Stephen Fry & Steven Pinker on the Enlightenment Today

Thank you all very much, it is exciting to be here. I love sitting next to heroes and Steven is one of my heroes, as John has said, and as I'm sure most of you know, he's one of the leading public intellectuals around. There are phrases one can use, but I hope they accept that one in the English-speaking world. I first encountered him as a linguist, as a man who explained and seemed to be the physical manifestation of Noam Chomsky on earth in terms of explaining him. from some Tomsk on generative grammar and all that stuff, language, instinctive words and rules, wonderful books like that and then of course the blank slate and a sense of moving forward from Steven who is a genius at everything type of thinking areas, evolutionary cognition. psychiatry and all kinds of areas of neuroscience and language that are fascinating, but the move from writing about language to writing on the blank slate, which obviously connects with the human mind, a sense of moving towards something a little more political, something a little more approachable.

What I think you have seen as a failure in public discourse about the mind, society, culture and intellectuals, and that was taken up by the wonderful better angels of our nature, who surprised people with their optimism. Steven is now considered a new optimist. and this wonderful book,

enlightenment

, now has a great title and I'm sure we can all think that yes, finally someone came forward and spoke for

enlightenment

to continue this journey, so I wanted to tell Steven that everything you do could accept your spelling. of the name Steven overlooked that if I can ask you if you have been conscious or felt moved to move from the more academic sphere of linguistics, psycholinguistics and neuroscience to the cultural sphere, I made the crossing when people asked me what I did during a live and I would say lost in 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 the mind to a broader understanding and there have been advances in public communication of science in areas such as evolution in cosmology, at Dana Source, but no one I knew had attempted to bring the discoveries of cognitive science to a broader audience and I thought it would be fun to try, so I wrote Language Instinct which attempts to explain everything you ever wanted to know about the language, but I hope it's an accessible format and I guess it wasn't an accessible format because people responded and one thing led to another, and then it went from that to another. the mall, if I can say it's a political side, I mean you could have been seen as a typical intellectual Harvard academic with sort of left-leaning liberal principles and the new sense of the word, but, of course, in the last years. it's like everything has changed in terms of our sense of what a left or a right means and you've infuriated both the left and the right to a certain extent with the blank slate and then the better angels of our nature, nor I won't even say it.

Tell me about your journey in that sense if you think you have stayed the same but the world has changed or you have altered your view of politics and well, starting from the position inspired in part by Noam Chomsky that language is a human being. faculty is one of our innate capabilities I extended the question of what our other innate faculties are how the mind works I suggested that along with language we have a set of emotions fear jealousy love anger gratitude we have a set of ways of constructing the world it is a kind of Intuitive physics, intuitive biology, and intuitive psychology, we have aesthetic reactions to the world, a sense of which landscapes are beautiful versus threatening, which spaces are attractive or not, and that this set of psychological reactions could be largely explained by evolutionary forces that They give rise to innate mechanisms but postulating a complex human nature, at least during much of the 20th century and before that, it had a kind of aroma that was more right-wing than left-wing and despite Chomsky himself, who is, of course, a fairly flagrant leftist, as I would say Romney at MIT, a stern left, we called himself a stern conservative, so Chomsky violated that equation, but in traditional liberalism there had been a kind of utopian vision that was based on the assumption that human nature was infinitely malleable so that we would not have to carry fatal defects we did not have to accommodate human jealousy or the desire for domination of revenge differences between the sexes but with proper socialization and parenting we could design society so that we in turn design to humans, yeah, I mean, in a way, it all comes down to, you know, the very simple debate about nurturing from nature, that you were pushing it more towards nature, that you know there was an evolution with which we were programmed encoded with certain faculties and ways of perceiving the world and responding to it as opposed to those who are being acculturated and the gift of a society in which we were born is that, in a sense, although in a certain sense the esteem, although it What evolution programmed into us was a set of mechanisms, all of which could be learned because, in fact, it would be a stupid organism that did not respond to information about the environment, including other people, but what I explored further in the blank slate were the political, moral and emotional nuances of nature. -nurture the debate why the nature-nurture debate is not only a scientific debate but also a political one and it is because traditionally there was at least one current of left liberalism that seemed to be committed to humans as blank slates, it is infinitely malleable while There is a strain of conservatism that began with the assumption that humans are tragically limited, that we are innately competitive and jealous and also limited in our cognitive faculties with implications such that we cannot, we are not intelligent enough to design society from the beginning. .

Top-down, so we have to rely on bottom-up distributed systems, like similar markets, but because humans are perennial II, tempted by conquest and exploitation, then we need deterrents like the rule of law and the armed forces to deter invasions, so he had a kind of tragic vision. that leaned a little to the right and you had a more utopian vision depending on a blank slate that leaned a little to the left. I couldn't explore those historical roots and then I tried to mix it up by pointing out that it's not really a dichotomy that if human nature is complex, if it has multiple parts, then there isn't one, you don't have to fall on the side that humans are inherently selfish, tragically flawed, ultimately limited or infinitely malleable plastic blank slates, but rather we have a set of motives. some of which have unfortunate characteristics like our desire for revenge, on the other hand we also have parts of human nature that can channel, control and inhibit our darkest impulses, we have the capacity for self-control and they are huge frontal lobes.

We know that we can count to 10 and say, on a rainy day and all our horses, etc., we have cognitive faculties like the ones I explored in the books about language in the mind, we can create new ideas by combining all old ideas and in an explosion combinatorics of possibilities we can have ideas about our ideas and ideas about our ideas as a common and recursive tutorial in fact, a recursive representation is one that can contain an example of itself, so every time you say well, I think he thinks that I'm going to come, but it's not like that, you're dead, a thought within a thought, you're having a recursive thought and then that covers the theory of mind, so the theory of mind essentially depends on a recursive being, yeah , mentalizer.

We can imagine what other people might think thanks to language, we also have the ability to learn from each other, and as society tests innovative arrangements and some of them work better than others, we can share our ideas about which ones work and which ones work better than others. That is not the case, so there is room for progress for social improvement. I gave you the toolbox that evolution gave us, the cognitive toolbox, so in you again using your idea of ​​language, it may be true that language, the competence of the language instinct, is encoded in us. but that does not mean that we will speak the same language, yes, in fact, that whatever nature gave us is a set of systems that must be nurtured, yes, that even the capacity for language is not a capacity for English or for the Japanese is the ability to receive information from our peers and allow us to speak and understand an infinite number of things.

I'm going to share with you my terrible joke, which is that it's actually a mistake to think that it's just nature and nurture is about the human will and the passion to succeed at it, even if brutally, so it's really the nature. Nurture and nature will come to Friedrich Nietzsche very soon because it is very much a Bugaboo of yours, yes, but if we now look at this extraordinary book, enlightenment for most people. If we have an idea of ​​what perhaps the Enlightenment is, we can think of the printing press 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 briefly outline, you can use your Wonderful Quotes from Kant, if you like, who defined Claire's Enlightenment and I was wondering if you could explain what you see the Enlightenment meaning. I identify three themes that animate the Enlightenment and form the bulk of the subtitle of the book Science of Reason. and helium, which together lead to progress, in fact, the reason comes from the understanding that traditional sources of beliefs are actually error-generating, things like authority, tradition, dogma, charisma, hermeneutical analysis of sacred texts, the subjective brilliance of certainty and that there is no substitute. for a reason and in fact reason is, in a very real sense, not non-negotiable for its own sake, but also even irrational ideologies use reason to justify themselves, in fact, as soon as they even began to propose any alternative to the reason and try to persuade people why it was better than the reason why you lost the argument because, as long as you are not threatening people, as long as you are not gathering an armed group to convert people, you don't bribes as long as you give them those reasons as long as you insist if they challenge you then you are not full of nonsense that there are people who should take you seriously then you have given up the point you have it would be like saying there is no such thing as time and I will tell you. it just doesn't make sense that's why there is no reason the word why is a word of reason precisely that is 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, furthermore, we can, since a priori we cannot be sure of any of our explanations, we have the imperative to test them to calibrate them. against reality and rejecting what the world tells us are and that is what we sometimes call empiricism, for example, by testing the validity and repetitive truth of an observation, for example, and it is often said that science cannot give us our values ​​that can tell us how the world works, but not how it should work or how we should 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.

On the other hand, there are many ideas from science that I believe should be part of the worldview, including the moral worldview 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 simply do not care about you they do not care if you get sick there is no entity or agent that would want you to get sick if you fall off a cliff it was not like that there is no destiny it was not predetermined, it is not about fulfilling some mission or purpose, things happen and I think if the Victorians were as surprised as we think they were by Darwin and in fact there is some historical evidence that they were not as surprised as we think.

It wasn't because we descended from apes or are apes, but it presented a natural world that was so callous and unfeeling and that we were the result of what we would now call an algorithmic set of rules, not a design. and there was no purpose to our life except the superficial purpose of reproduction. Well, in fact, there is no purpose judged by the laws of nature, of course, once the human brain is born, we humans have purposes, but it is a mistake to project our purposes ontothe laws of nature. the cosmos, so it's an example of a scientific view that has enormous relevance to moral reasoning, including the fact that if we care about our well-being, we can't expect the cosmos to take care of us, which is really, is really It is up to us to empirically test whether prayers are answered after all and the results are yes, no sentences and even another scientific idea with enormous implications for the human condition.

Is this the second law of thermodynamics? The law is that you spend a lot of time. In this book I talk about entropy and I love that you explain why this is more than just an important thing for physicists. Yes, in the technical sense, the second law of thermodynamics is that an entropy I in a closed system increases, that is, disordered heat. goes from a hot to a cold order, the temperature differences needed to have usable energy will inevitably dissipate over time unless the system is exposed to energy or information from the outside world, but the disorder of closed-flow systems increases. and as far as it implies things going wrong they don't need a special explanation in terms of some designer or entity wanting things to go wrong, it's just the natural course of events for things to not go the way we should. simply because there are many more ways in which things can go wrong than in which they can go right and that is why we have to deploy energy and information to create a zone of beneficial order in our local environment with the use of energy and This was a recent discovery because, as you know, we forgive our ancestors for mostly noticing examples of energy explosions, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, they would think it's a world where energy could appear out of nowhere, yeah , that is true, deceived by concentrated local sources of energy. energy like the core of the Earth and the Sun and one implication of that is that we asked the wrong question: we asked why there is poverty.

Poverty is simply the natural condition of the universe. The question we should ask ourselves is why there is wealth and, in fact, that was a great obsession of several thinkers of the Enlightenment. Adam Smith is his Scotsman and, I bet, his precursor, but it changes the way you look at things if you realize that what we really need to explain is why we can enjoy any order. prosperity organization that gives life so we live in a world and I think Tom stops saying it very well in a request explain if I take some rice pudding and it has a piece of jam in the middle and I take a teaspoon and I turn it five times the rice pudding turns pink if I hold the spoon still and turn it in the other direction I don't get the jam you never get the job across the world without making the leap so the world tends to get disordered Decadence, as we know , the heat death of the universe is the definitive story, but that is why life itself is pushing not only against gravity but against it it has to find ways to efficiently use heat and calories, energy work, are all the same . essentially to erect something that will fight against the inevitable, that is why evolution is so slightly possible in a local challenge to the law of entry intended to not challenge it globally because living beings take energy from the Sun or the depths of the sea. ocean vents and I have used it to create zones of order, we do the same with our intelligence, we are using information, we organize matter into improbable configurations that suit our needs, so that is just part of the larger point that a scientific understanding does not have.

Not only does it allow us to build devices, but it does speak to our ultimate situation, our ultimate goal in life, which is to use information and knowledge to create zones of beneficial order in this massive sea of ​​increasing entropy and then humanism is the third thing. What is important is that what are we using this reason and science for and the answer is, broadly speaking, human flourishing, where human flourishing would include life, health, happiness, knowledge, culture and this social warmth and friendship, which sounds obvious, who could be against human flourishing. or it turns out that humanism is actually a rather exotic moral system, that there are alternatives like that ultimately were the glory of the nation or the tribe or the race, the predominance of faith, bringing the commandments of God to the earth, carry out some historical action.

The dialectical or messianic era is becoming a reality, so simply concentrating the mind on what is good is making people healthy, happy, informed and fulfilled, that is a distinctive moral commitment and I identify that as one of the Alignment contributions now if we put together if we use knowledge to enhance human flourishing. I should mention another ingredient that is a big theme of the Enlightenment is that all of this is that humanism is possible because we are gifted with evolution, they didn't put it that way. but we express it like this now with a sense of sympathy with the ability to feel the pain of others to care about the well-being of others now the sense of sympathy that evolution gave us is quite insignificant it applies naturally to our genetic relatives to our business partners or members of our clan, but it can be pushed outwards by forces of cosmopolitanism, but that is by mixing people and ideas and for the very reason that if you have to exchange ideas and values ​​with other people it is quite difficult to keep. that my interests are special and yours are not because I mean you are 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 was 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 so that we can help our own specific kinship group, tribe or clan. or small group and the altruism that, so to speak, allowed sacrifice for the greater good of a small group to which we belong, can be applied to a much larger one, that's right, that's an idea.

Darwin himself proposed this idea, he said that once we see, once we see. We have the ability to sympathize with others and societies become larger and more complex, there is nothing that can stop it from expanding to encompass the entire human species once it is set in motion now, if you take these three ideas of the science of reason and humanism and you say that since the Enlightenment there has been the goal of understanding the world and applying that knowledge to enhance human flourishing, then one should enjoy progress, that is, sometimes we solve the problems we face , we accumulate the solutions that work and, over time, our human being. flourishing should increase and those problems are probably best characterized by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse war pestilence famine which one is the fourth it seems like we are waiting for the end of this century it seems a little redundant yes, it really could be that it reads horse in a sense, that's what they could admit, what were the biggest problems that humanity faced for millennia and all of which are concomitant with the fact that we evolved by evolution in a universe governed by entropy and death is the supreme type of energy for the humans.

We worry that our bodies will eventually merge with the ground, but that is the hope and then one might wonder: the Enlightenment ideal of progress sounds good in theory, the boss of that lament exercise and that is why you have become very well known. a lot of time, patience and indeed graphics to explain how, in fact, in his opinion, the elephant project worked first with the better angels of our nature and now, with this, he is really very interested in showing in all aspects how in different nations in different parts of the world at different times in history, the upsurge of enlightenment has served humanity and right now, 200 years later, we can answer the question and the question is that there has been enormous progress and you can, you can graph it and I did and thanks in large part to the works of Max Rosa, who is here, they offered the economist who is the owner of the website our world and data, but thanks to that, other available sources of data on human flourishing can answer the question.

Have we made progress or not? To take just one example, for most of human history life expectancy at birth was around 30 years

today

, in the developed world it is greater than 80 years and in the world as a whole it is 71 years . Very few people guess that it is so high that the supreme good, the supreme resource, life itself, has increased enormously, partly due to the reduction in infant mortality and even in what we

today

consider a fluid and healthy country, Sweden , almost a third of Swedish children died before reaching age. five years just over 200 years ago and then the infant mortality rate plummeted in the 19th century and what Sweden went through, then other countries happened, including those today, which tragically still have the highest infant mortality rates , as in sub-Saharan.

Africa, but their rates are also falling and some of those stories can be told in education. The world is becoming literate. I think about 80% of the world's population can read or write, while the historical average, even in Europe, was closer to 10. to 15% and illiterate people tend to be between 60 and 70 years old, not a Johnny, we know it's great, change is happening because both girls and boys, the world is getting closer to gender equality in education and literacy, you see it too. progress in violent crime in any region that was outside the reach of the law, in the border regions in the kind of anarchic and feudal mosaic of medieval Europe, there were homicide rates that were 30 to 50 times higher than what we see in Europe. about this it's about bandits and bandits and bar fights this lady puts arsenic in her husbands here death all those types of personal violence so that sinks even into an outlier for many of these trends it's at least among democracies Paradoxically, given how prominent it is among Western democracies, the United States is somewhat lagging on many of these dimensions, but even in the United States the violent crime rate has dropped by 50% in the last 25 years. .

It may be less obvious that the war has dwindled to zero and that the civil war in Syria has been the worst war in a generation, but even with the Syrian civil war the overall war death rate is a fraction of what which was in the Let's say that in the 80s, when the war between Iran and Iraq raged, when the Soviet presence in Afghanistan caused horrible fighting, for a decade there were civil wars in Africa and Latin America with the signing of the peace agreement in Colombia in those sixteen, the last war in the Western Hemisphere came to an end and the last minute of the Cold War, so five and six of the world's surface are now at peace, including areas such as Southeast Asia and, in fact, Europe, which was red as blood for four centuries and an entire category. of war I, the war between nations, in particular the war between great powers, could be obsolescence, obsolescence, the last war between great powers was the Korean War in 1953, but then you could say that others are all kinds of measures that, you know, economists care about what they have to do.

It has a lot to do with quality of life and meaning in life if you look at what you might consider indices of a meaningful life, such as free time to spend with family and culture, rather than the monotonies of household chores, if you appreciate it. Due to the penetration of electricity, running water, washing machines, electric stoves and refrigerators, the amount of time we spend on housework, which really means that the amount of time women spend on housework has gone from approx. 60 hours a week to 20 hours a week, the number The number of hours we work has fallen by about 20 hours a week in the last century since the days of Bob Cratchit and Christmas Carol and, therefore, with The combination of less time spent on housework and less time spent at work, the amount of free time has decreased. increased for both men and women, it stabilized in the 90s and I was a little puzzled by this fact, it even had a small drop, the reason is that women spend more time with their children nowadays, so a mother working or single Today, a mother spends more hours with her children than a married, stay-at-home mother did in the 1950s, right? will allow me to approach freakanomics books, for example, I would say that the American crime rate has decreased because abortion rates increased at exactly the time whena generation of criminals would have been born who did not gain weight due to weight, versus I am really sure. what you read turns out not to be, it falls into the category of too nice to be true, turns out it's an ingenious theory, it's not there, obviously, one of the first things that would have been put to you because a lot of people will be. hissing as we are used to condemning our own culture to seeing it as destructive to seeing the sciences ruining the world you know from a biosphere that you know well from a geosphere to a biosphere to a noosphere or if we now like to call it Anthropocene, you know that we have altered the Mother Earth and also all these things that you have said have brought us so much free time, peace and prosperity, surely they have also brought us anxiety, unhappiness, suicide and this is the disease that it is. the price we pay for all the benefits that the Enlightenment may have given us, but you also address this in the book, yeah, in every chapter on happiness where I look at data on self-reported happiness right after people, how happy are you, I want say.

Who could be a better judge or imagine yourself? Imagine the worst possible life you can imagine on the bottom rung of a ladder, and the best possible life you can imagine, at the top of the ladder, and there ten. rungs how bad would you say you are that's another way of asking related but not identical questions when you do that you discover that in most countries for which we have data over time happiness has increased but morality that only gives you It is a sample of countries where the data goes back, it doesn't go back that far.

My hand we also found that this data tends to correlate with GDP per capita, something contrary to the idea that money can't buy happiness, I mean, it can. It is not known exactly for each individual, but an ammeter does, and as the world has become more prosperous and all countries have become more African, there is reason to believe that global happiness has increased in terms of depression , anxiety.Psychopathology There is a widespread belief that we are suffering from a new epidemic of mental illness, particularly depression, but it turns out that it does not survive. Fact check: There has been more awareness about depression.

There are more diagnoses and the stigmas that people share are also eliminated. their experience of suffering from depression, which has the beneficial effect of other people coming out and realizing their own issues and receiving treatment that may be effective, but leads to the illusion that depression is actually increasing and surveys who try to apply a constant criterion over the decades, I suggest that it is nothing like homosexuality because crazy homosexuals like me have come out, it seems that there are more of us, but we are simply not easier and then there is the You know , Thomas Piketty and others have focused on the issue of inequality and it seems to be going in that direction, and you also have things to say about it that are quite surprising.

To some extent, inequality can be measured in many different ways. In many ways, this is something that I discovered as I got deeper and deeper into the topic of inequality and it's even very difficult to get an economist to say right exactly what the Gini index is for the United States in 2015 and You can get like five different answers depending on how you calculate it, but a couple of things that I was able to establish from this immersion in the literature and partly with the help of our world and our data, what is the global inequality that is decreasing throughout the planet? whether it is measured in cross-country comparisons where each country is a unit or, as best we can estimate, global population inequality is declining and that is simply because poor countries are getting richer much faster than rich countries are getting richer and one of the surprising facts about progress that we didn't discuss when I reviewed the list is that global poverty is decreasing.

Extreme poverty, I should say, defined by the World Bank as one dollar ninety a day in international dollars, is a kind of arbitrariness. limit to the ability to feel, eat, feed yourself and yourself and your family, according to some historical estimates, the extreme poverty rate 200 years ago was about 90 percent, that is, about 10 percent of the population world was not extremely poor now, it is the numbers 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 poorest in countries like China and Bangladesh and in some of the sub-Saharan African countries in Latin America, global inequality has now unquestionably decreased.

It has increased in many rich Western countries, especially English-speaking ones, such as the United States, Australia, but I suggest that inequality is not in their economy. Inequality is not in itself an evil that is practically impossible to avoid in any type of economy. It is not imposed from the top down by totalitarianism and, as Walter Side points out in his new book, the great leveling is the most effective if you really want to reduce inequality, the most effective ways are violent revolutions, pandemics, mobilization mass, war and state collapse, which should remind us to, as he says, be careful what you wish for.

I think the moral imperative is not really inequality per se, but in some of the possible concomitants of inequality, one of them is political inequality and resentment and the fact that the rich have too much political influence, especially in the United States. United, but also, but really morally, what should attract our concern is poverty, how much the people at the bottom have, not how big the gap is between them and there, and those who are at the top and are there thanks to a pit, especially in developing countries, thanks to market economies that have been growing and globalization, there has been a massive increase in the fortunes of the poor in richer countries and the welfare state has put a floor under of the poverty levels and therefore even in the United States, which is famous for its libertarianism compared to its Western peers, the United States has a fairly substantial welfare state and, as a result, poverty when measured in terms absolutes not in terms of percentage of the population's income, but In terms of what people can afford, can they afford to feed themselves and flow with themselves through other countries?

It has fallen roughly, depending on how you measure it, from about thirty percent of the population in 1960 to something like five percent of the population now when you measure it. taking into account the benefits of government and the falling cost of many goods and services, and I suggest that it is early poverty that we should morally focus on. I'm not so on the same page, so by taking a look you make an argument that the Enlightenment and what followed it as a result of open thinking, free reasoning and all the advantages of science and humanism that led to the industrial revolutions and yes, to some new types of poverty, but they have brought us to a not exactly a shining mountaintop, but to a place that was unimaginable even fifty years ago to some extent in terms of war famine and these other indexes that you follow, so the book could have stopped there, but of course, you could really, you could subtitle it, it's not the case for some reason. science humanism in progress, but you know the enlightened society and its enemies, it opposes Hayek, so why did we, as children, grandchildren, great-great judges of the grandchildren of the Enlightenment, seem to be so disrespectful of it, so doubtful of her, so cautious or skeptical, why?

Don't we accept that he has given us everything we have and we speak his language? Yes, and an important theme of the book is that this progress is not a mystical arc that points upward, it is not a historical dialectic that inevitably makes us become better and better until we reach that utopia that is the result of specific efforts to solve problems and retain the solutions that are effective and that if that principle is abandoned then progress can regress and then, of course, there have been catastrophes in which reversals have been made and today there are threats in authoritarian populist movements that explicitly reject many of the issues and Enlightenment institutions, such as Trumpism in the United States and some of the populist movements in Europe.

As opposed to a universal human flourishing, they prioritize the greatness of the nation, the glory of Russia, or the greatness of the United States, as opposed to the institutions of global cooperation that were a theme of the enlightened, there is the idea that there should be zero-sum competition between nations vying for greatness rather than relying on science and reason, religion is invoked and religious factions are re-empowered, there are often specific pushbacks against scientific discoveries such as vaccines and storage of today's articles on the WHO or talk about the enormous increase in measles in Europe as a result of a self-imposed wound that we are about to lick, and the question is why, in an era of progress behind us, of suddenly we're faced with these new new threats now partly it's partly because I think there are characteristics in human nature that I've always made attractive authoritarianism, tribalism, that many of the ideas of the Enlightenment are quite exotic discoveries that are enormously beneficial but they do not arise naturally.

For the human mind, and they have to be relearned and read offended in every generation, it is much more natural to think of the inherent goodness of my clan and imagine that the chief directly embodies the inherent goodness and virtue of my clan as opposed to the idea of the Enlightenment expressed more specifically by the American framers that the political leadership should basically be a group of committees with a chairman who is given the responsibility of keeping people away from each other and encouraging commerce, but who must live according to rules that justify any power we apply to them, yes, publish a strong man, because I mean using America in the Enlightenment and you know the beautiful white columns of Washington and you know the wording of the Independence deck, etc. many Americans, less than a hundred years after the United States became a country, were baffled beyond belief.

The fact that the country had been based on such perfect principles and ideals of enlightenment should have descended into carnage as dizzying as the bloodiest civil war in Nissan to date in history in its Civil War, the murder, the massacre of species of animals and, for us, most importantly, huge tribes of Native American people in the cruelest way possible, mafia violence that began in every city, this was a country founded exactly on the principles of the Enlightenment written by Jefferson, who was one of the heroes of the Enlightenment influenced by pain another hero of the Enlightenment and by Franklin these were these glorious people but they still believed in slavery and the Enlightenment gave rise above all to colonization, slavery and the exploitation of the native peoples of the common people. conquered in their lands and then there is a way of looking at the Enlightenment as if it had been like a virus and you can see why people in the third world might say that your Enlightenment did not enlighten us or that you are changing your missionary stance from being a Catholic or Methodist missionary to be a missionary of the Enlightenment, but I'm being a devil out there, yes, yes, I think so, I think it's certainly true that the Enlightenment should not be identified with the West and particularly not with the United States , although the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were magnificent statements of the Enlightenment, the Hui of the Enlightenment did not penetrate large parts of the United States, which retained more of a kind of manly culture of honor as a form of organizing society that principles justified in a set of propositions and there has long been a division in the United States that more or less coincides with the north and the south as to whether society should be organized by institutions justified by principles or by individuals who defend themselves and their interests by defending their slavery of honor, of course, was not as old as civilization, slavery is rather the rule and not the exception until the 18th century here, all the so-called great civilizations were dormant maintaining civilizations, including the so-called democratic Athens, good in Rome, including all the ATS, the biblical civilizations and that was transferred and expanded in the case that you are a Christian, you could say, of course, that they were, for the most part, Christians , dissenting Christians, who first suggested that you knew people like that in Wilberforce, as well as the Quakers, yes. most of the least objectionable not all Christians are Quakers there was a Frye who was one of Fox's friends who wasone of the first other side is jewish my father sighs quakers I think it's an anachronistic 2i2 connector between the slave trade and yes, my creation Yes, the religious might argue that their religion, whether Islam, Christianity or Buddhism, it's almost like some kind of serum, like Oliver Sacks, which is l-dopa.

If you inject someone, they instantly have a structure and a way of seeing the world that can transform them and they can live, but if you believe in the Enlightenment and the four pillars of it that you know were outlined or laid out then, that's not a series, clearly it is not, it is not magic. bullet does not transform you or the world it is a series of ways of working to notice something is much more difficult than a religion is not magical thinking, so there is a challenge and I finish the book wondering if so many cultural conservatives claim that humanism modern secularism, liberal cosmopolitanism, Enlightenment values ​​are too lukewarm to involve human animal spirits, they just won't excite people and religion will never go away because it talks about DP gains in the soul and the same with nationalism.

I am skeptical about this for several reasons, one of them being that the societies that most carry out the principles of the enlightenment, such as secular Western democracies like New Zealand, Denmark and Canada, do not seem to be collapsing and are spiritual enemies. be rather nice places to live people do well they don't seem to join Isis and there are large numbers to give meaning to their lives they also have the main destiny of people who vote would vote with their feet I mean everyone wants to go to the great enlightenment countries that include people in the religious leagues as excitable parts of the world don't want to stay there they want to go to Denmark and I posed the question of do we need or do we need the kind of secular humanist equivalent do we need humanist preachers banging out copies of Spinoza's ethics in the pulpit?

Well, I said he suffered, but you and the people we know from Christopher Hitchens when he was around and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Daniel Danette and others have been considered almost evangelical fundamentalists in their humanism, their secularism and so on, how do you do it? would they know? I do not think that's true. I mean, it's certainly not true for me and it is and I don't think it's true for the so-called Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, you know, I hate the principles of Janice Harris and Dawkins, yes, on the other hand, paradoxically, the critics of secular humanism that they say does not speak to the human spirit almost ask exactly that.

Well, you're not going to be successful until you have your evangelical process of secular humanism and you know that We need to have humanist congregations where people can roll their eyes and go into ecstasy and babble in Esperanto, so there was a Manor that I'm sure you knew as I, who was a very ordinary and angry man, but very brilliant in his own way. Stephen Jay Gould, oh yes, he is a paleontologist. I believe that he was the man who first proposed what he could: the non-overlapping magisteriums; in other words, he saw that where science, religion or spirituality can have its own magisteria, its own kingdoms, its own dominions.

I think that, ultimately, it is very unsatisfactory because it is impossible for science not to know, look at everything, but What was your opinion about it? You know we're leaving, we shouldn't talk, we should stay silent because Vikram Stein, an enemy of scientism, said What's your? Well, Steve Gould didn't seem to understand that you could be happy to have a morality that didn't depend on religion. He in a way gave religion the franchise for morality. He said you know science can't dictate our morals and, strictly speaking. that's true, although I think it may be overstated, therefore it's the job of religion, but in a way the whole issue of enlightenment was lost, that you can justify morality in terms of them, you could do it on utilitarian grounds, which makes the greatest number of people accommodated. it's moral, you could do it on ontological grounds, there are certain principles like: Canadian Browns election, yes, and you know the social contractor business, the other social contract, in fact, but yes, and you don't have to call on a deity for him to do it, except for all of Steve's vast addition and knowledge of the area and he missed the whole enlightenment principle which I think was kind of lazy on his part.

Some Stevens may be wrong. I just wanted to quote one thing that really fascinated me because it could be a criticism. I told you that here when you talk about reason you use two archetypes as if they were two opposites and you miss the middle and I think maybe it's an interesting idea, you say that the opposite reason is, by definition, unreasonable, it has not stopped a large amount of rationalists prefer the heart to the head, the limbic system to the cortex, blinking at the thought of McCoy instead of Spock and now you may say that talking about Star Trek seems a little silly, but actually this will lead me to our dear friend Nietzsche , the nature in his book the birth of tragedy turned to two Greek gods, Dionysus and an Apollo, to try to explain two sides of human nature walking, Freud, aging automatically in the superego, will go after which, in other In words, it's Greek tragedy as you saw, it was playing with the tensions between the frantic tribal bloodlust side of our animal selves and this harmonious, rational Apollonian side of ourselves and, interestingly enough, Gene Roddenberry was a genius.

If you look at Star Trek, there's McCoy, who's always gay. green blood monsters Spock is sane fascinating that one of them is one of them is logical, you know he is dead, how could your logic explain that place? and McCoy, the doctor, is physical, primal and emotional, but the point is in the middle is Kirk. who tries to be both, they will go to a planet that is everything and Kirk will try to explain that there is reason and order or that they were good, that it is all order and transfer where it is here. you have it on the furniture because you see that the neo-nazi side or Nam near crypto or proton RC of Nietzsche is the man and Superman, which some people consider a fiction that he was presenting, not the application, although he died crazy, so it is It's very difficult to know, but I just wanted you to know that the entire Romantic movement constantly ran into the wall of the Enlightenment and still does today, its romantic sense of the individual, the Maverick, apart from the tribe, and can become Crazy in Nazi love.

Iran does more, but it's also something we can feel instinctively, right? Yes, and I think I think it leads to great art, great plot lines, but it is not a great way to organize politics and society and I might add quoting a great figure, you would not enjoy nature, sir, he is fundamentally in the sounds like Spinoza, God, like Spinoza, and to bring him exactly with the Jewish philosopher and to bring home, Captain Kirk was played by a fellow Montreal Jew, William. Shatner, great, they are a Landsman, yes, part of my tribe, so now it's good that you mentioned Canada because of course you are Canadian and I suppose you know that the archetype of the Canadian public intellectual 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 called the global village and anxiety is that the written word would bring the first movement of the information age and you read it today and It's still quite surprising that it's quite difficult to read at times. but he is an extraordinary man and you have also fulfilled this role as a Canadian public intellectual and the third man who has been in the news recently is Jordan Peterson and although most people thought well, there is Steven Pinker, he is a liberal humanist and There's this Jordan.

Peterson is maybe a bit of a right winger he's a bit of a dog whistle a bit for good there was a famous I'm sure you saw his interview here on Channel 4 TV with Kathy Newman he now for those who I don't know, he he's also like you, a psychologist is essentially right and has written some very successful books, but I think you two agree in your detestation for what you might call what he would certainly call cultural Marxism on campus and yourself. I've had extraordinary pushback from that and I'd love to share the story of what happened to you recently when you spoke very sensibly about the nature of D platforms and all the things we're aware of.

American academic institutions, particularly American ones, yes. I participated in an event at Harvard organized by the Open Campus Initiative, which is a student organization dedicated to free speech, but there is a common accusation that all Millennials do not understand the concept of free speech and are just warriors of social justice and snowflakes, so these are Harvard students who are pretty adamant about advocating for what they call an open campus in conjunction with a barbed magazine here in the UK and the panel they convened was: political correctness helped elect Trump and They had it around the anniversary of the tropical ellipse, yes, and they had it in Wendy Canada, a well-known civil libertarian from the Boston area, and Brendan Jones, and many of us argued that obviously the victory It had several causes. but one of them was that there is certainly not a sector of the population that voted for Trump despite his non-flagrant inadequacy faithfully to his job as a reaction to the repression of opinions in forums such as university campuses and in particular this is true.

That I pointed out from the far right by the far right, I'm not referring to the tiki-torch-wielding neo-Nazis, but rather to the highly educated, often tech-savvy, almost exclusively male youth. they find with simply empirics. Facts that are indisputable on university campuses, such as the fact that different ethnic groups do not have the same crime rates as men and women, are not indistinguishable, that capitalist economies are more efficient and more humane than communist ones, and that immediately find themselves trampled on like a ton of bricks, if any of these facts are mentioned, they retreat assuming there are certain truths that the dominant establishment cannot handle and then spin them in the most toxic directions possible because they have never had a chance for these opinions are put into context, such as that the fact that there are differences between the sexes does not mean that sexism is justified, it is a new type of fair growth and equality or not is the same, as she quotes Helena Cronin, that all Abilities that show differences in means show enormous overlap in distributions, such as any number of traits at which men, on average, are better than women, but many traits at which women are better than men. , as well as the fact that there are differences in crime rates.

Now, for African Americans and whites it's just part of a general pattern that there are always differences, but those secondary explanations, those glasses in the statistics are not necessary because they never came because everything is closed, you are not allowed to say that. There is more crime here than there, you are not allowed to say that there are differences between the genders here exactly so you don't find that they come for an equally valid explanation which used to be that Irish Americans had higher crime rates than American prostitutes . That was a gap that disappeared and therefore the gap between whites and blacks could also disappear, but if you only understand the fact and not the context and the arguments that prevent you from taking that fact and drawing harmful consequences, then you will draw the consequences harmful.

You constantly said the result was this and the result was correct and I am the reason I know this happened. This is not speculation. It's just that I received disturbing emails from former students of mine at Harvard, so these are not stupid young people. Men in tech Jamie d'amour is an example, not that I've ever come into contact with him, but he's almost a prototype and naturally, due to the suppression of speech and debate, the alt-right becomes their landing place pleasant and they fatten each other. What else do the Lib Todds and the leftists and so on keep in the dark, and they can say that there are certain things that you know that mainstream academia can't handle the truth and they're right, but then? those ideologies can rot without the proper immune response and the result is that there are intelligent people voting for a strangely dangerous and unqualified presidential candidate, so those comments were manipulated so that only the part that says that where I pointed that out there are intelligent and educated members of the authorized ones, I know this for sure because some of the majority were Harvard students, yes, another example and that was manipulated and presented on both left and right sites as some kind of support for the Alt Right , while he was actually attacked for starving the Alt Right, which is why you sue.

Both The Guardian and The New York Times came to my defense; In fact, there is an article in an articleopinion in the New York Times about how social media is being used stupidly and that it doesn't have the way they took me out. context as an excellent example, I could be very stupid to say that in the same way at the beginning you said what language speaks to you about what program what is encoded within us what languages ​​are like the faculty allowed you to express that idea in other human faculties and In reality, isn't that formalism structuralism that later became postmodernism that served to cry and deplore?

Isn't that what they did? They said: let's look at language as a kind of structure and use what we know about language, including phonology and phonemes, and apply it to social activity, hence why the suffix e m- becomes so common now that we discover that you know the myth of Eames and of course it means that Richard Dawkins coined that they did the same thing and took the intellectual idea of ​​studying. of language and said that society is a type of language, it has the same type of rules, it is the same idea, but this is something, of course, you fundamentally disagree with your postmodern thinking about society and me I wonder if you could explain that and why.

Do you think it is so harmful to our culture? No, you're right, there was some sort of safe dispute whereby the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson Andrew Betts said yes, sir, and then it was carried over to anthropology by quoting Lady Strauss. I know and then the Marxists without reservation and so on, yes, in fact, and they have led me to the position, I think quite eccentric, that thought consists of nothing more than Herbert's strange opposition in autonomous symbol systems, although Structuralism later became poststructuralism, which was very abstruse and abandoned the exact propositions of structural linguistics and anthropology, but still retained the idea that was later carried over to dari deconstructionism that all statements are inherently paradoxical or circular because they are just symbols that refer to other symbols that refer to other symbols in a kind of close circle, but what he left out of the whole discussion in the whole course of modern linguistics is that there is not only syntax and phonology but also semantics , that is, language refers to things and that was left out and refers to things. both because it's connected to the world through perception, actually linguistic symbols like the dog and the table are not just defined and like a dictionary definition, I'm in terms of, you know, an animal and a mammal, but There are also small images in the dictionary, yes and they are our perception system that connects us with reality and they are also connected to a network of inferences of logical conclusions that we can draw and that make the meaning not completely arbitrary but intertwined with our scientific understanding of the world.

The fact that a dog is a mammal. and a mammal is a living being, these are not just arbitrary symbols, but they actually have content and that extends socially, I guess the argument between relativism and what is realism, you would say readers because you would say absolutism, yes, of course , no, realism. that is a scientific realism that is for thephilosophy of science that scientific proposition is actually about something, it is actually about the world, it can be true or false, so you know, because simply to finish in some way one of the things that those of us who have begun to learn that The funny thing about neuroscience is that since you started writing, even one of the things has become even more evident to David Reutimann Kahneman and Tversky and all these others have shown us how contingent our knowledge with it, they have taken obvious ideas, ideas that we grew.

We wake up with similar illusions, you know, images, you know, are there two faces or a chandelier or is it a straight line? You know, we realize how our brain interprets reality in a very unrealistic way and so now we also realize that reason itself is not stable. or reliable, it seems very fragile, you write brilliantly about some of the experiments showing intelligent liberal people who believe in evolution, you don't really understand it and if you ask them some questions, which they do, they will often get it wrong. Because of their misunderstanding of basic Darwinism, then you think, well, maybe there's something to this, not necessarily Derrida, in that sense, Foucault, there's something particular to these idiotic French idiots, whose greatest well, if only they could write, Ronan Bart could write so that you could believe in him because he wrote wonderfully, but they write so badly that it can't be true, it must be true, but anyway this idea that our reality is not what it seems and that somehow You're being scientific, it's your biggest thing you know you're guilty of. scientism you are too cold and real and in reality life is more fragile and ethereal and strange and difficult life is fragile and strange and will always be disconcerting, but when we do it, we develop institutions, especially those that have real power.

We must, as best we can, root them in reason and in scientific reality, which will never be absolute, but is the only reality we can get close to, and, crucially, you invoked people in my own profession like Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who of course have demonstrated the limitations of human reason that were vulnerable to illusions, yes, but I know there is a false conclusion that some people draw, but this is a refutation of the Enlightenment belief that we are all completely rational, now the fingers of the Enlightenment were Inflexible that we are not compassionate, they were some of the best students of human quirks and follies and people like Adam Smith than David Hume and, for them, I just went to the city ​​with our emotional passions, our fallacies. to those who were vulnerable, but what I think is the point of the Enlightenment emphasis on reason is not that every person is inherently rational but that we have some capacity for rationality and we must have it if we are even discussing the issue because the only way You could say that humans are irrational if you had some reference point of rationality with which to compare them;

Otherwise, the question itself would not make sense, but compared to ladybugs or bears, that is also when people commit some fallacy, such as taking a stereotype, the prototypical one. The example would be Linda, yes, she would be an eloquent woman committed to social justice and activism. Is she more likely to be a bank teller or a feminist bank teller? Which one is more likely than her to be a feminist bank teller now that, of course, she 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 conjunctions, so since multimers bank tellers are bank tellers, it is actually impossible for her to be more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank because there is everything now this comes out now here the fact that I can explain it yes and they explain yes they called it fallacy we call it fallacy compared to what is compared to the laws of logic and probability that you could understand, so these being irrational anyone who reads them can understand them some people who read them are irrational so it is a mistake to say that we are incapable of rationality if it is not easy for us, but does that mean that we have to submit because I am Sure that I'm not alone in this room finding out that you're splendidly almost Bertrand Russell like the use of logic, okay.

Oh God, that's what happens when I read philosophy. I have to go back to the pages. I got it. If you turn the page, I have lost it again the proposition what was the consulate what was the syllogism what was the you know and even in your and you say some wonderful graphs in the Union friend here max suddenly a word like percentile will appear an okra mosaic and if you end up in hall percentile and then obviously, I basically have to say Steven knows what he's talking about. I suppose he is right and in a sense some people would argue that that is no different than hermeneutical exegesis that the priest and superiors know that the Hierophant is explaining to the obedient flock of him.

Only I can interpret these facts and the moment you start using words that are from science and logic, most of us say: yes, yes, listen to the extent that it feels like that then there has been a failure that I I failed I would have time for him to explain it to an eleven year old boy well that is the aspiration yes and in fact it would be completely contrary to the spirit of science for scientists to be considered something of a priesthood it has to be that you may have to work a little in it, but you can reconstruct the record itself, yes, it must be, so the general principle is that we are obviously capable of reason to have this discussion in the first place and that there are norms and institutions that can foster reason collectively, although not necessarily individually, in each of us, so norms such as freedom of expression allow that if you say something, another person can criticize it in a way that authority cannot be trusted, such as empirical evidence, such as review by peers, like double-blind studies, all the standards of evidence in court, the standards of justice, the fact-finding commission, journalistic ethics, all the principles that make us collectively smarter than any of us would be individually and that is what we have to rely on, not on any assumption that any isolated individual is particularly wise and irrational.

I mean, in the end I'm always willing to believe a mathematician or scientist because they can say at three minutes At 11:00 on June 23, 2031 there will be an eclipse here and if you want they will show you that they are working and I never heard a priest or spiritualist predict something like that, yes, oh. I flip the switch and the light comes on, it almost seems magical to me, but I know that if I studied hard enough I would find the chain of reasoning, the chain of Ascari that has led to that light turning on, while everything else. is it magical thinking or mystery or do you know some kind of hidden thing that you have to believe in without being shown how it works, yes, actually, and it exists in terms of the arcane technical vocabulary being inaccessible to you, you know, a wide Readership changes over time because there has been a constant trickle of technical concepts from scientists, academics, and policy experts toward conventional understanding and that may even be one of the drivers of perhaps the strangest index or example of progress: the effect.

Flynn, the increase in IQ scores over the decades by about 3 IQ points per decade, resulting in a cumulative improvement of about 30 IQ points above 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 read books and had access to them. some of what started out as our Kino ideas that then proliferated through the population and therefore ideas that we even take for granted now started off as quite exotic concepts, so just an example, you know, nowadays, if anyone say, well, it's me, but dandelions and my headache don'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 time a pretty exotic concept in epidemiology , but now most educated people know what it is or a correlation. versus causality, you know, win-win situation, compensation, market, zero-sum game, zero-sum game, these are things that we are familiar with and that are pretty good.

All the fairly complex ideas that might have been considered a hundred years ago need to get a lot of attention. explanations, you know, some of Morrison's came out of game theory, yes, a fairly arcane branch of mathematics, yes, so what can happen is with education and not only with education in school, but with proliferation of ideas through the BBC or a Lauren magazine and websites etc. that basic understanding can be smarter, can become smarter, and therefore more sophisticated concepts become part of conventional wisdom. Well, as you saw, they gave me a note here and we talked so we could continue forever.

Simply I loved it. I love the way you open things up and if enlightenment has that word light and you show it to us, you know, you show light in all kinds of areas of our thinking in our behavior and I want to thank you. And I want to tell everyone here that Steve will spend 20 minutes signing copies of the book, but I know you'll want to join me in thanking him for his collaboration.