THE EDGE OF REASON, WITH DR. STEVEN PINKER

 

Dr. Pinker: There’s nothing in the universe that makes things better and better. Quite the contrary, nature is indifferent to our wellbeing and there are a number of forces that constantly grind us down.

 

Intro:

We live in confusing times.

Are things better than ever, as the statistics seem to say? If so, then why are we going through a mental health and meaning crisis, as all kinds of other statistics also say?

And why have we become so divided and polarized, spewing hate-filled, half-baked ideas at one another under the pretext of participating in democratic discourse?

We seem more and more drawn to the false certainty offered by various traps – maybe in reaction to all the uncertainty modern life brings.

From the endless rabbit holes of TikTok scrolling, to Facebook and X-style politics, where artificially neat lines separate friend from foe, and truth from falsehood.

We seem so desperate to hold on to anything that feels solid that we’re willing to throw anything else under the bus.

Is there an antidote to this bizarre modern condition – one that would help us enjoy and take advantage of the monumental amount of progress our species has achieved? One that would bring back some semblance of calm and unity and legitimate human progress? 

My guest in this very special episode of the podcast is award-winning Harvard psychologist and two-time Pulitzer-prize finalist Dr. Steven Pinker. 

Over the course of his career, Dr. Pinker has tirelessly pursued a sharp rational lens to expose the rigid ideas and reveal the blind spots that make us think and act in illogical ways. 

He argues that we aren’t necessarily wired for truth, and that progress doesn’t just happen on its own. These things require discipline, self-correction, and patience – all things our natural biological impulses can fight against: we want everything now, we want to be right, and we want to one up one another. 

We can then turn these bad impulses into bad ideas, and they slowly form a mental prison of sorts, holding us back from the good mental habits that actually improve the conditions of life. 

Why do intellectuals seem to hate progress? Why do we think that equal rights have to imply sameness? Why is rationality seen as uncool? And why are we so obsessed with negative information even when things are improving – and even at the cost of improving them more?

Dr. Pinker’s work brings sharpness and clarity to the fog of modern life

Our conversation spans the major ideas he’s explored in his work – from the blank slate, to the nature of progress, to better understanding reason, and why it seems so scarce today

It was a dream come true interviewing one of the greats – I hope you enjoy it, this is the edge of reason, with Dr. Steven Pinker.

 

Fred: Dr. Pinker, it’s an honor to have you with me here today.

Dr. Pinker: Thank you, nice to be here.

Fred: When you accepted this invitation, you mentioned how this caught your attention as a Montrealer. It’s nice to see that you still have a soft spot for your once hometown.

Dr. Pinker: I do indeed. I was just there for a family Seder at the house of my sister Susan Pinker, also a writer and a public intellectual, and the rest of the family gathered in Montreal. Always happy to have a reason to go back.

Fred: Like many of our best exports, you went on to have a tremendous career at Harvard as a cognitive scientist, a professor, a public speaker, but also as the author of a number of provocative, often controversial science books.

You’ve tackled topics like the nature of language, our sense of morality. You wrote an entire book on literary style, and more recently, about why the enlightenment project and the faculty of human reason are so important and are under some unique threats today. So again, thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

Dr. Pinker: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Chapter 1: Revisiting The Blank Slate

Fred: Your work covers so much ground and does so with originality and depth, it’s kind of hard to find a place to start. I felt like The Blank Slate was as good as any place to begin since it’s so fundamental to so many other ideas. For those not familiar with the term, the “blank slate” is the very popular idea that the human mind is a blank page, tabula rasa, as John Locke termed it, and that all of its content and structure comes from the environment, from culture, socialization, experience and so forth. The idea swept through academia and the social sciences in the 20^th century, it was part, I think, of a universalist conception of mankind, it basically held that “if humans were not that different, then we should all have equal rights,” but slowly it started casting a larger and larger shadow and became something like, “you can’t notice any inherent difference between groups or individuals because doing so would be taking a dangerous step back towards discrimination, and so we have to sort of think we’re all the same.” Your book is basically a thorough debunking of this idea. Why is the “blank slate” not a good idea, and from your perspective, is it a case of political and moral ideas, well-intentioned as they may be, interfering with scientific ideas and the pursuit of truth?

Dr. Pinker: Yes, that was a major theme of The Blank Slate that came out almost 23 years ago, then published in a new edition about four or five years ago. It tried to argue against the tendency to impose a particular view of how the world works as a shortcut to certain moral principles.

I think it’s a bad idea, both because the moral principles can stand on their own and ought to stand on their own. You should be clear about the reasons for moral principles, like, “it is evil to discriminate on the basis of race or sex,” “one shouldn’t be, callous or indifferent or abusive of children,” “people should be held responsible for their actions,” “we should try as far as we can to change our institutions so that they’re more just and more encouraging of human prospering.” All of these are impeccable moral principles, but in order to prosecute them, there has been a tendency, as I documented in the book, to make claims such as, “there are no differences between men and women,” “there are no differences between individuals and intelligence and personality,” “we can make decisions through some mysterious process called free will that has nothing to do with the physiology of the brain,” “we are all inherently unselfish and cooperative and, generous and peaceful.” I argue that these empirical claims are false, but it doesn’t mean that we should sacrifice our commitment to equality and social improvement.

Some of these just depend on moral principles that we ought to be able to articulate and safeguard, such as that it is immoral to penalize an individual based on the statistics of the group that they belong to. It’s unjust. Or because human nature is complex, and that is a major theme of all of my writings, we’re not blank slates, but we don’t just have one thing in our brain, it’s a complex interplay of many subsystems. Even if people do have some anti-social, rather nasty urges – people are competitive, they’re vengeful, they’re lustful, they’re  self-deceiving, they’re subject to many fallacies and biases. In addition to all of those lamentable parts of human nature, there are also what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” We also have a capacity for self-control, we don’t have to act on all our impulses, we have a faculty of reason, we could try to solve problems like violence or war. We have a sense of empathy, it doesn’t kick in automatically for everyone, but we can try to expand it beyond our local clan and tribe. So human nature gives us a lot to work with, and the moral imperative of trying to make things better can coexist with a realistic understanding that there is such a thing as human nature. Those are the themes of The Blank Slate, and then I try to work them out for a number of particular cases, like violence, like politics, like bringing up children, like the sexes, like the arts among other things.

Fred: It’s usually religious or deeply ideological societies that work this way with these sorts of broad, rigid preconditions to truth or which take moral principles and sort of transport them over to empirical reality, and then either prohibiting or attacking or shaming any evidence that would contradict or even nuance the official doctrine. I’m curious about your thoughts on a hypothesis, and many people have had this idea, that when a society loses religion, as broadly speaking, the West did with the enlightenment and so forth, you don’t just go straight to pure reason and science. Often a political ideology steps in to sort of fill the void instead.

Dr. Pinker: Well, that can sometimes happen. Political ideologies sometimes take on some of the worst features of religion, such as imposition of an ideology, policing of heretics, establishing loyalty to the coalition by verifying unfalsifiable beliefs – or sometimes even absurd beliefs. Anyone can say that rocks fall down instead of up, but to affirm that Jesus was resurrected from the dead or that sex is simply assigned at birth, it has nothing to do with biology, you have to be a real committed believer to affirm beliefs like that. It’s not just something you can open your eyes and see. You’ve got to have, we say drunk the Kool-Aid to believe those things. So, some of the features of religion, probably because they are embedded in human nature, can manifest themselves as loyalty to the creed of some deity, but it can also be loyalty to other creeds.

Fred: Yeah, and it’s always struck me as odd because I wonder what you think. To me, there is such a simple, almost like Aristotelian basis for equal rights, and it’s not that we’re all the same, if we’re all unique and different, and if groups are different, and you mentioned the great social science taboo is that no two groups will be identical, and it’s like, not something that we can sort of bring up. But if groups and individuals do have differences and unique characteristics, perhaps the basis for equal rights is to allow them to pursue those and to express those, not to sort of go in a direction of everybody being the same, and as you argue very persuasively in the book, we do not need to affirm sameness in order to get to the idea of equal rights, morally or politically.

Dr. Pinker: Yeah, there’s a tendency to equate fairness with sameness, and they’re not the same thing. In fact, the fact that we are different calls all the more strongly for recognition and protection of those differences, starting with differences of opinion. Some people hold different beliefs sometimes because of what they’ve been exposed to, sometimes because of the internal train of thought that brings them to where they are now, sometimes because of differences in temperament, some people really are constitutionally more liberal and open or more protective of the status quo and conservative.

 

Chapter 2: Ideology, Progress, and Intellectual Resistance

Fred: A lot of the themes in your work go back to the enlightenment and Enlightenment Now, is one of my favorite books ever, and I have to tell you a couple of things, one good, one bad about it. First is thank you for writing it. It gave these vague hunches I had about the cultural climate much more clarity and perspective, but it’s also gotten me into a lot of trouble. All of this optimism, I’m told, can make me a real buzzkill at dinner parties, ironically enough. So for those who haven’t read the book, it goes over the monumental amount of progress we’ve experienced since the enlightenment on virtually every dimension of human flourishing, from longevity to eliminating poverty, access to food, safety, democratic governance, and so on. But fast forward to the 21^st century, and for some reason we suddenly have a hard time acknowledging this progress or deriving any sort of sustainable appreciation for it. There’s this intense pessimism in the culture. It’s like we go from moral panic to moral panic and we don’t know how to stop. You can show people all the stats that we live in the best time ever, but people are still consumed with negativity. In the book, you cover many explanations for this, some innate ones like the negativity bias, to the incentives in the media industry, like “if it bleeds, it leads,” to the nature of chaos itself.

Progress tends to unfold slowly and incrementally in the background while chaos happens loudly and all at once, and sort of feeds into these media incentives. You have this ringing line in the book where you write, “intellectuals hate progress, and intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress, and then it’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering classes.” I love those sentences. Can you please expand on this a little bit? Why is it in your view that intellectuals hate progress so much and is at least some of the cognitive dissonance that we experience today the result of intellectuals of all forms, not just academics, but online pundits and politicians and so forth, sort of consistently failing to give the reality of progress its due.

Dr. Pinker: Some of it is because of the cognitive biases that you identified: the negativity bias, “bad” is psychologically more potent than “good,” the availability bias, namely that we estimate risk and probability by how easy examples come to mind, and the media are kind of an availability machine that they feed us with memorable images and narratives and prototypes.

Some of it is also because intellectuals themselves are an elite clique or faction. They’re in competition for status and prestige with other elites, business, government, religion, military, and some of this progress just doesn’t happen in the way that intellectuals like. Namely, there is a theory that’s articulated and implemented that by carrying out the plan, things get better. Some of them are due to be distributed, as opposed to centralized forces, such as the markets which improve prosperity, not just in rich countries, but especially dramatically in poorer ones in the last 30 years or so. Changing social norms is very hard to engineer from the top down. So some of it is because these are changes that were never theorized, some of them were, like there was research on public health, on vaccines, on nutrition, the green revolution, but some of them happened with no consultation or buy-in from intellectuals themselves. Also, as Thomas Hobbes said, “competition for praise inclines toward a reference of antiquity, for men contend with a living, not with a dead.” That is, anyone who is in competition, criticizing those in power, criticizing their rivals, will want to emphasize how bad things are now in order to blame them on people other than themselves, and whereas the past often seems unduly rosy simply because it shows how far we have declined, and the fault is the people I disagree with.

Now, I have to add that having been said, the progress that I documented in Enlightenment Now and before that, specifically with reference to violence and the better angels of our nature, didn’t automatically happen. There’s nothing in the universe that makes things better and better. Quite the contrary, nature is indifferent to our wellbeing and there are a number of forces that constantly grind us down. There’s the law of entropy, there are more ways for things to go wrong and be disordered than there are for things to go right and be beneficially ordered. There’s evolution, which means that germs and parasites and spoilage organisms are constantly evolving to eat away at our bodies and our food. There’s the darker side of human nature that we’ve already spoken about. So, left to our own devices, things don’t get better, they get worse. Things get better only because people try to solve problems and they use faculties such as empathy, such as rationality and reason, trial and error, learning from mistakes in order to eke out bits of progress by implementing various institutions, gadgets, laws that work, like vaccines, like democracy, like the rule of law, like international organizations. These are the causes for which progress is an effect. It doesn’t just happen. And if those causes are disabled, then things can get worse, and we know just even in the graphs that I plotted that things sometimes do get worse. We know there are downward swings, there are notches, there are  plunges there. There have been periods in history where the world has fallen into war. Even if the overall trend since 1945, has been for war to decline, we’re in the middle of one such uptick now. We know that nutrition can go into reverse, such as in Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, ironically named since it led to greatest manmade famine in history. We know that crime rates, even though they are far lower now than they were in the Middle Ages, but we’ve seen them fluctuate.

So things can get worse, and my argument ultimately is not that things get better, but they get better for certain reasons. The ones that I associate with the enlightenment, such as science, democratic governance, institutions of rationality, like a free press, if those causes are disabled, I predict things will get worse. There’s serious reason to believe that right now we are seeing an erosion of some of the contributors to progress.

Fred: Like, what are you referring to exactly?

Dr. Pinker: Well, the international community, such as the NATO Alliance of mutual protection among democratic states of the North Atlantic, the taboo against changing borders by force or conquest. There’s been a general idea since 1945 that borders are grandfathered in and so are states. If you start to talk about one country absorbing another, I won’t mention what those countries might be or of conquering territory, removing borders, that can pull out one of the props that has kept peace going. Also free trade, not only as a major source of global prosperity and reduction of global extreme poverty, but also as itself a pacifying force. This is a major idea in the enlightenment, that trade between countries disincentivizes them from attacking each other, because you don’t kill your customers, you don’t kill your debtors. Particular innovations, such as vaccines which have saved hundreds of millions of lives and astonishingly are being discredited by no one less than the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The kind of international aid that results in major reductions in death and disease such as vaccines, antibiotics, advice for maternal care, bed nets that prevent the spread of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, with the zeroing or drastic reduction of USAID, all of these programs might be threatened. So that’s just a sample of some of the things that I argued in both those books contributed to progress, which are now being disabled.

 

Chapter 3: Is Rationality Uncool?

Fred: All of these issues that you mentioned used to be tied together by this sort of a common narrative that these things were good. After World War II in Europe, it was like, “let’s turn into trading partners and reduce our incentives to go to war.” The more our economies are understood as zero-sum games, the more we have an incentive to actually launch a war against our neighbors. Or you mentioned the health cooperation and so forth. It seems like everything’s being absorbed into political narratives today, and I go back to the idea of the blank slate of political ideas and even perhaps certain moral ideas, hijacking all of reality. It’s almost like we can’t have a reasoned debate. In your book Rationality, which we’ll get to, you discuss people engage much more in motivated reasoning towards a political end, and it seems like the space for discussions around these issues, whether it’s free trade, whether it’s scientific cooperation, whether it’s borders is almost impossible to have outside of the sort of polarized politics that we have today.

Dr. Pinker: Yeah, that indeed is a problem, and it’s not just political, but it’s tribal. My sense is that the polarization is more extreme in the United States and there’s some data to suggest that it has widened. We know from studies that people will adopt a position if they think that it comes from their side. In fact, in experiments you can give a particular position on trade or taxation, and if you say it comes from the right, then people on the right think it’s a great idea and people on the left think it’s a terrible idea. Word for word, the same position, just flip where it supposedly came from and people will flip their allegiance. So that obviously is an impediment from our psychology to adopting the best possible policies. That is, there might be a good policy, but if it wasn’t invented here by your own coalition, then people will be in staunch opposition to it.

Fred: Yeah, and it goes to the whole discussion around reason, which we’ll get to, but more broadly, when I read Enlightenment Now and  debated it with so many different people, one of the themes that kept coming up, and I think one of the reasons why people have a hard time understanding our time as the result of progress, is it seems like people go from panic to panic today. The sort of broad tension that kept coming back in discussions around this book was the difference between, let’s call it objective wellbeing and subjective wellbeing. So my question to you is do you find it somewhat odd or strange that improvements in objective wellbeing, like the ones you outlined in the book, don’t just directly translate into better subjective wellbeing for societies. Many top psychology researchers today, I just interviewed Dr. Jean Twenge, are adamant that the best data show that we’re undergoing some kind of mental health crisis today, and it’s not because we diagnose more.

I often wonder, and I want to get your thoughts on this, whether subjective wellbeing requires things that haven’t really been part of the enlightenment tool bag, whether that’s long family dinners, a sense of gratitude, community involvement, good relationships, things that religious traditions, incidentally tended to emphasize more explicitly than the more rational or even mechanistic approach adopted by enlightenment thinkers.

Dr. Pinker: The idea of the enlightenment is that it’s just ideas and evidence that matter, so if those turned out to be conducive to human wellbeing, then the enlightenment mindset would say, “well, let’s do more of them. Let’s learn from reality.” So, as I understand, enlightenment ideals don’t prescribe exactly what you should do to make people better off. Although, you know, if you’re dead, if you’ve died in childbirth, if you’re starving, then everything else is moot. So it has to be that life, health, basic prosperity, and literacy, for example, that kind of come before everything. They’re kind of prerequisite to everything else. There are some traditional ways of life that may be conducive to human wellbeing. I’m not so sure that they’re religious because the data on happiness do not show that religious societies are happier. They certainly show that more affluent societies on average are happier. The happiest societies tend to be the democracies of the Commonwealth of Nations, and northern nations. Northwestern Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, these are all pretty happy countries and they’re not particularly religious, whereas a lot of very religious countries, like Afghanistan, are hell holes. So I don’t think it’s religion per se. There are some features of life, such as having family dinners, social engagement, teenagers seeing other teenagers instead of being in their bedrooms with their phones, that almost certainly conduce to human happiness. But I resist romanticizing the close-knit family-based societies of a hundred or more years ago because we tend to forget how much people struggled to escape those, including, you know, many of our grandparents who immigrated and left their communities to avoid arranged marriages. All of the novels and songs that complained about being forced into the same line of work that your father did, and being stuck in the same smothering small town, the restriction of choices for women. All of these go along with these traditional societies, and I don’t think anyone seriously could argue for a return to staying in your small town, going into the same line of work as your father, letting your parents or grandparents pick your marriage partner, women staying in the kitchen and church, and so on. So I don’t buy it, but it is also true that those data on happiness show that one of the contributors to happiness other than affluence, is a sense of freedom, but also a sense of social trust. That is, societies in which you constantly have to worry about other people screwing you, and you’ve gotta screw them before they screw you, those tend to be less happy than they should be based on their affluence. So both, social trust and freedom, are conducive to happiness. I don’t think we’ve found a way to reconcile all of these good things. And, I think that there is some evidence from Jean Twenge, from John Haidt that the headlong adoption of smartphones, especially social media, might be pushing too much away from social connection. This is also a theme of the book by Susan Pinker, my sister, The Village Effect, that face-to-face social interaction is a source of not just happiness, but literally of health.

Fred: Yeah, and I like the way you sort of break down if we take religious societies, traditional societies, and let’s call them more modern western societies, and we just sort of compare them as big sort of lumps that that would give us one picture. And then maybe certain aspects that were stronger in religious societies might be available for sort of repatriation inside of a secular society. For example, the social trust that you mentioned, like closer families for example, you also see all the data on the decline of social trust and social capital. I wonder sometimes whether we’ve gone too far in, not individual rights, but individualism as a lifestyle in a way that sort of erodes relationships and we know also the good data on the importance of relationships to happiness. So it’s almost like the argument would not be going back to the past, but maybe repatriating some lost elements of those societies.

Dr. Pinker: Yeah, I think we have to unbundle the features of traditional societies and promote those that we can justify. And again, nothing could be more consistent with enlightenment values than having a reason for what you’re proposing and a reason based in evidence and experience.

Fred: Absolutely, I strongly agree with that. So on the topic of reason, your latest book Rationality – a fantastic book, I just finished reading – argues that we need to reinforce our commitment to reason, partly because it seems so scarce today. We’re consumed by wild narratives, conspiracies, the tribal thinking we discussed, all tied together by often mediocre reasoning and logical flaws. “Humanity appears to be losing its mind,” you write, and why is that? Why does reason seem so scarce today? And another line that you mentioned is “rationality is uncool.” Why does it seem uncool and why does it seem so scarce today?

Dr. Pinker: Well, rationality has been uncool ever since the romantic movement of the 19^th century, and it’s very hard to find works of art, works of music, that glorify reason and rationality. It’s easier to valorize spontaneity, free expression, individuality, so that I think is often what the culture pushes. The way I think of it is there’s a lot of rationality in equality, that in some ways we’re more rational than ever. We’ve come up with mRNA vaccines in an astonishingly short period of time and sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 virus within a matter of days. We have more evidence-based medicine, evidence-based policing, use of data in sports, evidence-based governance so that the tools of rationality are more developed than ever. But we also have fake news. We’ve got conspiracy theories, we always did, but they’re easier to spread. We’re the same species, so I don’t think we’ve gotten any less rational by an evolutionary process, or a biological process, but for rationality to work, it depends on certain institutions of rationality, since all of us are capable of rationality, but also capable of biases and fallacies and self-serving ideologies, things that make our tribe look good, and the other tribe look bad. Not everyone could be right if they disagree. We rely on institutions that try to pool our rationality, and to deploy one person’s rationality against another person’s biases and flaws, such as ideally academia and scientific societies where with freedom of speech and open criticism and debate, a bad idea can be exposed. Someone might love it, they might try to impose it, they might glorify it, but if someone else finds a flaw in it, they’re allowed to say so and the rest of the community can recognize their rebuttals. In addition to academia and science, there’s also democratic governance where you’ve got checks and balances where you’ve got open debate in parliaments, where the leader doesn’t get to impose his will, but is subject to legislatures and judiciaries that can examine the merits of ideas. The judicial system itself with its adversarial process that it isn’t just a tribunal that can punish someone, but they have a right to a defense and the case is argued out in front of a neutral jury. The press, at least the responsible press, with standards of fact checking and editing, and reputation for accuracy and printing of errata. Even Wikipedia, which we probably all have spotted some flaws, but considering that it is not edited from the top down, but there’s a community of editors that can spot and change each other’s flaws. It is remarkably accurate, more so than just about any electronic medium. But what they all have in common is that these are institutions that are designed for truth seeking. They have safeguards that prevent one charismatic or powerful person from taking over. They allow for the exchange of ideas, and they have a commitment to seeking truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. Only with those kinds of institutions can we collectively pursue rationality, objectivity, truth, and when those institutions are disabled, either by governments or they cripple themselves, then the pursuit of truth will be compromised.

Fred: I think there’s a view that’s very prevalent out there, and it’s sort of hard to parse out from the political debate of it, but there’s this view that these institutions can be ideologically captured and become like forms of group-think or that they start to have a commitment to a particular political ideology over another. Would that be one of the ways in which we can lose the benefits that those institutions can produce as truth generating and truth promoting institutions?

Dr. Pinker: Yes, absolutely. That’s one of their chief vulnerabilities, that they can be captured. I think there’s some evidence that it’s happened to big parts of academia, that it certainly happened to the American political parties, which used to be intellectually more heterogeneous. It can happen to certain media outlets, like most recently, Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, just announced that there won’t be any op-eds critical of markets, that they’ll have to be published elsewhere. That is a rather astonishing imposition of an ideology on what used to be a forum that represented diverse viewpoints.

Fred: Yeah, and it’s almost like as soon as it enters that frame of being in favor of one political group over another, the opposing political group wants to effect its own hijack and sort of bring the institution to its own benefits. It’s almost like another symptom of this polarization that we talk about.

Dr. Pinker: That’s right, so it becomes a struggle for power rather than truth.

 

Chapter 4: Reason as a Moral Virtue

Fred: I have a more philosophical question around reason. You spend a good amount of time early in the book defining reason. You write that it’s using our mental faculties like formal logic or understanding probabilities and so forth to pursue goals more effectively. You point out also that a lot of our choices and goals are not necessarily rational, they’re more about preferences. So it’s not necessarily reason all the way down. One, particularly stylish sentence that caught my attention is, “it is neither rational nor irrational to prefer chocolate ripple to maple walnut, and it is in no way irrational to keep a garden, fall in love, care for stray dogs, party like it’s 1999, or dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.” I love the Dylan reference there. And then later in the book though, you imply that a commitment to reason does come with some constraints or influence on goals. You write that, morality is a mix of self-interest with sociality and impartiality, and impartiality is also one of the key aspects of reason. You write that rationality is not just about compute power, it also ties into things like reflectiveness and open-mindedness. And then you write rationality is not just a cognitive virtue, but a moral one.

This is an old philosophical debate: Is reason just instrumental to achieving goals that we may arrive to rationally or not? Or does it qualitatively elevate some goals over others? In other words, is reason compatible with different value systems? And if it is, how do we deal with the problem of moral relativism?

Dr. Pinker: So there’s an argument that goes back to David Hume, who said “reason must be a slave to the passions” by which he didn’t just mean “if it feels good, do it” or “fly off the handle” or “follow your impulses,” but rather that reason itself pretty much can’t be defined unless there is some goal that is specified because you wouldn’t call a computer that just spat out true but boring theorems or computed the digits of pie, or just added numbers together or multiplied numbers and gave you the results, that doesn’t strike us as particularly rational. Rational almost always means you figure out how to attain some goal and doesn’t specify what the goal itself is.

Although that having been said, there are some goals that are pretty close to non-negotiable, like, you know, being alive rather than dead in the sense that if you’re dead, you can’t even be having the discussion. By extension, basic things like health and nutrition, being fed instead of starving, literacy so that you could put ideas down. Hume pointed out that there’s nothing rational about perverting those things to being sick and in pain and impoverished and on death’s door, but they’re kind of built in, particularly since we are products of evolution, so we naturally have an urge to survive, to fight off injury and disease, to value our families to appreciate beauty and other goals.

So given that we are wired that way with goals, there can therefore be rational or irrational ways of promoting them. And in addition, and this is what gets us to morality and the passage that you quoted, as long as pursuing your goals involves someone else, that is someone else not to exploit you, not to kill you, not to steal from you, maybe to help you if you’re in trouble. Which of course characterizes all of us, none of us are a galactic overlord that controls every living thing in the universe, we all depend on the graces of others. Well then you can’t prioritize your wellbeing over someone else’s if you are seeking their buy-in, their consent, even continuing the conversation.

So much of morality consists of impartiality in the sense of what you argue for, for yourself, you can’t deny others, which is why the golden rule or its equivalence, may be found in so many different moral traditions.

Fred: So you do see rationality playing in the moral realm. Because of this recognition of the interconnected nature of life – interconnected with others – it does inevitably sort of enter into the moral realm and would elevate some goals over others. For example, the opposition to that would be the individualistic rational agent just simply seeking their own zero-sum interest at all times. If I understand properly your notion of rationality, you would perhaps not see that as necessarily rational because it doesn’t acknowledge this reality of the social interconnectedness of life or this fairness principle of impartiality.

Dr. Pinker: Yeah, it’s unsustainable if your wellbeing depends in any way whatsoever on what other people do, which of course it does. Then, if you are trying to arrange things in some society in which your interests will be respected by others, well, you have to respect their interests too as a matter of consistency and as a matter of persuasion.

This is not a theorem of logic, and this is Hume’s point. You can’t prove mathematically that we ought to be moral, but then you can’t prove that we’d rather be in comfort than in pain, or fed than starving, or healthy than sick either. But it is a fact that we do have those preferences. It is also a fact that we are enmeshed in social networks. You put those together, and morality comes out.

Fred: How would you deal with the sort of in-group/out-group component of this? So it’s like, I’m an interdependent with other people, but if I understand society as one group waging a power struggle over another group, then it might justify.Part of how I achieve the goals of this group is to sort of wrestle political power from it because politics is a zero-sum game to a degree. One politician will end up getting elected and another will end up not getting elected. So again, we sort of bring in the problem of politics. Would it then be possible to pursue rational goals that would also be detrimental to other groups? So, this sort of in-group/out-group dynamic to morality, or should that come even with some watering down from a sort of broader perspective?

Dr. Pinker: Yeah, well in a liberal democracy, the rules of the game are set up so that the ultimate beneficiaries are neither the ruling coalition or the opposition, but the population. What the system prioritizes is benefits to the people, and if the party in power is doing something wrong, they get punished at the ballot box. They don’t get to meet out vengeance on their political enemies, which enhances the zero-sum nature of politics. They still get a voice even if they are in the minority. That’s probably the difference between a liberal democracy and just a bare-bones electoral democracy, sometimes called an electoral autocracy because people just vote for one autocrat versus another. We know from following what happens in elections in countries that don’t have a robust liberal democracy, such as many African countries, that the most violent times and periods are around elections because everything is at stake, especially when parties are aligned with ethnic groups. If the party of the rival ethnic group gets elected, then your ethnic group gets disenfranchised, oppressed, all the jobs – and especially in countries where all the best jobs are in government – go to the other tribe and members of your tribe get fired with every turnover. So making a successful liberal democracy tries to eliminate the zero-sum faction against faction element and make it so that even the losing faction still has skin in the game.

 

 

Chapter 5: Our Mismatch with the Modern World

Fred: But in line with your thinking, I would presume you’re of the position that we can lose the benefits of a liberal democracy and start to sort of veer towards more this strict electoral democracy where it’s group against group. Do you see some of those features emerging in today’s United States?

Dr. Pinker: Yes, particularly some developments that are reminiscent of the worst democracies or dictatorships in banana republics and strong men states where the leader uses the apparatus of government to punish his enemies and to perpetuate his power. That’s an example of a democracy that’s gone off the rails and may not definitely be a democracy.

Fred: Another piece of this that also constitutes a challenge to the exercise of reason today is the role of technology and the sort of complexity that we see in our environment that we’re not kind of biologically used to. One of the things you write about in the book is reducing complex things to single causes, which is very attractive today, and even then, we make mistakes. We, as you write, confuse correlation with causation, or we deny the antecedent. Another cool sentence that you wrote, “Crackpots proclaim that all of history’s great geniuses were laughed at in their era, forgetting that if genius then laughed at, does not imply if laughed at then genius.” You’re a funny writer, I have to say. That was really, really funny.

You go on to make a distinction between two kinds of reasons: the “environmental type,” basically human animals who make quick decisions in natural environments, and then the kind required to play formal games like law or finance or digital business or whatever, with all these manmade rules and systems. How much of our predicament today, like these challenges to reason or these challenges to democracy that we see, are a function of our environment changing so fast with so much technology intermediating our exchanges. The tools we use, like social media, don’t seem the best to optimize for a careful rational piecing together of multiple causes and Bayesian logic. Would “unreason” then be a feature, not a bug of modern life where these biological animals suddenly have to handle all this complexity and information that they’re not biologically suited to do, kind of almost like an evolutionary mismatch situation?

Dr. Pinker: Yeah, I think that is responsible for a lot of the irrationality that we see, although I would identify that as a bug for sure. What the paradox of rationality, as I use it to lay out the themes of the book with that title, are that obviously we’re a species that is capable of stupendous rationality and not even counting the high tech achievements of modern technology and science, but just the fact that starting tens of thousands of years ago, our species spread out and colonized every habitat on earth. There are Inuit in the frozen north, there are people living in rainforests and deserts, and they all figured a way to make a living by rationality, that is by figuring out how to outsmart plants and animals to develop traps and poisons and collaborative hunting where a group of hunters can fell a much faster and stronger animal by working together. How do you reconcile that with the fact that you’ve got conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, vaccine denial, belief in ghosts and spiritual energy in crystals and pyramids. I think part of the answer is that what allows us to be collectively rational often are these formal tools of rationality, which are not innate – things like logic, the scientific method, and mathematics. They’re often stated in terms of formulas, like, “P implies Q, P therefore Q, not-Q implies not-P; it’s not the case that not-P implies not-Q.” Notice I’ve been intentionally jabbering in terms of Ps and Qs that makes those formulas very powerful because it doesn’t matter what the P is, doesn’t matter what the Q is, they have to follow the laws of logic, and at the same time, that doesn’t make them particularly intuitive. Many of the formal fallacies that are found in brain teasers, gotcha puzzles, behavioral economics, and the psychology experiments that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman made famous often involve abstract unfamiliar scenarios in which the correct answer depends on applying one of these formulas. This doesn’t mean that we’re irrational across the board, because if the same logical principles are couched in scenarios that are meaningful to us, meaningful to our day-to-day lives, our social existence. People can be very rational if you say, “if you want to purchase an alcoholic beverage, you must be over 21.” People are very good at figuring out, okay, well, that means that if someone is under 21 and drinking, they violated the rule. If they’re, over 21, then it doesn’t matter what they’re drinking. People are very good at working out the logical implications when it’s woven into the texture of everyday life, but when it comes to using these fantastic tools that have been developed by mathematicians, scientists, and computer programmers over the years, that you have to go to school to do, you have to apply some practice and problem solving. You’ve got to commit yourself to using them, that’s what’s not so intuitive.

That’s a distinction based on an idea from my friends Leda Cosmides and the late John Tooby, two of the founders of evolutionary psychology, that you alluded to: the difference between ecological rationality and formal rationality. “Ecological” in this sense doesn’t mean going green or hugging a tree, it’s ecological in the sense of being adapted to a natural environment. The natural environment of humans is small social groups, folk wisdom, intuition, and literacy. “Formal rationality” is all the stuff that you have to go to school to learn, and that’s why you have to go to schools, because they don’t come naturally to us.

 

Chapter 6: AI, Music, and Constructive Optimism

Fred: That’s part of the challenge, and I want to ask you a question specifically about AI, a field where I do a lot of work as a lawyer and helping a lot of AI developers patent their innovations and so forth, and also simultaneously listening to what’s going on in government. As governments get ready to regulate AI, there’s a lot of talk, not just in pop culture, but among pretty prominent intellectuals and in government about one particular fear around AI where I feel that we are being a little bit irrational, and I know that you’ve spoken about this in the past and I want to get your views on it. It’s the fear of runaway AI – the fear that we’re creating some kind of God or super intelligent being and that this being will take control and maybe decide in all of its wisdom and intelligence that the planet is better off without us or better off with humans as slaves, and eventually either dominate us or wipe us out. It’s a fear that we’ve seen in science fiction for a very long time, but it’s also, as I say, discussed in very serious circles, and it’s leading to actual development of policies and regulations. Recently, there was a bit of news about ChatGPT replicating itself, and people kind of use that to validate that fear. Is this kind of fear valid in your view, or does it confuse the nature of intelligence, the nature of what AI systems are with the will of biological agents?

Dr. Pinker: Well, I do think that the runaway scenarios involve that confusion. It goes back to the beginning of our conversation in which I mentioned that rationality itself has to be defined with respect to a goal, and it doesn’t say what those goals are. So even if we develop hyper-rational algorithms, like AI systems that answer questions or that plot routes or generate text, there’s no reason to think that would include raw power or dominance or subjugation. I think that’s projecting the products of natural selection – which is an inherently competitive process – on the very concept of intelligence.

I think it would be a disaster if people started to breed AI systems that competed against each other for finite resources, that would be a spectacularly stupid thing to do. So if anyone’s thinking of doing that, then they shouldn’t do it. But if it’s just developing tools, there are undoubtedly various risks to AI, but being dominated or extinguished or subjugated, I don’t think should be the main focus.

Fred: I wanted to close up with a question on the nature of music. Your views on music really trigger a lot of people. You once said that music was “auditory cheesecake,” something that was pleasurable, but not really an evolutionary adaptation. I had Dr. Daniel Levitin on the podcast a few months ago, and he recently published a book called, I Heard There was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine where he argues that music isn’t just enjoyable, it also has certain therapeutic qualities, like it’s been shown to help in the treatment of various diseases like Alzheimer’s or PTSD. He claims it’s also biologically adaptive. I know there’s a very strict Darwinian version of this argument about whether or not music is an adaptation, but assuming that music has some objective benefits to our health or maybe our social connection beyond just being pleasurable at the individual level, I wonder if we can maybe see it as an exogenous adaptation, like maybe a tool that can concretely help us in certain ways. I’m trying to see if we can bridge the work of two great Montreal cognitive scientists here.

Dr. Pinker: If music can be used to enhance human wellbeing, then, like anything that enhances human wellbeing, that’s great. That should not be confused with something that increased the reproductive radar of our ancestors. Surely I don’t think it is true that over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, mostly in hunting and gathering environments, that music was used to treat Alzheimer’s or PTSD. In fact, we know that’s false, that’s just not the way music is used.

Music is enjoyed in a variety of contexts which don’t have a whole lot in common, including being used for healing, being used for courtship, being used for war, being used for dance. So if someone thinks up a way to take advantage of music’s soothing or enjoyable properties, that’s great, but that doesn’t mean that music is an adaptation in the sense that the liver is an adaptation. In fact, I think we’re better off understanding putting music to good use if we don’t tie ourselves in knots figuring out how did it make our hunter-gatherer ancestors have more babies, because I’ve never seen a plausible argument that it does.

Fred: Is there a distinction there between reproductive fitness and external tools that human beings can create that benefit them in other ways, whether or not they constitute an evolutionary advantage in our history?

Dr. Pinker: That’s exactly the distinction, and I think it’s a mistake to confuse them. There are lots of things that we cherish that are absolutely not evolutionary adaptations, like reading, and a lot of things that might be evolutionary adaptations that we utterly deplore, like genocide and rape. So precisely in order to identify what is valuable, what is salutary, what is salubrious, what is worth cherishing, we shouldn’t get confused with what allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce.

Fred: So we shouldn’t confuse evolutionary fitness with whatever categories of morality. We shouldn’t say just because something is an adaptation then it’s morally good today.

Dr. Pinker: To put it mildly, that’s right. Otherwise, the most morally valuable thing would be to pump out a dozen babies.

Fred: There’s an unmistakable thread of optimism in your work, but it’s a realistic and almost conditional kind of optimism. I’m going to quote you again, “When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows, as opposed to other dubious pursuits like glory or redemption, and they apply their ingenuity and institutions that pool it with others, they occasionally succeed. When they retain their successes and take note of their failures, the benefits can accumulate and we can call the big picture progress.” It reminds me a lot of David Deutsch’s work, which also emphasizes particular forms of optimism. He sees pessimism as slowing down progress and optimism almost as a moral stance. If problems are solvable and if we have the ability to reduce human suffering or contribute to its flourishing, we almost have a moral duty to be optimistic in this sort of realistic sense. Machiavellian types often see this trait of optimism as naive or unrealistic. In your view, is it actually an important aspect of the spirit of science properly pursued?

Dr. Pinker: Yes, and David Deutsch was certainly an influence. In his book, The Beginning of Infinity, he laid out a rational basis for optimism. I tend to downplay the word, although I do use it sometimes, but a kind of constructive proactive optimism. It’s not that good things happen, but that if we try to make good things happen, then we can sometimes succeed, and if we don’t, we won’t. This is also a distinction made by the economist Paul Romer, who distinguishes between complacent optimism and constructive optimism. Complacent optimism would be “Christmas Day happens and you get a bunch of presents in your stocking,” versus constructive optimism, which would be “we want a tree house, let’s build one.” I think I would agree with Deutsch and with your implication that there is some moral case to be made for constructive optimism. Namely, it’s good if things improve. They won’t improve if we don’t think they can. Therefore, there is a moral imperative to try to improve our condition. 

Fred: Would the line there be optimism combined with proactive problem solving, not that progress just happens in the background if we pray for it or if we hope for it?

Dr. Pinker: Precisely, well put.

Fred: Just out of curiosity, are you working on your next book at the moment?

Dr. Pinker: I have just completed a book that will come out in September 2025 called When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. It is about the special state of awareness in which we know that other people know something different from everyone knowing the same thing, but not knowing whether everyone else knows it, and all of its manifestations. It turns out that there are many: in politics, in economics, in everyday life, in language.

Fred: That sounds fascinating and I can’t wait for that to come out.

Dr. Pinker: I hope you enjoy it when it does.

Fred: Thank you so much Dr. Pinker, I really appreciate this.

Dr. Pinker: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Fred: Thank you.