Stephen Fry & Steven Pinker on the Enlightenment Today

thank you so much everybody it's a thrill to be here I love sitting next to heroes and Steven is a hero of mine as as John has said and as I'm sure most of you know he is one of the leading public intellectuals there very other there are the phrases one can use but I hope you accept that one in in the english-speaking world I first encountered him as a as a linguist as a man who explained and seemed to be Noam Chomsky's physical manifestation on earth in terms of his explanation of some of Tomsk in generative grammar and all those things the language instinct words and rules wonderful books like that and then of course the blank slate and one sense to move then from Steven who is a genius in all kinds of areas of of thought cognition evolutionary psychiatry and all kinds of areas of neuroscience and language which are fascinating but the move from from writing about language to writing about the blank slate which well obviously connected to the human mind one sense to move towards something a little more political something a little more addressing what I think you have seen as a Fault in public discourse about the mind and about society and about culture and about intellectuals and that was picked up with the wonderful better angels of our nature which shocked people with its optimism Steven is now considered a new optimist and this wonderful book enlightenment now a great title and one which I'm sure we can all think yes finally someone has come up and spoken for enlightenment continues this journey and so I wanted to say Steven everything you do I'd might accept your spelling of the name Steven overlooked that if I can ask you if it has been a conscious or you felt impelled to move from the more academic sphere of linguistics psycholinguistics and neuroscience into the cultural sphere I made the crossover when people would ask what I did for a living and I would say lost at any language how it develops in children how it works wow that's really interesting and I thought there is a market for bringing ideas about language and mind to broader understanding and there has been had been a breakthroughs in public communication of science in areas like evolution in cosmology I in dana source but no one that i knew of had tried to bring me the discoveries of cognitive science to a broader public and i thought well it would be fun to try so i wrote the language instinct which try to explain everything you always wanted to know about language but i hope would be an accessible format and i guess it wasn't accessible format because people respond to it responded to it and one thing led to another right and then this moved from that to to the mall if i can say it's a political side of it i mean you might have been looked at as a typical harvard intellectual academic with sort of left-leaning principles of liberal and the new sense of the word but of course in the last few years it's as if everything has changed in terms of our sense of what a left or right means and and you have infuriated both left and right to some extent with with both the blank slate and then the better angels of our nature i won't even tell me about your journey in in that regard if you think you've stayed the same but the world has changed or you have altered your view of politics and and well b-front from the position inspired in part by Noam Chomsky that language is a human faculty it's at one of our innate capabilities I extended to the question of what are our other innate faculties how the mind works I suggested that together with with language we have a suite of emotions fear jealousy love anger gratitude we have a set of ways of construing the world a kind of intuitive physics and intuitive biology and intuitive psychology we have a aesthetic reactions to the world a sense of which landscapes are beautiful versus threatening which spaces are attractive or not and that this suite of psychological reactions could be explained in large part by evolution the forces that give rise to innate mechanisms but positing a complex human nature at least for a lot of the 20th century and beforehand I had a kind of a more of a right-wing aroma than a left-wing aroma and despite Chomsky himself who is of course a rather flagrant flagrant leftist us as MIT Romney might say severe left us called himself a severe conservative so Chomsky did violate that equation but but there had been a kind of in in traditional liberalism a kind of utopian vision that that was based on on the assumption that human nature was infinitely malleable so that we could we were not saddled with the with with with fatal flaws we did not have to accommodate human jealousy or dominance desire for revenge differences between the sexes but with the proper socialization and child-rearing we could engineer society to in turn engineer humans yes I mean in a way it comes down to the you know the very simple nature nurture debate that you were pushing it more towards nature it that you know there was a evolution we were programmed encoded with certain faculties and ways of perceiving the world and respond to it as opposed to those being acculturated and the gift of a society in which we were born is that I mean in a sense although in a sense the estimate although what what evolution programmed into us was a set of mechanisms all of which could learn because it would be a stupid organism indeed that did not respond to information about the environment including other people but and what I explored further in the blank slate was the the political and moral and emotional colorings of the nature-nurture debate why the nature-nurture debate is not just a scientific debate but also a political one and it's because traditionally there there was at least a strand of left liberalism that seemed to be committed to humans as blank slates is infinitely malleable whereas there is a strain of conservatism that that began with the assumption that humans are are tragically limited that we are innately competitive and jealous and and also limited in our cognitive faculties with implications such that we can't we're not smart enough to design society from the top down so we have to rely on distributed bottom-up systems like like markets but because humans are perennial II tempted by conquest and exploitation then we need deterrents like the rule of law and armed forces to deter invasions so you had a kind of tragic vision which was leaned a bit right and you had a more utopian vision depending on a blank slate which leaned a bit left I couldn't explore those historical roots and then then tried to scramble them by pointing out that that it's really not a dichotomy that if human nature is complex if it has multiple parts then there isn't a you don't have to come down on the side that either humans are inherently selfish tragically flawed ultimately limited or infinitely malleable plastic blank slates that rather we have a set of motives some some of which have regrettable features like our desire for revenge on the other hand we also have there are parts of human nature that can channel and control and inhibit our darker impulses we have a capacity for self-control and they are massive frontal lobes you know we can count to 10 and say for a rainy day and all our horses and so on we have cognitive faculties such as the ones the very ones that I explored in the books on language in the mind we can have create new ideas by combining all old ideas and in a combinatorial explosion of possibilities we can have ideas about our ideas and ideas about our ideas about like common tutorial and recursive indeed indeed a recursive representation is one that can contain an example of itself so every time you say well I think that he thinks that I'm coming but I'm not that is you in dead one thought within another thought you're having a recursive thought and then that covers theory of mind and so theory of mind essentially depends on on a recursive yeah mentalizing being able to picture what other people might think thanks so language we also have the ability to learn from each other and so as society tries out innovative arrangements and some of them work better than others we can share our ideas about which ones that work and which ones that don't so there is scope for for progress for social improvement I given the the toolbox that evolution gave us that the cognitive toolbox right so in you again using your language idea it may be true that language the language instinct competence is encoded into us but that doesn't mean we're going to speak the same language well yes indeed that the that whatever nature gave us is a set of systems that are to be nurtured yes that even a capacity for language is not a capacity for for English or for Japanese it's a capacity to take in information from our fellow humans and allow us to speak and understand an infinite number of thanks going forth I will I will share with you my terrible joke which is that it's actually a mistake to think it's just nature and nurture it's about human will and the passion to succeed in it however brutally so it's really nature nurture and nature will come to Friedrich Nietzsche very soon because he's very much a Bugaboo of yours yes but if we now look at this extraordinary book enlightenment now most people have an idea of what maybe the Enlightenment is we can think of printing giving rise to the Renaissance giving rise to science and the age of reason which then gives rise to what is known as the Enlightenment I love you just to sketch briefly you can use your wonderful quotations for Kant if you like who himself defined enlightenment of Claire and I wondered if you could just explain what you see the Enlightenment is meaning I identify three themes as animating the Enlightenment and they they form the most of the subtitle of the book reason science and helium well which collectively lead to lead to progress indeed so reason is comes from the the realization that traditional sources of belief are actually generators of error things like authority tradition Dogma charisma hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts the subjective glow of certainty and that there's no substitute for a reason and in fact reason is the in a very real sense not not negotiable because yes but also even unreasonable ideologies use reason to justify themselves indeed indeed that as soon as even began to propose some alternative to reason and try to persuade people why it was better than reason you kind of lost the argument because you're as long you're not threatening people as long as you're not amassing an armed Posse to convert people as you're not bribing them as long as you're giving them reasons as long as you would insist if challenged then you're not full of crap that there are that people should take you seriously then you've you've surrendered the point you have it would be like saying there's no such thing as time and I will tell you about it it just doesn't make sense this is why there is no reason the word why is a reason word precisely that's exactly right and reason as you say is the absolute basis the non-negotiable basis of the Enlightenment exactly and science comes from the conviction that the universe is intelligible that we can formulate we can try to explain things and moreover we can since we can't a priori be certain of any of our explanations we have an imperative to to test them to calibrate them against reality and to reject the ones that the world tells us are and that's what we call sometimes empiricism for example in testing of the validity and repetitive truth of an observation for example indeed and it's often said that science can't give us our values that there is it can tell us about how the world does work but not how it ought to work or how we ought to behave and that is true as a matter of logical categorization that is a statement of fact and a statement of value are not the same thing on the other hand there are many insights of science that that I argue must form part of the worldview including the moral world view of any educated person such as naturalism that the laws of the universe have no goal or purpose related to human well-being that the laws of physics they just don't care about you they don't if you get sick there's there's no no entity or or or agent that wanted you to get sick if you fall off a cliff it wasn't there's no fate it wasn't preordained it's not fulfilling some mission or purpose stuff happens and I think if Victorians were as shocked as we think of them as being by Darwin and actually there's some historical evidence that they weren't quite as shocked as we think they were it wasn't by the fact we may have descended from apes or be Apes it was that it presented a natural world which was so callous and unfeeling and that we were the result of a simple what we would now call algorithmic series of rules not a design and there was no purpose to our life except the shallow purpose of reproduction well indeed there's no and no purpose judged by the laws of nature of course once human brains come into existence humans have purposes but it's a mistake to project our purposes onto the laws of the cosmos so that that's an example of a scientific insight that that has tremendous relevance for for moral reasoning including the fact that if we care about our well-being we can't look to the cosmos to take care of us that it's really it's really up to us we can test empirically if prayers are answered after all and and the results are in yes prayers no and even another scientific insight with enormous implications for for the human condition is this the second law of thermodynamics the law is you spend a lot of time in this book talking about entropy and I love you just to explain why this is more than just something that's important to physicists yes the in the technical sense the second law of thermodynamics is that an entropy I in a closed system increases that is disorder heat goes from a hot order to a cold that differences in temperature which are necessary for to have usable energy will inevitably dissipate over time unless the system is exposed to energy or information from the outside world but that closed flow systems disorder increases and in what when implication is that things going wrong don't need a special explanation in terms of any designer or entity wanting things to go wrong it's just the natural course of events for things not to go our way simply because they're vastly more ways in which things can go wrong than for things to go right and so we have to deploy energy and information in order to carve out a zone of beneficial order in our local environment with the use of energy and this was a recent discovery because it's you know we forgive our ancestors for noting above all examples of explosions of energy volcanoes hurricanes earthquakes mudslides they would think it was a world in which energy could just appear from nowhere yeah that's true misled by concentrated local sources of energy such as the Earth's core and the Sun and one implication of that is that we we asked the wrong question we asked why is there poverty poverty is just the natural condition of the universe the question that we should ask is why is there wealth and indeed that was a major obsession of a number of Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith is his Scottish and men betcha precursors but it does changed the way you look at things if you you realize that really what we ought to explain is why that we get to enjoy any order prosperity life-giving organization at all so we live in a world and I think Tom stop out put it very well in a petition explains if if I take some rice pudding and it's got a lump of jam in the middle and I take a tea spoon and revolve it five times the rice pudding becomes pink if I keep the tea spoon still and revolve it the other direction I don't get the jam you never get the job through the world not getting the jump so that the world it tends to disorder decay as we know sort of the heat death of the universe is the ultimate story but and so life itself is pushing up not just against gravity but against it has to find ways of efficiently using heat and calories energy work they're all the same thing essentially to to erect a something that will fight the inevitable that's why it so lightly evolution is possible in in local defiance of the law of entry meant to be not in defiance of it globally because living things taken energy from from the Sun or from deep sea ocean vents and I've use it to create zones of order we do the same thing with our intelligence we're using information we arrange matter into improbable configurations that suit our needs so that's just part of the larger point that a scientific understanding doesn't just allow us to build gadgets but it it does speak to some our ultimate predicament our ultimate goal in life which is to use information that is knowledge to carve out zones of beneficial order in this mass massive sea of increasing entropy and then humanism is the the third major thing namely that the what are we using this reason and science in service of and the answer is broadly human flourishing where human flourishing would include life health happiness knowledge culture to this social warmth and friendship which sounds obvious who could be against human flourishing either it turns out that that humanism is actually a rather exotic moral system that there are alternatives such as that they ultimately were the glory of the the nation or the tribe or the race the predominance of the faith bringing God's commandments to earth carrying out some historical dialectic or messianic age being brought to reality so just the concentrating the mind on what's good is to make people healthy and happy and and knowledgeable and fulfilled that's a distinct moral commitment and that I identify as one of the contributions of the alignment now if you put them together if we deploy knowledge to enhance human flourishing I should mention one other ingredient which is a big theme of the Enlightenment is that all of this is the the humanism is possible because we're endowed by evolution they didn't put it that way but we put it that way now with a sense of sympathy with the ability to feel each other's pain to have a concern with the well-being of others now the sense of sympathy that evolution gave us is rather puny it applies naturally to our genetic relatives to our our trading partners or members of our clan but it can be pushed outward by forces of cosmopolitanism but that is by mixing of people and ideas and by reason itself that if you have to exchange ideas and values with other people it's rather hard to maintain that my interests are special and yours aren't because I mean you're not and I can say that but I can't get you to take me seriously and as soon as I have to negotiate agreements in larger circles and individuals I'm forced to expand my circle of sympathy outward and to treat other people and ultimately other sentient creatures as equivalent in interest to my own so in a sense the altruism that might have evolved in order for us to help our own specific kin group or tribe or clan or small group and altruism that as it were allowed sacrifice for the for the greater good of a small group to which we belong can be applied to a much much larger that's right that's an idea Darwin himself proposed this idea he said that once see once we have the capacity to sympathise with others and we societies get larger and more complex there's nothing that can prevent it from expanding to encompass the entire human species once that set in motion now if you take these these three three ideas of Reason science and humanism and say that that beginning with the Enlightenment there has been the goal of understanding the world and applying such knowledge to improve human flourishing then one ought to enjoy progress that is sometimes we solve the problems that face us we accumulate the solutions that work and over time our human flourishing should increase and those problems are probably best characterized by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse war pestilence famine what's the fourth one seems kind of we're looking forward to the end of this century seems kind of redundant yeah it really could be it's read horse in a sense that's what they could admit which were the hugest problems mankind faced for millennia indeed and all of which are concomitant to the fact that we evolved by evolution in a universe governed by entropy and death is the ultimate kind of energy as far as humans are concerned our bodies merge with the soil eventually but so that that that's the hope and then one could ask well the Enlightenment ideal of progress sounds good in theory the head of that lamenting workout and that's what you have become very well known for is is taking a lot of time patience and indeed graphs to explain how in fact that elephant project has in your opinion worked first with the better angels of our nature and and now with this you you you really are very very keen to it to show in every aspect how across different nations in different parts of the world in different times in history the the the uptick of enlightenment has has served mankind that's right now 200 years later we can we can answer the question and the question is there's been enormous progress and you can you can graph it and I did and I thanks in large part to the works of Max Rosa who is here they offered economist who's the proprietor of the website our world and data but thanks to that another available sources of data on human flourishing you can answer the question have we made progress or not well to take a just one example the most of human history life expectancy at birth was around 30 today in the developed world it's greater than 80 and in the world as a whole it's 71 very very few people guess that it's that high so that the ultimate good the ultimate resource life itself has vastly increased partly it's because of the reduction in childhood mortality and even in a of what we think of today as a fluent healthy country Sweden almost a third of Swedish children died before the age of five little more than 200 years ago and then the rate of child mortality plummeted in the nineteenth century and what Sweden went through then other countries went through including today's the countries that tragically still have the highest rates of child mortality such as in sub-saharan Africa but their rates are plunging as well and some of those stories can be told for education the world is becoming literate I think it's on the order of 80% of the world can read or write whereas the historical average even in Europe was closer to 10 to 15% and the people who are illiterate tend to be in their 60s and 70s it's not a Johnny we know it's great the change is going because and girls as well as boys so the world is approaching gender equality in education and literacy it's also see progress in violent crime in any region that beyond the reach of the law in frontier regions in the kind of anarchic all feudal patchwork of medieval Europe there were rates of homicide that were 30 to 50 times higher than what we see in Europe you're talking about this is highwaymen and brigands and barroom fight this lady's slipping arsenic into their husbands here death all of those kinds of personal violence so that's plunged including even in an outlier for a lot of these trends is at least among Western democracies is the United States the United States is paradoxically given how prominent it is among Western democracies is something of a laggard in a lot of these dimensions of in case that way but even in the United States the rate of violent crime has been reduced by 50% in the last 25 years perhaps less obvious that war has been in decline not to zero and the civil war in Syria has been the worst war in a generation but even with the Syrian civil war the overall rate of death in warfare is a fraction of it what it was in the say in the 80s when the iran-iraq war raged when the Soviet presence in Afghanistan led to horrific fighting for a decade there was civil wars across Africa and Latin America with the signing of the peace agreement in Colombia into that sixteen the last war in the Western Hemisphere came to an end and the last minute of the Cold War so five six of the world's surface now is at peace including areas like Southeast Asia and for that matter in Europe which were just blood red with blood for four centuries and an entire category of War I war between nations particularly war between great powers might be obsolescence obsolescence the last great power war was the Korean War in 1953 but then other you could say well those are all kind of measures that you know economists care about what do they have to do with with the quality of life and the meaning of life well if you look at what you might want to consider to be indices of a meaningful life like leisure time to spend with family and culture as opposed to the drudgery of housework well if you thanks to the penetration of electricity running water washing machines electric stoves and refrigerators the amount of time that we spend on housework which really means the amount of time that women spend on housework has gone from something like 60 hours a week to 20 hours a week the number of hours that we work has fallen by about 20 hours a week in the last century from from the days of Bob Cratchit and Christmas Carol and so with the combination of less time devoted to housework and less time spent at work the amount of leisure time has increased both for men and for women for women it leveled off in the 90s and I was kind of puzzled about this fact even had a bit of a dip the reason is that women spend more time with their children today so a working mother or a single mother today spends more hours of time with her children than stay-at-home married mom did in the 1950s right and you're confident that that correlation is actually causative according to the the time you studies that I applauded right that's what because obviously people will let me near the freakanomics books for example would say the American crime rate has gone down because abortion rates went up at exactly the time that a generation of criminals would have been born that weren't up because of weight versus really I'm sure you read turns out not to be it falls into the category of too cute to be true it's uh it turns out an ingenious theory it's not right there obviously one of the first things that would have been put to you because a lot of people will be hissing as a we're used to damning our own culture to to to seeing it as destructive to seeing Sciences ruining the world you know from going from a biosphere you know well for a geosphere to a biosphere to a noosphere or if we now like to call it the Anthropocene you know that we have altered Mother Earth and also all these things you've said have brought us so much leisure time and peace and prosperity surely they've also brought us anxiety unhappiness suicide and this is the illness that that is the price we pay for all the benefits that the Enlightenment may have given us but you address this in the book as well yes so every chapter on happiness where I look at data on just self-reported happiness just past people how happy are you I mean who could be a better judge or imagine yourself imagine the worst possible life that you can imagine in the let's call that the bottom rung of a ladder and the best possible life you could imagine that let's call it at the top of the ladder and there ten rungs what wrong would you would you say you're at that's another way of asking related but not identical question when you do that you find that a in a majority of countries for which we have data over time happiness has increased but moral that only gives you a sample of countries where the data go back they don't go back that far Mia hand we also find that those data tend to correlate with GDP per capita some contrary to the idea that money can't buy happiness I mean it can't you know exactly for every individual but but an ammeter kind of does and so as the world has gotten more affluent and all countries have gotten more Africa there's reason to believe that that world happiness is has risen as for depression anxiety psychopathology there's a widespread belief that we're we're suffering from a new epidemic of mental illness particularly depression but it turns out not to survive fact-checking that there's been more awareness of depression there's more diagnoses and also removal of stigmas that people share their experience of suffering from depression which has the beneficial effect of having other people coming out and and noting their own and getting treatment which is with which is which can be effective but it leads to an illusion that depression is actually increased and the surveys that try to apply a constant yardstick over the decades I suggest that it that it has not a bit like homosexuality because mad gay people like me have come out it seems there are more of us but it is simply that we're no easier and then there's the you know Thomas Piketty and others have focused on the issue of inequality that it seems to be going that way and you also have things to say about that that are quite sort of Wow i popping us to some extent inequality can be measured a lot of different ways this is something that I discovered as I kind of sank further and further into the inequality tar pitch and even it's very hard to even get an economist to say well what exactly is the Gini index for the United States in the year 2015 and you can get like five different answers depending on how it's calculated but a couple of things I was able to establish from from this dip into the literature and partly with the help of our world and data what is that globally inequality is as decreasing that across the planet that whether its measured in comparisons across countries where each country is a unit or as best we can estimate it in the global population inequality is decreasing and that's just because poor countries are getting richer so much quickly more quickly than rich countries are getting richer and and one of the an astonishing fact of progress that we didn't discuss in when I went through the list is that global poverty is decreasing extreme poverty I should say defined by the World Bank as a dollar ninety per day in the International dollars kind of an arbitrary cutoff for the ability to feel eat feed yourself and you and your family by some historical estimates the rate of extreme poverty 200 years ago was about 90 percent that is about 10 percent of the world was not extremely poor now it's the figures that have reversed and less than 10 percent of the world is extremely poor so because of this massive increase in the fortunes of the worst off in countries like China and Bangladesh and in some many of the sub-saharan African countries in Latin America global inequality has decreased now unquestionably inequality has increased within many Western wealthy countries particularly for whatever reason english-speaking ones when the United States Australia but I suggest that inequality is not in its economic inequality is not in itself a an evil that it's practically impossible to avoid in any kind of economy that isn't imposed from the top down by totalitarian and as walter side l points out in his new book the great leveling the most effective lays if you really want to reduce inequality the most effective ways are violent revolution pandemics mass mobilization warfare and state collapse which kind of should remind us that any as he puts it be careful of what you wish for I think that the moral imperative is really not inequality per se but at some of the possible concomitant of inequality one of them is political inequality and resentment and the fact that the rich have too much political influence all right especially in the United States but also but really morally what-what ought to attract our concern is is poverty is how much people at the bottom have not how big is the gap between them and there and those at the top and there are thanks to a well in especially in developing countries thanks to market economies that have been growing and globalization there's been a massive increase in the fortunes of the poor in wealthier countries the the welfare state has put a floor under the poverty levels and so even in the United States which is famously libertarian compared to its western peers the United States has a pretty substantial welfare state and as a result poverty when its measured in absolute terms not in terms of percentage of the income of the population but in terms of what people can afford can you afford to feed yourself and flow with yourself through other countries it's fallen from about depending on how its measured from about thirty percent of the population in 1960 to something like five percent of the population now when its measured taking into account government benefits and the falling cost of many goods and services so and and I suggest is early poverty that morally that we ought to concentrate on I'm not so much in equality absolutely and so taking a look you lay out an argument that the Enlightenment and what followed it as a result of open thought free reasoning and and and all the advantages of science and humanism that led to industrial revolutions and yes some kinds of new sorts of poverty but has brought us to a not exactly a shining mountaintop but to a place which was unimaginable even fifty years ago to some extent in terms of war starvation and these other indexes indices that you you go by so the book might have stopped there but of course really you could you could subtitle it not the case for reason science humanism in progress but you know the enlightened society and its enemies it's opposed to Hayek so why is it that we as children grandchildren great great judge of grandchildren of the Enlightenment seemed to be so disrespectful of it so doubting of it so cautious or skeptical why don't we accept that it has given us everything we have and speak its language yeah and and it's an important theme of the book is that this progress does isn't isn't some mystical upward-pointing arc it's not some historical dialectic that inevitably makes us be better and better until we reach you utopia it's the result of specific efforts to solve problems and to retain the solutions that are effective and that if there is an abandonment of that principle then progress can could go into reverse and then of course there have been catastrophes where it has gone into reverse and there are threats today in authoritarian populist movements that explicitly reject a lot of the the themes and the institutions of the Enlightenment such as trumpism in the United States and and some of the populist movements in Europe as opposed to a universal human flourishing they prioritize the the greatness of the nation the the glory of Russia or the greatness of the United States as opposed to institutions of global cooperation which were a theme of the enlightened there's the idea that there should be zero-sum competition between nations vying for greatness as opposed to a reliance on science and reason there's a invoking of religion and re empowering of religious factions there are often specific pushback against scientific discoveries such as vaccine vaccines and storing the papers today about WH o talking about the huge rise in in measles in Europe as a result of a self-imposed wound we kind of are on the verge of licking that so there are so that and the question is why in an age of progress behind us are we suddenly facing these new these new threats now partly it's because there are I think there's there features in human nature that I've always made authoritarianism tribalism appealing that a lot of the ideas of the Enlightenment are rather exotic discoveries that are enormous ly beneficial but they don't come naturally to the human mind and they've got to be relearned and and read offended every generation that it's much more natural to think of the inherent goodness of my clan and to imagine that the chief in directly embodies the inherent goodness and virtue of my clan as opposed to the Enlightenment idea most specifically articulated by the American framers that that political leadership should just be a basically a bunch of committees with a committee chair that is given the responsibility of keeping people from each other's throats and for encouraging commerce but that must live by rules that justify whatever power we apply to them yeah post to a strong man who is because I mean using America in the Enlightenment and the you know the beautiful white columns of Washington and the you know the the the phrasing of the deck of Independence and so on a lot of Americans less than a hundred years after America became a country were puzzled beyond belief wire country's set out on such perfect enlightenment principles and ideals should have descended into such a pouring carnage the most bloody into Nissan civil war still to this date in history in its Civil War the murder massacre of species of animal and to us more importantly huge tribes of Native American peoples in the cruelest possible way gangland violence beginning in all the cities this was a country founded in exactly enlightenment principles written down by Jefferson who was one of the heroes of the Enlightenment influenced by pain another hero of the Enlightenment and by Franklin these these glorious people were but they still believed in slavery and the Enlightenment gave rise first and foremost to colonization the enslavement and the exploitation of native peoples of ordinary people conquered in their lands and so there's a way of seeing the Enlightenment as having been like a virus and you can see why people in the third world might say well your enlightenment didn't enlighten us it was either you're changing your missionary stance from being a Catholic or a Methodist missionary to be an Enlightenment missionary but I'm being a devil's out there yeah yeah I think it's I do think it's it is certainly true that one mustn't identify the Enlightenment with the West and particularly not with the United States even though the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence were magnificent enlightenment statements but the Enlightenment Hui didn't penetrate large parts of the United States which retained more of a kind of a manly culture of Honor as a way of organizing society rather than principles justified in a set of propositions and there's long been in the United States a divided more or less coinciding with the north and the south as to whether society should be organized by institutions justified by in principles or by individuals defending themselves and their interests by defending their honor slavery of course was not as old as civilization the slavery is pretty much the rule rather than the exception until the 18th century here all of the so-called great civilizations were asleep holding civilizations including so-called democratic Athens good in Rome including all the ATS the Bible civilizations and that was carried over and and expanded in the you're a Christian you might say of course that it was you know mostly Christians dissident Christians who first who first suggested you know Wilberforce people like that well as Quakers yes did the most of the least objectionable not all Christians are Quakers there was a Frye who was one of the friends of Fox who was an early other side is Jewish my father sighs Quakers I think it's an anachronistic 2i2 connector the the slave trade with yes my making is yeah religionists might argue that their religion whether it's Islam or Christianity or Buddhism is almost like a sort of serum like like Oliver Sacks is l-dopa you you injected in someone and they instantly have a structure and a way of looking at the world which can transform them and they can live by but if you believe in the Enlightenment and and the four pillars of it that you've you know adumbrated then then or laid out then that isn't a serial it clearly doesn't it's not a magic bullet it doesn't transform you or the world it's it's a series of ways of working to warn something it's much tougher than a religion it's not magical thinking right and so there is a challenge and I end the book by wandering whether as many cultural conservatives claim that modern secular humanism liberal cosmopolitanism enlightenment values are just too tepid to engage human animal spirits that they just they won't fire people up and that religion will never go away because it speaks to DP earnings in the soul and what likewise with nationalism I'm skeptical of that for a number of reasons one of them is that societies that that most carry out enlightenment principles the the secular Western democracies like New Zealand and Denmark and Canada are they don't seem to be collapsing and spiritual enemy they seem to be rather Pleasant places to live people doing just fine they don't seem to be joining Isis and great numbers to give meaning to their lives they also have the main destination of people who vote would vote with their feet I mean everyone wants to go to the the great enlightenment countries that that's where including the people from the that the religious leagues like excitable zones of the world they don't wanna stay there they want to go to Denmark and I raised the question of whether or do we need do we need the kind of secular humanist equivalent do we need humanist preachers thumping copies of Spinoza's ethics on the pulpit well I went say suffered but you and and people we know of Christopher Hitchens when he was around and Richard Dawkins and sam Harris and Daniel Danette and others have been regarded as almost evangelical fundamentalist in your humanism your secularism and so on how would you know I don't think that that's true I mean it's certainly not not true of me and it's and I don't think it's true of the the so-called the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism you know I hate Janice Harris tenet and Dawkins yeah on the other hand you're paradoxically the the critics of secular humanism who say that it doesn't speak to the human spirit are almost calling for exactly that like well you're it isn't gonna succeed until you have your evangelical process of secular humanism and you know do we need to have humanist congregations where people can roll back their eyes and ecstasy and babble in Esperanto so there was a Manor who I'm sure you knew as I did who was a very ordinary and enraging man but very brilliant one in his own way Stephen Jay Gould oh yeah he's a paleontologist he I think he was the man who first proposed what what he could Noma the the non-overlapping magisteria in other words he saw that where science and religion or spirituality they can have their own magisteria their own realms their own domains I think it's ultimately very unsatisfactory because it's impossible for science not to you know look at everything but what was your view of that that you know we're off we should not speak we should remain silent because Vikram Stein an enemy of scientism said what's your well Steve Gould didn't seem to grasp that you could happy that you could have a morality that did not depend on religion he kind of gave religion the franchise for for morality said you know science can't dictate our morals and strictly speaking that's true although I think it can be exaggerated therefore it's religions job but he kind of missed out on the whole enlightenment thing that you can justify morality in terms of them you could do it on utilitarian grounds what makes the largest number of people well-off is moral you could do it on the ontological grounds there's certain principles like - choice Canadian Browns yeah and you know the social Contractors business the other social contract indeed it but yeah and you don't have to call in a deity to do it but for all of Steve's vast area addition and knowledge and he missed that the whole enlightenment principle that was I think was a something of a vacuum in his some Stevens can be wrong I wanted just to quote one thing which really fascinated me because it might be a criticism leveled at you that here when you talk about reason you use two archetypes as it were two opposites and and you miss out the middle and I think perhaps that's an interesting idea you you you say opposing reason is by definition unreasonable there hasn't stopped a slew of the rationalist from favoring the heart over the head the limbic system over the cortex blinking over thinking McCoy over spock and now you may say well talking Star Trek seems a bit silly but actually this is going to bring me to our dear friend Nietzsche the nature in his book the birth of tragedy he he pulled on two Greek gods Dionysus and an Apollo to try and explain two sides of human nature walk Freud matically age in the super-ego will he go after which it is in other words that Greek tragedy as he saw it was was playing off from the tensions between the tribal bloodlust frenzied side of our animal selves and this rational Apollonian harmonious side of ourselves and oddly enough Gene Roddenberry was a genius if you look at Star Trek there is McCoy who's always gay you green-blooded monsters Spock is sane fascinating that one of them is one of them is logic you know he's dead how could your logic account for that spot and McCoy the doctor is physical and primal and emotional but the whole point is in the middle is Kirk who tries to be both that they will go to a planet which is all it and Kirk will try and explain that there is such a thing as reason and order or they were good one that is all order and he will transfer where's here you really do have it in furniture because you see that the neo-nazi or Nam near crypto or proton RC side of of Nietzsche this the man and Superman which some people regard as a fiction that he was putting forward not the app although he did die mad so it's very hard to know but I just wanted to see you know that the whole the Romantic movement constantly crashed waves against the wall of the Enlightenment and it's still doing it today their romantic sense of the individual the Maverick aside from the tribe and and it can become insane in Nazis amor Iran does more but but it also is something we can instinctively feel for can't we yes and I think I think an lead to some great great art great plot lines but isn't much of a way to organize politics and society and I might add up quoting from a great figure you would not enjoy nature sir he's fundamentally on the sounds like Spinoza jeez like Spinoza and to bring it with Jewish philosopher exactly and to bring at home Captain Kirk was played by a fellow Montreal Jew William Shatner of cool they a Landsman yeah part of my tribe so now it's good you mentioned Canada because you are of course Canadian and I suppose there is you know the archetype public intellectual Canadian was the great Marshall McLuhan a man of extraordinary influence to this day whose prophecies and sense of how society would respond to what he famously called the global village and the anxiety is that the the the written word the first information age movement would bring about and you read him today and it's still pretty astonishing he's quite difficult to read sometimes but an extraordinary man and you have fitted this role as as a Canadian public intellectual too and the third man who's recently come rather into the news is Jordan Peterson and while most people thought well there's Steven Pinker he's a you know liberal humanist and there's this Jordan Peterson is he perhaps a bit right-wing is he does he sort of dog whistle a little for the all right there was a famous I'm sure you saw his interview here on Channel 4 television did you with Kathy Newman him now for those who don't know he's he's also like you a psychologist essentially is right and he's written some very successful but books I but you both I think meet on your detestation of what you might call what he would certainly call cultural Marxism in the campus and you yourself have suffered from some extraordinary blowback on that and I'd love to just to share the story of what happened to you recently when you spoke about we very sensibly about the nature of you know D platforming and all the things we are aware of in in American particularly American academic institutions yes I participated in an event at Harvard organized by the open campus initiative which is a student organization dedicated to free speech but lying a common accusation that the entire Millennial Generation doesn't get the concept of free speech and they're just social justice warriors and snowflakes and so these are Harvard students who are quite adamant in just defending and what they call an open campus in conjunction with spiked magazine here in the UK and the panel that they convened was did political correctness help elect Trump and they had it on the close to the anniversary of the Tropic ellipse yes and they had that that mean at Wendy Canada a well-known Boston area civil libertarian and Brendan Jones and the number of us argued that obviously that the victory had a number of causes but one of them was that there is a wasn't there's certainly a sector of the population that voted for Trump despite his no flagrant unsuitability faithfully job as a reaction to to the stifling of opinions in forums such as college campuses and in particularly this is true of the I pointed out of the alt-right by alt right I don't mean the hence with the tiki torches that neo-nazis but rather the rather highly educated often tech-savvy young almost exclusively men who find themselves come across just empirical facts that are undiscussables in college campuses such as the fact that different ethnic groups don't have the same crime rates that men and women aren't indistinguishable that capitalist economies are more more efficient and more humane than communist ones and they find themselves immediately stomped on like a ton of bricks if they any of these facts are so much as mentioned they withdraw assuming that there are certain truths that the mainstream establishment can't handle then they spin them in the most toxic possible directions because they've never had a chance for these opinions to be put into context such as the fact that there are differences between the sexes doesn't mean that sexism is justified it's a new kind of growth fairness and the sameness or not the same thing to quote Helena Cronin that all abilities that show differences in the means show enormous overlap in the distributions such as that for any number of traits in which men on average are better than women but many traits for which women are better than men likewise the fact that there are differences in the crime rates now for african-americans and whites is just part of a general pattern that there are always differences but those secondary explanations those glasses on the statistics aren't got to because never got to because everything is closed down you're not allowed to say there is more crime here than there you're not allowed to say there are differences between genders here exactly so you don't come across they're coming either for equally valid explaining it used to be that Irish Americans had higher crime rates than prostitute Americans that was a gap that they disappeared and so the black-white gap could disappear as well but if you only get the fact and not the the context and the arguments that prevent you from taking that fact and drawing harmful consequences then you will draw the harmful constant you said the result that this and the result right and and I'm the reason that I know this is happened this is not speculation is that I've gotten emails from disturbingly former students of mine at Harvard so these are no dummies from young men in tech Jamie d'amour being an example not that I've ever contacted him but he's almost a prototype and they are naturally because of the suppression of speech and debate the alt-right becomes their congenial landing site and they fat each other on what else is being kept in the in the dark by them the Lib Todd's the lefties and so on indeed and they can say that there are certain things that are you know the academic mainstream can't handle the truth and they're right but then those ideologies can kind of fester without the proper immune response and the result is that you have intelligent people voting for a bizarrely dangerous and unqualified candidate for president anyway so those remarks were then doctored so that only the part that says that in which I noted that there are intelligent and educated members of the authorized I know for a fact because some of the most were Harvard students yeah another example and that was been doctored and presented both on left-wing sites and right-wing sites as a kind of support for the alt right whereas it was actually attacked at for starving the alt right so you sue so sensitive so hypersensitive raw are the culture wars that you were suddenly being accused by the left of being right-wing because the right-wing had edited and without it fortunately the both the Guardian and The New York Times came to my defense there's actually an article in the an op-ed in the New York Times about how social media are making a stupid and use that hasn't the way that I was taken out of context as a prime example I might be very stupid in saying that in the same way at the very beginning you said what language talk to you about what's program what's coded within us how languages are faculty allowed you to put that idea out into other human faculties and actually isn't that one formalism structuralism that then became the post-modernism that you served to cry and deplore isn't that what they did they said let's look at language as a kind of structure and let's use what we know about language including phonology and phonemes and apply them to social activity hence the e m-- suffix becoming such a common thing now that we find you know myth Eames and of course means that richard dawkins coined that they did the same thing they took the intellectual idea of study of language and said society is a kind of language it has the same sorts of rules it's the same idea but this is something of course you fundamentally disagree with his postmodern thinking on yeah on society and i wonder if you could just elaborate on that and why you think it's so so deleterious to yes it to our culture no you're right there was a kind of secure dispute by which the structural linguistics of roman jakobson Andrew Betts going yeah so sir and then got ported over in anthropology by quote lady Strauss you know and then the Marxist without reserve and so on yeah indeed and I've been taken into the I think rather eccentric position that thought consists of nothing but Harbert rarey opposition's in the self-contained symbol systems although the structuralism then became post structuralism which in very abstruse and ways abandoned the exact propositions of structural linguistics and anthropology but still it retained the idea which then got carried over into dari des deconstructionism that all statements are inherently paradoxical or circular because they're just symbols that refer to other symbols that refer to other symbols in a kind of close circle but what it left out of the entire discussion in the entire course of modern linguistics is there's not just syntax and phonology but it's also semantics that is language refers to stuff and that got left out and refers to stuff both because it's connected to the world via perception we actually linguistic symbols like and dog and table aren't just defined and like a dictionary definition I'm in terms of you know an animal and mammal but they also little pictures in the dictionary yeah and they are our perceptual system connects us to reality and they're also connected to a web of inference of logical conclusions that we can draw that make meaning not completely arbitrary but enmeshed with our scientific understanding of the world the fact that a dog is a mammal and a mammal is a living thing these aren't just arbitrary symbols but they actually have content and that widens out socially into I suppose the argument between relativism and what is the realism you'd say readers because they would say absolutism yes right no realism that's a scientific realism which is for the philosophy of science that scientific proposition are actually about something they're actually about the world they can be true or false so you know because just to sort of finish off in a way one of the things we've started to learn those of us who curious about neuroscience is that since you started writing even one of the things has become even more apparent to David Reutimann Kahneman and Tversky and and and all these others have shown us how contingent our knowledge is with it they've taken ideas obvious ideas we grew up with like illusions you know pictures you know are there two faces or a candlestick or is this a straight line you know we realize how our brain is interpreting reality in a very non realist way and so we also now realize that reason itself is not stable or reliable it seems very fragile you write brilliantly about some of the experiments that show intelligent liberal people who believe in evolution you don't actually understand it and if they're asked a few questions which is true they will often get it wrong on the basis of their misunderstanding basic Darwinism and so you kind of think well maybe there's something in this not necessarily Derrida on that count Foucault there any particular of these idiot idiotic Frenchman whose greatest well if only they could write Ronan Bart could write so you could believe in him because he wrote beautifully but they write so badly they can't be true must be true but but nonetheless this idea that our reality is not what it seems and that somehow you're being scientist it's your biggest you know you're guilty of scientism you you're too cold and real and actually life is more fragile and ethereal and strange and difficult life is fragile and a strange and and will always have it be mystifying but when we will of policies we develop institutions especially ones that real power we are must to the best of our ability root them in reason and scientific reality which is the never going to be absolute but is the only reality that we can approach and crucially you invoked people in my own profession like Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman who of course have shown the limitations of human reason that were vulnerable to illusions yes but the and I know that there's a false conclusion that some people draw but this is a refutation of the Enlightenment belief that we're all that were completely rational now the Enlightenment fingers were adamant that we're not compassion 'el they were some of the the best students of human quirks and Follies and people like Adam Smith than David Hume and and for those I just went to town with our our our emotional passions our our that the fallacies that were vulnerable to but what I think to be the point of the enlightenment emphasis on reason is not that every person is inherently rational but that we do have some capacity for rationality and we must if we're even discussing the question because the only way you could say humans are irrational is if you had some benchmark of rationality against which to compare them otherwise the question itself would be meaningless yet compared to ladybirds or compared to bears well also that that when when people make some fallacy like taking a stereotype the prototypical example would be Linda yeah they'd be articulate woman committed to social justice and activism is she more likely to be a a bank teller or a feminist bank teller which is more likely to be a feminist bank teller now that of course violates the laws of probability because the probability of a conjunction always has to be less than or equal to the probability of one of the conjuncts so since multimers bank tellers are bank tellers it's actually impossible for it to be more likely than she's a feminist bank teller than a bank because there's all now this goes out now the here the fact that I can explain it yeah and it they explain yeah that they called it a fallacy we called it a fallacy like compared to what compared to laws of logic and probability which you they could understand so these be irrational anyone who reads them can understand them some people who read it irrational so it's a mistake to say that we're incapable of rationality if it doesn't come easy to us but does it mean that we have to submit because I'm sure I'm not alone in this room of finding you're splendidly almost Bertrand Russell like use of logic there okay Oh God that's what happens when I read philosophy I have to turn back to pages yeah I've got it I've got it you turn the page I've lost it again the proposition what was the consulate what was the syllogism what was the you know and and in even in your and say a wonderful graphs at Union friend here max were produced suddenly a word like percentile will okra tile will come up and if it ends in aisle percentile and then obviously and so I have to basically say Steven knows what he's talking about I I assume he's right and in a sense some people would argue that that's no different to the hermeneutic exegesis that that the priest and the higher are you know the Hierophant is explaining to their obedient flock I can only I can interpret these facts and and the moment you start to use words that are from science and from logic most of us go yes yes yes listen to the the extension which it feels like that then then there's been a failure that I failed would have time that he could explain it to an eleven-year-old well that that's that is the aspiration yeah and indeed it would be completely contrary to the spirit of science for scientists to be considered to be some priesthood it's got to be that you might have to put a little work into it but you can reconstruct the log itself yeah it must be and so the the overall principle is that that we obviously are capable of reason just to have this discussion in the first place and that there are norms and institutions that can foster reason collectively if not necessarily individually in each one of us so norms such as free speech that if you say something someone else is allowed to criticize it so you can't rest on authority such as empirical testing such as peer review such as double-blind studies all of the in court of law standards of evidence standards of justice fact-finding Commission's journalistic ethics all of the principles that make us collectively smarter than any of us individually would be and that's what we have to rely upon not any assumption that any individual in isolation is particularly wise irrational I mean in the end I'm always prepared to believe a mathematician or scientist because they can say at three minutes past 11:00 on the 23rd of June in the Year 2031 there will be an eclipse here and if you want they'll show you they're working and I've never heard a priest or a spiritualist ever ever predict anything like that yeah oh I'd switch the switch and the light goes on it almost seems magic to me but I know that if I were to study long enough I would find the chain of reasoning the chain of Ascari that has led to that light turning on whereas everything else is either magical thinking or mystery or you know a sort of hidden you have to believe without being shown the working yeah indeed and there is in terms of the arcane technical vocabulary being inaccessible to you know wide readership that itself changes over time because there has been a steady trickle down of technical concepts from scientists and scholars and policy wonks into conventional understanding and that may even be one of the drivers of perhaps the most bizarre index of progress or example of progress the Flynn effect the rise in IQ scores over the decades by about 3 IQ points per decade resulting in a cumulative improvement about 30 IQ points over the saturation and one of the explanations is how that could happen given that they read your books yeah well they've read people people have have read books and had access to some of what started out as our Kino ideas that then kind of proliferate through the population and so ideas that we even take for granted now started out as pretty exotic concepts so just an example you know nowadays if someone said well I am I but dandelions and my headache doesn't bother me anymore and you say oh that's just the placebo effect it's just a placebo now that the placebo effect was at one point a fairly exotic concept in epidemiology but now most educated people kind of know what it is or a correlation versus causation you know win-win situation trade-off market zero-sum game zero-sum game these are things we're familiar with which are quite good every quite complex ideas that might have been considered hundred years ago need to get a lot of explanations you know some Morrison came out of game theory yes fairly arcane branch of mathematics yeah so what can happen is with education and also not not just education in school but in proliferation of ideas through the BBC or a magazine lauren and websites and so on that that that the baseline understanding can be smarter it can become smarter and so more sophisticated concepts become part of the conventional wisdom well I have so as you saw I got given a note here and we've talked so I could go on forever I just loved you I love the way you you just open things up and if enlightenment has that word light in it and you you do show us you know you show light on all kinds of areas of our thinking in our behavior and and I do want to thank you and want to tell everybody here that Steve will be spending 20 minutes signing copies of the book but I know you'll want to join me in thanking him for his [Applause] you

Channel: How To Academy

Views: 416,689

Rating: 4.8060608 out of 5

Keywords: Steven Pinker, Stephen Fry, Harvard Professor, how to: academy, how to academy, london, emmanuel center, emmanuel center london, driftwood pictures, Enlightenment, 21st century, demagoguery, fundamentalism, fatalism, author, playright, actor

Id: 8aT61w3Q6vI

Length: 78min 48sec (4728 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2018