Enlightenment Now: The Future of Progress with Steven Pinker

tonight I will address the question is humanity progressing a question that naturally begs another question they mean what is progress you might think progress would be far too contentious and abstract to allow it to even be answered but in fact I think it's one of the easier questions that the human mind has ever posed we can define progress as improvements in human flourishing human wellbeing can be measured life health sustenance prosperity peace freedom safety knowledge leisure happiness if they've increased over time I submit that would be progress well let's go to the data beginning with the most precious thing of all life for most of human history life expectancy at birth hovered around thirty years of age but today worldwide it is 71 years in the richer parts of the world like Europe in the United States it's more than 80 years at the same time there's been spectacular progress in parts of the world that lagged in the increase in life expectancy including Asia and sub-saharan Africa one of the biggest contributors to low life expectancy at birth is the death of children the particular vulnerable stage in life and the death of a child will obviously lower the average more than the death of an elderly person in Sweden a quarter of a millennium ago about one third of children did not live to see their fifth birthday Sweden brought its rate of child mortality down by a factor of a hundred as have other parts of the world such as Canada South Korea and Chile and Ethiopia sub-saharan Africa is making great progress sustenance famine was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and could bring massive death and devastation to any part world but with starting with the British agricultural revolution in the 18th century the ability to grow more calories and to get them with where they're needed famines have become rarer and rarer and today occur only in the most remote and war-torn parts of the world prosperity for most of human history the economic growth was pretty much minuscule as we can see in a graph that plots the gross world product from the year 1 to the present and shows that for about 16 hundred years economic growth was about one pixel high then with the Industrial Revolution and the spread of education institutions like markets and finance and the globalization of trade gross world product is increased by a factor of about 200 since the early 18th century this would be a dubious claim to progress if all of those gains went to the proverbial 1% but in fact they have gone to reducing the rate of global poverty defined conventionally as a dollar ninety per person per day in 2015 u.s. dollars by that standard in 200 years ago 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty that is now down to 9 percent biess the for most of human history the normal state of relations between state states and empires was war and peace was a merely a brief interlude between wars but after the worst war in human history the world did something of a u-turn and since then since 1946 battle deaths have per capita had declined from about 20 per hundred thousand per year in the late 1940s to less than 1 per hundred thousand per year today the decline of war has been highly bumpy there were peaks for the Korean War the Vietnam War the iran-iraq war and the Syrian civil war but each peak was lower than the preceding one and today we're living in a period of a unique safety when it comes to chance of being killed in a war just one milestone in this progress but sometimes called the long piece was that when the government of Colombia signed a peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas three years ago it brought to it in the last war in the Western Hemisphere and the last remnant of the Cold War freedom and rights we've all been alarmed at the threats to democracy in countries like Turkey and Venezuela and Russia and Hungary nonetheless if you add up all of the democracies and autocracy x' in the world and scale them by how democratic or how autocratic they are you can see that the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade a majority of countries and more democratic than autocratic a majority of people living live in countries that are more democratic than autocratic unless that seemed incredible recall that said when I was a college student in the 1970s half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain and dominated by totalitarian communist dictatorships Spain and Portugal were fascist dictatorships Greece was under the control of a military junta as was much of Latin America and East Asia all of them democratic today the power of governments to brutalize their citizens has been eroded such as the death penalty there have been but three abolitions of the death penalty a year for the last three decades most recently Malaysia just last month and if current trends continue the death penalty will have vanished from the face of the earth by the end of the 2020s not that anyone's predicting that that will happen but just to give you an idea of the pace of change man in country after country homosexuality has been decriminalized most recently in India Lebanon and Trinidad and Tobago just in the last few months for most of human history children were set to work in fields and factories but child labor from a rate of about 30 percent in England 100 50 years ago was eliminated in the 21st century as were other countries such as Italy and the world as a whole has seen great progress in reducing the rate of child labour in the United States the despite scary headlines about bullying and cyber-bullying the violent victimization of children at school has been in decline as have rates of physical and sexual abuse indeed pretty much all forms of violence interpersonal violence have been in decline this is a long-running process it began in the Middle Ages in Europe when the consolidation of medieval kingdoms brought about a reduction in the rate of homicide from about 35 400 thousand per year to one per hundred thousand per year processes replicated whenever frontier regions are brought under the control of law such as in colonial New England the American Wild West and even in countries that remain violent today such as Mexico they used to be even more violent a century ago their homicide and reckon Mexico is five times higher a century ago not just homicide has come down but violence against women such as rates of domestic violence against wives and girlfriends and rates of rape and sexual assault knowledge the natural state of humanity is ignorance and schooling used to be a privilege for the fortunate few but the rate of Basic Education has gone from less than 20% 200 years ago this would be completing educate elementary school and a year or two of high school from less than 20% a couple of hundred years ago to 80% today and every part of the world has seen the progress including some of the poorer areas such as the Middle East South and East Asia and sub-saharan Africa all showing spectacular gains and what I would say is the most incredible astonishing difficult to believe example of progress that I have come across we've been getting smarter this is true in a well-documented phenomenon known as the Flynn effect IQ scores have increased by three points a decade all over the world for a century so people today are 30 IQ points smarter than their ancestors were a century ago well does any of this improve the quality of our life and in many ways it has for example typical workweek 150 years ago in Europe in the United States was more than 60 hours today it's fewer than 40 hours and thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in developed countries and the widespread adoption of labor-saving devices like washing machines vacuum cleaners refrigerators dishwashers stoves and microwaves the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework which people indicate is their leastwe favourite way of spending their time has gone from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a week well these are all things that measures that economists like to play with do they actually make a difference in what ultimately counts in happiness and the answer is that they do that the there is a strong but logarithmic relationship between life satisfaction and income may measured in gross domestic product per capita so obviously an extra thousand dollars makes a poor person happier than a rich person but nonetheless the relationship holds between countries and within countries people in rich countries are happier richer people within every country are happier the expectation is that as the world gets richer people ought to get happier and as best we can tell on average that seems to be true in 71% of countries for which we have longitudinal data on rates of happiness there have been increases since the over the last 35 years interestingly the United States is not one of them United States got a little less happy but the United States was pretty happy to begin with let me wrap up with with three questions about progress that I suspect have occurred to many of you one of them is what caused progress and in my book enlightenment now and as the subtitle indicates I suggested spam the growth of Reason science and humanism now you might say well what kind of an answer is that isn't it obvious that we should all adopt reason science and humanism aren't those words like motherhood that no one could possibly be opposed to well not exactly there are alternative goals sources of meaning and purpose in life such as religious morality divine Commandments authoritarian nationalism and a populism and reactionary ideologies that hark back to some golden age and see all see the trajectory of humanity not as progress but degeneration and that matter utopian romantic and messianic ideologies that look forward to some utopia a second question even if there has been progress are we better off denying yet make sure we don't slip back in complacency I don't think so I think that we're not best off with a view of the world that is pessimistic or a view of the world that is optimistic but a view of the world that is accurate obviously we have to be aware of danger and suffering and injustice wherever they occur but we also have to be aware of how they can be reduced because even if there are dangers in of falling into complacency and apathy there are also dangers of thoughtless fact-free pessimism one of them is fatalism if all our efforts to make the world a better place have been an abject failure and the world is just getting worse and worse despite all of our efforts well why waste time and money on a hopeless cause why throw good money after bad as Jesus said the poor you will always have with you the other danger is radicalism if you think that our institutions are failing and beyond all hope of reform you'll be open to calls to smash the Machine drain the swamp burn the empire to the ground in the hope that anything that rises out of the rubble is bound to be better than what we have now they're dangerous response or receptive to aspiring leaders who promise only I can fix it final question is progress inevitable and the answer is of course not progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time that would not be progress that would be a miracle and progress is not a miracle progress consists of using knowledge to solve problems problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems that must be solved in their turn so the existence of problems today does not mean that there has been no progress because the problems of yesterday were worse as Franklin Pierce Adams I put it nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory the upshot is that progress can continue if we remain committed to Reason science and humanism and if we don't it probably won't thank you in the book you spend a good deal of time talking for example about the availability heuristic as a source of failing in problem-solving and the remedies to it and maybe you could share a little bit about that and a couple of the other cognitive drivers in the book because I think that that would help people understand a little bit more deeply this notion of progress yes there the availability heuristic is part of the explanation of why people are unaware of the progress that's taken place it's an idea that was suggested by the late psychologist Amos Tversky and his collaborator Daniel Kahneman many of you may have heard of Kahneman as the author of the bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 this is the the idea that the human mind tends to estimate frequency probability prevalence by a mental shortcut of using basically its own search engine as a guide to frequency the more quickly you can remember something more easily you can imagine it the more quickly a narrative or an image comes to mind the more common you think it is or what example is that if people are asked to judge what are the biggest threats to life and limb people think that tornadoes kill more people than asthma attacks asthma attacks kill about 40 times as many people as tornadoes but turn areas make really good television asthma attacks not so much so we see the tornado sweep through the trailer park in Oklahoma and we think oh my god must kill a lot of people but in fact it's just a an unforgettable image out of whack with the actual data it's one of and if you think about what what the news consists of it consists of things that happen not things that don't happen there's a cliche in journalism we cover the plains the crash and all the planes that take off you never see a journalist saying I'm reporting live from a country that's a piece or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists so as long as violence and disasters haven't vanished from the face of the earth which they never will there'll always be enough instances to fill the news and people can have the impression that the world is as bad as it has ever been or even or has gotten worse simply because the all of the areas that have gotten better never make the news also because the improvements tend to be incremental a few percentage points a year which can compound whereas things that happen suddenly are generally bad things it's easier for things to go wrong very quickly than to go right very quickly that's part of the answers the question of why people are unaware of the progress that I think is visible when you look at data there are other aspects of cognitive psychology that are relevant to how that progress happens in the first place namely the application of reason and and and science and and humanism at least so I argue there the the paradox is how can we be as a species so rational we've figured out that the secrets of life and matter and the universe we stole a lot of them but at the same time so irrational how can the same species that thought up the theory of evolution and the structure of DNA also believed that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a pizza reals light of Washington or that vaccines cause autism the I think the answer as a cognitive psychologist is we do have we are born nature gave us a certain kernel of rationality and our ancestors used it to outsmart plants and animals to devise tools and traps and form coalition's by itself the rationality of a human being is not enough to lead to to progress however a group of humans that agreed to abide by certain norms of Reason such as free speech even though I want to be right and a lot of prestige and glory and power come from me trying to convince everyone you guys all get to criticize me and I can't I can't jail you if you do and there there's therefore a marketplace of ideas where good ideas could drive out bad ideas empirical testing no matter how plausible an idea is until you confront it against reality give reality a chance to falsify it see if it survives even you don't know whether it's true or not logic just some some trains of thought that are intuitively compelling actually don't make sense when you put them under a microscope and then look at the step by step logic so that's another tool that we have have invented and spread to the extent that people abide by those rules then we can be collectively more rational than any of us is individually but of course they don't always apply and so it's a mixture of the power of human cognition with the institutions and norms that that allow it to to flourish collectively one of the principal premises of your view of the possibilities of the good side of human and you described human morality has been ambiguous in its nature at times is your concept of sympathy that because there is a trait of sympathy in human cognition it is possible for us to empathize generalize and in a sense to do certain rules of equity and fairness can you say a little bit more about that yeah there is this is a major idea around the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th centuries that humans are endowed with a Faculty of sympathy and ability to feel others pain it'll call it compassion or empathy commiseration they called it then pity now by by itself as with human cognition just left to our own devices what evolution gave us is really not enough to lead to progress because even though we have the capacity for sympathy we tend to focus it on cute little furry baby animals on our blood relatives on our clan or tribe our allies and it takes a push to expand our circle of sympathy to embrace the the nation the the Alliance the and ultimately all of humanity I do think that there are nudges to that expand our circle of sympathy such as journalism history realistic fiction travel the cosmopolitan forces that that mean that people aren't confined to their tribe and village they get to experience the lived experience and pleasures and pains like like that each of us is right so before we go into some of the challenges that may exist for the world I'd like to give a moment for understanding why it is that my colleagues may be really good at what they do and there's a section of the book where you talk about and if the Revenge of the Nerds not that my colleagues are nerds let me be clear about that but that there are in fact people who are super forecasters and it's not an accident and it's a contrast to many of the people who we view as experts yeah so this is work pioneered by another cognitive psychologist Philip tetlock now at UPenn who held experts feet to the fire by actually having them lay out predictions that could actually be tested within some reasonable window five years we'll more countries leave the eurozone will the price of oil go up or down will a new war break out in Latin America a large number of questions he found that most pundits scored about the same as a chimpanzee picking bananas with the answers printed at them especially those with a strong something that meant they were known for a big idea a political ideology a bulldog for the right a bulldog for the left he did find that there were people who who could predict way above chance he called them super forecasters and this really was the Revenge of the Nerds in that they were they thought in quantitative terms not that they were mathematical whizzes but they were comfortable thinking in guesstimates and orders of magnitude ten hundred a thousand ten thousand they were Bayesian in the sense of doing probabilistic reasoning reasoning according to the theorem of the eponymous Reverend Bayes namely to first take into account the the priors how likely is an idea before you need to look at the data based on everything you know so far then how likely would be the observations that you have at hand given one possibility about the state of the world and another divide that by how common are those observations across the board on any possibility that's a they didn't literally always do the math but that was the way their they balance their intuitions they were willing to be proven wrong they they treated hypotheses as tools not as cherished possessions that they needed to defend they believed in the wisdom of crowds they consulted other super forecasters and tried to merge or triangulate their predictions with others and they had a true appreciation of contingency and chance and randomness they were more likely to say that if you were to rewind the tape of history and play it again things have could have turned out very different the people who believed in grand dialectics and historic forces and inevitabilities and the direction of history they tended to rank with the chimpanzees I don't know where Dean's fit within that particular context let me now turn to some issues that you identify in the book and why you feel that they are somewhat overrated and let's start with the question of terrorism yes so terrorism by by definition is a tactic for creating terror so it is designed to strike fear into the hearts of people but in terms of the actual damage that it does it is well know human death can be treated frivolously there are lots of things that can kill us out there and terrorism is one is is engineering in general not one of them that is it kills fewer people every year then lightning strikes Beast bee and wasp stings no comparison to police blood or homicides from road rage from barroom brawls from domestic quarrels to say nothing of accidental deaths like falling off ladders texting while driving but terrace game the system of journalism they know that one way to draw attention to themselves and their cause is to kill a few innocent people in circumstances in which we I'll picture ourselves and draw attention and and perhaps provoking a disproportionate response so the outside of war zones where it's not easy to draw the line between insurgency and terrorism and where most terrorism takes place but in the rest of the world terrorism while awful and tragic is really low on the list of threats to life and limb and and I think the combination of the habits of journalism and the rhetoric of politics inflate their the actual threat let's take an example that you do take with a greater degree of seriousness about its magnitude which is nuclear weapons and maybe you could walk through the reasoning in the book about the issue of nuclear weapons well I don't I don't think the you know I don't think the clock is ticking away toward doomsday and and I don't don't think that the bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock serves much purpose this is the one whose hands are adjusted from between two minutes to midnight to 17 minutes of to midnight kind of PR stunt now nonetheless what has to take seriously risks that even if small would be so catastrophic that that we ought to do everything possible or anything from happening and I I do think that we should think more seriously about making nuclear weapons less tempting to use about having greater safeguards than the just the whims of the commander-in-chief to try to make the systems less vulnerable to to accidental sightings now they probably have been getting safer the close calls seem to be getting less frequent but still they're they're they're not negligible and to move toward a world perhaps with the where nuclear weapons are abolished outright in incremental steps such as reducing the number something we've already done that the size of the world's nuclear Arsenal has been reduced by about 85 percent since the height of the Cold War with policies such as no first use such as never newzik using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state through negotiating tactics of gradual reciprocation and and reductions that that might get us to zero this may sound like an idea from you know bearded professors and beatniks from the 1960s strumming guitars and singing folk songs but in fact it has been endorsed by some of the most realistic of the the Cold War realists by Sam Nunn and William Perry and George Shultz and Henry Kissinger all of them will come out in favor of the total abolition of nuclear weapons as famously Ronald Reagan did at least in a moment of musing in the mid-1980s so it's not a crazy idea it's not a romantic utopian idea and it is one that I think that we ought to give more attention to let me use the example of nuclear weapons to go into some of the dimensions that may make the long line of progress that you illustrate it a little less comforting you know in the 1930s as we face the Great Depression there was a strong argument by the economists of the day and the less a fair of economics that there should be no massive government intervention to try to deal with the Great Depression because in the long run things would work out the markets would adjust and Keynes famously replied in the long run we are all dead and that issue it really deals with the time scale at which progress and responses to problems take place and it's a fundamental issue for making public policy and it's a fundamental issue for society so the first aspect of this then is that it may be that there are problems that really despite the longtime trends are truly massive and RuPt of in some medium-term in the 1920s and 1930s and 40s are a good example that type of disruption and those curves of progress that you spoke about the second thing that nuclear weapons represents is that the capacity to do damage due to the progress of Technology due to the fact that we live in a much more heavily interdependent and if you would skilled world where there are many more people who have the ability to make decisions that have large impacts on the world is getting greater so that the oops moment may be much worse in a particular moment as in the case of nuclear weapons and then there are certain problems where even with reason and science we are able to manage them better but they have some properties that make them hard to manage in your book for example in talking about climate change you acknowledge a problem that my colleague professor David Victor has emphasized in his work on global climate policy that there is a tragedy of the Commons where people do not in a sense internalize the full costs of their actions on others and that at the same time there's a that leads to a sort of shirking on the collective task in front of us so those things are in a sense objective strategic dilemmas we have greater capacity for doing damage when we miss make mistakes in calculating those dilemmas and in the medium-term we could run into some deep problems so today we're in a conversation where people in the meetings that we've held throughout this day with experts from around the world there was a recurring worry that not that we're at the moment of the world falling apart but that the problem solving that has marked progress since 1945 may be running into a pause and that there is a very outside chance of an oops moment maybe not nuclear war maybe not a world war but that there could be a major setback for some of the progress of the world order how do you think about that in regards to your general framework well well there could be I mean progress is not a magical force that protects us against threats and problems and quite the contrary the forces of the universe are constantly grinding us down we've got the second law of thermodynamics that the more ways for things to go wrong and for things to go right and and any time we we use energy there's some loss and we can't create a new energy evolution is pitted against us they're always organisms that can make a sick that can eat our food so any gains that we have made are because we've applied our ingenuity to push back at the forces of the universal yes there could be there could be problems threats nuclear war is one we've already talked about whether we the world is getting more fragile more when there's a greater likelihood of a huge catastrophe but that's not at all clear for what just as an example I mentioned briefly if there's a a crop failure in one part of the country we don't have a famine in most of the world because you just ship food from somewhere else that couldn't have done that hundred years ago would have spoiled there wasn't the transportation infrastructure we can there was the black death it killed a quarter of Europe there's no guarantee that there won't be another pandemic but certainly we've got a medical infrastructure that can develop vaccines and antivirals and antibiotics a lot more quickly than they could have 100 years ago when the son of a sitting president United States died of an infected abscess now we can't be complacent about our resilience and then there are for example the threats of antibiotic resistant pathogens that we ought to take seriously we have to take seriously all the threats the vulnerability of cyberspace to sabotage or your warfare if we don't take the threat seriously then things could go wrong but but nor do I think that it's just a ticking bomb that we're enjoying ourselves on the way down from a fall off a 30-30 second floor that is only a matter of time before everything explodes it all depends on what we do now right so let's take the example of democracy where you present it strong evidence that democracy is in many respects at a high tide although we've seen some reversion to what my colleague Steph Haggard golf and calls competitive autocracy placing democracy and when we take a look at the larger picture for example the evidence that you cite of the rise of if you would more cosmopolitan and more sympathetic ideals in the public space that give us hope for democratic progress we're also seeing from that same data from Professor Englehart and some of his collaborators that the percentage of vote in Western Europe for example for populist both in the raw vote and in their parliamentary shares have nearly tripled since the 1960s so that at the same time that we've gone through a period of an intense growth in education in many respects we've made enormous scientific progress and we have made as you've said great material progress in general we still start to see the beginnings of something that seems to fall outside of this ideal of democratic reasoning and sympathy that you point to in the book yeah so the who's to that Englehart enorus of who tracked votes for populist parties have shown an increase especially in the last compared to 25 years ago fifty years ago although the populism seems to be over the last five years to be plateauing there are some reasons to think that it does not represent the wave of the future just because of certain demographic trends including ones that Englehart and norris documents such as that there's support for populist parties kind of falls off a cliff as you go down the generational cohorts that its authoritarian populism is very popular among or not very popular but its most popular among aging baby boomers and the last members of the Silent Generation less popular among Gen X still less among the Millennials and least popular among the the Gen Z's now this would be irrelevant if people become more populous as they get older as in the old saying that if attributed to too many authors that if you're a if you're not a liberal when you're twenty you have no heart and if you are a liberal when you're sixty you have no head I've comes in very all kinds of variations that turns out to be false that that people pretty much keep their political convictions with them as they age and again actually it's the the world value survey people like running or heart have shown that which suggests that the as the baby boomer is kind of shuffle off the stage and get replaced by younger cohorts there'll be some erosion and support for populism and there are other demographic factors that that probably will push against it as well such as urbanization authoritarian populism is most popular in rural and exit urban areas and education support falls off with education in the world is getting more more educated this is not to minimize the the harm that can be done such as the fact that on both sides of the the Atlantic populace are trying to renew nuclear arms race they're pushing back at the measures such as pricing of carbon emissions and other pollutants that would internalize these dangerous externalities that indeed is only by thinking about why unregulated systems would naturally lead to we dangerous pollution ahead emissions that we can think up policies whether they're cap-and-trade or pricing or even top-down back at maximum levels it's by analyzing the problems and figuring out what it would take to get to a solution that we can propose policies like that and that we should genuinely be concerned at politicians and political movements that that don't recognize these needs don't recognize the problems that have to be solved and how to solve them well I'd like to return to that issue the climate change and the environment in a moment but I want to just push a little bit further on the the popular controversy over globalization in the United States part of my experience working in the Obama administration was trying to figure out the level of congressional support for trade agreements and although general popular opinion surveys show that the American people in general support trade when you start to count congressional seats and votes the situation has actually become much worse the stress in the Democratic Party has been now matched by a flip in the support in Congress in the Republican Party and so what can happen in these circumstances is that it isn't so much that you're debating the particular economic merits of a trade agreement you're really debating something that it represents which is a sense that global boundaries are eroding that control over solving your own internal problems are diminishing and those things are very real to political leaders representing local constituencies and in reading your book I read a number of reviews of it one that really struck me was a review by Professor Ellis and drop net Gopnik who's a very distinguished psychologist at Berkeley and she wrote a really a lotta Tori review of your book in the Atlantic but then she said but maybe there's a problem with globalization that also has its roots in our cognitive operative operatives and what she cited was evidence that human attachment to specific places and particulars our commitment care trust and love in a sense what you call sympathy in a broader way and that perhaps edit one of the consequences of globalization may be reinforced by the fact that imagine you're a bright young woman who wants to be a great neuroscientist where do you go you're not going to stay home in Kentucky you're going to come to one of the super magnet talent centers San Diego Cambridge Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh etc and that in the sense the ability to for many people to have a local life with deep attachment and ways is somehow people feeling being eroded either by objective fact or by the sense that globalization makes it less matter of their local control so could you explore that for us and about the psychological premise that went into this argument yeah the I find the argument a little odd because it's surely if a brilliant woman can escape a village where the in earlier times the family elders would have chosen a spouse versus have to pump out the babies as soon as she was married her education would be curtailed and all the brilliance would be withheld from from from from the world from from being applied to solving problems now she could move to a city and maybe she will have to get on a plane to see her mom instead of or her mother-in-law instead of living in the mother-in-law's house this affects me his progress that she has the choice she if she wanted to stay home home in Kentucky no one no one's forcing her to leave at the point of a gun but the fact that we have the options both because of technology and crucially because of changes in attitude in women's empowerment women can do things that that they that they couldn't essentially ago or even 50 years ago everything has costs so you it is true that you can't simultaneously be a Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist at UCSD or or MIT and enjoy all of the closeness of village life in Kentucky but it's hardly an indictment of modernity that we now have the choice and also the close-knit village life it's not all it's cracked up to be it's there's a reason that we or our parents or our grandparents fought so hard to escape it it's stultifying it's it's it's stifling it's it's depressed it's literally depressing and in a sense that the I didn't this these are data that came out after enlightenment now so I wasn't able to include them but the Economist ran a feature a few months ago showing that world suicide rates contrary to milk to popular pressures have been going down by a lot forty percent or so in the last twenty five years and a big driver not in the United States where the suicide rate has been creeping up since it's one of its low points in 1999 the worldís Holtzman coin going down the reason is people are leaving villages and so you don't have a woman living in the household of her mother and pounding millet pumping out one kid after another being bossed around by her mother-in-law and and then killing herself now she can move to the city and have some autonomy and that people really do like autonomy even if it comes it's the expense of some closeness or enough so I want to return to the area of climate change because I thought the chapter in the book on climate change was particularly interesting as an application of some of the logic that you lay out about problem solving and about where and how to identify the nature of a problem so maybe you could share with us tonight some of those insights that you offered about the question of climate change yes so climate change is another problem that is undeniable that we're currently not on track to solving but that we ought to the I think the what are the starting points I suggest is that we don't just give up and say we're doomed let's just enjoy life while we can let our grandchildren worry about it or let our grandchildren to suffer we ought to take it on as a problem we also most obviously and first and foremost not deny that it is a problem that the the scientific case for human-made climate changes is by now overwhelming we can see it all around us and it couldn't and it could become with some probability really really serious potentially even catastrophic at least that's has a high enough probability that it would be foolish to dismiss it I don't think that we should fold climate change into a bundle of every other issue that politically against our hearts pumping I think the agree agree New Deal is a disaster when it comes to dealing with climate change I think that the even though the denial on parts of the American right the reality of human-made climate change is disastrous I think that the some of the efforts of the left - and the hard green effect if that's a term to urge us to undo the Industrial Revolution go back into harmony with nature live small is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst because it's not gonna happen people the use of energy to improve human welfare has been one of the drivers of the progress that we've enjoyed and there are a couple of billion people who are going to want to enjoy the same benefits that we and the rich countries have enjoyed so there's going to whatever is gonna happen is there's going to be an enormous thirst for energy and and that that's a good thing that that's how we got to get kids out of the fields that's how we got to get women how we got women out of the kitchen that's how we get to see the world how we get to see our our mothers if you get sick on the other coast we don't want to give up that that lifestyle the question is how do we get the benefits of an energy-rich lifestyle without bringing on possible climate catastrophes and that calls for decarbonizing the energy sector the combination I suggest I can't take credit for these ideas but I but I do advocate of policy particular some kind of carbon pricing that would internalize the external externalities that the cost to everyone of private transactions such as driving a car and using an air conditioner that should be factored into the price that we pay so that there are billions of people who are making decisions now in the future in the direction of less greenhouse gas emissions now as we've seen in the past year if you simply impose a carbon tax then people will put on yellow vests and start spray-painting the Arc de Triomphe and turning over cars so it has to be combined with way of mitigating the costs to two poor people who so it has to be accompanied by some kind of rebate and in combination with with a technology that is technologies that give us the most energy with well as quickly as possible zero emissions and eventually negative emissions these would include the obvious ones of renewables like solar and wind but also I argue nuclear power which is the most scalable abundant round-the-clock form of energy that we know of it's dangerous have been exaggerated by some of the same psychological biases that we spoke about at the outset that make terrorism outsize in people's imaginations whether it be not retiring the plants that we now have that are running just fine and which lead to increase in emissions whenever we shut them down but also building out plants in especially in countries like China and India where there's going to be a huge growing thirst for energy and then with a transition to a new generation of nuclear technology small modular reactors perhaps new new technologies perhaps even fusion which doesn't always seem to be as they as appreciate put it thirty years away and it always will be but there have been some advances at MIT Department of nuclear engineering if I could mention a rival to to this University where there really does seem to have been a breakthrough any chances here locally I see so you know no offense to the local lab advances in fourth generation and other nuclear technologies and eventually perhaps the carbon capture and storage that we've got to go not just zero but negative two because even the carbon that we have pumped into the atmosphere and we'll continuing will continue to do will heat up the atmosphere unless we figure out how to suck it out one of the legacies of the Enlightenment was the notion of cosmopolitanism sort of an idea that there was a universal shared way of using reason and enlightenment in the world spreading around the world and that was certainly one of the artifacts of the first era of globalization if you would today we are really living in an age where the capacity for discovery and research the level of education around the world it's truly no longer the predominant monopoly of the traditional wealthy countries there is truly great discovery going on around the world even in places that many people in the audience don't fully recognize such as in Africa where there's an enormous amount of creative research being done and engineering problem solving in many ways so we're living in a new age of the spread of knowledge many of these things are tied to the values that you advocate for in the book but does cosmopolitanism ever serve in tension with the pride and cultural differences and history and how do we think about that balance as we go forward in the world yeah another profound question the people do people humans are are tribal in the sense that we tend to submerge our identity with some larger group that we feel as some kind of extended kin or an affinity to the we tend to divide ourselves into groups based on sometimes rather flimsy pretext and immediately think the worse of what other of the other group on the other hand those cognitive tribes if you will be the group that we think that we belong to don't have to coincide with a race or with a any fixed unit like a nation or a state or a religion we can we are flexible enough to imagine ourselves as belonging too many too many overlapping tribes we could be an Italian and American and a Catholic and a citizen of the world and a fan of the the the Celtics or the Chargers or a user of apple or Windows each one of which defines a tribe that has shifting pattern of friends and enemies perhaps but one of them can be as a citizen of the world the idea of cosmopolitanism so the idea would be that if we retain our local identities in terms of cuisine and music and dress and humor and and symbols and rituals but when it comes to things that count like you know military competition or economical operation then we we think more broadly and we avail ourselves of a huge cafeteria of opportunities that globalization presents you know I love the my mother's home cooking but I also like the option of going out for Thai food and the world is richer if everyone can do that even if it means that it's less exotic to visit Thailand you've already had tasted the food still I think it's a better world when you can go out for Thai when you want to I think that it would be appropriate right now to thank a cosmopolitan an enlightened view of the world from professor Pinker thank you so much [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 21,900

Rating: 4.6782608 out of 5

Keywords: Steven Pinker, Philosophy, Clinical Psychology, Enlightenment Now, GPS 30th anniversary

Id: f9J75kxWY-E

Length: 56min 12sec (3372 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/JustShhhhhh]

Mencionan a Chile un par de veces.