Professor Steven Pinker - Too Much Morality

Full transcript: Steven Pinker on London Real

6:07 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. With me today is Mr. Peter Irving, who is a mixed martial arts fighter and also a writer for Fighters Only Magazine. And our guest today is Mr. Steven Pinker.

6:18 He is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. He is an experimental psychologist, a cognitive scientist, a linguist, and a popular science author. Did I get that right? Yeah, that’s right. It’s pretty good.

6:31 And his most recent book is The Better Angels of Our Nature, A History of Violence and Humanity. Welcome to London. Thank you. How does London treat you when you come here? I love London.

6:43 You do? Yeah, well, one of the world’s great cities and one that I’m in particular fond of. Partly because I grew up in Canada, so I used to be a subject of the British Commonwealth, and there’s a bit of an anglophile in me. Okay, so you feel right at home? I feel right at home, yeah.

6:57 Under the Queen. And also, you’ve worked at schools on the East Coast, you live on the East Coast. Do you agree that London is much more like the East Coast in the U.S., as opposed to the West Coast in the U.S.? Yeah, and I have spent some time in the West Coast. I taught at Stanford for a year, and I spent two sabbaticals in Santa Barbara, something, by the way, that I highly recommend.

7:19 Oh, Santa Barbara. That’s one of the gorgeous spots on Earth. But yeah, people often compare Boston to London. It’s quite unfair to London, but it does have some red brick architecture. And by the standards of American cities, Boston does have a bit of an English feel.

7:34 A bit, I mean, so we were fellow alumni, is that what that said? We’re alumni, yeah. So I was at MIT from 89 to 93, and you were there. I was there from 82 to 03, so 21 years on the faculty of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Wow, that’s fantastic.

7:49 I’ve never really talked much about my time at MIT, and I’ll just briefly say a few things. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, and I felt almost honored every time I walked in there every day, which is hard to do for four years. And I would walk in lobby seven, which is like the front building, and I would just always stare right up at the ceiling as I walked in, and it was just like, wow. And you walk down the hallways and you see, you know, these scientists.

8:10 Norbert Wiener and memorialized, yeah, that huge dome and lobby and that neoclassical architecture that MIT has had for 150 years. Yeah, and they do it, and they pull it off somehow. And they also mix a lot of modern architecture, IM Pei and stuff like that in with the neoclassic. And so, overall, it’s a pretty good looking campus. Yeah, it’s kind of higgledy-piggledy, there’s a bit of everything, but the most recent It was built after I left, was designed by Frank Gehry, and it’s this almost comic book extravaganza of cock-eyed cylinders and half-domes and buildings that are a bit wonky, and that’s where, among other things, the linguistics department is.

8:53 I was not in linguistics, I was in brain and cognitive sciences, but I was over in linguistics all the time. Okay. Wow, yeah, it’s always changing. The Media Lab was kind of just getting started when I was there, and now it’s really exploded into its own you know its own thing. Yeah they displaced me. My department was on land that the Media Lab coveted and they expanded so rapidly that they sent us off into rented space for a couple of years until we got our own building. You know we were talking briefly here about this whole MIT Harvard rivalry and if it exists or not and that they’re really different culturally schools like if you if you saw the Facebook movies Zuckerberg’s trying to get into the eating clubs of Harvard, but like as an undergrad at MIT, you’re just trying not to get your ass kicked on a regular basis, you know, you’re staying up all night in the library, it’s like there’s no, for me it seems like they’re culturally very different from an undergraduate standpoint.

9:45 Would you agree? Yeah, and they do play in different leagues, quite literally in the case of football, but also in terms of their space of rivals, and Harvard compares itself to Yale and Princeton and Columbia, the other Ivy League schools that are full service universities. They have a lot of humanities as well as sciences and some professional schools like medical schools. MIT considers itself in the league of Caltech, California Institute of Technology, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon in Princeton, the more scientifically and technologically oriented universities.

10:19 Right. Steven your field is one of the ones that crosses over into the rivalry. Yeah, exactly. So I’m in, well, I’m in a psychology department at Harvard at MIT, they called our department Brain and Cognitive Sciences, because we stretched from cognitive psychology, which is my field, to artificial intelligence, to neuroscience and molecular neurobiology. So there are people studying the molecular basis of learning and memory and fruit flies. They didn’t really think of themselves as psychologists, so they had to come up with a creative name for the department. Do you miss MIT sometimes? I do sometimes miss MIT.

10:54 There are different cultures and of course proud of different things. I taught for many years introduction to psychology at MIT, which counted as a humanities and social science distribution course. I might have taken that course. You probably did. Was it oversubscribed your course?

11:12 Would it fill the halls? Yeah, and you probably took it before I taught. I took it over in 96. Okay. Then I ported it over to Harvard where it counted as part of their science requirement which led to no end of amusement at MIT that what counts as a humanities course at MIT counts as a science course at Harvard. But there are different cultures and one of the things I miss about MIT is that they’re very they’re proudly oriented to getting the job done, to being excellent at whatever they do. They don’t do everything. They don’t have a physical anthropology department. Their biology department barely studies anything bigger than a molecule.

11:47 They don’t have classical Greek. They choose a certain number of topics, and then they just study it in the most excellent way possible. And there’s a constant churning. Fields constantly get absorbed. New departments are created.

12:01 Old ones destroyed. When I got to MIT, one of my colleagues said that when he arrived at MIT in the 50s, there were six professors of airplane propeller design and no professors of computer science. So obviously, if it had stuck with a legacy of old academic fields, it would not be what it is today. Harvard, it’s more, that’s why we’ve done it for 325 years, why change now? Okay, so while we’re on the subject of MIT, you reference Chomsky a lot when you’re in your linguistics stuff.

12:32 Yes. You must have been colleagues there then for? Not in the same department, because he was in linguistics and I was in cognitive science, but certainly colleagues at the same institute, yeah. And for people that know much about Chomsky, Can you give a bio for him, or could you tell a little bit about him? Well, he is famous for two reasons.

12:50 One of them is his political activism. He is a very vociferous critic of American and British foreign policy. He is a leftist but not Marxist. He calls himself an anarcho-syndicalist, which is a kind of anarchist, anarchist of the left. a right-wing anarchist movement, kind of more libertarian, objectivist, Ayn Rand style, but he is more of a communitarian, libertarian anarchist.

13:20 But anyway, a fierce critic of Israel, of Britain, of the US, and an early critic of the Vietnam War. And he has a huge following because of his prolific output in politics, I mean, probably more than a hundred books. He’s on the Rage Against the Machine, cites him in their liner notes. I think Shambha Wamba had one of his lectures on the B side of one of their records when they used to be records. But then he is also famous for having really founded the modern approach to linguistics, starting in the 1950s when he was just in his 20s.

13:58 He pretty much revolutionized the field. He polarized the field. Most people in linguistics are either rapidly in favor of his theories or determined to bring him down, not an entirely healthy state of affairs, so a polarizing figure in linguistics as he is in politics. But in linguistics, he was the first to give linguistics a psychological spin, saying that the problem of the study of language is really a problem of how human children acquire language, they do without any lessons or instruction or not much in the way of feedback.

14:37 This to him suggested that human children are born with a circuitry in the brain that is specialized for acquiring language by noting that language is not just a list of sentences. Every sentence that we’re uttering is probably uttered for the first time in the history of the universe, but we nonetheless can produce and understand sentences fluently. That means that there must be something in the brain that is an algorithm or a recipe for generating and interpreting sentences rather than a memorized list.

15:12 And that this changed the whole mission statement for linguistics. It wasn’t just listing a bunch of constructions, but rather it was what is the mental software that allows us to use language and prior to that the mental software that allows us to acquire language. So he argued that all languages conform to a universal plan, what he called a universal grammar, which he then related to the hypothetical innate circuitry with which children acquire language, that that’s where language universals come from, they come from the human brain.

15:48 You subscribe to the idea of the meta-grammar as well? To some extent, I think Chomsky’s particular theories of grammar are a little too complicated and exotic for my blood. I think they’re kind of needlessly complicated. And whenever you have a theory that is so identified with one individual, whether it be Freud or Piaget or any big theorist, it’s never exactly the truth because this is all bigger than any of us, and a field that is too oriented, either for or pro or con, one person’s ideas I think is somewhat distorted.

16:34 But I do think that he had some important insights. I think the idea that children are specialized for learning language is on the right track. I think the idea that what is interesting about language is the mental software that allows us to learn and use it. I think that’s a positive agenda. And then he also introduced a number of technical ideas, the fact that a sentence is not just, first of all, it’s not just a string of words, it’s not just one word reminds you of the next one that reminds you of the next one, reminds you of the next one, and so you have a chain of word associations, but there is a hierarchical structure, words are grouped into phrases which are grouped into bigger phrases which are grouped into sentences.

17:12 The fact that even that is not quite enough to explain how language works because then and there are also ways in which we mangle those hierarchical phrase structure trees. We snip a word from one place and glue it somewhere else, what he called transformations. So when I say, what did you eat this morning? The what refers to the position after eat, namely whatever it is that you ate. And to understand how we can ask a question, you have to add an additional bit of machinery to the algorithm that allows us to speak, namely one that relates words in multiple positions in a sentence, that’s another technical innovation, led to the concept of deep structure.

17:57 So I think all of those are genuine and long-lasting contributions to understanding of how language works. Do you ever get asked like, why do linguistics matter? Because I think for a lot of people they see this and they’re like, this is just semantics, and why do linguistics matter so much to a modern day man? I know that’s a very simple question, but. Oh, lots of reasons.

18:17 Just, we’ll start with the question of intellectual curiosity. What makes us tick? What makes humans different from other animals? Well, one of the main reasons is we talk and understand, and other animals don’t. Human life is made possible through language.

18:36 Look at what we’re doing right here. We’re just making noise into microphones. And then people are listening to us. How come? Why are they listening to all these noises?

18:43 And we’re making noise as we exhale. And the reason is, language allows us to convey an unlimited number of ideas, and they can be totally abstract intellectual ideas, theories of the origin of the universe, what happens to our soul after we die, what is the nature of good and evil, what is the nature of language, all of that just by making noise. And then, of course, at a more practical level, anything that humans do together, and everything we accomplish, we accomplish together.

19:11 Guy grows foods, sells it to someone else who produces podcasts. There’s an exchange and lots and lots of middlemen. None of that would be possible if we couldn’t have language, couldn’t build the buildings that we have, assemble the armies that we have, the governments. All of that depends on language. So if you’re curious about human beings, you’ve got to be curious about language. So that’s the intellectual reason. There are lots of scientific puzzles like how did it evolve, how do kids acquire it, how does the brain handle it.

19:44 Then there are enormous numbers of practical applications. There are entire industries that are basically industries that deal with language as a commodity like the press, like book publishing, like radio, like most of television, like the internet. Those are all industries that buy and sell language, chunks of language. it would be an enormous economic benefit if we could have computers and internet search engines that could understand language as opposed to just strings of words.

20:18 What we already enjoy, technologies like Google Translate, like search engines, like voice recognition when you call it directory assistance, are the first easy bit of applied artificial intelligence of language, but there’s much more to come. Acquiring a second language, which is a burning question to parents of bilingual couples. Husband speaks German, wife speaks Chinese. Kid might be going to an English school, what do they do with the kid? In business, more and more, we have to deal with people in other continents and countries.

21:00 What’s the best way to acquire their language in a hurry? And I can go wrong. What happens if you have a three-year-old who has not said a word? Does it mean that the kid is retarded? Does it mean that the kid’s autistic?

21:12 Is there any way to get the process going? If you have a stroke or other kinds of brain damage and you lose the ability to speak, that can mess up your life seriously. How do we tell whether the damage is restricted to language and how do we get language back in these people? So, anyway, those are just a few of the reasons why language matters. I’m thinking of this, I was in Tokyo one time for business and I was out at night and I met a Japanese girl and I met her and there we were and we could not say one word of communication with each other.

21:43 And so there’s only so much that smiles will get and after a while and I just realized it was like a real world example of the fact that how powerful any kind of language is. Absolutely. That’s a great example. And it just shows that human social life is made possible by language. It’s very hard to imagine how we could have societies, friendships, and so on without language.

22:05 Now, other primates have a primitive version. They groom each other, different primate species will touch various body parts, but clearly it’s a… It’s something that I wanted to ask you about, the uniquely human language capacity. What about, there was some controversy with one of your books about the AIP sign language. How does, is that a different function from human language that AIPs can memorize sign language?

22:38 Absolutely. It’s different in two ways. One of them is that it’s not sign language by any stretch of the imagination. You and I could be having this conversation right now in British sign language or American sign language. A sign language has a complex grammar.

22:51 It is fully capable of expressing any human thought, it just happens to use the fingers and the eyes instead of the tongue and the ears. Does it follow the same grammatical patterns that spoken language does? Mostly, not entirely because it takes advantage of the fact that space is different from sound and so there are certain aspects of space that sign language is put to good use. But yeah, it does have a, for example, just like words are made up out of meaningless vowels and consonants. So you can’t predict the meaning of dog from the meaning of duh and the meaning of ah and the meaning of guh. They’re just units that you combine to multiply the number of possible words. Sign language gestures are not pantomimes. They are also composed of units like hand shapes, like motions, like orientations, like positions, which are meaningless but get combined in fixed arrangements that are understood to refer to words. And then there’s a syntax so that you can distinguish between say a man biting a dog and a dog biting a man. None of that is present in the systems that are taught to apes. The other difference is that you do need another species to teach them to apes, namely us. We don’t need another species to teach our own language to us.

24:09 Children just acquire it spontaneously. So an ape wouldn’t teach another it that’s right yeah it doesn’t it doesn’t it’s not sustainable and it is not and it wasn’t developed by the apes in the first place was you know we didn’t get our language from Martians it came out of our own heads and so I think it’s completely different I think it’s more of a stunt than a real than a real analogy right it’s like you know more than any other guests that I’ve had on here is is I find with you and I was texting Pete over the weekend when I was just doing more research on you it’s like it’s almost impossible to pigeonhole you because you you do all these linguistic work you’ve got your book that’s talks about the recent book about the history of violence in humanity you were one of the first guys to have your genome see and put on the internet you know you came out in support of Lawrence Summers years ago when he made some statements I think about women on the faculty you talk about morality is that the idea are you trying not to be pigeonholed because very few people have that mentioned much of a broad interest yes there is there is one common thread and that is an interest in human nature what makes what makes us tick what is the how does the mind work and so that language is one of the things that the human mind is good at and you know genocide is another one sad to say but but if you’re interested in in the the capabilities of

25:24 The human brain and they what’s interesting about the human species that’s where all of these fall together but yeah aside from that yeah I get bored you must get bored so I take a yeah and well which me but the thing is that there’s another sense which I’m never bored because there’s just no end interesting questions you can ask about human nature. What I do is I tend to bite into one topic and I try to explore it in as much depth as I’m capable of reading everything I can read, putting it together in my best guess as to a cohesive integrated theory, and then once I’ve done that then I’m curious about something else. So I wrote a my first book which is a fairly technical book was a theory of how children acquire language, how they learn words, how they learn the little grammatical prefixes and suffixes, how they learn ordering of words, how they learn auxiliaries, and I did this massive technical book, and it was my best attempt at a really tough problem, but then I wasn’t going to just do that for the rest of my life, and so another book that I did, my first popular book, was even stepping back from how kids acquire language, just what’s the deal with language? How does it work?

26:39 All the questions that people would ask me in pubs and in taxis, I would try to, you know, why are there so many languages? What’s the best way to get our kid to speak mom’s language if it’s not the same language as the community? Who decides what’s correct and incorrect grammar? You know, can apes acquire slang language? So all those questions I wanted to answer between one pair of covers.

27:05 And the question is how do you do it without it just being a kind of random encyclopedia, kind of a hodgepodge, like tied together with the idea that language is an adaptation of the human species. Other animals evolved to do their things, spiders spin webs and beavers build dams, and humans use language. that’s what makes humans human. So your books increasingly aimed towards the layman, rather than- My last, yeah. So after having written two books that are not sold in stores, as they say about the famous veg-o-matic, you being an American would know what I’m talking about.

27:46 Yeah, but I don’t like- Those late night TV commercials. Yeah, these have- Not sold in stores. Absolutely, these products not sold in stores. Not sold in stores. So my first two books were not sold in stores, sold to fellow academics.

27:57 But then the six books that I’ve done since have been, well, they’re crossover, because I do intend them to be for an academic audience as well, but also for people who are not academics. Do you feel some names like you, I mean, your books sort of increasingly quoted more controversy as they’ve gone that way, or provoked more discussion, perhaps. I mean, do you stand by 100% everything that you put into print, or do you sometimes put things in there that to provoke discussion on these issues?

28:26 I certainly stand by them when I write them. Sometimes I can change my mind afterwards, but yeah, no, I don’t put in stuff just to be controversial or to get headlines. No, that would be, yeah, no, that would be tedious. And it’s kind of not, it goes against the whole ethics of what I like to think I do, namely, if you’re a scientist, you’re interested in the truth, you’re not interested in stuff that diverts people from the truth. Now, it doesn’t mean I have the truth.

28:50 Obviously, like any human, I’m gonna be wrong about lots of stuff, but that’s the aspiration. You know, one of the reasons we started the podcast was because I would watch the news and I renamed the news because I think it should be called bad news. Yes, right. And you were talking about that, I think, in your book, your recent book, because I think the perception everyone has is that violence is on the rise because we see all the time in the news about all these violent actions taking place.

29:14 And so part of the reason of London Real is we try to put someone forward that just has something interesting and positive to say every week. But I was wondering if you could talk more about your book, The Better Angels of Our Nature and your theory of how violence has decreased over time and how we might not perceive it so because of the media. Absolutely, what makes the main idea of Better Angels so surprising, the main idea being that violence has been in decline over the long-term of human history, is as you say, you open the paper, paper by the way is this thing that print out of the news, they used to deliver it to your doorstep, You could buy it at a stand, just for those people who may not know what I’m talking about.

29:57 Or you read the news. I still like a newspaper that you get. I’m showing my age. Yeah, same here. But whether it’s on TV or internet or old fashioned dead trees, news is about stuff that happens, not about stuff that doesn’t happen.

30:12 And as long as rates of violence haven’t gone down to zero, which obviously they haven’t, there’s always enough of it to fill the news. And so if your impression of how violent the world is comes from the news, you’ll You’ll think not only is it as violent as ever, but you’ll think that it’s more violent than ever before, because now everyone’s a reporter. All it takes is a cell phone, and there are seven billion of them. Many of them can do color video footage, which they can upload to the internet, and so everyone is a war reporter.

30:40 So the violence that takes place, and granted there still is a fair amount of it, is in our face. But the parts of the world that are not at war, no one is beaming video footage of a peaceful street corner in Nicaragua or Angola or Mozambique or East Timor, places that had horrific bloodshed in the past that thankfully we don’t hear about anymore. So it’s only when you look at numbers, when you actually look at how many people are killed as a proportion of the population, that you can really appreciate how much more peaceful the world is today.

31:17 This is true in the scale of homicides where, say, in Britain, an Englishman today has about 135th the chance of being murdered as his medieval ancestors. Fascinating stats. Yeah, and it’s a surprise when you see those curves and they go down from the year 1200 to the present. I was shocked when I first saw that graph and most people today are surprised when they first see it. fact that we don’t even appreciate this, but big rich countries don’t go to war with each other anymore. So Britain and France are not at war, Britain and Germany, Britain and America. That used to be what big countries and empires did.

31:57 They were always at each other’s throats. America, the Soviet Union, that’s what I got up with. Yeah, exactly. Then as of 1945, that stopped. You know, the Korean War was the last time that two big powerful countries fought each other. Now there’s still lots of nasty wars involving smaller countries and too many of them but they don’t kill as many people as the good old-fashioned wars between big rich countries with their big rich armies and even in the developed developing world which continues to have far more wars than the developed world but even there if you actually plot the number of wars over time and the number of deaths in war over time. It’s also gone down, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Then there are other things that people kind of knew all along and have to be reminded of, but slavery used to be legal everywhere on earth. Now it’s not legal anywhere. Wrongdoers were, and where wrongdoing could mean stealing a cabbage or criticizing the king, could be put to death in the most grisly, gruesome form of torture imaginable, disemboweling, crucifying, breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, and then the corpses of a hanged man might be displayed in public and rotting on the power bridge. Yeah, I actually looked this up right down the road here on Tyburn, which is basically High Park Corner. The last guy was hanged, I think it was 1867. Yeah, it was the last public institution.

33:23 And did they leave his body to rot? I think that may have been a little, a few decades after they abolished that practice. Yeah, I think you’re right. But it would be I like something you would go down and it goes see is a social. Oh, yeah, you bring out the kids Yeah, right. Yeah hookers would be they’re drumming up business But people are still inclined towards the you know, the voyeurism of violent things and it’s just expressed differently, right?

33:44 They’re I think they’re inclined toward it and as a purveyor of mixed martial arts, you know, you That’s right Yeah, I think I don’t think the brain has changed. I think we still enjoy watching violence We enjoy imagining ourselves in violence. We pay other people to do it for us now, and they do it voluntarily. So yeah, I don’t think the brain has changed, and there are all kinds of other forms of violent entertainment that we enjoy, both lowbrow like Schwarzenegger movies and highbrow like Shakespeare, like Homer, but we don’t do it to each other nearly as much.

34:20 Steven more recently, if you look over the last couple of decades, this is not just a trend over millennia, but I don’t know if in Britain you have the same campaign against bullying that we have in the US. I don’t think it’s active, like is there? There’s TV advertisements and things like that, I’m not sure how effective they are. It’s a big deal in the United States. The President Obama gave a speech against bullying, Oprah Winfrey, who has this enormous follower group of followers, has campaigned against it, there are laws against it.

34:50 This is for a behavior that, when we were kids, was just part of growing up. Boys will be boys. The idea that it would be a national priority to stamp out bullying among little boys would have seemed ludicrous just 20 years ago. But now it is a major focus of social service agencies, and it has been effective. That is, rates of bullying have gone down in every country that has gathered statistics.

35:14 So it’s an ongoing process. The international campaign against violence against women is another example. Probably the animal rights movement is yet another one. The campaign against persecution of gay people is yet another. So it’s a process that’s still, I think, going to go on.

35:37 But it seems to be we’re in a phase of a trend that has been going on for centuries or millennia. continuing? I mean, are we aiming towards a sort of peaceful utopia at the end of the line? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’ll be a utopia. You know, I think we’ll still get on each other’s nerves. I think they’ll still be barroom brawls every once in a while.

35:57 They’ll still be terrorist groups because all it takes is, you know, half a dozen unemployed men sitting around a barbershop or a pub to form the popular front for the liberation of whatever, but I do think that, and there can be nasty surprises. There can be, you know, some narcissistic despot could take over country and think that it’s a really good idea to start conquering territory or spreading revolution. So there are nasty shocks. There are, I think, a baseline level of violence, except for a totalitarian state, you’re never gonna stamp out to zero, but aside from that, I think the general trend is going to continue to go down.

36:37 That is, I think the world, just as it took a while for the world to get around to abolishing slavery everywhere, and parts of the countries in the Middle East didn’t do it until the 60s, but it did happen. And I think that’s also going to happen for things like gay rights and domestic violence against women. It won’t be instantaneous, it won’t be smooth, but I think history is going to push in that direction. And it’s not because I think that there’s some kind force, mysterious, dialectical arc of justice that’s going to bring us to utopia.

37:11 I think it’s just like other human problems that human ingenuity has been set to chipping away at. You know, shortages of food, people don’t starve to death in the same numbers that they used to. Disease, people don’t die of smallpox and polio anymore, just because smart people have worked together to try to bring the rates down. Now, we haven’t eliminated all disease, and we probably never will eliminate all disease, but we can eke out longer and longer lifespans, you know, a few months, a few years at a time.

37:43 And likewise, violence is a scourge. It’s really, we’re really better off if we don’t kill each other than if we do. And the problem is, how do you get the other guy to agree not to commit violence at the same time as you do? If you’re a unilateral pacifist, if you beat your swords into plowshares, but the other guy keeps his swords, you could be in big trouble. The question is, how do you get everyone to beat their swords into plowshares at the same time? It’s not so easy. But it’s a problem that we use our ingenuity for, democracy, United Nations, all kinds of other, Oprah speaking out against bullying on TV. Each one of them, I think, is a little increment that lowers violence on average by a bit, and we’re going to keep trying.

38:28 So we’re not evolving as a species per se, we’re just improving our technology in a way. I mean, we’re just making this better, making this better, making this better, and this is one of those things? I think so. That’s right. Yeah, that would be the way I would put it.

38:42 You gave a lecture I saw recently and you said there was too much morality in the world, which is a great way to get me to listen. And you were talking about, I think, the Israel and Palestinian conflict and how the The root of that conflict has so much, I guess, emotional baggage in morality that keeps them from resolving it. And I was just wondering if you could expand on what you meant by that. Yeah, and that’s a major theme of Better Angels is that, well, I distinguish between morality, that is, what really is right and wrong according to our best moral philosophy, our best arguments, and the human moral sense, which is whatever circuitry evolved that gives us a sense of what’s right and wrong.

39:23 And just like other parts of our psychology can be out of whack with reality, you know, we have a sense of number, but it’s not enough to do mathematics. It’s pretty much, you know, the difference between one and two in many. And with math, we refine our psychology of math to do more and more sophisticated math. Likewise, with morality, a lot of the inborn morality doesn’t lead to less violence. It actually leads to more violence.

39:48 For example, the idea that someone who does some harm must be punished, and the idea that what counts as harm is not necessarily hurting another human being, but violating a tribal norm, betraying a coalition, introducing an impure substance into the body, engaging in some impure sexual act. We have a long list of things that people sometimes somewhere can deem immoral, hence deserving of punishment, hence increasing violence, and if you actually reduced violence to just psychopaths getting what they want and eliminating humans that happen to be obstacles on their path, there’d still be a lot of violence left. But you’d get rid of an awful lot of the worst cases in human history, like the Holocaust, like Stalin, like Mao, like Paul Pott, like the wars of religion.

40:39 All of these- But the psychopaths make the news, right? make the news and there’s a strong human tendency to assume that your enemy is a psychopath. Namely he is interested only in causing harm for the sake of it. He’s you know twirling his mustache and cackling about how evil he is. Whereas if you get inside his head he’s thinking that he is advancing morality and bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth and punishing evil doers and we have both sides thinking that about the other side, then you can have an absolute refusal to compromise.

41:17 You can have people refusing to be bribed out of violence. That is, European Union gives you a billion dollars a year to stop the jihad. That makes it even more inflamed because what are you, a whore who is willing to sell out your values for mere money? So I think morality Morality is a big problem, morality in the sense of human moral intuitions. What’s the way around that?

41:44 There has been a slow but an unsteady but unmistakable trend, particularly in the West, but I think globally to try to make people more utilitarian, to think more about, define morality in a much narrower sphere of who gets hurt, who flourishes. So just like when you’re arguing with an older person who thinks that there’s something sinful about homosexuality, you say, look, it doesn’t hurt anyone. There are two people that what they do in private, as long as no one gets hurt, then there can’t be anything wrong with it.

42:18 Now, that is a really radical idea. It just seems so obvious. But it’s not obvious to an untutored human brain. But slowly it wins the day. And to the extent that we become more, think more like utilitarian, it’s almost more like economists what makes people better off in aggregate and have fewer sacred causes then I think humanity goes in a good direction and if you look at things like and but what forces us to go in that direction is when we have to pool our intuitions globally and come to some agreement that involves as many people as possible which is a kind of byproduct of cosmopolitanism and globalization if If I gotta do business with someone from China or someone from Saudi Arabia, I can’t say, well, the way that we’re gonna arrange our affairs is according to the laws of Christianity because, you know, they’re not gonna listen to me.

43:16 They’re not even gonna get off the ground. I gotta appeal to something that applies to all humans. So I’m pushed in that direction of not my sacred scriptures, since nothing can convert the whole word to Christianity where the Muslims can convert the whole world to Islam, that’s never gonna fly. As long as you have to do business, and by business I mean not just economic business, but just anything that you have to cooperate over, that pushes your morality away from these tribal and puritanical concerns toward what makes people better off.

43:52 So I think that’s one of the historical trends. And do you think a superpower needs to be involved? Or like, I hate to say the UN they haven’t been the most effective, but do you think some type of ombud smud needs to get involved in these things? I think something like that, and even though there’s a lot about the UN that’s pretty farcical, like the speech-making at the General Assembly, the fact that the Security Council, five countries including France, has a veto, there’s a lot of silly bits of the UN.

44:23 On the other hand, they do much more good than harm. For one thing, they’re peacekeepers, the guys in the blue helmets. They don’t always work, but on average, they prevent wars from reoccurring, so they save lots of lives and they’re not given enough credit. But studies that look at cases where there have been peacemakers and where there haven’t shown that where the peacemakers are there, they really do make peace on average. Also, just the existence of the UN has set a new norm of international relations, just like what’s done, what’s not done, such as conquest.

44:58 It used to be that if you were a country, what was your goal in life, what was your mission statement? And it’s to conquer more territory, to be as big as possible. And of course you look at history, the borders and the maps go all over the place and Poland gets divided between Germany and Russia. It’s a great YouTube video that shows the history of Europe, continental Europe for 1500 years. Have you seen it?

45:22 Yes. And Poland grabs Lithuania, and then it goes, ugh, and you see it’s fascinating. And Poland vanishes. It’s fascinating. It is absolutely fascinating.

45:29 I totally agree. Okay, so that has changed. So that map, as of 1945, none of the borders move. You get a few splits, so the Union falls apart. Yeah, Germany back together.

45:41 Germany back together again, Czechoslovakia splits into two. But even when they split, the boundaries are sacred. And part of the new norm system that came in around the time of the UN is that a member of the United Nations is immortal, so you don’t conquer them and swallow them up and wipe them off the map. That’s new in human history. And the borders that you have, you’re stuck with.

46:07 No matter how illogical, irrational, they may have been drawn by some drunken British colonial administrator after a couple of scotches. They may make no sense, they may even make a lot of trouble, but they’re grandfathered Now, that leads to a lot of bad stuff. On the other hand, it does lead to almost an elimination of wars fought over territory. So all in all, it’s probably a good deal for the world, and that is part of the regime that came along with the UN.

46:36 Yeah, maybe the Kurds might disagree with you or a few people out there. Oh yeah, lots of African nations, there’s no doubt. Yeah, Uzbekistan and… Oh, you bet. There’s a lot of frozen injustices.

46:47 On the other hand, if we had the war for the liberation of Kurdistan, there’d be an awful lot of dead people that we don’t have. So again, it’s hard to rewind the tape of history and say, granted, the Kurds really should have their own country. On the other hand, if there was a kind of free-for-all, let’s decide who gets their own country and let’s draw borders around them in the United States. Get a sheet in the US, actually. Yeah.

47:13 Where’s Mexico? Exactly. Canada where I come from and so you know good fences make good neighbors and just the fact that you’ve taken conquest off the list of viable options for governments. Governments don’t say should we conquer our neighbors anymore and all in all that’s probably a good thing. What kind of criticism have you got from this book? There’s a lot of well there’s a lot a lot of stuff in the book so different people have different hot buttons. A lot of anthropologists aren’t comfortable with the statistics that I presented suggesting that tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists have higher rates of death and warfare than modern societies. There’s still a strong Rousseau and noble savage ideology among anthropologists. Is it tough to get statistical information about hunter-gatherer? It is. Is it all Papua New Guinea or is it all So a lot of them are from Papua New Guinea, a bunch from Amazonia, but they’re also archaeological studies.

48:15 How many skeletons have, you know, hatchets embedded in skulls, things like that. You talked about that body found in the Andes. Oh yeah, victims of sacrifice or the one found in the Alps, Iceman, Utsi the Iceman. You described what they found on him. It turns out he was a victim of foul play.

48:35 So I think all the numbers show that there’s a range of variation. It’s not that all non-state peoples are violent all the time, but on average, the rates of violence are way, way higher than modern societies. And even when anthropologists have gone after that, but I just challenge them, okay, just give me numbers and I’ll add them to my list. MIT guy. Absolutely an MIT guy.

49:01 There are people who say as long as nuclear weapons continue to exist, we are by definition more violent because we have the capability of killing more people more quickly than ever before and there it depends on what you mean by violent. We do have nuclear weapons but they haven’t been used since Nagasaki. There is a movement to abolish them all, Global Zero, which all of the world’s leaders have signed on to. All? Not Kim Jong-il.

49:31 Yeah, that’s right. You’re right. All the great powers have signed on in principle. Not Kim Jong-un and not the Israelis and Ahmadinejad, not so clear. But it’s quite possible that our children or grandchildren will live in a world without nuclear weapons and Nagasaki will have been the last.

49:55 But on the other hand, it may not. There may be a terrible crisis. It could be that King Jong-un decides it would be a good idea to nuke Seattle, and then who knows what would happen. So I can’t say it won’t happen, but I don’t think the mere existence of nuclear weapons means that we’re more violent if they never get used, which I think is a distinct possibility. It could be abolished someday.

50:16 It could be. Other things, chemical weapons have been formally abolished and haven’t been used for quite some time. Cluster bombs, things like that. Mines. There have been a number of prohibition regimes that seemed utopian at the time, but did take hold.

50:34 Legitimate piracy, that is, I was just in the National Portrait Gallery yesterday. I love that museum. That’s my favorite museum. And there was Sir Francis Drake, and he was famous as a pirate. He’s famous for plundering Spanish ships.

50:49 And it wasn’t like illegal. It was one of your people, Pete. It was a legitimate occupation, though. It was a legitimate occupation. And at the time, you could have said, the world will always have legitimate piracy and privateering, but they abolished it.

51:02 Now, we still got Somali pirates, but interestingly, thanks to a failed state, it’s not legitimate the way it was. Those pirates aren’t gonna get their portraits in the National Portrait Gallery. Maybe not. So it can happen. So it’s the other criticisms.

51:21 It’s undoubtedly a fact that World War II was the most violent event in human history in terms of the number of people killed that we had. The middle of the 20th century had some pretty vicious genocides, Hitler, Stalin, and then in Asia a bit later, it was recently a 78 with Pol Pot. And so fitting that into the chronology, you can spin doctor it in different ways. As a spike, you can… Yeah, I mean, I think it is. I don’t claim that the trajectory of war and genocide really was in decline until 1945.

52:00 I think up until 1945, I would not say that the world saw movement away from war. I mean, I divide violence into different scales. I think homicide and world wars are just different phenomena. the major war followed a different timeline than, say, homicides, or slavery, or disemboweling prisoners. But so you criticize that and say, well, as long as we had a world war as recently as 1945, who’s maybe were just living in a temporary respite, and pressure is building up, and its whole system could blow tomorrow, I give arguments why I don’t think that’s going to happen.

52:39 But I don’t think it can’t happen. I just don’t think it’s very likely. You know, one of our viewers asked a question, and we had a soldier in here about a month and a half ago, British soldier who had spent two tours in Iraq, one tour in Afghanistan, and suffers from a very noticeable case of post-traumatic stress disorder. And, you know, he still has hard times even concentrating on the most basics of things, you know, the bad dreams, he’s very shaky even talking about things.

53:03 And that’s a field that has obviously some very psychological components to it, and it’s a brush with violence. And I was just wondering if you have thoughts PTSD or if that’s something I don’t know that you’ll ever explore more in the future yeah I probably not I don’t think I’ll study it professionally but it’s what we don’t know is whether there’s been an increase in PTSD or we care so much more about veterans that it’s been they get more care more attention their stories are heard whereas in the term wasn’t coined into I think what you You would have called it shell-shocked in World War I era, wouldn’t you? Yeah, he claimed that even the Greeks had a term for it, I think.

53:44 Yes, that’s right, shell-shocked, that’s right, battle fatigue. So I don’t know, we know that the phenomenon has existed always. Whether the rates are higher, we don’t know. In the U.S., certainly some of the increase in rate comes from the fact that if you are diagnosed with PTSD, you get far more attention, far more benefits. a big incentive structure to get that diagnosis, which isn’t to say that the people who have it are malingering or faking it, but it just means that people who are on the borderline in the past would definitely be classified that way today.

54:20 But I think it’s part of a greater concern for people in the military than we used to have. It used to be that we had the expression cannon fodder. No one really cared about the fates of soldiers. Wars were waged without much concern for minimizing casualties, and World War I was the notorious example. 20,000 people killed in the first day of one battle, the Battle of the Somme, the generals who would send men over the top into machine gun fire if they were bored because trench warfare had bogged down too much.

54:57 Now we’ve got far lower rates of death in warfare even when wars are waged. Do you get these ideas like when you’re in a bathtub? This is like four or five years ago and you’re like, honey, I’m going to write this book about violence. No. Okay.

55:14 So I always have like a few ideas floating around as to what my next book is going to be. And then there’s usually some catalyst like, okay, that’s what I’m going to do next. And the catalyst for this one actually came from a blog posting where there’s a website called edge.org run by John Brockman where it’s actually a little bit like the show. He’s got interviews but also written pieces by not all scientists, also philosophers, but with a kind of a science tilt.

55:48 And he also has an annual question where he asks, gets about 100 people to answer some question in a few paragraphs. One year the question is, what are you optimistic about? And I cited a few factoids that I had just come across, like that English homicide rates had come down by more than an order of magnitude, like the fact that the Cold War ended without almost a shot being fired, like the fact that tribal warfare was more destructive proportionally than modern warfare. And I said, well, there are some things to be optimistic about. And then I started to get correspondence from people in other fields that, like the guys who count deaths in war as accurately as possible over time, and they said, oh, you could have mentioned in addition the fact that since 1990 the rate of death and warfare has gone down.

56:42 Historical criminologists who said it wasn’t just England by the way, it was also Italy and Germany and Scandinavia and Switzerland. Colleagues in my own department who said, oh, you could have added rates of spanking and smacking of children, rates of domestic violence, those have come down too. All these things started coming in and I thought, gee, there’s really a big interesting story to be told here because, first of all, people don’t know this. People think the world’s getting more violent.

57:12 And second of all, it’s a really tough and interesting challenge as a psychologist to explain what went right. How could all this change in behavior happen way faster than evolution could change our underlying nature? And so the combination of an interesting message to spread and the challenge of explaining yet. That’s got to be your next book. It strikes me that we’re talking about the cost benefit analysis of violence changing, but the Cold War ending without a shot hinges on the stalemate of both powers possessing nuclear arms. The statistics about less injuries in wars, we’re talking also then about increases in protective armor, changes of tactics, increases in surgical capacity, battlefield surgery and things like that.

58:08 So does the statistics really completely reflect that people are becoming less violent or just that violence is changing and being farmed out as specialists in a way that once upon a time all of us would have been viable soldiers rather than a profession? Yeah, well, I think those are there the answer is both in that one of the ways you can reduce violence given that I don’t think violence will ever go down to zero is you use the least possible to Accomplish what you agree is worth accomplishing. So I mean an obvious example is the police. I’m really glad that police exist. I want them to have Guns and weapons and tasers. I I think that’s a better world than one in which we all have to defend our own safety By the way, I read that you subscribe to some anarchist ideals as a very young man and change your change your mind after the Montreal Police strikes. Absolutely. So I lived through that experiment Are you an anarchist?

59:09 Yeah, okay. Well, I’m going to be with with with Chomsky but yeah, I’ve Continually reviewed my my politics right up to the point where I really don’t know what I stand for I’m just still against a few things. That’s that well Yeah, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t go and say that I’m a I’m a hardcore on it Okay, I think that’s that’s very really admirable not to be an est but to constantly reevaluate it That’s the I think that’s a scientific spirit at its best Let the world tell you whether you’re right or wrong about your convictions as opposed to having like a religious conversion and being a something or other ist all your life.

59:43 But yeah, I lived through, it almost sounds like a philosophical thought experiment. What would happen if the police ever went on strike? Well, the police did go on strike in a very peaceful part of the world, Montreal, where I grew up, and all hell broke loose. There was rioting, there were two murders within the first few hours of the strike till they called in the Mounties to restore order. What year was this?

1:00:05 1969. Okay. So yeah, I think they’re, I think it’s really good that we have the police and they police use violence. That’s what a policeman does. Uh, but it’s much less violence than if you had everyone armed with an AK 47, which by the way is what a lot of my fellow Americans think is a good idea.

1:00:23 I think they’re out to lunch. Uh, so yeah, you outsource your violence, you constrain it, you use as little as possible, you justify that, which you use, uh, and, and it’s all in the service of reducing the aggregate amount of violence worldwide. And a lot of the changes, the particular changes, like you change your battlefield tactics so that you don’t kill as many people to accomplish the same objectives, including battlefield surgery. You’ve got a dollar to spend in the military.

1:00:56 Do you buy more weapons or do you buy higher tech surgery? a choice that armies have increased, at least modern ones, have made increasingly in the direction of bringing our soldiers home alive. So I think a lot of it is technological. I don’t think we’ve become just more moral, but we’re better at applying the morality that we have, and the morality is getting more focused on human life and happiness. I saw an advertisement recently for the RAF that was a recruiting ad.

1:01:27 Yeah, where an operator is monitoring a battlefield scene and spies are rocking about to be launched in a sort of computer game style from afar, launches a strike and the tagline at the end is mission accomplished, zero casualties. So that was being put out there. That’s really good. I’ve got mixed feelings about it because it strikes me as somewhat naive to recruit people on the idea that they’re going to go to war, but not actually have to do any killing.

1:02:01 But on the other hand, it does strike that the modern ideal is warfare with the minimum amount of casualties. So I don’t know quite how I feel about that actually. I think it’s a huge change. I think you put your finger on it and you’re right, look, you’re going to war, you’re going to kill people. There’s no getting around it.

1:02:17 And that’s one of the reasons why there should be as few wars as possible, ideally zero. But it’s still a big difference if there is a war, whether you have indiscriminate bombardment from the air and shelling and massive tank battles. And the difference is, when the shooting is over, how many people get to live the rest of their lives and bring up their children and kiss their wives and enjoy life. And if you’re taking out a rocket launcher as opposed to shelling an entire area, taking out the rocket launcher and 1,000 people, that’s a big difference.

1:02:52 Of course, that is also happening, though, isn’t it? That’s the problem. Well, so this is where you have to count, because it is happening. There have been drone strikes that have wiped out families and weddings, but nonetheless the numbers are way different than in past wars, because there’s much, much less of that. And so that’s another case where if you just read the headlines and you say, does Does it exist, or is it at zero?

1:03:19 You can get a very misleading impression compared to how many people get killed, and I think numbers count because the difference between 100 and 10 is 90 people who get to watch their kids grow up. Yeah, numbers do count, and you see the funeral processions that they drive through the town in Britain, and you see those, and the pictures go to your head, and you hear about all the drone strikes, but then when you run the numbers, which you’re an MIT guy, because you’re seeing thousands, not hundreds of thousands. Yeah, and I think numbers are morality in this case because you know those 90 people are 90 people who or 900 people or 9,000 people or 900,000 people are all human beings who get to enjoy life And the fewer people who are maimed and killed the better You mentioned gun control and I was just wondering how you look at gun control and if also if you could explain it to a a Brit you know yes or a person in the audience who looks at the states and they cannot get in their head why these people won’t give away their guns yeah you live with the Americans you must have a feel for why they don’t want to get away well I live in Massachusetts which is not a not a random sample of the US we do have gun control and and in the United States is several countries yeah not just 50 but but but there’s a big difference between the north and the coasts, as opposed to the south and the southwest.

1:04:41 And you see that in rates of violence, much higher in the south and southwest. You see it in politics, much more conservative, more martial values, valuing military intervention, capital punishment, corporal punishment of children, gun ownership, all much higher in the south and the southwest. to aggregate the figures for the country as a whole. And the United States really is kind of in the trailing edge of a lot of these trends. Europe is ahead of the curve, US a bit behind it.

1:05:16 And this is even true of something like slavery. All the European countries got rid of it. We still had to have a civil war over it. And interestingly, the civil war was north against south. So that persists.

1:05:27 I think the simplest explanation is that until recently, the US, particularly the West, the Wild West was in a state of anarchy. It was the nearest sheriff was 90 miles away if you were lucky and you had a lot of these a lot of the US was settled by kind of gender imbalanced communities that is men, young men. Young men, no government, no women equals trouble and equals violence. It’s like a night out in Britain. Yeah right well and that’s That’s probably, you know, Britain is less violent in the U.S., but when you find violence in Britain, that’s probably where you find it.

1:06:06 Very much. I’ve heard American people express surprise when fistfights break out, and because of the stalemate factor of the presence of guns, they’ve said, oh, no, these people wouldn’t throw a punch because you just produce a gun, and then everybody forces the stalemate. The problem with that is, I think that probably does happen a lot of the time, but when it doesn’t happen, you’ve got a corpse. And so our rates of homicide have come way down, partly because we throw so many people in prison, not entirely.

1:06:41 Our rates have come down to, now it’s about five per hundred thousand per year. UK is more like one to two. And the UK rates have come down as well, but they were never, US at its worst, it was ten. It’s five to ten times higher than a typical European country, including the UK. Just to continue the story, you’ve got young men living in a state of anarchy.

1:07:08 You develop a culture of honor, namely your defense is you’re armed, you’re willing to use it, everyone knows you’re willing to use it. You develop a reputation for toughness and willingness to prove your mettle by not letting anyone get away even with an insult or a dirty look, then you pull out the gun. That kind of got entrenched, so when government did arrive, and especially since it was democratic government, people got the government that they wanted, and the government they wanted was the one that’s going to let them continue to defend themselves as they’ve always defended themselves, namely with their own sense of honor and weapons.

1:07:47 Whereas in Europe, you had the brutal monarchies and basically pacifying the people, then eventually the people got around to making the government democratic. By the time they did, they had already given up their weapons. Whereas in the US, it was more or less democratic from the start, and so Americans wanted to keep their weapons. And built on rebellion. I mean, the whole country was kind of…

1:08:09 Yeah. And so we have the cult… It’s kind of a paradox because Americans are both hyperpatriotic, but still have the idea that any time they wanted to, they could overthrow their own government. So how the ultra patriots and the Second Amendment keep our guns to defend ourselves against tyranny, how those mindsets could coexist in one skull is not obvious, but it does. Is there a solution for this, or at least your opinion on it?

1:08:36 I tend to think the solution will probably come generationally, that guns will appear to be more and more stupid for younger and younger generations and that the gun nuts will die out. You see that happening in other kinds of social change. You see it happening in hunting. By the way, an interesting statistic that people don’t appreciate about the U.S. is even though we’ve got more and more guns than ever, there are fewer and fewer households that have guns.

1:09:03 Hunting has become kind of a thing that old geysers do. Young people just aren’t into hunting. And so the curve of number of households with guns goes down, even though the nuts have more and more of them, but they’re fewer and fewer of those people, and that might be the way that it changes. The other possibility is that when you have crises like the recent shootings in Connecticut and in Colorado, that people often will make a change in the wake of a crisis, even though So the crisis doesn’t kill as many people as the day-to-day murders that we live with, but something that makes a lot of news can sometimes be a crisis that the politicians don’t let go to waste.

1:09:46 Yeah, sometimes, although they haven’t seemed to jump on the last five or ten. True. But it’s a tough, well, it’s tough. I have a family in Arizona, and I visited there, and it’s just interesting to talk to them, and they will get quite vehement when you talk about them giving up their guns, And they take it very personally and very seriously, and it’s like an inborn right. Well, see, what can happen is, and this is the – It’s a constitutional right, isn’t it?

1:10:10 And it’s a constitutional right. It is. But they believe it even – I mean, they believe it’s a – Well, also, it’s how the Constitution is interpreted, where you could have read the Second Amendment as saying that – I mean, it literally says, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, in words to that effect. You could interpret it as saying, it licenses states having militias, but it doesn’t license necessarily citizens having a revolver in their dresser drawer, but that is the way the Supreme Court recently interpreted it.

1:10:40 But the bit of psychology that gets involved here is that certain issues just get moralized, and what they actually mean literally is beside the point that this is what my tribe holds It’s sacred and you challenge that, you challenge the legitimacy of my people and so the same kinds of intractability that you get in the Middle East where you have a sacred site, I mean what does that mean? What does that have to do with bringing up your kids in peace and happiness or this bit of land, that bit of land? But you stake your identity on it and you just can’t compromise.

1:11:22 Being a, you know, a quizzling or a whore if you give up on it. And in some parts of the U.S., gun rights have become a sacred cause that are beyond cost-benefit calculations. It’s kind of like, you know, I ask you how much would you, you know, how much would you sell your child for? And you don’t come back and you say, well, what are you offering? You’re saying, I’m offended you would even raise the question. Now, it doesn’t mean that it’s permanent because we are, fortunately, all hypocrites. And they’re sometimes, you There’s that old joke, a little bit old-fashioned about the man who says to the woman, would you sleep with me for $1 million?

1:12:01 She said, gee, $1 million? I don’t know. I don’t have to think about it. He said, would you sleep with me for $100? She says, what kind of woman do you think I am?

1:12:10 And he says, we’ve already established that. We’re just haggling over price. So that captures a little bit sexist by today’s standards, but it captures a crucial feature of our psychology, namely that there are certain categorical distinctions that are sacred, that under the right circumstance we can rethink if the price is right. And that hypocrisy might be the hope for all of us. Wow.

1:12:37 Like an MIT economist would say there actually is a price for that baby. Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s economists really offend people, the economist’s way of thinking. But I think it’s undervalued. There’s something there, you know, if the regression analysis there is and if the people in the Middle East could be bribed away from their sacred values there’d be people who are alive and prosperous who now are would be you know killed or Impoverished, but they would cut the check if they can make We get people to accept the check I think on average would be better off my colleague Michael Sandell would have a fit He just wrote a book arguing the exact opposite that there’s just too much economic thinking but I think we could actually use more of it okay I’m a utilitarian in that sense you know I was wondering if you could tell us even what is a typical week like for you at Harvard University did do you walk in with your crimson robes on the trumpets and April Fool’s Day maybe okay the typical day is very different when the semester is in session versus the rest of the year. Do you teach? Oh yeah, big time. Undergrads, grads? I teach psychological science, of course, that has anywhere from 200 to 300 undergraduates in it, so I lecture to a big lecture hall. Okay.

1:13:59 And I organize the graduate seminar for one of the tracks in our department, cognition, brain, and behavior. So I lecture and get my, schedule my colleagues to give lectures. I make appearances in team-taught courses, and I do a lot of undergraduate events. The Undergraduate Mind-Brain Behavior Society, the Futurist Society, the Secular Humanists, the Hillel Jewish Student Society, pretty much whoever asks me. So I do… Why do you do that with undergrads?

1:14:35 Because you don’t have to do that. You could be writing books and giving TED Talks. Well, two reasons. One of them is, I get a paycheck from Harvard and I figure that’s what they pay me for, but also it’s actually, it would probably do it even if, well I guess it isn’t required if I didn’t do it, no one’s keeping track as far as I know, except for the undergraduate teaching that really isn’t the contract. But I also, on top of that, just the duty to my institution, in 40 years I’m going to be dead.

1:15:09 But the ideas that I think are interesting that I’m hoping to enrich, I kind of hope that they’ll survive. If they do survive, the only way they’re going to survive is that people who aren’t going to be dead in 40 years, to which younger people know about them, and so you can’t believe in ideas and the value of ideas and the value of science and explanation and rationality without wanting to share them with younger people. That’s part of the package of thinking that ideas are a good thing in the first place.

1:15:42 So I do feel a responsibility to share it, well, with people in general, and that includes younger people. Does it also help you keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening with that younger generation? Yes, and that’s something that I should have mentioned as well, that I think part Part of being wise, part of being a scholar, part of being a scientist, is recognizing being alert to your own limitations. The reason that in science we have experiments, we have peer review, we’ve got open criticism, we at least pretend that ideas are what count, not authority.

1:16:19 The esteemed, fancy professor has to take a question from an undergraduate and take it seriously and defend it with the best possible evidence, even if it’s some underling. That’s the whole value system, that the people are apt to defend things for personal reasons and that if you want to advance knowledge, you’ve got to minimize all of this psychology that’s a big nuisance, ego, investment in your own ideas, sacred values. things up for grabs. And so part of that is there are things that are going to be obvious to me. And as I get older, they’re going to still be obvious just because I’m the same person. And it is going to be younger people who weren’t brought up in the same way who are going to have ideas that I’m going to find offensive, some of which are probably going to be true. And if I’m serious about what I’m doing, I’ve got to listen. And sometimes going to be painful and probably I’ll go to my grave defending wrong ideas which seem right to me just because I am a human being and the younger people challenging them are going to be right and I’m going to be wrong but the more I try however with however much difficulty it’s going to take to take those ideas seriously probably the more correct my ideas are going to be.

1:17:43 Sounds like a House of Commons debates where you know these people like the Prime Minister have to constantly be accountable. Yeah exactly right now Now that’s great theatre for an American. Our senatorial proceedings have much more decorum, but on the other hand they also get locked into a lot of bad decisions. So yeah, that’s absolutely right. How do you keep your ego in check?

1:18:06 How are you able to look at the fact that I’m an aging Steven Pinker and then I know that by definition some of my ideas are going to be obsolete and yet I’m still going to cling on them because of my ego. How do you keep that in check? it’s not totally up to me, so I do, you know, reviewers will review my books and other scientists will review my papers and they’ll ding them if they think they’re bad and I’ll be enraged and furious and offended and insulted and there’s just nothing I can do about it.

1:18:35 I think there are a number of injustices but it doesn’t matter if they’re going to happen anyway. So all in all, it’s the system that’s going to keep my ego in check. And I do what I can, that is, I keep trying to remind myself, well, maybe your opponents have a point, probably not as successfully as I should, and fortunately the world is set up so that I don’t always get my way. Yeah. No, no, that’s true.

1:19:01 I think we’re slowly running out of time here. Just a quick question for you. What’s next for you? After the book on violence is going to be something completely different, but related to my general interest in language, and this is going to be a writing style manual. That is, how do you write more clearly and stylishly?

1:19:19 How do you avoid sounding like an academic? How do you avoid sounding like a corporate hack, like a bureaucrat, like a lawyer, and write things that people will enjoy reading and get your message effectively? And the advice will be not just from my own personal experience, but from my field, namely linguistics and cognitive science. What do we know about how the mind works and how language works that could be translated into advice on how to write more clearly, and also how should a writer deal with matters of correct usage and grammar.

1:19:55 There are people who will tell you that you should never say, hopefully the rain will stop, that that’s a terrible grammatical error, or to use epicenter as meaning cause of a great change. How do you, given that the language is always changing, given that we don’t have an academy that actually legislates on these matters, what’s a writer to do? So that’s the kind of question that I’ll take up in this book. That’s very different for you. Very different. It does involve the kind of decisions that I make as a writer, but also involves practical applications of all of the theoretical material that I’ve always been thinking about.

1:20:34 Wow, I saw a lecture you were doing on linguistics and you were talking about a lot of incorrect grammar and how in your mind that was only because I think the north of England and the south of England had the wrong way of saying something and it just mattered because someone was in power that we have this correct. Absolutely. And then like Ebonics which is you know a controversial way of certain African Americans speak in the US and how you’re saying well it can be quite functional.

1:20:58 Yeah, so one of the lessons is that what we think of as correct and incorrect is is partly just what got standardized. If the capital of England was in the North instead of in London, then a lot of the things that we now consider correct would be considered slang and vice versa. Likewise, if it was African Americans who wrote the Declaration as opposed to European Americans, then a lot of what’s called Black English or Ebonics, like he be working, would be correct.

1:21:27 So some of it’s arbitrary. It’s still a standard. And just like driving on the right or driving on the left, you really, in certain contexts, you gotta know what the standard is and abide by it while recognizing that it’s partly arbitrary. There was a bit of an industry wasn’t there with the emergence of the middle class to create rules in order to sell books and so important like irrelevant rules from Latin and things like that about not ending a sentence with a proposition and stuff like that.

1:21:53 Absolutely, yes, that’s absolutely correct. And yeah, with the rise of the professional middle class, there was exactly that. So some of the rules are just stupid and they should just be eliminated because they don’t make writing any clearer or more graceful but they just come from this period that you just spoke of, yes. Wow, Stephen, how do people get ahold of your book? How do they get in touch with you?

1:22:16 You’re quite a Twitterer, is that right? I’m something of a Twitterer, yes, so I try to tweet whenever I come across something interesting that I think would be interesting to other people. I don’t comment, I don’t have a running commentary through the day, I find those Twitter feeds pretty tedious, but I’m pretty easy to reach. My books are sold in stores now, as well as being available from online booksellers. And yeah, I’m not hard to find.

1:22:45 Okay, yeah, I think it’s at Pinker on Twitter and they have the website. www.stevenpinker.com. Stevenpinker.com, yeah. Fantastic, it was a complete pleasure having you here. It was better than I expected.

1:22:59 Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I hope you enjoy the kind of the trial log, you know, it’s a great, it’s a great format. Yeah, I enjoyed it very much. It’s lots of fun.

1:23:08 Fantastic. Well, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, if you click the subscribe button, we’d appreciate if you want to see the extremely good looking Steven Pinker, you can come to our YouTube channel, which is London Real TV. And you can see the three of us, Peter as well. And lots of good looking people, you know, getting better looking every day. And we’re also on Twitter, Facebook, London realers.

1:23:28 And I would say we do a Reddit Q&A for Steven, but you just did one recently. So if you want to get more info about Steven, you can check that out on Reddit. And that’s it. Thanks. Thanks, guys.

1:23:40 I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. All right. Take care.