Dr. Steven Pinker from Harvard University

He's the Johnstone family professor in the Department of Psychology there and has taught additionally at Stanford and MIT

He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition psycho linguistics and social relations

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

He's won numerous prizes for his research his teaching and his nine books

Including the language instinct how the mind works

The blank slate the better angels of our nature and the sense of style

he's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist a

humanist of the year a

recipient of nine honorary doctorates and one of foreign policies world taught

100 public intellectuals and times

100 most influential people in the world today

He's chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary

And writes frequently for the New York Times The Guardian and other publications

Enlightenment now, the case for reason science humanism and progress, was his tenth and best-selling book

published in February 2018

and It's very nice, by the way

to have the opportunity to speak with you again, and thanks very much for making the time

Thank You Jordan

PETERSON: So, can I ask you it's been about a year since we talked last I guess I'd like to ask you

First of all, personally, what's this year been like for you? You've become a much more controversial figure

I would say than

would really be predicted but

you've always seemed to me to be a

solid reliable

interesting

mainstream scientists not someone who would attract a tremendous amount of critical

Attention and yet you've become well oddly enough

associated with the intellectual dark web what ever that happens to be and so much of what you're doing is

controversial and so, what's that being like and what's your life be like over the last while

Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defensive reason science humanism and progress would be

incendiary and I'm hardly a flame thrower and.. and as you note

I have put forward some pretty controversial ideas in the past such as that.. uh.. men and women aren't indistinguishable

and that we all Harbor some unsavory motives like

Revenge and dominance but saying the world has gotten better turns out to be a radical

inflammatory hypothesis there... uh...

there are there's first of all just sheer incredulity because the you of the world that you get from

Journalism is so different from the view of the world when you get from data because journalism reports everything that goes wrong

It doesn't report things that go right, and so if they're more things that go right every year. There's just no way of

Learning about it if you know the world from the papers and so there's just sheer disbelief. I'm talking about there are

intellectual factions that are committed to the idea that the world has never been worse than it is now and

data on human progress undermines

Some of their their foundational beliefs and then so that does attract

some some opposition people think of it as a defense of

neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular humanism

Traditional liberalism and so does get some people exorcised

Basically anyone if you're a social critic if your reputation comes on saying what's going wrong about the current society.

then

You're kind of committed to the idea that things have gotten gotten worse and the idea that things are

Not as bad as they used to be not as bad as they could be is an insult to that

those core beliefs

Yeah, well, it's it's a surprising thing because well and so so let's let's talk about that a little bit

I mean, here's some of the things I know,

I think I know and

Maybe you could describe some of the things, you know

And like I started learning that the world

had been improving when I worked for a UN committee about five years ago now and started looking at the

data on

Ecology and sustainable economic development and that's like there's some bad ecological news

I think that what we're doing to the oceans is

Fundamentally unforgivable and and foolish beyond belief, but there's some ecological news. That's of

Surprising positivity like there is a paper published in Nature not so long ago

Stating for example that an area twice the size of the US has greened in the last

15 years think it was last 15 or 20 years that actually happened to be as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide because

Plants can keep their pores closed if there's more carbon dioxide and so they can live in more

semi-arid areas and

There's more forests in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago and more forests in India and China

Than there were 30 years ago. And then this has gone along with it massively improved stan... standard of living

The child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952, which is a

statistic that I just regard is

absolutely miraculous, the

African economies are growing, sub-saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment if the stats are reliable then

economies anywhere else in the world

Partly because the Africans are getting connected electronically and have access to reasonable information into something

Approximating let's say stable currency

alternatives, um...

There... there's people are the rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate

Right, we have poverty

Considering it at a dollar ninety a day between 2000 and 2012 and I've read criticisms of that saying well

that was an arbitrary number, but if you look at

$3.80 a day

You see the same

Decline if you look at $7.60 a day

You see the same decline not as precipitous and even the UN not known I would say for its optimistic

Prognostications estimates that at this rate by the year 2030 there won't be anyone in the world

Who's living below the current poverty level? So...

so there are some positive statistics so

What... what... what... what would you like to add to that?

Oh yes, and those are all of those those numbers are reported in graphs in enlightenment now, but also what else?

Illiteracy is declining

rates of uh... of uh...

Violent crime including violence against women and children are declining, child labor is declining

Death and warfare is declining how people have more leisure time. They have more access to

small luxuries like ear and

Reporting on plane fare, so it's funny that that all of these

Examples of human progress which one would think indicate the attempt to make the world a better place? It's not just do-gooding

It's not romantic. It's not utopian. We really can improve the world if we set our minds to do it should-should around so much anger

Partly because they people are so unused to thinking that things have gotten better, but they confuse it with

Certain kinds of magical thinking such as...

that things.. that this must mean that there is a force in the universe that that

Carries us ever upward that just makes progress happen by itself, which is the exact opposite to reality the universe

Not only doesn't care about us. But as a number of features that are constantly pushing back at us like like like entropy like

like pathogens

Entropies a bad one

Entry entropy is is the is the root of all human suffering

So here this doesn't care about us

I've read to other things that are peculiar that are so interesting and well, okay, so first of all, um,

It's pretty hard on the Marxists. I would say because

Even though there is inequality and inequality is a problem

first of all, it doesn't look like

Inequality can be placed at the feet of capitalism. It seems to me to be a far more intractable problem than that

second it's clear that the poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality and third and this is hard on the

environmentalists I think is that it turns out that if you

Get people's income up to about five thousand dollars a year in terms of gross domestic product

They actually start to care about the environment

Which I suppose is because they're not worried about dying

Instantly that day or that week and so we seem to be in this perverse

situation for a pessimist where

We could make people

wealthy and

in in a positive manner and

We could make the world a better place simultaneously and that does seem to be very hard on

ideologue whose

ideology is predicated on a

Fundamental pessimism where you get the other people like the biologists do this sometimes and say well, yeah, we're purchasing all this short-term

prosperity

you know for these billions of people but at the cost of some medium to long term

eventual precipitous, you know

apocalyptic collapse and it's very difficult to formulate an argument against that kind of idea because

Well, you never know when some yeah, I think this is one of the thing tell him takes you to task for doesn't he?

Yes, I even though I actually have pretty extensive

coverage of the tail risks both in the better angels of our nature and in enlightenment now

and and indeed we do we cannot take

incremental improvement as itself an indication that the

Risk of catastrophe is at an acceptable level it may not be uh...

It's very hard to estimate what the risk of it

catastrophe is but there are certainly some that we that we ought to take very seriously

You're on the other hand the fact that you mentioned

uh...

Are often resisted by people in the green movement

I'm just going to lean down and pick up my earbud which rolled across the floor

Ah, but if anything it should give hope and succor to the environmental movement because it shows that

it is not true that we have to choose between

Economic growth which people do not want to give up and protecting the environment

That we can have both and indeed. There are some ways in which they go together the

nations that have done the most to clean up their

environment in the last ten years are the wealthiest nations because they can afford it if you're dirt-poor as you mentioned the your first

Priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head and the you know

The fate of the white rhinoceros is pretty pretty low on your list of priorities

And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity

It's really awful to do (without) electricity. And I know having visited cities like Mumbai which are horribly polluted

And and they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity

Well on the other hand when you get more prosperous, then you willing to spring for the cleaner energy

and you can afford the clean your energy and as you mentioned your

values tend to climb a hierarchy and more

long term

Future concerns loom larger in your value system so it's an odd

Assumption that both the hard right and the hard green have in common

Which is that if we want to protect the environment we have to sacrifice

Prosperity go back to a simpler more peasant

Style of life the hard greens say well that we've got to give up modernity give up