https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pBylbB7s5Nw
I’m very pleased today to be talking to Dr. Steven Pinker from Harvard University. He’s the John Stone family professor in the Department of Psychology there and is taught additionally at Stanford and MIT. He’s an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics and social relations. Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. He’s won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Sense of Style. He’s an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates and one of foreign policy’s world top 100 public intellectuals and times 100 most influential people in the world today. He’s chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for the New York Times, The Guardian and other publications. Enlightenment Now, the case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress was his 10th and best selling book published in February 2018. And it’s very nice, by the way, to have the opportunity to speak with you again. And thanks very much for making the time. Thank you, Jordan. So can I ask you, it’s been about a year since we talked last. And I guess I’d like to ask you, first of all, personally, what’s this year been like for you? You’ve become a much more controversial figure, I would say, than would really be predicted. Like, you’ve always seemed to me to be a solid, reliable, interesting, mainstream scientist, not someone who would attract a tremendous amount of critical attention. And yet, you’ve become, well, oddly enough associated with the intellectual dark web, whatever that happens to be. And so much of what you’re doing is controversial. And so what’s that been like? And what’s your life been like over the last while? Yeah, you wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, humanism and progress would be incendiary, and I’m hardly a flamethrower. And as you know, I have put forward some pretty controversial ideas in the past, such as that men and women aren’t indistinguishable, that we all harbor some unsavory motives like revenge and dominance. But saying the world has gotten better turns out to be a radical inflammatory hypothesis. There’s, first of all, just sheer incredulity, because the view of the world that you get from journalism is so different from the view of the world that you get from data, because journalism reports everything that goes wrong. It doesn’t report things that go right. And so if there are more things that go right every year, there’s just no way of learning about it if you view the world from the papers. And so there’s just sheer disbelief. On top of that, there are intellectual factions that are committed to the idea that the world has never been worse than it is now. And data on human progress undermines some of their foundational beliefs. And so that does attract some opposition. People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular humanism and traditional liberalism. And so it does get some people exercised. Basically, if you’re a social critic, if your reputation comes on saying what’s going wrong about current society, then you’re kind of committed to the idea that things have gotten worse. And the idea that things are not as bad as they used to be, not as bad as they could be, is an insult to those core beliefs. Yeah, well, it’s a surprising thing. So let’s talk about that a little bit. I mean, here’s some of the things I know, I think I know. And maybe you could describe some of the things you know. And I started learning that the world had been improving when I worked for a UN committee about five years ago now and started looking at the data on ecology and sustainable economic development. And that’s like, there’s some bad ecological news. I think that what we’re doing to the oceans is fundamentally unforgivable and foolish beyond belief. But there’s some ecological news that’s of surprising positivity. Like there was a paper published in Nature not so long ago, stating, for example, that an area twice the size of the US has greened in the last 15 years, think it was last 15 or 20 years. That actually happened to be as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide, because plants can keep their pores closed if there’s more carbon dioxide and so they can live in more semi-arid areas. And there’s more forests in the Northern Hemisphere than there were 100 years ago, and more forests in India and China than there were 30 years ago. And then this has gone along with a massively improved standard of living. The child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952, which is a statistic that I just regard as absolutely miraculous. The African economies are growing, sub-Saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment if the stats are reliable than economies anywhere else in the world, partly because the Africans are getting connected electronically and have access to reasonable information and to something approximating, let’s say, stable currency alternatives. And people are, the rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate, right? We have poverty considering it at 3.80 a day, you see the same decline. If you look at 5,000 a year, in terms of gross domestic product, they actually start to care about the environment, which I suppose is because they’re not worried about dying instantly that day or that week. And so we seem to be in this perverse situation for a pessimist, where we could make people wealthy and in a positive manner, and we could make the world a better place simultaneously. And that does seem to be very hard on ideologues whose ideology is predicated on a fundamental pessimism, where you get the other people, like the biologists do this sometimes, and say, well, yeah, we’re purchasing all this short-term prosperity, you know, for these billions of people, but at the cost of some medium to long-term eventual precipitous, you know, apocalyptic collapse. And it’s very difficult to formulate an argument against that kind of idea, because, well, you never know when some… I think this is one of the things tele takes you to task for, doesn’t he? Yes, even though I actually have pretty extensive coverage of the of tail risks, both in the better angels of our nature, and in enlightenment now. And indeed, we cannot take incremental improvement as itself an indication that the risk of catastrophes is at an acceptable level, and it may not. It’s very hard to estimate what the risk of a catastrophe is, but there are certainly some that we ought to take very seriously. But on the other hand, the facts that you mentioned are often resistant by, particularly by people in the Green Movement. I’m just going to lean down and pick up my earbud, which rolled across the floor. But if anything, it should give hope and succor to the environmental movement, because it shows that it is not true that we have to choose between economic growth, which people do not want to give up, and protecting the environment, that we can have both. And indeed, there are some ways in which they go together. The nations that have done the most to clean up their environment in the last 10 years are the wealthiest nations, because they can afford it. If you’re dirt poor, as you mentioned, your first priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head. And the fate of the white rhinoceros is pretty low on your list of priorities. And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity. It’s really awful to do without electricity. And I know, having visited cities like Mumbai, which are horribly polluted, and they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity. But on the other hand, when you get more prosperous, then you’re willing to spring for the cleaner energy, and you can afford the cleaner energy. And as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy, and more long-term future concerns loom larger in your value system. So it’s an odd assumption that both the hard right and the hard green have in common, which is that if we want to protect the environment, we have to sacrifice prosperity, go back to a simpler, more peasant style of life. The hard greens say, well, that we’ve got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to living off the land. The hard right says, well, I don’t want to do that, no one wants to do that, so to hell with the environment. The reality is that if both policy and technology are deployed intelligently, as they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment without going backwards and forgoing all of the benefits of modernity. Right, well, I was shocked when I started to learn about this, the fact that there was so much good, both economic and ecological news, with the economic news perhaps being somewhat better than the ecological news. And it doesn’t mean that we can sit back and relax and the environment will clean itself up all by itself. Quite the contrary, we know why the environment got better, combination of policy like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in the United States in 1970, and technology like catalytic converters and scrubbers and clean energy. So it doesn’t happen by itself. The fact that it has, this is one of the great fallacies in people’s understanding of progress, that they equate the existence of progress with progress happening all by itself, as if it was some force of the universe, which is contrary to reality. The other, you mentioned that the existence of human progress is a blow to doctrine near Marxist, which is certainly true, because we have seen the spectacular economic growth of India and China when they liberalized their economies, and the disasters of, say, North Korea with a beautiful control group, South Korea, same geography, same resources, same culture, same language, same history. What differentiates them is their political system, and South Korea is a much better place to live. It’s not only freer, but it is also enormously more prosperous. But as for the… And I’m going to debate Slavoj Zizek on the 19th of April, and I’ve been preparing for that, you know, and I thought what I might do to begin with is list, there’s a graph that I think humanprogress.org put out, it might be Matt Ridley’s graph, or maybe Hans, is it Hans Rosling? Rosling? It may be, it’s Mariam Tupi, is the proprietor of human progress. But it’s what they call the most miraculous, most important graph in the world, which shows this unbelievable acceleration of human prosperity, basically kicking in exponentially around 1895. And… Yeah, so a little bit earlier, but this is a combination of data sources, including a late historical connoisseur, Angus Madison, who began the Madison Project, trying to retrospectively estimate GDP per capita in areas where they did not collect those data at the time, but using historical data. Yes, it is astonishing, and I’ve got to say, when I first saw that curve, when I was working on Better Angels of My Nature, I was stunned. I mean, this is the original hockey stick. Yes, that’s the hockey stick graph that… Very little economic model until the Industrial Revolution, and then it shoots up exponentially. Right, right, and so, you know, I look at that and I think, well, look, I mean, what’s the issue here? We still have inequality, but you can’t put it at the feet of capitalism, because it seems to be a much more fundamental mechanism. Well, at least poverty, certainly, yes. Yes, well, and even inequality, I mean, there seems to be this proclivity towards the unequal distribution of phenomena, not just monetary phenomena, but I mean, if you look in virtually every domain of human endeavour that’s associated with creativity, you get a Pareto distribution of productivity, you know, I mean, a small number of basketball players shoot the vast majority of the hoops, and a small number of record recording artists record the majority of the hits, a small number of planets have most of the mass, and like, there is this… I mean, I’m not trying to make a case that inequality isn’t a problem, I’m trying to make a case that it’s a way deeper problem than the Marxists presume, and then you have the other problem that, well, the poor keep getting richer, I mean, half the world is middle class now, and obesity is a bigger problem than starvation, and so when I’m talking, I can’t, I’m really having a hard time trying to understand what the Marxists have left as a doctrine, it’s like, well, the problem you guys were identifying seems to not exist anymore. Yes, so part of it is that their foil is a kind of Ayn Randian objectivism in which you have a pure, untrammeled, unconstrained market capitalism with no regulation and no social safety yet. Now, one of the discoveries that I made, which was almost as surprising as the hockey stick graph of prosperity, is the fact that in the 20th century, every developed country, every rich country, went on a spree of social spending, and so that from a baseline of about 1.5% of GDP redistributed to children and the poor and the elderly and the sick, now the median OECD country redistributes about 22% of its prosperity, and all rich countries are in a band from about 20% of GDP to about 30% of GDP. The United States is at the low end. Actually, Canada, to my surprise, our home and native land is actually a bit lower than the United States. I still have people in the United, even though Canada would appear to have a more generous welfare state than the United States. And in fact, the United States would be even higher if you added all of the socialism that is done through employers, like retirement and health insurance, which in other countries is done through the government. But even if we just looked at government redistribution, there just does not exist a wealthy country without an extensive social safety net. For a number of reasons. Here’s the theory. Tell me what you think about this. So I’ve been trying to, let’s say, steel man the positions of the left. I don’t mean the radical left. I mean the moderate left, because I believe that the dialogue between the moderate left and the moderate right is what keeps our ship stabilized, essentially. And for this reason. So imagine people have to group together cooperatively and competitively to solve difficult problems, because we have difficult problems. That’s entropy, let’s say, and the assault of the natural world. So we have to group together. When we do that, we create hierarchies. And we do that in large part, we hope, by elevating those who are the most competent at solving the problems to the higher positions in the hierarchies. Now, that can be contaminated by power and tyranny and crookedness and poor selection and all of that, poor measurement. But fundamentally, if your hierarchy is functional, the more competent people rise to the top. Now, that produces the advantage of solving the problem. But it produces the disadvantage of making a lot of people stack up at the bottom of that hierarchy, because that’s what tends to happen because of the Pareto distribution and the built-in proclivity for inequality. So the answer to that seems to be, well, we produce the hierarchies, we accept the inequality, but then we attend with some degree of clarity of vision and care to those who are dispossessed by the necessity of the hierarchies. And your claim seems to be, from what you just said, is that that’s essentially what we’ve been doing in civilized democracies for the last hundred years, and that that seems to be roughly working. Well, it is, yes, sorry, now whether or not the hierarchies are optimal in the sense that we’re better off with the hierarchy, because of just what will happen in a distributed market economy, you may have winner-take-all situations where the most entertaining story, the most efficient car, the best washing machine in a global market will push out a lot of the competitors, and so you get that Pareto distribution. Whether or not anyone would have designed it if they were to plan the entire society might even be beside the point. As long as you don’t have central planning and distribution, it might naturally result if it is not explicitly opposed, which some of our policies do. As you mentioned, it’s a little bit like the environmental progress in that far from being in opposition to economic growth, it’s often economic growth that lets people become more munificent, more generous. There are a number of reasons why every wealthy country has a social safety net and why, as countries get richer, like Brazil and India and China, they turn their attention to more social welfare. The European and North American societies did it in the 20th century and the developing world is following suit. Partly it’s because some of the redistribution is investment, it’s a public good. It’s really good if the entire population is educated for everyone, including the people who are hiring them, and so some of it is just investment in public goods. That’s another interesting take on the Marxist position because the funny thing is that, you know, you lived in Montreal, I lived in Montreal. Montreal is a relatively flat city in some sense in terms of its economic distribution, like there are no pockets of terrifying poverty, at least on the island, and it’s a very safe place and so it’s socially rich in some sense. I always felt wealthy when I lived in Montreal, even though I was living on a PhD’s stipend, which was very low. The area we used to call the student ghetto, which now has luxury condominiums. Right, right. But what was so lovely about Montreal was that it was safe, it was beautiful, and it had an unbelievably vibrant public culture. Yes. That was all a consequence of the fact that people, generally speaking, were well enough off. And so, you know, if you contrast that with a country like Brazil, where a tiny minority of people have all the wealth, well they’re stuck with the problem of living in gilded prisons. They have to move their children around in helicopters. And like, I think one of the things that people realize as societies become richer is that it’s better to calculate your wealth on a broader level, to include more people within the purview of what constitutes wealth for you. Because it’s so nice to be in a city that’s thriving and healthy and not crime-ridden and resentful. And those need to be factored in as elements of individual wealth. That’s right. And there is a debate among social scientists as to whether it is inequality that drives these other social goods, such as low crime, such as public investment, such as education, or whether it’s prosperity. It’s not so easy to tell them apart because, in general, poorer countries like South Africa and Brazil have sky-high inequality. Countries like Norway and Sweden and Switzerland, which have less inequality, are also pretty rich. And it isn’t so easy to see which one is driving it. Because as societies get richer, as we’ve discussed, they tend to redistribute partly out of investing in a public good, such as lower crime, such as having an educated populace is just a really good thing. Partly, it is literally insurance and the euphemism social safety net that is something that captures you if you fall. It captures the idea that even when people are well off, they worry that they’re there but for fortune go I, that you’ve got to be nice to people on the way up because you might need them on the way down. And so putting a bottom, a floor on how poor you can be makes everyone feel a little more secure that if the worst thing happened, they would not be destitute. It’s not that uncommon for people who are in the top 10 percent, say, of the economic distribution, or even in the top 1 percent, to suffer a substantial reversal of fortune at some point in their life. And it’s a very rare person, a very, very rare person, who isn’t at economic danger of economic disadvantage at some point in their life for some reason. Well, certainly people move in and out of the top decile, top 10 percent of the income distribution. Although this argument for social spending would be to indemnify people against the worst outcome. I don’t think that many people in the top 10 percent, or to say nothing of the top 1 percent, will ever go on welfare. But still, a lot of people in the middle class can imagine it, and they don’t want to think that they’ll be out on the street if they lose their job or if they have a suddenly suffer a big medical expense. And the third reason after investment and insurance is just compassion or empathy. We see in the history of the West, after the industrial revolution, you get a literature of compassion for the poor. You have the little match girl, you have Les Misérables, and Jean-Baptiste Jean being in prison for stealing a bit of bread to save his sister. You have the the jodes bearing grandpa on the side of Route 66 in Grapes of Wrath. And so people are also moved by sheer fellow feeling with their compatriots, their fellow citizens. Maybe that’s another reason why the people who are criticizing your informed optimism are irritated. Because, you know, if your fundamental political doctrine insists that well, your primary identity is your group, whatever that happens to be, and the primary motivating factor for the function of your group is raw naked power played out within that group against all other groups, the introduction of something like the notion of an implicit compassion for the downtrodden seems to like wreak havoc with the purity of that ideological position. But like I’ve never met anyone in my life, and I know a large number of extraordinarily successful economically successful people, I’ve never met anyone in my life who walks down the street and sees a down-and-out alcoholic who’s clearly suffering terribly as a consequence of dwelling on the street. What would you say? Celebrate the justice of the universe in elevating them above that person who’s suffering. I mean, I think… Well, go ahead. I mean, we do know from social psychology that there is a tendency to blame the victim, to believe that in a just world. So I think those are two motives that we have, compassion for everyone, but also a feeling that those who are badly off must have done something to deserve it. We do see this, of course, in the surveys that you and I have. Well, you see a tension there because of course… You see a tension. I think that’s right. It’s also modulated by some degree of ethnic solidarity, and it’s been noted that some of the generous welfare states of Europe have at least historically occurred in countries that are ethnically more homogeneous, certainly racially more homogeneous than the United States, which tends to be somewhat stingier. Now, this is not… There is some elasticity into what we cognitively categorize as our group, and one of the great achievements of any kind of nation-building is to instill a feeling, well, we’re all Canadians, or we’re all Swiss, or we’re all Iraqi, something that has actually not happened in Iraq, which is a big problem. Unless you have that fictional family, that fictional clan of a nation, then people tend not to cooperate, including in ways of providing social welfare for the worst off. That’s a ridiculously interesting point, I would say, because one of the things that you really see in Canada, for example, and our Prime Minister is a real devotee of this idea, is that there really is no Canadian culture. There’s no central Canadian ethos, and what we have is a plurality of multicultural microcosms, and that that’s actually all for the best. Yes, the Canadian mosaic as opposed to the melting pot is a very good idea. Although the Prime Minister’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, famously tried to forge a kind of Canadian identity that spanned English, the Anglophone and Francophone communities, hardly exemplified in himself, because he was a dashing, charismatic figure who was distinctively Canadian. He just wasn’t French, he wasn’t American, he had the rose in his lapel, he wore a cape, he was perfectly bilingual, he was debonair and witty and charming. We all felt at the time, I remember this, I remember Trudeau mania, we all felt, now that is a Canadian, that’s something to aspire to, and he did, with his policies and with his symbolism, forge a kind of Canadian consciousness above and beyond the mosaic of the Lebanese Canadians and the Italian, maybe Jewish Canadians and so on. Well, and with sufficient, what would you call it, success to at least keep the country together, which was something quite remarkable. Well, he had to, at one point, he had to declare martial law to do it. Yes. During the October crisis, when separatist terrorists kidnapped a trade commissioner and a government minister. Right, a dark day for Canada. Well, so it looks like there’s a contradiction, maybe, and you can tell me what you think about this in a certain element of leftist doctrine, because assuming that multiculturalism can be reasonably viewed as part of the leftist doctrine, if it is the case that people are more likely to be generous to those that they see in some sense as their in group, then what it suggests is that you need to take the mosaic of your culture, the African Canadians and the European Canadians and the Asian Canadians, the same in the U.S., and have them maintain their culture and their traditions, but also to embed them inside a broader game that constitutes the national identity that unites them all despite their differences. And it seems like, given what you just described, that unless you can forge that trans-ethnic or trans-racial identity, that you motivate people to be less generous in their social policies. Well, that is true, and I consider this to be one of the key ideas of coming out of the Enlightenment, opposed by the counter-Enlightenment of the 19th century by the Romantics and maybe the Nationalists, that a state, a group of people under the jurisdiction of a government, are held together basically by a social contract, by agreement that we’re all in this together, there are many public goods that we share, public costs that we can suffer, a government that allows us to get along by serving in our interests is a way of improving our social welfare, which is a very different conception of a nation than the blood and soil nationalism of the of the 19th century continuing well into the 20th. That what makes us a nation is that we’re all white, we all speak, we come from the same ancestry, and that the successful nations are often ones that manage to forge the somewhat artificial identity. So that’s also fascinating. Because then, okay, then we got two arguments here for that, for that, let’s say, artificial or conceptual nation building process. One is that maybe you could allow people in their different ethnic and racial groups to maintain key elements of their identity, and feel comfortable doing so, but also embed them in their own identity, and then but also embed them in a broader game, like a game that’s voluntarily played and laid out. But exactly, by the same token, given your logic, that’s also the most effective antidote to the kind of nationalism that is identitarian, that also seems to be in the resurgence. And you see this, I really see this as having been done extraordinarily effectively in the United States. Now they had the advantage of the examples of England and France, but that the American experiment was an experiment in conceptual nation building. It’s like, here’s the state of principles that we can all agree on, despite our differences, and to the degree that we decide that we will agree on these principles, then we’re the same enough. We can cooperate. We don’t need to revert to nationalism, or- No, very much. In the Declaration of Independence, that was made crystal clear, that to pursue life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, governments are formed with the consent of the governed to allow people to flourish, to prosper. Nothing in the Declaration said anything about being European, being white, being Protestant, being Christian. It was really a social contract set up for first principles, which of course, there’s some pretty big problems with, of course, the African citizens. It took quite a while to work that out. And there were tensions in the 20th century with ways of immigration from Ireland, from Eastern Europe, from Jews, from Italians. And there were, of course, tensions between the Italians and the Irish, but by the standards of human history, they got worked out pretty well. I think capitalizing on a feature of our psychology, which is that even though we do have an in-group favoritism, we do have tribalism. What counts as a tribe is pretty elastic. It is not by skin color. We form coalitions that cut across skin color. And a successful country is one that capitalizes on that elasticity, form a virtual tribe, which is simply every citizen of the country, and then ultimately, every citizen in larger units, including the humanity, including all the world. A lot of this depends on undermining certain features of human nature, such as in solidarity. And it’s been noted that in cultures that have a lot of cousin marriage, where you’re related to people in your clan, it’s rather hard to do nation building there, like in Iraq, for example. People don’t have a sense of superordinate loyalty to a coalition about their blood relatives and they are tightly tied to blood relatives by cousin marriage. But this also played itself out in the history of the United States. And there’s a wonderful snatch of dialogue at the end of the first Godfather movie, when Michael Corleone enlists after Pearl Harbor and his brother Sonny says, what, did you go to college to get stupid? Your country ain’t your blood. You’re going to be a sap who dies for strangers. And that is a perfect encapsulation of the difference between traditional tribalism and the mentality that we need for a successful world. Right. Well, so it sounds like it’s, you know, it sounds like one of the ways to combat right wing identitarianism, that the new emergence of right wing identitarianism is to make that conceptual distinction between national identity that’s predicated on blood and soil, let’s say kinship, direct kinship, or even secondary kinship, and these more abstract conceptions. Now it seems to me, so just, you may know this or you may not, but Ben Shapiro’s new book is number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And I read Ben’s book a while back and I think it shares some features with your book and it shares some features with my book. And I would say the features it shares with my book is that I stress the importance of the Judeo-Christian stories as part of that conceptual substructure that unites a civilization. And then it has features in common with your book because it’s also a pro-enlightenment manifesto celebrating the achievements, let’s say, of the Greeks and the rationalists moving forward from there. Like Shapiro sees our culture as, and this is something that I agree with, I would say, as a marriage between that Judeo-Christian tradition and that emergent enlightenment. You’re, you’re, and stop me if I’m wrong, but your emphasis, so let’s say that we’re playing this abstract conceptual game that unites us as a people independent of our ethnicity and our race. And there are principles that constitute the game rules for that agreement. And you see those as primarily deriving from the enlightenment and starting then. Well, not, I mean, there’s nothing new under the sun and certainly some of the enlightenment ideas had precursors of the Renaissance and in ancient Greece. But that set of ideas that came together then needed, of course, further elaboration. I think that that’s much more of a basis of human progress than the Judeo-Christian tradition. Again, every intellectual movement draws from pre-existing ideas and moments. And so there was some cherry picking from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it certainly did not depend on belief in Jesus Christ our savior. It did not depend on a one God as opposed to many gods. It really depended on human well-being, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s something you can believe in regardless of your theological commitments. So what, what do you think? So here, here’s the question I have about that is that, like, it seemed to me, so that the people who formulated the Declaration of Independence, for example, accepted as self-evident that human beings were intrinsically valuable and the locus of sovereignty insofar as they were the citizens who would determine the course of the nation. And there’s some recognition there, as far as I’m concerned, of intrinsic value outside of a rational argument, you know, as an a priori presupposition. We accept these truths as self-evident, right? And the most fundamental truth of that is that it’s something like, in my view, it’s something like the strange metaphysical equivalence of man before God, the fact that we all have intrinsic value. And that’s where I see the enlightenment being irreducibly embedded inside this underlying structure. And that’s, that’s different than the idea of progress, which is something that, that you’re focusing on and that I think is more attributable to the development, let’s say, of science and technology. But it still seems to me that the enlightenment had to have an under-structure that enabled it to emerge for those self-evident truths to be accepted universally as self-evident. And well, except I agree that there, that those aren’t scientific ideas. And this is, these are the set of ideas that I draw together under the rubric of humanism. It’s not clear that the self-evident right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is particularly Judeo-Christian. In fact, I think I don’t think you could find that in scripture. And in fact, in the Jewish tradition, God chose the Jews. We’re the chosen people. So the idea of universal, of human worth and well-being is not a particularly Jewish notion. I don’t think it’s a particularly Christian notion. You’ve got to, it’s only, you have to accept Jesus in order to escape eternal damnation. None of that’s in the declaration. What’s self-evident is other things that are almost prerequisite to even considering what ought to go into a country or anything else. Namely, you’ve got to be alive rather than dead. You’ve got to be able to express opinions in order to even have that conversation. So you’ve got freedom. Happiness, as we know from evolutionary considerations, is basically the set of motives that kept our ancestors alive and allowed us to come into existence in the first place, combating the grind of entropy. So I think that the foundation of that Enlightenment belief is not particularly Judeo-Christian, but more existential. It just comes from what are the actual prerequisites to being a incarnate reasoning creature. Okay, so I’m going to press you on two elements of that. And I’m not disagreeing with you, by the way, because I’m not convinced that I’m right. It’s just that these, this is how things have laid themselves out for me and my thinking. I mean, one of the things that’s very interesting about the book of Genesis is that it insists that human beings are made in the image of God and that that gives them an intrinsic value and that they’re made in the image of God, regardless of whether they’re male or female. And then I know the Jews emerge as the chosen people in the Old Testament, but there’s also a strong idea, powerful conceptual idea in the Old Testament that emerges that the people of Israel, the true Israelites, are those who wrestle with God. So it’s like an existential adventure. It’s partly based on blood. It’s partly based on ethnicity, but there’s a conceptual idea too there that there’s the struggle for ethical endeavor, let’s say, and the struggle for the discovery of the meaning of existence is actually what marks out the true follower of God. And then as Judaism transforms itself, at least in some part into Christianity, what I see happening is that you get the idea that that identity with God that existed in Genesis, that intrinsic value starts to become more humanized, that really manifests itself sort of fully in the Renaissance, that the religious figures start to become more individual and that the idea that each individual does in fact have a divine worth that keeps the state at bay is part of what allows for the conception that people are deserving of the chance independently of their ethnicity and their race and their creed and their sexuality to do such things as pursue life, liberty, and happiness. And I see, because otherwise I can’t see, I can’t see where the ideas would have otherwise emerged during the Enlightenment. Well it’s, you know, partly the Enlightenment came about as a reaction to seeing what happens if you ground human worth in religious doctrines such as the European wars of religion, unprecedented carnage, and together with the burning of heretics, if you’re going back to scriptures, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, God commands the Israelites to engage in one genocide after another. There is no prohibition against slavery, there’s no prohibition against rape, there’s no prohibition against grisly forms of torture for victimless crimes like working on the Sabbath. I don’t think it’s very easy to come come up with a notion of universal human rights from either scripture or Christianity. I think the reason that it happened in the Enlightenment, who knows why anything happened to the exact moment that it did, partly it was a realization of the internecine carnage from the wars of religion, but also it’s when you start to peel away scripture and dogma and doctrine, what you’re left with is our common humanity, namely there’s no way that I can insist that only my interests are special and you’re not because I’m me and you’re not, and I hope for you to take me seriously. So as we engage in any kind of discourse with diverse other people, what we are forced to fall back on is what we have in common, namely we are both sentient, we are both rational, we have the ability to suffer, we have the ability to flourish. I made it the same stuff as you, I can’t claim that if you don’t suffer, that would be a ludicrous proposition, and that’s what gives you the notion of universal human rights and as government as a derivative means of pursuing those rights, as opposed to say divinely ordained monarchy. It’s so hard in discussions like this because it depends to some degree on your time frame and also on whether you take the broad picture or you concentrate on the details to some degree, because like I mean I’ve got no objection to any of the descriptions of the horrors of religious tribalism that you just laid out. I mean I would place that more in the domain of tribalism than in the domain of religion, because I think the tribalist tendency is the warlike tendency that the mass subordinate. Although the most severely punished heretics are often those within the tribe, those are the ones where you really want to burn a distinct as an example. So it’s not, it is, I think there’s tribalism, I think there’s also a kind of puritanical emphasis on the on pure essence that anyone who contaminates the body politic must be expelled. Oh yes, there’s definitely that, and well you see that with taboo violations in tribal systems as well. And authoritarianism, the idea that the challenging a legitimate authority is itself inherently evil, it’s not the idea that criticizing the leader is essential to the health of a nation, which is constitutive of idea of democracy and freedom of speech. You have the ability to make fun of the president on now without getting in front of him. And the moral obligation to. And moral obligation to, and that’s a deeply unintuitive feeling that the natural human tendencies to, we know this from the work of people like Rick Schwader and John Haidt and others, is that les majesté, attacking the king, is a a mortal sin that hierarchies are themselves often moralized. That’s a natural human idea that was kind of, I guess as we say deconstructed or rejected during the Enlightenment, including the rationale for government laid out in the Declaration of Independence. It’s a funny thing, eh, because what I see happening is that over the thousands of years of religious thinking, let’s say that went on in the West, is that what emerged initially was the idea that there was something akin to deity that characterized human beings. And that’s stated very early on in the religious tradition and in a very surprising way, partly because it’s distributed between men and women equally. And it seems to be partly a creative function in that human beings partake in the co-creation of existence and partly an ethical function in that we’re called upon to act courageously and truthfully. And that’s the core idea, I think, that’s expressed in Genesis. And it’s a really sophisticated and demanding idea. And then I see it like the mustard seed that’s part of the parable in the New Testament. It’s this tiny idea that takes root and against incredible odds manifests itself across the centuries until what we get is an increasing realization of the universality of humanity. And that that constitutes part of the core of the Enlightenment. And you know, you made arguments about religious sectarianism and religious like tribal warfare. But the funny thing is, is that I would say that the critics of of your defense of the Western Enlightenment project might point to the same details in some sense. And to say, well, look at the consequences of Enlightenment thinking, there’s been endless warfare since the Enlightenment, there’s been a tremendous generation of destructive technology, the negatives, which you can point to case by case and piece by piece, arguably outweigh the positives. I mean, I certainly don’t believe that, but people could make that case. And so it’s so difficult, hey, when you’re when you’re trying to take a long view of history, to decide what, which part of the melody you focus on, like is it the deep, or is it the details that, that seem to work against those themes? Yes, well, I of course, talked about the trajectory, historical trajectory of warfare in some detail in the bitter angels of our nature with something of a reprise in the chapter on peace and enlightenment now. And it’s certainly not true that wars increased after the Enlightenment, quite the contrary. If you look at the percentage of years that the great powers of the day were at war with each other, it actually goes goes down starting in the 17th century. Great power wars don’t even occur anymore. We haven’t had one for about 65 years. But the it is, what happened was that that in the centuries after the 18th century, there were two trends that went in opposite directions, which is that wars actually got shorter and less frequent, the ones that did occur got deadlier, that is, countries got more efficient at killing more people in a shorter amount of time, partly because of the of weaponry, but also just because of social organization, being able to conscript large numbers of young men and then to send them to the battlefield as cannon fodder until and a lot of that was driven actually by counter enlightenment ideologies of nationalism, which led to both, both world wars, then starting in 1945 for the first time, wars became less frequent, shorter, and less deadly. And so the first time in I think, in human history, you have a systematic move away from occurred after 1945 with the formation of the United Nations, with a kind of unprecedented universalism, the kind of global consciousness, including all races, all religions, still not, of course, universally accepted, but even as an aspiration about that’s something that’s pretty new in human history, it did not occur during the time of the European Enlightenment in the 18th century. But I think it was the consolidation of the Enlightenment ideals, including the formation of the United Nations, which was a call for by by Emmanuel Kant, as a perpetual peace, which of course did not happen at the time, but we’ve enjoyed it since and crucially for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations, now the Sustainable Development Goals, you have people coming together, nations coming together, some of them not from a Judeo-Christian tradition by any means, but who have been the Judeo-Christian tradition by any means, but who can agree on things like, well, it’s really better if people live than if they die of disease, it’s better if babies don’t die in their first year of life, it’s better if kids go to school, it’s better if we don’t go to war, it’s better if we have a clean environment, all these things that we have in common because we’re human beings. So we can agree on the lack of utility of unnecessary suffering, something like that, and maybe even the lack of the utility of unnecessary malevolence. Yes, you don’t need to be, all you need to do to endorse that is be a human, have the ability to suffer or to flourish. So, okay, so let me switch this a bit if you don’t mind, and I’d like to speak a bit more personally, if you would. What’s the consequence for you over the last year of this increasing public exposure and also controversy, and what do you think just out of curiosity about being associated with this loose IDW, you know, which no one really joined, but just emerged out of the blue. I mean, I think all the people in it, in some sense, you’re the most surprising member because, well, Well, yes, you may be the prototype, but, you know, and I am more peripheral, I think it just comes from being, just not having drunk the Kool-Aid of political correctness, identitarianism, social justice, warfare, wokeness, as long as you’re not part of that tribe, as long as you haven’t signed up to that, then you get associated with this, of course, whimsical, humorous entity called the intellectual dark web. Right, right. So, so you defined, I mean, it’s a joke because, of course, there is a dark web. Right. Well, it’s a joke in all sorts of ways, because it’s a ridiculous club. I mean, I’ve been trying to figure out what characterizes the people who’ve been loosely aggregated in that association, you know, and I think that a certain fortunate independence is part of it. You know, that almost everyone in that group has their own means of support. I mean, you’re a university professor, obviously, and that could be taken from you, but I mean, you have nine books, and many of them are best sellers, and like you have the means to keep yourself operating as an independent being without being dependent on any necessary external bureaucracy. And I also have, and I also have tenure, which means that I’m a little harder to fire than most people in most jobs. Right, right. Exactly. So that gives me a certain, I used to be cynical about tenure as a unique sinecure of university professors, but there is part of the initial rationale, mainly giving you some degree of intellectual independence. I’m really coming to appreciate it. Oh yes, tenure is like the Canadian Senate. Except when it’s absolutely necessary. Right. Yeah, yeah. I think it’s really, and politically, of course, the people in this, I mean, there is no, as we said, there is no such thing as intellectual dark web except as a kind of joke. But the people who are connected to it, I think have a certain amount of unwillingness to kowtow or bow down to some of the pieties that have become orthodox on many college campuses and in some of the elite media. Because politically, the people who’ve been connected to it are pretty diverse. They’re very diverse. There’s almost the complete range, except for the absence of people who are politically correct. The other thing that’s very interesting about the group, two other things I would say, is that they’ve been very effective users of social media, and also they don’t think that their audience is stupid. You know, yes, I think that’s that is true. And it’s one of the keys to effective teaching, to effective communication. One of the first bits of advice I got when I made the crossover from academia to popular writing from an editor at a university press, he told me the mistake that academics often make when they try to reach a broad audience is they talk down. They assume that their audience is not as upright as they are. So then the key is assume that your audience is your intellectual peer, but they happen not to know some stuff that you know. I offer that also as writing advice in my book, The Sense of Style. But you’re also right that the independent minded people that we’ve been talking about try not to use insults and put downs as a means of argument, not even so much their audience being stupider, but rather being evil. That if you don’t agree with me, then you are a reprehensible human being. Yeah, that’s definitely a mistake within the bounds of that group, let’s say. I think it’s a brand mistake, let’s say, whenever that happens. So, well, and of course, that defines the kind of politically correct social justice warfare that these people are reacting to, namely that the mode of argument that I think we’re all trying to distance ourselves from is that if you don’t agree with me, then you are a moral cramp. Right, right. So, okay, so now, what’s been the personal consequences for you? Like you’ve been at the center of a fair bit of controversy. And I mean, it’s very difficult to have a series of bestselling books, for example, and speaking tours and so forth, without being controversial in some way, because it probably indicates that you’re not saying anything of any real novelty or importance. But what how has it affected you? And has it been a net positive or a net negative? And then how are people reacting to you? Oh, it’s unquestionably a net positive. And at least so far, I have certainly escaped the kind of the outrage mobs that we know can be aroused by advancing heterodox opinions. I have gotten some anger. I was subject to a rather bizarre incident where a panel that I was on called the political correctness like Donald Trump, where some of my remarks were spliced in the video. It was then cited by the by the alt-right and neo-Nazis, which led to a kind of denunciation on the left. Fortunately, in my case, I can’t complain because the New York Times stepped into my defense. Jesse Singal wrote an op-ed with my photo adorning it, saying how social media are making a stupid and using the attack on me as evidence for the pathology of social media. So I came out of that unscathed. On the other hand, I do live in some degree of fear that the mob could turn on me at any moment. There was a wonderful essay by Neil Ferguson expressing a similar fear. He said, well, my wife who’s made of braver stuff than I, tells me not to worry. She’s made of braver stuff than almost anyone else in the world. That was the in-joke, of course, his wife being Ayaan Hersi, one of the bravest people on the planet. That was a sly little bit of humor for those who know his personal situation and a reminder that people have withstood much fiercer attacks than any of us have to worry about. Right, right, right. How are people responding to you in public? When you’re out in public, I mean, you’re a rather striking figure. You’re easy to recognize. What happens when you go out? How do people respond to you? Oh, it’s positive. I have nothing to complain about. People recognize me and I expect after this, what we’re doing now airs, that I’ll be recognized even more because I know that you have quite a broad and diverse following. But also in person, as we know, people tend to often mitigate the kind of animosity that is easy to express when you’re anonymous, behind the shield of social media removing anonymity. But people are much more civil face to face. I have gotten a lot of warmth. I’ve gotten to my surprise a number of people writing to me saying that I’ve been good for their mental health, including my Quillette essay. Even though technically, like you, I’m a psychologist. Unlike you, I’m not a clinical psychologist. I have no confidence whatsoever in treating anxiety, depression, psychological problems. And I even have to explain to people and ask me what I do for a living. I tend to avoid saying I’m a psychologist, even though that’s what my degree is. People assume that I’m a clinical psychologist, which I’m not. So I sometimes say I’m a cognitive scientist because no one has any idea what that means. You know, I think you’ve been good for my mental health. Well, that’s what some people, for the first time in my life, I say I’ve kind of earned that credential. But some people write in they say I just am so dejected and discouraged and downtrodden by reading the news that when I come across the data that you’ve presented that humanity has been improving, it actually is good for my mental health. I don’t feel as despairing for my children, for myself, for the future of my country. Well, that’s a big deal. And you’re also, it’s more than that. It’s not only that you’re saying it’s deeper than that. For a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, you’re a credible source and like, naive optimism is worse than cynical pessimism, I think, because it’s too fragile, it’s too easily damaged. But your optimism isn’t naive, it’s, it’s data based, and it’s well researched. And so you can go in there as a pessimist, like a powerful pessimist, and you can think, oh, oh, well, look at that, look at that. And, and look at that. And, and it’s not just one or two things, it’s enough things. So that starts to be a story. And you think, oh, well, maybe we’re not going to hell in a hand basket quite as fast as we thought we were. And then we’ve got necessarily, well, at least not necessarily. Yes. Well, and that’s something. But then there’s a there’s an implicit message there too, which is perhaps the enlightened message itself, which is that, well, not only are things getting better, but human beings are the sorts of creatures that could make things better if they chose to. And that’s, that’s a radical message, I think. I mean, one of the things I’ve noticed about what people respond positively to in my lectures is my insistence to them that they could be, they may not be, but they could be powerful forces for good and powerful beyond really, in some ways, beyond the limits of their imagination is that human beings unbounded rationally, even from an enlightenment perspective, independent of the metaphysics is that we do have the capacity to address incredibly complicated problems. And with goodwill and caution and a certain degree of intelligence, we can actually make them better. And I think that that’s a deeply positive message, especially for young people who’ve been raised on nothing but a steady diet of disenfranchisement and nihilistic pessimism about the future. Indeed. And it has been a source of tension in my own intellectual autobiography, because I note that I’m not an optimist about the human condition by ideology or by background. In fact, I wrote a book called The Blank Slate on the modern denial of human nature, arguing that we’re not blank slates, that we are equipped by evolution with a lot of motives, some of which are not so pleasant, not so conducive to human well-being, like tribalism, like authoritarianism, like greed, like cognitive illusions, like self-exception. But what shifted my world view was really coming across data that came as much a surprise to me as to anyone, showing that violence has gone down and poverty has gone down and prosperity has gone up. And then trying to resolve that tension. How could we as a species both burn each other alive and engage in rape and discrimination and genocide, but on the other hand, somehow manage to power this improvement? And I think it comes from the fact that we’re cognitively and psychologically complex. We have a number of ugly motives, but we also have some modicum of empathy. We have self-control. We have cognitive processes that allow us to reason. We have language that allows us to share our ideas. And if we manage to channel those with the right institutions, with a commitment to free speech, to democracy, to science, to empirical testing, then we can mobilize the better angels of our nature, as Abraham put them, and kind of eke out bits of improvement despite our worst selves. I think it’s quite comical that you used a religious analogy for that title. I mean, because I think part of the case that you’re making, and I would say this is a narrative case to some degree, is that despite the depth of human depravity, which is definitely something that you did discuss in the blank slate, although not as intensely as some people have, that good, so to speak, has the capacity to triumph over evil and sorrow, despite the depths of both of those. And that is also an unbelievably optimistic message, because I don’t believe that you can be a credible voice for optimism. And what would you say, someone who celebrates the human spirit, unless you’re very cognizant of its depths, because otherwise you’re just not informed. You’re just not the right enemy. That’s right. And you have to, I think, value the hard-won human institutions and norms that don’t necessarily come naturally to us, like the rule of law, like free speech, like empirical basing arguments on empirical data, things that have to be inculcated every generation. We’re not doing such a good job with this generation, I sometimes think, but it’s because of these games that we’ve invented that bring out our better side, that we have been able to overcome our inner demons, our darker angels. I wonder sometimes, too, I wonder why you think about this. I mean, you know, when I grew up, when you grew up, you know, from the end of World War II until, let’s say, 1989, there were real reasons for apocalyptic thinking, in my estimation. You know, the massive buildup of the thermonuclear arsenal and the constant tension and testing between especially the Soviets and the Western Bloc. The times when we came so close to nuclear annihilation, I think, for several generations, and then also in the 60s, the discovery of human beings as, let’s say, a planet transforming force on an ecological level, I think there were real reasons for people to be terrified into a kind of apocalyptic pessimism. And I kind of wonder sometimes if one of the things that you’re not battling against is, what would you say, is the revelation that that period of time in some sense is over, is that that particular apocalypse, God willing, has been reduced substantially in probability. And we can now start to think about the future in a positive way again. But man, it was 45 years, you know, and not counting World War II, which I think we probably shouldn’t count. It was 45 years where everyone was, well, being taught that if they put themselves under their desks as elementary school, that was going to protect them from an atomic blast. And so I wonder if that is coming out of that. That’s true. I think 1989 truly was momentous. It was the end of the Cold War and the worst threats of nuclear exchange. It also led to a decline in the number of proxy wars in Asia and Africa and South America, which people don’t appreciate. You look at the horrific wars that are taking place now, such as in Yemen and Syria, and you might think that we’re in an unprecedented area of warfare. But this is nothing compared to the 70s and 80s, where Africa was in flames. The war in Vietnam killed far more people than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria combined. There were threats like the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Richard Nixon raised the level of nuclear alert, something that has not happened since. These really were perilous times. Quite apart from the Cold War, Iran and Iraq fought their version of World War I, which threatened to choke the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, bringing the world economy to a halt. And then we lived through that. So people forget how awful the 60s, 70s and 80s were in terms of… Right. Well, and there was also the fact that, well, in Africa and in South America, I would say in particular, those proxy wars also being also ideological wars, absolutely stifled economic development, both in South America and in Africa. And I think one of the reasons that we’ve seen this unparalleled improvement in economic conditions, let’s say, it’s obvious in China because of their market reforms, but in Africa is at least in part because there aren’t, there isn’t a coterie of insane Soviet dictators dictating economic policy to African leaders that’s absolutely counterproductive and pathological. And so just by removing that source of trouble, much less adding anything new and good, just by getting rid of that source of trouble, the Africans have been able to free themselves from the worst excesses of the most foolish economic theories of the 20th century. And I really think that started to manifest itself in the 2000s. That was part of it. And there is each effect, it’s the others, so that poverty makes civil war more likely and vice versa, because war has been called development in reverse. And that nothing is worse for an economy than schools are being blown up and people pull out of their offices and shot and institutions destroyed as quickly as they can be built, markets, transportation networks. But also if countries are poor, and then it’s true that Marxist economic ideas make countries poor, then it becomes more attractive to join militias and rebel groups because the government isn’t doing anything for you. And you’ve got a lot of young men who have nothing better to do with their time, no loyalty is commanded by the incompetent government. And then of course, both superpowers would fund the insurgency movements that opposed whichever government the other superpower was supporting. Right, and amplifying the problem. Ponsequence. Amplifying the problem. Again, people forget, when people talk about what a terrible state the world is in now, they often forget how awful the Cold War was for what we now call the developing world, then called the third world. Right, right, right. Okay, so let me close with this, if you would. We’ve had a good conversation. What are you working on at the moment that’s occupying you, that you have hopes for? And what are your general hopes, let’s say, for the next three or four years? I mean, your career is ascendant in a manner that is true of very few people. And you have a tremendous global impact, I would say, all things considered. And one that as far as I’m concerned is overwhelmingly to the good. What’s next for you? And what would you like to see happen in the future for you over the over the next few years? Well, for the world, I would certainly like to see a push back against authoritarian populism and a momentum going back to the forces of humanism, of cosmopolitanism, of globalism, of democracy against the identitarian politics, primarily of the populist right, since they are in power, but also of the campus left. But the renewal of the narrative that we, if we think about what we all have in common as human beings, and if we apply our brain power overcoming our cognitive limitations, then we can solve problems. Climate change being a big one, I have my own views on climate change. I’ll express them in a Times editorial. It’s coming out in a couple of days. Oh, I’m looking forward to it. Is that going to get you in trouble? Yes, it will. And I’ll leave that as something. Okay. Okay. Well, I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to seeing what you think. It’s a very complicated problem. It is a very complicated problem, but I think some of the activists are making it more complex and worse. But I’ll leave that as a little enigma until people check out that article. Although there was a hint in enlightenment now. Okay. And academically? Academically, I’ve done a number of studies over the years taking off from an interest in how language is used in a social context. For a large part of my career, I studied language. It made me curious about why we don’t just blurt out what we mean so much of the time. We have issue bail threats, sexual come-ons that are kind of folded between the lines. We showy showy, we beat around the bush, we hint, we use euphemisms. That led me to the concept of common knowledge in the game theorist sense of, I know something, you know something, I know you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know that you know that I know it, add it to the item. Or not. In cases where we each know something, we’re not so sure that the other guy knows that we know it. I think that’s hugely powerful in our social and emotional lives. And I have a, I’m going to start writing a book in two years whose tentative title is, Don’t Go There, Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Depocracy, Outrage, and Taboo. Hmm, that sounds extremely interesting. I mean one of the things that I’ve observed, you know, is that people have a hierarchy of values and that the deeper in the hierarchy the value is embedded, the more experiential reality is stabilized, the more it’s united under a single goal, and the more it’s brought in out of uncertainty. And I think we have rules that are like, don’t disrupt too much of someone’s map territory with any given utterance. And so we tend a bit to play on the periphery, you know, like it might be too much for you to stand to be outright objected by or rejected by someone that you’re sexually attracted to, you know, because it casts light on your validity as a acceptable source of DNA, let’s say. But to play a bit and to tease a bit and allow you to accept carefully and casually delivered playful rejection without it having to go way down into the depths of your character. It’s like to me, it’s like a minimal necessary force doctrine. Sorry about that technical snap. Yes, I think there is a lot to that, just the ego threat of being rejected. But in addition, we have, we divide our social relationships into qualitatively different categories. And a sexual relationship really is different from a friendship or a workplace relationship. It is an inescapable fact that often people are sexually attracted to each other. Sometimes one attracted to the other, but not not vice versa. Too often, indeed. There is something that is inherently threatening about a, say, a professional relationship or on a friendship. If the sex is kind of out there, you’ve learned about even though paradoxically, any grownup knows that there’s got to be sexual attraction in a lot of heterosexual relationships that are not overtly sexual. So he might know it, she might know it. But as long as he doesn’t know that she knows that he knows that she knows, that he knows it, then you can work under the fiction that the relationship is 100% platonic or 100% professional. There’s something about learning it out which generates common knowledge. Neither side can deny that the other one knows that they know it. Right. Unequivocally changes the qualitative nature of the relationship. Once it’s, as we say, once it’s out there, it’s out there. You can’t take it back. The cat is out of the bag. The bell can’t be unrung. Mm-hmm. I wonder too if you think it’s because the explicit statement, imagine that you have implicit motivations and many of them, and as implicit motivations, they have a relatively low probability of being manifested. But when you formalize that implicit motivation in speech, do you suppose you move the probability of enacting it up the hierarchy and therefore pose more of a threat to the other person? Is it that the speech is somehow closer to action than the- I think so. But I think it’s even deeper than that. I don’t think it’s just sort of an analog shift along the scale. There’s something qualitatively different about blurting something out. That’s for sure. I think we subdivide our relationships into different types. Authority, subordinate, equal sharing and communality of interest, exchange. These can take place over different resources, over money, over sex, over aid. We are very attentive to which one holds between in a given dyad in a particular time. Each one is a different coordination game, as the game theorists would put it, where we both begin if we’re in the same cell, if we’re on the same page. But if we have discrepant understandings, then there can be in mild form awkwardness, embarrassment in the extreme case, shock, outrage, worry. Yeah, well it’s reminiscent of the problem of dual relationships that are often talked about in professional ethics. You know that it’s very, of course, very difficult to have a unit dimensional relationship with someone. But you’re constantly warned ethically not to, for example, if you’re a clinical psychologist, not to make a friend out of your client. And to say nothing of a sexual partner. Well, yes, to say absolutely nothing of that. Yes, exactly. These sorts of things happen between professors and students. And so, and I think to some degree they’re inevitable. But the dual relationship problem also means that you end up playing at least two games with different outcomes. And so the aims become blurry and the degree of conceptual confusion also increases. And now I’m not exactly sure why making that explicit would necessarily make it worse. But it does seem to be associated with what would you call it, an unwise complexification of the situation. Absolutely. And it is that kind of social emotional dynamic that I will be writing about in that. Don’t go there. Exactly that paradox. Well, I’m very much looking forward to reading it. And I’d also, one of my dreams, by the way, I don’t know what you think about this. I think it would be fun. And I suppose this is perhaps an invitation. I think it would be fun to sit down with you and Ben Shapiro and have a talk about religion and the Enlightenment and the state of the modern world. I don’t know if you’d ever be interested in doing something like that. Not a political discussion, you know, but because I think there is something to be thought out in a serious way between the Enlightenment types like you and like Sam Harris, for example, because I would put him in the same, well, not in the same category, but in a similar. Yeah, no, I think there’s a lot of overlap. Yeah, yeah. And then people like Sarah, like Ben and I who are and maybe the union and analysts, for example, who tend to view the historical movement towards increased freedom and prosperity as a longer process. There’s really something there that needs to be hashed out. And it’s really complicated. And might be fun to have a conversation about that at some point if you if you were ever interested in if you ever have the time. I accept the invitation. All right. Well, I’ll talk to Ben because okay, I think we can have a good conversation, you know, and scrap it out a bit and see if we could get somewhere because like I really liked your books, you know, I really liked Enlightenment now and I regard myself in many ways as as a pro-Enlightenment figure. I mean, I’m very scientifically minded. I’ve done a lot of empirical research and learned a tremendous amount from it. And I certainly believe that the mastery of science and technology has been a major contributor to the furtherance of human well-being. And there’s something to be said for the solidity of an objective materialist view of the world. But there’s there’s an element there that seems to me to be troublesome that leads to a kind of nihilism which interestingly enough you happen to be fighting with some of your optimism, which is quite quite nice to see. But I think there’s fertile discussion there to reconcile, maybe to reconcile some of the unnecessary tension between the different streams of thought that have made Western culture and world culture for that matter the the remarkable creation that it actually is. I think that could be fruitful indeed. All right, well is there anything else that you’d like to mention to people at any forthcoming talks you have or public appearances or things you’d like to draw their attention to or are we are we at the end of a fruitful discussion? The problem is we could just keep going. So where to start? I will be I’m often on the road. I’m often given public lectures and discussions. I have one. I’m having a public event with Paul Krugman next week at Brown University. It may not be next week by the time this circulates. Maybe the past 10 minutes by then. But yeah on my website I have a list of things. Okay, okay. Well it’s pretty fun to see that there’s a public audience for this sort of discussion. Who would have guessed? Much more than anyone would have guessed just five years ago. For ideas and debate absolutely. Another reason for optimism. Let’s hope. Very nice talking to you and thank you very much for taking the time and good luck with your talks and your academic endeavors and with your attempts to help people understand that there’s reason to be hopeful now and perhaps even more reason to be hopeful in the future and about people. That’s a hell of a thing for someone who doesn’t think there’s a blank slate. Indeed. Thank you Jordan. Thanks for having me on. Great pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much. Okay thank you. Let’s stay in touch. Bye bye. Bye.