Steven Pinker || Humanism, Enlightenment and Progress

the podcast. Doctor Pinker is an experimental psychologist who caducts research and visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnston Professor of Psychology at Harvard,

Pinker is also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research his teaching in his ten books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind, We're the Blank Sleet, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now, The Case

for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policies, World's Top one hundred Public Intellectuals, and Times one hundred Most Influential People in the World Today. He is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes

frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian and other publications. Steven, great to have you on the show today. Thank you, scotch Oh boy, so I to say I've been following your work for almost my whole life is no overstatement. You know, you really influenced me a lot pre my career. I remember reading your How the Mind Works, actually devouring How the Mind Works in the back seat of my parents' car when I was a teenager, and really feeling when I read your book as though I understood how the

mind works. And watching the development of your career and your thinking and writing, it seems to me like there's a real common thread, although your scope of import seems to widen, but it seems like this common thread is sort of understanding of our common humanity or a common heritage, evolutionary heritage. You know, there's a humanism in how the

mind works. Right here is my broadest concern is human nature and its implications, and recognizing that human nature is universal is a foundation for humanism, that is, in valuing human wellbeing human flourishing as the ultimate moral good. Yes, I think we're both agreed on that. And this idea of human flourishing is something that goes well beyond just happiness, and you make that clear in your new book Environment Now. And when you talk about happiness that flourishing incorporates lots

of things. What are some of the main essential elements of flourishing in your view? Yes, In fact a happiness feature. Researcher gave me a hard time for not just defining human well being in terms of happiness, which is the easiest thing to measure, but I meant to expand it to include other things that we deem worthwhile, such as raising children, which can make people less happy in real time,

such as accomplishing something like writing a book. I'd be to acknowledge that the process of writing a book leads to many moments of unhappiness, but I never regret doing it, just as people seldom regret having children, but creating works of lasting value, helping people other than oneself, making discoveries

that benefit humanity. There are things other than having a smile on your face that we deem worthy of humans striving, absolutely, and not only in terms of that, but in terms of looking at the course of human history and seeing what has improved what hasn't improved. Some things that we think we will improve are going to increase happiness, don't necessarily or increase flourishing, for instance, Like you talk about economic inequality, for instance in your book, is something that

doesn't necessarily equate to increased flourishing? Is that right? Yes? Right? In general, people are happier when they are more prosperous, obviously many exceptions, but richer countries are happier on average, and more prosperous people within countries are happier on average, Although we know that that's only one of the components of subjective well being. Others include social trust, freedom, and other intangibles. Inequality has a complicated relationship to subjective well being.

For while it was thought that the more unequal to the society, the less happy areas people were on average, presumably because no matter how well off people are, they're always comparing themselves to others, and between the average and the best off increases. According to this way of thinking, then even if people were materially better off, they might be less happy. The more recent data suggests that that

probably isn't true. That what tends to kurt people's resentment is not so much inequality per se as a sense of unfairness. They feel that they're living in a society that is meritocratic and that they have a chance of getting ahead, or even that the rewards are distributed impartially. They can live with inequality, there are opportunities for their kids to get ahead, and that the evidence is that other people are getting richer. Then they feel just fine

about their life situation. But if they feel they're trapped, that's what leads to less happiness. The reason that it's been hard to tease them apart is that across societies, lots of good things tend to go together. And this was a as a social scientist, this is a constant frustration and trying to disentangle effect. Yeah, tell me about it. You wrote that in a different context when you strite about g or general intelligence. You know that's a hard

one as well. Right, you don't cover that too much in your current book, but you know, I think that's kind of an extension. It's a similar problem, right, it kind of is. And there's no a single letter to the phenomenon that Sweden is a much more pleasant place to live than Somalia, for example. But a lot of good things go together. Some countries are richer, they are better educated, they are greater gender equality, they're more tolerant of minorities and gay people, and they tend to be

more equal. And so in the correlation across countries, what looks like a benefit to equality can just be a benefit of sheer prosperity. I mean, your way is not just egalitarian. It's rich. And if you try to tease a party, the wealth and the equality, and it's often wealth that actually pushes the happiness around more than an inequality.

That's a subject of one of the chapters in the book. Absolutely, And you also talk about increases in autonomy and certain the implications of that doesn't always necessary, that doesn't always necessarily lead to increased happiness. You say some things about, like you know, increased autonomy for women, which I think is undeniably a good thing that the definition belongs to

progress doesn't necessarily increase happiness among women. Right, yes, And one of the great paradoxes of happiness research, which even really forgetten about as well, is that, strangely, over the last several decades in the United States, happiness for women has gone down a little bit. Happiness in other advanced democracies for women has pretty much flatlined, even though happiness

for men has increased slightly on average. The paradox is that this is an era in which women have far more opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers did, opportunities in the workplace, opportunities for self expression, economic opportunities, but it hasn't on average, made women happier. And it may be that as women that have greater opportunities greater freedom, they set higher goals for themselves. And indeed, if you ask men and you ask women to list their life priorities,

men in many ways are rather simple creatures. They want professional success, you know, they want they want a family. We're simple organisms. Women are more complex. Women list among their like priorities all the things end list, but in addition, things like a responsible member of their community and affecting positive social change and place out even higher value than men on being a good parent, being a good family member.

So there's just a lot, awful lot of things that women today strive for, and that's an awful lot of ways of being frustrated. Possibly, and that might account for the paradox that as women's autonomy and freedom have expanded, their happiness is not increased. Yeah, I'm really glad that you lay out a lot of these nuances in your book. Was really helpful for me as a well being researcher. You know, distinguished between happiness and meaning and autonomy and happiness,

et cetera. So that was really helpful for me. So here's a quote from your book. The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious, It is uplifting, It is even dare I say spiritual? So first of all, why dare I say? I know why? But I want to hear from your bos. I argue that endorsing the Enlightenment worldview means rejecting anything supernatural spirits, gods and karma

and destiny and ghosts and souls and so on. That we live in a natural world governed by physical laws and that no real good comes from thinking about an afterlife or a divined punisher or a rewarder. But of course one could define spirituality in a psychological sense, namely some sense that we have of awe, of appreciation, of a perception of processes and forces that are bigger than ourselves.

And I wrote that passage to counter an accusation of humanism, namely an attempt to make humanity as a whole better off somehow boring or bourgeois or materialistic or tepid or arit that we can't be truly fulfilled unless we believe in a protector in the sky, or myths of heroic ancestors,

or something transcendent, something beyond life on earth. And I suggest that there is a way of li looking at human progress that looks at the massive reduction of suffering that we've accomplished, at the hope for still more reductions of suffering, the attempt to understand the cause most including our place in it. The attempt to create works of beauty and value that are spiritual in the best sense,

but they don't involve any ghosts or spirits or anything supernatural. Yeah, you know, this idea of the psychology of self transcendence is a fastening field and one that I've been doing some work with David yiden On. And you know, there's no reason to say that the instinct or the delight we get from that feeling of self transcendence isn't something that's hardwired into us, something that didn't evolve itself, that is maybe in itself non reducible to other aspects of

our human nature. When I read your book, it seemed I felt as though this book was the most romantic of all of your books so far. This progression is interesting. You know, controversy got into with how the mind works when you refer to music as auditory cheesecake, and then people took that to mean that therefore music can be reduced one hundred percent two language, you know, and that's you know, I think you would say, that's not you

can't really, that's not what that means. Even if it was a byproduct, even if evolved as a byproduct of another module or function, doesn't mean that that in itself shouldn't be appreciated. But you obviously a lot of some critics took it that way. But I here's a quote from your new book which makes me think that maybe while you might not have changed that view, you write

more about how enriching these the experiences are in themselves. So, for instance, say the arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight. And it's a very romanticism kind of line. Well, in fact, it's completely consistent with the analysis of music and how the mind works. But maybe I should have called it cheesecake. Maybe I should have called it tiraisou or something more expensive. That's the thing, Yeah, I think so.

I came from a generation where cheesecake was like the ultimate luxury in the nineteen seventies, is a big piececake craze. It was considered kind of the height of epic curity and discernment to really to savor the right kind of cheesecake rather than the wrong kind. Was that in Canada, Canada? No, No, that was back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was people of my generation. Remember you go to dinner parties and people say, oh, you tried the cheesecake at Baby Wants It. Oh, no,

it's not as good as a cheesecake at Rosies. And it was a kind of form of epicurean one upmanship of most refined exquisite cheesecake. But in any case, the two statements are actually completely compatible because one of the reasons I did choose, admittedly the somewhat shocking metaphor cheesecake for music, precisely to underscore that we should not confuse evolutionary adaptation in Darwin's sense, the literal sense of some feature that makes the bearer of that feature have more

surviving babies. That is not the same as human worth. In fact, often there are cross purposes. Yeah, reading, for example, is just not something we were evolutionarily prepared to do, couldn't be because it's so recent in our revolutionary history, but it's obviously one of the things that make life worth living. On the other hand, blood revenge the idea that if someone hurts a member of your family, you should kill a member of their family, or someone insults you,

you should lash out violence to establish your credibility. That probably is an adaptation, but it is certainly not something to celebrate. The more we repress it, the better. So the idea of that full analysis was just to say that it's natural to confuse the two senses of adaptive namely the biologist technical sense of a trait that increases fitness, where fitness means number of surviving offspring and adaptiveness in

the sense of what is healthy, valuable, worth maximizing. That's a great distinction, And the other relevant distinction to me seems to be the distovers proximal one. You know, some people can take what you're saying is the only things that in our current lifetime. Everything we do in our current lifetime is explained our actions, our immediate actions are explained based on the actions of our ancestors, which is

not true. You know, we can that's maybe why we have free will in the sense, but I mean, we shouldn't get into the whole free will thing. But you know what I'm saying, Oh, I know exactly. Say so, you put your finger on the key reason that evolutionary psychology is so misunderstood and often reviled. It is a is attempting fallacy to confuse you identify them as the proximate and ultimate levels. But another way thinking about it

is the psychological level what we actually experience. What are our thoughts, our drives, our feelings, our motives, our brain processes versus an evolutionary explanation, namely, why do we have those feelings in the first place. And the reason they're so easily confused is that the process of natural selection could often be metaphorically described as genes being selfish, trying

to make as many copies of themselves as possible. And if you slip into that language, even though it can simplify process, it's easy then to confuse it with the actual motives of the human being that was shaped by those genes. But they're very different, the metaphorical motives of

the genes and the real motives of the people. Again the ultimate versus proximate levels, And if you confuse them, then you'll be baffled by statements like, well, if sexuality is a way to reproduce, why would anyone ever use contraception? Isn't that a paradox? Well, it's not a paradox because

explanations applied two different levels. The sexual desire is a something we describe at a proximate level, people want to have sex with attractive partners, and in the kind of environment that we evolved in before contraception, that would just automatically to reproduction. But it's not the same as an actual desire to have a baby in terms of what's going on in someone's mind when they are sexually aroused, and if so, indeed, contraception would be the most revolting, repugnant,

dangerous thought imaginable. It is because that's not the way evolution works. We don't literally have a desire to make as many babies as possible. We have a desire. That desire is at the ultimate level, and it's a metaphorical desire of the genes. The real desire of the person is to enjoy sex and to cherish babies that you think are your own, and that will automatically be to reproduction. But it's not the reproduction per se. That is the motive in the brain of a person at the time,

at that proximate level. And that example that applies to how it things like altruism. People confuse the explanation of why people sacrifice themselves for the ultimate benefit of the genes as a kind of cynical debunking of the purity of someone's altruistic motive, and that too is a confusion. And we've talked about yet another one when it comes to music. Yes, thank you, that was very very well put. You know, when I was reading your book, I thought

of a couple analogies. You know, one main point of this book that I what thought was great and you brought in the physicist is named Sean Carroll. Is that right or yes? That nature isn't necessarily concerned with human well being, and that point is excellent. But I think a very related point is that human nature isn't necessarily concerned with human well being either, you know, And I

think both those points are really profound. Yeah, I think they are essential points that the laws of the universe don't care about you. So if we want to improve human welfare, we've got to figure out how to do it ourselves, because the universe is indifferent to our well being. But you're right at pointing out that is another kind of source of the human tragedy, which is that what was selected in the course of human evolution is not guaranteed to make us either happier or to make us flourish.

That is, there are lots of human traits that have a straightforward evolutionary explanation, but they don't really make us better off in the sense of happier, more harmonious, flourishing. Some do but we have to take a critical eye at our own psychology to identify which of our traits actually make us better off it should be indulged, and which ones really should be subjects of self control. Yes, and I think that brings us to a question of

human progress, because it's not encoded in our DNA. What an objective list of what human progress would look like is something we need to use reason to figure out. First of all, I want to ask why do intellectuals hate progress so much? And then I want to ask you if you could just list what you see are some of the main indicators of human progress that we all probably should agree on our indicators. Well, many, many intellectuals do hate progress, paradoxically enough, including those who call

themselves progressive. This is not all intellectuals, obviously, the intellectuals

who are embrace Enlightenment values do believe in progress. But there is almost since the Enlightenment unfolded, there's been a counter light, a romantic movement, and many intellectuals that actually detests modernity, that looks back to a greater harmony with nature, greater community that distrusts science as a source of weaponry and pollution, that is not particularly impressed by the well being of all of humanity, but rather holds out great

feats of artistic creation as the ultimate value. And this has always led many schools of intellectual thought, the existentialists, the critical theorists like a. Dorno and Forkhimer of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism and Nietzscheanism to be deeply contemptuous of the notion of progress and to highlight all the problems that modernity has brought. Why do I think they're wrong?

The speaking as a psychologist, first thing I just would note is that the well you can get a misleading impression of the state of the world from the journalism because of what we psychologists all know of as the availability heuristic. Mainly, we tend to assess risk and probability and danger by memorable examples, and that's what journalism is in the business of giving us. So as long as suffering and mis fortune and accidents of violence happened fall

into zero, they never will. There'll always be examples that they can fill the news. And if that's your source of understanding of the world, then you be systematically mislay. It's only when you look at data sets that aggregate the wars and the war in nations and the peaceful nations, the homicides that occur, and the number of people around who are not murder victims and plot them over time, that you could even ask the question of whether there's

been progress. The fact that bad thing's happen now doesn't say anything about progress one way or another, because only if you compare the amount of suffering now with the amount of suffering in the past, do you even know which way the sign is, whether it's got up or down.

And to appreciate the distance of progress. When I became aware of data sets of violence over time, which showed that rates of personal violence like homicide and rape and assault have declined in most countries over the centuries and decades, that rates of death in war have lunged since the end of World War two, that barbaric practices like slavery, like execution by torture, disemboweling or burning into steak, such

as the application of capital punishment for frivolous misdemeanors like shoplifting, have been eliminated. Even more recently, kinds of violence such as victimization of children in the schoolyard, bullying, sexual abease of children, physical abease of children, domestic violence, all into plaine when you look at the data as opposed to the remaining incidents. Then for enlightenment. Now I've broadened that to other measures of the human flourish. You can start

with some. I guess you'd call them the big three, being healthy, wealthy, and wise. That is longevity, hugely increased. For most of human history, it was about thirty Now it is seventy one worldwide and more than eighty and developed countries. Prosperity, the global poverty used to afflict ninety percent of the world's population. Now it applies to less than ten percent. And why most of history most people

were illiterate. Nowadays eighty percent of the worlds of the world is literate, ninety percent of the people under the age of twenty five. Well that I agree, that's progress. If that is in progress where it is, that's the point, right. But you say that, you know, you asked a whole bunch of instances of what you refer to as progressophobia, and I want to pick one because I think it's in a lot of ways for me, and one of

the most interesting ones. So here is all your fancy statistics about violence going down doesn't mean anything if you're one of the victims. Now, this is very interesting one because and I think it's not so easy out of that one in the sense I mean you responded, you said true, But they do mean you're less likely to be a victim, And I think that's a very good point.

This is the question I want to ask you, is why should people care about long term trends over hundreds and hundreds of years when they're only living one short lifetime and what matters most to the individual is their own well being within that lifetime. Why should they care? Yeah, Well, a lot of these strats apply over over the years and decades, not just over the centuries. The fact that the rate of violent crime plummeted from nineteen ninety two

to twenty fourteen. The fact that in the lifetime of many people alive today in Germany and Japan were some of the most warlike countries in the history of humanity. Now they're two of the most pacifist countries. That the production of extreme poverty is really a phenomenon of the last thirty years or so, They at least the steepest plunge and even increasing lifespans except for one sector of the American population, but for everyone else's life lifespan has

gone up in the lives of people living today. The one statistic that I cite from You'll have advance and longevity a person in that Kenya over the last few decades has because lifespan has increased actually faster than living. Every day that they get older. They have not approached death by a single day that is, a year passes, but Kenyans living year longer, so they don't even approach death. All of us two as we age day by day by day. So many of these are things that are

experienced that can be experienced within a lifetime. I really want to nail the point of like why should certain people? So let's do specific examples. Let's say that you're in the eye of the storm, so to speak. Let's say

you're in a extremely probably stricken neighborhood. You feel hopeless, you feel like things are really really tough for you, and I pick up your book and I read it, you know, knowing like like, oh, well, at you know, it could have been worse if I lived one hundred years ago, you know, like, how is that consolation for that individual. Well, I didn't write the focus constellation for the worst off, but I read it to the people who want a view of recent history and of the globe.

So it would be a different book if it was directed at unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. Yeah, that's a good point, even they Admittedly this requires a feat of reflection and perspective taking, but just knowing that problems are not seemingly intractable. Problems may not be intractable, they're not unsolvable. That we've solved other problems. The kinds of advances in education and prosperity and health that have been

enjoyed elsewhere can be applied universally. So there's reason for hope. Not in the sense of waiting for goodies to arrive, like waiting for Santa Claus, hope in the sense that the right kinds of political and economic and social change pulled out the promise of improving the lives of everyone, even though the ones who are most miserable today. Countries

at war can a chief piece. Just this morning we read that one of the worst ongoing wars in South Sudan might wind down since the leaders of all a peace treaty Even when I wrote the book, there was the widespread sense that economic growth had flat lined and

that unemployment was bound to get worse. But the last year of the Obama presidency and continuing to the present, there's been economic growth and the reduction in unemployment, including a reduction in people who are sitting out of the workforce and entirely so it's often premature to assume that the misery will be forever, that problems are intractable, that there's nothing that we can do about them. Thank you. That was a good answer, and thank you for letting

me play Devil's av Could I enjoy doing that? You know, I just like thinking of all the angles, So thank you. Something I was thinking about now defending your position. Now, you know, it occurred to me Wring your book that hysteria can be a very dangerous thing to society. So even if you're in the eye of what you think as a storm, it might not actually be a storm, and it might be nice to know that. Right, So you have this quote. Not every problem is a crisis,

a plague, or an epidemic. And among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them. If I had to pick one single line from your entire book, I mean it'd be hard if I had to just pick one, because there are a lot of juicy quotes from your book, but that one, in particular, I think offer is a really hopeful perspective even if you are suffering in this world, to know, you know, because there are a lot of things right now.

We could talk about some of those things that are being painted by the media as an epidemic or a crisis, and you see it in the news over and over again, and just that framing can be very pernicious, right, I think so for one thing, it does feed into kind of radicalism. I desire just to earn the empire to the ground, because anything that rises out of the ashes has found to be better than what we have now. To give up on hopes of reform and improvement, and

it can lead to a kind of fatalism. Well just if we are fortunate, but just enjoy life while we can, because there's nothing we could do about these contractable problems, and we're we're doing it anyway. So yes, it is. I was trying to go beyond some of the journalistic cliches of the end of this and the death of that, and the dawn of a post something era. That the prices of the day are often can be overcome, be

surmounted if you have a problem solving mindset. So here are a couple of things that are the news will tell me are epidemics, and which I actually thought were epidemics till I read your book, and now I'm rethinking that I want to make sure in this new book I'm wor here on that I have integrity, that I'm saying it right. So weliness and suicide are two big ones, and if you type either those words in Google, you'll get plenty of articles saying that they have reached epidemic proportions.

Could you maybe set me straight on that, Yes, it is a bad only true that race of suicide in the United States have risen since nineteen unity doing and all of those hits that you're going to get from Google, will I use nineteen nuney nine as a starting point. Ninety nine is kind of a local minimum for the

suicide rate in the United States. It was the lowest that had been in several decades, and so it was it started that is starting from a whole point it is not to minimize the tragedy of suicide, and it has genuinely increased since nineteen ninety nine. Even there, when it has to drill down and look where it is happening,

and it's not everyone that's committing suicide. More often, it is that vulnerable sector of the population that is also in the victim of opioid overdoses, unemployment, dropping out of the workforce. It's largely baby boomer, less educated, more rural men, and so that is a sector of the population that's suffering, and that's they have been driving up to the suicide rate. But it is not an across the board phenomenon, and other sectors of the population have seen suicide rate stable

or come down. It's generally arise a lot of it because of the Great Procession. That when you have periods of high unemployment and an often higher inflation, economists call it the misery index good reason. It does make people miserable, and suicide rates do tend to increase. They were much higher, by the way, during the Great Depression than they are

in the wake of the so called Greater Session. But if one looks at data on suicide over time, it wasn't one doesn't start the clock at nineteen eighty nine, and one sees that it is not the case that we're suffering from a general suicide epidemic. It's really really is localized and for the world as a whole. The Global Burning Burden Disease Project has shown that suicide rates

have come down over the last twenty five years. And then loneliness is another really big one which is actually sometimes linked to the suicide indeed, and again there's you and I and our correspondence that talked about evidence that lowliness is associated with many terrible like outcomes which reduced

health and burning death. For a number of reasons. That it's close to home because my sister Susan Pinker wrote a book called The Village Effect on the psychological benefits of face to face contact and conversely the harms of lowness. So loneliness is a terrible thing, but it is not true that we're in a sudden epidemic, new epidemic of increased loneliness. That remember the Beatles song eleanor Rigby, Yeah, all the loathly people, Yeah, I think sixty six And

the sociological classic the Lonely Crowd by David Reastman. That was in nineteen fifty two fifty three, And the data that I've seen, mainly from Brod Fisher, sociologist at Berkeley, who's done a kind of meta analysis of surveys of loneliness, it says that they've been a very little change of loneliness over the decades. This is not to minimize the suffering of people who continue to be lowly, but it's not true that more recent times have seen loneliness. As dirocket.

Those are two different claims. Do you think that during the EA we were just as lonely? We probably were less lonely because we had smaller tribes, right, and we had greater opportunities for intimate connection and support from people. I don't know, what do you think. I think that is almost certainly true. On average, everyone knew everyone else.

On the other hand, only by Donald Simon's one of the founders of evolutionary psychology is that often our most intense feelings and emotions, to speak at evolutionary history where they were uncertain and where where there was variation, and the consequences of doing without work catastrophic. So why do we never take pleasure in oxygen, but we do take great pleasure in food, even though oxygen is more vital to life in terms of how long you can do

about it. He points out that one of the reasons that we feed is so exquisite when we have it is that very often in evolutionary history, we didn't do it something that was worth striving for, precisely because it was so difficult to get. Likewise, the love of children. There were high rates of child mortality, and the reason we treasure our children so intensely is precisely because they were always in jeopardy of perishing, all the more reason

to devote effort to their well being. So this is a speculation anthropological data, but the vast, huge emotional effect of social connectedness and the pain of loneliness might reflect not only that we were typically surrounded by France and allies,

but there were probably were types when we weren't. With social shunning, with ostracism, isolation probably did occur in our evolutionary history, which is precisely why they are so painful, because a person isolated from the community won't survive long. So I suspect that there was variation even in our

evolutionary history. Yeah, and I really like Leary's work linking it to decrements and self esteem, you know, the need for belonging when you know, and showing how that social protection system works, like we're so hyper attuned to the possibility of rejection that will be sad even at the slightest hint of rejection, but beyond a certain point, it's

like an inverteduce shaped curve. Beyond a certain point, like as long as we're like moderately accepted, we don't care if we're very accepted, you know, that makes sense from the evolutionary logic point of view. That's interesting. What it does suggest is that certain percentage of the time rejection and ostracism feel, which is why they're so inkful there.

It's catastrophic, you know, to be emotions for things that are rare, like radioactivity example, or for many people exposure to too much sunlight which gives us a sunburn, we don't feel it, as it's happening a lot of things where we don't have negative emotions, where they kind of come in handy when we do have negative emotions. It suggests that it may have been a very real occurrence

in our revolutionary history. So interesting kind of reverse engineer our emotions like that is, you know, to see like that passes, you know, like looking through a microscope at a universe how many millions of years ago? You know, Yeah, I like that. I just thought of that on the spot, but it just it felt like an analogy there. So there's a lot of As a professor, you know, I hear a lot of talk of the crisises on campus, so mental health crisis and rape crisis. But have you

looked at data on where those things are crisis? They're obviously important issues and problems, but have they reached epidemic proportions as well? Well? Overall the rate One thing I discovered, to my surprise, was that rates of great nationwide have plummeted since data were first kept in meur in the nineteen seventies. Now, that was the height of the American crime boom, so we don't know what rates of great were, say in the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, probably lower, but

they have come dramatically down. Rates of sexual harassment are probably down, even though of course they're recorded far more often, which is which is a good thing. One of the reasons perhaps that they've been Yeah, now I don't know about sexual assault on campus, for see, because we don't really have lonitut new data on that, And probably in all data on sexual violence is that definitions can change

over time. So for example, if having sex with someone who's drunk is now considered sexual assault, and that was not true in all times and places, So it's not so easy to compare data different eras. And what about the mental health what's called the mental health crisis or a lot of ways, I mean that is linked to

the suicide and loneliness things we're talking about. Indeed, and there are data from King Twenga that both depression and anxiety had increased in American college students, although anxiety seems to have leveled off since the nineteen nineties according to the latest meta analysis by one of her students. Although the increasing even in the increasing depression, which was the result of a separate cross temporal meta analysis, does not

indicate that major depression, just measured bouts of depression. And again a complication there is that over the decades which twenty massed those data, the composition of America, the American student body changed far more people went to college, including a huge degree of inclusiveness of people with mental health issues. In the first place. It's a little hard to know how much of that increase is due to, say, increased

stress of living now compared to earlier decades. I suspect that some of it is real and least and certainly some of the beast things of anxiety from the fifties to the nineties, but by part of it. In any temporal trend, one always has to distinguish three possible causes, one of them being a period effect, the zeitgeist changing times, a cohort or generational effect. Some generations are more screwed

up than others, being probably the most generation. That's the technical terms, and an age effect, namely that people change as they grow up and get old, and so if the population is a different mixture of teenagers, young adults, older adults, senior citizens, and so on, then will naturally be changed in the average simply because in the case of suicide, for example, the risk of suiciety increases with age.

So to tease those apart is not always straightforward, and there are indications that my generation of baby rumors kind of push the statistics in a bad direction at every stage in our lives. We're more subject to suicide other the cohorts or and after more subject depression, and in many ways, for all the ways in which the millennial generation has been maligned, as younger generations go, they're in relatively good shape is compared to their babe parents. So interesting,

and thank you for that level of nuance. You know, as a professor like you, you know, I am concerned about what I am hearing, and I'm curious how prevalent it is, and I want to you know, that helps inform in terms of what my priorities are in terms of helping my students. Some data is interesting that that suicide is lowered in millennial teenagers compared to n X and baby bloomer teenagers. Evidence that lowliness has gone down for high school and college students compared to earlier eras.

And I can found period with cohort and unless you have data, repeated data over many decades from people across the age range, it's impossible to distinguish. But I suggest that it's better to be a teenager or a young adult in recent years than in years before that yourself has now kind of sewn a new panic about a post millennial generation. I get calls them a controversial claim as well. Yeah, I was going to say it was

no picnic of being a teenager in my generation precisely. Well, in general, one quote that I often use it talking about the themes of the book is that the best explanation of good old ways is a bad memory. Yeah. Yeah, I love when you said that, and I really resonated with that, And yeah, you could ask any generator. It is not what my parents would say, like, oh, it was a picnic for us. Well, I thought we should in the little time we have left. I thought we

should talk about the Enlightenment. How about that, which is actually like the point of your main book case You make a case for reasons, science and humanism, So let me condense a whole bunch of stuff here. So in terms of reason and science, I thought we could talk about politics. That seems to be a very relevant topic nowadays. And the thing that I find interesting is that you talk about, you know, you see an arena after arena, the world has been getting more rational, which is euphanism

for better in your worldview. Who I've noticed, But you do say there is a flaming exception. You say, electoral politics and the issues that I've clung to it not necessarily, you know, all these other trends you show in the book have progressed, but you're saying there actually is something real here going on that like we're not showing progress, if anything, we might be even what's the opposite of progress, aggression? Regression,

not regression to the mean, but real regression. Yeah. Yeah, So could you please tell me about that trend that you're you've observed. Well, certainly the part of that is anecdote could be the twenty sixteen presidential election, which had that in many ways was a carnival of irrationality. Donald Trump to single outsides, but on the single outside where

they were cleaningly erroneous beliefs. Among many of his orders, there were a contempt for truth telling, where objective tallies of the number of lies from Trump showed that he was the most mendacious presidential candidate, and since data were kept, I didn't hurt any But he's our president, so that was the most granted as my president, Steven, that's a

hashtag called not my president. That's right. Yes, Unfortunately, technically to our great detriment, and there are some data that political polarization has increased that even though a majority of Americans still consider themselves moderate, the greater percentage are on the bar left of the far right, and they each one thinks the less of the other in terms of their mental confidence and honesty and integrity. If that's a

bad thing. There's evidence that presidential debates have gotten stupid or over time, and that that is longitudinal data. So you know, again, shouldn't by nostalgia. There's plenty of idiocy in earlier elections, but the political arena certainly is not can be said to be getting increasingly rational, especially at the presidential level, and there may be a reason for it. I mean, the contrast that I drew that you alluded to is that we have in other realms of life

a movement towards rationality. In sports, we've got moneyball and saber metrics and other quantitative approaches. In a crime, we've got CompStat and other kinds of data driven policing that are responsible in good part for the American crime to climb. In our medicine, we have more evidence based medicine. In online there's the rationality community in day to day governance, there's evidence based policy and nudge and behavioral insights. In

journalism itself, there's fact checking like a fact Snopes. We have Wikipedia, which is a remarkable achievement, all volunteers producing a pretty decent encyclopedia. So in a lot of areas, life has been getting more rational, but our elections have

been getting crazy. There probably are features of electoral politics that pushed forward a certain kind of irrationality that have been noted since the time of Plato, such as that people literally don't have a state in an election, in the sense that when we talk about people voting against their interests, we're only talking to the aggregate, since any individual's vote is astronomically unlikely to determine the outcome of an election. In fact, I mean this is a taboo statement,

your vote really doesn't matter. With your vote doesn't matter. Everyone's vote matters, but for each individual basing the dilemma or the decision of how much of my time should I allocate to becoming cognism of the issues, should I study the details of NAPDA? For example, vote because they know that it really doesn't make a difference, not even

the candidates, not even the candidates. That's the scandal. Yeah, so voting as a form of self expression, and especially at the federal level, you've got the strange bundles of highly practical policy divides like tariffs, like highly consequential ones like clear arms control, like climate change. They're often bundled by with emotional hot buttons like abortion, like wedding cakes.

We gave couples where people have an emotional stake in issues that really don't affect them, and they see the franchise as a way of a form of self expression. So you get competing identities, competing loyalties, competing tribes, rather than the kind of Civics textbook idealization of deliberation over

the best policies. This is less likely to happen at a local level, where a lot of municipal governments are actually doing pretty well and people are happy with their mayors that they don't even know which political party their mayor belongs to. But we have not figured a way of closing that gap, getting democracy in the sense that to apply in this crazy arena of national electoral politics. Why is it getting so divide. I'm seeing this trend

as well, But what are the causal factors that play here. Well. A lazy answer would be social media the answer to every question about everything that's going on. A good answer. It feels intuitively satisfying. It does make a little too intuitively sure, Yeah, but I suspect when we're to blot the influence, the polarized cable news would probably have a

bigger impact. Fox News has been shown actually to push electoral results around in kind of pseudo experimental studies that compare, say, one town whose cable provider happens to include Fox News and a neighboring one that doesn't see that makes a difference in their elections, and it does and not anticated social media, and social media may have exaggerated it. There

happened tendencies. It may also be segregation by fashion. We tend to live with people who do the same things that we do in urban areas or in certain kinds of suburbs versus others. So I myself don't have a simple answer that question. Probably no one does. But you have a solution, I mean, you say, here, can we imagine a day in which the most famous columnists and talking heads have no predictable political orientation but try to

work out defensible conclusions on the issue. BI it's just basis, Well, that could be a Beatles song, you know, one can

only dream that. Yeah, well it is. You know, I can't claim to have a solution, but at least identifying a problem as a start, And many of us are not even aware that we identify with the left, As more academic students have been right, we're probably making ourselves less rational just by that very affiliation, simply because the answer is, well, we know from studies that people's judgement concluding their ability to solve math problems is warped by

their political affiliations. People will make math errors in the direction out there their favorite conclusion. So we know from the lab, and we have reason to believe from history that the left, nor neither the left nor the right has all the answers to fixing all society's problems, that we have to be more evidence based or issue by issue focused, and that an allegiance to one of the other ideology probably makes us less rational. Even if that ideas out there, maybe at least start a little bit

of movement to I guessing the problem for sure. So just real quickly, let's quickly talking about god, religion, so humanism. I'm on board with humanism, but you talk about can we get a good without a god? You know, can we get these values without a god? Is religion a human need? And I just wanted you to unpack this very very stimulating state. We say, don't confuse vulnerability with

a need. I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by that and link it to what a humanistic ethics or humanistic morality could look like as well. Religions are packages, their bundles, their unity organizations. They have art, they have culture, they have continuity with the past, they have moralities, and then they have all of these natural

and theological beliefs. And we have many religions that have been quietly unbundling them in a kind of benign hypocrisy where they emphasize their role as community centers or places for moral reflection. And the divine punishment and the archaic

Old Testament morality are kind of soft pedled. I don't think people have a need to believe in supernatural entities, in a god in the sky and word of punishment, in an afterlife, and gods of mountains and streams and that trees but we can be moored in that direction because of our theory of mind, our intuitive psychology, our tendency to impute minds to other entities, and in history, set of beliefs has been bundled together with these community organizations,

and it's possible for the organizations to arise without supernatural creed and humanist organizations and examples. It is also possible for the legacy religious and tutions to downplay the supernatural but to continue to function as community centers. And that would be a denign hypocrisy that we can encourage. But you don't have to believing, as we talked about in the top of the conversation, believing in universal human capacity to flourish or suffer is an up to ground morality.

We don't have to have divine commandments or reward and punishment in afterlife. Okay, that's a big statement that we could talk about for another four hours, but we won't.

But I thank you for articulating that position. And you know, I think a lot about rationality and you kind of equating rationality with the good And some people might listen to this and think that you're calling for a suppression of emotions, and I know you're not doing that, but one could think that's what you're doing in a sense as well when you talk about the counter Enlightenment and romanticism.

But you know, you talked about that earlier in the book about the counterloayment, but then later in the book you do talk about how you know, the unification of knowledge across all fields, including your humanities and arts, can be fulfilled only if notled foes in all directions. And so it seems to me that really is your core point there is that you're not talking for some sort of pure rationality, if such a thing even exists, devoid of all emotions. You're saying that there's a lot that

we can integrate here. We can integrate the arts, we can integrate even the romanticism counter enlightenment, but we can still integrate lots of aspects of human experience, including religious experience divorced from belief, you know, the actual experience itself into this worldview that you're of Enlightenment values. Is that correct? Yeah? And there are a lot of reason doesn't mean asceticism or ugliness or monotony, and there's nothing irrational about falling

in love. And maybe you know, hey, it's not irrational or to appreciate the beauty of the world or the comfort of community, but those are shouldn't be seen as the antitheses of reason by any means. It's not you know, we shall turn into mister Spock. So yeah, So I don't think we should act irrationally when we set the goal that we're sure of, should do what's necessary to attain that goal rather than falling back on impulse or superstition.

And certainly when it comes to academic disciplines, the humanity subject matter and the methods of the humanities are absolutely indispensable. And I couldn't have written Enlightened Now without it, without history, without philosophy, with political theory. But I do think there

has to be an integration. That should not be a phobia of data and hypothesis testing within the humanities, nor should there be a wariness of incorporating the best and most recent ideas of human nature into age old questions like what makes us take and how is that manifested in our artistic creations, and how to should it affect the design of our political institutions? Those are a feature of the Enlightenment. To get back to the overarching theme

of the book. All those guys, they were philosophers, but they were also intuitive psychologists, and of course you and I cite them today, we cite human causality and spinosa on. I even told Nzsche sometimes don't kill me. In many ways, wasn't a cute psychologist. And it was really with the more recent professional division of philosophy from psychology that we even think of them as as alternatives. They're not psychological claims are not the same as philosophical or mormative conceptual claims.

We have to respect the logical distinctions, but they often bear on each other. And that was certainly true in the Enlightenment, as the philosophical and points and psychological points were brought to bear on each other. And I think we should see more of it today, despite the somewhat artificial division of knowledge into academic disponse. Well, I really

love that call for that third culture, right, Yeah. You know, as I reading your book, I keep thinking about, Wow, there's a good book here that can square the Allolightenment that you're talking about with like modern day notions of Enlightenment. I actually see a correspondence there, and I was worrying have you ever felt at one with all things enter in a different sense of enlightenment. Yes, my, my, my editor was a little wary of the title. Sure, I think it was a book on Buddhism. It is not.

But it's not not a book on Buddhism. Well maybe not that kind of beyond my uh my skill set to answer question. It seems like as we more approach truth, beauty and goodness, we more approach the feeling of oneness. So I I just saw lots of similarities there Robert Right made. Yes. Yes, I'm a big fan of Robert Right. I'm not sure that Buddhism is true, but if it is an argument that he has made, okay, fair enough.

So I want to end today with a quote that I think summarizes a lot of what we're talking about today. Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morally and politics consistent balancing the conflicting desire among people. Well, thank you for writing to a beautiful book and really having such a call for more harmony in the world. Thank you, Scott, and thanks for bringing up those very

provocative points and it's as pandiating question. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure for me too. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes.

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