Noam Chomsky || On Human Nature and Human Progress

is a public intellectual, linguist, and political activist. He's the author of many influential books, including Manufacturing Consent, The Political Economy of the Mass Media, and his latest with Robert Pohlan, Climate Crisis and The Green New Deal, The Political Economy of Saving the Planet. Chomsky is also known for helping initiate and sustain the cognitive revolution. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Maritis

at MIT. Thanks so much for making time to chat with me today. Now glead to be with you. Just had to take care of a dog. Is the dog okay? Yeah? Just trying to horn in. I'm trying to shut them up, down down, It's okay. If if if he or she wants to participate in the podcast, that's fine with me.

Usually she usually calms down and gets under the desk. Excellent. Well, so I'm a cognitive scientist by training, so i'm and I'm One of the things I'm really fascinated with is the is the history of the field that I work in. And I had the great pleasure of working with and being mentored by Herb Simon, for instance, who was one of the ones who helped form this cognitive revolution as well.

And I was wondering, if you could we could trace a little bit, you know, in the sixties fifties, how did your work, you know, in linguistics intersect with the other work going on during that cognitive revolution, the time decision making and Marvin Minsky's work. How did all this stuff call ask that that epic? Can you take me back to the fifties sixties right now? Well, I knew Herb Simon and Marv Minsky mark most of my life.

We were colleagues. So the it was one of the strains that one of the core elements of the what's called the cognitive Revolution I don't like the term particularly, but one of the core elements, of course, was language. The other core element was visioned a couple of other things, and so we all knew each other. Of my own work was on trying to construct theoretical accounts that would account for the capacity of humans to do what we're now doing. Its core problem of the cognitive sciences. What's

the name? Sure the capacity? How can an individual acquire it during their lifetimes, in fact, during their early childhood, and ultimately how could such a system evolve? Those are the core problems of study of linguistics beginning around nineteen fifty. It's a pretty sharp break from structural linguistics, which had quite different goals and aspirations. Sure, oh yes, go on, Yeah, I've actually written some about these years. If you want me to send you something, that'd be great. Yeah, just

I have your email, so that'd be really great. Yeah. So when did you first make contact with behaviorism and what was your immediate gut reaction when you first encountered that body of work and the notions of sort of the stimulus response way of thinking about behavior. Knew about it from childhood, but the real encounter was when I moved to Cambridge. I came to Harvard as a grad student in nineteen fifty one that I was basically studying philosophy.

So I was a student of Fan Coins mainly, and he was one of the chief exponents of Skinner and Opper and conditioning this party rigid form of behavior, and Skinner's William James Lectures had just appeared a couple of years ago. Later became his book on language, and the drafts were very widely read, and it was influential, in part because of coins advocacy and part coagu. It fits the tenor of the times very well, so it was

kind of a bible when I got there. You look at say George Miller's first early books, out of the

later ones, they're pretty strict behaviors. It was even you know, some of his early experiments were considered rather shocking and sounds kind of obvious, showing that you could understand a word better if it was in a sentence, then if it was in isolation, which shouldn't happen on what should happen on rigid behavior, as Browns is that you here the first word of a sentence, then there's a certain probability for the next one, and kind of like what's

done with deep learning today. And by the time you got to the end of the sentence, you can barely guess what the word is because the probabilities go down. But of course the results are exactly the opposite. As you hear the sentence, he can just the last work. None of this works. But that was some of his early work and it was considered quite surprising. By the mid fifties, George had significantly changed and became one of the founders of cognitive science. But when I got there

in fifty one, this was orthodoxy. With a couple other things that happened. Claude Shannon had come along with information theory, the Shannon and Weaver book with Weavers kind of popularization and extension of the technical ideas was another bible. Cybernetics was another. Signal detection radio engineering was another, and they all kind of converged into a euphoria of which Scinerian behaviorism was a central part, a sense that we're cracking

the last frontiers. When Brick and Watson came along fifty three, that enhanced the idea that we're now moving to a new era. It was called unified science in which we'd be able to we had the tools to deal with the problems that were called problems of mind and psychology. There were a couple of us who thought this was all nonsense. Three in fact, to three grad students, my friend Mars Halle, who I worked with till the end of his life, and Eric Leneberg, who also a grad student.

He went on in later years to found modern biology of language. But the three of us just didn't believe

any of it. We thought it made no sense. We began reading European comparative the college, Tenberg and Lawrence others looked at comparative psychology work, and I was introduced by a friend, my Shapiro and art historian suggested that I should read Carl A. Ashley's Serial Order and Behavior, which was a very important article back in around nineteen fifty, which just knocked the props out of the whole behavior system.

Nobody knew it. I mean, neurologists knew it. It was in the neuroscience literature, but psychologists and I think others

were totally unaware of it. When I wrote about it for the first time in a review of Skinner's herb Behavior went to Press nineteen fifty seven, but that I think was the first mention of it in the general coology and cognitive science literature, so that these were things that we were Eric went on to start writing articles on He was doing a good deal of work at the time on various a variant forms of linguistic behavior, studying pathologies, early studies on use of SNIGN, cognitive deficiencies,

and language and neural deficiencies. And this went on to become his Biology of Language book, very very important book, Biological Foundations of Language. But at first it was essentially the three of us. Then George Miller got interested in lin linked up with Jerry Brunner, who was formed the

Cognitive Science group at Harvard, spent a year there. I was working quite a lot with George Miller in the mid fifties, books a couple of arrables together, taught together, and so on, and then it just kind of expanded, linked up to some extent with the early work and artificial intelligence Simon Simon and Newell, Marvinsky and McCarthy, and by the early sixties it become kind of a fairly I can't say integrated, because there are a lot of

internal disputes, but interlinked approach to many questions the euphoria, but then had pretty much anticipated you get it. You can get a good sense of it by reading the Yoshu of Barholal's essays around nineteen sixty five. He's an Israeli, a logician who was a regular visitor to Porlely Research Level Electronics MIT, which was kind of the center of most of it. And at first he was very much

a partisan of the euphoric hopes. But by the mid sixties he was a close personal friend also back from about nineteen fifty, but he had pretty much come around to agree with the skeptical approach and wrote some retrospectives about it which are quite interesting and knowledgeable. Around the mid sixties. I can get a sense from his work that's kind of what it was like in the early days in Cambridge. There was no linguistics. I was practically

the only linguist. The romaniocopsin was there, but from the European tradition, but there were no American linguists. In fact, about the only person it was an American linguistics tradition factor consensus, but it was quite different in character. It was it was described its proponents described as a taxonomic science set of procedures which you could apply to any purpose of data. It would identify the elements and their

distributional arrangement. That was linguistics. That's basically my own background. This was quite different. So what was it like? You know, was there a great excitement in the air. Did you feel like you were you were leading a revolution at the time or was it only in retrospect that you realized it was a revolution? Well, myself, I thought it was just a personal hobby. I took for granted that the consensus of American linguists had to be on the

right track, and this was a totally different approach. But it was my own. A couple of others got interested in it. By by the mid fifties, we felt that we were pursuing something that should displace the I think it was the consensus, and as I say, none of us agreed with the None of us means three or three of us with the behaviors, the dogmas that were rampant at the time, But never the question wasn't is it a revolution? But is this the right way to

pursue things? Gradually I learned that there were anti students. As I say, we were reading European ethology, which had some similarities, and I began looking into the history a little further learned that there were much earlier tradition that had been totally forgotten some of that. So my own view in retrospect that you might call this the second cognitive Revolution. Turns out, in the seventeenth century, the time of the origin of modern science, a lot of things

of this kind were happening. They didn't have what they lacked, and what we had was the period of computation didn't come along till mid twentieth century, so there were no tools for trying to explore the kinds of questions that they were raising. But I look back to Galileo as contemporary, as they recognized something very significant wasn't discovered later until I wrote about it the mid sixties, and almost nobody

knows it now. But in fact, if you look back, the early founders of modern science, like Galileo, were just amazed by what they regarded as the most astonishing, remarkable fact in the world that with a few dozen symbols we could construct in our minds infinitely many thoughts and even convey to others who have no access to our minds, the innermost workings of our minds. The galileo, for example, alphabet was the most stupendous of human inventions because it

enabled this miracle to take place. And of course it was understood that the alphabet was just representing some system in the mind which does the same thing, and that didn't develop. The tradition of what was called general and rational grammar through the eighteenth seventeenth eighteenth centuries, which tried to develop these ideas, but lacking the theory of computation, there was no way to formulate it. How do you

formulate a computational process that captures these capacities. By the mid twentieth century, when I was a student, I was studying logic and recursive function theory, and you could see that that offered modern recursive function theory and theory of computation provided the tools in which you could proceed to develop computational systems which gave a recursive enumeration of the

expressions of a language, basically expressions of thought. And you could find also provided means by which this could be translated into the map, into sensor, remote motor outputs and inputs, so you could link it to perception, production, learnability, how can it be acquired? All these questions on the agenda as soon as the skill together. Yeah, I'd love to double click there for a second on this idea of

a neatness and this idea of learnability. What was unique about what you did was it was certainly not saying that learning doesn't matter at all in the process, but the learning of the language seemed to operate in a way that almost the language of the word learning doesn't seem to really conform to what psychologists tend to think of as learning during that time, it didn't seem to

operate by those same sort of principles. I was wondering how your thoughts on this have evolved over the years, especially in light of Arthur Reeber's work, for instance, on implicit learning, showing that artificial grammars can be learned, that we are not sort of hardwired. I'm not a big fan of that phrase, but you know what I mean,

hardwired to have that specific rule structure. But we perhaps maybe like through to statistical learning, we can learn languages, and so there's a lot less built in than maybe we once thought. And I'm wondering how you're current thinking of that is, all of these results are negative. They

show you can't do anything. You can do it. I mean, if you have a bunch of supercomputers running and huge amounts of data and do a lot of statistical analysis, you can come close to approximating a set of phenomena, like you can come pretty close to approximating the sentences in the Wall Street Journal. That's a zero scientist interest.

If you did a ton of statistical analysis of chemical experiments, let say you know, people mixing things in the laboratory and so on, you could get a fair approximation to what they're actually doing. Would I tell you anything about chemistry. Nothing. It's a game. It's a way of selling a propaganda for IBM, you know, or for Google these days. But it tells you absolutely nothing about the nature of the system and the way it's acquired and learned that human

beings don't. A two or three year old child has mastered the basis of the language. We now know from statistical analysis the data available to a child that it's extremely empoverished. I mean sounds like the child is hearing millions of sentences. But when you take into account such elementary facts as Zip's law. You know this the rank frequency distribution, And it turns out that almost everything you

barely hearing bigrams, let alone trigrams. So from the what's back in this is what's there is a problem that was understood in the early fifties called poverty of stimulus. How do you go from the empoverished stimuli available to the rich knowledge attained? It was obvious in the early

fifties is a major problem. By now we know it's a much worse problem, far worse than was assumed, because because by now we have extensive studies, first of all of the data available, we don't have to guess anymore, and extensive studies of acquisition of language. None of that existed. And it turns out that not about the earliest age you can start testing that kids already have very rich knowledge which goes way beyond what they produce. This is

work that's going on for fifteen sixty years. So the problem of poverty stimulus is overwhelming. Now. The deep learning approaches have no problem. That they have basically as much data as you want, vast amounts of data, huge amounts of computing capacity. And with that, what they get is kind of what you get if you did what I just suggested, looked at or takes an example closer to the language. I suppose that you did deep learning studies

of the communication system of bees. You could get a fair prediction, probably pretty good predictions of what bees do. You know, bes start going out of the hive, they wander around, they find a flower, they they have the capacity of dead reckonings, or they go straight back to the hive. They waggle their wings and the other bees start fluttering around when they go to the flower. But they'll tell you anything about bee communication. Nothing. You know,

It's not what when Frish was doing. It's not what other bee scientists do. They want to find that how it works. The fact that you can kind of approximate the phenomena just tells you a nothing. You can look at the phenomena without approximating, well, you know, I'm thinking of these implicit learning paradigms that I administered in my dissertation, like action time learning or artificial grammar learning. This formed

a core basis of my dissertation. I was really interested to the extent to which there's individual differences where people can soak up the probabilistic rule structure of something unconsciously, you know, without their conscious awareness. And I found that people or some people are better at it than others, but overall, you know, most people. I debriefed them afterwards, I said, did he notice that fifteen percent of the

time this sequence it followed this sequence? Eighty five percent of the time it followed that sequence, and that you got faster at the reaction time for the eighty five percent. And they had no idea, you know, consciously that they learned these things. And these were artificial you know, languages, These are not, you know, something that we evolved. And so do you think that's telling us anything about how much is build in versus how much is not building?

Because I think it might. I think it does tell us something tells you something about human cognition. But I think it's a mistake to use the word artificial. Languages nothing to do with languages. I mean, these are data sets that have may are constructed to share some of the superficial properties of languages. But it tells you absolutely nothing about how language is acquired, certainly not acquired this way. I mean, as I say, if you take a look

at the actual data available to children. You don't even get a lot of biagrams, let alone trigrams. And this is not there because what you're what the kid is hearing mostly is the function words, the end of and so on. And then you look at the rank frequency distribution, it goes very sharply down in tails, often to a long tail. So I mean there's some statistical learning, but very much at the margins, you know. So there's nothing

wrong with the experiments they're studying. They're interesting things to study about cognition. And of course everything goes on unconsciously, like you and I have absolutely no awareness of the rules that we're following in this conversation, way beyond the levels of consciousness. I mean, people are deluded to think that what we call inner speech is somehow our thinking processes. Absolutely not. What we call inner speech is a pale reflection of the externalized form of what's going on in

our minds. And if you actually think about it's just bits and pieces of fragments. Our construction of sentences in our minds is vastly more quipped than what we call inner speech, and you can see it very simply by just doing things like reading out loud, which is much slower than reading. You can read a page in a fraction of the time and understand it of reading it, because the externalization is just very much slowing everything down. There's all kind of stuff going on in our minds.

We can study it the way we study be communication from the outside. Can't introspect into it totally beyond the level of consciousness. How do you link some of this to modern day behavioral genetics? What do you think of the field of modern day behavioral genetics? And you know, obviously those tools weren't available to you when you first when you first started in the field, and I was worrying sort of what your your own sort of thinking about about that is in terms of what tells us

about a neatness? Well, now it tells us. I mean, it's an important field. It's an important field for biology, but it's very far from accounting for even much simpler traits than language. There was a lot of enthusiasm when the genome project came along about all the things that were going to follow from it. But what we've mainly learned is do you have a clue how instructions in

the DNA turn into an organism. I mean, even just figuring out how you get protein folding you can barely do by Now that's an area where AI has made some contributions. But that's remember the bare beginning of what makes an organism. It's good to study these things, but you should study simple traits, not a very complex trait like language, which is going to be way out of sight for any such investigations, or intelligence, whatever intelligence is.

What do you think intelligence is? Well, all I can tell you is that I, for about sixty years was on admissions committees for graduate courses at MIT, which has pretty high standards. You can pick maybe five percent of the applicants and they're all very highly qualified. I can't remember once when anybody ever suggested looking at IQ. Nobody cares. It's totally irrelevant. That's not the kind of thing you look. I'm sure you find the same thing. I mean, you've

been on commission on admissions commissions. We'll ever look at IQ. Well, you know, SAT is a is correlated with IQ, very very highly, right, So it's subconsciously if we look at SAT or indirectly, or are we select for IQ. I don't know about you, but we looked at SAT as a kind of a marginal phenomenon enough some interest. For example, if some kid an applicant is just all as you know, top flight in every area, and the SAT we regarded that as kind of negative, probably means he has no

special interests and no ingenuity and creativity. If you get somebody who does very well in some areas and very poorly in others, you want to take a second look. Maybe there's some maybe there's some spark here that makes him do creative work and put aside things he's not interested in. So it's something, but I don't think it's much of a criterion. Of course, if somebody's score is

very low in everything, you think, well, probably not qualified. Yeah, so it sounds like you're challenging this idea of general intelligence as being the most important or even important at all for college admissions and what about life more broadly? You know you can find something, Okay, I don't think it's a very interesting characteristic. Well what's interesting or for you think take a look at I mean, I've had

many years to look back. I'm sure you have to, not as many as you, yeah, not as many as But when you look back and you ask all of these kids who came into mi T were very highly qualified. Some of them had very distinguished careers, did a lot of exciting work. Others just did routine, uh technical work, you know, perfectly competent, but like it adds a brick here and there to which you know, if you look back,

it's pretty hard to find the distinguishing characteristics. Actually, I was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is a very highly selective of three or four year research graduate fellowship, no duties or responsibilities, and that they tried to have very high standards for selection and occasionally look back and try to do the same judgments and the same story. You can't tell. These are really matters of character in many ways, more than technical more than mental ability.

I mean, they're going to have somebody who's a you know, a math genius, but will never discover anything. It just doesn't have the right right characteristics. Yeah, I really, I really appreciate that. You know, even creativity, we you know,

we find a distinctionary research between creativity and intelligence. You know, I'd like to talk about creativity a little bit because this is a topic that you've talked about in other you know, sort of even a political sort of way in terms of what societies can help us thrive and are most likely in conducive to autonomy and human freedom and creativity. How do you define creativity? Like, how do you even conceptualize that such a word? I wouldn't try

to define it. The only terms you can really define are within well grounded explanatory theories. So if you're working in physics, you can give a technical definition of energy within the framework. But if you were to ask me how I define energy, ordinary life can give you something descriptive description, but no definition. There are definitions outside of very narrow sectors of carefully constructed theoretical systems. But creativity is the ability to First of all, it's the ability

to be puzzled by things. You have to start with that. There are infants have that capacity. They're puzzled by everything. They're constantly asking questions that can't stop. Is annoying. You know, how what's this? How does that work? You know? If you're a parent, drive you bananas. They want to the

world's very puzzling, strange. They want to understand it. That's driven out of people's heads in many ways, parked by the educational system part in other ways, But there are some people who retain it, and in fact, if you look at the great moments of history of science, pretty much what they were. So take say, the Scientific Revolution seventeenth century, the great science that really changed science practically,

it basically was based on being puzzled. Galileo's contemporaries were just dissatisfied with the what we're called explanations of things. So why do balls fall to the ground, Well, it was an explanation, that's their natural place. They're attracted to

the earth. They didn't regard that as an explanation. As soon as they began looking at it, they found that we don't really understand and in fact all that was believed turns out to be wrong, Like it was universally taken for granted that a heavy lead ball full faster than a small lead ball. Galileo showed by thought experiments incidentally, never carry any experiments by thought experiments ingenious thought experiments, so this can't be the case. And that's what happens

when you're puzzled. A pillion people are willing to question orthodoxy, not as to accept it because that's what everybody says, but to be to want an argument for it, to challenge it. Sometimes it's right, you get convinced. Sometimes you see, it's just dogma. And behaviorism was like that. It was just dogma. It's soon as it began to look at it carefully, totally fell apart. But it's hard to do that. There were people who did like lashly for example, and

wore ignored. But if enough people do it, they began to interact, They start to try to work out real answers. They keep finding flaws in their own end answers, address those. Then you get creative work. But how to pick it up among people? I can't say yeah or pick it up. But the other interesting question is how can we bring it out of people in a society. I really, you know, do you remember that that conversation you have with Fuco? Does that? Does that ring a bell? That that legendary

conversation you know? I remember it? Of course? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm obviously you do. I'm joking. But it's a it's a very uh well watched video and and debate. But I'm just very interested in the discussion you had with them about about creativity. You too, seem to have very differing views of what the essential question there is for for how society should be organized and UH and and issues of the role of justice for creativity. I was wondering a few thoughts about that have have changed

over the year. I mean, as I understand Fucau's position, at least from what I got out of the discussion and reading his work. He doesn't seem to think seems to think that everything just as a matter of who has more power than others. So it's a matter of distribution of power. And if you want to take a political position, say, at that time he was pretty committed sort of French style Marxist malice. So we're on the side of the proletariat and we want them to win.

And if you ask, as I did, ask, if you look back at the they suppose it turns out that what the proletariat will institute is inhuman, destructive, cruel and so on, does that mean we oppose it? He said, no, it's just a matter of which side you're on. There's no right or wrong, there's no questions of justice, there's no basic human nature, just which power system it takes control. That may be a caricature, I'm not sure, but that's what I understood is position to be what I understood

it as well, I totally reject it. I think there's a fundamental human nature. We don't understand much about it, but we can try to discover it. My guess, partly from experience, partly from study, partly from wish fulfillment, is that the goal of human beings is to be free and independent, the creative, not controlled by others, under pursuing their own free and independent interests. This is the basic

Enlightenment position. So what you find they're so humble, the other great figures of the Enlightenment, and it's the origins of classical liberalism just won't have been forgotten. That's the reason, for example, why working people in the nineteenth century early Industrial Revolution were bitterly opposed to the wage labor, regarded as a fundamental assault on human dignity and human rights.

In fact, that was a very standard position at the time, because in fact, the slogan of the Republican Party that wage wage labor, what they called wage slavery, is no different from slavery except that it's temporary at the magram Lincoln, And in fact that's the whole classical liberal tradition, there's way back to the Greeks and the Romans. That's a modern idea that having a job is a good thing. Well, I think that the tradition is probably right that people

don't want to be subject to masters. I don't care whether the masters are the Central Committee or the corporate fact about the same thing. But that's a guess about human nature. I can't demonstrate it today. Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm trying to think a lot about

the modern day. You know, these social justice movements we're seeing today with Black Lives Matter, and there's I don't know if you're familiar with the term woke or wokeness, and there are some people criticize wokeness, And then I'm trying to think, you know, do you ever hear anything from some of the arguments coming from what some would

call woke sort of denying a human nature? And you know, because a lot of them really are big fans of Foco, you know, do you ever do you have any criticize, criticisms of maybe some of the methods used in modern day social justice movements that have moved us away from the classical liberal sort of ideal. Well, I think they

don't understand the classical liberal ideal. They regard the classical liberal ideal as modern capitalism, very far from that they do and even sometimes maybe viewed as modern day conservatism. You know what modern day conservatism, in my view, is extreme authoritarianism. Well, libertarian in the United States is almost fascism. It's the most extreme form of subordination to power. It's just subordination to private power, and that's even worse than

subordination to the state. I mean, if you're like, if you have a job in a factory, say, let alone an Amazon warehouse, you're under for most of your waking life. You're under the kind of control that Stalin couldn't have dreamt of. Like Stalin couldn't tell you that at three o'clock in the afternoon, you have five minutes to go to the bathroom, and you got to wear these clothes and on some other clothes, and this is the path you have to take when you're moving from here to there.

I mean, people that lit alone an assembly line, which is kind of control that no dictator could even dream of, or a person working at a cash register just totally turned totally into an automaton under total control of an authority. I mean, that's extreme form of authoritarian control. We know one of those dogs. Mesh want question, kind of like behaviorism in nineteen fifty, is that this is a good thing. As I say, in the early Industrial Revolution, this was

regarded as totally intolerable, built on basic human rights. Now it's considered the highest thing in life. I can get a job flipping Hamburg. That's it. I think that's so what you're saying about, there's no There are a lot of people like Fucoh and many others who say there's no human nature. That's first of all, it's insanity. It's like saying we're no different from cats. I mean, it's insane. You know, of course there's a human nature. What they

mean is something different. They mean what they've probably mean, which makes sense, is that the particular social forms and arrangements in which we are integrated are subject to change. That's correct, that seems reasonable. But it's not going to turn us into into insects. It's not going to give us an insect visual system. It's not going to turn us into creatures that are incapable of language. I mean, we have a nature, and in fact it's very rigid

and strict. Within it are variations and social and cultural and other arrangements that lead to variations. I mean, take say the visual system. Since we just think of the classical experimental work Hubil and Weasel, for example on human un vision a male vision. I mean, what they show is that early, early modification of the visual system, story cortex can lead to radical changes in the phenotype and the outcome that appears. It doesn't happen with us because

we all have about the same visual experience. But if there was a mangle around who could stick electrodes into our visual cortex or control the stimuli that we see, we'd have totally different visual systems that the as adults maybe no visual system a cat. As they showed, if you deprive a kitten of structured visual stimuli for the first couple of weeks of life, it's essentially blind. The analytics systems just degenerate. Okay, that means and it's kind

of the same as speaking different languages. But the point is you can't change an mammalian visual system into an insect visual system with compound eyes. That's mammalian nature. Within mammalian nature, there's a lot of possible options within human nature. There's a lot of possible options, and it's the options

that interest us as human beings. We take for granted what's common to us, kind of like sports, Like when you go to the Olympic, you don't see a competition and walking across the room has anybody to do that? You see competitions and things that humans are no good at all, like pole holding. So if you go way to the edges of human competence and start to find differences among people, but the overwhelming mass of competence is

just shared, well, I agree. I mean this idea of there being a common human nature and a shared common humanity sometimes I feel like gets at odds with the massive divisions we see today through identity, you know, political identity is being the first and foremost thing that is the most important thing about a person these days, or or or gender identity, you know, you know, the use of linguistics right now is very interesting in how we see a proliferation of gender pronouns, you know, far beyond

the sex biological sex binary you know, what what do you? What do you uh? What are your thoughts on on this and how we can balance the need to want to appreciate someone's personal identity and the things that divide us, but while at the same time not forgetting that there is a common humanity, there is a common human nature that that you're talking about. Well, first of all, let's let's try to take the standpoint of uh an an observer who looks at us the way we look at frogs. Okay,

that an observer would say they're all identical. There are minor variations between them right around the extreme periphery. Just as if we look at frogs, we say frogs frog, But if you really started looking closely at different frogs, you find slight differences in the way they do things. Well, as a frog, you're interested in the differences. They don't care about the fact that we're all frogs that you just take for granted. Yea interested in what's a little

bit different between this frog and that frog. But from the point of view of us looking at frogs so minor you can't even see it. That's the same with this what pronoun you use. From the point of view, the nature of humans is so marginal you need a microscope to be detected. But for human life, that's what matters. We don't care. We don't even pay attention to the fact that we're all fundamentally humans that we just take for granted. What's interesting to us in our lives is

these very slight differences around the edges. Do you say everyone thought he was here, or do you say everyone thought they were here? Or something? It's worth thinking about for human life, and it's important. So for example, I wouldn't like it if people called me a kite. Let's say, I mean, I don't think there should be a law against it, but I certainly wouldn't like it. I wouldn't like it either. I wouldn't like it either. And it's

the same. And if some woman feels she's being slighted, if you say when you mean anybody, okay, I can understand that too. Can you adjust to it? So you don't expect people to walk around talking about kikes and niggers and walps and so on. That's already internalized pretty recently. Incidentally, you go back not very long it was normal speech.

Even even writing one of my favorite articles from I think it's Forbes magazine, the main business journal back in around nineteen thirty was thirty two early thirties When I was a kid, that was it was Fortune magazine had a front page cover saying the wasps are unwhopping themselves, meaning Mussolini's doing a good job. So the wops are unwhopping themselves. I don't think you say that now, I

don't think so. So there's a positive, you know, the use of linguistics to help us with an appreciation of differences and respecting the uniqueness of an identity. Is it can be a positive thing in changing, you know, in quality in a society. Is that what you're saying, except that I would call it linguistics, just like I wouldn't call it physics. If I adjust the books on my desk so they don't fall, it's true it's physics, but I don't have to go to a physicist to find

out about it. And it's the same in this case. Linguistics isn't going to tell you anything about whether they should say the walks are unwhelping themselves. Okay, I can describe it, but don't give the rules for it. It's not going to tell you whether to do it or not. But just like a physicist, I'm going to tell me how to adjust the books. These are parts of human life, which are way beyond the sciences of their comprehension. But yes,

it's a it's a topic you have to be concerned about. Uh. And I think you have to have to ask yourself seriously, should we burn down the city of Washington because George Washington was a slave owner? Okay, I'm sure you can find some people to say we should. I don't think. So these are the judgments you have to make as a human being living in a complex society. So what do you think of the Black Lives Matter movement right now?

And and and uh? And race being the topic of consciousness because I saw an interview you did about five years ago where you made a really good point about how races and slavery it's a core part human of our history as a country Americans, but it's not as big a part of our consciousness. And now it's becoming, you know, and now it's really in our consciousness. And

I was wondering some of your thoughts on that. Now five years later, there's been a big change in the last few years among certain parts of the society, not the society in general. Society in general is very racist, shows up in all kinds of ways. A large part of the Trump volts, for example, is coming from deeply white supremacist circles, circles that don't feel themselves as racist, like I have black friends, you know, but just think the country is a white Christian country and it has

to stay that way. That kind of white supremacy is very widespread. But on the other hand, there is a change in consciousness many circles. You can see it in the reaction to the George Floyd murder. Blacks have been murdered for a long time. This reaction was quite different, spontaneous, enormous in scale, way beyond anything in American history, and have widely supported at around sixty percent support, a lot of solidarity, sensible goals. It was a very striking phenomenon,

led by Black Lives Matter organizers, but many others coming in. Well, that's one sign of serious changes. I want to see another sign. Take a look at this morning's New York Times. There's a very good op ed by Eric Fohner, fine historian calling for abolition, and what he's calling for is abolition of criminal labor, mostly black. He's a historian of abolitionism, reconstruction,

the Civil War, and so on. He points out that the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery had a qualif patient it said forced labor is legitimate as a punishment that, as he discusses, was the opening that the South used to He says, we still have it today in private prisons where convicts are forced to work for ridiculously low wages for profit. Says we should really move on to abolition. He wouldn't have had that up a couple of years ago.

It's a sign of the increasing consciousness and awareness of the really black history that is our actual dark, cruel history, its history that's part of our legacy. Now we've never grown out of it. Part of it the extermination of the indigenous populations and other part of it. And these are things that are gradually seeping into consciousness, not anywhere near enough. So there are holocaust museums all over the country. Try to find out how many museums there are for

slavery of Nation of Indians. Yeah, I thought that was a good point. You made that point in that interview five years ago. There that you don't see, and I don't think we There has been many more slavery museums in that five years so that thought that was a really good point. So in some sense we're making progress and social progress in lots of ways. You're very pessimistic about the future. You've called Trump, you know, our current

president right now, the worst criminal in human history. That's a pretty big that's a pretty big deal. Why more so than like Hitler did Hitler devote his energies to trying to destroy the possibility of human life on earth, to try to maximize the use of fossil fuels and to eliminate the regulatory system that provides some mitigation. Is

condemning the human species to extinction? Are we going to survive another couple of if in the next few decades if we don't deal with the elimination of fossil fuels, we can be very confident that will have passed irreversible tipping points. Practically one hundred percent of climate scientists agree on this. I think it's a good point. But you know what I'm concerned about is, you know, Trump did win.

There are a lot of people who didn't vote for him their primary The people that vote for him their primary concern You know, a lot of them were poor.

You know, they were concerned about their own lives, they're concerned about what they're going to do, and I think, you know, i'd love to get your thoughts how we can get the Democrats to actually focus on reducing economic inequality and meaningful ways so they can bring on board and convince the poor and uneducated people to stop voting for you know, the next Trump, you know, or even Trump four years from now. You know, what can what can we do as Democrats? Well, I think that's right,

but we should separate it from the former question. Is Trump the most dangerous criminal in human history? I think that's worth considering, and I think the evidence for it is overwhelming. Every time I say it, I say, here's an outrageous statement, very outrageous statement. Ask yourself if it's true. Okay, and nobody wants to think about it, so we turned to something else. But I think it's pretty important. Okay, but let's put it aside. So what can the Democrats do? Well,

that's a very pertinent question. In fact, we've just seen what happens when they don't do anything. So take the November election. There's been a lot of There are areas of the country that voted for Trump that haven't voted for a Republican for one hundred years, and there's been a good deal of discussion of it. Like South Texas, Mexican American area, it's an oil economy, hadn't voted Republican since Harding. A lot of them voted for Trump, even

some counties went for him. The reason. What they heard from their sources, Fox News, the White House, whatever they get their information from. What they heard is Biden wants to take away your job, destroy your community, destroy your businesses, devastate your families. Don't vote for him. Vote for Trump, who says I'm going to keep your jobs, keep your families, keep the oil production working, and so on. That's what

they heard. Now, if the Democrats were a political party that had any concern for the general population instead of being committed to Wall Street and rich donors and the wealthy professional classes. If that were the case, they'd have had organizers down in South Texas saying, look, it's a fact that we're going to have to get off the oil based economy. There's just no debating that. That's like debating the weather. It's a fact. We have to face it. Now.

Here's the way we can face it. We can face it with feasible, sustainable measures which will give you better jobs, better lives, better communities, happier existence. Here's the way to do it. But they didn't do that. Okay, so there's the answer your question. You don't you don't break through the propaganda. Yeah, that's what's going to happen. That's definitely

one answer. Do you see any potential backlash from focusing too much, going too far left and that kind of being the main democratic talking points, you know, in terms of race and gender. Do you see any any potential problems with making that too much the central focus you can I'm in the atmosphere and many universities is by now toxic. Cancel culture. Are your trying to cancel culture?

It's called cancel culture. It goes way beyond that. It's the disdain for people who use the wrong pronoun says a lot of young people in the universities feel they're walking on eggshells. If I say the wrong thing or do something that's slightly the wrong way, then it's the tragedy that'll be You know, I won't be killed, but you have to be expelled from the society. And if you go there far, you're doing completely the wrong thing totally. So it's possible to take important issues and to destroy

them by just not handling them. Like what I said before, somebody came along and said, let's burn down Washington. That's you know, maybe you can make an argument for it. That's not the way to deal with the world. A lot of sensible way. What are your thoughts about defunding the police depends? Well, that's an interesting case use. If you just used the slogan defund the police, you're giving an enormous gift to the far right and pick it

up and run with it. They love it. These guys want to take the police out of your community so that black criminals can come in and rob your house. I want that now. I suppose he did it insanely, the way many of the organizers did, the way Bernie Sanders did, the way Alexandria Causi Portes did. She was asked, what do you mean by defund the police, and her answer was, just go into any white suburb. That's what

we mean by defund the police using drugs. You know, pick them up, beat them up, take them to jail, incarcerator. You deal with it sensibly through community services. You have the police when you need them, but they're not supposed to be involved in community service operations of family disputes, overdoses, mental health issues, because they're not these issues. That's community service. I think the police are in favor of that kind of defunded. Bernie Sanders did the same. He said, yeah,

that's what we want. We want police freed from publications that are none of their business and are just a burden. And in fact they are probably ninety percent of what they do. And let's fund let's have better pay for police, so it's more desirable, profession people, better trained, and have them focused on police work. But the things that should be done like they're done in a white soburb, they should be done everywhere. I lived in a suburb of Boston.

Just give you an example. We were away for the summer and some neighbors called us up and said, somebody broke windows in your house. So we came back to see what happened. It turned out somebody had broken in so we called the Lexington police and it came over. The first thing they said is look in your medicine cabinet. We looked in our medicine cabinet, and yes, somebody had gone through it taking some stuff out, and they said, there is this kids in the neighborhood. We know who

they are. We're not going to send them to jail. It's up to their parents and the community to discipline them and put them on the right path. That's the way to deal with it. I didn't want them to go to jail. I suppose it was a black community. You know what happened. Yeah, So when Cassio Cortez says, defund the police means make it look like a white server, that's a message that makes sense. Yeah, and that goes

that transcends the slogan. You know, this just just just a superficial you know, just to fund the police, you know, without any nuance or yeah. Yeah, I agree. Well, thank you for giving me your point on that. You know, I am wondering, what's the biggest thing you were wrong about and change your mind over in your career A lot of things. I'm in in academy and professional work,

scientific work all the time. Yeah. Right now I'm writing in the midst of an article which gets it, just works on problems that I didn't notice in earlier, things which are totally wrong enough to be fixed. That happens every day. So in scientific work, it's just that's what we're work. Is fine, mistakes, you direct them move on. In social political domains, not very much. I still believed

pretty much when I believed as a young teenager. I mean, there are individual things that are wrong, like text day of the Vietnam War, which I devoted a lot of my life to. I started in the early sixties when it was very unpopular, but that was much too late. It started ten years earlier, but nobody even heard of it. By the early sixties, is already getting out of control.

There are things like that. Well, do you have any regrets, like a big regret in terms of your academic work or your activism work something Maybe you've said that you regret. I can I mean an academic work, of course, says it's not really a matter of regrets. You made mistakes. You want to correct, not regret. That's discovery and learning and growing. In the general domain of life, of course, should have done differently. I have one final question. I

want to be very respectful of your time. You have grandchildren, right, great great grandchildren. Okay, I can't see one of them's in Japan. I can't travel. Can you see them on Skype or on the screen anything like that? I don't know. It's me, you know, the world's you know. I was just wondering if you could give advice to your great grandchildren, you know, for the life that they're going to grow up to live in fifty years from now, you know,

and when you probably won't be here. Who knows you may you may be here, but you know what sort of advice for them? And then you know that can that can just apply to to any young person listening to you right now, who really values and treasures your thoughts. Well, I never rate really gave any advice to my children. They didn't ask for it, then I didn't give it.

I do get a lot of letters from young people these days asking for advice, and what I usually say is the only advice I know is if anybody tries to give you advice, put it aside. Figure it out for yourself, what kind of life you want, how to lead it. There's no general answers to you should live, no rules. There's cliches. You can give the cliches, but it's really up to you. You have to create your own life. But if you're an activist, if you're aspiring academic,

you want to make the world a better place. You know, surely you have some bit of advice you could give to people hanging on your every word. Here I can repeat the cliches, they can figure them out for themselves. Okay, fair enough. I just want to thank you so much for this chat, but also just inspiring me in my own career and being such a legend. Good very Please talk to you bye, have a good one. Thanks for

listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.