Professor Steven Pinker | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union Web Series

[Music] good evening and welcome to another virtual evening here at the oxford union my name is james price i'm the president for this term and in just a minute we'll be in conversation with professor stephen pinker who has a presentation for us without further ado we're going to now turn to uh professor pinker who's going to give us a presentation thank you my title progress and enlightenment in the 21st century immediately raises the question what do i mean by progress could you possibly get people to agree on what the concept of progress even is i don't think it's that hard to define progress i define it as improvements in human flourishing where human flourishing would comprise dimensions such as life health sustenance prosperity peace freedom safety knowledge leisure happiness if they have 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 itself for most of human history life expectancy at birth was pinned at around uh 30 years of age but then beginning in the 19th century with advances in sanitation antibiotics vaccinations life expectancy began to increase to the point where today it is uh 71 years worldwide uh close to more than 80 years in more fortunate affluent countries in europe in the americas but every region of the world including sub-saharan africa has shown spectacular gains uh sustenance famine was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and in any part of the world was just one bad harvest away but thanks to advances in agronomy famines no longer are a matter of an inability to grow sufficient calories and protein but a question of getting it to remote and war-torn parts of the world prosperity the uh there is no answer to the question why is there poverty poverty is the natural state of humanity the question that we ought to ask is why is there wealth and for most of uh human history there was little to no growth from the back background level of uh prosperity to begin with for about 1600 years economic growth was less than one pixel high then with the industrial revolution it has shot up to about 200 times what it was in the early 18th century now this would be a dubious form of progress if all of those gains in prosperity went to the proverbial one percent but in fact they have decimated the rate of extreme poverty by today's definition of extreme poverty about 90 percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty 200 years ago that has fallen to less than 9 now within developed countries of course uh many if not most of the gains have gone to the um to the more affluent but it does not mean that developed countries have become increasingly indifferent to the plight of the needy quite the contrary whereas 150 years ago only developed countries devoted only about 1.5 percent of their gdp to redistribution that is to social spending to the poor to children to the sick to the elderly in the 20th century every developed country went on a binge of uh redistribution or social spending so there is still a range from relatively stingy countries like the united states to more munificent ones like france but an average oecd country reallocates about 22 percent of its gdp to social spending peace for most of human history the natural state of uh relations between big empires and kingdoms was war and peace was merely a brief interlude between wars but then after the most destructive war history world war ii that began to change and uh from a rate of about 20 battle deaths per 100 000 people per year in uh 1946 the rate has fallen quite unevenly to less than uh one percent today uh it's been a something of a roller coaster with peaks for the korean war the vietnam war the iran-iraq war and the syrian civil war but the overall trajectory is unmistakably downward freedom and rights we have read with alarm about the threats and erosion to democracy in many countries not least my own adopted country of the united states but still if you add up all of the countries and not just focus on the most uh flagrant backsliders and you give them a score from -10 for an autocracy to plus 10 for uh the best possible democracy you see that the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the last decade or so unless this seemed impossible to believe i can just think back to when i was an undergraduate student and half of europe was behind the iron curtain living under totalitarian communist dictatorships spain and portugal were literally fascist dictatorships most of latin america was under the control of military juntas in east asia south korea taiwan indonesia philippines all of them controlled by military or right-wing governments all of them democratic today uh and we don't read as much about the countries here and there who have made progress toward democracy but overall the trajectory has been upward violent crime in any part of the world that lives in a state of anarchy there will be high rates of predation and vendetta and blood feuds uh in medieval europe the homicide rate was about 35 per hundred thousand per year and homicide statistics um go back centuries because people have always been interested in killings and corpses are a pretty objective measure of that kind of violent crime then uh in every european country rates of homicide fell so that they are about one percent today and that process tends to be replicated whenever central governments establish control over uh frontier and anarchic regions and the uh code of vendetta is replaced by a court system and the rule of law happened again in colonial new england happened late still later in the american wild west and even parts of the world that remain violent today such as mexico were uh far more violent a century ago not just homicide but other forms of violent crime have been in decline these are data from the united states on uh two forms of violence against women namely sexual assault and domestic violence against wives and girlfriends they've come down uh considerably since data started being recorded in the 70s knowledge the natural state of humanity is ignorance and illiteracy and for most of human history literacy was a privilege of a um a small aristocratic and clerical minority about 15 of europe was literate uh 500 years ago then uh every european country achieved um 100 literacy by the 20th century uh the united states as well uh and then that has been spreading to the rest of the world such as latin america and the world as a whole today is about 80 literate uh 90 for people under the age of 25. well does any of this improve the quality of our lives these are the kinds of data that economists enjoy measuring but how does it affect us uh in in our daily lives well in uh there have been tremendous progress in that sphere as well for example 150 years ago the typical work week in the united states and europe was more than 60 hours per week today it is less than 40 and most workers receive several weeks of paid vacation which would have been inconceivable in dickensian times and thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity 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 waste on housework has declined from about 60 hours a week to fewer than uh 15 hours a week as a result at least in the united states i'm sure it's the same in britain the amount of leisure time that we have has increased over the last 50 years both for men and for women for women you can't help but notice the flattening of that progress beginning in the 1980s and the reason is that women today spend more time with their children actually both sexes do a single working woman today spends more time with her children than a married stay-at-home mom did in the 1950s contrary to our stereotypes well does any of this make us any happier because that would be the ultimate measure of progress and the answer is we certainly would expect it to because there is a strong relationship between life satisfaction and income measured as gdp per capita it is of course a logarithmic relationship this is plotted on log coordinates because an extra thousand pounds uh makes a poor person much happier than a rich person but nonetheless it occurs throughout the scale both across countries uh each country represented by a dot and within countries uh the scatter represented by an arrow impaling the dot uh this since the world has gotten richer all parts of the world we would expect that its people to get happier and in about 70 of countries for which we have data that is true uh interestingly the united states is not one of them but the united states started off as a relatively happy country uh to begin with and contrary to a widespread uh misconception that despite all of our affluence and uh and luxuries and banishment of early death that suicide rates are spiking nothing could be further from the truth worldwide suicide rates have declined by about 40 percent over the last three decades and that is true in a majority of countries well this all raises some questions about progress such as what caused it in the 19th century there was a vaguely mystical notion that nature contained some dialectic toward progress that lifts us ever upward but that is quite opposite to the way the universe works the universe has no particular concern for our well-being and often seems to be trying to grind us down in my book enlightenment now i argue that the ideals of the enlightenment were responsible for uh progress namely reason science and uh humanism that is when we apply our ingenuity to the goal of making people better off every now and again we succeed if we remember what works discard the failures then increment by increment we can uh make ourselves better off nothing mystical about it this less this seems so obvious that it doesn't deserve a name let alone a book there are alternatives to recent science and humanism for example the idea that our purpose in life comes from religious scripture the uh doctrines of authoritarian nationalism and populism reactionary ideologies that say we've got to get back to a golden age rather than striving toward improvement and revolutionary ideologies that say that we have to dismantle the system in the hope that anything that rises out of the rubble is bound to be better than what we have second question even if there has been progress are we better off kind of denying it or pretending it isn't theirs to safeguard against a slide into complacency and i don't think so uh i think we're best off with an understanding of the world that is accurate this is not a brief for optimism it's a brief for accuracy of course we must be aware of danger suffering and injustice wherever they occur but we also have to be aware of how they can be reduced because counteracting the danger of complacency there are dangers to thoughtless pessimism among them are fatalism if despite all of our efforts life just gets worse and worse why even bother why throw uh good money after a uh hopeless cause and the threat of radicalism to calls to smash the machine drain the swamp uh burn the empire to the ground if you believe that all of our institutions are failing and beyond all hope for reform third question is progress inevitable and the answer is of course not progress does not mean that everything gets 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 as your colleague david deutsch emphasized in his book the beginning of infinity and solutions create new problems that have to be solved in their turn this brings me to a topic that i could not possibly avoid in a talk about progress namely the pandemic that we have been living through for the past 10 months how do we understand pen a pandemic in a world of progress and the starting point is to remember that infectious disease is the rule in life not the exception as uh pathogens and parasites are universal you and i are big yummy mounds of gingerbread there for the eating as far as a germ is concerned uh as augustus de morgan said great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them and little fleas have lesser flea fleas and so add infinitum uh and the world has been racked by pandemics far worse than the one we've been living through the plague of justinian which killed about half of europe the black death uh 10 to 60 of europe the colonization of the americas led to the loss of uh 90 of the indigenous population uh there were pandemics in china and india the smallpox pandemic killed uh 300 million people in the 20th century alone the so-called spanish flew a century ago killed 50 million hiv aids has killed 32 million so far now pandemics unquestionably set back progress at least for a while for example here is a graph of life expectancy in a number of european countries over the 20th century when i first saw this graph i uh you can't help but notice this dip and my conclusion initially was oh my god that is the horrible human cost of war of world war one until i looked at the uh years and discovered that that's not the death toll from world war one that's the death toll from the spanish flu but you will also notice that the life expectancy uh improved after the uh pandemic had run its course also true of the terrible tragedy of hiv aids in africa which set back life expectancy but uh since then has uh rebounded and we can uh hope for that that will happen with coven 19 as well our traditional defenses against infectious disease the reason that despite the universality of pathogens and parasites we're not all dead our species do not go extinct is that we have uh an immune system we have sexual reproduction which makes our children genetically different from ourselves so that any uh pathogen that has cracked our internal uh locks uh has to start all over again when it comes to our kids the emotion of disgust a primitive defense against disease vectors and uh sadly xenophobia modern defenses are reason science uh and humanism uh the uh these forces of progress had already begun to reduce the death toll from the five most lethal infectious diseases that strike children pneumonia diarrhea measles uh malaria and hiv aids and there's we are beginning to see the uh progress made against covin 19 that the pathogen was identified in days the uh sequenced uh genome within a week the first vaccine tested in four months and uh two shown to be effective within nine months uh deployed on a large scale within ten months that is an astonishing accomplishment in human progress uh as this graph from marion to be showed up when it came to other vaccines anywhere between 3 000 years and uh five years had to elapse before vaccines were deployed in the case of covid19 it was less than four months so let me just uh wrap up with some conclusions about progress progress is a real phenomenon it is not a matter of optimism of seeing the glasses half full of wearing rose-colored glasses it's there in the data when you look at it the data show that our lives are longer healthier richer safer smarter freer fairer and more equal than uh ever before terrible problems remain undoubtedly progress is not the same as perfection uh the existence of problems today however does not mean that there has been no progress because uh most often the problems of yesterday were worse as franklin pierce adams said nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory progress is an unnatural state of affairs it does not happen by itself it is the result of applying knowledge to enhance human flourishing progress can continue if we remain committed to reason science and humanism uh and if we don't it may not thank you thank you very much for that professor pinker um while you get yourself uh sat back down again i'll just remind everybody who's watching this that please please do submit your questions into the q a function um just at the bottom of the the zoom chat and i'll be asking them to professor pinker in just a second i'm also aware of my own foibles at knowing that i'm such an optimist myself um that seeing all of that recorded exactly with all of my biases and i'll try and be a bit more critical in some of the the questions that are coming along i suppose the first question therefore would be wondering with all of these graphs moving in the right direction with what is you say it's not a miracle but it certainly looks like a miracle and sounds like a miracle in some ways um just at first glance why is it that so many people are so damn miserable all the time and so much too negative about everything what is it that in the brain or in society that makes us not feel the the wonderful momentum and trajectory that we're all on uh yes well of course since progress is not a blanket phenomenon that makes everyone happier at the same time there are people who are genuinely worse off but in addition those of us much of the gloom that we feel in addition to what is actually merited when things do get worse such as a pandemic or such as countries that have uh suffered from authoritarian populism such as my my adopted country at least until tomorrow but even when things go better people often think they go worse and that is a combination of a feature of our own psychology called the negativity bias we feel um losses more than we appreciate gains we tend to forget the negative effect of advent but it does combine with just with the nature of journalism because journalism is about things that happen not things that don't happen and a lot of good things are things that don't happen a country that's not at war that doesn't get attacked by terrorists or a rampage shooter that is not suffering a pandemic and those aren't news and when progress does happen it tends to be um it tends to creep up it's not built in a day as uh one of your colleagues at oxford max roser has put it um 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 had that headline because it didn't happen on a particular thursday in october and so a billion and a quarter people escaped from extreme poverty and no one knows about it uh and that it feeds into our psychology the uh the nature of journalism thanks to the uh what daniel kahneman and amos tversky dubbed the availability heuristic namely we judge uh risk and danger and frequency by how readily we can recall anecdotes and images and narratives from memory and so if you have uh memory and impressions fed by gordy that's going to lead to the impression that uh they are plentiful all of the boring countries at peace kids who go to school and who are well-fed and healthy just don't register in our mental tabulator of events in the world do you get this um that negativity bias yourself do you do you notice it happening in your own brain or are these sorts of graphs so so seared into the way you think about and look at the world that you manage to escape the trap of those availability and negative biases i try to um uh calibrate my intuitions with with data because i consume headlines just like uh everyone else and i'm a regular visitor to the uh that the absolutely stupendous website that run out of your own institution uh max roser's our world and data which is it gives you a very different view of the world um than the daily headlines including um a data-driven understanding of what is going wrong it's not by by no means a a happy new site it has probably the the best graphical interface for understanding the covin pandemic updated daily and allowing the crucial uh information about which countries are doing a better job than which other countries but nonetheless it is a uh that kind of mindset for me and i think for everyone of um looking at data and trends is uh keeps you mentally healthier than just consuming uh report after a report of everything that's going wrong absolutely i think there's some good practical take-home advice for all of our viewers right there i know i'm definitely guilty of spending too much time on twitter which doesn't exactly have a an abundance of good news always um what of those data-driven points maybe from our world in data or somewhere else what is it that most gives you pause for thought that think you may be wrong on some of the or at least to some extent wrong or that these trends will start going downwards and backwards well um most of the news regarding carbon emissions has not been particularly sheery i mean well there's the side effect of the economic downturn from covet has been that we've been burning less carbon but that's obviously not uh sustainable um although there are there are other graphs that are cause for not total gloom namely the uh plunging cost of um uh solar and wind power uh although the numbers from solar and wind don't add up to uh send us on a carbon free trajectory anytime soon um the the um figures for democracy even though i i did mention they are higher in this decade than they have been in any other decade but there's no question that uh over the course the last decade there's been a decline uh and i i think a number of the uh what we see particularly in in the united states with the uh the uh the rise of authoritarian populism of conspiracy theorizing of a turn away from exactly the ideals of the enlightenment that i've been challenging navally science and data and policy mean that the generators of progress are themselves threatened which means it uh we'll we'll see if things start to turn around a bit tomorrow but to the extent that ideals of the enlightenment are repudiated uh the drivers of progress aren't going to be there then all of those points about authoritarianism and or even carbon emissions and various other conspiracy problems a lot of those things sound like they're very rife in the people's republic of china at the moment um and obviously that is the the place where um the cover 19 came from i think you tweeted very recently that you're skeptical of this idea that uh um the cover 19 escape from a lab by some kind of accident and that you've got to bet on it but i wonder if you could talk about that specifically but broadly china how enlightened it may be is and how in touch with those enlightenment values and what that may spell for the future of the world yes i i do have a there's an organization called long bets where people can um put skin in the game and a number of years ago sir martin reese bet that there'd be an episode of bio terror or bio error before 2020 that would uh have a million casualties so i i took him up on it several years ago and uh we have agreed uh even though the current state of evidence would have me as the winner but uh neither of us is confident that that is that that we know the cause of the outbreak to settle the bet and so we've put it off by at least six months until um there's a real consensus uh i think i'll win um but uh but still i both of us want to want to to be sure so china is a complicated case in um one of the uh brain children of the enlightenment namely markets as a driver of economic growth and economic growth as a force of progress and kind of lifting up every other aspect of human well-being science have been wholeheartedly adopted by china in contrast to say the preceding regime of mao zedong on the other hand notions of human rights and democracy and freedom of speech and inquiry not so much a question is where as china becomes more affluent and of course sectors of china have have been but it's still a much poorer country than those of uh western europe or north america or other east asian countries will there be a pent-up demand for openness and rights will the stifling of free exchange of ideas pose a drag on what they clearly value namely economic growth and of course china has been held as an alternative to the paradigm of liberal democracy and enlightenment in the west it has helped itself as i mentioned to some of the enlightened values but but not not others so if you were to take a long bet with me now um would you think that the the this century will be the maybe the chinese century based on all those sorts of metrics and the graphs you looked at or do you think those other kinds of pressures will will really drag it right down or until maybe there's some kind of democratic overthrow perhaps well economically there's just no question it'll be the world's largest economy um i mean just com if you compare to the united states it's got about five times the population so as long as it's not you know uh five times as poor as long it doesn't have one-fifth of the affluence just by the laws of arithmetic is going to be bigger and i i'm going to be mused by the panic in the united states over china overtaking it in terms of economic output uh this is a good thing unless you think it's it's a good thing for china to be to have one-fifth of the affluence of the united states forever it's bound to overtake it and likewise the uh european union with or without britain so unquestionably it's going to be economically bigger which means it's also going to be more powerful by some measures its citizens are going to live longer and and uh healthier just because that's what tends to happen in more affluent countries in general affluent countries tend to have uh all of the other good things that is they statistically they tend to be safer they tend to be um more gender equal they tend to be more democratic um they tend to be more peaceful but but there are some conspicuous exceptions such as the uh arab oil states which are uh filthy rich but repressive and in a number of ways backward china will be an interesting case because it's going to get richer and richer whether it will follow the trajectory of other liberal values going along or be another kind of conspicuous exception is i i guess i probably won't make a bet on that one last quick thing on china do you think that uh if it manages that if the ccp stays in control in a way that many fear it might do you think that it would try and uh actively go against other enlightenment values in other states it's being very aggressive towards say hong kong and breaking up the the sign of british declaration there it's been very aggressive towards taiwan and india and australia would you think it would get to such a point where it would actively seek to undo various other features of the enlightenment so that it can exert more rail politic control over the world well i mean hong kong certainly and tragically uh taiwan is a very it is a dangerous situation there australia and india less so simply because it's uh does not have real or nominal control over them uh i don't think that either australia or india will move in the direction of uh of china um for less develo still less developed countries in africa uh they'll accept aid from wherever it comes from and whether they'll and it's foreseeable that they could adopt more of a say a china model than a west western europe model and going back to my bet with with uh lord reece it will be interesting if china's lack of openness um is seen as working to its own disadvantage in not getting at the uh to the bottom of the source of covet um since it doesn't do anyone good not to to have the potential to start pandemics and not know about it because you don't you suppress embarrassing news that's an example of how open one of the built-in advantages of openness might um and has in the past uh worked in its favor whether you can have a closed society uh indefinitely would be the one of the great questions of the century thank you i do hope that all of our viewers have been um cheered up um even in these sort of darkest of days and in britain certainly we're in the middle of another lockdown by the very positive story there i'd like to ask a little bit more about you personally um we talked just before we came on air about some of your specialities in things like linguistics um why have you entered the fray in such a way you feel a little like cincinnati's putting down the plow and sort of returning to save rome why why not sort of spend your your career as an academic without getting all the the kind of council attempts and all those sorts of crap inspired you well one thing one thing led to another and uh an interest in language and more generally in human nature led to an uh further interest in where does human nature come from and the answer to that is uh evolution which has always been a contentious topic and in particular in in my case it led to the since there have been accusations that anyone who believes in human nature must embrace a kind of reactionary politics after all you can't change human nature does that mean does that dash any hope for reform and social improvement doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for peace because war is in the genes and man is just a uh man the man the killer uh and i pushed back against that by noting not only does human nature comprise a number of conflicting tendencies we i think we do have instincts toward vengeance and dominance but we also have empathy and self-control and moral norms and problem-solving capacity but even an analysis of of uh human nature is loot when you look at historical data and if the data are telling us that rates of violence uh have declined then it's becomes as they say a philosophical question of whether we're doomed to perpetual strife and and uh uh and oppression the the data say that we're not so that was the trajectory that led me to the surprisingly controversial claim that there has been uh progress and of course any discussion of human nature bumps into politicized questions like are men and women indistinguishable are uh uh individuals interchangeable in terms of their genetic endowment and um that that does take you into various minefields or took me into those minefields um could you talk a little bit about that i think you talked this this last summer um about a sort of cancellation attempt made against you um and it's obviously quite a fraught issue across university campuses it is at oxford um and it goes into this wider debate about free speech what do you think about that the debate that's been raging recently um and is it the sort of very brittle discussion that we're having these days about it because it always descends into whether parlor should be uh banned or whether twitter should get rid of donald trump and more generally the state of of academic free speech and free speech more broadly yeah i think it's a discussion that we need to have with uh you know a fair amount of of uh subtlety that is dividing issues from each other that are easy to go on together so for example the platform of a president of the united states i think is a sweet generous issue and you can't generalize from where donald trump can keep his twitter account to other free speech issues especially when he uses that account to issue bellicose statements about uh nuclear uh war so let's put aside the issues about the president of the united states the uh there are also issues about legitimate government control over speech where very wide latitude i think ought to be available and here i'm strongly within the american tradition of broad latitude for speech outside of government coercion the the american first amendment when it comes to universities it isn't um and to mainstream publishing uh outlets both book publishers and um uh uh news outlets the issue isn't uh should everyone get a platform because obviously no one ever has there has to be there have to be measures of quality control and discernment not every kook gets an op-ed in the guardian or a tenured position at the university of oxford the problem with a lot of cancel culture is that legitimate scholarly inquiry reading standards of peer-reviewed science and scholarship gets quashed because of the content of the conclusions that is that there is a an orthodoxy on a number of politicized issues where uh unpopular but uh opinions that have have met standards of quality get uh get get squashed that's bound to lead both to a distortion of our understanding of reality and it opens the door to uh demagogues who can then claim that they too are victims of cancer culture as we've seen in the united states where the cancellation of a book by a rather irresponsible politician josh hawley he turned it around and blamed that on cancelled culture preposterous in his case but the uh uh universities opened the door for him to to walk through and it also i think saps the credibility of the entire um establishment of responsible truth-seeking and fact-finding that if uh if it is widely believed that uh dissenting opinions will will will not be tolerated that anyone who goes against the mainstream will be um canceled fired suppressed then people think why should i trust the consensus of scientists uh you tell me that 99 of scientists accept human-made climate change yeah but from what i've read about universities if anyone didn't they would they'd be canceled so why should i believe the scientific consensus that's the kind of uh i think dreadful uh risk that we're it's not a risk it's a reality uh price that is being paid for the unfortunately often valid impression that universities are not crucibles for open exchange of ideas and so you have knowledge as one of those features in your presentation and this does seem this growth of cancer culture like it could be a block on that kind of progress and i'm not normally one to quote lenin but i think lenin asked the question what is to be done so what needs to be done in encountering this yeah so uh i i think um part of the pushback has to come from uh people in positions of power and responsibility and one of the shocking features of cancel culture is how quickly university provosts and vice chancellors and presidents have acceded to quite preposterous demands for uh intellectual conformity coming from uh sometimes from from uh uh students and academics and i would like to see a little more uh backbone commitment to principle from the people who actually wield the levers of power but it uh also at the grassroots level one of one of the great hazards of um of of punishment of dissenting ideas is that we know from sociological modeling that that can lead to a um something called pluralistic ignorance where everyone um believes that everyone else believes something but most people don't believe it but that kind of denial that emperor's new clothes phenomenon can occur when there is punishment when uh you get punished for if you have legitimate feel you're gonna be punished for an unorthodox opinion and you fear that you're gonna be punished for failing to punish if you don't denounce someone for being a racist that shows that you're a racist that can lead to the entrenchment of pluralistic ignorance where some there are a percentage of people who are fanatical true believers then there's a much there can be a much larger people who've been intimidated into silence and so to break that spiral of silence to have the little boy saying the emperor is naked we have to also empower the people uh the the students the younger people the uh who perhaps aren't going along with this repression but are just afraid to open their mouths so they have to be given a platform as well speaking of giving students a platform we're going to turn in just a second to the the many wonderful questions that our members are sending in the the last question from me that i'm going to be asking everybody this term what's the one thing and it can be a really niche concern niche issue that we should be paying lots of attention to but we aren't um well let's see where'd i begin uh small modular nuclear reactors uh fourth generation nuclear uh the world is ravenous for energy it's probably not all going to come from solar and wind especially in developing countries which are uh should and ought to be allowed to grow economically you can't grow economically without plentiful energy a new generation of um uh nuclear energy that does not uh have the expense and uh regulatory burden of massive light water reactors is at least one place to look and that's another very positive answer i'm going to turn to some questions now and hope that maybe in these questions there's somewhere that i can tempt you into a long bet with me um okay is the by the way how are we doing with the microphone issues i just noticed oh yeah you sound great there thank you okay um the the first question i've got here is from jessica swafford from jesus college who says um i noticed in your happiness graph there was a decline in the us which you mentioned around uh 2010 2014. um this is around the same time that smartphones became mainstream do you think immediate access to seeing what others are doing all of the time has contributed to this dip there there is a uh there is such an argument that um uh the constant social comparison of uh the fear of missing out everyone seems to be uh happy but me plus the channels for sniping malicious gossip uh especially for i think for younger people who don't have the uh the experience and emotional maturity or to ride out the nastiness could could be a factor although in the in the case of the united states there has been a slight decline that's got that began even before that time so i think that could be a contributor but there is something in in in that in many ways where the united states is a very weird country uh uh by the standards of affluent democracies and the united states has been getting less happy even before the introduction of smartphones though i uh it's conceivable that that contributed thank you we've got a question from uh manuel fiba here um who says well thank you for sharing your observations um and uh you can clearly follow your argument of reason and science having an effect on our ability to combat pandemics but another important aspect of enlightenment namely humanism can be under a threat given social distancing and increasing isolation what are your what are your reflections on that um yeah a good question and um hopefully the experiment will be over soon enough that it won't leave a that even if it did have a an effect uh it would be reversed quickly enough although in general while there's no substitute for face-to-face contact uh entirely it is remarkable how much as a species we thrive on information that what we're doing right now the the video conferencing and video chatting has filled us an astonishing proportion not 100 percent but an enormous amount of of human interaction and prior to that of course there were long-distance relationships there were epistolary relationships it's rather surprising how far humans can get by the uh the written and uh spoken word to say nothing of video feeds not the same but in fact in probing how the humanism originated in people have second thoughts about burning heretics alive and and uh breaking people on the wheel there is a theory that uh beginning in the 18th century the uh the printing press and the widespread distribution of of uh novels uh got people into the habit of inhabiting other people's skin and seeing the world from their uh point of view that made it a little harder to be sadistic and callous and that was all through the the written word alone that's a a hypothesis from lynn hunt um from martha nussbaum and others i discussed it in the better angels of our nature and i think there is some evidence for it but uh we're as we've as uh once been uh put we are in form of wars we uh devour information and uh not all the way but a large part of the way we can now go by these other channels thank you there's an anonymous attendee has asked something i think it relates to this idea of of increased empathy and ways we can get around that how should we given everything that's happened in the past year tackle the problem of racism in our societies well there has been of course uh uh very conspicuous efforts to root out racism in uh all of its forms and uh a little-known fact and this ties into the earlier themes is that uh racism has been declining again this may sound incredible on the face of it but in surveys both of overt racism at least in the united states i don't know about data from britain but if you ask people questions like do you think that black and white children should go to school together would you move out if a black family moved moved in next door do you think that uh blacks are lazier than whites um do you uh would you be upset if your child married a uh a person of another race the rates of racist responses have uh plummeted and in some cases they are kind of bouncing around the floor the level of crank opinion and there's a phenomenon over the last 60 or 70 years uh now you might say well that might just be an artifact of social desirability people know that these aren't things that you admit to in polite company but they're as racist as ever but at least two measures of more uh covert subtle racism have also shown decline i did an admittedly crude analysis in enlightenment now of searches for racist jokes where people you can get those data from data from uh google and these are things that people do in the privacy of their uh their homes there's no social desirability basis uh and uh and those searches have declined people don't find racist and sexist and homophobic jokes as funny as they uh they used to and my colleagues tessa charlesworth and mazarin banaji mazarin banaji being famous for her implicit association test the most widely used test of implicit bias that is not asking people questions uh about other races but looking to see how they strongly they associate white faces with positive adjectives and black faces with negative adjectives she's been doing that research for 20 years and she and tessa charlesworth have found that measures of uh implicit unconscious bias have been declining as well so we've been doing something right um we have seen in the last few years uh uh some of the overt races crawling out from under under the rocks possibly because of uh social media but even during the trump years the progress against racism continued um the uh one can hope that there will be a backlash against the uh overt forms of racism that have been given a a voice and at some of the measures that are called systemic racism i think somewhat misleadingly because there may be residues of past discrimination and oppression but that obviously ought to be um eliminated as well i'll just throw in one a couple of other measures of progress that uh although there's still a black white gap in the united states which ought to be reduced both the um all of the gaps health income literacy and happiness have uh shrunk over the last uh 60 years or so i'm finding all this very encouraging uh thank you we've got a question from george turner two questions actually um in saying thank you for your for your talk and the question so far um what your thoughts are on sort of post-modernism and it's it's sort of skepticism of things like science and reason um and linked to that why is it that some people will accept um uh sort of with only a priori judgment about scientifically backed claims about climate change but then not at the same time all the evidence that say free markets lead to um greater wealth and progress as well uh uh uh yes an app question so um post-modernism both is incoherent because any claim that um truth is relative or socially constructed or uh uh is itself uh advanced as if it was objectively true for everyone and so by its own standards is uh is contradictory namely if someone says everything is a social construction and has no inherent merit you can always say well does that claim have any inherent merit if not i don't have to believe it if it does you just contradicted yourself this is a theme that i work out in my forthcoming book on on rationality but also uh relativists social constructionists postmoders and so on don't have the courage of their convictions in two regards one of them is that they of course avail themselves of the gifts of modern medicine and indeed of modern economies uh they'll use antibiotics and and most of them probably will get vaccinated and when it comes to the kind of atrocities and crime that energize the moral momentum behind post-modernism namely that there is deplorable inequality and oppression and dangerous human-made climate change well unless you believe that those are just narratives uh then you've got to be committed to objective truth and science as the means of demonstrating it is is carbon dioxide a social construction is climate change just another narrative if you say well no they're really real and we've got to take steps against them against them you've signed on to the whole agenda of science as a means of determining uh objective truth as for the benefits of free market economies on the one hand yes i think it is a something that that intellectuals are apt to deny in the face of evidence that it is markets that make people affluent and many good things come from affluence including in in china and india on the other hand the data also tell us that um markets by themselves have no mechanism for providing for the those who have nothing to offer in the marketplace such as children such as the elderly such as the sick such as the poor and that 100 percent of affluent countries have an extensive social safety net and redistribution as i showed in the graph from the oecd earlier in the talk so looking at what works in the world as our indicator of what political system we ought to praise yes markets but also yes um social spending and uh and regulation unless you're proposing some theoretical idealistic utopian entity that has never existed namely an affluent market society with no social spending um then you have to looking at the data acknowledge that that's simply what a free market economy is namely it has regulation and social spending in addition okay we've only got a couple of minutes left so i'll go on to some very easy uh light touch questions um i.e god uh lots of questions in here about the role that religion has played perhaps because the enlightenment came around out of europe um does christianity have any kind of particular role that it can play that it's helped in these sorts of areas or even another question here linked to it that because the the enormity of the universe and the unlikelihood of of us getting these kinds of progress and things existing at all are there any merits for the arguments around the existence of god yes uh well i'll start with the last first uh no i don't think there are any uh uh there's no any merit for arguments for the existence of god um and classic objections are uh why why is there coveted why why did the holocaust take place why was there why did god allow slavery to happen uh and cancer and childhood starvation and all the rest um in terms of uh contributions of religion uh it would be it would be a mistake to say there that there have been none i mean religion is a very large category there have been some excellent ideas such as christianity's um uh disparagement of revenge vendetta the the the code of blood revenge which was the way of most traditional societies were organized and so when jesus said there are alternatives that was a that was a pretty big idea religious institutions to the extent that they support charities and hospitals and give people a a place to meet and work with other people are good things which is separate from the content of religious beliefs and certainly um together with whatever benefit beneficial effects have come out of religious institutions there are of course also uh crusades and fatwas and inquisitions and wars of religion continuing to take place in in the the middle east so overall i think that the positive contributions of um religion can be and are being taken over by humanistic institutions like hospitals and charities and liberal democracies uh the moral content is simply the the moral secular moral philosophy of the enlightenment of uh utilitarianism deontological theories that don't need scripture or commandments to uh give us reasons why it's not a good thing to rape and kill and exploit each other um thank you now last minute i found one one last question here that maybe where i get my long bet with you what's your view on brexit i know it's a parochial question but yes uh talk about a minefield i i i thought it was a bad idea for no for no other reason than uh northern the northern ireland uh irish republic border but also keeping scotland in the uh within the united kingdom and just the overall momentum toward international cooperation which i think is a good thing despite the unquestionable irrationalities in the eu but personally i think it would have been better to try to push back against the what's wrong with the eu than just to bail out all together i hope i haven't made uh enemies but maybe i've made friends among me um professor pinker thank you so much for for your time thank you to all the questions that have come in uh hopefully people will be leaving with a spring in their step um knowing that progress is real and that there's some development to be had there and some greater wonders and joy in the world for everyone who was lucky enough to make it into the ballot we'll see you in the other zoom chat you've had a link for and with that professor pinker thank you very much indeed [Music] you

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Length: 58min 56sec (3536 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021