Steven Pinker and George Will on Liberalism

i'm rob tracinsky this is symposium where we bring people together to have conversations about the nature of liberalism uh my guests today are george will and stephen pinker george will uh most of you would know as a washington post columnist uh thanks for coming on glad to be with you and stephen pinker is a professor of psychology at harvard and author most recently of uh enlightenment now a defense of the values of the enlightenment thanks for coming on thanks for having me and one of the reasons i wanted to have these two people on is to this idea of bringing people together in a conversation about liberalism now stephen pinker probably represents you know in the most broadest sense represents what we would think of as 20th century liberalism whereas george will represents maybe a more 19th century liberalism uh more of a classical liberalism but the idea here is to talk about you know what liberalism means in that broader sense in the sense that would encompass both the 20th century liberals and and the uh and the the classical liberals uh many of whom actually call themselves conservatives and to uh to talk about what liberalism is maybe in the more in the political philosopher's sense uh not rather than the you know we have liberalism in this sort of partisan political sense that we use in everyday discourse but in the political philosopher's sense it needs advocacy of a free society so i think i want to start with george will on this because uh you know you describe yourself as a conservative you have sort of absurd the idea of trying to reclaim the label of liberal and yet i think you would think of yourself as a classical liberal so what does liberalism mean in that broader sense what does it what do you think liberalism should mean in that broader sense what are the central ideas needed to to define it and defend it yes it's a little late in the day to try and sort out the terminological train wreck of american political categories but in fact american conservatives properly understood that is to say medicines lincolnians etc are the legacies of classical liberalism you said 18 19th century i'd say 18th century but that's equivalent i think the central idea is that liberalism was born in in the united states as an assertion of individualism a a society in which we believe in individual agency that liberals uh resist the tendency to subsume people into categories and into groups what we now call identity politics and resist the idea that because we are socially situated which is a commonplace common sense truth therefore somehow uh our agency is is outsourced or compromised uh to me one of the fundamental purposes of liberalism in the in the early 21st century is to insist upon the reality of human agency that's that's okay now let me then go back to stephen and talk about what does liberalism mean in in the way you would define it or what are the principles what are the principles that you would like to see as the basis for an american liberalism yes well like like most people who study language i have to uh concede that it doesn't matter how i define the word word the meaning of words uh emerges spontaneously in terms of how everyone uh chooses to use them and the case of liberalism uh as as we've noted it has a number of meanings there's the classical liberal sense today often called conservatism ironically enough it's often used as a synonym for leftism but on the other hand is also used as a synonym for libertarianism particularly when it's prefixed by neo so the word itself is uh uh is highly policinous as we say uh many meanings i i would identify it like like george um as the um uh the belief that political institutions uh should be considered as under uh negotiated among equal rational individuals and subject to continual updating that's i think approximately how classical liberalism might be uh characterized in that regard it contrasts with uh various kinds of tribalism that the political institutions are repositories for the soul of some nation or ethnic group or or race or uh identity categories as uh george has identified its current manifestation it's um can be contrasted with uh authoritarian um uh institutions that uh humans are so uh flawed and compromised that we must subordinate ourselves to some authority wiser uh than ourselves obviously contrasts with uh uh theocratic and uh religious uh conceptions of institutions coming from scripture or from an authority so that that's how i would think of the the overall core um but it has uh different meanings depending on what you contrasted with in that conversation european conservatism became articulate and self-conscious in reaction to the french revolution it was colored by i would say tainted by throne and altar blood and soil defense of hierarchies and of sort of suspicion of change when it crossed the atlantic uh it became something very different it became a celebration in america particularly of change someone once said that the story of the bible reduced to one sentence is god created man and woman and promptly lost control of events and conservatives in america like the absence of control that's the point conservatives celebrate the spontaneous order of freely contracting consensual individuals whereas those we call liberals today who actually are progressives and should be called progressives because they are the the inheritors of a distinguished intellectual pedigree they say in fact the point of government is to assert control to bring social change under the the conscious guidance of particular experts and elites usually those propounding progressivism so uh in that sense uh that it seems to me is why we ought to call today people call themselves liberals should be called progressives and own their their heritage and get on with the argument well let me let me tie into something here that just that uh uh stephen you talked about things being negotiated between equal rational individuals but subject to change which i think involves more of an idea that that social institutions will evolve democratically and i think perhaps the role of democracy and liberalism is a point of difference in those two different visions yeah so i i added that proviso of constantly subject to renegotiation to capture the idea that people associate liberalism with uh with change and conservatism with uh stasis and of course there is the berkian argument that stasis for its own sake uh if not necessarily good it certainly should be the default because we're always teetering in the pref precipice of uh of chaos and so if some social arrangement has managed to keep us from each other's throats so far um don't discard it precipitously that of course that's burke's a reaction to the french revolution that george mentioned uh and people associate liberalism with change not always accurately because you know nowadays liberals are highly small c conservative with regard to some institutions but there is there is that also just to pick up on something that george mentioned another dimension you know i think the political space is multi-dimensional there isn't just a left-to-right divide but one of the dimensions that's kind of aligned with uh left right and to some extent liberal conservative dimension is whether the control of our our darker side of our our violent impulses is done by uh outsourcing uh control and indeed violence to um a disinterested institution a government this is the idea of walk and hobbs and uh and and madison of uh we we agree that for everyone's benefit it's good to have a uh a government that's vested with certain powers in order to keep us from each other's throats subject to feedback from those who are governed as opposed to a culture of honor which is that every individual takes on the responsibility of protecting himself and his family from violence by maintaining a credible threat of retaliation including a willingness to avenge insults and a distrust of any central authority like a government that is uh vested with responsibility to protect us from violence and i think a major division between say western europe and the united states or at least the the south and southwest of the united states is uh on this side of the atlantic we have retained a kind of our own version of a culture of of honor not exactly sicilian but there is a kind of hatfield in mccoy's um uh dueling culture that says it's up to every man to defend himself and his family uh only a weakling would outsource it to the government and indeed government itself is is uh so mistrusted uh that opposition to the government including uh armed opposition to the government is uh legitimate even within a modern democracy an idea is considered quite anachronistic in much of uh of europe and indeed of the coastal and northern united states well some of that idea of armed resistance to the government kind of brings us into the the contemporary the the very current uh environment that we're in right now uh in the last couple of weeks and so i think that's a good idea to it's a good time to bring up something that on both sides in the last year or so but you know more freshly on the right both sides in america of the sort of left traditional left-right divide have shown themselves to have an illiberal element to them uh so i want to sort of invite each of you to talk about the illiberal element on sort of quote unquote your side uh maybe george talk about the what do you think what what do you think is the source and the the root of the ill liberal element that we're seeing on the right sources is an epidemic of grievance the the cult of victimization which has flourished on the left for a long time and now has been adopted on the right as a kind of we've developed in the last few years a kind of crybaby conservatism where conservatives say everyone's picking on me hollywood academia the media et cetera et cetera uh well the grievances are real in the sense that uh a lot of these institutions have have been uh conquered by the less long march through the institutions the fact is that conservatives are not are hardly uh embattled in that sense uh there's a vast array of means now getting one's message out there's an enormous amount of good writing from the conservative side so it seems to me the idea that conservatives conservatives should get over sort of relishing their embattled uh status as they see it and again get on with the argument because conservatives have done rather well i uh i cast my first presidential vote in 1964 for barry goldwater out of the southwest that stephen was talking about after he lost 44 states everyone said well that's the honest we're going to hear that well republicans won five of the next six presidential elections so our parties are are flexible they're sensitive seismographs trembling to every quiver of public opinion and they adapt so uh it seems to me conservatives should quit hunkering down and join the fray well i think the culture of victimhood is a an important ingredient to the current moment especially on the left and the academic left there's an insightful analysis by a pair of sociologists bradley campbell and jason manning and alluding to the just the culture of honor that i mentioned as the core of the kind of the uh institutional uh ethos of a lot of the uh the american south and southwest so they contrasted it as originally i think norbert elias the german sociologist did with a culture of dignity which is that you achieve uh honor and status and uh esteem and worth not by a willingness to retaliate against insults as in the culture of honor but the opposite with a demeanor of self-control and uh dignity controlling your emotions something of course that you can afford to do if you're protected against violence by their police and court system so the the culture of dignity arose with the consolidation of the uh of the state uh in european history and kevlar many identify now a third ethos which they call the culture of victimhood now they did not apply it as far as i remember to american conservatism it's ironic that it probably does apply but rather to campus uh politics and ethics where now you achieve status by being part of a a victim group being victimized something that again you have the luxury of doing if you've got an institutional infrastructure that's willing to punish your uh enemies your your alleged oppressors uh that uh provides an opening to take advantage of that in the case of universities the campus um uh harassment bureaucracy that allows you to press your interests and your status by claiming victimhood uh status yes the bias response teams and all the rest you not only acquire status by being acquiring victimhood you acquire special exemptions and rights cornell university has now said that that it would be mandatory to be inoculated for all students against seasonal flu unless you're a person of color and feel because of centuries of abuse of your body that you can't trust authorities to inject you with things therefore this heritage of victimization gives you a special status even a kind of right yeah i noticed that the the language of victimhood has been used very much also to to clamp down on free speech that you know speech that you don't like is victimizing you it is a form of violence and i know stephen you've been uh in some ways the the on the receiving end of that i also saw uh there was a university recently that banned george will from speaking as well uh as a uh as an unwelcome person but stephen could you comment on the troubles you've had with that as well uh yeah indeed there is this uh peculiar notion that uh harm and hurt are uh legitimate reasons for clamping down on on speech the absurdity being that uh of course anyone feel can have their feelings hurt by hearing an opinion that they they don't like that's a pretty basic feature of human nature we tend to uh identify uh our own self-worth by the various shibboleths and beliefs and dogmas of our tribe and it's it's unpleasant to see those challenged i mean we all take a lot of pleasure in reading uh op-eds that agree with us and uh get annoyed by reading those that disagree with us i mean that's a feature of human nature that we ought to recognize and uh control and it is a a a a regrettable development that um uh that those feelings are now legitimized that is that if if an opinion makes you uh feel bad that is a uh pretext for suppressing it a very dangerous road to say two steps here one is that speech is violence if it uh hurts your feelings but then this summer we got a permutation of that which is silence is violence that if indeed you don't you don't verbally loudly ascend to a certain catechism uh on a political agenda you are by your silence uh injuring people so it's it's a pretty comprehensive speech regulation you know some someone once said this had a big impact on me as a writer that uh uh years ago somebody was said a good op-ed should cause the reader to throw down his newspaper in a fit of peak and uh i think i'm always inspired to that a little bit uh but you know that the idea that that would then be a bad thing is is the the idea that has come up recently but what i want to talk now about is is what does what common ground do we have here i think there is actually a lot of common ground between we're used to arguing left versus right and you know over issues of you know should we have government uh medic a government health care program versus not a government health program and disagreeing on those things but i also want to talk about what it is we have in common and what the common ground is and and one of the things that that emerged earlier was the phrase steven used equal rational individuals uh which ties very much to to to what to what you said george so i want to invite you to talk about um what it is you think uh um is the common ground that we can work from i think the common ground is that uh we're persuadable that everyone should be persuadable on on the agenda i mean look at what we're really not arguing about anymore we argue about the the modalities of obamacare but the country has long since settled the argument about having a social safety net about having what we used to call a welfare state we now call the entitlement state we're arguing about marginal issues and splitable differences which is what makes the current frenzies and fury so strange to me because they're really not about public policy barack obama's greatest achievement was when he entered the office there was not a national consensus that there should be everyone should have health care regardless of pre-existing conditions eight years later there is that consensus and we're going to work around that consensus and work with it going forward it seems to me from elizabeth warren on the left to ted cruz on the right the political class is much more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology they all agree that we should have a large uh generous welfare state and not pay for it everyone's agreed we're gonna we're gonna borrow the the necessary money uh the democrats have what they call modern monetary theory which they praise and embrace and the republicans denounce it and embrace it it's all the same so on on the big issue the public policy issues there's precious little argument what what drives today's bitterness is the sense of that the other side despises its opponents that condescension is in the air it's a matter of its status anxiety all around and and that makes it rather hard to have a regime of persuasion yeah i i tend to agree that that we should identify the common ground and indeed the uh the fact that there does not exist a prosperous liberal democracy without a substantial uh welfare state uh and regulation um is a data point that we should uh acknowledge that um in fact it's kind of a liberal burkianism that is this is the way every affluent democracy works so the idea that you uh cut the social safety net down to the the minimum or to zero is a radical idea uh in the context of uh existing so successful social arrangements i myself was had an epiphany a number of years ago and i just looked at a graph of percentage of gdp uh redistributed among oecd countries uh how much of a wealth our state your countries have and they're all within a pretty narrow range i mean you've got the united states and canada at about 20 you've got france at about 30 but there just doesn't exist an affluent democracy that doesn't have it and uh that indeed is something that is like like other issues such as uh racial segregation um uh equality gender equality in in the law uh gay rights gay marriage uh issues that used to be controversial that no longer are and i think burke was right and ironically it's now an argument for a kind of uh a kind of progressivism that we ought to take a look at what social arrangements seem to be more or less working across the world and take that as a kind of default it could be a lot worse uh let's try to make it a little bit better but uh uh countries have um universal health care system health insurance uh it's a radical for a country not to have it and we should just acknowledge that as uh the current state of the art and that might expand the amount of common ground that we uh we recognize and of course my my my thing is that in general we should be far more aware of data on human well-being both across countries and uh over periods in history i can to to to the extent that i'm a a progressive or a liberal it's that i believe in progress actually most progressives hate progress by the way um so but uh uh simply looking at graphs of human well-being uh longevity violence um uh freedom um poverty and seeing how they improve it says telling us something that we have no right to divine by intuition or to or derive from dogma it's something that where we have to learn from the state of the world and that is that something about our social arrangements are are better than they used to be uh let's build on what has worked let's and just as we look at changes over time as a kind of signal from the world to challenge our dogmas and our preconceptions we should look at comparisons across countries and that is another way in which um i i have been pushed in a somewhat you know liberal progressive direction in that you compare national statistics of measures that everyone agrees are good things educational attainment health lack of teenage pregnancy lack of drug addiction lack of substance abuse lack of obesity the united states doesn't do so well we're not number one we're we're better than a lot of uh africa and uh south asia but we're way behind a lot of uh western and northern europe and uh former british commonwealth countries we should take that as a as a signal that we're not doing everything that we we could do to make one another better off now that that raises something i'm so glad you went this direction because one of the reasons i i thought i wanted to get the two of you together for a conversation was i expected that you know when you get stephen pinker on he's going to talk about graphs and data and and that sort of scientific social science approach to it and i thought well when you get george will on he's going to quote edmond burke now you've confounded me a little stephen by doing both of those things uh but i want to talk a little bit about that that difference you know if we if if persuadability and persuasion is the real big common ground here the difference in in maybe methods so sort of a more of a social science method and more of a philosophical or humanities method and i wanted to see if george if you would comment on that well pick up where stephen just left off it seems to me that to be a 18th century enlightenment libertarian liberal which is to say to be a conservative as i understand it in the american context is to believe in natural rights but to believe in natural rights is to believe if if you don't import some kind of theism into this to believe in natural rights is to be a real utilitarian what natural rights language has you say is as a rule experience teaches that the following rights are important to human flourishing this gets me to what stephen was talking about which is data let's find out who's flourishing and what we're going to consider flourishing and and what as a rule produces flourishing so the more we can reduce politics to not entirely of course but can reduce politics somewhat to an empirical discussion the better and this this brings in um this is where you get get the data you you reduce natural rights arguments to arguments about uh what the world has learned about flourishing but but i also want to talk about what is it that that the more the philosophical principles bring in order to helping you to understand what the questions are to ask and how to interpret the data and the wisdom that comes from the the you know the philosophical discussion of philosophical principles perhaps when combined with the data well george has uh actually put together the two approaches that at least in moral philosophy 101 are always set aside set apart as the two poles namely utilitarianism and deontology or the notion of uh natural rights now and i i agree that that distinction is drawn too sharply but some of the 18th century i don't know if you want to call them liberals or not but jeremy bentham cesare vicaria the founders of classical utilitarianism um you did say greatest good for the greatest number added up and that doesn't of course as as we know from intro moral philosophy that doesn't always comport with um uh individual rights as in the textbook thought experiments you know if the patient comes in for a you know a bunion operation and you decide and there's a another patient who needs a heart transplant a second who needs a liver transplant a third it needs a kidney transplant and so on do you euthanize the uh the patient who's come in distribute his organs and save five lives of the cost of one uh it's great it's good for the greatest number but that's where we draw the line and say uh the the rights trump the uh the additive sum of uh welfare but of course those the thought experiments are extreme and uh and i do tend to agree that the natural rights tend to be the best way to achieve the greatest good for the the the greatest number and i consider that to be the great contribution of late 18th century enlightenment um thinking perhaps classical liberalism although jon stewart mill and the spilling over into the following century deserves some of the credit as well but the idea that there is a basis for morality that is not theocratic doesn't come from scripture god's commandments uh namely that whether you conceptualize it in terms of um equal rights that what i want for myself i can't deny to you just because i'm me and you're not that's logically uh incoherent together with the notion of if everyone's better off uh who could argue against that those give you a secular basis for morality not not scriptural um that uh that i consider to be a core of the uh enlightenment contribution and indeed uh classical liberalism now i want to end by sort of well first of all i want to say that that part of what i'm trying to do here is is bring together people who are from different strains of what you might call liberalism so for example i'm going to be uh if if we were talking about my views i would be my radical by stephen's uh uh estimate on the issue of the welfare state where i think there is a case on data and principle to be made against it but that will wait for another day but i want to talk about what do you think is the way to go forward and not necessarily to get each other to get always to to to grab the consensus where we all agree with each other but to be able to cooperate together and to i think to to shore up the foundations of of liberalism broadly conceived well let me go yeah i think you're asking how do we how do we move forward in the united states yeah uh to a more civilized politics i think first of all we have to relearn certain habits that's i've recommended that the biden administration begin with a big expensive infrastructure project because there's something in it for everybody and you can split the differences and it'll get people back into the habit of legislative bargaining which is inherently additive you support my project i'll support your project and we'll all get the third guy's project and that's that's why uh legislative bargaining always grows the government but that's a transaction cost of democracy and you learn a little bit but well if we did this we'd begin to reacquire the habits of bargaining and of negotiating and chatting and talking just it's shocking that we have to talk about relearning these things as we approach 250 years as a republic but we do beyond that it it seems to me we ought to start teaching american history better no nation can survive it doesn't produce elites that believe in the nation and we need history taught by grown-ups who teach that history is a record of what grown-ups did in difficult circumstances and the great conservative virtue is prudence which is the process of applying pristine principles to untidy reality and we ought to be able to go back and understand that lincoln was a great man and so was grant and madison was a genius and long story short we have to get away from the 1619 project approach to understanding our past stephen well i i tend to agree that uh we have to uh reinforce starting with education but continuing in journalism uh what has worked not just what has failed and the fact that uh constitutional democracy was you know an awful lot better than absolute monarchy a lot better than anarchy a lot better than theocracy is something that we ought to know and that should not be tendentious that's i think a demonstrable fact like and continuing to the present that uh if we i i completely agree with george that to the extent that we can remove the sectarian and tribal uh symbolism of issues and make them transactional uh we can get a lot more done and that we should be conscious of the tendency that we have toward uh political tribalism and um consider that to be a problem that we ought to minimize and so when it comes to climate change uh al gore should not be the spokesperson because he gives it a left-wing brand and uh you've already politicized an issue that ought not to be politicized likewise with with infrastructure and uh i think george pointed to an a uh unintended consequence of a lot of the push toward both transparency in government and uh an end to pork barrel projects that was a big issue in the in the 90s and early 2000s but what i think wasn't appreciated at the time is to get stuff done you need um you know something some amount of log rolling some amount of uh favor trading and you also need the kind of um discreteness and uh benevolent hypocrisy that we all depend on to get along in everyday life you don't just blurt out everything you think if you want to maintain your friends and peace peace at home there's a certain amount of systematic discretion uh confidentiality lack of transparency if everything is out there then the kind of compromises sometimes dirty compromises you need to get things done uh become impossible so we need a little bit more acknowledgement of uh human nature in the actual conduct of uh of government um i i think it's it is it is a stupendous challenge of how to back off from this uh the this ideological tribalism or sectarianism that is now both paralyzing the actual operation of government and um uh raising the temperature and enabling violence uh uh in the political arena uh recognizing that it is a problem is at least the first step toward dealing with it and we've got to keep it in mind as among the challenges that we face are not just how to do what ought to be done but how to uh take it out of the left-wing right-wing red sox yankees good guy bad guy hatfield mccoy dynamic and which is why to come back to where i began a discussion today which is individualism is the heart of the matter because when you focus on individuals as freely consenting agency possessing rights possessing consenters and persuadable people then that that's the solvent that that's how you dissolve tribalism turns out tribalism is natural individualism is unnatural i totally agree but there you're going to without an extra a couple of commentaries you're going to raise the ir of communitarians both left and right the atomized individual is uh an idealization that doesn't that's not the way we work we're inherently social we're inherently community based all of which is true uh and i think one has to separate the psychology that yes we are tribal creatures we all we belong to families and communities on the other hand when it comes to uh articulating the base for government and for laws and for government coercion the idealization that it is a social contract negotiated among individuals is the the best way to have a a human government even though of course people live in communities and they have families and they cooperate with each other but the individual as the entity that actually feels pleasure and pain and happiness and uh and misery uh whereas the collective doesn't uh except metaphorically that the individual is the ultimate beneficiary of uh policies and the ultimate uh entity that suffers if it becomes oppressive is the way we should negotiate our social arrangements while completely acknowledging the inevitable objection that we are social beings yes the communitarians have lit upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery which is that we're socially situated yet get over it the fact is in our social situations we are individuals exercising choices and agencies and uh some people would like to be less immersed than others would in their communities let a thousand flowers bloom well i i what george said something i really liked which is talking about the the habit of talking and so i'm very glad that we've gotten the two of you together to talk and have this conversation and i hope that we can uh make a habit of doing this sort of thing uh so i really want to thank both of you for coming on thanks george and thanks steven enjoyed it thank you very much nice to meet you george nice to meet you robert my guests today have been george will and stephen pinker i'm rob tracinsky with symposium magazine if you enjoyed this discussion check out the magazine at symposium.subscribe to the podcast subscribe to the youtube channel for more conversations like this one and thank you for joining the conversation

Channel: Symposium

Views: 9,247

Rating: 4.817544 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Nki-81_JgZk

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021