Steven Pinker: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think? Betting odds, it seems to me what we used to think of it is gone forever. We may salvage some parts of it for the new thing that will be, whatever that is. I guess I’ll say not gone forever, but certainly in retreat. Why not gone forever? Because it’s got some built-in advantages. One of them is a reference for science, which is the truth is what refuses to go away when you stop believing in it. Any method that is optimized for finding the truth has just that built-in advantage. It can be repressed. There can be censorship. There can be irrationality. In general, something that finds the truth, it’s got that going for it, and universalism, namely that if liberal enlightenment depends on universal human rights, the maximization of human interests, the fact that we’re ultimately birds of a feather, we all want to be alive rather than dead, that there is something logically incoherent in saying, “I deserve rights because I’m me and you don’t because you’re not me. ” I can impose that by brute force, but to the extent that we all have to agree on something, we’re not going to agree on me being imperial leader. Now, they aren’t guaranteed to succeed because there is brute force and infirmities in human psychology and cognition, and mob effects and all the rest, nor is liberal enlightenment defenseless. I don’t believe in historical momentum. I think that’s mystical, but there are some things that do look, if not irreversible, to have an awful lot of historical momentum. Like human sacrifice. All the ancient civilizations did it. Now it’s gone. I don’t think it’s coming back. Why? A combination of we’ve got enough knowledge about cause and effect to know that throwing a virgin into the volcano will not, in fact, bring good weather or make a plague go away. Some degree of empathy for the average person, so that we don’t want to cut the beating heart out of someone’s chest, on average. Likewise, slavery, it exists clandestinely, but we don’t have any legal slavery anymore. In Mauritania, don’t we? Don’t we have more slaves in the world today than we did way back when, by some counts?…

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