Steven Pinker: Progress, Despite Everything

I'm very pleased today to be talking to 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 Policy's World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals and TIME's 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. It's very nice, by the way, to have the opportunity to speak with you again, and thanks very much for making the time.

Jordan Peterson: Thank you. 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 scientist, 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, whatever that happens to be. And so much of what you're doing is controversial. So, what's that been like, and what's your life been like over the last while?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defense of reason, science, humanism, and progress would be incendiary, and I'm hardly a flamethrower. And, as you note, I have put forward some pretty controversial ideas in the past, such as that 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’s first of all sheer incredulity, because the view 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 there are 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 foundational beliefs. So that does attract some opposition. People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular humanism, traditional liberalism. And so it does get some people exercised. 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 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 those core beliefs.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, it's a surprising thing because… so let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, here are some of the things I know I think I know, and maybe you could describe some of the things you know. 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 foolish beyond belief, but there's some ecological news that's of surprising positivity. Like, there’s 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—I 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 as absolutely miraculous. The African economies are growing; sub-Saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment, if the stats are reliable, than economies anywhere else in the world, partly because the Africans are getting connected electronically and have access to reasonable information and to something approximating, let's say, stable currency alternatives. There... There's… people... 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?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Oh yes, and those are all of those numbers are reported in graphs in "Enlightenment Now," but also what else? Illiteracy is declining; rates of violent crime, including violence against women and children, are declining; child labor is declining; death and warfare are declining; people have more leisure time. They have more access to small luxuries like air and reporting on plane fare. So it's funny 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.

Jordan Peterson: Should-should around so much anger?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Partly because 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—this must mean that there is a force in the universe 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 has a number of features that are constantly pushing back at us—like entropy, like pathogens. Entropy is a bad one. Entropy is the root of all human suffering.

Jordan Peterson: So here, this doesn't care about us.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I've read two 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 in a positive manner, and we could make the world a better place simultaneously. And that does seem to be very hard on ideologues whose ideology is predicated on a fundamental pessimism.

Dr. Steven Pinker: You get the other people like the biologists who 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…

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, I think this is one of the things that... tell him takes you to task for, doesn't he?

Dr. Steven Pinker: 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 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. It's very hard to estimate what the risk of a catastrophe is, but there are certainly some that we ought to take very seriously.

Jordan Peterson: You're on the other hand, the facts that you mentioned are often resisted by people in the green movement.

Dr. Steven Pinker: 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, your first priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head, and the fate of the white rhinoceros is 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 they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity.

Jordan Peterson: Well, on the other hand, when you get more prosperous, then you're willing to spring for the cleaner energy.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And you can afford the clean energy and, as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy, and more long-term future concerns loom larger in your value system.

Jordan Peterson: 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, we've got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to what, are you living off the land? The hard right says, well, I don't want to do that; no one wants to do that.

Dr. Steven Pinker: So to hell with the environment. If the reality is that, if both policy and technology are deployed intelligently, they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment without going backwards and foregoing all of the benefits of modernity.

Jordan Peterson: Right, I was shocked when I started to learn about this, the fact that there was so much good, both economic and ecological news, with the economic news perhaps being somewhat better than the ecological news. And it doesn't mean that we can sit back and relax and the environment will clean itself up all by itself. Quite the contrary, we know why the environment got better, a combination of policy—like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in the United States in 1970—and technology, like catalytic converters and scrubbers and clean energy. So it doesn’t happen by itself. The fact that it happened is one of the great fallacies in people's understanding of progress if they equate the existence of progress with progress happening all by itself, as if it was some force of the universe, which is contrary to reality.

Dr. Steven Pinker: The other you mentioned, that the existence of human progress is a blow to doctrinaire Marxism, which is certainly true, because you have seen the spectacular economic growth of India and China when they liberalized their economies and the disasters of, say, North Korea with a beautiful control group in South Korea. Same geography, same resources, same culture, same language, same history. What differentiates them is their political system, and South Korea is a much better place to live. It's not only freer, but it is also enormously more prosperous.

Jordan Peterson: Do debates level XI check on the 19th of April, and I've been preparing for that, you know? And I thought what I might do to begin with this list there's a graph that I think humanprogress.org put out. It might be Matt Ridley's graph or maybe Hans…

Dr. Steven Pinker: Hans Rosling?

Jordan Peterson: Rosalyn, it may be Martin Merriam to be is the proprietor if you're right. But it's what they call the most miraculous, most important graph in the world and shows this unbelievable acceleration of prosperity, basically kicking in exponentially around 1895.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yes, a little bit earlier, but this is a combination of data sources, including the late historical constant angle Madison, who began a Madison project trying to retrospectively estimate GDP per capita in eras where they did not collect those data at a time, but using historical data.

Jordan Peterson: Yes, it is astonishing and I've got to say when I first saw that curve when I was working on "The Better Angels of Our Nature," I was stunned. I mean this is the original hockey stick, yes, till the Industrial Revolution, and then it shoots up exponentially.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Wait, so, you know, I look at that and I think, well, look. I mean, what's the issue here? We still have inequality, but you can't put it at the feet of capitalism because it seems to be a much more fundamental mechanism.

Jordan Peterson: Well, ease poverty, certainly.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yes, yes. Well, and even inequality, I mean, there seems to be this proclivity towards the unequal distribution of phenomena, not just monetary phenomena. But I mean if you look at virtually every domain of human endeavor that's associated with creativity, you get a Pareto distribution of productivity. You know, I mean, a small number of basketball players shoot the vast majority of the hoops, and a small number of recording artists record the majority of the hits. A small number of planets have most of the mass. And, like, there is this… I mean, I'm not trying to make a case that inequality isn't a problem. I'm trying to make a case that it's a way deeper problem than the Marxists presume. And then you have the other problem that the poor keep getting richer. I mean, half the world is middle class now, and obesity is a bigger problem than starvation. And so when I'm talking, I can't… I'm really having a hard time trying to understand what the Marxists have left as a doctrine.

Dr. Steven Pinker: It's like, yeah, the problem you guys were identifying seems to not exist anymore.

Jordan Peterson: Yes, so part of it is that their foil is a kind of play-aroundian objectivism in which you have a pure, untrammeled, unconstrained market capitalism with no regulation and no social safety net. Now, one of the discoveries that I made which was almost as surprising as the hockey stick graph of prosperity is the fact that in the 20th century every developed country, every rich country, I went on a screen of social spending. And so that from a baseline about 1.5 percent of GDP redistributed to children and the poor and the elderly and the sick, now the median OECD between redistributes about 22% of its prosperity and all which countries are in a band from about 20% of GDP to about 30% of GDP. I have the United States is at the low end, actually Canada to my surprise, our home and native land, is actually a bit lower than the United States. I don't even know Canada; it would appear to have a more generous welfare state than the United States. And in fact, the United States would be even higher if you added all of the socialism that is done through employers, like retirement and health insurance, which in other countries is done through the government. But even if we just looked at government redistribution, it just does not exist a wealthy country without an extensive social safety net.

Jordan Peterson: Here's the theory. You tell me what you think about this. So I've been trying to, let's say, steel man the positions of the left. I don't mean the radical left; I mean the moderate left because I believe that the dialogue between the moderate left and the moderate right is what keeps our ship stabilized, essentially, and for this reason: Imagine people have to group together cooperatively and competitively to solve difficult problems, because we have difficult prob—that's entropy, let's say—and the assault of the natural world. So we have to group together. When we do that, we create hierarchies, and we do that in large part, we hope, by elevating those who are the most competent at solving the problems to the higher positions in the hierarchies. Now that can be contaminated by power and tyranny and crookedness and poor selection and all of that poor measurement. But fundamentally, if your hierarchy is functional, the more competent people rise to the top. No, that produces the advantage of solving the problem, but it produces the disadvantage of making a lot of people stack up at the bottom of that hierarchy because that's what tends to happen because of the Pareto distribution and the built-in proclivity for inequality. So the answer to that seems to be, well, we produce the hierarchies; we accept the inequality, but then we attend with some degree of clarity of vision and care to those who are dispossessed by the necessity of the hierarchies. And your claim seems to be from what you just said is that that's essentially what we've been doing in civilized democracies for the last hundred years, and that that seems to be roughly working.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, it is, yes, that's right. Now whether or not the hierarchies are optimal in the sense that we're better off with the hierarchy because of just what will happen in a distributed market economy, you may have winner-take-all situations where the most entertaining story, the most efficient car, the best washing machine in a global market will push out a lot of the competitors. And so you get that creative distribution. Whether or not it's anyone would have designed it if they were to plan the entire society might even be beside the point as long as you don’t have central planning and distribution, it might naturally result if it is not explicitly a host which some of our policies do.

Jordan Peterson: As you mentioned, it's a little bit like environmental progress that far from being in opposition to economic growth, it's often economic growth that lets people become more munificent or generous. There are a number of reasons why every wealthy country has a social safety net, and why as countries get richer, like Brazil and India and China, they turn their attention to more social welfare. The European and North American societies did it in the 20th century, and the developing world is following suit. Partly it's because some of the investment and some of the redistribution is an investment; it's a public good. It's really good if the entire population is educated or everyone, including the people who are hiring them.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And so some of it is just investment in… One take on the Marxist position because, funny thing is, is that you know, you lived in Montreal, I lived in Montreal. Montreal is a relatively flat city in some sense in terms of its economic distribution—like there are no pockets of terrifying poverty, at least on the island—and it's a very safe place. And it's socially rich in some sense. Like I always felt wealthy when I lived in Montreal, even though I was living on a HD's stipend, which was very in the area we used to call the Stephen get home. Yeah, the sound luxury condominiums.

Dr. Steven Pinker: What was so lovely about Montreal was that it was safe, it was beautiful, and it had an unbelievably vibrant public culture. Yes, there was all a consequence of the fact that people, generally speaking, were well enough off.

Jordan Peterson: And so, you know, if you contrast that with a country like Brazil where a tiny minority of people have all the wealth, well, they're stuck with the problem of living in gilded prisons. They have to move their children around in helicopters. And, like, I think one of the things that people realize as he's become richer is that it's better to calculate your wealth on a broader level to include more people within the purview of what constitutes wealth for you because it's so nice to be in a city that's thriving and healthy and not crime-ridden and resentful. And those need to be factored in—there are elements of individual wealth.

Dr. Steven Pinker: That's right. And there is a debate among the social scientists as to whether it is inequality that drives these other social goods such as low crime, such as investment, such as education, or whether it's prosperity. It's not so easy to tell them apart because, in general, poorer countries like South Africa and Brazil have sky-high inequality, while countries like Norway and Sweden and Switzerland, which have less inequality, are also pretty rich. And it isn't so easy to see which one is driving it because as societies get richer, as we've discussed, they tend to redistribute partly out of investing in a public good, such as will a crime, such as having an educated populace, is just a really good thing. Hardly—it is literally insurance.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And the euphemism social safety net captures too, if you fall, the idea that even when people are well off, they worry that they're there but for a fortune goai that you got to be nice to people on the way up because you might need them on the way down. And so putting a bottom floor on how poor you can be makes everyone feel a little more secure that if the worst thing happened, they will not be destitute.

Jordan Peterson: Yes. Well, so that's a second thing. It's not that uncommon for people who are in the top 10%, say, of the economic distribution, or even in the top 1%, to suffer a substantial reversal of fortune at some point in their life. And it's a very rare person—a very, very rare person—who isn't at economic danger of economic disadvantage at some point in their life for some reason.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, certainly people move in and out the top decile, top 10% of the income distribution. Although this argument for social spending would be to indemnify people against the worst outcome, I don't think that many people in the top tenth, or to say nothing of the top 1%, will ever go on welfare. But still, a lot of people in the middle class can imagine it, and they don't want to think that they'll be out on the streets; their job or finances will suddenly suffer a big, you know, medical expense.

Jordan Peterson: And the third reason, after investment and insurance, is just compassion or empathy. We see in the history of the West after the Industrial Revolution you get a literature of compassion or war—you have "The Little Match Girl," you have magnesia table—and about wrong being in prison for stealing a bit of bread to save his sister.

Dr. Steven Pinker: You have the Joads bearing Grandpa on the side of Route 66 in "Grapes of Wrath." And so people are also moved by fear, fellow-feeling with their fellow citizens. That's another reason why the people who are criticizing your informed optimism are irritated because, you know, if your fundamental political doctrine insists that, well, everything—your primary identity is your group, whatever that happens to be, and the primary motivating factor for the function of your group is raw, naked power played out within that group against all other groups, the introduction of something like the notion of an implicit compassion for the downtrodden seems to wreak havoc with the purity of that ideological position.

Jordan Peterson: But, like, I've never met anyone in my life, and I know a large number of extraordinarily successful, economically successful people, I've never met anyone in my life who walks down the street and sees a down-and-out alcoholic who's clearly suffering terribly as a consequence of dwelling on the street.

Dr. Steven Pinker: What would you say? Celebrate the justice of the universe in elevating them above that person who's suffering?

Jordan Peterson: I mean, I think—well, go ahead.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I mean we do know from social psychology that there is a tendency to blame the victim, to believe that, you know, in a just world, so I think those are two motives that we have: compassion for everyone but also feeling that those who are badly off must have done something to deserve it.

Jordan Peterson: We do see this, of course, in the app service that you and I usually attend, because of course…

Dr. Steven Pinker: The attention I think is also modulated by some degree of ethnic solidarity. There's been noted that some of the generous welfare states of Europe have least historically occurred in countries that are ethnically more homogeneous—certainly racially more homogeneous—than the United States, which tends to be a somewhat stingy.

Jordan Peterson: Now this is not a—if there is some elasticity into what we call beautifully categorized as our group, and one of the great achievements of any kind of nation-building is to instill a feeling, well, we're all Canadians, or we're all Swiss, or, we're all Iraqis. Something that has actually not happened in Iraq, which is a big problem. If you… unless you have that fictional family in a fictional clan nation, then people tend not to cooperate, including in ways of providing social welfare for the worst half.

Dr. Steven Pinker: It's a ridiculously interesting point, I would say, because one of the things that you really see in Canada, for example—and our Prime Minister is a real devotee of this idea—is that there really is no Canadian culture. There's no central Canadian ethos. And what we have is a plurality of multicultural microcosms, and that that's actually all for the best.

Jordan Peterson: No, I guess the Canadian mosaic as opposed to the melting pot, isn’t it?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Right, right. The Prime Minister's father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, famously tried to forge kind of Canadian identity that spanned English, the Anglophone and Francophone communities, hardly exemplified in himself because he was a dashing, charismatic figure who was distinctively Canadian.

Dr. Steven Pinker: He just wagered. He wasn't French; he was an American. He had the rose in his lapel. He wore a cape. He was perfectly bilingual. He was debonair and witty and charming. We all felt at the time—I remember this. I remember Trudeaumania—we all felt, now that is a Canadian. That's something to aspire to. And he did with his policies and with his symbolism, or Jack, I'd have Canadian consciousness above and beyond the mosaic of the Lebanese Canadians and the Italian Canadian, Jewish Canadians, and so on.

Jordan Peterson: Well, in sufficient, what would you call it, success, at least to keep the country together, which was something quite remarkable.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I mean, well, he had to have, at one point, he had to declare martial law to do it.

Jordan Peterson: Yes. I dream of the October crisis when separatist terrorists kidnapped a Trade Commissioner and a government minister.

Jordan Peterson: Look, it looks like there's a contradiction. Maybe you could tell me what you think about this apparent contradiction in a certain element of leftist doctrine because, assuming that multiculturalism can be reasonably viewed as part of the leftist doctrine, if it is the case that people are more likely to be generous to those that they see in some sense as their in-group, then what it suggests is that you need to take the mosaic of your culture, the African Canadians and the European Canadians and the Asian Canadians—the same in the US—and have them maintain their culture and their traditions, but also to embed them inside a broader game that constitutes the national identity that unites them all despite their differences.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And it seems like, given what you just described, that unless you can forge that trans-ethnic or trans-racial identity that you motivate people to be less generous in their social policies.

Dr. Steven Pinker: So look, that is true. Now I consider this to be one of the key ideas of coming out of the Enlightenment, opposed by the counter-enlightenment of the 19th century by the romantics, I mean the nationalists, that a state—a group of people under the jurisdiction of a government—but held together basically by a social contract by agreement that we’re all in this together. There are many public goods, better we share public costs that we can suffer a government that allows us to get along by serving our interests is a way of improving our welfare.

Jordan Peterson: It’s a very given conception of a nation and the blood and soil nationalism of the 19th century, continuing well into the 20th. But what makes us a nation is that we all—we’re all white; we all speak—we all come from the same ancestry.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And that the successful nations are often ones that manage to forge somewhat artificial identities.

Jordan Peterson: That's fascinating because then, okay, then we've got two arguments here for that, for that let's say artificial or conceptual nation-building process. One is that maybe you can allow people in their different ethnic and racial groups to maintain key elements of their identity and feel comfortable doing so, but also embed them in a broader game, like a game voluntarily played and laid out.

Dr. Steven Pinker: But if exactly at the same token, given your logic, that's also the most effective antidote to the kind of nationalism that is identitarian that also seems to be in the resurgence.

Jordan Peterson: You see this, I really see this as having been done extraordinarily effectively in the United States now. They had the advantage of the examples of England and France, but that the American experiment was an experiment in conceptual nation-building. It's like, here's a creative principle that we can all agree on despite our differences, and to the degree that we decide that we will agree on these principles, then we're the same enough we can cooperate. We don't need to revert to nationalism or…

Dr. Steven Pinker: Or very much in the Declaration of Independence. That was made crystal clear that to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—governments are formed with the consent of the governed to allow people to flourish, to prosper. Nothing in the Declaration said anything about in European big white in Protestant union in Christian. It was really a social contract I set up from first principles, which of course made some pretty big problems with—of course—we are the African citizens. It took quite a while to work that out, and there were tensions in the 20th century with waves of immigration from Ireland, from Eastern Europe, from Jews, from Italians.

Jordan Peterson: And there were, of course, tensions between the Italians and Irish.

Dr. Steven Pinker: But by the standards of human history, they got worked out pretty well.

Jordan Peterson: I've been capitalizing on a feature of our psychology, which is that even though we do have an in-group favoritism, we do have tribalism, what counts as a tribe is pretty elastic; it is not by skin color.

Dr. Steven Pinker: We form coalitions that cut across skin color, and a successful country is one that capitalizes on that elasticity, forms a virtual tribe, which is simply every citizen of the country.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And that, ultimately, every citizen in larger units, including humanity, including all the world. A lot of this depends, blow on undermining certain features of human nature, such as kin solidarity. It has been noted that in cultures that have a lot of cousin marriage, where you're related to people in your clan, it's rather hard to do nation-building. There, like in Lincoln Y, for example, people don't have a sense of superordinate loyalty to a coalition about their blood relatives, and they are tied to blood relatives by a cousin marriage.

Jordan Peterson: But it's also played itself to the United States and there's a wonderful snatch of dialogue, the end of the first Godfather movie when Michael Corleone enlists after Pearl Harbor, and as brother Sonny says, what did you go to college to get stupid? Your country ate your blood. You’re going to die out. You can be a sap who dies for strangers.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And that is a perfect encapsulation of the difference between traditional tribalism and the mentality that we need for successful…

Jordan Peterson: Right? Sounds like it's, you know, it sounds like one of the ways to combat right-wing identitarianism, the new emergence of right-wing identitarianism, is to make that conceptual distinction between national identity that's predicated on blood and soil, let's say kinship—direct kinship—or even secondary kinship—and these more abstract conceptions.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Now it seems to me—so just don’t just—you may know this or you may not, but Ben Shapiro’s new book is number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and I read Ben's book a while back. And I think it shares some features with your book, and it shares some features with my book. And I would say the features it shares with my book is that I stress the importance of the Judeo-Christian stories as part of that conceptual substructure that unites a civilization. And then it has features in common with your book because it's also a pro-Enlightenment manifesto, celebrating the achievements, let's say, of the Greeks and the rationalists moving forward from there.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Like Shapiro sees our culture as, and this is something that I agree with, I would say, as a marriage between that Judeo-Christian tradition and that emergent Enlightenment. You're—you're and it's taught me if I'm wrong, but your emphasis… So let's say that we're playing this abstract conceptual game that unites us as a people independent of our ethnicity and our race, and there are principles that constitute the game rules for that agreement, and you see those as primarily deriving from the Enlightenment.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, not—I mean, there's nothing new under the sun, and certainly someone waiting Vijaya T has had precursors in the Renaissance and in ancient Greece. But that set of ideas that came together that needed, of course, further elaboration. I think that that's much more of a basis of human progress than the Judeo-Christian tradition. Again, every intellectual movement draws from pre-existing ideas, and so there was some cherry-picking from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it certainly did not depend on belief in Jesus Christ, Our Savior; it did not depend on a one God as opposed to many Gods. It really depended on human well-being, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's something you can believe in regardless of your theological commitments.

Jordan Peterson: So what do you think? So here's the question I have about that. It seemed to me that the people who formulated the Declaration of Independence, for example, accepted it as self-evident that human beings were intrinsically valuable and the locus of sovereignty insofar as they were the citizens who would determine the course of the nation. And there's some recognition there, as far as I'm concerned, of intrinsic value outside of a rational argument. You know, it’s a—it's a—it's a—it's a—it has to be as self-evident, right? And the most fundamental truth of that is that it’s something like, in my view, it's something like the strange metaphysical equivalence of man before God; the fact that we all have intrinsic value and that's where I see the Enlightenment being irreducibly embedded inside this underlying structure.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And that's—that's different than the idea of progress, which is something that you're focusing on and that I think is more attributable to the development, let's say, of science and technology. But it still seems to me that the Enlightenment had to have an understructure that enabled it to emerge for those self-evident truths to be accepted universally as self-evident.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, exactly. I agree that those aren't scientific ideas. And this is the set of ideas that I draw together under the rubric of humanism. It's not clear that the self-evident right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness is particularly Judeo-Christian. I think—I don’t think you could find that in US Scripture. And in fact, in the Jewish tradition, God chose the Jews, who were the chosen people, so the idea of universal human worth and well-being is not a particularly Jewish notion, nor is it a particularly Christian notion. You've got to—it's only you—you have to accept Jesus in order to escape eternal damnation. None of that's in the Declaration. What’s self-evident is things that are almost prerequisite to even considering what ought to go into a country or anything else. Namely you've got to be alive rather than dead; you've got to be able to express opinions in order to even have that conversation. So you've got freedom, happiness, as we know from evolutionary considerations—it’s basically the set of motives that kept our ancestors alive and allowed us to come into existence in the first place—combating the grinder of entropy.

Jordan Peterson: So I think that the foundation of that Enlightenment—we can certainly say—is not particularly Judeo-Christian but more existential. It just comes from what are the actual prerequisites to being an incarnate reasoning creature.

Jordan Peterson: Okay, so I'm going to press you on two elements of that. And I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way, because I'm not convinced I'm right. It's just that these—this is how things have laid themselves out for me in my thinking. I mean, one of the things that's very interesting about the book of Genesis is that it insists that human beings are made in the image of God and that that gives them a bit intrinsic value and that they're made in the image of God regardless of whether they're male or female. And then I know the Jews emerge as the chosen people in the Old Testament, but there's also a strong idea—a powerful conceptual idea in the Old Testament that emerges that the people of Israel, the true Israelites, are those who wrestle with God. This was like an… it’s like an…it’s like an existential adventure. It's partly based on blood, it's partly based on ethnicity, but there's a conceptual idea to there that there’s the struggle for ethical endeavor, let's say, and the struggle for the discovery of the meaning of existence, is actually what marks out the true follower of God.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And then, as Judaism transforms itself, at least in some part, into Christianity, what I see happening is that you get the idea that that identity with God that existed in Genesis, that that intrinsic value starts to become more humanized, that manifests itself fully in the Renaissance—that the religious figures start to become more individual—and that the idea that each individual does in fact have a divine worth that keeps the state at bay is part of what allows for the conception that people are deserving of the chance, independently of their ethnicity and their race and their creed and their sexuality, to do such things as pursue life, liberty, and happiness. And I see—'cause otherwise I can't see where the ideas would have otherwise emerged during…

Dr. Steven Pinker: Pointed. But it's, you know, partly the Enlightenment came about as a reaction to see what happens if you ground even worth in religious doctrines, such as the European Wars of Religion, Parker’s unprecedented carnage. Together with the burning of heretics, if you're going back to have scriptures, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, God commands the Israelites to engage in one genocide after another. There is no prohibition against slavery; there's no prohibition against rape; there's no prohibition against grisly forms of torture for victimless crimes, like working on the Sabbath. I don't think it's very easy to come up with a notion of universal even rights from either scripture or Christianity.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I think the reason that it happened to me in the Enlightenment, who knows why anything happened at the exact moment did it? It did hardly—it was a realization of the internecine carnage from the Wars of Religion, but also when you start to peel away scripture and dogma and doctrine, what you're left with is our common humanity, namely, there's no way that I can insist that only my interests are special and you're not because I'm me and you're not. And I hope for you to take me seriously, seriously engage in any kind of discourse with diverse other people, what we are forced to fall back on is what we have in common, namely, we are on both sentient; we are both rational, the ability to suffer. We have the ability to flourish. I made it the same stuff as you. I can't claim that you don't suffer; that would be a ludicrous proposition. And that's what gives you the notion of universal human rights and as government as a derivative means of pursuing those rights as opposed to say Divinely ordained.

Jordan Peterson: It's so hard, like this, because it depends to some degree on your time frame and also on whether you take the broad picture or you concentrate the details to some degree. Because, mm-hmm, like, I mean, I've got no objection to any of the descriptions of the horrors of religious tribalism that you just laid out. I mean, I would place that more in the domain of tribalism than in the domain of religion because I think the tribalist tendency is the warlike tendency that the movie.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Although the most severely punished heretics are often those within the tribe. Those are the ones would be really what a burn at the stakes, as an example. So it's not, it is—I think there's tribal.

Jordan Peterson: So I think there's also a kind of puritanical emphasis on the pure essence that anyone who contaminates the body politic must be expelled.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, you see that with taboo violations in absolutely tribal systems. Wealth or terianism—the challenging of legitimate authority is itself inherently evil; it's not the idea that criticizing the leader is essential to the health of a nation.

Jordan Peterson: Which is constitutive of our idea of democracy and freedom of speech. You have the ability to make fun of the president.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yes, the moral obligation to, and we're obliged to it, Madison, that’s a deeply unintuitive feeling that the natural human tendency is to—we know this from the work of people like a rich waiter and John Height—and I know this is that less measure stay attacking the king is a mortal sin.

Jordan Peterson: That reject the height hierarchies or themselves often moralized. That's a natural human idea that was, I guess, isn't it's a deconstructed or rejected.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I joined the Enlightenment, including the rationale for government laid out in the Declaration.

Jordan Peterson: It’s a funny thing because what I see happening is that over the thousands of years of religious thinking, let’s say, that went on in the West, is that what emerged in this was the idea that there was something akin to deity that characterized human beings and that stated very early on in the religious tradition and in a very surprising way, partly because it’s distributed between men and women equally, and it seems to be partly a creative function in that human beings partake in the co-creation of existence and partly an ethical function in that we're called upon to act courageously and truthfully.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And that’s core idea, I think, that’s expressed in Genesis, and it’s a really sophisticated and demanding idea. And then I see it like the mustard seed that’s part of the parable in the New Testament. It's this tiny idea that takes root and against incredible odds manifests itself across the centuries until what we get is an increasing realization of the universality of humanity and that that constitutes part of the core of the Enlightenment.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And you know, you made arguments about religious sectarianism and also the—and—and and religious-like tribal warfare, but the funny thing is that I would say that the critics of your defense of the Western enlightenment project might point to the same details in some sense and say, “Well, look at the consequences of Enlightenment thinking. There’s been endless warfare since the Enlightenment. There’s been a tremendous generation of destructive technology.” The negatives which you can point to case by case and piece by piece arguably outweigh the positives. I mean, I certainly don't believe that, but people could make that case, and so it’s not so difficult when you're trying to take a long view of history to decide which part of the melody you focus on, like is it deep?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yeah, me or is it the details that seem to work against those themes?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yes, why of course talk about the trajectory, historical trajectory of warfare in some detail in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" with something of a very—I were praising the chapter on keys. And it's certainly not true that wars increased after the event. Quite contrary, if you look at the percentage of years that the great powers they were at war with each other, it actually goes down starting in the 17th century. Great power wars don’t even occur anymore; we haven’t had one for 65 years. But be it is what happened was that in the centuries after the 18th century there were two trends that were in opposite directions, which was that wars actually got shorter and less frequent. The ones that did occur got deadlier—that is, countries got more efficient at killing more people in a shorter amount of time, partly because of weaponry, but also just because of social organization, being able to conscript large numbers of young men and then send them to the battlefield as cannon fodder.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Until and a lot of that was driven actually by counter-Enlightenment ideologies of nationalism, which mention both world wars and starting in 1945 for the first time, wars became less frequent, shorter, and less deadly. And so for the first time in, I think in human history, you have a systematic move away from warfare that occurred after 1945 with the formation of the United Nations, with a kind of unprecedented universalism, the kind of global consciousness including all races, all religions, still not of course universally accepted and even as an aspiration about, that's something that's pretty new in human history.

Jordan Peterson: It did not occur during the time of the European Enlightenment in the 18th century, but I think it was the consolidation of Enlightenment ideals, including the formation of the United Nations, which was a call for by Immanuel Kant’s essay on perpetual peace, which of course did not happen. But we've enjoyed it recently, and crucially for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations now, the sustainable development goals, you have people coming together, nations coming together, some of them not from a Judeo-Christian tradition by date by any means, but who can agree on things like, well, it's really better if people live there free of disease. It's better if babies don't die in their first year of life. It's better if kids go to school. It's better if we don't go to war. It's better if we have a clean environment—all these things that we have in common because we're human beings.

Dr. Steven Pinker: On the lack of the utility of unnecessary suffering, something like that, and maybe the even the lack of the utility of unnecessary malevolence. That’s something you don’t need to be, oh yeah, you need to do to endorse that.

Jordan Peterson: Is to be a humanist and have the ability to suffer or to flourish.

Jordan Peterson: So, okay, so let me switch this a bit, if you don't mind. And I'd like to speak a bit more personally, if you would. What's the consequence for you over the last year of this increasing public exposure and also controversy and what do you think just out of curiosity about being associated with this loose IDW? You know, which is that no one really joined, but just emerged out of the blue.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I mean, I think that all the people in it, in some sense, you're the most surprising member, because…

Jordan Peterson: Bob, well, yes.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yeah, and I am more providing it just comes from being, you know, just not having drunk the Kool-Aid of a political correctness identitarianism social justice warfare.

Dr. Steven Pinker: As long as you're not part of that tribe, as long as you haven't signed up to and associated with this, this, of course, whimsical, humorous entity…

Jordan Peterson: Copy it.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Right, right! It is a joke because of course there is a dark web, right? Because it's a ridiculous club.

Jordan Peterson: I mean, I've been trying to figure out what characterizes the people who've been loosely aggregated in that association, you know, and I think that a certain fortunate independence is part of it. You know that almost everyone in that group has their own means of support. I mean, you're a university professor obviously, and that could be taken from you, but I mean, you have nine books, and many of them are bestsellers.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And like you, you have the means to keep yourself operating as an independent being without being dependent on any necessary external bureaucracy.

Jordan Peterson: And I have, and I also have tenure, which means that I'm a little harder to fire than most people in those jobs. So that gives me a certain… I used to be cynical about tenure; it’s a unique cynic you are of university professors. But there isn’t part of the initial rationale giving you some degree of intellectual independence.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I'm really coming to appreciate tenure.

Jordan Peterson: Like the Canadian Senate, it’s useless, except when it’s absolutely necessary!

Dr. Steven Pinker: Hey, yeah.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, I think it’s really—and politically, of course, the people in this… I mean there is no… as you said, there’s no such thing as an intellectual dark web, except it’s kind of a joke, but the people who are connected to it did have a certain amount of unwillingness to kowtow or bow down to some of the pieties that have become orthodox on many college campuses and in some of the elite media.

Dr. Steven Pinker: This politically, the people who’ve been connected to it are pretty diverse. They're very diverse.

Jordan Peterson: They're there—there's almost the complete range, except for the absence of people who are politically correct.

Dr. Steven Pinker: The other thing that's very interesting about the group… two other things I would say is that they've been very effective users of social media and also they don't think that their audience is stupid, you know?

Jordan Peterson: Yes, I think that's a true and it's one of the keys to effective teaching, to effective communication. One of the first bits of advice I got when I made the crossover from academia to popular writing from an editor at a university press told me the mistake that academics often make when they try to reach a broad audience is they talk down. They assume that their audience is not as laidies as they are.

Dr. Steven Pinker: So the key is to assume that your audience is your intellectual peer, but they happen not to know some stuff that you know.

Jordan Peterson: Well, I offer that also as writing advice in my books, "The Sense of Style." But you're also right that these independent-minded people that we’ve been talking about try not to use insults and put-downs, not as a means of argument.

Jordan Peterson: Not even so much their audience thinks stupider, but rather being evil; if you don't agree with me, then you are a reprehensible—that's definitely a mistake within the bounds of that group, let's say. I think it's a brand mistake.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Let's say whenever that happens, well, and of course, it's apples if that defines the kind of politically correct social justice warfare that these people are reacting to.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Namely that the mode of argument that I think we’re all trying to move to distance ourselves from is that if you don’t agree with me, and you are a moral crab, right?

Jordan Peterson: Right, right!

Jordan Peterson: And so, okay, so now what's been the personal consequences for you? Like you've been at the center of a fair bit of controversy, yeah?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult to have a series of best-selling books, for example, and speaking tours and so forth without being controversial in some way, because it probably indicates that you're saying anything of any real novelty or importance. But how has it affected you? And has it been a net positive or a net negative, and then how are people reacting to you?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Oh, it's unquestionably a net positive, and at least so far I have certainly escaped. They kind of beat the outrage logs that we know can be aroused by advancing Ever heterodox opinions. I have gotten, you know, some anger. I was subject to a rather bizarre incident where a panel that I was on called the political correctness like Donald Trump where some of my remarks were spliced into the video; it was then cited by the alt-right and neo-Nazis, which went to a kind of denunciation on the left.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Fortunately, in my case, I can’t complain because the New York Times stepped into my defense. Jesse Single wrote an op-ed with my photo adorning it saying how social media is making a stupid and using the attack on me as evidence with pathology, so social media.

Jordan Peterson: So I came out of that unscathed.

Dr. Steven Pinker: On the other hand, I do live in some degree of fear that the mob could turn on me at any moment.

Jordan Peterson: It was a wonderful essay by Eddie by Neil Ferguson expressing a similar fear; he said, well, my wife is made of a braver stuff than I tells me not to worry.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I think it’s a joke, of course, his wife being really, I understand. Sorry, bravest people on the planet.

Jordan Peterson: But that was a sly little bit of humor for those who know his personal situation and a reminder that people have withstood much fiercer attacks than in you must have to worry about.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Right, right, right! And how are people responding to you in public? Like when you're out in public? I mean, you're a rather striking figure; you're easy to recognize. What happens when you go out?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Or how do its form to you?

Jordan Peterson: Oh, it’s positive. I have nothing to complain about; people recognize me. And I expect after this what we’re doing now airs that I'll be recognized even more because I know that you have quite a diverse following. But in also in person, as we know, people tend to MIT often mitigate the kind of animosity that is easy to express in— when you're anonymous in claiming the shield of social media.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Removing the people are a much more civil face-to-face.

Dr. Steven Pinker: I have gotten, you know, a lot of warmth. I've gotten, to my surprise, a number of people writing to me saying that I've been good for their mental health.

Jordan Peterson: My core, let us say, even though technically maybe flanked, I'm a psychologist unlike you. I'm not a clinical psychologist; I have no confidence whatsoever intriguing anxiety, depression, psychological problems. But for them, and I even have to explain to people who ask me what I do for a living. I didn't—I tend to avoid saying I'm a psychologist, even though that's what my degree is—a great.

Dr. Steven Pinker: The people assume that I'm a clinical psychologist, which I'm not, so I sometimes say I have a cognitive scientist because no one has any idea what that means.

Jordan Peterson: You know, I think you’d be good for my mental health.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, that's what some people—for the first time in my life, I said I kind of learned that credential.

Jordan Peterson: But some people write, and they say, I just—I'm so dejected and discouraged and downtrodden by reading the news that when I come across the data being presented that humanity has been improving, it actually is good for my mental health. I don’t feel as despairing or for my children, for myself, for the future.

Jordan Peterson: You're also—it's more than that. It's not only that you're saying; it's deeper than that for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, you're a credible source, and like naive optimism is worse than cynical pessimism, I think, because it's too fragile; it's too—it's too damaged.

Dr. Steven Pinker: But your optimism isn't naive; it’s data based, and it’s well-researched.

Jordan Peterson: And so you can go in there as a pessimist, like a powerful pessimist, and you can think, oh, oh, well, look at that, look at that, and look at that, and—it's not just one or two things, it's enough things that start to be a story, and you think, oh well, maybe we're not going to hell in a handbasket quite as fast as we thought we were, and that's not necessarily—yeah, well at least not necessarily, yes.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, and that starts something, but then there's an implicit message there too, which is perhaps the Enlightenment message itself, which is that, well, not only are things getting better, but human beings are the sorts of creatures that could make things better if they chose to.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And that's a radical message, I think. I mean one of the things I’ve noticed about what people respond positively to in my lectures is my insistence to them that they could be—they may not be, but they could be powerful forces for good and powerful beyond, really, in some ways beyond the limits of their imagination.

Jordan Peterson: Is that human beings unbounded rationally, even from an Enlightenment perspective, independent of the metaphysics, is that we do have the capacity to address incredibly complicated problems, and with goodwill, and caution, and a certain degree of intelligence we can actually make them better, and I think that that's a deeply positive message, especially for young people who'd be raised on nothing but a steady diet of disenfranchisement and like nihilistic pessimism about the future.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Indeed, and it has been a source of tension in my own intellectual autobiography, because, and I know that I'm not an optimist about the human condition by ideology or by background. In fact, I wrote a book called "The Blank Slate" on the modern denial of human nature. We're not blank slates; we are equipped by evolution with not a lot of motives, some of which are not so conducive to human well-being, like tribalism, like authoritarianism, like my greed, like cognitive illusions, like self-exception.

Dr. Steven Pinker: But that what shifted my worldview is really coming across data that came as much of a surprise to me as to anyone, showing that violence is going down and it is fun.

Jordan Peterson: How could...

Dr. Steven Pinker: Prosperity has gone up, and then trying to resolve that attention. How could me as a species both burn each other alive and engage in rate discrimination and genocide? I mean the other hand, somehow manage to power this improvement, and I think it comes from the fact that we have more cognitively and psychologically complex. We have a number of ugly motives, but we also have some modicum of empathy, we have self-control; we have cognitive processes that allow us to reason. We have language that allows us to share our ideas, and if we manage to channel those with the right institutions, with a commitment to free speech, to democracy, to science, to empirical testing, then we can mobilize the better angels of our nature, as Abraham and, and kind of eke out improvements despite our worst selves.

Jordan Peterson: I think it's quite comical that you used a religious cell analogy title. I mean, because I think part of the case that you're making—and I would say this is a narrative case to some degree—is that despite the depth of human depravity, which is definitely something that you did discuss in "The Blank Slate," although not as intensely as some people have, that good, so to speak, has the capacity to triumph over evil and sorrow, despite the depths of both of those. And that that is also an unbelievably optimistic message because I don't believe that you can be a credible voice for optimism and what would you say—someone who celebrates the human spirit unless you're very cognizant of its darkness, because otherwise, you're just not informed, you know?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Right?

Dr. Steven Pinker: And you have to, I think, value the hard-won human institutions and norms that don't actually necessarily come naturally to us, like the rule of law, like free speech, like empirical facing arguments on a caracal data—things that have to be inculcated every generation. We're not doing such a good job with Generation, I sometimes think.

Jordan Peterson: But it's because of these games that we've invented that bring out our better side that we have been able to overcome our inner demons, our darker angels.

Jordan Peterson: I wonder sometimes, too, I wonder what you think about this. I mean, you know when I grew up and when you grew up, you know, from the end of World War II until let's say 1989, there were real reasons for apocalyptic thinking.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And in my estimation, you know, they—the massive buildup of the thermonuclear arsenal and the constant tension and testing between especially the Soviets and the Western bloc.

Jordan Peterson: They, at the times when we came so close to nuclear annihilation, I think, for several generations. And then also in the 60s, the discovery of human beings as a planet-transforming force on an ecological level. I think there were real reasons for people to be terrified into a kind of apocalyptic pessimism.

Jordan Peterson: And I kind of wonder sometimes if one of the things that you're not battling against is, what would you say, is the revelation that that period of time in some sense is over?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Is that that particularly pound lips, God willing, has been reduced substantially in probability, and we can now start to think about the future in a positive way again.

Jordan Peterson: But man, it was 45 years, you know. And not counting World War II, which I think we probably shouldn’t count, it was 45 years where everyone was being taught that if they put themselves under their desks as elementary school…

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yes, that would protect them from an atomic blast.

Jordan Peterson: And so coming out of that.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Now that's true, I think 1989 truly was momentous. It was the— the end of the Cold War and the worst threats of nuclear exchange.

Dr. Steven Pinker: It also led to a decline in the number of proxy wars in Asia and Africa and South America, which people don't appreciate. Look at the horrific wars that are taking place now such as in Yemen and Syria, and you might think that we’re in an unprecedented era of warfare, but this is nothing compared to the seventies and eighties when Africa was in flames.

Dr. Steven Pinker: There were—

Jordan Peterson: The word that man killed far more people than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria combined.

Jordan Peterson: There were threats like—I mean the Yom Kippur War in 1973—Richard Nixon raised the level of nuclear alert; something that has not happened since; these really were perilous times. It’s quite apart from the Cold War.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Iran and Iraq are their version of World War I, which threatened to choke the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, bringing the world economy to a halt.

Jordan Peterson: And then, so people forget how awful these 60s, 70s, and 80s were in terms of…

Dr. Steven Pinker: Right? It was also the fact that, well, in Africa and in South America, I would say in particular, those proxy wars also being also ideological wars absolutely stifled economic development both in South America and in Africa.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And one of the reasons that we've seen this unparalleled improvement in economic conditions, let's say, well, it’s obvious in China because of their market reforms, but in Africa it's at least in part because there are—not there isn’t a coterie of insane Soviet dictators dictating economic policy to African leaders that's absolutely counterproductive and pathological.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And so just by removing that source of trouble, much less adding anything new and good, just by getting that source of trouble the Africans have been able to free themselves from the worst excesses of the most foolish economic theories of the 20th century.

Jordan Peterson: And it really is—it started to manifest itself in the 2000s; that was part of it.

Jordan Peterson: And Z is really—each effect is the others so that poverty makes civil war more likely and vice versa—because war is a system called development in reverse.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And that nothing is worse for an economy than if schools are being blown up and people pulled out of their offices and shot and institutions destroyed as quickly as they can be built—markets, transportation networks.

Jordan Peterson: But also if countries are poor and then it's true that Marxist economic ideas make countries poor, and it becomes more attractive to join militias and rebel groups because the government isn't doing anything for you.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And quite a lot of young men who have nothing better to do with their time, their loyalty is commanded by the incompetent government, and then, of course, both superpowers would underwrite the insurgency movements that opposed whichever governments the other superpower was supporting, so we were amplifying the problem, which consequentially would find the problem.

Jordan Peterson: Yes, people forget when people talk about what a terrible state the world is in now, they often forget how awful the Cold War was for the great.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Right!

Jordan Peterson: Right.

Jordan Peterson: So let me close with this, if you would. We've had a good conversation. What are you working on at the moment that's occupying you that you have hopes for and what are your general hopes, let's say, for the next three or four years?

Dr. Steven Pinker: I mean, your career is ascendant—a manner that is true very few people—and you have a tremendous global impact, I would say, all things considered, and one that, as far as I'm concerned, is overwhelmingly to the good. What's next for you, and what would you like to see happen in the future for you over the next few years?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Well, for the world, I would certainly like to see a push back against authoritarian populism and a momentum going back to the forces of humanism, cosmopolitanism, of globalism, aqua see against the identity politics primarily of the populist right since they are in power, but also of these begins left.

Dr. Steven Pinker: But the renewal of the narrative that we—if we think about what we all have in common as human beings and if we apply our brain power to overcoming our cognitive limitations, we can solve problems; climate change being a big one.

Dr. Steven Pinker: If I have my own views on climate change at all, it's special imminent, you know? Times editorial is coming out in a couple of days.

Jordan Peterson: It’s going to get you in trouble, yes it will.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to seeing what you think.

Jordan Peterson: It’s a very common problem. It is a very complicated problem.

Dr. Steven Pinker: But—and I think some of the activists are making it more complex and worse, but I'll leave that as a little enigma until people check out that article.

Jordan Peterson: Oh boy, seeking enlightenment now, okay.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And academically, I've done another studies over the years taking off from an interest in how language is used in a social context; I prefer a large part of my career. I studied language; it made me curious about, well, why we all just worry about what we mean so much at the time he issued bail threats, sexual commands that are kind of folded between the lines, we show a salary and you eat around the bush.

Dr. Steven Pinker: That led me to the concept of common knowledge game theory, since I know something, you know something, I know you know it, you know that I know that you know, or not cases where we each know something, who’s not so sure, but the other guy knows that you know I think that suddenly I think it's usually powerful in our social and emotional lives.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And I have a—I'm going to start writing a book in two years whose tentative title is "Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, and Rage."

Jordan Peterson: I’m extremely interested!

Jordan Peterson: One of the things that I've observed, you know, is that people have a hierarchy of values, and then the deeper in the hierarchy the value is embedded, the more experiential reality is stabilized, and the more it’s united under a single goal, and the more it’s brought into out of uncertainty, and I think we have rules that are like don’t disrupt too much of someone's map territory with any given utterance.

Jordan Peterson: And so we tend a bit to play on the periphery, you know? Like it might be too much for you to stand to be outright objected by or rejected by someone that you're sexually attracted to, you know, because it casts light on your validity as a acceptable source of DNA, let’s say. But to play a bit and to tease a bit and allow you to accept carefully and casually delivered playful rejection without it having to go way down into the depths of your character, it's like to me, a necessary force doctrine!

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yes, sorry, I’ve got a technical snap.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Yes, I think there is a lot to that, just the ego threat of being rejected, but in addition, we divide our social relationships into qualitatively different categories, and an essential relationship really is different from a friendship, or a workplace relationship.

Dr. Steven Pinker: It is an inescapable fact that often people are sexually attracted to each other. Sometimes one's attracted to the other but not vice-versa too often indeed, there is something that is inherently threatening about a, say, a professional relationship on a friendship.

Jordan Peterson: Yes, the sex is kind of, oh, he blurted out, even though paradoxically, any grown-up knows there’s got to be sexual attraction in a lot of heterosexual relationships that are not overtly sexual.

Dr. Steven Pinker: So he might know it; she might know it, but as long as he doesn’t know that she knows that he knows that she knows he knows it, then you can work under the fiction that the relationship is 100% platonic or 100% professional?

Jordan Peterson: There’s something about learning it out which generates common knowledge, neither side in denied.

Dr. Steven Pinker: The idea that even without the explicit statement, imagine that you have implicit motivations, and many of them, and as implicit motivations they have a relatively low probability of being manifested. But when you formalize that implicit motivation in speech, do you suppose you move the probability of enacting it up the hierarchy and therefore pose more of a threat to the other person?

Jordan Peterson: Is that the speech is somehow closer to action?

Dr. Steven Pinker: Then do you think so? But I think it’s even deeper than that. I don't think it's just sort of an analogue shit along the scale. There is something qualitatively different about learning something out. That’s for sure.

Jordan Peterson: I think we subdivide our relationships into different types: authority, subordinate, equal sharing, and community of interest exchange when these can take place over different resources, over money, over sex, over aid.

Jordan Peterson: And we don’t know. We are very attentive to which one holds between a given dyad at a given time. Each one is a different coordination game, as the game theorist would put it, where we both, again, we’re on in the same cell if we're on the same page. But if we're at a discrepant understanding, then there can be, in mild form, awkwardness, embarrassment; in the extreme case, shock.

Dr. Steven Pinker: The problem of dual relationships that are often talked about in professional ethics, you know, that it's very difficult to have a unit-dimensional relationship with someone, but you're constantly warned ethically not to, for example, if you're a clinical psychologist, not to make a friend out of your client and to say nothing about my sexual prime.

Jordan Peterson: Absolutely nothing of that, yes, exactly.

Jordan Peterson: These sorts of things happen between professors and students.

Dr. Steven Pinker: And so, and I think to some degree they’re inevitable, but the dual relationship problem also means that you end up playing at least two games with different outcomes, and so the aims become blurry, and the degree of conceptual confusion also increases.

Jordan Peterson: And I'm not exactly sure why making that explicit would necessarily make it worse, but it does seem to be associated with an unwise complexification of the situation.

Dr. Steven Pinker: Absolutely, and this is that kind of social-emotional dynamic that I will be writing about in "Don't Go There" exactly, that paradox.

Jordan Peterson: