A New Chill in the Classroom | GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution

[Music] it's tuesday april the 20th and you're watching good fellows a hoover institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns in this time of pandemic i'm bill whelan i'm the virginia hobbs carpenter fellow in journalism here at the hoover institution and i'll be the moderator of today's show which means that i have the privilege of introducing the stars of our show three hoover institutions senior fellows we jokingly refer to as the good fellows we begin with john cochran john's a distinguished economist and he is the hoover institutions rosemary and jack anderson senior fellow hello john hi everybody our second good fellow lieutenant general h.r mcmaster he's a former presidential national security adviser as well as the hoover institutions fouad and michelle ajami senior fellow hello hr bill great to see you and our third good fellow historian and author neil ferguson the hoover institutions milbank family senior fellow neil's next book doom the politics of catastrophe comes out on may the 4th we're going to do a special episode of goodfellas devoted to that so save yourself the trouble of buying it now before it sells out on may the 4th hello neil and ablated happy birthday i hope you partied like it was 2019. well i i just uh was on the phone to my uh older kids who are in the uk whom i haven't seen for over a year now and the reason i was a little late for this session was that they were wishing me a belated happy birthday so yeah it's uh i'm not going to reveal my advanced age because i don't like to dwell on that but yes we're doomed we are doomed as of may the 4th and i know that our guests will will be inclined to disagree with that view yes and our guest today is none other than stephen pinker who has the good sense to join us from cape cod stephen pinker is the john stone family professor in the department of psychology at harvard university where he conducts research on language cognition and social relations dr pinker is the author of no less than 12 books his latest bestseller enlightenment now the case for reasons science humanism and progress argues that science and reason have helped humanity achieve enormous moral and material progress which will continue only so long as mankind doesn't give in to despair and tribal conflict bill gates calls enlightenment now his quote favorite book of all time not that we're bill gates favorite broadcast of all time stephen pinker but welcome to good fellows thanks so much thanks for having me okay a warning in advance dr pinker uh if it's optimism that you come to preach you may be outnumbered on this panel one of our good fellows is our resident optimist the other two uh kind of vary between grumpy and skeptical i'll let you figure out which is which but i'd like to begin the show by asking you this question sir i read a piece in the harvard crimson recently the headline an endangered species the scarcity of harvard's conservative faculty this was an account of the paper's annual survey of the faculty of arts and sciences they interview 236 faculty members asking them for their ideology 183 reported back as liberal to some degree seven identified as conservative to some degree or about three percent we repeat those numbers 236 faculty members at harvard 183 liberals seven conservatives let me ask you this question stephen pinker why would i be optimistic if i'm reporting to work every day in a place where i'm outnumbered ideologically intellectually 26 to one yes a couple of things first of all it's a misunderstanding of my book enlightenment now and better angels of our nature on the decline of violence but these are briefs for optimism i don't use the word optimism in the title of either one i'm just calling attention to data that most people are completely unaware of namely that rates of violence have on average come down now we can what that means for the future can be debated but it is a fact that most people are unaware of simply because they base their understanding of the world on headlines rather than on data they'll always be enough headlines to uh make it seem as if the world is falling apart if that's how you base your view of the world it might be out of whack with reality the data television story but going back to so so it's not a brief optimism it's brief for uh what hans rosen calls factfulness namely your assessment of how far we've come should just be based on the uh the trends and not the anecdotes or incidents but i i agree that actually it is a problem for academia that there is a there's decreasing viewpoint diversity there is uh if you want to be even more pessimistic if you look at the age profile of conservatives they will probably include my colleague harvey mansfield who is a non-engineering a number of other conservatives like weiss have uh retired and uh and there's just no question that this at least within the the the uh the microcosm of the university this is cause for concern as um the harvey silverclay the civil libertarian uh points out in a uh modern university diversity means people who look different but think alike and i i agree this is not a good thing i'm a member of heterodox academy which is designed to promote a diversity of viewpoints in the university world just note that this is a an asset it's a virtue the more we disagree the greater the chance that one of us might be right i think the phenomenon to go a step deeper is too bad the survey didn't ask for more the very young are the very woke the progressives the sort of middle-aged woodstock and generation liberals it would have been interesting to see that transition and not so much the transition of political viewpoint uh as the increasing amount of intolerance from from one side of the political viewpoint uh indeed there is no we should avoid stereotyping an entire generation or in fact any generation since uh we baby boomers uh uh got the whole thing started as i like to say billy joel was wrong we did start the fire and i do remember back from when i was an undergraduate a uh a student activist yelling over a megaphone fascists do not have the right to speak i reproduce a poster from a talk given by my colleague e.o wilson that advised students to bring noisemakers and this is these were before the millennials were born and so the seeds were planted by the baby boomers and indeed it's the baby boomers who are now the deans and the provosts and the senior bureaucrats who are indulging this uh clapping down on free speech conversely there i have been impressed listening to a number of my students and how they resent being told to shut up by their peers and there is a a fair groundswell toward free speech and viewpoint diversity in generation z although it is true that statistically there is greater intolerance in younger cohorts than older ones and that is not a good sign for the future i agree that sounds like one of the very few trends that hasn't been going in a good direction i wanted to kind of tease out a little bit more what you think has happened because it's true that there was the seeds were planted by the baby boomers on the other hand if you could take a time machine and go back to the late 60s or early 70s harvard i sense that the atmosphere would be very different from from harvard or any of the other major universities today now you you must be coming up for 20 years uh in your harvard position i remember when we were colleagues i think the proportion or the number of conservatives declined about 10 when i left but it was changing it was changing steve i remember that last year i taught which must have been 2015 2016 a new chill in the classroom and it was a strange kind of thing one sense that people felt inhibited in discussion the students felt inhibited by one another as much as by anything that the professor might think and that was new to me uh and it contrasted markedly with what i had encountered when i had first been teaching at harvard which must have been 2000 2004 or 2006 or thereabouts so what happened do you think and have you noticed that that same relatively recent change i mean this is what the heterodox academy folks like john hate think that something quite recently has changed that distinguishes generation z's experience from the baby boomers in the late 60s well the the change has been most dramatic since last june uh if and you can quantify it the foundation for individual rights and education which i i'm an advisor tracks the number of cases brought to their attention of professors or students whose rights to free speech have been infringed upon and they noticed a big spike in the kind of great awokening following the uh george floyd murder last uh late last spring but it had been getting worse before then and of course it isn't just universities it's the it's it's the new york times it's uh cnn it's a lot of corporations it's it probably got a big push from currents that were in the universities back when we were students the critical theory of the frankfurt school which kind of justified intellectual repression as a part of uh as a driver of of progress but it uh it i don't know if a historic good historian of ideas has yet traced how this very strange takeover gathered momentum and and uh and acquired its current hegemony whether it's that uh contra the statement attributed to henry kissinger that academic battles are fierce because so little is at stake perhaps a lot is at stake because the elites are populated by graduates of universities often by graduates of the liberal arts programs where they're the ones who instead of going into business or the military or technology they tend to achieve positions institutional power they seek them and maybe they carry with them some of the academic doctrines that seemed rather richer 30 or 40 years ago but have have become the uh our intellectual currency um now so it could be that flow of intellectual influence from universities which we may have underestimated there could be demographic trends where because the country has been self-segregating into urban and coastal uh enclaves and leaving behind a more conservative um uh heartland that more and more there's more and more homophily people are rubbing shoulders with people just like them and that has increased polarization on both sides but i can't claim to understand it but it is a major phenomenon and i i really would like to understand it it's a good thing we have a psychologist or with us because it seems like from an outsider's that's what i wanted an interview about you about there isn't it it's a good it's a good thing if he's if he doesn't start analyzing us there is a social psychology element here oh absolutely yeah rather than then analyze it as an intellectual movement where you'd have to take it it's you referred to this in an earlier discussion we have as as a tribal movement almost religious where you stand up and say clearly ridiculous things in order to signal your membership in the tribe and that helps this tribe to take over the institutions of civil society you mentioned many i would add non-profits government agencies the alphabet soup of uh international agencies which which now yes it turned from climate to uh to racial theories last june and and it'll probably move on but help us to think that you know from what you know of a social psychological phenomenon or neil neil brought us to during during the great uh plagues there were sort of religious uh movements that that sounded very similar and also had a similar thing of um we're going to go out and and get rid of the heathen and the unbelievers and as well so does that does your psychology training give you some insights onto this movement uh viewed as such not not so much as an intellectual yeah um there is a uh what we've come to value as enlightenment liberal ideals due process democracy freedom of speech viewpoint diversity are deeply unintuitive we naturally fall back on tribalism on sectarianism on um what the the general family of bias is sometimes called the my side bias kind of self-explanatory where you assume that people in your tribe have the truth and that others are stupid or evil or both and to be reminded well yeah everyone has always thought that they're right and that that's why we have mechanisms of open deliberation and free speech and due process it's kind of a lesson that every generation has to be learned and uh and to to clamp down on these tendencies toward tribalism toward puritanism namely to to uh value ideological purity as a virtue and to consider disagreement to be a form of heresy authoritarianism to assume that uh there are authorities with a a vision of the truth who we ought to to follow all of these are what our modern institutions uh kind of learned are not very good ways of running human affairs at least the scale of a whole society but we really do have to relearn them and we have been kind of remiss at uh repressing these more primitive sides of our uh social nature hr h.r you come from three and a half decades of public service wearing a uniform or working in the white house how do you make sense of campus life well i'd like to ask stephen about about uh an aspect of it involving identity politics and stephen i really like the the way that you've pointed out that that identity politics is you know is really a form of bigotry because it assumes that everyone's views conform to their identity category so i'd like to tell you that you know as a as a bald washed up general i'll speak for my you know for my identity group and just i'd really be interested to know if you beg are you beginning to see a backlash against us can you start helping us think about about the future of campus life i don't i don't think students are naturally predisposed toward wanting to be fed a certain orthodoxy or toward wanting to be categorized under the belief that you know that uh that their their character is determined that their ability is determined by identity category did do you see do you see uh an optimistic uh do you have an optimistic view of the future on cam of campus life and and uh and what are your indicators uh that you see that there's a nascent backlash not just campus life but life in civil society in america which is the the larger yeah um there is pushback to i'm not sure i'm ready to call it optimism yet but it is not steamrollering over everything unopposed i think one of the reasons that it has taken over so quickly is that the people who do hold positions of responsibility have just never themselves given any thought to why we have principles like like fruit speech and due process they've grown up with it it's the air they breathe and then the first time they get challenged by a woke mob saying if you don't do what we say we're going to call you uh you're racist or transphobic they immediately fold because they're kind of defenseless they've never really thought through why we have uh principles like empirical testability of social hypotheses and and and and all the rest and so they take the path of least resistance they want to make the pain go away it often costs them very little if anything to capitulate to the demands of of the uh the woke monks and they just aren't equipped with the arguments as to why you know if you call for due process you shouldn't be cancelled now there and and in order to push back so that a provost say doesn't simply have pressure coming from a woke mob but has pressure coming from another direction so at least he or she has to give it some thought and maybe go back to the principles of why it's okay for people to disagree in public there are uh at least five organizations three of them formed just in the last couple of months there's counterweight in the from the uk there's uh fair i believe you have barry weiss on the show and she's one of the the co-founders there's the academic freedom alliance in addition in the uk there's the free speech union before that there was a fire which has kind of the legal muscle to use the first amendment or university's own free speech policies to push back in the legal arena there's heterodox academy so with at least six organizations it would be premature to say that they're going to roll back the tide but at least there's something pushing in the other direction and that could be critical for these um people call the university administers administrators spineless and they they are but i think they're also um innocent uh they have are have not been exposed to the decades of jurisprudence on uh what is protected speech why it should be protected why free speech was essential for anti-war movements for the abolitionist movement why it's a really good thing that we're committed to free speech that's all forgotten and so they are worried about getting accused of racist they'll say i'll do whatever i can so that i'm not accused of being a racist and have no idea as to why that capitulation can compromise something that's truly important steve let me come at this as the historian it seems to me that uh in your recent books that have focused on the material improvements in life which as you rightly say uh most people underestimate there's a kind of puzzle that that we should try to examine could it be that these unhealthy trends in the direction of illiberalism uh this uh strange revulsion against free speech that in fact this trend has its roots in precisely the material improvements that you document uh in enlightenment now and in the better angels of our nature could we think of this and it may be that this argument relates to the john hates greg lukianov argument that the generation that has come into this extraordinary comfortable world with significantly reduced risk of of war homicide etc it is a fragile generation i i i wasn't wholly persuaded by the coddling of the american mind which argues that there's a kind of generational problem that can be attributed to parenting strategies i wasn't wholly persuaded of this i think i prefer the notion that if you grow up in a world of extreme comfort by historical standards with all your rights entirely guaranteed to the point that you take them for granted you're actually liable to the totalitarian temptation to police speech and and cast these and cast these benefits aside not understanding what they're worth would that be a plausible hypothesis based on on your work actually uh yeah and i as much as i admire john height i think he's brilliant and greg lukayanov i think he's also brilliant and courageous aichi wasn't exactly persuaded by by that hypothesis i think there's a uh because when there's an attack by the social justice warriors they don't seem like wounded snow you know wounded war wounded victims they don't act like snowflakes they are uh highly aggressive and i think what we have instead is a what the sociologist jason manning and bradley campbell call a culture of victimhood where the victimhood it doesn't really weaken them or wound them uh but it is a pretext for them to uh assert power camel and manning suggests that historically there's been a transition from a culture of honor the kind of manly virtue that consists of retaliating against any affront or insult and then you know you i see just uh about an hour ago you wrote about that in the uh the the scottish uh temperament would put the corleones to shame and the culture of honor yeah my enemies should take note but i i wrote about in the better angels about the transition in many western societies to a culture of dignity and this is a long and slow process from the middle ages where to achieve a manly status you no longer would lash out if you're insulted but quite the contrary you show the ability to master to control your emotions to respond with dignity rather than uh with anger what campbell manning suggests is that we're seeing the emergence of a third culture the culture of victimhood where your claim to status and eminence comes from being a victim and that this is enabled by an entire bureaucracy particularly within the universities that parlays claims of victimhood into uh uh into power advantages namely the dean for equity and inclusion can stomp on whoever you don't like if you accuse them of having victimized you and you cat and you categorize people into victims or oppressors i think stephen i mean i i i think about this problem as as really supplanting heroism with victimhood and of course what that does is it it undervalues the degree to which we do have agency what i like about your work is that you you reinforce the the idea that we can work together to build a better future for generations to come we do have agency and what i see today is this sort of interaction that you know are describing between identity politics on one extreme and various forms of bigotry and racism on the other side they draw strength from each other and create these centripetal forces that are spinning us apart from one another would you agree with that assessment and what can be done to reinforce as you do in your writing are common humanity and bring people back together for meaningful respectful discussions and a restoration of empathy which you argue for as well yeah no i think i i think that's right and there is going back to kind of the intellectual roots of the great awokening a lot of it does come from a very different vision than what i loosely consider to be ideals of the enlightenment namely problems are inevitable but human ingenuity deployed in the service of solving problems can eke out increments of progress solutions create new problems so it's a constant process but we can solve problems if we um [Music] decide to focus our energies that way the view from of of of wokeness inherited from the critical theory of the frankfurt school of marcusa and adorno and horkheimer is a kind of descendant of marxism that says history is a struggle it's not solving problems it's a zero-sum competition uh the in contrast to classical marxism whereas all about economic classes now they are races or or sexual identities or genders and that progress consists of resting power from one group uh and and uh handing it to the other but that there can't be overall improvement there could just be reallocation and the tearing down of these power structures is is i think starting in the 60s and wokeness is is too narrow this we go back to the 30s to the marxists where it was many of the same phenomena we saw and also a claim of victimhood of the workers at the expense of the capitalists is is the excuse to seize power by any means look internationally uh a lot of um a lot of the things going wrong in the islamic world come from a sense of we're the victims and therefore we have to blow things up but i i want to go go back to the the whole progress question because i think we're taking for granted that all of our listeners have read all of your books and um i want to give you a little bit of a chance to advertise but also to ask it as a question um i'll summarize you know as an economist i see it it is a fact that we live in the most prosperous society ever um in economics people look back to the 1950s as a wonderful glorious age sorry the average american is at least five and probably more like seven times better off than they were in the 1950s health has gotten better rates of violence have gone i mean except for some parts of the inner city um uh in you know rates of violence have gone from and down around the world you know war just doesn't come as often as it used to uh life is longer the environment is better we live in this in this wonderful world and yet there's this paradox that our politics demands constant crisis our politics seems to demand a a narrative of everything is falling apart i was amused for example our new president announced that um we are in the middle of three crises the climate crisis the racial crisis and the pandemic crisis i don't think any of them counts as a crisis in actual crisis the third is a public health challenge of uh by historical standards minor order but we seem to need this our politics seems to want this narrative everything is not just in danger we're conservative so everything's in danger of going to hell in the handbasket but uh but a uh a narrative of everything actually has gone to hell in a hand basket the climate is actually today burning uh our our racial situations far rather than being better than at any time in our history is actually you know worse than it was when when when actual slaves were coming off ships and chains so so as having you you can say more on how wonderful things are but also on this interesting paradox between the facts and and the necessary political narrative um so yes by by by most indicators we really are uh better off there are some where we're worse off i mean i would say that uh greenhouse gas emissions are a real problem the pandemic unquestionably was a problem although thanks to science we are going to eliminate it with a fraction of the death toll of previous pandemics and pandemics are just a fact of of not only of human life they're just a fact of life uh you know we're big yummy hunks of meat from the point of view of adjournment it's natural that they would evolve to you know naught us from the inside we always had the defense of our immune system now we have another defense of uh human-made vaccines and we're going to vanquish this a lot uh quicker than say the uh the spanish flu but there's no question that the pandemic was a true um you know statistically as opposed to anecdotally driven it was you know unquestionably a uh a threat it um you know 350 000 extra deaths in a year absolutely i don't mean to minimize that but there is a narrative but compared to the black death the spanish flu the regular deaths every summer uh you know we did this was small but the larger case there's this there's this nostalgia for everything was wonderful in the past and it's falling apart which is so completely at odds with the facts well yes the best and they say the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory and uh so why is there such a discrepancy between the uh the facts of progress in people's perception one reason is uh the one that i alluded to at the beginning namely that because news is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that happen in the world in any given day partly because um most events are um are are for the worse anything that happens suddenly is probably uh damage no i don't want to fight with you those are choices the news could be written uh you know new vaccine and that you read popular mechanics or science today or whatever there's there's nothing but good news there's a choice to go look for bad news there's a and that's i'm i was hoping you'd put your psychologist hat on yeah tell us why we choose this to who's well i may be putting an economist out to whose use is it to choose this narrative well yeah so i i was going to get i i i don't disagree with what you said on top of this negativity bias there is just a natural bias in recording events rather than trends uh good things don't happen in a day that creep up a few percentage points a year and they compound as max rosa put it also an economist the headlines the papers could have had the headline 137 000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday every day for the last 30 years but they never ran that headline and so a billion and a quarter people escape from extreme poverty no one knows about it so that's a that's a built-in bias that's just inherent in news and i've often thought that if if news outlets were responsible they would take a page from the the sports and business pages and they would run continuous like a dashboard continually updated data on things like crime rate and greenhouse gas emissions and extreme poverty war deaths and so we would see how the needle moves and in particular to see what our policies did to it um but on top of that natural bias i i i do agree that there is a tendency to accentuate the negative partly there is a negativity bias in human psychology in general uh daniel kahneman and amos tversky called it the uh called a loss aversion we're much more sensitive to decrements in our fortune than to equal size increments uh but there's also but as you know it's not that every outlet has it because popular mechanics does have a presumably by design a more popular spin i think you also see in kind of intellectual elites a tendency toward negativity because it's not generally it's not them it's not they who are responsible for the improvements uh they it's it's not professors of sociology who get clean water through the pipes or develop the vaccines or the or the successful police forces or even the the uh the peace treaties and so there's a kind of inter-elite jealousy and and rivalry as to who deserves credit for what goes right and since the intellectuals can't claim themselves can't claim credit the whole world is making choices without consulting them for at least a century maybe 150 years there's been a very strong uh tendency toward decline among intellectual elites uh arthur herman has a book called the the uh idea of decline in western civilization we documents starting with with uh nietzsche and heidegger and sartre and all of the all-stars of the intellectual firmament uh tend to be um uh highly pessimistic the world is coming has been coming to an end for a very long time and me i see neil is frowning because i know that they're uh i i just learned that your next book is called doom well i'm also also going to say stephen you may have you may explain some of the dynamics on good fellows as well you know i'm i'm i'm the optimist and i'm i am i'm of the academy i guess now but have not been across across my career and i'm the one who tends to be on the optimist side of our discussions let me pose a question i'm sorry neil um i've i've not known you as long as neil stephen uh or john um i admire you work as does hr uh you seem to make perfect sense lord knows you have good taste being in cape cod instead of cambridge um so the question stephen is when i see the chronicle of higher education with the headline why do people love to hate stephen pinker why would anybody want to hate you yeah i'm a mild-mannered canadian i don't know why it's because he has such good hair i think maybe maybe there's a little bit of jealousy in that but i think this is a good this is a good chance to segue into why you came under attack and you survived your attack so maybe there's a there's a tale on how to write out these sort of things stephen yeah certainly yeah i i certainly didn't apologize i had this was i think in reference to a petition that circulated last summer by a number of um junior linguists asking the linguistic society of america receiving my fellow status which the uh association did not accept based based on some tweets uh in which i cited some data on police shootings and on uh rampage killings various other uh heresies and and uh and sins uh the um yeah i i don't consider i'm certainly not a flamethrower i don't court uh controversy i don't um i i manage my controversy portfolio carefully i don't pay a pine on every view that i that i have but nonetheless it doesn't take much to be an academic heretic today simply because there is i think there is a congealing orthodoxy and just to take the view of a kind of what i think of as an open-minded social scientist what's the evidence for for this position uh do we get to challenge it can can uh identify you as a uh a contrarian if not if not a heretic um i i like to say that uh academia is at the the left pole the uh hypothetical location from which all directions are right uh just as like when you're at the north pole all directions are south academia has uh has staked out the uh the left pole so what is your advice when someone if you're an academic and you see the lit torches coming your way what do you do well i don't i don't know how well this advice will uh can be exported but certainly to stand your ground to to do what academics ought to do and then we state your strongest possible case now that won't always work because there are irrational forces towards sectarianism and tribalism but at least for the sector that uh has just never even thought about the issues before and most people haven't thought about most issues they can inherit a set of values need not be aware of the history of ideas behind them and sometimes it can just be uh eye opening to be reminded of the you know why why we have to look at data why we can't just ratify a consensus why we have to have diverse viewpoints and just to continually make that uh is not guaranteed protection but it will work with some people i think one of the stories of the last couple of years is that previously the council mob came for conservatives but now it comes for liberals and i consider it a liberal favorite story of the week for me so far was the american humanist association canceling richard dawkins withdrawing the 1996 humanist of the year award and it strikes me that there's an almost monty python-esque quality about the american humanist association pronouncing richard dawkins a heretic for a tweet that he wrote in which he questioned whether you could change your race as easily as you could change your your gender so let's think a little bit about what that means gk chesterton a great conservative thinker said the problem with atheism is not that men believe in nothing it's that they'll believe in anything and i wonder if part of the the problem for a scholar like you steve is that that liberalism turns out to be a rather fragile center ground to hold at the moment uh and and in a way that the struggle heterodox academy has is to try to kind of hold this this center ground when there really is no ground to the right anymore because there is more or less an extinction event for conservative academia and everything is to the left of you so i wonder if you're still going to be a liberal i don't know 10 years from now at some point i think you liberals have to accept that the conservatives may have had a point about liberalism that it's fundamentally self-liquidating as an ideology well this is one of the reasons that one of the reasons i wrote enlightenment now is to kind of lay out a coherent a coherent agenda for um liberalism in the small l sense in the classic liberalism sense that is it can't just be well we we hate conservatives um it's uh the the positive agenda has to be as humans as living things were subject to all kinds of uh insults from the cosmos from [Music] entropy disease organisms overall decay we are a cognitive species we can figure out how the world works to the extent we commit ourselves to human improvement to making giving people longer and happier and healthier and more prosperous lives and um uh using our collective ingenuity to solve problems marginally marginalizing uh the darker sides of human nature like tribalism and magical thinking then we we can gradually succeed the data on progress being uh evidence and therefore there's something that we should you know live for and work for and fight for namely the the project of the enlightenment improving human welfare and the conservative critique of the enlightenment i mean thinking here of someone like thomas carlisle was that if all you are offering people in in a secular society is is material betterment don't be surprised if they turn against you remember in crime and punishment raskolnikov's dream in which the world goes absolutely mad and in his nightmare everybody believes that they have the truth and they all fall upon one another and terrible violence ensues i remember when i first read that thinking oh god what an extraordinary prophetic vision of where europe would ultimately go where russia in particular would go um so i guess if i asked myself the question when did i kind of shift from from being a classical liberal in the way that i think you are to being conservative was the realization that ultimately if you give people material progress as we've given young americans on an unprecedented scale they will thank you by becoming totalitarians because you've not given them anything to believe in you've only given them uh material improvement and condescension towards the past you've told them uh you you are actually superior morally superior to people in the past and all the values that they held dear and i guess that the conclusion that i've come to is that it's not a sustainable position that of the secular liberal what you end up doing is just paving the way uh paving the way to the bolsheviks or the red guards or some other uh revolutionary movement that destroys all that you've tried to to build i would build on that by saying i think we're making a mistake here by treating this as an intellectual movement as opposed to a political movement i mean what we face is a political slash religious movement that gives people meaning uh much like the bolsheviks did and whose nobody ever seized power by saying you know what gdp grew another percent this year just like it has the last 150 years that's why you have to paint a story of imminent decline in crisis that's your trouble with facts there is a you you said this so brilliantly last time i'll say it again that there's this political thing by which you people are forced to stand up and say ridiculous things to signal that they are part part of the mob well when you stand up and say here are the facts on the sources of the death rates of young african-american men by various sources that set of facts directly contradicts an important narrative that people must stand up and say to be part of the club most recently a hilarious one happened this morning the city of east palo alto which is sort of the poor partner of the bay here is discussing its various problems um guess what the top problem according to the worthies is for the city of east palo alto let's see crime horrible schools poor infrastructure no jobs nope the disparate impact of climate change coming to the city of east palo alto right now well if you actually if you if you say facts in an intellectual way you're just running counter to this this narrative of deliberately fake ridiculous things that one must stand up and say to be part of a political movement so it's really that the political movement invading universities which one might have hoped or at some point as a space of intellectual life and invading the intellectual life of the country the civil society that used to be where we had an intellectual life of the country i think you're underestimating the sense of it being political as opposed to simply intellectual choices here no well i i agree that there that it is a political movement um yeah i mean in response to neil it's you know a lot of the improvement that we've seen is not just uh gdp per capita though it is that and that there's nothing to sneeze at but it is also equality in the liberal sense of of of um demolishing apartheid and jim crow the uh uh arbitrary constraints that kept uh women from full participation in civic and economic life even earlier the abolition of slavery steve i'm not disagreeing with you about any of those it's not just material progress my point is that all of that all of those improvements a creation of an open society a free society uh ultimately doesn't endure because the people who inherit it take the freedoms for granted and because they have no anchoring beliefs are easily seduced by the purveyors of an illiberal ideology that says for example we need to reintroduce segregation to make sure that we can effectively discriminate in favor of people of color and it's that's the problem that you you bring about a free society uh you bring about an open society but you have no way of preserving the loyalty of the younger generation to it and this was the thing that i think came out from from some of the research that jasher monk was doing recently on the the indifference of young people or relative indifference of young people to democracy itself the fact that wokism is smuggling in deeply liberal ideas including even segregation uh and nobody kind of seems to realize that this is the the negation of all the things that you hold dear so i'm kind of coming closer and closer to the the 19th century critique of liberalism that it would never be able to stop the slide into something far more revolutionary i'm kind of also thinking here about burke and the french revolution i feel as if there's something unstable about your enlightenment first of all i don't think it's actually really the enlightenment but let's let's accept your terminology there's something inherently unstable about your version of the enlightenment which means that it can't endure because the people who benefit from it take it for granted and have no core values and no real loyalty to the open society that appears to be the problem we face today and it's why ultimately the most depressing prospect is that we create the most equal the fairest the most prosperous society and young people turn away from fundamental freedom i want to fight with that and then i'll lead to hr and bill stephen because we're not even trying we started this conversation with university administrators who had no idea why we have free speech you just had some vague memory that it was a good idea successful societies educate their young they teach their young the history of their society they teach their young the civil institutions of their society they teach their young why we had a constitution how that constitution came it sometimes is a an overly sugar-coated uh you know uh uh uh series of uh of wonderful uh improvements which a little bit of self-criticism is good but we are not even trying the education system doesn't teach civics it doesn't teach american constitutional history we now the military does here's an example of an institution that that thinks about its culture and and that hr will tell us how do you take this sort of this this um this woke society and and then there are soldiers who actually learn about what they're doing and they create a subculture so to neil's point i think we have not really tried i don't think this is inevitable if a society cared and tried to educate in its young to preserve here's what we are who we are and why we are you young man or woman take this forward as opposed to just go do what you want uh i think there might be a better chance and i think the military is an example of how you preserve and maintain a culture even in a very hostile world stephen why don't you take a crack first at this uh this idea of that of neil's that has economic growth and liberty has it you know has it stolen the siege the demise of our democracy and then maybe address john's point is is that you know can we overcome you know neil's uh your grave concern about our future through leadership i mean what so i i'm interested in your answers to both of these questions well yeah neil and you're basing your argument on a conjecture of the worst thing that might happen but um so far democracies have not been that fragile i mean there's weimar germany i suppose but the bolshevik revolution did not really emerge out of a stable liberal democracy unless you consider the karensky uh interim government but it grew out of the uh uh out of uh autocracy um the i agree that the liberal currents in the uh the greater opening are are uh troublesome uh but unless they actually succeed in re-implementing a kind of jim crow i think it's just premature to say that democracies carry the seeds of their own destruction given that very few democracies have actually collapsed the uh there has been some recession so if you look at quantitative measures of democracy like vdem uh the overall curve toward increasing uh democracy has shown a little bit of a backsliding so you know we've lost a decade or so but uh still the world is close to its peak in terms of the uh overall level of democracy and we haven't seen a you know a row of dominoes of one liberal democracy after another collapsing into bolshevism now again again i mean i would not want to um set the conditions where this this uh this might happen and if some of our you know current um uh social justice warriors had their way and had no resistance then maybe that would happen but it hasn't happened yet and i think it's premature to draw a conclusion of an inevitable historical progression for something that has never happened yeah well i mean of course democracy did disintegrate in most of europe in the 20s and 30s so we know what a collapse of democracy looks like it's happened it's happened once before but i'm i'm less concerned about democracy per se which is just a kind of way of choosing governments i think it's the fact that you you actually have a threat to individual liberties uh that really troubles me and an indifference to to individual liberties and to go to to john you say we haven't really tried oh no we've tried we've tried to drive those ideas out of the curriculum we've systematically made sure that conservative intellectuals don't get jobs we've made sure that there are only seven conservatives and one of them is in his 90s at harvard so we've really tried to make sure that uh the more conservative interpretation of liberty isn't available isn't tours and that just leaves the classical liberal version which i'm arguing is not actually robust in the face of attacks from the left because the problem is that it was mostly classical liberals who hired the leftists who are now tenured at these institutions and it was mostly classical liberals who made sure that conservatives didn't get hired and that is partly why i've lost faith in people who say well i'm a classical liberal because where were you when those tenure decisions were getting taken so so i would add um if there's a danger that i see uh it's not so much the slide to bolshevism but the slide to sclerosis um democracy seems to lead to ever higher taxes ever higher regulation uh ever less competition crony capitalism if you will and that's in some sense what's happened at the university a very uncompetitive uh thing was taken over by by a crowd that then had an ideological thing going on and that you know we see that in in western europe so can capital it can in democracy i hate to admit this um milton friedman was wrong democracy and economic progress don't necessarily go terribly well hand in hand uh democracies are responsive to interest groups and the prime interest group is is labor groups or business groups that want to monopolize markets and and take things over so and the slide the growth has been good we're better than we ever have been but growth has been slowing down since the 1950s and we are consciously shooting ourselves in the foot in in very many ways that the the slide to sclerosis and cronyism seems to be the danger of the at least the advanced democracies stevie can i ask you a question here then i think maybe to pull a little bit of this together is you know if if this a true strength of a democracy is an educated populist i think what we're talking about now is a real danger to a democracy is a is a populist that's indoctrinated with an orthodoxy that has that that contains the seeds uh of of liberalism's destruction and and our democracy's uh destruction you have a prescription for the academy we've talked many times on the show about the need for reform in the academy uh what do what do you think can be done in a practical way to address to neil's concerns of the the squeezing out over time of alternative perspectives what can be done to make sure that we're not indoctrinating our young people with an orthodoxy that contains the seeds of illiberalism yeah i think that is the challenge of of uh of the academy i agree with john that we have not done a good job of reminding generations of students to say nothing of our peers of the the value of free speech open open inquiry due process all of the things that it took many centuries to to achieve i think a lot of the pressure has to go toward the university administrators the um not just the bureaucrats but the provosts and the deans and the presidents where all the pressures come from one direction they uh there's a it's an unenviable position because there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it's not easy to get things to go right but there have to be they have to get pushback from the defenders of of um uh of of classical liberalism um so that they the path of least resistance is not just capitulating to the social justice war warriors we have to uh at least you know not knowing how to plot a counter-revolution but uh one thing that we academics are kind of ought to be good at doing ones we're paid to be doing is is by pressing arguments by by pushing back by uh by challenging the the orthodoxy uh through organizations like heterodox academy and the and fair and and counterweight uh but to to push back and to um also reinforce the history of lynch mobs of slides into autocracy of mob justice of uh pogroms of of racial segregation to remind people of why these hard-fought victories all the why these institutions ought to be savored and cherished because people do forget and i think that's a danger more than just prosperity but enjoying the the fruits of a liberal democracy you can forget why those institutions uh were justified in their day and need to be rejustified today i would add to that the positive history of the great promise of america as manifested in our declaration and in the constitution and to to really view the revolution uh as you know as as a war of independence that enshrined our country uh in enshrined in our country values and principles that ultimately made the institution of slavery untenable rather than you know this kind of warped perspective of the revolution these days that has gained widespread acceptance it was it was fought to preserve slavery yet and then of course to recognize the the failures of you know of reconstruction and the rise of jim crow and ku klux klan but then also you know acknowledge the dismantlement of de facto of segregation inequality of opportunity during the civil rights movement and of course stephen you're recognizing there's still more work to be done but i think you know your overall narrative of optimism of recognizing the great promise of america i think is really important to regain our self-respect which is richard warranty pointed out is a necessary ingredient for self-improvement for individuals as well as for nations i just want to add a cheer what you said the answer and i'll put on hr mode has to be building alternative institutions uh we we're in the situation where there's many people who understand how crazy things are but they are scared to speak because alone who are you against the mob but if you have institutional support people who will come to your help people will help who will together help assemble the facts of the counter argument uh that i think is is the hope for not just universities but the larger institutions of civil society than many people i talk to inside government agencies who are appalled at what's going on with their agencies and and scared to speak out so stephen we have just a couple minutes left on the show so i'd like to ask you one last question i'd like to each of the good fellows to weigh on this too the chicago tribune recently wrote an editorial the headline was the best time to be alive is now so stephen can you briefly tell us why this is the best time to be alive uh is now and i'd like each of the good fellows to build on steven's answer yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't say now in the sense of this week because we're not over the pandemic and the pandemic was unquestionably uh a step backwards it's just a bad thing and bad things do happen but uh rewind just before the pandemic it was pretty close uh the uh certainly the rate of extreme poverty worldwide was lower than it ever has been and continuing to sink the level of democracy not at a peak but it's pretty close to to a peak the um longevity uh very close to peak worldwide it is 72 it used to be more like 30 in affluent countries it's in the low 80s education rates of illiteracy are at all time lows and again rising girls as well as boys just about any measure of human well-being when when quantified has shown improvements in that we are at the peak we've been knocked off a bit by the pandemic but that that that always happens and uh the past history of curves of human progress show a notch when there's a an epidemic or a pandemic and then recovery and that seems to be what we're about to witness okay hr one reason why this is the best time to be alive well i think it's the best time because we've demonstrated a high degree of resilience and i think it's neil's superb book shows when it when when everybody gets a chance to read it they'll understand we never see these crises coming and we've been through some traumas this year maybe not crises as john has pointed out but but some real traumas and and i think that many of our institutions uh have been put to the test and and they came out okay i mean they were stretched but they came out okay so i guess the the challenge is to is to regain our confidence uh and ensure that we remain resilient before for the next for the next doom that awaits us i'll even go with with you know that pandemic is ending and and good things have come of it um we have seen the incompetence of some of our institutions like the fda and cdc and i think reform will follow we've invented mrna vaccines and gotten them quickly approved this this could be spectacular the ability to quickly design vaccines to end things that come uh and uh doom hasn't come yet i'll just emphasize the crucial frame of mind that stephen said you look at the levels of things not recent changes people tend to say oh the 50s were great because they look at the growth rate of gdp or china china is doing great because they look at the growth rate no look at where we are the level of income the level of the fact of many people out of poverty the level of life expectancy these are the best years in 2 million or 200 whatever it is of our species that we've ever had and let's just not screw it up mr doom well of course the title of my book is is ironical uh as as good history should be what's fascinating about human beings is that they constantly anticipate the end of the world and like i quote the wonderful beyond the fringe sketch peter cook dudley moore alan bennett jonathan miller now is the end perish the world long pause oh well never mind lads same time again next week we're bound to get a winner eventually the the title of the book is is therefore a kind of play on our preoccupation with impending doom and it never comes uh the setbacks come and as we've been saying covert 19's been a severe one but to date it's killed 0.94 of the world's population making it roughly three orders of magnitude smaller than the black death the 1980-19 influenza just over a century ago ago was 40 times worse in terms of its impact on global population so you'll be delighted to hear viewers that doom is not as you might wrongly infer from the title uh a a book that predicts the impending demise of of mankind quite the opposite and indeed i think the biggest risk to us is is not that the climate is going to fry the planet that we should certainly be concerned about that i think the biggest risk to us is that we unwittingly succumb to totalitarianism the ideology that probably killed the most people of any ideology in history in the 20th century so that's a brief synopsis and a trailer for our next show not one of you chose to sing the best of times from la caja fall i'm greatly disappointed well that is a wrap for this episode of good fellows uh don't despair we'll be back next week with the new topic and a new conversation by the way keep those questions coming to us you have a question for neil john or hr or all three of them uh write them in very simple to do so you just go to our website which is hoover dot org forward slash ask goodfellows and fire away that website again hoover dot org forward slash ask goodfellas stephen pinker's book uh that full title is enlightenment now the case for reasons science humanism and progress you can buy it on amazon and you're also getting neil's book but which is doom i think is that the toe of your book neil doom say it one more time that's our drinking game for this week doom dr pinker also has a website which is not surprisingly www.stevenpinker.com pink or spelled as you might expect steven spelled this with the v stephenpinker.com and brave man that he is he is on twitter his twitter handle is at sa pinker s a pinker's twitter handle on behalf of hoover's good fellows neil ferguson h.r mcmaster and john cochran our special guest today steven pinker we wish you and yours the very best stay safe stay healthy and we'll do our best here at the hoover institution to help you stay informed we'll see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 99,566

Keywords: Steven Pinker, Harvard, conservative, cancel culture, woke, Great Awokening, Bari Weiss, optimism, doom, crisis

Id: AfwJYrJn4Qo

Length: 63min 26sec (3806 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021