Steven Pinker on the radical left, Jordan Peterson, Chomsky, and Sam Harris.

it it really is a terrible idea to try to change the meaning so that people can't even get certain thoughts across so if you ask is it possible for a white powerless unemployed working-class person in a poor southern in order Appalachian town to be have derogatory opinions about african-americans and you say oh no we can't ask if he's racist because racist means power hi professor it's a pleasure to meet you nice to meet you I'm Kurt I'm uncle the director this is Peter and he's helping me tag-team this interview okay very good pleasure to meet you nice to meet you okay so is it all ready if we just get right into the questions let's go starting off I want to know what is the left we have to define the left and I would like you to give its defining traits its characteristics it's hard to give a definition because political ideologies turn into tribes and so people affiliate with those in the group they like to interact with that they valued morally and nowadays especially the United States it's harder and harder to discern a common intellectual thread behind the left and the right we see that especially in the rough it's where you have pro-russian anti-free trade right-wingers all go in the mind of anyone who was a right-wing or even 10 years ago also vote the left has switched in a number of its affiliations but I would use it informally in a way that people tend to identify those who are sympathetic with with socialism those who tend to be at least in American politics more likely to be the Democratic Party than the Republican Party there are a number of positions that go with it but they can often be blurred as the coalition's themselves Ricola less would you identify with or do you identify with someone who's on the Left no I certainly don't identify with the right and most people would identify me based on my positions as center left in terms of them I believe in a graduated income tax I believe in regulations on environmental despoliation I agree I'm in favor of from social programs like welfare and medicine on the other hand I also believe in the importance of markets I believe in the primacy of free speech and individual rights I believe that policing is an important component of reduction of violence which is not a popular view on the left so I have an eclectic mix which I examine on an issue-by-issue basis and evaluate in terms of my best reading of the evidence but I try not to fall into an ideology or quite left there seems to be a considerable overlap recognizing these differences in your opinion when does the left go to far you know let's say a number of ways is especially the contemporary left has tended to gravitate toward identity politics toward seeing debate and analysis of social issues in terms of the relative power of different ethnic groups and races and seeing social progress in terms of rectifying and imbalance between whites and blacks or men and women as opposed to recognizing discrimination that has occurred but striving toward a society in which people are evaluated based on their individual rights and their individual merits so identity politics and with that a a relativistic epistemology that says that your opinions are determined to by your race your gender your sexual orientation your handicap status as opposed to their internal consistency and support by evidence I think there's far too much hostility to markets into capitalism on the left is given the historical and contemporary rector of which societies one we want to Riven North Korea versus South Korea West Germany versus East Germany Venezuela vs. Uruguay for example let's see though well those are old I think the as I mentioned before the hostility on the left to rule of law and law enforcement is inconsistent with their role of policing in reducing violent crime that be another issue that the left I think has lost touch with with facts and the importance of market economies in elevating societies from extreme poverty the fact that global extreme poverty has declined by 75 percent in the last 30 years largely because of liberalisation market economies in countries like China and Vietnam and India so those are a number of issues in which the left has gone off the tracks but the contemporary American right is far worse the Trump is right in integrating international agreements and norms which are increasingly going to be necessary to confront global challenges like climate change the hostility to any form of regulation even ones that would be justified by a market friendly mindset such as pricing harm to the environment which even if you're a staunch capitalist utilize the market itself will not take care of the indifference to the the plight of people who can't contribute enough to a market economy to support a decent way of life the difference today to the poor to the sick after the elderly and therefore a rather ideological opposition to all forms of government assistance to the to the needy we just know again there's nothing that dictates that you have to be hostile to social programs if you're sympathetic to markets because it's just a basic of analysis of markets that they don't provide for for the poor so unless you just are happy to let the cooler starve and die of disease you have to have markets you have to have mechanisms that the market doesn't provide it is hardly radical eating if you are a free market libertarian sorry you've done some work with the heterodox Academy right I guess that's right I gave the keynote at their last meeting for example have you seen the rise of the campus left do you see it as becoming more extreme in the past few years and and can you give some examples of that if you do see it as becoming more extreme yeah I think it I think it has although as I said in my address contra contra Billy Joel we did start the fire we did the baby boomers and there were episodes of intolerance and shutting down of free speech when I was an undergraduate number of decades ago I think there is an increase in the number of speakers who are decided who are shouting down with loud protests sometimes physical alteration altercations with the setting of fire alarms and we also know just by surveys of a political affiliation of professors that they are drifting rather sharply to the left in many humanities departments there are more Marxists than there are people who identify as conservatives why do you think that is some of it is because of an increase in social and residential segregation that people with higher amounts of education will live with other people who are just like them and people particularly in on college campuses or in large cities and people who are more conservative tend to be more in the suburbs exurbs in rural areas partly because academia has some I think some pathologies in terms of people hiring people like themselves so that once there was a generation that got tenure in many departments they replicated themselves hired people with the same so those are a couple of the reasons is there's also a natural there's a I think a natural affinity among intellectuals for more liberal positions some of the justified it was often liberals and leftists who are at the forefront of social movements that universally now I take for granted and that we now enjoy such as racial equality gender equality and gay rights so some degree of liberal filters may be a good thing but when it comes to stifling disagreement recognising that universities are not structured in a totalitarian fashion and that there still are orthodoxies in universities and taboos some of which you have touched on do you believe that universities follow a propaganda model or would you not go that far no I mean I think there are tendencies in some disciplines in some departments toward replicating with particular ideologies the other hand a lot of members of the heterodox Academy are university professors a lot of the responses to campus suppression come from campuses so it is not it is not utilitarian it is not a propaganda Factory you had mentioned a variance by discipline in terms of how ideological these disciplines become that there's a variance what explains this variance why are certain disciplines more ideological let's say than others this is purely speculative but I think disciplines that are closer to the sciences tend to be a little less ideological because there is at least a commitment and sometimes the reality of holding your beliefs to a caracal account to see which of your beliefs survive empirical tests whereas in disciplines where that is not on a norm or an ideal or an aspiration they can be more justyou force of personality charisma rhetoric that can preserve certain beliefs against a possible falsification I remember you were talking about the effects of political correctness in the form of a backlash a rise of the right like a counter position and you already mentioned that the right seems to pose a greater threat right now can you talk about the relationship why is it that why is it is it necessary that when the left gets too out of hand and the right does something similar that's not exactly the argument it's more that when opinions get suppressed and people who might even be reasonable same opinion suppress suspect that the academia or whatever form it is can't handle the truth that bear if they can't show why a position is wrong why it seemed coherent why is contradicted by the facts but they just fed it out completely they suspect well there must be something to that idea because if there's something wrong with it they could just show it's what was wrong we wouldn't have to squelch it and so they can retreat to their own bubbles we're much more extreme and dogmatic and categorical and unsubtle versions of the hypothesis can that I can confess her unopposed by people who might be more conversant with it with the data and the counter arguments so they can be a kind of maligned mirror image of campus orthodoxy in both write orthodoxy now by the way the reason that I think that the right is worse is because they they have power I mean their senators they're the governor's they're the President and though the right-wing orthodoxy is much more dangerous than professors and students shutting out speakers in universities but they do they can feed each other where a lot of the so let me just be concrete there are universities there is often a hostility and a lack of comprehension of market economies now in reality there is no such thing as a market economy that does not have regulation and social transfers redistribution that's just the libertarian fantasy of a perfect anarcho-capitalist free market country where the government does nothing but enforce contracts and prevent the use of force does not exist and good reasons why it doesn't exist there are number of reasons why it's not level but um because often those on I campus assume that capitalism and free markets equate to anarcho-capitalism and capitalism is pretty much a dirty word on campus then get a hard-line libertarian rebound we're in a lot of the American right there's hostility to all regulation of hostility to all redistribution often resulting in the gutting of completely justifiable mechanisms of regulation or or social programs a reaction to the uncritical hostility to capitalism on the campus left so any it's unhealthy when you have such a lack of nuance a lack of compromise a lack of discussion and you get polarized extremes and we're seeing that in politics or the one hand universities on the other let's get into some cognitive science I remember you were suggesting that we have some leeway or some elasticity in our brain for what we categorized as an in-group versus an out-group obviously because none of us were around each other a million years ago or ten thousand years ago but that this but the identity politics somehow undermines that or or takes advantage of it in a negative manner can you explain this one of the core beliefs of the of the earth right of the ban in Breitbart Trump version of modern nationalism is that we are hard-wired to fall into tribes that the idea of a global civilization of transnational organizations is utopian is futile because we evolved as tribal creatures now I think we do have tribal instincts but what counts as a tribe is highly elastic and certainly not a race because in our evolutionary ancestry would seldom have encountered a person driven off the race link so you couldn't have a built-in hostility other races only as time more to some notion of coalition or clan people who are on a side who might have some fictive relatedness that that makes them seem like one brothers or or or like families but that the idea that this coincides with a modern nation-state with the United States of America or France is I think anachronistic we have multiple tribal affiliations were loyal to our University to our sports team to our state or province to our country and that there it's not that we categorize ourselves as belonging to one and only one tribe equals nation which is in locked in zero-sum competition with other nations and that is the basis of crumb pused foreign policy okay for our viewers for the people watching this can you define the enlightenment broadly speaking what are the values of the Enlightenment well the there's no official definition because it didn't they weren't like opening closing ceremonies there's no membership card so there really is no definition it's it's a term that's loosely applied to as a movement to a number of thinkers in the sec typically in the second half or second two-thirds of the 18th century primarily in England Scotland America and Germany it tends to include a embrace of science skepticism toward religion and scripture an emphasis on the power of reason and of human rights when I referred to enlightenment ideals I spell it out in the subtitle of my book I mean the reason science humanism and progress now I don't claim that that is the correct definition of the arrangement I don't care what the correct definition is there isn't one I wrote a defense of Reason science humanism and progress I used enlightenment as a loose label form I could have also called it secular humanism we're gonna call it cosmic power liberalism enlightenment ideals were attached here but nothing is at stake over whether the term is correct in that case let us dive into some of these ideas particularly progress and humanism to start I think it's fair to say that the term progress is very long and diverse history history philosophy in the interest of synchronizing our metric we'd like to touch on the similarities and differences of your view of progress and its previous historical usage for example the philosopher of progress Hegel believed that material substance conformed to a sort of set inevitable ideological track and that this was how history were a sort of unfolding of material on a set course of ideas and that this was inevitable but this seems to conflict with your view of progress would you agree absolutely yeah well when I think of progress it's not that but it is honest but where does your view of progress differ first of all I deny that there exists a force dynamic dialectic that we can call progress the human condition does not have progress built then quite the contrary the University is a different trust kind of grinds us down both three forces of of entropy the growth of natural growth disorder and the process of evolution which is a competitive process where various germs and parasites and pathogens and pestilence organisms and spoilage organisms are always trying to do us in either way in our well-being and the only way to progress happens in the teeth of all of these forces pushing against it is the extent to which humans use ingenuity that is their understanding of how the world works and they deploy it in the service of improving human wellbeing where human well-being would include health happiness prosperity freedom stimulation the social ties are the kind of things that the people like and want to the extent that the kind of things that people like and want improve over the course of time that's progress and what makes it possible is humans solving problems deploying their understanding of the world to make other humans better off thank you we're just trying to make sure that our viewers understand how your view of Progress differs from let's say the traditional if there is one view of progress and to the rest absolutely it's extremely important because people often confuse them and indeed the notion that I have a problem is actually rather simple and boring one namely if people live longer that's progress people are less likely to be murdered that's progress if women can do what they want to do that's progress so the Enlightenment thinkers in the early enlightenment high technological progress to ideological progress arguing that the two go hand-in-hand would you also agree to that assumption not necessarily because it depends on what the technologies are deployed to do nuclear weapons for example our technological tour de force but not a example of progress because they're designed to kill people who said they'd be better off antibiotics on the other hand oxidation panty retroviral those are examples of progress because they also involve human ingenuity but in order to make people happier and healthier in longer lived so the progress technology only drives progress when it's deployed in the service of humanism and that's why crucially in my subtitle I had humanism as one of the ideals without it scientific advances don't necessarily lead to progress thank you we find with the russian philosopher Alexander Dugan he believes that these two should also not be equated that technological progress an ideological progress can be leagues apart when looking at the West do you find that this is the case or do you find that when you look at Western societies that their technological progress does match their ideological progress sorry about that I don't know if you're gonna do this so that's going online unedited okay so it'll be yeah sometimes not always and it's important to distinguish enlightenment ideals with Western ideals of the Enlightenment a lot of the ideals originated in the West all ideas have to originate somewhere but they're they're not the same thing and in the West there's been furious opposition to enlightenment ideals I encounter enlightenment in romantic militarism in romantic nationalism so Western and enlightenment are definitely not the same thing and within the West there there have been many examples of progress often driven by by science and technology or by philosophy and human rights the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it's hard to even to call that Western it did most of it was written by by some Western thinkers and it was pushed by Eleanor Roosevelt but with the opposition of many forces within the West the United States is very squeamish for example her signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because there was Jim Crow those racial segregation Britain was uneasy about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but they still had their colonies where as a number of Eastern countries were happy to sign on Ethiopia and Africa a number of Muslim majority countries were happy to so later on so is universal human rights a Western concept well somewhat and somewhat not understand that it varies and the way it's benefiting like an ideas have been adopted would you still say that the genesis of the Enlightenment is a uniquely European phenomenon no some of the parallel ideas originated in other parts of the world in in India in Ethiopia there was a hermit living in a cave in Ethiopia named Yakov who originally sorry independently came up with a number of the like things like skepticism of a scripture and human rights more recently in the family of ideas that I think most of us would want to promote their ideas that distinctly came from the East such as Gandhi's concept of nonviolent resistance such as restorative justice and Ubuntu from South Africa so the family of ideas that center around using knowledge to advance human well-being they can come from anywhere if we dilute the Enlightenment down to just sort of these Universal ideas as opposed to a specific European movement do we run the risk of sort of decaffeinated it into just the kind of core essence of human beings that seeks freedom oh it's still the Enlightenment well yes and no so no in terms of capital e enlightenment if find that you want to use the word to refer to these family of ideas that originated in certain fingers the second half of the 18th century but words often often have multiple meanings there are far fewer words in the English language than there are concepts and so we can distinguish the Enlightenment referring to a historical period and movement from enlightenment ideals namely reason science and humanism and as long as we'll clear which the work we're referring to on the news Gordon light would you attribute the polygenesis of these Enlightenment ideas as a reflection of our human nature that human beings want freedom seek rationality universally and this is why it's polygenesis some extent they think is that we all want freedom for ourselves the idea that we ought to promote freedom for everyone may not be so hardwired into human nature but it might be universal nonetheless with a combination of features of human rationality and self-interest just the logical necessity that you can't coherence waiting saying but only my rights count because I mean you're not well project doesn't recognize me but versus you and so when you have certain human intuitions such as our own desire for health and happiness for ourselves and our families but then sharpened in the core or hardened in the crucible of debate in discussion with people who are unlike us then the requirement of logical consistency paired with the desire for freedom and well-being will push in the direction of universal I can namely soon as I'm in conversation with you I can't say well only my happiness counts because I mean you're not and hope for you to continue the conversation if we're gonna come to any kind of agreement it's gonna have to be well if I value my freedom I've got to acknowledge your desire for your freedom so let's come up with a social arrangement that gives us the maximum amount of freedom consistent with our not impinge upon each other's freedom we come up with a social contract there's not exactly human nature that a single person thinking up how the world would work would never come up with that or probably wouldn't but with human nature in the combination of discourse debate holding other people to account ferreting out law school inconsistencies can I think will push in the direction of humanism than other Enlightenment values if if these sort of intuitions that are that are required for this crucible of debate discussion are universal and are something that human beings didn't choose to have they sort of transcend our conscious choice and are ascribed into our natures is it something that's therefore beyond humanism in the sense that human beings control being the instincts that cause them to be enlightened they are because if maybe evolution larger historical factors and that we just kind of play along in this role I think they're they're natural in the sense that as people start to interact with larger and larger universes of discourse more people who are unlike themselves and and as they learn from historical mistakes as they see what works and what doesn't anybody of course it pushes them in the direction of universal a few minutes but if although it's far from determined because ideals and norms and institutions like checks and balances liberal democracy peer-review scientific communities free speech those are not an inevitable they're not even particularly natural they are optimal in the sense that if we seek to improve our condition those are the mechanisms that will allow us to do it and I think it's for that reason that you do see some you do see progress materially there is it seems to be a historical movement toward abolishing slavery even sacrifice discriminatory laws and practices and cruel practices not even not inevitable not monotonic but unmistakable and I think it's the combination of me of human interests and the inherent impartiality or objectivity of a reason women where did you apply it if as soon as you get commit to reason you're forced along certain tracks if the let's say this is a sort of game theory scenario right where like you said my recognizing if your rights and your recognizing my rights lead to an optimal sort of super ordinance situation arthel are the rules that make that super ordinate situation are optimal game we should be playing determined by human beings or are human beings players in the game where the rules those rules are beyond us and if they are beyond us is it still fair to say that human beings are the greatest determiners of their of their destiny that there's still humanism or at least for these rules transhuman yeah yeah I tend to think there are trans human is that any rational rational self-interested species would be forced to them in the inner limit as discourse proceeds over time they are thought up by humans they in constraint unit so for example I love the idea of peer review in science and I hate the experience of getting reviews of my own manuscripts back because like all scientists I think idiots would miss the point why do you want me to mess up my beautiful paper on the other hand stepping back I realize as much as I hate the reviews that I get at a meta level I sign on to the whole idea of peer review knowing and simultaneously that I'm right about everything that I say and that as a human being if it couldn't possibly be right about everything that I say so we do have to live with that dual conscious consciousness as the combination probably of our evolutionarily fake human nature which is to believe that we're always right and Noble and the conclusion that were forced to in discussion with others in acknowledgement of history that yeah everyone thinks they're right it can't all be right they are wrong I'm not a Superman I'm not a deity I can't be any less fallible that everyone else that I see therefore I'm going to submit to those rules so don't come naturally but in something that we can fall into given debate given experience given awareness of history Fukuyama wrote about the end of history which is essentially claiming that liberalism is the undisputed champion of the world but then there's Alexander Alexander Dugan who says no there's a multiplicity of other options viable options do you see there being another option to enlightenment to enlightenment values there's no viable alternative to reason certainly if as soon as you start to argue that there might be we've lost the argument because you've appealed to reason or if you conversely if you reject reason there's no reason for anyone to take the argument seriously because you confess there's no good reason to believe it so I don't think there's an alternative to reason I don't think it's an alternative to humanism other than that you could argue for I mean you could impose it by brute force and again you're not about argument then it is I have a little justifiable for the same reason I don't think there's an alternative to science now this isn't is these our normative arguments is what we ought to strive for if you interpret Fukuyama's making historical argument that societies will inevitably go in that direction it's not clear that he himself would have argued that but that certainly isn't true he could certainly have our society's evolving into a dictatorship and other forms of authoritarianism in terms of the direction that the world has taken I think it's easy to blow off Fukuyama and he did set himself up for easy refutation honking articles that announced the return of history with the rise of authoritarian capitalism in China or nationalist populism in Russia in the United States on the other hand in Fukuyama's defense the number of democracies has increased since he published that article in 1989 and not just in the Eastern Europe but in Latin America in East Asia in Africa and even with the a clashes it's not clear in the future how many countries are gonna model one sells on there's a good news Russia it seems unlikely so end of history is a gimmick a minute even Fukuyama probably didn't really the end he certainly didn't be history in terms of stuff no longer happening I mean it conflict over major systems of national organization but it's in terms of whether say France is going to become more like China in 50 years or China is going to become more like more like France it's it's not if I had to bet on one or the other I'd say try to become more like France okay speaking on this is odd divide have you read Sam Harris as moral landscape and if so what do you think about it yeah I am I came to be sympathetic with with Harris learned in moral landscape I it is a statement of humanism he made in some aspects of it more strongly I would he claims that in a nutshell told was simplified it that what is moral is a an empirical matter matter of what makes people best off and if you interpret that as saying that it is just an empirical matter that there is no philosophical ground into it then I think that would go too far it's not clear whether Sam himself would insist on that it's a view of progress compatible with post-modernism a sort of anti grand narrative ideology depends on what aspect of post-modernism here you referred you you there may be within most models the idea that when power imbalances get rectified when people of color and women wrest power from white males that would be a kind of progress but certainly the notion that there's been a long history of progress which could continue driven by science and universal human rights I think probably most public post modernists women said wouldn't sign on to that yeah I'm not sure I would call that a grand narrative you know if people if people try to solve problems occasionally they succeed if they solutions cumulate and then now life can get better for more and more people is that a grand narrative it doesn't sound so grand to me but it is something that I would defend okay while we're irritating the post modernists there's progressive nations then that means that there's non progressive nations or even perhaps backwards nations does this mean that some cultures are better than others well better than others in some ways so I think for example a culture which wouldn't have equality is better in that regard in which the girls are kicked out of school and women are forced to marry and prevented from driving and coding so yeah I think it's a society that executes homosexual sexuals is morally inferior to one that has equal rights so yeah I think if you it sounds more radical than it is but if you have any world standards whatsoever societies differ in the degree to which they implement and enlist in those regards those practices of those societies are our superior doesn't mean that the people are superior doesn't mean that that any individual has more inherent moral value than any other one but in terms of cultures practices habits yeah how could you maintain the oxygen any commitments to raise morale okay I know you gotta go so Peters gonna ask one question then if I have time I'll just ask one more okay what is the cause of this progress that you've observed in your writings at what expense we obtained it when one looks at the history it's tempting to say that because of colonialism slavery child labor in factories that this was sort of the price cream enlightened societies paid for their advancement what would you say to that claim found labor is certainly astley predates the Enlightenment that was just the default you set your children to work in the farm on the farm I made very briefly to specify when we mentioned child labor specifically in the English textile industry from which the industrial revolutions are those let's say sparked there was a recruitment for orphans small children with nimble fingers that could work threading machines these are the specific child laborers referring to yeah yeah there were well there were a clearly a number of harms that coincide it with say with the Industrial Revolution and if we could go back in time and make arguments then that we appreciate now then one can imagine alternative history that would have had the advantages of industrialization without the video harms certainly colonial exploitation we entity had educated with beginning with conversant Cortez and Bizzaro that was way before the Enlightenment in fact it's kind of what empires did throughout history as they conquered and Exploited this their subjugated crow population so I would not say that those are certainly a necessary accompaniment of enlightenment values but more generally nothing is occurs with only benefits especially in hindsight there's a lot that are to have unfolded differently in terms of the necessary price that was paid certainly firm to the environment was an accompaniment in industrialization that we still have not dealt with in the case of greenhouse gas emissions the next stage anything we didn't want to call progress is to enjoy the advances that energy capture has brought while rectifying and undoing the harm that we've done to the planet if I may just press on your answer to a degree understanding that these let's say perils and evils predate the Enlightenment is it still possible that they were a huge contributing factor for the success of enlightened societies who made let's say the most efficient use of these perils did to some extent so for example the growth in economies in the 19th century or especially the first half of the 19th century are we exploited slave labor particularly in the United States although of course it was the 19th century in which slavery was for the first time in history abolished in country after country but yes it is a more general answer is that as history unfolded there were harms that accompanied the benefits were they necessary I don't think so but since history only unfolded once we'll never know for sure that is if enlightenment were applied more consistently and the rights and interests of people in populations populations in Africa and Asia were taken into account if the universal human rights movie was Universal couldn't have had an industrial revolution and expansion of rights that truly was universal I think that that could have happened it didn't happen the extent that they should have the universal human rights have to wait at least a century maybe hundred fifty years and that is going to history of Kovach yes okay the last question you can choose between one of these two do you feel like some of the new atheist feel that Jordan Peterson is causing harm to the Enlightenment project by making religion more palatable so that's question number one you can choose that or what are your thoughts on Noam Chomsky I know he has some disagreements with you and I wanted to know if if you've read them and if you could outline to our audience what they are and then yours sponsors to that you can choose those two Oh Jordan Peterson is a poly by his own mission many ways to count for enlightenment think so including his sympathy to religion his skepticism about progress so yes I don't I don't think I would identify him despite his intellectual independence he was willing mr. challenged Authority he is not what you would call a defender of the project in terms of Chomsky he I think he has a being an anarchist himself necessary not only has a romantic vision of life in the state of nature about before the onset of government and civilization the data pretty much universally show that there were higher rates of violence in pre state societies than in state societies this would include the biggest analysis does are after I finish better angels of our nature by a Hosea Jose Maria Gomez and his collaborators where they accumulated every datum that they could come across on race of violence in ants tribes chiefdoms and States and in of course there are hundreds of society they show unequivocally that rates of violence are lower in state societies than in tribal societies so I can think that although no tends to deny that it goes against his gift i sensibilities but that's that's what we do suggest if you look at their entire instead of cherry picking a few peaceful societies was an ugly list and and and I am celebrating the fact that societies have become more peaceful over time but they did not start out peaceful thank you so much time I appreciate it I was a pleasure thank you so much for your time and you and sorry for the interruptions thanks thank you very much have a great day yes can you hear me thank you where are you by the way congratulations thank you what but the next question is wearing taupe but what recall okay I'm going to be in Toronto in a couple of weeks okay okay okay as a linguist what do you make of the redefinition of words primarily at least as far as my research is shown by the campus left by the grievous studies or the radical eft or whatever they're called such as racism which is the old definition of racism plus power or violence which is which now incorporates speech about physical violence or what constitutes a Nazi because they may say well words change all the time we're just changing where is this which is par for the course so I want to know what you think about that words change all the time but it's an organic bottom-up viral process it's not something that an interest group can engineer first of all because you've got to get buy-in from several hundred million English speakers and less you're a a language totalitarian despot you can't order people how to how to speak something is catch on and in processes that don't quite understands and certainly if it's in the service of an agenda then there's going to be a lot of obvious resistance you know if I'm coca-cola and I say well I'm legislating from now on the word water will be coca-cola so every time you want a water at a restaurant we're gonna serve you coca-cola billion for it and you say wait I said that's not what water means and I say well look words change all the time you say no wait a second that just sheer manipulation that's not gonna work it and should not work and I'd say the same thing for an interest group trying to redefine words as people ordinarily understand them which is the but in any case the only way in which language changes any way I can speak with some Authority here being the chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and when I ask my colleagues of the dictionary how do you guys decide what the official meeting Awards is and they say well we pay attention to the way people use language so it's not as if any authority even a dictionary board can legislate language and in the case of woods like like racism it it really is a terrible idea to try to change the meaning so that people can't even get certain thoughts across so if you ask is it possible for a a white powerless unemployed working-class person in a poor southern in order Appalachian town to be have derogatory opinions about african-americans and you say oh no we can't ask if he's racist because racist means that you have to have power well you can that's the question and similarly to say that it is impossible for an African American to have beginning thoughts about Asians or whites or for Asians to have bigoted thoughts about African Americans if they happen to be powerless well we put in a language is to get thoughts across to communicate if you try to words so that certain thoughts are impossible who are difficult to express then you just made it impossible to get knowledge and clarity about the state of the world the same would be true of violence metaphors are great we can talk about that use anything as a metaphorical sense but you really do want to make a distinction between someone's saying mean things on Twitter and someone putting a bullet in your head or nice between your ribs and say that well you're not allowed to use words of the distinguish those if you use the word violence to refer to physical violence it has to apply to verbal violence as well well how are you gonna say even the thought that I just said that and I just expressed a namely that there is a big difference between being murdered and being insulted or in the case of my own research that there's been an enormous decline in the occurrence of physical violence has there been a decline or priests or no change in the amount of insult well that's an interesting question but it's it is a separate question and the point of language is we can pose that question or any other question that's the beauty and power of language and the idea of trying to engineer it in a way that advances a particular theory or agenda or political ideology at the expense of just being able to share our ideas is my idea because it makes it hard to the clarity get knowledge get understanding but it also excludes people from the discourse in an age in which we're getting more polarized than ever more more and more people not only disagree with others but think that they are stupid or and evil since not everyone can be infallible and omniscient and correct about everything there's got to be room for respectful disagreement trying to engineer language to make that impossible is a pernicious idea okay that's pretty has ever worked where an organization or someone from the top down imposed a certain word and then it became part of the dictionary because people had to use it there there certainly are changes for example the the title Miz as opposed to the former miss missus there was a campaign in the 1970s it wasn't from in any organization but that that miss and missus should be dropped and is they should be replaced by miss I mean that was for a particular political agenda and it it carried the day probably because it did not it actually increased the utility of language there are a lot of times when I I don't know if a woman is married or not gonna don't care and I shouldn't be the language wouldn't force me to decide it kind of gets in the way of communication together of course with conveying the attitude that a woman's marital status is an essential part of her identity but that is not true of men and then also been changes in words like Negro which was very perfectly acceptable word in the 1960s Martin Luther King referred to Negroes we have the United Negro College Fund that was replaced by black which has been partly superseded by African American and other other terms for politically and emotionally charged concepts like crippled or people that we would now call disabled and in between they were handicapped so there is that kind of I've called a euphemism treadmill where one term replaces another again there's no one who mean the legislates it it is a grassroots phenomenon the catch is on there again there is no particular harm to clarity of communication if you call someone african-american or you call them black you're conveying the same concepts there's a change in attitude and there so it is possible for fraternity to change but those are ones where there was nothing particularly tendentious and nothing that particularly impeded communication or okay thank you so much I appreciate your time I appreciate them something like 16 hour turnaround from when you received the request happy anniversary I hope you do a celebrate well tonight too many times more than once but the as a place to celebrate I know this incredibly touristy but when I go to Toronto I go up to the top of the CN Tower the best food in the world and a lot of tourists there but the view really is spectacular oh well I don't know if I've been here an hour than that you know you're not going to get your way all the time the other person is not perfect and neither are you that's the ground rules that you got to be a team that lots of people in life are going to oppose you attack you undermine you but what when you get home you've got to have the solidarity of loyalty and support of your arrest I was of course working both ways okay thank you so much that's it have a great day

Channel: Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

Views: 155,226

Rating: 4.5675163 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: oLVL2u-ZJ8c

Length: 56min 33sec (3393 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/curtdbz]

Submission statement: I'm working on a documentary called "Better Left Unsaid" which explores the question "when does the left go too far?" Here's a conversation I had with Pinker and we touch on Peterson, Sam Harris and Chomsky.

I also have a Chomsky interview on the channel, which went viral where I was excoriated by Chomsky fans who hated that I brought up Peterson.

[u/cloake]

To caveat, Pinker says the right is much worse. Not even worth discussing apparently. And he outlines very progressive stances for the most part. Just want to cut into that editorialized title.

[u/[deleted]]

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