actual principles of the university who like to acquire and transmit knowledge.

Stephen, you're one of the most prominent supporters and promoters of alignment values. We've talked about that a little bit already, I've just spent a few weeks on tour with Jordan Peterson, and he asked me to join him as an agnostic to disagree as much as I could with the things that he's saying on stage. And I want to try and see if we can have a conversation about some of the things that he's saying, because I think for whatever reason, that conversation has become relevant, and I think it's not accidental. So his argument is, and I think I'm quoting him directly on stage, actually, at the first show that we did.

The Enlightenment was wrong. and there's a bunch of things that he would say about that but one of them would be that Nietzsche correctly predicted what would happen in the 20th century with the death of God who I think is fair to say was killed by the objective pursuit of truth that you so admire and practice and then the things that are happening in the 21st century are a further consequence of the same thing

and we've talked about dumerism already but we could also talk about the fact that all over the world, but mostly in the West, we're not reproducing the sufficient rate to replenish the population and so on and so forth. Do you, why is he wrong? Oh, well, let's begin at the beginning. Was light better before the Enlightenment,

and there were worse religion that killed people by the tens of millions, life expectancy was 30, land heretics were burned at a stake, when a third of children in the Donald them to see their fifth birthday, when there were routine forms of sadistic, corporal and capital punishment like disemboweling and breaking of the wheel.

I think that wasn't so great. I think he'd agree with that. I don't think he's saying technological progress and science are off. It's not just technological. progress. We could still break, yeah, there's more, but we could still break people on the wheel. We could still keep women out of positions requiring brain power and autonomy.

We could still execute homosexuals. We could still fight wars of religion. To blame the 20th century on, first of all, the death of God assumes that there was a God to kill it in the first place. Some death of God's highly misleading. It's a very niche way of putting it. But a secular understanding of morality, that it doesn't come

from scriptural commandments that tell you to stone adulteresses and to a gemicide against your enemies, but rather from universal human well-being, is a moral advance, and in fact it has led empirically to enter

ways of living. Today, it is the most secular countries that are the most pleasant places to live. World Western Europe, we have Commonwealth countries of New Zealand and Australia and Canada, and the most religious countries

are hell of us. God hasn't died in Afghanistan. I'd rather not live there. No, I accept that. So that moral framework, where does it come from? Which moral framework? The secular moral framework

that you prize. How do we know what's good and what's wrong? Oh, by... What's evil, maybe. By finding common ground with applying reason. Mainly, I don't want to be bird to death of a portrait or storm to death or kept, I think, urine or enslaved. I want to...

I'm not the only person on the planet. I have to live with other people. We have to have clothes that we live by. given that these are my interests, I can't deny them to you if I want you to take me seriously and if I want to come to an agreement with you on how we ought to live our lives. Namely, if you don't privilege your own interests, as soon as you acknowledge that our perspectives are interchangeable, then you have a basis for morality. You've caught in the cold rule.

You've caught the fail of ignorance. You've got the greatest put for the greatest number. you find universal making universalizing the maxim of your actions the different ways of formulae in it that will all come down to not privileging your interests over everyone else's

at the basis of democracy that all men are created equal and that was self-evident right to life liberty with assumed happiness in order to achieve those goals institutions have formed

they invite a consent of the governed so you can reason your way to a meaningful and a beneficial society, which you can't, if you are imposing the Old Testament morality, if you vest absolute power in a... Let's pause. So we've had a small technical issue, which is that woke

students have come in and turned out the lights off, as you can see. I mean, that isn't really what happened if you're watching. We just had some technical issues here. We were in the middle of debating the Enlightenment. I don't know exactly where we were. Do you remember? I don't remember the sentence in which we were cut off, but I do remember saying that we should not miss the era before the Enlightenment. That's when Lighten expectancy was 30,

and a third of babies died before childbirth, and heretics were burned alive, and criminal punishment consists of disembowelment. So we should not miss it. Moreover, the best places to be alive today are the least religious, such as northern and western Western Europe and the former Commonwealth countries, and the worst places are where religion is dominant. That's exactly right.

You were slagging off Afghanistan. That's basically what was going on. I'm six ton of ambivism now, so let's stop. How do you know it's only six to it? But I guess the question is, and maybe it's an unrelated question, I don't know, how do you explain the fact that much of the world is failing to reproduce? Hello. Women have more options, and so when they weigh the choice between staying home and

popping out and nursing babies as opposed to being out in the world and having a career and doing stuff, well, until they're childbirth. There's a strong negative correlation between fertility and women's empowerment. probably there's also more distractions in life that more people are scrolling their social media feeds instead of having sex. It's more expensive to bring up and raise a child. Contraception is more available.

So probably a lot of things are converging. But there's a strong demographic shift that as countries become more affluent, more educated, and more gender-ecalculative. their birth rates go down. And I suppose this brings us all the way back to the very beginning of our conversation about what people talk about when they talk about the crisis. I mean because you're a parent?

I'm not a parent, so I'm part of the culprit. Oh, I'm a culprice. I'm a problem. As a parent, this is a very annoying thing that parents always say, but as someone who recently became a parent, I can tell you. Mazel Tov. Thank you very much. It is something that changes the way you see the world,

and it is something that gives meaning and purpose. Do you think that it's possible that the technological progress that we are so excited about, including the contraceptive pill and all sorts of other things, Louis Perry's book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, details much of this. The crisis of meaning and purpose that people at least talk about, whether you're accepted or not,

partly because we know that the reproduction of issues caused not by women having fewer children, but by fewer women becoming mothers. So we have a society in which fewer men and fewer women are becoming parents, and therefore that source of meaning and purpose that was readily available to all our ancestors is no longer there. Yeah, I think that is certainly part of the lowliness epidemic. Why, when they're more means of connecting with people than ever, are more people lowly,

and it's because they have fewer relatives. They have fewer siblings. They have fewer aunts and uncles. They have fewer nieces and nephews. I think in past generations lowliness was the problem. It was busybody relatives. You don't talk about you much about your life and not not believe you alone. But yeah, I think it's probably, I think there's also in Gen Z there is a certain little dread about bringing children into the world

and under the fear that will all go extinct by 2050 because of runaway climate change. Not unlike the fear that the boomers had that they shouldn't bring children in the world because of inevitable there'll be a nuclear Armageddon, where the Soviets and Americans fight it out with ICBMs. And I think that is unfortunate, because I agree that even not having children of my own, but having grandchildren, having nieces and nephews, that perpetuating life is one of the things that gives life's meaning, and it is a tragedy if people are deprived of that. Although you can still find meeting and purpose with one or two children as opposed to five or six. So it needn't be that everyone have the brutes that characterize the baby boomers generation or the 19th century.

Oh, but this is what I'm saying. Women aren't having fewer kids. Well, they must be having fewer children, too. You don't have, they're far fewer bruns of three or four kids than they were in the past. No. On average, from what I understand, maybe I'm wrong, is the decline in reproduction is true. driven almost exclusively by fewer women becoming mothers. I mean, that would imply that the ones who are having three, are having the, the 2.3 children of the 50s, and that seems unlikely, but nonetheless, I'm not disputing the fact that there are more women not having any children,

which can lead to even deeper tragedies down the line as they age and don't have the children who will take care of them or pick them up when they fall or make arrangements for them to go into assisted living or all the things that people do for their parents or even call them up every day to see how they're doing. And actually do worry about that among my peers, the women who did not have children who could be facing a very lowly and miserable old age. Stephen, it's been an absolute precious. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Yes, and for putting up with the technical difficulties. the final question that we end all of our interviews is always the same.

It's what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? One thing. It's the kind of question that if I had it in advance, I probably could have come up with something clever, but on the spot, what is the one thing? In fairness, we did tell him about a two hours ago. Yeah, exactly. And exactly.

So you're taking away my excuse. That's right. We've got to go off-piece. just say something. That we're not even talking about. I would say about enough. I would say a new generation of nuclear power as a solution to the climate crisis. The reason being that there is something.

Talk about that. Oliver Stone had a feature film called Nuclear Now, which as far as I know, no one is seen, even though it was an Oliver Stone film. And he's one of a few. But if you do the math, there's no way that we're going to get out of these. climate crisis without a massive expansion of carbon-free energy, of which reliable 24-7 carbon-free energy,

of which nuclear is the only conceivable source. But there isn't enough talk in any of the circles of people concerned about climate change about how to provide the needs not only of our society, if we try to reduce the amount of combustion of fossil fuels, but the growth both in Indonesia and China and India and Bangladesh and Africa. The increased demand, if for nothing else, for mining Bitcoin and training the AI models. But human appetite for energy is insatiable. It ought to be because energy is the only way we can push back against entropy,

the force that makes everything one downhill and can fall apart. So it's part of human betterment that we have a lot of energy to capture. would it need more? If we have to do with less from burning fossil fuels, we'll have to discover new sources of which nuclear is the only plausible. Stephen Pinkard. Thank you very much.

Head on over to locals right now where we will ask Stephen your questions. As someone has added the importance of data and rational argument, has Stephen been convinced to change his mind on any hotly debated issues.