Progress, Despite Everything

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 20 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.

[2] Weekly update, Mom is still stable, and we are still stressed out.

[3] She's finally going home from the hospital next week.

[4] That's about it for updates, to be honest.

[5] Actually, I just tried Wagyu beef for the first time.

[6] Not that that's an important update, but if you haven't tried A5 Wagyu, try it.

[7] It's literally the best thing I've ever eaten.

[8] It was like eating chocolate.

[9] I almost cried.

[10] Sorry, that's not an important update, but I was still excited about it.

[11] I've only been eating meat for so long.

[12] Anyway, this week's episode titled Progress, Despite Everything, features Dr. Stephen Pinker.

[13] Stephen Pinker is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

[14] Dad's going to introduce him right away, so I won't give anything more away.

[15] Hope you enjoy it.

[16] Dr. Stephen Pinker is a very interesting human.

[17] being.

[18] When we return, Dad's conversation with Dr. Stephen Pinker, progress despite everything.

[19] I'm very pleased today to be talking to Dr. Stephen Pinker from Harvard University.

[20] He's the John Stone family professor in the Department of Psychology there and is taught additionally Stanford and MIT.

[21] He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations.

[22] Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard.

[23] 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.

[24] 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 policies, world top 100 public intellectuals and times 100 most influential people in the world today.

[25] 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.

[26] Enlightenment now, the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress was his 10th and best -selling book, published in February 2018.

[27] And it's very nice, by the way, to have the opportunity to speak with you again.

[28] And thanks very much for making the time.

[29] Thank you, Jordan.

[30] So can I ask you, it's been about a year since we talked last.

[31] And I guess I'd like to ask you, first of all, personally, what's this year been like for you?

[32] You've become a much more controversial figure, I would say, than would really be predicted.

[33] 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.

[34] And yet, you've become, well, oddly enough, associated with the intellectual dark web, whatever that happens to be.

[35] And so much of what you're doing is controversial.

[36] And so what's that been like?

[37] And what's your life been like over the last while?

[38] Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defense of reason science, humanism, and progress would be incendiary.

[39] And I'm hardly a flamethrower.

[40] And as you note, 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.

[41] But saying the world has gotten better, it turns out to be a radical, inflammatory hypothesis.

[42] There are, 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.

[43] It doesn't report things that go right.

[44] And so if there are more things that go right every year, there's just no way of learning about it.

[45] And so there's just a sheer disbelief.

[46] On top of it, there are intellectual factions that are committed to the idea that the world has never been worse than it is now.

[47] And data on human progress undermines some of their foundational beliefs.

[48] And so that does attract some opposition.

[49] People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular humanism, traditional liberalism.

[50] And so it does get some people exercised.

[51] Basically, if you're a social critic, if your reputation comes on saying what's going wrong about the 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 that, those core beliefs.

[52] Yeah, well, it's a surprising thing.

[53] Well, so let's talk about that a little bit.

[54] 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.

[55] 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.

[56] And there's some bad ecological news.

[57] I think that what we're doing to the oceans is fundamentally unforgivable and foolish beyond belief.

[58] But there's some ecological news that's of surprising positivity.

[59] Like there was a paper published in nature not so long ago, stating, for example, that an area twice the size of the U .S. has greened in the last 15 years.

[60] I think it was last 15 or 20 years.

[61] 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 a hundred years ago and more forests in indian china than there were 30 years ago and then this has gone along with a massively improved standard of living um 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.

[62] The African economies are growing sub -Saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment.

[63] If the stats are reliable, then economies anywhere else in the world, partly because the Africans are getting connected electronically and have access to reasonable information into something approximating, let's say, stable currency alternatives there there's people are people the the rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate right we we have poverty considering it at a dollar 90 a day between 2000 and 2012 and I've read criticisms of that saying well that was an arbitrary number but if you look at 380 a day you see the same decline if you look at 770 60 a day, you see the same decline, not as precipitous, and even the UN, not known, I would say, for its optimistic prognostications, estimates that at this rate, by the year 2030, there won't be anyone in the world who's living below the current poverty level.

[64] So there are some positive statistics.

[65] So what would you like to add to that?

[66] Oh, yes.

[67] And those are, all of those numbers are reported in graphs in Enlightenment now.

[68] But also, what else?

[69] Illiteracy is declining.

[70] Rates of violent crime, including violence against women and children are declining.

[71] Child labor is declining.

[72] Death in warfare is declining.

[73] People have more leisure time.

[74] They have more access to small luxuries like beer and getting, affording our plane fare.

[75] So it's funny that all of these examples of human progress, which one would think vindicate the attempt to make the world a better place, it's not just do -goating, it's not romantic, it's not utopian.

[76] We really can improve the world if we set our minds to do it, should arouse on much anger, partly because people are so unused to thinking that things have gotten better, but they confuse it with certain kinds of magical thinking, such as that things get, this must mean that there is a force in the universe that carries us ever upward, that just makes progress happen by itself, which is the exact opposite to reality.

[77] The universe not only doesn't care about us, but there has a number of features that are constantly pushing back at us, like entropy, like pathogens, like entropy is a bad one.

[78] Entropy is the root of all human suffering, ultimately.

[79] I've read, too, other things that are peculiar that are so interesting.

[80] Well, okay, so first of all, it's pretty hard on the Marxists, I would say, because even though there is inequality and inequality is a problem, first of all, it doesn't look like inequality can be placed at the feet of capitalism.

[81] It seems to me to be a far more intractable problem.

[82] than that second it's clear that the poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality and third and this is hard on the environmentalists I think is that it turns out that if you get people's income up to about five thousand dollars 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 or you get the other people like the biologists do this sometimes and say well yeah we're purchasing all this short -term prosperity at, you know, for these billions of people, but at the cost of some medium to long -term eventual precipitous, you know, apocalyptic collapse.

[83] 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 thing Telep takes you to task for, doesn't he?

[84] Yes, even though I actually have pretty extensive coverage of the, tail risks, both in the better angels of our nature and in Enlightenment now.

[85] 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.

[86] It's very hard to estimate what the risk of catastrophe is, but there are certainly some that we ought to take very seriously.

[87] But on the other hand, And the facts that you mention are often resistant by people in the green movement, 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.

[88] And indeed, there are some ways in which they go together.

[89] 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.

[90] If you're dirt poor, as you mentioned, your first priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head.

[91] And the fate of the white rhinoceros is going to be pretty low on your list of priorities.

[92] And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity.

[93] It's really awful to do without electricity.

[94] 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.

[95] But on the other hand, when you get more prosperous, you're willing to spring for the cleaner energy, and you can afford the cleaner energy.

[96] And as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy and more long -term future concerns loom larger in your value system.

[97] 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.

[98] The hard greens say, well, that we've got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to living off the land.

[99] The hard rights says, well, I don't want to do that.

[100] No one wants to do that, so to hell with the environment.

[101] The reality is that if both policy and technology are deployed intelligent as they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment without going backwards and forego all of the benefits of modernity.

[102] Right.

[103] 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.

[104] And it doesn't mean that we can sit back and relax and the environment will clean itself up all by itself.

[105] 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.

[106] So it doesn't happen by itself.

[107] The fact that it has this 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.

[108] The other, you mentioned that the existence of human progress, is a blow to doctrinaire Marxists, 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.

[109] What differentiates them is their political system, and South Korea is a much better place to live.

[110] It's not only free, but it is also enormously more prosperous.

[111] And as well, I'm going to debate Slavo Ishizek 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.

[112] There's a graph that I think Human Progress .org put out.

[113] It might be Matt Ridley's graph, or maybe Hans, is it Hans Rosling?

[114] Rosling?

[115] Rosling.

[116] It may be, it's Mariam Toopey is the proprietor of Human.

[117] Right.

[118] 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.

[119] Yes, a little bit earlier, but this is a combination of data sources, including a late historical connoisse Madison, who began the Madison project, trying to retrospectively estimate GDP per capita in eras, they did not collect those data at the time, but using historical data.

[120] Yes, it is astonishing, and I've got to say, when I first saw that curve, when I was working on better angels of our nature, I was stunned.

[121] I mean, this is the original hockey stick.

[122] Yes, you know, I look at that, and I think, well, look, I mean, what's the issue here?

[123] We still have inequality, but you can't put it at the feat of capitalism, because it seems to be a much more fundamental mechanism.

[124] Well, at least poverty, certainly, yes.

[125] Yes.

[126] 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 endeavor 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.

[127] recording artists record the majority of the hits and 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 Marxist 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 I'm really having a hard time trying to understand what the Marxists have left as a doctrine.

[128] It's like, well, the problem you guys were identifying seems to not exist anymore.

[129] Yeah, so part of it is that their foil is a kind of Iron -Randian objectivism in which you have a pure untrammeled, unconstrained market capitalism with no regulation and no social safety net.

[130] 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.

[131] And so that from a baseline, 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 which countries are in a ban from about 20 % of GDP to about 30 % of GDP.

[132] The United States is at the low end.

[133] Actually, Canada, to my surprise, our home and native land is actually a bit lower than the United States.

[134] I still have people figured out, even though Canada would appear to have a more generous welfare state than the United States.

[135] And in fact, the United States would be even higher if you added all of the socialism that has done through employers like retirement and health insurance, which in other countries has done through the government.

[136] But even if we just looked at government redistribution, there just does not exist a wealthy country without an extensive social safety net.

[137] So here's a theory.

[138] Tell me what you think about this.

[139] So I've been trying to, let's say, steal man the...

[140] positions of the left.

[141] I don't mean the radical left.

[142] 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.

[143] So imagine people have to group together cooperatively and competitively to solve difficult problems, because we have difficult problems.

[144] That's entropy, let's say, and the assault of the natural world.

[145] So we have to group together.

[146] 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.

[147] Now that can be contaminated by power and tyranny and crookedness and poor selection and all of that, poor measurement.

[148] But fundamentally, if your hierarchy is functional, the more competent people rise to the top.

[149] 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.

[150] 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.

[151] 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.

[152] Well, it is, yes, that's right now, whether or not the hierarchies are optimal in the sense that we're better off with a hierarchy, because of just what will happen in a, I'm going to 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 creative distribution.

[153] Whether or not anyone would have designed it if they were to plan the entire society might even be beside the point.

[154] 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.

[155] 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.

[156] 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.

[157] The European and North American societies did it in the 20th century, and the developing world is following soon.

[158] Partly it's because some of the redistribution is investment.

[159] It's a public good.

[160] It's really good if the entire population is educated for everyone, including the people who are hiring them.

[161] and so some of it is just investment in public goods.

[162] Okay, so that's another interesting take on the Marxist position, because the funny thing is, is that, you know, you lived in Montreal.

[163] I lived in Montreal.

[164] Montreal's a relatively flat city in some sense in terms of its economic distribution.

[165] Like there are no pockets of terrifying poverty, at least on the island.

[166] And it's a very safe place.

[167] and so it's socially rich in some sense.

[168] Like I always felt wealthy when I lived in Montreal, even though I was living on a PhD's stipend, which was very well.

[169] The area we used to call the student ghetto, which now has luxury condominiums.

[170] Right, right.

[171] But what was so lovely about Montreal was that it was safe, it was beautiful, and it had an unbelievably vibrant public culture.

[172] Yes.

[173] And that was all a consequence.

[174] of the fact that people generally speaking were well enough off.

[175] 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.

[176] They have to move their children around in helicopters.

[177] 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.

[178] Because it's so nice to be in a city that's thriving and healthy and not crime -ridden and resentful.

[179] And those need to be factored in as elements of individual wealth.

[180] That's right.

[181] 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.

[182] 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.

[183] 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.

[184] Partly, it is literally insurance, and the euphemism social safety net, that is something that captures you if you fall, captures the idea that even when people are well off, they worry that there but for a 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.

[185] 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.

[186] It's not that uncommon for people who are in the top 10%, say, of the economic distribution or even in the top 1 % to suffer a substantial...

[187] 20 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[188] I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator.

[189] Weekly update, mom is still stable and we are still stressed out.

[190] She's finally going home from the hospital next week.

[191] That's about it for updates, to be honest.

[192] Actually, I just tried Wagyu beef for the first time.

[193] Not that that's an important update, but if you haven't tried A5 Wagyu, try it.

[194] It's literally the best thing I've ever eaten.

[195] It was like eating chocolate.

[196] I almost cried.

[197] Sorry, that's not an important update, but I was still excited about it.

[198] I've only been eating meat for so long.

[199] Anyway, this week's episode titled Progress Despite Everything, features Dr. Stephen Pinker.

[200] Stephen Pinker is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

[201] Dad's going to introduce him right away, so I won't give anything more away.

[202] Hope you enjoy it.

[203] Dr. Stephen Pinker is a very interesting human being.

[204] When we return, Dad's conversation with Dr. Stephen Pinker, Progress Despite Everything.

[205] I'm very pleased today to be talking to Dr. Stephen Pinker from Harvard University.

[206] He's the John Stone family professor in the Department of Psychology there and is taught additionally Stanford and MIT.

[207] He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations.

[208] Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his best.

[209] BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard.

[210] 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.

[211] 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 policies 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 being like for you you've become a much more controversial figure I would say than would really be predicted.

[212] 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.

[213] And yet, you've become, well, oddly enough, associated with the intellectual dark web, whatever that happens to be.

[214] And so much of what you're doing is controversial.

[215] And so what's that been like?

[216] And What's your life been like over the last while?

[217] Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defense of reason science, humanism, and progress would be incendiary, and I'm hardly a flamethrower.

[218] And as you note, 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.

[219] But saying the world has gotten better, it turns out to be a radical.

[220] inflammatory hypothesis, there are, 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.

[221] It doesn't report things that go right.

[222] And so if there are more things that go right every year, there's just no way of learning about it.

[223] And so there's just a sheer disbelief.

[224] On top of it, there are intellectual factions that are committed to the idea that the world has never been worse than it is now.

[225] And data on human progress undermines some of their foundational beliefs, and so that does attract some opposition.

[226] People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular humanism, traditional liberalism.

[227] And so it does get some people exercised.

[228] basically anyone, if you're a social critic, if your reputation comes on saying what's going wrong about the 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 that, those core beliefs.

[229] Yeah, well, it's a surprising thing because, well, so let's talk about that a little bit.

[230] 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.

[231] 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.

[232] And that's like there's some bad ecological news.

[233] I think that what we're doing to the oceans is fundamentally, unforgivable and foolish beyond belief.

[234] But there's some ecological news that's of surprising positivity.

[235] Like there was a paper published in nature not so long ago stating, for example, that an area twice the size of the U .S. has greened in the last 15 years.

[236] I think it was last 15 or 20 years.

[237] 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.

[238] 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.

[239] And then this has gone along with a massively improved standard of living.

[240] 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.

[241] 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 to something approximating, let's say, stable currency alternatives.

[242] There's, and people are, the rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate, right?

[243] We have poverty considering it at a dollar 90 a day between 2000 and 2012.

[244] And I've read criticisms of that, saying, well, that was an arbitrary number.

[245] But if you look at 380 a day, you see the same.

[246] same decline.

[247] If you look at 760 a day, you see the same decline, not as precipitous.

[248] And even the UN, not known, I would say, for its optimistic prognostications, estimates that at this rate, by the year 2030, there won't be anyone in the world who's living below the current poverty level.

[249] So there are some positive statistics.

[250] So what would you like to add to that?

[251] Oh, yes.

[252] And those are, all of those numbers are reported in graphs in enlightenment now.

[253] But also, what else?

[254] Eliteracy is declining.

[255] Rates of violent crime, including violence against women and children are declining.

[256] Child labor is declining.

[257] Death in warfare is declining.

[258] People have more leisure time.

[259] They have more access to small luxuries like beer and, and, and, um, and, um, um, affording a plane fare.

[260] So it's funny that all of these examples of human progress, which one would think vindicate the attempt to make the world a better place, it's not just do -goating, it's not romantic, it's not utopian.

[261] We really can improve the world if we set our minds to do it, should arouse on much anger, partly because people are so unused to thinking that things have gotten better, but they confuse it with certain kinds of magical thinking, such as that things get, this must mean that there is a force in the universe that carries us ever upward, that just makes progress happen by itself, which is the exact opposite to reality.

[262] The universe not only doesn't care about us, but there has a number of features that are constantly pushing back at us, like entropy, like pathogens, like entropy is a bad one.

[263] Entropy is the root of all human suffering, ultimately.

[264] I've read, too, other things that are peculiar that are so interesting.

[265] Well, okay, so first of all, it's pretty hard on the Marxists, I would say, because even though there is inequality and inequality is a problem, first of all, it doesn't look like inequality can be placed at the feet of capitalism.

[266] It seems to me to be a far more intractable problem.

[267] than that.

[268] Second, it's clear that the poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality.

[269] And third, and this is hard on the environmentalists, I think, is that it turns out that if you get people's income up to about $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.

[270] And so we seem to be in this pervert.

[271] 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 or you get the other people like the biologists do this sometimes and say well yeah we're purchasing all this short -term prosperity at 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 thing tell it takes you to task for doesn't he yes even though I actually have pretty extensive coverage of tail risks, both in the better angels of our nature and in Enlightenment now.

[272] 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.

[273] 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.

[274] On the other hand, the facts that you mentioned are often resisted by people in the green movement.

[275] 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.

[276] And indeed, there are some ways in which they go together.

[277] 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.

[278] If you're dirt poor, as you mentioned, your first priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head.

[279] And the fate of the white rhinoceros is going to be pretty low on your list of priorities.

[280] And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity.

[281] It's really awful to do without electricity.

[282] And I know having visited cities like Mumbai, which are horribly polluted, and that they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity.

[283] 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.

[284] And as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy and more long -term future concerns loom larger in your value system.

[285] 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.

[286] The hard greens say, well, we've got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to living off the land.

[287] The hard rights says, well, I don't want to do that.

[288] No one wants to do that.

[289] So to hell with the environment.

[290] The reality is that if both policy and technology are deployed intelligent as they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment without going backwards and foregoing all of the benefits of modernity.

[291] Right.

[292] 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.

[293] And it doesn't mean that we can sit back and relax and the environment will clean itself up all by its.

[294] itself, quite the contrary.

[295] We know why the environment got better, a 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.

[296] So it doesn't happen by itself.

[297] 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.

[298] You mentioned that the existence of human progress is a blow to doctrinaire Marxists, 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.

[299] what differentiates them is their political system, and South Korea is a much better place to live.

[300] It's not only freer, but it is also enormously more prosperous.

[301] And I'm going to debate Slavo Ishizek 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.

[302] There's a graph that I think human progress .org put out.

[303] It might be Matt Ridley's graph, or maybe Hans, is it Hans Rosling?

[304] Rosling.

[305] Mariam Toopee is the proprietor.

[306] Right.

[307] 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.

[308] Yes, a little bit earlier, but this is a combination of data sources, including a late historical connoisse, Angus Madison, began the Madison project, trying to retrospectively estimate GDP per capita in eras where they did not collect those data at the time, but using historical data.

[309] 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.

[310] I mean, this is the original hockey stick.

[311] Yes, you know, I look at that and I think, well, look, I mean, what's the issue here?

[312] 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.

[313] Well, at least poverty, certainly, yes.

[314] Yes.

[315] 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 endeavor that's associated with creativity, you get a perido distribution of productivity.

[316] 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 Marxist 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.

[317] I'm really having a hard time trying to understand what the Marxists have left as a doctrine.

[318] It's like, well, the problem you guys were identifying seems to not exist anymore.

[319] Yeah, so part of it is that their foil is a kind of iron -randian objectivism in which you have a pure, untrammeled, unconstrained market capitalism with no regulation and no social safety net.

[320] 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.

[321] And so that from a baseline, 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.

[322] And all which countries are in a ban from about 20 % of GDP to about 30 % of GDP.

[323] The United States is at the low end.

[324] Actually, Canada, to my surprise, our home and native land is actually a bit lower than the United States, So have people figure that out, even though Canada would appear to have a more generous welfare state than the United States.

[325] 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 has done through the government.

[326] But even if we just looked at government redistribution, it just does not exist a wealthy country without an extensive social safety net.

[327] So here's a theory.

[328] Tell me what you think about this.

[329] So I've been trying to, let's say, steal man the positions of the left.

[330] I don't mean the radical left.

[331] 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.

[332] And for this reason.

[333] So imagine people have to group together cooperatively and competitively to solve difficult problems because we have difficult problems.

[334] That's entropy, let's say, and the assault of the natural world.

[335] So we have to group together.

[336] 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.

[337] Now, that can be contaminated by power and tyranny and crookedness and poor selection and all of that, poor measurement.

[338] But fundamentally, if you're hierarchy, is functional, the more competent people rise to the top.

[339] 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.

[340] 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.

[341] 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.

[342] And that that seems to be roughly working.

[343] Well, it is, yes, that's right now.

[344] 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 creative distribution.

[345] Whether or not anyone would have designed it if they were to plan the entire society might even be beside the point.

[346] 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.

[347] As you mentioned, it's a little bit like environmental progress, far from being in opposition to economic growth, it's often economic growth that lets people become more munificent, more generous.

[348] 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.

[349] The European and North American societies did it in the 20th century and the developing world is following soon.

[350] Partly it's because some of the investment in some of the redistribution is investment.

[351] It's a public good.

[352] It's really good if the entire population is educated for everyone, including the people who are hiring them.

[353] And so some of it is just investment in public goods.

[354] That's another interesting take on the Marxist position because the funny thing is, is that you know, you lived in Montreal.

[355] I lived in Montreal.

[356] 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 and so it's socially rich in some sense like I always felt wealthy when I lived in Montreal even though I was living on a PhD's um uh stipend which was very well the area 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.

[357] And that was all a consequence of the fact that people generally speaking were well enough off.

[358] 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.

[359] They have to move their children around in helicopters.

[360] And 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.

[361] Because it's so nice to be in a city that's thriving and healthy and not crime -ridden and resentful.

[362] And those need to be factored in as elements of individual wealth.

[363] That's right.

[364] 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.

[365] 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.

[366] And it isn't so easy to see which one is driving it.

[367] 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.

[368] Partly, it is literally insurance, and the euphemism social safety net, that is something that catches you if you fall, captures the idea that even when people are well off, they worry that they're 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.

[369] 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.

[370] It's not that uncommon for people who are in the top 10%, say, of the economic distribution, or even in the top 1 % to suffer a substantial reversal of fortune at some point in their life.

[371] 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.

[372] Well, certainly people move in and out of the top decile, top 10 % of the income distribution.

[373] Although this argument for social spending would be to indemnify people against the worst outcome.

[374] I don't think that many people in the top 10th or to say nothing at the top 1 % will ever go on welfare.

[375] 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 suddenly suffer a big medical expense.

[376] And the third reason, after investment and insurance, is just compassion or empathy.

[377] We see in the history of the West, after the Industrial Revolution, you get a literature of compassion for the core.

[378] You have the little match girl, you have Les Miserables and Jean Valjean being in prison for stealing a bit of bread to save his sister.

[379] You have the Jodes bearing grandpa on the side of Route 66 in grapes of wrath.

[380] And so people are also moved by sheer fellow feeling with their compatrious, their fellow citizens.

[381] Maybe that's another reason why the people who are criticizing your informed optimism are irritated.

[382] Because if your fundamental political doctrine insists that 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.

[383] The introduction of something like the notion of an implicit compassion for the downtrodden seems to wreak havoc with the purity of that ideological position.

[384] But like, I've never met anyone in my life, and I know a large number of extraordinarily.

[385] successful, economically successful people.

[386] 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.

[387] What would you say, celebrate the justice of the universe in elevating them above that person who's suffering?

[388] I mean, we do know from social psychology that there is a tendency to to blame the victim, to believe that in a just world.

[389] 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.

[390] We do see this, of course, in the surveys that you and I. Well, you see attention there, because, of course.

[391] You see attention.

[392] I think that's right.

[393] And of course, it is reasonable change.

[394] It's also modulated by some degree of ethnic solidarity.

[395] 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.

[396] Now, this is not, there is some elasticity into what we cognitively categorize as our group.

[397] 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.

[398] Unless you have that fictional family, that fictional clan of a nation, then people tend not to cooperate, including in ways of providing social and welfare for the worst off.

[399] 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.

[400] Yes, the Canadian mosaic as opposed to the melting pot is a very idea.

[401] Right.

[402] Although the prime minister's father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, famously tried to forge a kind of Canadian identity that spanned English, the Anglophone and Francophone communities, partly exemplified in himself because he was a dashing charismatic figure who was distinctively Canadian.

[403] He just wasn't French.

[404] He wasn't American.

[405] He had the rose in his lapel.

[406] He wore a cape.

[407] He was perfectly bilingual.

[408] He was debonair and witty and charming.

[409] We all felt at the time, I remember this.

[410] I remember Trudeau mania.

[411] We all felt, now that is a Canadian.

[412] That's something to aspire to.

[413] 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 -Canadian, Jewish Canadians, and so on.

[414] Well, with sufficient, what would you call it, success to at least keep the country together, which was something quite remarkable.

[415] Well, he had to, at one point, he had to declare martial law to do it.

[416] Yes.

[417] During the October crisis, when separatist terrorists kidnapped a trade commission.

[418] and a government minister.

[419] Right, a dark day for Canada.

[420] Well, so it looks like there's a contradiction maybe.

[421] 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 they're 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.

[422] 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.

[423] That is true.

[424] And I consider this to be one of the key ideas of coming out of the Enlightenment, opposed by the counter -enlightment of the 19th century, by the romantics and the nationalists, that a state, a group of people under the jurisdiction of a government, are held together, basically by a social contract, by an agreement that we're all in this together.

[425] There are many public goods that we share public costs that we can suffer.

[426] A government that allows us to get along by serving in our interests is a way of improving our welfare, which is a very different conception of a nation than the blood and soil nationalism of the 19th century continuing well into the 20th.

[427] That what makes us a nation is that we're all white.

[428] We all speak.

[429] if we come from the same ancestry, and that the successful nations are often ones that manage to forge the somewhat artificial identity.

[430] So that's also fascinating, because then, okay, then we got two arguments here for that, let's say, artificial or conceptual nation -building process.

[431] 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 a broader game, voluntarily played and laid out.

[432] But 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.

[433] And you see this, I really see this as having been done extraordinarily effective, in the United States.

[434] Now, they had the advantage of the examples of England and France, but that the American experiment was an experiment in conceptual nation building.

[435] It's like, here's the state of principles that we can all agree on despite our differences.

[436] And to the degree that we decide that we will agree on these principles, then we're the same enough.

[437] We can cooperate.

[438] We don't need to revert to nationalism or...

[439] Very much.

[440] 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.

[441] Nothing in the Declaration said anything about being European, being white, being Protestant, being Christian.

[442] It was really a social contract set up from first principles, which, of course, there had some pretty big problems with, of course, the African citizens.

[443] It took quite a while to work.

[444] that out.

[445] And there were tensions in the 20th century with ways of immigration from Ireland, from Eastern Europe, from Jews, from Italians.

[446] And there were, of course, tensions between the Italians and the Irish.

[447] But by the standards of human history, they got worked out pretty well.

[448] 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.

[449] It is not by skin color.

[450] We form coalitions that cut across skin color.

[451] 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.

[452] A lot of this depends on undermining certain features of human nature, such as skin solidarity.

[453] 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.

[454] 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.

[455] But this also played itself out in the history of the United States.

[456] And there's a wonderful snatch of dialogue at the end of the first godfather.

[457] movie when Michael Corleone enlists after Pearl Harbor and his brother son he says what did you go to college to get stupid your country ate your blood you're gonna die out you're gonna be a sap who dies for strangers and that is a perfect uh encapsulation of the difference between traditional tribalism uh and the mentality that we need for a successful right well so it sounds like it's you know it sounds like one of the ways to combat right -wing identitarianism, 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.

[458] 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.

[459] 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.

[460] 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.

[461] 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 it's Stop me if I'm wrong.

[462] 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.

[463] And there are principles that constitute the game rules for that agreement.

[464] And you see those as primarily deriving from the Enlightenment and starting then.

[465] Well, not, I mean, there's nothing new under the sun, and certainly some of enlightenment ideas had precursors of the Renaissance and in ancient Greece.

[466] But that set of ideas that came together then, and it needed, of course, further elaboration.

[467] I think that that's much more of a basis of human progress than the Judeo -Christian tradition.

[468] Again, every intellectual movement draws from pre -existing ideas and movements, and so there were was some cherry -picking from the Judeo -Christian tradition.

[469] But it certainly did not depend on belief in Jesus Christ, our Savior.

[470] It did not depend on one God as opposed to many gods.

[471] It really depended on human well -being, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

[472] That's something you can believe in regardless of your theological commitments.

[473] So what do you think?

[474] So here's the question I have about that, is that 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.

[475] And there's some recognition there, as far as I'm concerned, of intrinsic value outside of a rational argument.

[476] you know it as a as an a priori presupposition we accept these truths as self -evident right and and and the the 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.

[477] And that's different than the idea of progress, which is something that you're focusing on and that I think is more attributable to the development, let's say, of science and technology.

[478] But it still seems to me that the Enlightenment had to have an understructure that enabled it to emerge for those self -evident truths to be accepted universally as self -evident.

[479] Well, I agree that those aren't scientific ideas.

[480] These are the set of ideas that I draw together under the rubric of humanism.

[481] It's not clear that the self -evident right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is particularly Judeo -Christian.

[482] In fact, I don't think you could find that in scripture.

[483] And in fact, in the Jewish tradition, God chose the Jews.

[484] We're the chosen people.

[485] So the idea of universal human worth and well -being is not a particularly Jewish notion.

[486] I think it's a particularly Christian notion.

[487] You've got to, it's only, you have to accept Jesus in order to escape eternal damnation.

[488] None of that's in the Declaration.

[489] What's self -evident is are things that are almost prerequisite to even considering what ought to go into.

[490] to a country or anything else.

[491] Namely, you've got to be alive rather than dead.

[492] You've got to be able to express opinions in order to even have that conversation.

[493] So you've got freedom.

[494] 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.

[495] So I think that the foundation of that Enlightenment belief is not particularly Judeo -Christian, but more existential.

[496] It just comes from one of the actual prerequisites to being a incarnate reasoning creature.

[497] I'm going to press you on two elements of that.

[498] And I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way, because I'm not convinced that I'm right.

[499] It's just that this is how things have laid themselves out for me in my thinking.

[500] 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.

[501] 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.

[502] So it's like an, it's like an, it's like an existential adventure.

[503] It's partly based on blood.

[504] It's partly based on ethnicity.

[505] But there's a conceptual idea too there that there's, the struggle for ethical endeavor, let's say.

[506] And the struggle for, for the discovery of the meaning of existence is actually what marks out the true follower of God.

[507] 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.

[508] And I see, because otherwise I can't see, I can't see where the ideas would have otherwise emerged during the Enlightenment.

[509] 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.

[510] There is no prohibition against slavery, there's no prohibition against rape, there's no prohibition against grizzly forms of torture for victimless crimes, like working on the Sabbath.

[511] I don't think it's very easy to come up with a notion of universal human rights from either scripture or Christianity.

[512] 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 internacy and carnage from the wars of religion.

[513] But also, it's when you start to peel away scripture and dogma and doctrine, what you're left with is our common humanity.

[514] 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.

[515] As soon 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.

[516] Namely, we are both sentient.

[517] We are both rational.

[518] We have the ability to suffer.

[519] We have the ability to flourish.

[520] I made it the same stuff as you.

[521] I can't claim that if you don't suffer, that would be a ludicrous proposition.

[522] And that's what gives you the notion of universal human rights.

[523] and as government as a derivative means of pursuing those rights, as opposed to, say, divine -reordained monarchy.

[524] 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.

[525] Because, like, I mean, I've got no objection to any of the descriptions of the horrors of really, religious tribalism that you just laid out.

[526] 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 vast subordinate.

[527] Although the most severely punished heretics are often those within the tribe.

[528] Those are the ones that you really want to burn a mistake as an example.

[529] So it's not, it is, I think there is tribals.

[530] And 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.

[531] Oh, yes, there's definitely that.

[532] Well, you see that with taboo violations in tribal, in tribal system as well.

[533] And authoritarianism, the idea that challenging a legitimate authority is itself inherently evil.

[534] It's not the idea that criticizing the leader is essential to the health of a nation, which is constitutive of the idea of democracy and freedom of speech.

[535] You have the ability to make fun of the president on the, you without getting fun.

[536] And the moral obligation to.

[537] And the moral obligation to.

[538] And that's a deeply unintuitive feeling that the natural human tendencies to, we know this from the work of people like Rick Schuader and John Haidt, and others is that Les Magistay attacking the king is a mortal sin that hierarchies are themselves often moralized.

[539] That's a natural human idea that was kind of, I guess, as we'd say, deconstruct it or rejected during the Enlightenment, including the rationale for government laid out in the declaration.

[540] It's a funny thing, eh?

[541] 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 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.

[542] And that's the core idea I think that's expressed in Genesis.

[543] And it's a really sophisticated and demanding idea.

[544] And then I see it like the mustard seed that's part of the parable in the New Testament.

[545] 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 you made arguments about religious sectarianism and and and religious like tribal warfare but the funny thing is is that I would say that the critics 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.

[546] There's been endless warfare since the Enlightenment.

[547] There's been a tremendous generation of destructive technology.

[548] the negatives, which you can point to case by case and piece by piece, arguably outweigh the positives.

[549] I mean, I certainly don't believe that, but people could make that case.

[550] So it's so difficult, hey, when you're trying to take a long view of history to decide what, which part of the melody you focus on.

[551] Like, is it the deep, deep, or is it the detail?

[552] that seem to work against those themes.

[553] Yes, well, I, of course, talk about the historical trajectory of warfare in some detail in the Better Angels of our nature, with something of a reprise in the chapter on peace and peace and enlightenment now.

[554] And it's certainly not true that war is increased after the Enlightenment, but quite the contrary.

[555] If you look at the percentage of years that the great powers of the day were at war with each other, It actually goes down starting in the 17th century.

[556] Great power wars don't even occur anymore.

[557] We haven't had one for about 65 years.

[558] But what happened was 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.

[559] The ones that did occur got deadlier.

[560] That is, the countries got more efficient at killing more people in a shorter amount of time.

[561] partly because 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.

[562] And a lot of that was driven actually by counter -enlighting ideologies of nationalism, which went to both world wars.

[563] Then, starting in 1945, for the first time, wars became less frequent, shorter and less deadly.

[564] And so the first time in, I think, in human history, you have a systematic move away from warfare 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, that's something that's pretty new in human history.

[565] It did not occur during the time of the European Enlightenment in the 18th century.

[566] But I think it was the consolidation of Enlightenment ideals, including the formation of the United Nations, which was a call for by Emanuel Continent, as a perpetual peace, which of course did not happen at the time, but we've enjoyed it since.

[567] And crucially, for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations, now the sustainable development goals.

[568] You have people coming together, nations coming together, some of them not from a Judeo -Christian tradition by any means, but who can agree on things like, well, it's really better if people live and 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.

[569] 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.

[570] That's something.

[571] You don't need to be, all you need to do to endorse that is be a human, and have the ability to suffer or to flourish.

[572] So, okay, so let me switch this a bit, if you don't mind.

[573] And I'd like to speak a bit more personally, if you would.

[574] What's the consequence for you over the last year of this increasing public exposure and also controversy?

[575] 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.

[576] I mean, I think of all the people in it, in some sense, you're the most surprising member because, well.

[577] Well, yes, you may be the prototype.

[578] But, you know, and I am more peripheral.

[579] I think it just comes from being, you know, 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 and then you get associated with this this, of course, whimsical, humorous entity called the intellectual dark web.

[580] Right, right.

[581] So you...

[582] I mean, it's a joke because, of course, there is a dark web.

[583] Right.

[584] Well, it's a joke in all sorts of ways because it's a ridiculous club.

[585] I mean, I've been trying to figure out what character of, is 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.

[586] 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 bestsellers, and, like, you you have the means to keep yourself operating as an independent being without being dependent on any necessary external bureaucracy.

[587] And I also have tenure, which means that I'm a little harder to fire than most people in most jobs.

[588] Right, right, exactly.

[589] So that gives me a certain, I used to be cynical about tenure as it's kind of a unique synecure of university professors, but there is part of the initial rationale, namely giving you some degree of intellectual independence, I'm really coming to appreciate.

[590] Oh, yes, 10 years like the Canadian Senate.

[591] It's useless, except when it's absolutely necessary.

[592] Yeah, yeah.

[593] 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 an intellectual dark web, except it's a kind of joke.

[594] For the people who are connected to it, I think have a certain amount of unwillingness to to kow or bow down to some of the pieties that have become orthodox on many college campuses.

[595] Because politically, the people who have been connected to it are pretty diverse.

[596] They're very diverse.

[597] There's almost the complete range except for the absence of people who are politically.

[598] correct.

[599] 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.

[600] You know, yes, I think that's, I think that is true and it's one of the keys to effective teaching, to effective communication.

[601] 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, she told me the mistake that academics often make when they try to reach a broad audience is they talk down.

[602] They assume that their audience is not as upright as they are.

[603] So the key is assume that your audience is your intellectual peer, but they happen not to know some stuff that you know.

[604] And I offer that also as writing advice in my book, the sense of style.

[605] But you're also right that the independent -minded people that we've been talking about try not to use insults and put -downs, not as a means of argument, not even so much the audience being stupider, but rather being evil, that if you don't agree with me, then you are a reprehensible human being.

[606] 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.

[607] So, well, and of course, that defines the kind of political, 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 move to distance ourselves from is that if you don't agree with me, then you are a moral credit.

[608] Right, right.

[609] And so, okay, so now, what's been the.

[610] personal consequences for you.

[611] Like you've been at the center of a fair bit of controversy.

[612] And I mean, it's very difficult to have a series of best -selling 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.

[613] But how has it affected you?

[614] And has it been a net positive or a net negative?

[615] And how are people reacting?

[616] to you?

[617] Oh, it's unquestionably a net positive.

[618] 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.

[619] I have gotten, you know, some anger.

[620] I have, I was subject of a rather bizarre incident where a panel that I was on called the political correctness like Donald Trump.

[621] Trump, where some of my remarks were spliced in a video that was then cited by the alt -right and neo -Nazis, which led to a kind of denunciation on the left.

[622] Fortunately, in my case, I can't complain because the New York Times stepped into my defense.

[623] Jesse Singale wrote an op -ed with my photo, adorning it, saying how social media are making me as stupid and using the attack on me as evidence with the pathology of social media.

[624] So I came out of that unscathed.

[625] On the other hand, I do live in some degree of fear that the mob could turn on me at any moment.

[626] There was a wonderful essay by Neil Ferguson expressing a similar fear.

[627] He said, well, my wife who's made it of a braver stuff than I tells me not to worry.

[628] Yeah, well, she's made it braver stuff than almost getting us in the world, so I don't know.

[629] Well, that was the in -joke, of course, his wife being Ion, Herssey, one of the bravest people on the planet.

[630] But that was a sly little bit of humor for those who know his personal situation.

[631] And a reminder that people have withstood much fiercer attacks than any of us have to worry about.

[632] Right, right, right.

[633] And how are people responding to you in public?

[634] Like, when you're out in public, Like, I mean, you're a rather striking figure, you're easy to recognize.

[635] What happens when you go out?

[636] Well, how do you get to phone to you?

[637] Oh, it's positive.

[638] I have nothing to complain about.

[639] 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.

[640] 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, remove anonymity.

[641] The people are much more civil face -to -face.

[642] I have gotten, you know, a lot of warmth.

[643] I've gotten, to my surprise, a number of people writing to me saying that I have, been good for their mental health.

[644] That's included in my Quillette essay, even though technically, like you, I'm a psychologist.

[645] Unlike you, I'm not a clinical psychologist.

[646] I have no confidence whatsoever in treating anxiety, depression, psychological problems.

[647] And I even have to explain to people and ask me what I do for a living.

[648] I tend to avoid saying I'm a psychologist, even though that's what my degree is in my department.

[649] People assume that I'm a clinical psychologist, which I'm not.

[650] So I sometimes say I'm a cognitive scientist.

[651] Because no one has any idea what did that mean.

[652] You know, I think you've been good for my mental health.

[653] Well, that's what some people, for the first time in my life, I say I've kind of earned that credential.

[654] But some people write in it and they say, I'm 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.

[655] I don't feel as despairing for my children, for myself, for the future of my country.

[656] that's a big deal and well and you're also it's more it's more than that it's not 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.

[657] And so you can go in there as a pessimist, like a powerful pessimist.

[658] And you can think, oh, oh, well, look at that, look at that, and look at that.

[659] And it's not just one or two things.

[660] It's enough things so that it starts to be a story.

[661] And you think, oh, well, maybe we're not going to hell in a handbasket quite as fast as we thought we were.

[662] At least not necessarily, yeah.

[663] Well, at least not necessarily.

[664] Yes.

[665] Well, and that's not something, but then there's an implicit message there too, which is perhaps the Enlightenment 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.

[666] And that's a radical message, I think.

[667] 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.

[668] 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.

[669] 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.

[670] Indeed.

[671] And it has been a source of tension in my own intellectual autobiography because, and I note that I'm not an optimist about the human condition by ideology or by background.

[672] 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 that what shifted my worldview is 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.

[673] And then trying to resolve that tension.

[674] How could we as a species both burn each other alive and engage in rape and discrimination and genocide.

[675] But on the other hand, somehow managed to power this improvement.

[676] And I think it comes from the fact that we're cognitively and psychologically complex.

[677] We have a number of ugly motives, but we also have some modicum of empathy.

[678] We have self -control.

[679] We have cognitive processes that allow us to reason.

[680] We have language that allows us to share our ideas.

[681] 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.

[682] I think it's quite comical that you used a religious analogy title.

[683] I mean, because I think part of a 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.

[684] And that is also an unbelievably optimistic message, because I don't believe that you can be a credible voice for optimism.

[685] And what would you say, someone who celebrates the human spirit unless you're very cognizant of its depths?

[686] Because otherwise, you're just not informed.

[687] You're just battling the right enemy.

[688] That's right.

[689] And you have to, I think, value the hard -won human institutions and norms that don't necessarily come naturally to us.

[690] like the rule of law, like free speech, like empirical, basing arguments on empirical data, things that have to be inculcated every generation.

[691] We're not doing such a good job with this generation, I sometimes think.

[692] 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, are darker angels.

[693] I wonder sometimes, too, I wonder what you think about this.

[694] I mean, you know, when I grew up and 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.

[695] 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.

[696] And I kind of wonder sometimes if one of the things that you're not battling against is, what would you say is, 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.

[697] and we can now start to think about the future in a positive way again.

[698] But man, it was 45 years, you know, and not counting World War II, which I think we probably shouldn't count.

[699] 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.

[700] And so I wonder if something's coming out of that.

[701] No, that's true.

[702] I think 1989 truly was momentous.

[703] It was the end of the Cold War and the worst threats of nuclear exchange.

[704] It also led to a decline in the number of proxy wars in Asia and Africa and South America, which people don't appreciate.

[705] 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.

[706] But this is nothing compared to the 70s and 80s, or Africa was in planes.

[707] The war in Vietnam killed far more people than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria combined.

[708] There were threats like the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

[709] Richard Nixon raised the level of nuclear alert, something that has not happened since.

[710] These really were perilous times.

[711] There's quite apart from the Cold War, Iran and Iraq thought 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 we lived through that.

[712] So people forget how awful the 60, 70s, and 80s were in terms of...

[713] Right.

[714] 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.

[715] And I think one of the reasons that we've seen this unparalleled improvement in economic conditions, let's say, well, it's obvious in China because of their market reforms.

[716] 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.

[717] that's absolutely counterproductive and pathological.

[718] 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.

[719] And I really think that started to manifest itself in the 2000s.

[720] That was part of it.

[721] 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 if schools are being blown up and people pulled out of their offices and shot and institutions destroyed as quickly as they can be built, markets, transportation networks.

[722] 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.

[723] And you've got a lot of young men who have nothing better to do with their time.

[724] No loyalty is commanded by the incompetent government.

[725] And then, of course, both superpowers would fund the insurgency movements that opposed whichever government the other superpower was supporting.

[726] So...

[727] Right.

[728] And amplifying the problem.

[729] Consequentifying the problem.

[730] 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.

[731] Right, right, right, which is, okay, so let me close with this, if you would.

[732] We've had a good conversation.

[733] 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?

[734] I mean, your career is ascendant in a manner that is true of very few people.

[735] And you have a tremendous global impact, I would say, all things considered.

[736] And one that as far as I'm concerned is overwhelmingly to the good, what's next for you?

[737] And what would you like to see happen in the future for you over the next few years?

[738] Well, for the world, I would certainly like to see a pushback 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 rights, since they are in power, but also of the campus left.

[739] 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.

[740] Climate change being a big one, and I have my own views on climate change.

[741] I'll express them in a New York Times editorial that's coming out in a couple of days.

[742] Oh, I'm looking forward to.

[743] Is that going to get you in trouble?

[744] Yes, it will.

[745] And I'll leave that as something Okay, well, I'm looking forward to that.

[746] I'm looking forward to seeing what you think.

[747] It's a very complicated problem.

[748] It is a very complicated problem, and I think some of the activists are making it more complex and making it worse.

[749] But I'll leave that as a little enigma until people check out that article.

[750] Although there was a hint in Enlightenment now.

[751] Okay.

[752] And academically?

[753] 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.

[754] For a large part of my career, I studied language.

[755] And it made me curious about why we don't just blurt out what we mean so much at the time.

[756] We issue failed threats, sexual come -ons that are kind of folded between the lines.

[757] We're shilly -shally, we beat around the bush, we hint, we use euthanism.

[758] That led me to the concept of common knowledge.

[759] 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 at or not, cases where we each know something, we're not so sure that the other guy knows that we know it.

[760] I think that's hugely powerful in our social and emotional lives.

[761] And I have a, I'm going to start writing a book in two years whose tentative title is, don't go there.

[762] Common knowledge and the science of civility, hypocrisy, outrage, and taboo.

[763] That sounds extremely interesting.

[764] 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 out of uncertainty.

[765] And I think we have rules that are like don't disrupt too much of someone's map territory with any given utterance.

[766] 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.

[767] But to play a bit and to tease a bit It will allow you to accept carefully and casually delivered playful rejection without it having to go way down into the depths of your character.

[768] It's like, to me, it's like a minimal necessary force doctrine.

[769] Yes, I think there is a lot to that, just the ego threat of being rejected.

[770] But in addition, we have, we divide our social relationships into.

[771] qualitative different categories, and a sexual relationship really is different from a friendship or a workplace relationship.

[772] It is an inescapable fact that often people are sexually attracted to each other, sometimes one attracted to the other, but not vice versa.

[773] Yeah, all too often, indeed.

[774] There is something that is inherently threatening about a, say, a professional relationship or chronic friendship, if the sex is kind of out there, if you've blurt it out, even though paradoxically, any grown -up knows that there's got to be sexual attraction and a lot of heterosexual relationships that are not overtly sexual.

[775] So he might know it, she might know it, but as long as he doesn't know that she knows, that he knows that he 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 blurting it out which generates common knowledge.

[776] Neither side can deny that the other one knows that they know it.

[777] Unequivocally changes the qualitative nature of their relationship.

[778] Once it's, as we say...

[779] Once it's out there.

[780] It's out there.

[781] You can't take it back.

[782] The cat is out of the bag.

[783] The bell can't be unwrung.

[784] And it changes in the relationship.

[785] I wonder, too, if do you think it's because the explicit statement Imagine that you have implicit motivations, and many of them.

[786] And as implicit motivations, they have a relatively low probability of being manifested.

[787] 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?

[788] is that the speech is somehow closer to action than the...

[789] I think so, but I think it's even deeper than that.

[790] I don't think it's just sort of an analog shift along the scale.

[791] There is something qualitatively different about blurting something out.

[792] That's for sure.

[793] I think we subdivide our relationships into different types, authority, subordinate, equal sharing, and communality of interests, exchange.

[794] And these can take place over different resources, over money, over sex, over aid.

[795] And we are very attentive to which one holds between in a given dryad in a particular time.

[796] Each one is a different coordination game, as the game theorist would put it, where we both win if we're in the same cell, if we're on the same page.

[797] But if we're, we have discrepant understandings, then there can be in mild form, awkwardness, embarrassment in the extreme case shock outage, Yuri.

[798] 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.

[799] 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.

[800] To say nothing of a sexual partner, right?

[801] Well, yes, to say absolutely nothing of that.

[802] Yes, exactly.

[803] These sorts of things happen between professors and students.

[804] And I think to some degree they're inevitable.

[805] But the dual relationship problem also means that you end up playing at least two games with different outcomes.

[806] And so the aims become blurry and the degree of conceptual confusion also increases.

[807] 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 an unwise complexification of the situation.

[808] Absolutely.

[809] And it is that kind of social, emotional dynamic that I will be writing about.

[810] in that, don't go there.

[811] Exactly that paradox.

[812] Well, I'm very much looking forward to reading it.

[813] And I'd also, one of my dreams, by the way, I don't know what you think about this.

[814] 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.

[815] I don't know if you'd ever be interested in doing something like, that not a political discussion you know but uh but uh because i think there is there is something to be fought out in a serious way between the enlightenment types like you and 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 we're we're we're there's a lot of overlap yeah yeah and and and and then people like sam like ben and i who are and maybe the the union and now analyst for example, who tend to view the historical movement towards increased freedom and prosperity as a longer process.

[816] There's really something there that needs to be hashed out, and it's really complicated, and it might be fun to have a conversation about that at some point if you're ever interested in, if you ever have the time.

[817] I accept the invitation.

[818] All right, all right.

[819] Well, I'll talk to Ben, because...

[820] I think we could have a good conversation, you know, and scrap it out a bit and see if we could get somewhere.

[821] Because like I really liked your books, you know.

[822] I really liked Enlightenment now.

[823] And I regard myself in many ways as a pro -enlightenment figure.

[824] I mean, I'm very scientifically minded.

[825] I've done a lot of empirical research and learned a tremendous amount from it.

[826] And I certainly believe that the mastery of science and technology has been a major contributor to the furtherance of human well -being.

[827] And there's something to be said for the solidity of an objective, materialist view of the world.

[828] But 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 nice to see.

[829] 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 remarkable creation that it actually is.

[830] I think that could be fruitful indeed All right, well Is there anything else that you'd like to mention to people Any forthcoming talks you have or public appearances Or things you'd like to draw their attention to Or 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 but I'm often given public, public lectures and discussions.

[831] I have one.

[832] I'm having a public event with Paul Krugman next week at Brown University.

[833] It may not be next week by the time it's circulates, maybe the past tense by then.

[834] But yeah, on my website, I have a list of upcoming.

[835] Okay, okay.

[836] Well, it's pretty fun to see that there's a public audience for this sort of discussion, eh?

[837] Who would have guessed?

[838] Much more than anyone would have guessed just about five years ago.

[839] Yeah, it's remarkable.

[840] for ideas and debate, absolutely.

[841] Another reason for optimism.

[842] Let's hope.

[843] Very nice talking to you, and thank you very much for taking the time.

[844] 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.

[845] That's a hell of a thing for someone who doesn't think there's a blank slate.

[846] Indeed.

[847] Thank you, Jordan.

[848] Thanks for having me on.

[849] Great pleasure talking with you.

[850] Okay, thank you.

[851] Let's stay in touch.

[852] Bye -bye.

[853] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, Twelve Rules for Life, antidote to chaos.

[854] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[855] See jordanb peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[856] Really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[857] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend.

[858] Next week's podcast is going to be a 12 Rules for Life lecture recording from Dad's Lecture in Calgary on July 27 2018 at the Jack Singer Concert Hall.

[859] Have a wonderful week and I'll talk to you next Sunday.

[860] Follow me on my YouTube channel Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and at Instagram at jordan .b. Peterson.

[861] Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, Jordan B. Peterson dot com.

[862] My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[863] That's self -authoring .com.

[864] From the Westwood One podcast network.