Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. So
Speaker 1: today it's a great honor to have Stephen Pinker on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Doctor Pinker is an experimental psychologist who caducts
Speaker 1: research and visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew
Speaker 1: up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and
Speaker 1: his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnston Professor of Psychology at Harvard,
Speaker 1: Pinker is also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has
Speaker 1: won numerous prizes for his research his teaching in his
Speaker 1: ten books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind, We're
Speaker 1: the Blank Sleet, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The
Speaker 1: Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now, The Case
Speaker 1: for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker is an elected
Speaker 1: member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two time
Speaker 1: Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient
Speaker 1: of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policies, World's
Speaker 1: Top one hundred Public Intellectuals, and Times one hundred Most
Speaker 1: Influential People in the World Today. He is chair of
Speaker 1: the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes
Speaker 1: frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian and other publications. Steven,
Speaker 1: great to have you on the show today. Thank you,
Speaker 1: scotch Oh boy, so I to say I've been following
Speaker 1: your work for almost my whole life is no overstatement.
Speaker 1: You know, you really influenced me a lot pre my career.
Speaker 1: I remember reading your How the Mind Works, actually devouring
Speaker 1: How the Mind Works in the back seat of my parents'
Speaker 1: car when I was a teenager, and really feeling when
Speaker 1: I read your book as though I understood how the
Speaker 1: mind works. And watching the development of your career and
Speaker 1: your thinking and writing, it seems to me like there's
Speaker 1: a real common thread, although your scope of import seems
Speaker 1: to widen, but it seems like this common thread is
Speaker 1: sort of understanding of our common humanity or a common heritage,
Speaker 1: evolutionary heritage. You know, there's a humanism in how the
Speaker 1: mind works. Right here is my broadest concern is human
Speaker 1: nature and its implications, and recognizing that human nature is
Speaker 1: universal is a foundation for humanism, that is, in valuing
Speaker 1: human wellbeing human flourishing as the ultimate moral good. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think we're both agreed on that. And this idea
Speaker 1: of human flourishing is something that goes well beyond just happiness,
Speaker 1: and you make that clear in your new book Environment Now.
Speaker 1: And when you talk about happiness that flourishing incorporates lots
Speaker 1: of things. What are some of the main essential elements
Speaker 1: of flourishing in your view? Yes, In fact a happiness feature.
Speaker 1: Researcher gave me a hard time for not just defining
Speaker 1: human well being in terms of happiness, which is the
Speaker 1: easiest thing to measure, but I meant to expand it
Speaker 1: to include other things that we deem worthwhile, such as
Speaker 1: raising children, which can make people less happy in real time,
Speaker 1: such as accomplishing something like writing a book. I'd be
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that the process of writing a book leads
Speaker 1: to many moments of unhappiness, but I never regret doing it,
Speaker 1: just as people seldom regret having children, but creating works
Speaker 1: of lasting value, helping people other than oneself, making discoveries
Speaker 1: that benefit humanity. There are things other than having a
Speaker 1: smile on your face that we deem worthy of humans striving, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and not only in terms of that, but in terms
Speaker 1: of looking at the course of human history and seeing
Speaker 1: what has improved what hasn't improved. Some things that we
Speaker 1: think we will improve are going to increase happiness, don't
Speaker 1: necessarily or increase flourishing, for instance, Like you talk about
Speaker 1: economic inequality, for instance in your book, is something that
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily equate to increased flourishing? Is that right? Yes? Right?
Speaker 1: In general, people are happier when they are more prosperous,
Speaker 1: obviously many exceptions, but richer countries are happier on average,
Speaker 1: and more prosperous people within countries are happier on average,
Speaker 1: Although we know that that's only one of the components
Speaker 1: of subjective well being. Others include social trust, freedom, and
Speaker 1: other intangibles. Inequality has a complicated relationship to subjective well being.
Speaker 1: For while it was thought that the more unequal to
Speaker 1: the society, the less happy areas people were on average,
Speaker 1: presumably because no matter how well off people are, they're
Speaker 1: always comparing themselves to others, and between the average and
Speaker 1: the best off increases. According to this way of thinking,
Speaker 1: then even if people were materially better off, they might
Speaker 1: be less happy. The more recent data suggests that that
Speaker 1: probably isn't true. That what tends to kurt people's resentment
Speaker 1: is not so much inequality per se as a sense
Speaker 1: of unfairness. They feel that they're living in a society
Speaker 1: that is meritocratic and that they have a chance of
Speaker 1: getting ahead, or even that the rewards are distributed impartially.
Speaker 1: They can live with inequality, there are opportunities for their
Speaker 1: kids to get ahead, and that the evidence is that
Speaker 1: other people are getting richer. Then they feel just fine
Speaker 1: about their life situation. But if they feel they're trapped,
Speaker 1: that's what leads to less happiness. The reason that it's
Speaker 1: been hard to tease them apart is that across societies,
Speaker 1: lots of good things tend to go together. And this
Speaker 1: was a as a social scientist, this is a constant
Speaker 1: frustration and trying to disentangle effect. Yeah, tell me about it.
Speaker 1: You wrote that in a different context when you strite
Speaker 1: about g or general intelligence. You know that's a hard
Speaker 1: one as well. Right, you don't cover that too much
Speaker 1: in your current book, but you know, I think that's
Speaker 1: kind of an extension. It's a similar problem, right, it
Speaker 1: kind of is. And there's no a single letter to
Speaker 1: the phenomenon that Sweden is a much more pleasant place
Speaker 1: to live than Somalia, for example. But a lot of
Speaker 1: good things go together. Some countries are richer, they are
Speaker 1: better educated, they are greater gender equality, they're more tolerant
Speaker 1: of minorities and gay people, and they tend to be
Speaker 1: more equal. And so in the correlation across countries, what
Speaker 1: looks like a benefit to equality can just be a
Speaker 1: benefit of sheer prosperity. I mean, your way is not
Speaker 1: just egalitarian. It's rich. And if you try to tease
Speaker 1: a party, the wealth and the equality, and it's often
Speaker 1: wealth that actually pushes the happiness around more than an inequality.
Speaker 1: That's a subject of one of the chapters in the book. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And you also talk about increases in autonomy and certain
Speaker 1: the implications of that doesn't always necessary, that doesn't always
Speaker 1: necessarily lead to increased happiness. You say some things about,
Speaker 1: like you know, increased autonomy for women, which I think
Speaker 1: is undeniably a good thing that the definition belongs to
Speaker 1: progress doesn't necessarily increase happiness among women. Right, yes, And
Speaker 1: one of the great paradoxes of happiness research, which even
Speaker 1: really forgetten about as well, is that, strangely, over the
Speaker 1: last several decades in the United States, happiness for women
Speaker 1: has gone down a little bit. Happiness in other advanced
Speaker 1: democracies for women has pretty much flatlined, even though happiness
Speaker 1: for men has increased slightly on average. The paradox is
Speaker 1: that this is an era in which women have far
Speaker 1: more opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers did, opportunities in
Speaker 1: the workplace, opportunities for self expression, economic opportunities, but it
Speaker 1: hasn't on average, made women happier. And it may be
Speaker 1: that as women that have greater opportunities greater freedom, they
Speaker 1: set higher goals for themselves. And indeed, if you ask
Speaker 1: men and you ask women to list their life priorities,
Speaker 1: men in many ways are rather simple creatures. They want
Speaker 1: professional success, you know, they want they want a family.
Speaker 1: We're simple organisms. Women are more complex. Women list among
Speaker 1: their like priorities all the things end list, but in addition,
Speaker 1: things like a responsible member of their community and affecting
Speaker 1: positive social change and place out even higher value than
Speaker 1: men on being a good parent, being a good family member.
Speaker 1: So there's just a lot, awful lot of things that
Speaker 1: women today strive for, and that's an awful lot of
Speaker 1: ways of being frustrated. Possibly, and that might account for
Speaker 1: the paradox that as women's autonomy and freedom have expanded,
Speaker 1: their happiness is not increased. Yeah, I'm really glad that
Speaker 1: you lay out a lot of these nuances in your book.
Speaker 1: Was really helpful for me as a well being researcher.
Speaker 1: You know, distinguished between happiness and meaning and autonomy and happiness,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So that was really helpful for me. So
Speaker 1: here's a quote from your book. The story of human
Speaker 1: progress is truly heroic. It is glorious, It is uplifting,
Speaker 1: It is even dare I say spiritual? So first of all,
Speaker 1: why dare I say? I know why? But I want
Speaker 1: to hear from your bos. I argue that endorsing the
Speaker 1: Enlightenment worldview means rejecting anything supernatural spirits, gods and karma
Speaker 1: and destiny and ghosts and souls and so on. That
Speaker 1: we live in a natural world governed by physical laws
Speaker 1: and that no real good comes from thinking about an
Speaker 1: afterlife or a divined punisher or a rewarder. But of
Speaker 1: course one could define spirituality in a psychological sense, namely
Speaker 1: some sense that we have of awe, of appreciation, of
Speaker 1: a perception of processes and forces that are bigger than ourselves.
Speaker 1: And I wrote that passage to counter an accusation of humanism,
Speaker 1: namely an attempt to make humanity as a whole better
Speaker 1: off somehow boring or bourgeois or materialistic or tepid or
Speaker 1: arit that we can't be truly fulfilled unless we believe
Speaker 1: in a protector in the sky, or myths of heroic ancestors,
Speaker 1: or something transcendent, something beyond life on earth. And I
Speaker 1: suggest that there is a way of li looking at
Speaker 1: human progress that looks at the massive reduction of suffering
Speaker 1: that we've accomplished, at the hope for still more reductions
Speaker 1: of suffering, the attempt to understand the cause most including
Speaker 1: our place in it. The attempt to create works of
Speaker 1: beauty and value that are spiritual in the best sense,
Speaker 1: but they don't involve any ghosts or spirits or anything supernatural. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, this idea of the psychology of self transcendence
Speaker 1: is a fastening field and one that I've been doing
Speaker 1: some work with David yiden On. And you know, there's
Speaker 1: no reason to say that the instinct or the delight
Speaker 1: we get from that feeling of self transcendence isn't something
Speaker 1: that's hardwired into us, something that didn't evolve itself, that
Speaker 1: is maybe in itself non reducible to other aspects of
Speaker 1: our human nature. When I read your book, it seemed
Speaker 1: I felt as though this book was the most romantic
Speaker 1: of all of your books so far. This progression is interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, controversy got into with how the mind works
Speaker 1: when you refer to music as auditory cheesecake, and then
Speaker 1: people took that to mean that therefore music can be
Speaker 1: reduced one hundred percent two language, you know, and that's
Speaker 1: you know, I think you would say, that's not you
Speaker 1: can't really, that's not what that means. Even if it
Speaker 1: was a byproduct, even if evolved as a byproduct of
Speaker 1: another module or function, doesn't mean that that in itself
Speaker 1: shouldn't be appreciated. But you obviously a lot of some
Speaker 1: critics took it that way. But I here's a quote
Speaker 1: from your new book which makes me think that maybe
Speaker 1: while you might not have changed that view, you write
Speaker 1: more about how enriching these the experiences are in themselves. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, say the arts are one of the things
Speaker 1: that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty
Speaker 1: and insight. And it's a very romanticism kind of line. Well,
Speaker 1: in fact, it's completely consistent with the analysis of music
Speaker 1: and how the mind works. But maybe I should have
Speaker 1: called it cheesecake. Maybe I should have called it tiraisou
Speaker 1: or something more expensive. That's the thing, Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: I came from a generation where cheesecake was like the
Speaker 1: ultimate luxury in the nineteen seventies, is a big piececake craze.
Speaker 1: It was considered kind of the height of epic curity
Speaker 1: and discernment to really to savor the right kind of
Speaker 1: cheesecake rather than the wrong kind. Was that in Canada, Canada? No, No,
Speaker 1: that was back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was people of
Speaker 1: my generation. Remember you go to dinner parties and people say, oh,
Speaker 1: you tried the cheesecake at Baby Wants It. Oh, no,
Speaker 1: it's not as good as a cheesecake at Rosies. And
Speaker 1: it was a kind of form of epicurean one upmanship
Speaker 1: of most refined exquisite cheesecake. But in any case, the
Speaker 1: two statements are actually completely compatible because one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I did choose, admittedly the somewhat shocking metaphor cheesecake
Speaker 1: for music, precisely to underscore that we should not confuse
Speaker 1: evolutionary adaptation in Darwin's sense, the literal sense of some
Speaker 1: feature that makes the bearer of that feature have more
Speaker 1: surviving babies. That is not the same as human worth.
Speaker 1: In fact, often there are cross purposes. Yeah, reading, for example,
Speaker 1: is just not something we were evolutionarily prepared to do,
Speaker 1: couldn't be because it's so recent in our revolutionary history,
Speaker 1: but it's obviously one of the things that make life
Speaker 1: worth living. On the other hand, blood revenge the idea
Speaker 1: that if someone hurts a member of your family, you
Speaker 1: should kill a member of their family, or someone insults you,
Speaker 1: you should lash out violence to establish your credibility. That
Speaker 1: probably is an adaptation, but it is certainly not something
Speaker 1: to celebrate. The more we repress it, the better. So
Speaker 1: the idea of that full analysis was just to say
Speaker 1: that it's natural to confuse the two senses of adaptive
Speaker 1: namely the biologist technical sense of a trait that increases fitness,
Speaker 1: where fitness means number of surviving offspring and adaptiveness in
Speaker 1: the sense of what is healthy, valuable, worth maximizing. That's
Speaker 1: a great distinction, And the other relevant distinction to me
Speaker 1: seems to be the distovers proximal one. You know, some
Speaker 1: people can take what you're saying is the only things
Speaker 1: that in our current lifetime. Everything we do in our
Speaker 1: current lifetime is explained our actions, our immediate actions are
Speaker 1: explained based on the actions of our ancestors, which is
Speaker 1: not true. You know, we can that's maybe why we
Speaker 1: have free will in the sense, but I mean, we
Speaker 1: shouldn't get into the whole free will thing. But you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, Oh, I know exactly. Say so,
Speaker 1: you put your finger on the key reason that evolutionary
Speaker 1: psychology is so misunderstood and often reviled. It is a
Speaker 1: is attempting fallacy to confuse you identify them as the
Speaker 1: proximate and ultimate levels. But another way thinking about it
Speaker 1: is the psychological level what we actually experience. What are
Speaker 1: our thoughts, our drives, our feelings, our motives, our brain
Speaker 1: processes versus an evolutionary explanation, namely, why do we have
Speaker 1: those feelings in the first place. And the reason they're
Speaker 1: so easily confused is that the process of natural selection
Speaker 1: could often be metaphorically described as genes being selfish, trying
Speaker 1: to make as many copies of themselves as possible. And
Speaker 1: if you slip into that language, even though it can
Speaker 1: simplify process, it's easy then to confuse it with the
Speaker 1: actual motives of the human being that was shaped by
Speaker 1: those genes. But they're very different, the metaphorical motives of
Speaker 1: the genes and the real motives of the people. Again
Speaker 1: the ultimate versus proximate levels, And if you confuse them,
Speaker 1: then you'll be baffled by statements like, well, if sexuality
Speaker 1: is a way to reproduce, why would anyone ever use contraception?
Speaker 1: Isn't that a paradox? Well, it's not a paradox because
Speaker 1: explanations applied two different levels. The sexual desire is a
Speaker 1: something we describe at a proximate level, people want to
Speaker 1: have sex with attractive partners, and in the kind of
Speaker 1: environment that we evolved in before contraception, that would just
Speaker 1: automatically to reproduction. But it's not the same as an
Speaker 1: actual desire to have a baby in terms of what's
Speaker 1: going on in someone's mind when they are sexually aroused,
Speaker 1: and if so, indeed, contraception would be the most revolting, repugnant,
Speaker 1: dangerous thought imaginable. It is because that's not the way
Speaker 1: evolution works. We don't literally have a desire to make
Speaker 1: as many babies as possible. We have a desire. That
Speaker 1: desire is at the ultimate level, and it's a metaphorical
Speaker 1: desire of the genes. The real desire of the person
Speaker 1: is to enjoy sex and to cherish babies that you
Speaker 1: think are your own, and that will automatically be to reproduction.
Speaker 1: But it's not the reproduction per se. That is the
Speaker 1: motive in the brain of a person at the time,
Speaker 1: at that proximate level. And that example that applies to
Speaker 1: how it things like altruism. People confuse the explanation of
Speaker 1: why people sacrifice themselves for the ultimate benefit of the
Speaker 1: genes as a kind of cynical debunking of the purity
Speaker 1: of someone's altruistic motive, and that too is a confusion.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about yet another one when it comes
Speaker 1: to music. Yes, thank you, that was very very well put.
Speaker 1: You know, when I was reading your book, I thought
Speaker 1: of a couple analogies. You know, one main point of
Speaker 1: this book that I what thought was great and you
Speaker 1: brought in the physicist is named Sean Carroll. Is that
Speaker 1: right or yes? That nature isn't necessarily concerned with human
Speaker 1: well being, and that point is excellent. But I think
Speaker 1: a very related point is that human nature isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: concerned with human well being either, you know, And I
Speaker 1: think both those points are really profound. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: they are essential points that the laws of the universe
Speaker 1: don't care about you. So if we want to improve
Speaker 1: human welfare, we've got to figure out how to do
Speaker 1: it ourselves, because the universe is indifferent to our well being.
Speaker 1: But you're right at pointing out that is another kind
Speaker 1: of source of the human tragedy, which is that what
Speaker 1: was selected in the course of human evolution is not
Speaker 1: guaranteed to make us either happier or to make us flourish.
Speaker 1: That is, there are lots of human traits that have
Speaker 1: a straightforward evolutionary explanation, but they don't really make us
Speaker 1: better off in the sense of happier, more harmonious, flourishing.
Speaker 1: Some do but we have to take a critical eye
Speaker 1: at our own psychology to identify which of our traits
Speaker 1: actually make us better off it should be indulged, and
Speaker 1: which ones really should be subjects of self control. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I think that brings us to a question of
Speaker 1: human progress, because it's not encoded in our DNA. What
Speaker 1: an objective list of what human progress would look like
Speaker 1: is something we need to use reason to figure out.
Speaker 1: First of all, I want to ask why do intellectuals
Speaker 1: hate progress so much? And then I want to ask
Speaker 1: you if you could just list what you see are
Speaker 1: some of the main indicators of human progress that we
Speaker 1: all probably should agree on our indicators. Well, many, many
Speaker 1: intellectuals do hate progress, paradoxically enough, including those who call
Speaker 1: themselves progressive. This is not all intellectuals, obviously, the intellectuals
Speaker 1: who are embrace Enlightenment values do believe in progress. But
Speaker 1: there is almost since the Enlightenment unfolded, there's been a
Speaker 1: counter light, a romantic movement, and many intellectuals that actually
Speaker 1: detests modernity, that looks back to a greater harmony with nature,
Speaker 1: greater community that distrusts science as a source of weaponry
Speaker 1: and pollution, that is not particularly impressed by the well
Speaker 1: being of all of humanity, but rather holds out great
Speaker 1: feats of artistic creation as the ultimate value. And this
Speaker 1: has always led many schools of intellectual thought, the existentialists,
Speaker 1: the critical theorists like a. Dorno and Forkhimer of the
Speaker 1: Frankfurt School, postmodernism and Nietzscheanism to be deeply contemptuous of
Speaker 1: the notion of progress and to highlight all the problems
Speaker 1: that modernity has brought. Why do I think they're wrong?
Speaker 1: The speaking as a psychologist, first thing I just would
Speaker 1: note is that the well you can get a misleading
Speaker 1: impression of the state of the world from the journalism
Speaker 1: because of what we psychologists all know of as the
Speaker 1: availability heuristic. Mainly, we tend to assess risk and probability
Speaker 1: and danger by memorable examples, and that's what journalism is
Speaker 1: in the business of giving us. So as long as
Speaker 1: suffering and mis fortune and accidents of violence happened fall
Speaker 1: into zero, they never will. There'll always be examples that
Speaker 1: they can fill the news. And if that's your source
Speaker 1: of understanding of the world, then you be systematically mislay.
Speaker 1: It's only when you look at data sets that aggregate
Speaker 1: the wars and the war in nations and the peaceful nations,
Speaker 1: the homicides that occur, and the number of people around
Speaker 1: who are not murder victims and plot them over time,
Speaker 1: that you could even ask the question of whether there's
Speaker 1: been progress. The fact that bad thing's happen now doesn't
Speaker 1: say anything about progress one way or another, because only
Speaker 1: if you compare the amount of suffering now with the
Speaker 1: amount of suffering in the past, do you even know
Speaker 1: which way the sign is, whether it's got up or down.
Speaker 1: And to appreciate the distance of progress. When I became
Speaker 1: aware of data sets of violence over time, which showed
Speaker 1: that rates of personal violence like homicide and rape and
Speaker 1: assault have declined in most countries over the centuries and decades,
Speaker 1: that rates of death in war have lunged since the
Speaker 1: end of World War two, that barbaric practices like slavery,
Speaker 1: like execution by torture, disemboweling or burning into steak, such
Speaker 1: as the application of capital punishment for frivolous misdemeanors like shoplifting,
Speaker 1: have been eliminated. Even more recently, kinds of violence such
Speaker 1: as victimization of children in the schoolyard, bullying, sexual abease
Speaker 1: of children, physical abease of children, domestic violence, all into
Speaker 1: plaine when you look at the data as opposed to
Speaker 1: the remaining incidents. Then for enlightenment. Now I've broadened that
Speaker 1: to other measures of the human flourish. You can start
Speaker 1: with some. I guess you'd call them the big three,
Speaker 1: being healthy, wealthy, and wise. That is longevity, hugely increased.
Speaker 1: For most of human history, it was about thirty Now
Speaker 1: it is seventy one worldwide and more than eighty and
Speaker 1: developed countries. Prosperity, the global poverty used to afflict ninety
Speaker 1: percent of the world's population. Now it applies to less
Speaker 1: than ten percent. And why most of history most people
Speaker 1: were illiterate. Nowadays eighty percent of the worlds of the
Speaker 1: world is literate, ninety percent of the people under the
Speaker 1: age of twenty five. Well that I agree, that's progress.
Speaker 1: If that is in progress where it is, that's the point, right.
Speaker 1: But you say that, you know, you asked a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of instances of what you refer to as progressophobia,
Speaker 1: and I want to pick one because I think it's
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways for me, and one of
Speaker 1: the most interesting ones. So here is all your fancy
Speaker 1: statistics about violence going down doesn't mean anything if you're
Speaker 1: one of the victims. Now, this is very interesting one
Speaker 1: because and I think it's not so easy out of
Speaker 1: that one in the sense I mean you responded, you
Speaker 1: said true, But they do mean you're less likely to
Speaker 1: be a victim, And I think that's a very good point.
Speaker 1: This is the question I want to ask you, is
Speaker 1: why should people care about long term trends over hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of years when they're only living one short
Speaker 1: lifetime and what matters most to the individual is their
Speaker 1: own well being within that lifetime. Why should they care? Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of these strats apply over over the years
Speaker 1: and decades, not just over the centuries. The fact that
Speaker 1: the rate of violent crime plummeted from nineteen ninety two
Speaker 1: to twenty fourteen. The fact that in the lifetime of
Speaker 1: many people alive today in Germany and Japan were some
Speaker 1: of the most warlike countries in the history of humanity.
Speaker 1: Now they're two of the most pacifist countries. That the
Speaker 1: production of extreme poverty is really a phenomenon of the
Speaker 1: last thirty years or so, They at least the steepest
Speaker 1: plunge and even increasing lifespans except for one sector of
Speaker 1: the American population, but for everyone else's life lifespan has
Speaker 1: gone up in the lives of people living today. The
Speaker 1: one statistic that I cite from You'll have advance and
Speaker 1: longevity a person in that Kenya over the last few
Speaker 1: decades has because lifespan has increased actually faster than living.
Speaker 1: Every day that they get older. They have not approached
Speaker 1: death by a single day that is, a year passes,
Speaker 1: but Kenyans living year longer, so they don't even approach death.
Speaker 1: All of us two as we age day by day
Speaker 1: by day. So many of these are things that are
Speaker 1: experienced that can be experienced within a lifetime. I really
Speaker 1: want to nail the point of like why should certain people?
Speaker 1: So let's do specific examples. Let's say that you're in
Speaker 1: the eye of the storm, so to speak. Let's say
Speaker 1: you're in a extremely probably stricken neighborhood. You feel hopeless,
Speaker 1: you feel like things are really really tough for you,
Speaker 1: and I pick up your book and I read it,
Speaker 1: you know, knowing like like, oh, well, at you know,
Speaker 1: it could have been worse if I lived one hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, you know, like, how is that consolation for
Speaker 1: that individual. Well, I didn't write the focus constellation for
Speaker 1: the worst off, but I read it to the people
Speaker 1: who want a view of recent history and of the globe.
Speaker 1: So it would be a different book if it was
Speaker 1: directed at unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a good point, even they Admittedly this requires a feat
Speaker 1: of reflection and perspective taking, but just knowing that problems
Speaker 1: are not seemingly intractable. Problems may not be intractable, they're
Speaker 1: not unsolvable. That we've solved other problems. The kinds of
Speaker 1: advances in education and prosperity and health that have been
Speaker 1: enjoyed elsewhere can be applied universally. So there's reason for hope.
Speaker 1: Not in the sense of waiting for goodies to arrive,
Speaker 1: like waiting for Santa Claus, hope in the sense that
Speaker 1: the right kinds of political and economic and social change
Speaker 1: pulled out the promise of improving the lives of everyone,
Speaker 1: even though the ones who are most miserable today. Countries
Speaker 1: at war can a chief piece. Just this morning we
Speaker 1: read that one of the worst ongoing wars in South
Speaker 1: Sudan might wind down since the leaders of all a
Speaker 1: peace treaty Even when I wrote the book, there was
Speaker 1: the widespread sense that economic growth had flat lined and
Speaker 1: that unemployment was bound to get worse. But the last
Speaker 1: year of the Obama presidency and continuing to the present,
Speaker 1: there's been economic growth and the reduction in unemployment, including
Speaker 1: a reduction in people who are sitting out of the
Speaker 1: workforce and entirely so it's often premature to assume that
Speaker 1: the misery will be forever, that problems are intractable, that
Speaker 1: there's nothing that we can do about them. Thank you.
Speaker 1: That was a good answer, and thank you for letting
Speaker 1: me play Devil's av Could I enjoy doing that? You know,
Speaker 1: I just like thinking of all the angles, So thank you.
Speaker 1: Something I was thinking about now defending your position. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, it occurred to me Wring your book that
Speaker 1: hysteria can be a very dangerous thing to society. So
Speaker 1: even if you're in the eye of what you think
Speaker 1: as a storm, it might not actually be a storm,
Speaker 1: and it might be nice to know that. Right, So
Speaker 1: you have this quote. Not every problem is a crisis,
Speaker 1: a plague, or an epidemic. And among the things that
Speaker 1: happen in the world is that people solve the problems
Speaker 1: confronting them. If I had to pick one single line
Speaker 1: from your entire book, I mean it'd be hard if
Speaker 1: I had to just pick one, because there are a
Speaker 1: lot of juicy quotes from your book, but that one,
Speaker 1: in particular, I think offer is a really hopeful perspective
Speaker 1: even if you are suffering in this world, to know,
Speaker 1: you know, because there are a lot of things right now.
Speaker 1: We could talk about some of those things that are
Speaker 1: being painted by the media as an epidemic or a crisis,
Speaker 1: and you see it in the news over and over again,
Speaker 1: and just that framing can be very pernicious, right, I
Speaker 1: think so for one thing, it does feed into kind
Speaker 1: of radicalism. I desire just to earn the empire to
Speaker 1: the ground, because anything that rises out of the ashes
Speaker 1: has found to be better than what we have now.
Speaker 1: To give up on hopes of reform and improvement, and
Speaker 1: it can lead to a kind of fatalism. Well just
Speaker 1: if we are fortunate, but just enjoy life while we can,
Speaker 1: because there's nothing we could do about these contractable problems,
Speaker 1: and we're we're doing it anyway. So yes, it is.
Speaker 1: I was trying to go beyond some of the journalistic
Speaker 1: cliches of the end of this and the death of that,
Speaker 1: and the dawn of a post something era. That the
Speaker 1: prices of the day are often can be overcome, be
Speaker 1: surmounted if you have a problem solving mindset. So here
Speaker 1: are a couple of things that are the news will
Speaker 1: tell me are epidemics, and which I actually thought were
Speaker 1: epidemics till I read your book, and now I'm rethinking
Speaker 1: that I want to make sure in this new book
Speaker 1: I'm wor here on that I have integrity, that I'm
Speaker 1: saying it right. So weliness and suicide are two big ones,
Speaker 1: and if you type either those words in Google, you'll
Speaker 1: get plenty of articles saying that they have reached epidemic proportions.
Speaker 1: Could you maybe set me straight on that, Yes, it
Speaker 1: is a bad only true that race of suicide in
Speaker 1: the United States have risen since nineteen unity doing and
Speaker 1: all of those hits that you're going to get from Google,
Speaker 1: will I use nineteen nuney nine as a starting point.
Speaker 1: Ninety nine is kind of a local minimum for the
Speaker 1: suicide rate in the United States. It was the lowest
Speaker 1: that had been in several decades, and so it was
Speaker 1: it started that is starting from a whole point it
Speaker 1: is not to minimize the tragedy of suicide, and it
Speaker 1: has genuinely increased since nineteen ninety nine. Even there, when
Speaker 1: it has to drill down and look where it is happening,
Speaker 1: and it's not everyone that's committing suicide. More often, it
Speaker 1: is that vulnerable sector of the population that is also
Speaker 1: in the victim of opioid overdoses, unemployment, dropping out of
Speaker 1: the workforce. It's largely baby boomer, less educated, more rural men,
Speaker 1: and so that is a sector of the population that's suffering,
Speaker 1: and that's they have been driving up to the suicide rate.
Speaker 1: But it is not an across the board phenomenon, and
Speaker 1: other sectors of the population have seen suicide rate stable
Speaker 1: or come down. It's generally arise a lot of it
Speaker 1: because of the Great Procession. That when you have periods
Speaker 1: of high unemployment and an often higher inflation, economists call
Speaker 1: it the misery index good reason. It does make people miserable,
Speaker 1: and suicide rates do tend to increase. They were much higher,
Speaker 1: by the way, during the Great Depression than they are
Speaker 1: in the wake of the so called Greater Session. But
Speaker 1: if one looks at data on suicide over time, it
Speaker 1: wasn't one doesn't start the clock at nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: and one sees that it is not the case that
Speaker 1: we're suffering from a general suicide epidemic. It's really really
Speaker 1: is localized and for the world as a whole. The
Speaker 1: Global Burning Burden Disease Project has shown that suicide rates
Speaker 1: have come down over the last twenty five years. And
Speaker 1: then loneliness is another really big one which is actually
Speaker 1: sometimes linked to the suicide indeed, and again there's you
Speaker 1: and I and our correspondence that talked about evidence that
Speaker 1: lowliness is associated with many terrible like outcomes which reduced
Speaker 1: health and burning death. For a number of reasons. That
Speaker 1: it's close to home because my sister Susan Pinker wrote
Speaker 1: a book called The Village Effect on the psychological benefits
Speaker 1: of face to face contact and conversely the harms of lowness.
Speaker 1: So loneliness is a terrible thing, but it is not
Speaker 1: true that we're in a sudden epidemic, new epidemic of
Speaker 1: increased loneliness. That remember the Beatles song eleanor Rigby, Yeah,
Speaker 1: all the loathly people, Yeah, I think sixty six And
Speaker 1: the sociological classic the Lonely Crowd by David Reastman. That
Speaker 1: was in nineteen fifty two fifty three, And the data
Speaker 1: that I've seen, mainly from Brod Fisher, sociologist at Berkeley,
Speaker 1: who's done a kind of meta analysis of surveys of loneliness,
Speaker 1: it says that they've been a very little change of
Speaker 1: loneliness over the decades. This is not to minimize the
Speaker 1: suffering of people who continue to be lowly, but it's
Speaker 1: not true that more recent times have seen loneliness. As dirocket.
Speaker 1: Those are two different claims. Do you think that during
Speaker 1: the EA we were just as lonely? We probably were
Speaker 1: less lonely because we had smaller tribes, right, and we
Speaker 1: had greater opportunities for intimate connection and support from people.
Speaker 1: I don't know, what do you think. I think that
Speaker 1: is almost certainly true. On average, everyone knew everyone else.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, only by Donald Simon's one of
Speaker 1: the founders of evolutionary psychology is that often our most
Speaker 1: intense feelings and emotions, to speak at evolutionary history where
Speaker 1: they were uncertain and where where there was variation, and
Speaker 1: the consequences of doing without work catastrophic. So why do
Speaker 1: we never take pleasure in oxygen, but we do take
Speaker 1: great pleasure in food, even though oxygen is more vital
Speaker 1: to life in terms of how long you can do
Speaker 1: about it. He points out that one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that we feed is so exquisite when we have it
Speaker 1: is that very often in evolutionary history, we didn't do
Speaker 1: it something that was worth striving for, precisely because it
Speaker 1: was so difficult to get. Likewise, the love of children.
Speaker 1: There were high rates of child mortality, and the reason
Speaker 1: we treasure our children so intensely is precisely because they
Speaker 1: were always in jeopardy of perishing, all the more reason
Speaker 1: to devote effort to their well being. So this is
Speaker 1: a speculation anthropological data, but the vast, huge emotional effect
Speaker 1: of social connectedness and the pain of loneliness might reflect
Speaker 1: not only that we were typically surrounded by France and allies,
Speaker 1: but there were probably were types when we weren't. With
Speaker 1: social shunning, with ostracism, isolation probably did occur in our
Speaker 1: evolutionary history, which is precisely why they are so painful,
Speaker 1: because a person isolated from the community won't survive long.
Speaker 1: So I suspect that there was variation even in our
Speaker 1: evolutionary history. Yeah, and I really like Leary's work linking
Speaker 1: it to decrements and self esteem, you know, the need
Speaker 1: for belonging when you know, and showing how that social
Speaker 1: protection system works, like we're so hyper attuned to the
Speaker 1: possibility of rejection that will be sad even at the
Speaker 1: slightest hint of rejection, but beyond a certain point, it's
Speaker 1: like an inverteduce shaped curve. Beyond a certain point, like
Speaker 1: as long as we're like moderately accepted, we don't care
Speaker 1: if we're very accepted, you know, that makes sense from
Speaker 1: the evolutionary logic point of view. That's interesting. What it
Speaker 1: does suggest is that certain percentage of the time rejection
Speaker 1: and ostracism feel, which is why they're so inkful there.
Speaker 1: It's catastrophic, you know, to be emotions for things that
Speaker 1: are rare, like radioactivity example, or for many people exposure
Speaker 1: to too much sunlight which gives us a sunburn, we
Speaker 1: don't feel it, as it's happening a lot of things
Speaker 1: where we don't have negative emotions, where they kind of
Speaker 1: come in handy when we do have negative emotions. It
Speaker 1: suggests that it may have been a very real occurrence
Speaker 1: in our revolutionary history. So interesting kind of reverse engineer
Speaker 1: our emotions like that is, you know, to see like
Speaker 1: that passes, you know, like looking through a microscope at
Speaker 1: a universe how many millions of years ago? You know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that. I just thought of that on the spot,
Speaker 1: but it just it felt like an analogy there. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of As a professor, you know, I
Speaker 1: hear a lot of talk of the crisises on campus,
Speaker 1: so mental health crisis and rape crisis. But have you
Speaker 1: looked at data on where those things are crisis? They're
Speaker 1: obviously important issues and problems, but have they reached epidemic
Speaker 1: proportions as well? Well? Overall the rate One thing I discovered,
Speaker 1: to my surprise, was that rates of great nationwide have
Speaker 1: plummeted since data were first kept in meur in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. Now, that was the height of the American
Speaker 1: crime boom, so we don't know what rates of great were,
Speaker 1: say in the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, probably lower, but
Speaker 1: they have come dramatically down. Rates of sexual harassment are
Speaker 1: probably down, even though of course they're recorded far more often,
Speaker 1: which is which is a good thing. One of the
Speaker 1: reasons perhaps that they've been Yeah, now I don't know
Speaker 1: about sexual assault on campus, for see, because we don't
Speaker 1: really have lonitut new data on that, And probably in
Speaker 1: all data on sexual violence is that definitions can change
Speaker 1: over time. So for example, if having sex with someone
Speaker 1: who's drunk is now considered sexual assault, and that was
Speaker 1: not true in all times and places, So it's not
Speaker 1: so easy to compare data different eras. And what about
Speaker 1: the mental health what's called the mental health crisis or
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, I mean that is linked to
Speaker 1: the suicide and loneliness things we're talking about. Indeed, and
Speaker 1: there are data from King Twenga that both depression and
Speaker 1: anxiety had increased in American college students, although anxiety seems
Speaker 1: to have leveled off since the nineteen nineties according to
Speaker 1: the latest meta analysis by one of her students. Although
Speaker 1: the increasing even in the increasing depression, which was the
Speaker 1: result of a separate cross temporal meta analysis, does not
Speaker 1: indicate that major depression, just measured bouts of depression. And
Speaker 1: again a complication there is that over the decades which
Speaker 1: twenty massed those data, the composition of America, the American
Speaker 1: student body changed far more people went to college, including
Speaker 1: a huge degree of inclusiveness of people with mental health issues.
Speaker 1: In the first place. It's a little hard to know
Speaker 1: how much of that increase is due to, say, increased
Speaker 1: stress of living now compared to earlier decades. I suspect
Speaker 1: that some of it is real and least and certainly
Speaker 1: some of the beast things of anxiety from the fifties
Speaker 1: to the nineties, but by part of it. In any
Speaker 1: temporal trend, one always has to distinguish three possible causes,
Speaker 1: one of them being a period effect, the zeitgeist changing times,
Speaker 1: a cohort or generational effect. Some generations are more screwed
Speaker 1: up than others, being probably the most generation. That's the
Speaker 1: technical terms, and an age effect, namely that people change
Speaker 1: as they grow up and get old, and so if
Speaker 1: the population is a different mixture of teenagers, young adults,
Speaker 1: older adults, senior citizens, and so on, then will naturally
Speaker 1: be changed in the average simply because in the case
Speaker 1: of suicide, for example, the risk of suiciety increases with age.
Speaker 1: So to tease those apart is not always straightforward, and
Speaker 1: there are indications that my generation of baby rumors kind
Speaker 1: of push the statistics in a bad direction at every
Speaker 1: stage in our lives. We're more subject to suicide other
Speaker 1: the cohorts or and after more subject depression, and in
Speaker 1: many ways, for all the ways in which the millennial
Speaker 1: generation has been maligned, as younger generations go, they're in
Speaker 1: relatively good shape is compared to their babe parents. So interesting,
Speaker 1: and thank you for that level of nuance. You know,
Speaker 1: as a professor like you, you know, I am concerned
Speaker 1: about what I am hearing, and I'm curious how prevalent
Speaker 1: it is, and I want to you know, that helps
Speaker 1: inform in terms of what my priorities are in terms
Speaker 1: of helping my students. Some data is interesting that that
Speaker 1: suicide is lowered in millennial teenagers compared to n X
Speaker 1: and baby bloomer teenagers. Evidence that lowliness has gone down
Speaker 1: for high school and college students compared to earlier eras.
Speaker 1: And I can found period with cohort and unless you
Speaker 1: have data, repeated data over many decades from people across
Speaker 1: the age range, it's impossible to distinguish. But I suggest
Speaker 1: that it's better to be a teenager or a young
Speaker 1: adult in recent years than in years before that yourself
Speaker 1: has now kind of sewn a new panic about a
Speaker 1: post millennial generation. I get calls them a controversial claim
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, I was going to say it was
Speaker 1: no picnic of being a teenager in my generation precisely. Well,
Speaker 1: in general, one quote that I often use it talking
Speaker 1: about the themes of the book is that the best
Speaker 1: explanation of good old ways is a bad memory. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love when you said that, and I really resonated
Speaker 1: with that, And yeah, you could ask any generator. It
Speaker 1: is not what my parents would say, like, oh, it
Speaker 1: was a picnic for us. Well, I thought we should
Speaker 1: in the little time we have left. I thought we
Speaker 1: should talk about the Enlightenment. How about that, which is
Speaker 1: actually like the point of your main book case You
Speaker 1: make a case for reasons, science and humanism, So let
Speaker 1: me condense a whole bunch of stuff here. So in
Speaker 1: terms of reason and science, I thought we could talk
Speaker 1: about politics. That seems to be a very relevant topic nowadays.
Speaker 1: And the thing that I find interesting is that you
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, you see an arena after arena,
Speaker 1: the world has been getting more rational, which is euphanism
Speaker 1: for better in your worldview. Who I've noticed, But you
Speaker 1: do say there is a flaming exception. You say, electoral
Speaker 1: politics and the issues that I've clung to it not necessarily,
Speaker 1: you know, all these other trends you show in the
Speaker 1: book have progressed, but you're saying there actually is something
Speaker 1: real here going on that like we're not showing progress,
Speaker 1: if anything, we might be even what's the opposite of progress, aggression? Regression,
Speaker 1: not regression to the mean, but real regression. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So could you please tell me about that trend that
Speaker 1: you're you've observed. Well, certainly the part of that is
Speaker 1: anecdote could be the twenty sixteen presidential election, which had
Speaker 1: that in many ways was a carnival of irrationality. Donald
Speaker 1: Trump to single outsides, but on the single outside where
Speaker 1: they were cleaningly erroneous beliefs. Among many of his orders,
Speaker 1: there were a contempt for truth telling, where objective tallies
Speaker 1: of the number of lies from Trump showed that he
Speaker 1: was the most mendacious presidential candidate, and since data were kept,
Speaker 1: I didn't hurt any But he's our president, so that
Speaker 1: was the most granted as my president, Steven, that's a
Speaker 1: hashtag called not my president. That's right. Yes, Unfortunately, technically
Speaker 1: to our great detriment, and there are some data that
Speaker 1: political polarization has increased that even though a majority of
Speaker 1: Americans still consider themselves moderate, the greater percentage are on
Speaker 1: the bar left of the far right, and they each
Speaker 1: one thinks the less of the other in terms of
Speaker 1: their mental confidence and honesty and integrity. If that's a
Speaker 1: bad thing. There's evidence that presidential debates have gotten stupid
Speaker 1: or over time, and that that is longitudinal data. So
Speaker 1: you know, again, shouldn't by nostalgia. There's plenty of idiocy
Speaker 1: in earlier elections, but the political arena certainly is not
Speaker 1: can be said to be getting increasingly rational, especially at
Speaker 1: the presidential level, and there may be a reason for it.
Speaker 1: I mean, the contrast that I drew that you alluded
Speaker 1: to is that we have in other realms of life
Speaker 1: a movement towards rationality. In sports, we've got moneyball and
Speaker 1: saber metrics and other quantitative approaches. In a crime, we've
Speaker 1: got CompStat and other kinds of data driven policing that
Speaker 1: are responsible in good part for the American crime to climb.
Speaker 1: In our medicine, we have more evidence based medicine. In
Speaker 1: online there's the rationality community in day to day governance,
Speaker 1: there's evidence based policy and nudge and behavioral insights. In
Speaker 1: journalism itself, there's fact checking like a fact Snopes. We
Speaker 1: have Wikipedia, which is a remarkable achievement, all volunteers producing
Speaker 1: a pretty decent encyclopedia. So in a lot of areas,
Speaker 1: life has been getting more rational, but our elections have
Speaker 1: been getting crazy. There probably are features of electoral politics
Speaker 1: that pushed forward a certain kind of irrationality that have
Speaker 1: been noted since the time of Plato, such as that
Speaker 1: people literally don't have a state in an election, in
Speaker 1: the sense that when we talk about people voting against
Speaker 1: their interests, we're only talking to the aggregate, since any
Speaker 1: individual's vote is astronomically unlikely to determine the outcome of
Speaker 1: an election. In fact, I mean this is a taboo statement,
Speaker 1: your vote really doesn't matter. With your vote doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Everyone's vote matters, but for each individual basing the dilemma
Speaker 1: or the decision of how much of my time should
Speaker 1: I allocate to becoming cognism of the issues, should I
Speaker 1: study the details of NAPDA? For example, vote because they
Speaker 1: know that it really doesn't make a difference, not even
Speaker 1: the candidates, not even the candidates. That's the scandal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so voting as a form of self expression, and especially
Speaker 1: at the federal level, you've got the strange bundles of
Speaker 1: highly practical policy divides like tariffs, like highly consequential ones
Speaker 1: like clear arms control, like climate change. They're often bundled
Speaker 1: by with emotional hot buttons like abortion, like wedding cakes.
Speaker 1: We gave couples where people have an emotional stake in
Speaker 1: issues that really don't affect them, and they see the
Speaker 1: franchise as a way of a form of self expression.
Speaker 1: So you get competing identities, competing loyalties, competing tribes, rather
Speaker 1: than the kind of Civics textbook idealization of deliberation over
Speaker 1: the best policies. This is less likely to happen at
Speaker 1: a local level, where a lot of municipal governments are
Speaker 1: actually doing pretty well and people are happy with their
Speaker 1: mayors that they don't even know which political party their
Speaker 1: mayor belongs to. But we have not figured a way
Speaker 1: of closing that gap, getting democracy in the sense that
Speaker 1: to apply in this crazy arena of national electoral politics.
Speaker 1: Why is it getting so divide. I'm seeing this trend
Speaker 1: as well, But what are the causal factors that play here. Well.
Speaker 1: A lazy answer would be social media the answer to
Speaker 1: every question about everything that's going on. A good answer.
Speaker 1: It feels intuitively satisfying. It does make a little too
Speaker 1: intuitively sure, Yeah, but I suspect when we're to blot
Speaker 1: the influence, the polarized cable news would probably have a
Speaker 1: bigger impact. Fox News has been shown actually to push
Speaker 1: electoral results around in kind of pseudo experimental studies that compare, say,
Speaker 1: one town whose cable provider happens to include Fox News
Speaker 1: and a neighboring one that doesn't see that makes a
Speaker 1: difference in their elections, and it does and not anticated
Speaker 1: social media, and social media may have exaggerated it. There
Speaker 1: happened tendencies. It may also be segregation by fashion. We
Speaker 1: tend to live with people who do the same things
Speaker 1: that we do in urban areas or in certain kinds
Speaker 1: of suburbs versus others. So I myself don't have a
Speaker 1: simple answer that question. Probably no one does. But you
Speaker 1: have a solution, I mean, you say, here, can we
Speaker 1: imagine a day in which the most famous columnists and
Speaker 1: talking heads have no predictable political orientation but try to
Speaker 1: work out defensible conclusions on the issue. BI it's just basis, Well,
Speaker 1: that could be a Beatles song, you know, one can
Speaker 1: only dream that. Yeah, well it is. You know, I
Speaker 1: can't claim to have a solution, but at least identifying
Speaker 1: a problem as a start, And many of us are
Speaker 1: not even aware that we identify with the left, As
Speaker 1: more academic students have been right, we're probably making ourselves
Speaker 1: less rational just by that very affiliation, simply because the
Speaker 1: answer is, well, we know from studies that people's judgement
Speaker 1: concluding their ability to solve math problems is warped by
Speaker 1: their political affiliations. People will make math errors in the
Speaker 1: direction out there their favorite conclusion. So we know from
Speaker 1: the lab, and we have reason to believe from history
Speaker 1: that the left, nor neither the left nor the right
Speaker 1: has all the answers to fixing all society's problems, that
Speaker 1: we have to be more evidence based or issue by
Speaker 1: issue focused, and that an allegiance to one of the
Speaker 1: other ideology probably makes us less rational. Even if that
Speaker 1: ideas out there, maybe at least start a little bit
Speaker 1: of movement to I guessing the problem for sure. So
Speaker 1: just real quickly, let's quickly talking about god, religion, so humanism.
Speaker 1: I'm on board with humanism, but you talk about can
Speaker 1: we get a good without a god? You know, can
Speaker 1: we get these values without a god? Is religion a
Speaker 1: human need? And I just wanted you to unpack this
Speaker 1: very very stimulating state. We say, don't confuse vulnerability with
Speaker 1: a need. I was wondering if you could explain what
Speaker 1: you mean by that and link it to what a
Speaker 1: humanistic ethics or humanistic morality could look like as well.
Speaker 1: Religions are packages, their bundles, their unity organizations. They have art,
Speaker 1: they have culture, they have continuity with the past, they
Speaker 1: have moralities, and then they have all of these natural
Speaker 1: and theological beliefs. And we have many religions that have
Speaker 1: been quietly unbundling them in a kind of benign hypocrisy
Speaker 1: where they emphasize their role as community centers or places
Speaker 1: for moral reflection. And the divine punishment and the archaic
Speaker 1: Old Testament morality are kind of soft pedled. I don't
Speaker 1: think people have a need to believe in supernatural entities,
Speaker 1: in a god in the sky and word of punishment,
Speaker 1: in an afterlife, and gods of mountains and streams and
Speaker 1: that trees but we can be moored in that direction
Speaker 1: because of our theory of mind, our intuitive psychology, our
Speaker 1: tendency to impute minds to other entities, and in history,
Speaker 1: set of beliefs has been bundled together with these community organizations,
Speaker 1: and it's possible for the organizations to arise without supernatural
Speaker 1: creed and humanist organizations and examples. It is also possible
Speaker 1: for the legacy religious and tutions to downplay the supernatural
Speaker 1: but to continue to function as community centers. And that
Speaker 1: would be a denign hypocrisy that we can encourage. But
Speaker 1: you don't have to believing, as we talked about in
Speaker 1: the top of the conversation, believing in universal human capacity
Speaker 1: to flourish or suffer is an up to ground morality.
Speaker 1: We don't have to have divine commandments or reward and
Speaker 1: punishment in afterlife. Okay, that's a big statement that we
Speaker 1: could talk about for another four hours, but we won't.
Speaker 1: But I thank you for articulating that position. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think a lot about rationality and you kind of
Speaker 1: equating rationality with the good And some people might listen
Speaker 1: to this and think that you're calling for a suppression
Speaker 1: of emotions, and I know you're not doing that, but
Speaker 1: one could think that's what you're doing in a sense
Speaker 1: as well when you talk about the counter Enlightenment and romanticism.
Speaker 1: But you know, you talked about that earlier in the
Speaker 1: book about the counterloayment, but then later in the book
Speaker 1: you do talk about how you know, the unification of
Speaker 1: knowledge across all fields, including your humanities and arts, can
Speaker 1: be fulfilled only if notled foes in all directions. And
Speaker 1: so it seems to me that really is your core
Speaker 1: point there is that you're not talking for some sort
Speaker 1: of pure rationality, if such a thing even exists, devoid
Speaker 1: of all emotions. You're saying that there's a lot that
Speaker 1: we can integrate here. We can integrate the arts, we
Speaker 1: can integrate even the romanticism counter enlightenment, but we can
Speaker 1: still integrate lots of aspects of human experience, including religious
Speaker 1: experience divorced from belief, you know, the actual experience itself
Speaker 1: into this worldview that you're of Enlightenment values. Is that correct? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of reason doesn't mean asceticism
Speaker 1: or ugliness or monotony, and there's nothing irrational about falling
Speaker 1: in love. And maybe you know, hey, it's not irrational
Speaker 1: or to appreciate the beauty of the world or the
Speaker 1: comfort of community, but those are shouldn't be seen as
Speaker 1: the antitheses of reason by any means. It's not you know,
Speaker 1: we shall turn into mister Spock. So yeah, So I
Speaker 1: don't think we should act irrationally when we set the
Speaker 1: goal that we're sure of, should do what's necessary to
Speaker 1: attain that goal rather than falling back on impulse or superstition.
Speaker 1: And certainly when it comes to academic disciplines, the humanity
Speaker 1: subject matter and the methods of the humanities are absolutely indispensable.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't have written Enlightened Now without it, without history,
Speaker 1: without philosophy, with political theory. But I do think there
Speaker 1: has to be an integration. That should not be a
Speaker 1: phobia of data and hypothesis testing within the humanities, nor
Speaker 1: should there be a wariness of incorporating the best and
Speaker 1: most recent ideas of human nature into age old questions
Speaker 1: like what makes us take and how is that manifested
Speaker 1: in our artistic creations, and how to should it affect
Speaker 1: the design of our political institutions? Those are a feature
Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment. To get back to the overarching theme
Speaker 1: of the book. All those guys, they were philosophers, but
Speaker 1: they were also intuitive psychologists, and of course you and
Speaker 1: I cite them today, we cite human causality and spinosa on.
Speaker 1: I even told Nzsche sometimes don't kill me. In many ways,
Speaker 1: wasn't a cute psychologist. And it was really with the
Speaker 1: more recent professional division of philosophy from psychology that we
Speaker 1: even think of them as as alternatives. They're not psychological
Speaker 1: claims are not the same as philosophical or mormative conceptual claims.
Speaker 1: We have to respect the logical distinctions, but they often
Speaker 1: bear on each other. And that was certainly true in
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment, as the philosophical and points and psychological points
Speaker 1: were brought to bear on each other. And I think
Speaker 1: we should see more of it today, despite the somewhat
Speaker 1: artificial division of knowledge into academic disponse. Well, I really
Speaker 1: love that call for that third culture, right, Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: as I reading your book, I keep thinking about, Wow,
Speaker 1: there's a good book here that can square the Allolightenment
Speaker 1: that you're talking about with like modern day notions of Enlightenment.
Speaker 1: I actually see a correspondence there, and I was worrying
Speaker 1: have you ever felt at one with all things enter
Speaker 1: in a different sense of enlightenment. Yes, my, my, my
Speaker 1: editor was a little wary of the title. Sure, I
Speaker 1: think it was a book on Buddhism. It is not.
Speaker 1: But it's not not a book on Buddhism. Well maybe
Speaker 1: not that kind of beyond my uh my skill set
Speaker 1: to answer question. It seems like as we more approach truth,
Speaker 1: beauty and goodness, we more approach the feeling of oneness.
Speaker 1: So I I just saw lots of similarities there Robert
Speaker 1: Right made. Yes. Yes, I'm a big fan of Robert Right.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that Buddhism is true, but if it
Speaker 1: is an argument that he has made, okay, fair enough.
Speaker 1: So I want to end today with a quote that
Speaker 1: I think summarizes a lot of what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the
Speaker 1: conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call
Speaker 1: morally and politics consistent balancing the conflicting desire among people. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for writing to a beautiful book and really
Speaker 1: having such a call for more harmony in the world.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Scott, and thanks for bringing up those very
Speaker 1: provocative points and it's as pandiating question. It's been a
Speaker 1: pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. It's been a
Speaker 1: pleasure for me too. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to
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