Steven Pinker: belief

Transcript context

…I think my view would be science will do fine, but even the Enlightenment proper did not have universalism to begin with. The future for universalism, to me, looks quite grim. I think we will have a steady stream of low-level conflict across major powers. China does all these cyberattacks on us. They would have been acts of war way back when, and we just put up with it. Russia sabotages EU infrastructure. That might have been an act of war way back when. We just put up with it. We’ll just be creeping up, up, up that threshold, not to nuclear war, but we’ll get as close as we can get without deterrence really having to kick in. The world will just be more violent and have more conflict. Why is that wrong? I think that’s interesting because, as you say, it doesn’t result in war, and war would be much worse. The invasion of Ukraine, rewinding the clock 100 years, that could have been like the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo. It could have been that NATO decided to go all in, and something like World War I or even worse could have happened. As awful as Ukraine is, and that is awful, it’s not as bad as World War I. If these cyberattacks, these insults, because of a norm threatened by Putin, no doubt, and by Xi, that you don’t invade your neighbors, you don’t try to rearrange borders by force, we haven’t had another world war. If what you said is correct, things could suck, but still, they could suck much worse if we had a world war. I think it is less likely than it was 100 years ago. If you had to model in as fundamental and abstract a set of terms as possible, not relying on the names of individuals very much, why liberal enlightenment is in retreat today, what does your model look like?…

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