Can Reason Save Us?

Josh Landy
Is reason our only guide to the true and the good?

Ken Taylor
Or can reasonable people disagree on what is true and good?

Josh Landy
Is it a mistake to fetishize reason?

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that began at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ken teaches philosophy and I direct the literature and philosophy initiative.

Ken Taylor
Welcome everyone to Philosophy Talk.

Today we’re asking: can reason save us?

Josh Landy
Save us from what?

Ken Taylor
Well, demagogues busy trying to undermine democracy? climate deniers, you know, addicted to fossil fuels. religious fanatics, who see unspeakably evil acts as like their ticket to paradise that, you know, the forces of unreason. They’re everywhere for some reason.

Josh Landy
You sound like some kind of Manichean, like you think there’s this cosmic battle of the forces of darkness and the forces of light

Ken Taylor
Well, yeah, of course there is.

Josh Landy
Well, okay, so you see it that way, at least it might come with some comfort to know that those forces of darkness have been losing ever since the enlightenment.

Ken Taylor
Come on. How do you explain the current political situation in the United States or Brexit in your own homeland? Or the man in the Middle East? How do you explain all that, then?

Josh Landy
Yeah, okay. But they take a longer view. I mean, think about the abolition of slavery, the rise of democracy, the defeat of fascism, colonialism, Stalinism, not to mention progress in science, technology, medicine. I mean, all these things are triumphs of reason, Ken.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, Josh, but like, take the Nazis, for example. They weren’t argued out of existence. They weren’t bludgeoned to death, dude.

Josh Landy
Alright. Look, the forces of reason sometimes need help from other kinds of force. I grant you that.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, like the force of army. By the way, without the Red Army—Stalin’s Red Army—Hitler would have never been stopped. So I want to ask you, why did you put communism on your list of defeating horribleness?

Josh Landy
Stalinsim—I mean, Stalin was a monster.

Ken Taylor
Oh yeah, but Marx—he was as much a man of the Enlightenment as that you so admire I know is Adam Smith or Immanuel Kant, me? Look, he believed in scientific rationality. He was opposed to religious dogma. He was a huge advocate for human dignity.

Josh Landy
So yeah, well, yeah. Marxism is wonderful in theory. It’s a great theory. But in practice, unfortunately, it also gives us the Gulag and, you know, Mao’s Cultural Revolution,

Ken Taylor
Which just goes to show you, Josh, you should not fetishize reason the way you do.

Josh Landy
Wait, you’re blaming the Gulag on reason?

Ken Taylor
Well, Stalin had his scientists and engineers, right. I mean, they adhere to the canons of scientific rationality, otherwise, they could have done their thing. I mean, he had this huge collection of party apparatchiks, they managed to sprawling state. How you think they did that? By standard bureaucratic rationality.

Josh Landy
How exactly do you think the Great Leader controlled this group of Oso rational henchmen exactly?

Ken Taylor
Well, like in any large organization, various rational incentives.

Josh Landy
Rational incentives like fear, intimidation, I mean, these aren’t your everyday tools of rational man.

Ken Taylor
Well, yeah, they were from Stalin’s point of view.

Josh Landy
Okay, so let me see if I understand you correctly. You’re saying the Gulag is just like one more manifestation of bureaucratic rationality?

Ken Taylor
Yeah. I mean, it’s not one that you or I would use—I think you wouldn’t use

Josh Landy
Not currently.

Ken Taylor
But it worked pretty well for Stalin for a long time. You gotta admit that it worked.

Josh Landy
So it’s all about whether it works. I mean, you sound like some kind of relativist, Ken. I mean, next thing you’re going to be telling me the reason was responsible for the Holocaust.

Ken Taylor
Well, not all by itself. But surely who could possibly deny that reason played a major role in the Holocaust? Who could deny that?

Josh Landy
Me! Reason didn’t give us the Holocaust, virulent antisemitism, Ken. I mean, look, if you’re the kind of person who sees Jews as cockroaches fit only for exterminationm, there’s something wrong with you. You’re not using your reason correctly.

Ken Taylor
I see your problem here. Here’s the thing. You’re not aware that unfortunately, I mean, it really is unfortunate. Reason doesn’t and it can’t tell us what to value It just takes whatever we value you know wherever they come from it takes them as given. And then it tells us how to build a world in accordance with those values. So yeah, here’s the very sad fact if you start out with like anti semitic values as input then yeah and you let reason man it’s gonna give you the Nazi state as its output reason this wonderful thing that you so—

Josh Landy
I can’t agree with you, Ken. Look I’m with Kant on this:I think reason can and should determine our values

Ken Taylor
You so over romanticize reason. I mean, come on, you’er a literary guy—haven’t you read your Nietzsche?

Josh Landy
A little bit yeah, but I look I all I’m gonna say to that is like if niches view implies that the Nazis were rational, then he’s just wrong on this. He can’t be right reason went dark in the Nazis.

Ken Taylor
I avabhortoid the Nazis as much as you do. But that doesn’t make them irrational, Josh. It just makes them different.

Josh Landy
Different as in evil.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, okay. Evil. Yeah, different as an evil. I agree with you.

Josh Landy
Thank goodness for that. Okay. But look, I think you’re still vastly under estimating reason. I think that’s the mistake you’re making. And I think look, if we’re going to be saved from those things you were mentioning a moment ago. Reason is our only hope.

Ken Taylor
Here’s what I will concede. Before we get to decide who gets to keeps these lovely words, reason rational reasonableness, all that stuff—but you know what, these words have always been contested. They were even contested during the Enlightenment, Hume on one side, Kant on the other.

Alex Jones
And that’s why we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, to give us a sense of how contested they are even today. She files this report.

Liza Veale
Reason has made some powerful headway over time. We don’t burn witches at the stake for sports so much anymore, but are we becoming more reasonable? Or is our unreasonableness just evolving with the times taking new forms?

Alex Jones
Go down the rabbit hole and I’ll show you how far it goes.

Liza Veale
This is Alex Jones. His alternative news website InfoWars gets 10 million monthly visits making it more popular thanTthe Economist and Newsweek.

Alex Jones
Everyone’s having their water poisoned, everyone’s having deadly vaccines pushed on them, everyone is having weaponized television aimed at em. Pizzagate is real. Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake Vegas—it’s as phony as a $3 bill or as Obama’s birth certificate. The attacks in Orlando were a false flag terror attack. That’s what a false flag is and we’ve never had one so open and shut as Oklahoma City. I am the person that popularized the term false flag.

Liza Veale
Or for a different flavor of the modern day person’s imperviousness to reason, there’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness company, Goop.

The Buzzlist
Today on The Buzzlist: interesting items from Gwyneth Paltrow is website, Goop. Coming in at number three, psychic vampire repellent. This sprayable elixir combines gem healing and aromatic therapeutic oils to banish bad vibes and bloodsuckers. Coming in at number two, the Darwin jelly fish tank for $1,600 you can house your own jellyfish but again it is sold out. However, you can run one for $352 per day.

Liza Veale
Despite being called dangerous by Truth and Advertising and paying out to consumer protection lawsuits, Goop has an estimated annual revenue of $20 million. We want to believe—it’s a lever that easily overpowers cognition. And political pundits know this. Ae’ve all learned by now, appealing to an audience’s favorite beliefs is essential, but reasonable discourse is expendable. So let’s just take a second to listen to how the discourse is sounding.

Kellyanne Conway
…lied about it. I am answering it. That’s not what I asked. No one’s questioning him Can I just keep us on the rails here for just a second because he did not answer the question. I know you like to pivot, I get it.

Shariah
Are you interested in have Shariah law as law in America? Who is? Islam. No, are you? No. Okay. Are you? Show me where they’re making headway. It’s a national movement. This is a national movement? Yes. It’s like a band of frickin idiots over here. You just calling me stupid hillbillies. Why is it stupid to be afraid of Shariah?

The View
That’s what you said! You know what’s horrible? When peoples who shouldn’t be here end murdering the children of Americans. You know what’s hard? What’s horrible was when the President of the United States whips up people to beat the hell out of people.

Speaker 1
Neo-fascist Becky right here. Becky the Neo-fascist, right here.

Speaker 2
Stop yelling about it. I am! I’ve been fighting for like three months. You’re still white, you’re still responsible. This is your fault! You’re inherently racist!

Megyn Kelly
This is not effective. You don’t answer one charge by pointing to the other—I did answer. We’ll get to that in a minute. Don’t talk over me, l’ll give you the chance—you’re talking over me. the minute I challenge you, you tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Because you don’t!

Liza Veale
I understand the intensity. The stakes are high when it feels like your team is fighting for a little control over the world before the others ruin its chances. So we retreat into our atomized information economies and sling mud when we can. The chaos and mistrust wouldn’t be so tragic if the people who controlled the economy didn’t find it all so perfectly useful. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that—hmm—uplifting tour of the rational landscape Liza. I’m Ken Taylor, along with my Stanford colleague, Joshua Landy, and we’re coming to you from Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park.

Josh Landy
Our guest today is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, and a world renowned cognitive scientist. He’s the author of “Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, Steven Pinker.

So, Steve, I love this book. And one of the things I love about it is that makes a really strong case for the value of reason. But you know, some people might say, why do you need to do that? I mean, reasons it’s obvious that reason is a great thing. So what was it that made you wake up one morning and think that’s what the world needs, a book making the case for reason.

Steven Pinker
The the main inspiration was coming across data sets showing that contrary to popular impressions, there has been an enormous amount of progress in the human condition, people are living longer, they are living safer lives, they are less likely to be poor, less likely to be illiterate, less likely to die of disease and hunger. And that these developments did not happen by accident. The universe doesn’t lift us up word on an escalator. They are the result of people applying reason and science to make humanity better off. And under underappreciated people don’t know that there’s been improvement, therefore, they’re not curious as to what led to the improvement.

Ken Taylor
So you think it’s not obvious that reason led to the I mean, other people deny that reason led to the improvement.

Steven Pinker
There are people who are unaware that there’s been improvement. And there is a speech moving coming from my own professional tribe, cognitive scientists, who have shown how the many ways in which human beings are not so rational, there’s a long list of biases and fallacies and errors that the human mind is vulnerable to. But this has led to a clickbait the false implication that we shouldn’t even bother to make our discourse more rational. Because people are inherently irrational. They’re never convinced by facts and logic. So let’s just lie about your joy.

Josh Landy
I often hear people say, yeah, well, you know, memory, how can you possibly rely on—all memory is fabrication. I asked him, do you remember where your car is? Maybe like, if it was all fabrication, we wouldn’t be able to.

Ken Taylor
So I want to ask another question, though. So look, there are people philosophers who think that, you know, reasons, to us an instrumental thing it can calculate means then, but it can’t help you set your ultimate ends. And that was kind of a debate between me and Josh. So I just wonder, do you have a view about that can reasons that ultimate ends or is it just an instrumental?

Steven Pinker
Well, I think that’s literally true in the sense that, to take an example, if you had a child who was dying of a disease, and you had a drug that you you could cure the disease, it is not a logical error to withhold the drunk from the child, perhaps that is true. On the other hand, it does somehow seem perverse to do it. Why does it? It’s because each one of us values our own lives. And there is no logical basis for me valuing my life over anyone else’s, in which case, I have to grant equal recognition to your interest. Now, again, this is not a logical deduction, but it seems pretty reasonable.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, but that suggests that you think that Josh, so I said, Well, look, if you start out with Nazi values, anti semitic values, and you apply this instrumental reason it’s going to produce reason is going to produce this Nazi state. It’s gonna be managed by instrumental reasons and all that sort of stuff. He says, No, that can’t happen, because reason won’t let you have those Nazi values.

Steven Pinker
I mean, if one thing the Nazis actually did believe in a large number of unreasonable things together with their repugnant value of not valuing Jewish lives, they believe that Jews stabbed Germany in the back. That’s what ended World War One, they believe that the Jews were a dip biologically different species whose blood would contaminate Gentiles. A number of beliefs that are actually are factually incorrect. In addition, the fact that they would jail or shoot people who disagreed with them is ipso facto evidence that their belief system was not based on reason, because if it was, they’d be happy to let the argument proceed. And they win the argument.

Josh Landy
And they’re clearly using the tools of interaction as you look at footage of Hitler giving, giving them speeches, you don’t think Well, that’s a rational guy. Like they clearly do his problems, maybe reading too much analytic philosophy, but he’s crazy. No, Hitler’s crazy. He’s not just crazy. He’s also exploiting irrational tendencies on Part of irrational. Yes, irrational tendencies are part of the people.

Ken Taylor
He was pretty good at adjusting his I just I mean, again, I don’t share his values but he was pretty good at adjusting means to end. Right so this there’s a lot to dig in. I’ll remind you this is Philosophy Talk, coming to you from Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park. Our guest is the renowned cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker.

Josh Landy
In our next segment, we’re going to take a deeper look at the nature of reason. Is it the only guide to the true and the good? Is there even always one thing that’s reasonable to do or believe in the first place? Or does it depend on where we stand?

Ken Taylor
Probing the nature of reason—along with questions from our live and reasonable audience, when Philosophy Talk it continues.

Josh Landy
I’m doing alright, getting good grades. The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.

Alex Jones
Thanks to our musical guests, Tiffany Austin and Adam Shulman. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Steven Pinker, and we’re asking whether reason can save us.

Josh Landy
Can reason only tell us how to achieve our ultimate aims? Or can I also tell us what ultimate aims are worth adopting? Join the conversation by raising your hand and the microphone will come around to you.

Ken Taylor
Steve, so look, philosophers have talked about the nature of reason for a long, long time ways. Aristotle, Plato, none of that’s been was scientific. It was like a priori and intuitive. I want you to put your cognitive scientist hat on. And from the perspective of cognitive science, how should we think of reason in this in this 21st century? Is it like a single capacity was Descartes Right? Was Plato, right? Is it a bundle of distinct capacities tell us the most astounding thing. That’s why scientists discovered about reason.

Steven Pinker
There are systematic discrepancies between reasoning. That is how the human mind proceeds left to its own devices, and reason in the sense of our best understanding of what follows from what a long list of discrepancies between how we think and how we ought to think.

Ken Taylor
So there’s like there’s normative, how we ought to think what counts is a good inference. Philosophers revel in that stuff, that norms of rationality, right? And you’re saying, The striking thing that cognitive science has discovered is that we don’t live up to those norms. Our brain is not designed to live up to those ancestors.

Steven Pinker
Now, of course, it can’t be the case that we’re incapable of rationality, otherwise, we’d never be able to make the argument that people are systematically irrational, because we wouldn’t have a benchmark of rationality against which to compare the human.

Ken Taylor
Humae makes that argument people like, you know. I mean, you’re the world renowned cognitive scientists, you make that argument. What about the ordinary folks?

Steven Pinker
Well, you you the argument would be incoherent, unless we had a standard of what rationality was, you couldn’t say people are irrational, because there’d be no such thing as rationality. And we wouldn’t be able to have the conversation in the first place, or a conversation about anything else, for that matter, you wouldn’t be able to have this program, if there wasn’t a standard of rationality that you were exercising.

Josh Landy
It seems like—I mean, I agree. And it seems like the question then is, okay, how do we get from one to the other? How do we get from our flawed every day reasoning processes to this more normative standard of reason?

Steven Pinker
Yeah. And that’s where the norms and institutions of reason come in principles like free speech, like open debate, like the avoidance of fallacies like arguing ad hominem or arguing from the historical origin of an argument, the demand that if a claim is empirical, it’d be confronted against evidence from the world, all these things that aren’t terribly natural to us. But once we’ve implemented them, we’ve seen that collectively, they make us smarter than any one of us individually.

Ken Taylor
That’s what I was gonna say collectively, because all the stuff you were talking about requires kind of collective structures. But my vision, right is the capacity in me in my brain, I open my eyes, I focus I see the clock, I don’t need your help to see the clock, but I may need your help to see that eight o’clock because I need the concept and I get that, but my hearing doesn’t require your aid. I mean, sort of reasoning some like capacity in my brain. Why do I need the help of all you guys to stay on track?

Steven Pinker
Well, in fact, one of the fundamental discoveries of philosophy is that that naive realism, just opening your eyes and seeing the world as it is, is false that worry about perceptual illusions. And just as there are cases where our eyes deceive us, there are cases where our minds deceive us. You show where your eyes deceive you, you pull out a yardstick you use better methods of assessing loudness. And the same thing for logical coherence.

Ken Taylor
Well, but there’s something there’s a capacity in my brain for vision, there’s a capacity in my brain for audition for sensing things, right for sensory motor coordination, that’s in my brain. Right? And it just kind of runs. There are illusions and like that, but is there a capacity in my brain? Because all that stuff you talked about about correction and the norms? That doesn’t seem like it’s just in my brain, it’s somehow in us

Josh Landy
But surely it’s both, Ken. I mean, I think the norms and institutions was a really important a deep one, right? That collectively, we can achieve much more in the domain of reason than we can individually. But you know, you could count them in one way to retirements to say, Oh, my God, we’re all system one, we’re all just blindly—

Ken Taylor
Distinguish system one versus system two.

Alex Jones
Right, so Daniel Kahneman has this distinction system one, which is sort of our our automatic kind of heuristic, very flawed way of processing the data from the world. But we also have system two, which is our reasoning capacity where we can we can actually reflect on and say, Oh, well, boy, this straw, my drink looks bad. But I guess maybe it isn’t actually. Yeah, like and upon reason. So, you know, I tend to agree with Steve, even at an individual level, we’re not doomed because we’ve got our system two.

Ken Taylor
I mean, do you like this distinction? There are people who don’t like the system, one system two distinction, but are you one who likes or dislikes it.

Steven Pinker
Yeah, I think it captures something about cognition. And I would just add that the system to works not just because we can put our thinking caps and sit back and reflect and ponder slowly. But also we have social institutions, such as the fact that if we make a claim, someone else can disagree with us, and we have to defend it, right? Or if it’s an empirical claim, we’re called on to to give evidence to do experiments to consult data. So it’s the social institutions that our system to recruits in the first place and insists on applying that make system to effective.

Ken Taylor
So if I were trying to ask, Well, what actually is this capacity for reason? It’s partly in our psychology, but it’s partly somehow distributed in our collective lives together, because you’re like, you are like an instrument. For me, you’re like part of my cognitive system, because I could, it’s like mill says, you know, anybody who just knows his own side of the, of the issue doesn’t know the issue, or I can’t remember that you don’t even know that it’s abuse, or so. So I need the other person. Right. And somehow, it’s something about my mind that’s made for this kind of collective cognitive activity.

Steven Pinker
That’s right. And but it also crucially, depends on the rules of the game. It isn’t enough just to immerse a person in a community because we know there can be collective delusions, they can be well, like the Nazis. Yes, like the Nazis, like the madness of crowds like Mitch, a witch hunts, that the city, a group think there have to be norms that allow new ideas to come in and challenge consensus of an in group and the demand to challenge ideas against empirical reality whenever they bear on the state.

Ken Taylor
So I want to open this up to the audience requests. And I’ll remind you, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re asking whether reason can save us with Steven Pinker. And we’ll get to your questions in a second, but I want to put another issue to you. Because I wonder something. Do you think the Enlightenment was, like, a contingent, historically specific, culturally specific achievement? Or was it just an outgrowth somehow, like a Hegelian way of a natural endowments of the human mind? And maybe you don’t have grand theories? I mean, now Hegel has grand theories, I think you tend to—

Steven Pinker
I don’t think it was inevitable. But I think that it was more than just a historically contingent cultural development. It wasn’t just a fad, it wasn’t just a set of memes. Reason is a reason. It’s what we are using now. And it is available for anyone who thinks about anything at any time, which is why enlightenment themes were not uniquely Western, but have popped up in other historical periods in classic Arab civilization and Mughal India, simply because you can’t avoid reason once you start thinking about anything because thinking about anything is reasonable.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, why does anybody resist the Enlightenment values then? I mean, if they’re kind of you, I don’t know if you didn’t quite say they were inevitable, but they were really compelling. Right? But why why would the Salem witch hunts and all that stuff? Oh, I was there. Hitler. Why was there Stalin’s Gulag?

Steven Pinker
Oh, I think the Enlightenment is not cognitively natural enlightenment values. I think that we naturally fall back into tribalism into authoritarianism into magical thinking, and that it is actually quite a stretch to get us To realize that we have to shelve a lot of our intuitions and gut feelings and instincts in order to enjoy the fruits of reason.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re a Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California, in front of a live audience, a really reasonable live audience. And I think that we have questions about it. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, what’s your comment or question?

Michael
Thank you so much. My name is Michael. I’m out of San Francisco. And up to this point in dialectic in the shortest possible way, how are we differentiating reason from objective moral good?

Ken Taylor
That’s a really good question. Kant thinks a reason gives you morality. It’s just like the commandments of morality are categorically binding on all rational beings as such. Hume says that, Nietzsche says it can’t over romanticize his reason, do you think morality comes from reason alone?

Steven Pinker
Not reason alone, but reason combined with a valuing of one on one’s own continued existence, and it’s pretty hard to see how you could have reason without that. So I don’t want to say that it is a logical implication. But I would say it’s a short step.

Josh Landy
That’s all you need. You only need reason plus a valuing of your own consumers as well.

Steven Pinker
And you need a a community of people in discourse, your own well being has to hinge on the existence and behavior of other people, right? That is, you have to have a motive to persuade them of something. Once you do that, it’s very hard to persuade them that your interests are special, because you’re you and they’re not. There’s nothing magical about the pronoun “I” as I think it was Sidgwick said.

Josh Landy
Well, you know, I can imagine somebody saying, Well, why should I? And when people when I say to people, gosh, you know, I’d rather I’d rather drive this huge truck, even though it’s polluting the environment. And they say, Well, you really shouldn’t do that. And you got to think of the future generations. Why should that person listen to them? Because after all, there, aren’t there cases where we shouldn’t I mean, if that’s the case, we probably should listen to the community. But if I’m saying don’t burn that person, because you think she’s a witch, and they say, No, we all agree. That’s a case where it makes a why should I listen to my community?

Steven Pinker
Yeah, it’s their two questions. And one of them is what will actually be effective and getting someone to stop to trade in the SUV for the Prius or the bicycle. And the other is what would actually count as a good reason for them to do it, even if they happen to be unreasonable. Right. So the first is a matter of persuasion. It’s sort of a psychological question. The other is more of a normative question.

Josh Landy
And I’m more interested in normative question.

Steven Pinker
Well, the normative question is, well, would you agree to, if previous generations had done something that ruined the environment that prevented you from living the life that you would like to live? Could you justify that? And if not, if you would object and say, Hey, you living 100 years ago, what you did was wrong, because of the way it affects me, then you can’t turn around and say what I’m doing now is okay, even if it hurts generations subsequent to me.

Ken Taylor
We’ve got more questions from our audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir.

Dolmas
I’m almost from Lithuania. I wonder how do you reach the unreasonable in the modern age when they have the modern witch hunts on Twitter and other forms? And how do you make them change their minds instead of them? You know, getting rid of you?

Ken Taylor
Good question. What do you think, Steve?

Steven Pinker
How will I change the world? I don’t know the answer, but book at a time, one book at a time. You know, I don’t know how you can accomplish what we know has been accomplished, namely that in many regards, the society as a whole has gotten more reasonable. We, even in the the fever swamps of the right there is no move now to reinstitute Jim Crow laws or laws against homosexuality. Most people when their child gets sick, they don’t call a witch doctor, they don’t have an exorcism, they really do take them to a doctor. Most people don’t believe in unicorns. So there are ways in which somehow the society has changed through the proliferation of ideas, sometimes from the top down, sometimes through social shaming, sometimes through practical effects that everyone can see.

Ken Taylor
Let me give you let me give you a view. I don’t know if I believe it. But it seems to me plausible, okay, there are, there are a lot of I’m going to call them the cognitive avant garde, the cognitive avant garde, do science and create new things. And there they are the leading edge of reasons future, okay. Now, here’s, here’s one thing about being a social human. A lot of us get the free ride on the cognitive avant garde, right? I mean, I’ve no Einstein but I understand physics. So now, the social structures bring lots of people along, but they don’t bring everybody along. So I don’t know that reason necessarily spreads throughout the entire collectivity. I mean, yeah, there is a cognitive avant garde committed to reason and they talk to each other and they cooperate. And some people get pulled along in their way. But a lot of people get left behind. And then there are those people who want to exploit the people who are left behind and manipulate them and they’re geniuses. doing that. So it’s not clear to me that unbalanced, everything’s gonna I mean, the cognitive avant garde gets the benefit of it, and those get pulled in their way. But lots of people are the prey of the Sophists as it were, the marketers and all that stuff.

Steven Pinker
I think that’s all true. And I think that we don’t have the ability to predict when reason will prevail, but the fact that there are examples where has prevailed, and emboldens us to think that it is possible if we keep up the effort. And if we understand a little bit better how some of the dynamics of belief propagation work, whether it’s through schools, whether it’s through media, but really we don’t have a debate now over whether we should have segregated drinking fountains or whether gay people could be hired as teachers or whether women should have the vote, or whether you should have an exorcism if your child gets sick. Somehow, despite all of our irrationality, we managed to just put some things not completely but largely outside the arena of respectable discourse.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Angela
Angela from San Mateo. There is supposedly like 150 individual biases that Everyone possesses. Given that and given our tendency to look for affirmation. How do you figure that the group is not just leading you astray?

Steven Pinker
there to really the point that I made earlier? The first of all, we know that somehow, we have succeeded because science has discovered DNA and the atom we have eliminated smallpox, we’ve sent people to the moon. We’ve extended human lifespan, we’ve reduced child mortality, we’ve reduced famine. So something is working despite these 150 biases. And I suspect that that what it is our institutions like science, like a free press, like a liberal democracy, like the rule of law, that allows us to, to overcome these biases collectively, even though if any of us had to rediscover human ingenuity from scratch, those biases would keep us at square one.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re asking whether reason can save us with Steven Pinker from Harvard University and author of “Enlightenment Now!”

Josh Landy
In our final segment, we’ll ask how we can give reason truth and goodness more sway over our lives and give less weight and nefarious passions and prejudices.

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California. We’ll take more questions from our live and lively and rational audience and enlightenment to win Philosophy Talk continues.

Tiffany Austin
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Josh Landy
Thanks again to our live musical guests, Tiffany Austin and Adam Shulman. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re asking whether reason can save us with Steve pinker from Harvard University. Steve, I want to go back to the question, how can even perfectly rational individual cognizes rationally going about it, it doesn’t necessarily add up to a rational collective decision. I think this is one of the hard problems of the 21st century. So what do you think?

Steven Pinker
Yes, there we we obviously can’t optimize everything. Everyone’s preferences, or even any criterion by which everyone’s preferences can be simultaneously optimized. The other hand, you can’t dispute whether or not rationality and progress in knowledge is possible. Of course, it’s possible. We’ve eliminated smallpox, we’ve sent someone to the moon, we invented the internet and the smartphone and something has improved things. Yes, it hasn’t optimized.

Ken Taylor
That’s right. But still take a problem like global warming, which is a collective action problem, right, which I can’t just come up, I suppose I could have the killer technology that sells it. But that’s, you know, if the tipping point gets too long, I got to make people adopt and use that technology and all this stuff. Right. So we got these collective action problems. And the difference between now and before is that we have impacts on a global scale, but we don’t really have global institutions. or at least not adequate global institutions that coordinate us all. So I don’t know, I think we could be headed for, like deep disaster, even if we’re all individually perfect.

Josh Landy
If I can add to that, just to try to make it a little worse. I mean, I, I’m a big fan of reason as you are. But I have a worry in this particular case, that, you know, the worry would be well, in all the only other cases you’re talking about, there isn’t really a tension between the kind of progress that comes out of these enlightenment values and institutions. But here, it seems as though the progress depends upon technological advancement, that is causing climate change. And so here, it seems like we have there’s a real problem for the view, we can’t just say, well, let’s let’s sort of sick enlightenment values on it, but sick progress on it, because progress is the very thing that’s been causing the problem in the first place.

Steven Pinker
Well, no, because if it’s causing the potential for disaster, that that’s not progress. I mean, I think we would all agree, but the thing about reason is they can always step back and assess the problems that the application of reason in the past has caused so far. And so we can, indeed, framed the technological question as given that we have improved our fiscal standard of living so far at the cost of the environment, how do we change that trade off so that we can enjoy the same benefit of energy capture of moving people around heating homes, cooling homes making cement without releasing massive amounts of co2? That is selfish. Well, the thing is, I’m not making a prognostication that will succeed. I’m challenging the idea that there’s some inherent reason that we can’t Yeah, but I don’t think you’re and then going back to the collective active, right. Once again, I’m not gonna make a prediction that, that I know that we’re going to solve it, maybe we won’t solve it, maybe there will be a disaster. However, I don’t think it’s a problem. In principle, we cannot solve it. Because we know that collective action problems have been solved on a global scale through global institutions. Again, there’s no I’m not guaranteeing this will happen. But there is a pathway by which everyone agrees to a sacrifice, ike the Paris accord. So the route is there that there’s not a guarantee that we’ll take it just there’s no in principle, reason that we can’t.

Ken Taylor
I agree about that. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir, what’s your comment or question?

Aliya
Aliya from Iran. I think it’s a little bit unfair to judge a reason with advances in technology. You know, technology is something that reason is kind of the foundation. But, you know, has this reason made us happier, like sending man to the moon? Is it something valuable?

Steven Pinker
You know, there’s two, there’s two parts, one of them is there can be things that make us better off that don’t necessarily make us happier. But in general, the answer is we have gotten happier. On average, a majority of countries for which we have data over the decades on levels of happiness show that in a majority those countries happinesses increase. knighted states, by the way, is not one of them. Yeah, but a majority 80 87% of countries for which we do have data show that they have gotten happier.

Josh Landy
Yeah, so one way to think about this question is Hooray for reason. Hurray for science progress. But you know, what about enchantment? Right. So there’s something I think a lot about in my work about that, you know, as the the reach of science expands, so, the the space for enchantment diminishes. And in your book, enchantment shows up, it’s things like ogres, which is in demons, but I think it’s also like sprites and nymphs and fairy godmothers. And you know, when it’s love, and it’s art and things like that, and so I want us to kind of rephrase the happiness question this way. You know, isn’t doesn’t happiness also depend on enchantment? And where’s the where’s the space for enchantment just gonna shrink and shrink and shrin kuntil—

Ken Taylor
He’s enchanted by science.

Steven Pinker
Yeah, no, no, I’m also I’m enchanted by by love and by art. The sprites and fairies you can keep.

Josh Landy
Okay, so they were metaphorical.

Steven Pinker
Yeah, this is I deal with it now. Because I know there is I know, there’s the view that, well, we’ve eliminated famine, and we’ve doubled human lifespans, and we’ve reduced child mortality by a factor of 100. And we’ve eliminated war for most of the planet. But yeah, that’s all kind of—

Ken Taylor
You know about the hedonic treadmill, you know, you get more and more stuff. And you say, well, we settle there is, I mean, that’s part of it. It’s like, what is the point? What is the purpose? What is my life for? What do I give my life over to?

Steven Pinker
Well, you know, I really don’t think that eliminating disease and starvation and poverty and war is all that boring and meaningless. But even if the hedonic treadmill were true, and it turns out, you don’t a treadmill is not true that the studies that show that people are not happier after winning the lottery, but that turns out to be wrong. People really are happier after winning the lottery. I know what I’m doing tonight. Even if that were true, living to the age of 80 He is better than living to the age of 30. Okay, that’s, that’s the question. But I do agree that we need to have a more heroic narrative of the fact that we are eliminating child mortality. And we are reducing war, and how you can restore the sense of purpose and nobility and heroism and excitement to things like world peace and say, achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Now, maybe that doesn’t get the blood pumping. But, but it could, if properly advanced and framed.

Ken Taylor
Okay, so Steve, I want to do something that we do from time to time here on Philosophy Talk, you’re gonna make you czar of rationality, you have these plenary powers, and you get to change whatever institutions whatever laws, whatever practices, educational, private, whatever you like, and nobody can resist it. So your task is to make reason govern our lives more and passion and prejudice and bias less. So what are you going to do in your day as czar?

Steven Pinker
I guess, force people to defend their beliefs against people who criticize them.

Ken Taylor
John Stuart Mill, in other words.

Steven Pinker
That would be a good start. And I would advance the norm both in education and in intellectual discourse, in general, in op eds, in political debates, that you have to justify your beliefs about the world by citing evidence, and with statistical sophistication, that is you can’t allow yourself to fall prey to the biases that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown.

Josh Landy
I like this czar a lot. But to me, it’s the same point. But it’s like there’s a connection to another point that you make, I think, brilliant. For me, it’s actually the core point of the book that there’s too many ears being you know, saying that everything’s terrible. And net, there’s no progress. And, and, you know, one of the things I love is that you point out the great danger of that way of thinking about things that it leads to apathy, or even to, you know, really weird political choices. I want to talk about 2016. And so, you know, I mean, you know, a great thinker once said that the statement I refuse to be deceived could be the best way to deceive yourself. This is where these people are, they’re, they’re so obsessed with, with warding off potential deceit that they can’t believe anything, by the way that think it was neat. Yeah. Yeah. So what was it? What do you do bizarre about that? What do you do about the eeyore-ism, this kind of almost professional cynicism about the world?

Steven Pinker
Well, I think you have to, to hold people, when they make a claim about things getting worse to deciding data, and to call them on the fallacy that something bad is happening now. Therefore, things have gotten worse. And that’s an error in arithmetic, you cannot make a claim about a trend from one data point, you have to at least look at one other point in the past, just holding up advisors to the standard that before you say something’s getting worse, you have to compare now to some earlier period of time, that would get rid of some of the Eeyores.

Ken Taylor
Steve, on that note, this has been a fascinating conversation. I’m not sure if reason can save us but it has been fun thinking about it. So thank you for joining us.

Steven Pinker
Thank you.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Steven Pinker. He’s a professor of psychology at Harvard University—though Stanford of the East—and aworld renowned cognitive scientist. He’s also author of the very fine book and many other fine books, but the very fine book “Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” So Josh, are you filling stirred an optimist?

Josh Landy
I mean, not just from reading the book, but also from this conversation. I definitely put Steven Azhar I think, you know, if we if we could bring back a sense of responsibility to the facts and evidence and argument and these analytical ways of reaching judgments, and not just one data point. Yeah, I mean, I think we make real progress.

Ken Taylor
Well, I think we could if we could get everybody on board, but I think it’s much harder. And there’s parts of the book in which Steven talks about how hard it is about the politics and the tribalism in our politics. And I don’t know I think human cognition is really a mess. Sure, the out cognitive avant garde or cognitively well off, but I don’t know that the mass of humanity is on the same page with those of us in the Cardinia of Hong Kong to get there. Well, maybe maybe we’ll see. But you know what this conversation it continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers, where our motto is, with apologies to Descartes—get this—Cogito Ergo Blogo, I think therefore I blog. And you can become a partner in our community just by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, either here or on the radio. We’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on our blog. Now it’s time for some unreasonably fast talking from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… I have my suspicions that reason itself cannot haul us out of whatever global jam we may or may not be in. It’s all kind of murky, isn’t it? For one thing, reason helped get us into whatever mess we’re in in the first place. We’re not brains in jars, playing chess telepathically with our body-deprived fellows. We’re flesh and blood hungry sex monsters with instincts for survival that are enabled, but not always helped by reasoning. Buying guns, for instance. A logical choice if you want venison or to defend your home from rabid invaders. But then your grandson’s gonna raid the cabinet and take out half of his graduating class because Suzy snubbed him at the prom. We think, but not ahead. We filter our brain through gauze and barbed wire. Reason has supplied us with all kinds of reasons for personal behavior, excuses, conditions. We’re sisgen and entitled. We’re libtards. We’re alt right. We’re a person of color. Identity is all. Which is all good, I guess, unless you’re a Nazi. Since the end of history, which I guess happened? We no longer have the Cold War to energize us here in the west. Also, with the Cold War gone, the west has slowly come to realize that China, the Mideast. Africa. Central and South America are all places, with their own history books, or history apps, I suppose now. Fear of eastern infection is leading us back to the ideologies, and obsessive behaviors, that blew up the world in the first place. Case in point, the fear and hatred of George Soros by the right in the United States has spread to Hungary, Soros’ homeland, where the current leader is dismantling all the philanthropic entities Soros created there. Sort of a junior version of Trump just setting fire to anything Obama touched. There’s a logic to it sure. It’s going to make America great again, if your definition of great is wow we can smoke in bars again after dipping our unfiltered cigarettes in Monsanto Round up. The same people questioning our current state of greatness are the people who get mad at protestors for saying America isn’t great. But then we all think it’s horrible in different ways. Immigration and women and whiny liberals. Global warming, corruption, incipient fascism. Which is it? And we think it’s great because… what? Parades and jetskis. Two for one sales. The promise, just beyond the horizon, of driverless cars. Certainly many of the things that made us great are fading. Movies. Baseball. Nice jobs. Independent contractors are the new workforce. We’re supposed to embrace that, because we have no choice in the matter. As a writer and actor I’m used to it. But I answer to editors, directors, producers, clueless executives. Uber drivers, for example, get their orders from an app. Meet your new boss, not the same as your old boss. The new Mr. Dithers is a ringtone. Is that reasonable? That’s the trouble with reason in a fallen world. We apply reason to things that don’t make much sense. World peace, end to hunger? No, we problem solve things like how can I get a pizza faster? Can’t we make a robot that can tie shoes? Why can’t I take a shower while I’m commuting? We’re restless and whiny. We compose negative Yelp reviews. We figure out ways to destroy lives on Twitter. If we worry about global warming it’s because it’s too hot and we have to take off our brand new sweater. Rising ocean levels means we’re not gonna drown. Mold in the drywall will be the next global issue. There’s a global petulance. We don’t care about the starving. We just don’t want them coming over here and getting in the way. And we spend an awful lot of time snooping, spying, grassing, finger waving, snubbing. We yearn for transparency. We have to know everything about everybody all the time, otherwise we’re hiding something, we’re not being authentic, we’re toxic, we’re lugging around baggage. Everything is meant to be seen. Forest meet trees. Transparency meet murk. I gotta go

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, and the Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our Executive Producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin. Special thanks to Andrew Unger, Jean Forstner, Amanda Hall, and the Kepler’s Literary Foundation.

Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Sun Lee, Dan Brandon, Becky Barron, and our musical guests – Adam Shulman on piano and Tiffany Austin on vocals.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer of Philosophy Talk is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Our Marketing Director is Cindy Prince Baum.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University and from the partners in our online community of thinkers. The views

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis-expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website — philosophy talk dot O-R-G, where you too can become a Partner in our Community of Thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.