#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene in the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pulya Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
#
Kickass podcast in Hindi.
#
A few days ago, my aunt in the US wrote to me.
#
She's visiting India at the end of January after many years and wanted to know what gift
#
I assured her that I wanted nothing but she insisted, saying that she was going to get
#
me a gift anyway and it might as well be something I wanted that I could not get in India.
#
I grew up as a kid in the 1980s and in those days when our relatives visited from America,
#
they would come laden with unimaginable, almost magical goodies.
#
There was so much that you did not get in India.
#
But now, racking my brains, I can't think of anything that I could not get here.
#
Clothes, electronics, perfumes, books, music, hell, everything is available here.
#
Finally, I asked my aunt to get me some assault rifles.
#
But in a larger sense, this got me to thinking how much my world has changed.
#
Back in the day, we used to scramble even to listen to good music.
#
We'd spend days sourcing music and getting mixtapes made and every new song we gathered
#
We had limited ways of watching movies from around the world and I remember how eagerly
#
we'd tune in to watch the one eclectic film per week that Doordarshan showed in a late
#
People often speak of how the film in which Annie gives it those ones was shown only once
#
Well, I remember watching it that one time.
#
As I'm sure do many other Indian kids my age, there was nothing else.
#
Today we can play any song we want to on Google Play or Amazon Prime or Apple Music.
#
We can stream a whole world of movies and the technology on our phone today is the science
#
I think it was my friend Uday Shankar who once said that the next generation will not
#
know what it is like to get lost.
#
That's right GPS Zindabad, though as a caveat, battery is Mordabad.
#
But battery life aside, our lives are just bloody astonishing and we take all this progress
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
My guest today is Steven Pinker, who I regard as one of the great public intellectuals of
#
our times and someone who's been a huge personal influence on me.
#
My favorite book by Pinker is The Blank Slate, which shone a light on what exactly human
#
nature is and where it comes from and gave me a deep sense of the contingency of my existence
#
and my personality and my identity.
#
All that is a recipe for humility, but it also gave me a sense of awe and wonder at
#
the complexity of the machinery in our brains.
#
But the book that is the subject of this episode is his latest book, Enlightenment Now, which
#
demonstrates using exhaustive data how the world has gotten better across every metric
#
that we can possibly think of and how we need to respect enlightenment values if we are
#
to preserve and enhance his fragile progress.
#
I met Steven at the sidelines of the recent Times Literary Festival in Mumbai and we recorded
#
in a makeshift studio we set up at the venue, so please do excuse us for any sound disturbances.
#
Also I'd originally requested a two-hour interview.
#
He promised me an hour instead, but due to unavoidable circumstances, he needed to wrap
#
So I couldn't quite manage to unwind into the sort of long leisurely conversation I
#
like, but 40 minutes with Steven Pinker is still 40 minutes of enlightenment now.
#
Who can complain about that?
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and get right into the conversation.
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Stephen, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
#
Stephen, when I'm with my friends, I often ask them a question about what book changed
#
the way they think about the world.
#
And when the question comes back on me, my answer often is a blank slate, which of course
#
I want to turn the question back to you today.
#
What is a book or what are the books which changed the way you view the world?
#
For me, there was not a single book.
#
I've written on many topics, and so my worldview on each one of these topics was shaped by
#
And also, I tend not to be influenced by one thought reader or one theory.
#
I'm pretty eclectic, so there's usually a set of books that influences me.
#
When it comes to the topic of my most recent book, Enlightenment Now, probably the single
#
book that influenced me the most might have been David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity,
#
which put the whole idea of progress and enlightenment in a coherent framework.
#
But I was also influenced by books on global economic development, Charles Kenny's Getting
#
Better, Hans Rosling's podcasts, and Ted Talks and his recent book Factfulness.
#
For the changes in war, I was influenced by the books of a political scientist named John
#
So, it's always hard for me to pin down one book.
#
For other topics such as how the mind works, I was influenced by the writings of John Tooby
#
and Leta Cosmides, the evolutionary psychologists who are friends of mine, and Richard Dawkins
#
In the case of the language instinct, I was influenced by, of course, the writings of
#
Noam Chomsky, such as Language and Mind, Reflections on Language, both of which I read when I was
#
a student, as well as books by the founders of psycholinguistics, that is the merger of
#
linguistics with psychology, such as George Miller and one of my advisors, Roger Brown.
#
And in your book, you started by saying that the thinkers of the Enlightenment court laid
#
that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual
#
men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion, stop
#
code, basically thinking in terms of individuals.
#
And you point out three processes which make it possible, entropy, evolution, and information.
#
In fact, you just mentioned John Tooby, and one of the memorable quotes of your book is
#
when the title of a paper by him, The Second Law of Thermodynamics, is the first law of
#
So tell me a bit about why is entropy your central concept?
#
Because I think there are discoveries of science that ought to be fundamental to our understanding
#
of the human condition, just who we are, where we came from, what are our challenges.
#
Entropy is one of them, the concept originally derived from thermodynamics, that because
#
there are so many more ways in which things can be disordered or random or useless and
#
ordered or structured or useful, over the natural course of events, things go from orderly
#
to chaotic, to random, to disordered, unless there is the application of energy and knowledge
#
information that can create circumscribed zones of order or structure, even if the universe
#
as a whole is more disordered, but at least in parts of the world close to us, it can
#
be more ordered, such as growing food, such as making shelters, such as fighting decay.
#
So entropy being one of a number of concepts that are fundamental to our understanding
#
of reality, that were developed after the Enlightenment.
#
The Enlightenment thinkers by no means thought of everything.
#
And what entropy means is that we should realize that human effort is, that human knowledge
#
are always necessary, even to preserve the life that we enjoy now, let alone to make
#
a better life, that we don't need to find evil people or forces or demons that are trying
#
to make life difficult for us, that life being difficult is just what happens because of
#
the laws of the universe, unless we combat it.
#
Evolution is another idea that is critical to understanding the human condition, also
#
only discovered after the Enlightenment, namely that what makes us what we are, the process
#
of natural selection, did not shape us to live in harmony, to be happy, to be healthy.
#
Rather, evolution is driven by competition, amoral competition.
#
And so human nature was what was selected to prosper in that competition and therefore
#
human nature by itself does not incline us to be particularly wise or beneficial just
#
Now that includes abilities such as cognition, reason, problem solving.
#
That includes emotions like empathy, sympathy, self-control, that we can try to co-opt and
#
strengthen to improve our life.
#
But only if we decide to enhance those parts of our nature can we expect human life to
#
And then the third concept is information, just the idea that order, non-randomness knowledge
#
can be measured, can be explained in terms of material carriers of information, such
#
as brains, such as communications media.
#
So we can understand the whole world of knowledge, ideas in a rigorous way that does not contradict
#
the idea that we are hunks of matter that were produced by evolution because we know
#
that physical objects can be processors of information, including brains.
#
And you know, you talk about progressophobia, what you call, and there's a great quote from
#
you where you say, start quote, intellectuals hate progress.
#
Intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress.
#
It's not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you.
#
Most pundits, critics, and their biopensor readers use computers rather than quills and
#
inquills and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it.
#
That's the idea of progress that rankles a chattering class.
#
The enlightenment believed that by understanding the world, we can improve the human condition,
#
Why do intellectuals hate progress?
#
Some of it is, has not always been true, and of course, it's not true of all intellectuals.
#
But there does seem to be a major strain of intellectual thought of people who write op-eds
#
in newspapers, social critics, authors of books.
#
Part of it is just professional competition.
#
Most intellectuals aren't in charge of running things.
#
They aren't in charge of delivering clean water or curing disease or policing the streets
#
It's very easy to criticize society, which is a way of criticizing other elites, other
#
professionals that everyone else is failing but them.
#
They're here to point out the failings of their professional rivals.
#
I think that's one reason.
#
Another is that many of the processes that have improved the human condition don't necessarily
#
consist of what intellectuals deal with, verbally articulated propositions.
#
No one voted for the Industrial Revolution.
#
No one even understands exactly why it was an increase in peace and a decline in war
#
Things that take place gradually through distributed knowledge are markets or another example,
#
natural languages as they develop over the course of history.
#
Many intellectuals distrust processes of order that weren't designed and implemented according
#
to the principles laid down by intellectuals.
#
Like Adam Ferguson said, a lot of human progress comes from human action, not human design.
#
Just perhaps think in a top-down way rather than understand the bottom-up spontaneous
#
order which leads to markets, language, and so much progress.
#
Now, in some cases, it really was the verbally articulated propositions of intellectuals
#
that did lead to progress, such as in the design of democracy in the United States around
#
the time of the founders, such as scientific theories that were put into practice, such
#
as vaccination and the germ theory of disease.
#
So it's not as if everything arises just from spontaneous cooperation, but aspects of human
#
progress that were not planned tend to be dismissed by many intellectuals.
#
You also point out to a number of biases like the optimism gap, the availability bias, and
#
the negativity bias that we tend to perceive the world as being worse than it is.
#
You have a great chart in your book which shows how media coverage, even as the world
#
is getting better, media coverage gets more and more negative.
#
As a journalist, we are always taught to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,
#
but obviously bad news sells and no one's reporting that, hey, nothing happened today.
#
People were, everything was peaceful.
#
Yes, and there are certain distortions that are just built into the nature of journalism
#
that will affect people's perception of the world.
#
We know that people's perception of risk and danger and probability is driven by available
#
examples in memory, the availability heuristic it's called, and what journalism delivers
#
is available instances for memory, explosions and gaffs and disasters, things that are media
#
genic tend to be bad because bad things can happen very quickly.
#
Good things tend to build up gradually such as the reduction in, say, global extreme poverty
#
which is declined by about 137,000 people per day.
#
That can add up over 30 years to a billion and a quarter people who have escaped from
#
extreme poverty, a major transformation of the world that people are unaware of because
#
there was never a Thursday in October in which it happened all of a sudden, it just gradually
#
But together with these inherent distorting factors, just because of the nature of journalism,
#
there is also part of the culture of journalism that puts negativity as a kind of a moral
#
That if journalists report anything that's going well, they're now considered to be corporate
#
public relations hacks or government propagandists.
#
It's almost considered to be against journalistic ethics to report what goes well, and that
#
the mission of journalism is to expose how the world is terrible and getting worse.
#
Now, of course, journalism obviously has to report the disasters, the crises, the catastrophes,
#
but if it's biased in that direction, then I have argued that it can lead to outcomes
#
that are worse than mere complacency.
#
It can lead to fatalism, to people thinking, well, if things just get worse and worse no
#
matter how many efforts have been applied to making it better, well, what's the point
#
of trying to make things better?
#
Let's just enjoy ourselves individually while we can, because hopes for reform are futile.
#
It can also lead to radicalism, to people just giving up on institutions of liberal
#
democracy saying, let's just destroy it all because anything that replaces it is bound
#
to be better than what we have now.
#
Or to leaders who promise, only I can solve the problems, only I can fix it.
#
The entire establishment is so corrupt that you need to vote in someone who is powerful
#
and charismatic like me.
#
So I agree with you, of course, but there's also the dilemma that I'm an editor as well.
#
And let's say you're the editor of a large newspaper.
#
What do you tell your people?
#
How do you change this culture?
#
Because ultimately for your newspaper to survive, you've got to print news that people want
#
to read and you're catering to human nature in a sense.
#
Well, although it's not as if mainstream newspapers have hit on a formula for financial
#
success over the last 10 years, and a lot of people say that they now, a majority, according
#
to a Reuters poll, say that the news depresses them so much that they simply avoid it altogether.
#
There are data that suggests that even if the negative stories get more clicks, that
#
positive stories, at least stories that involve some positive affect tend to last longer.
#
They have a longer tail and they are more likely to lead people to sign up and subscribe.
#
So it may not be true that the only way to keep up clicks and eyeballs is to report disasters.
#
Let's talk about enlightenment.
#
Now, you've got a great, you know, you quote a great question that Amos Tversky asked you,
#
which is quote, how much better can you imagine yourself feeling than you're feeling right
#
How much worse can you imagine yourself feeling, stop quote.
#
And obviously, you know, when I read this, it was like, I can imagine myself a little
#
bit better, but not really too much.
#
And there's no end to how much worse I can be.
#
Which kind of illustrates the thesis of your book that the world has just gotten so much
#
Well, it illustrates how a feature of human psychology that often leaves us unappreciative
#
of the progress that's taken place, Tversky's observation about our emotional life, a feature
#
of our psychology, sometimes called the negativity bias, probably reflects the law of entropy
#
that we talked about earlier, namely, there really are more things that can go wrong than
#
And the things that can go wrong can hurt you a lot more than things that go right can
#
So there is an adaptive design to being more capable of feeling pain, more sensitive, or
#
vigilant for disaster, because there really are a lot of ways things can go wrong.
#
And in addition to loss aversion, it's just a packaged deal that is...
#
And what it leaves us ill-equipped to do is appreciate the kind of global and national
#
changes that can best be appreciated by data, by a more global synoptic view that aren't
#
things that naturally occur to us, but that we can best appreciate through data.
#
Although, of course, we also appreciate them in our day-to-day life.
#
Those of us who've lived long enough know that it really is better that you can stream
#
a movie whenever you want than have to wait for years for it to show up at a theater,
#
that the dentistry is approved, that medical procedures have approved.
#
Many procedures now don't require cutting a person open, but can be done endoscopically.
#
So we do tend to notice these things, but they don't leave as much of an impact on our
#
mood and our psychology as they should, if you consider them objectively.
#
And what you've done in the very comprehensive second section of Enlightenment now is you've
#
looked at all the different parameters that you can use for judging human welfare, like
#
life, health, wealth, and so on, and shown how across all of them, things have got better.
#
Let's just skip through them one by one very quickly.
#
In your chapter on life, I was very struck by this Johann Norberg quote about Kenya,
#
where he's talking about Kenya between the years 2003 and 2013.
#
And he says, quote, after having lived, loved, and struggled for a whole decade, the average
#
person in Kenya had not lost a single year of the remaining lifetime.
#
Everyone got 10 years older, yet death had not come a step closer, which, stop quote,
#
which basically means in those 10 years, the life expectancy went up by 10 years.
#
No, it is quite striking how, particularly in poor countries, how much life has improved
#
in a way that most Westerners and citizens of rich countries don't appreciate.
#
Because we're stuck with our images from the 1970s of the African kids with the swollen
#
bellies, of them surrounded by flies, and of the beggars with the bulls.
#
And we don't appreciate how much both health and prosperity and education, all three of
#
those have increased in poorer countries.
#
And when I talk about life expectancy going up, people often tell me that, oh, it's because
#
child mortality rates are gone.
#
But as you show through all your graphs in that particular chapter, it's not just that
#
child mortality rates have gone down.
#
Across the board, even life expectancy for people reaching 50, for people who reach 65,
#
across the board, life expectancy has just shot up.
#
Yes, which is important.
#
I did check that because, of course, averages can be misleading.
#
And it was simply that more babies were surviving.
#
Well, every time a baby survives, you're adding many decades onto the average.
#
And so that could be misleading, even though, of course, that itself would be a tremendous
#
moral progress if we prevented children from dying.
#
But it's even better than that in that, as you summarized it accurately, a 60-year-old
#
has more years of life ahead of them now than a 60-year-old several decades ago.
#
Let's go to your chapter on Chris.
#
I was struck by the Chris Rock quote there.
#
This is the first society in history, and obviously he's talking about America, not
#
This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.
#
Yes, rather the kind of tactless but accurate comment that only a comedian can get away
#
with, although nowadays even comedians can't get away with them.
#
But yes, obesity is a terrible problem in rich countries.
#
But as problems go, it's certainly better than malnutrition and starvation.
#
And you also write about how knowledge grows energy.
#
One example of that being Norman Bollock's Green Revolution, where you write, quote,
#
thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used
#
to need to produce a given amount of food.
#
Another way of stating this bounty is that between 1961 and 2009, the amount of land
#
used to grow food increased by 12%.
#
But the amount of food that was increased grew by 300%.
#
Yes, and it's not only a benefit to humanity to have more available food.
#
But it's also a benefit to the ecosystem, to the environment, the planet, a newer approach
#
to environmental protection, sometimes called ecomodernism or ecopragmatism, which is different
#
from the traditional green movement.
#
Green movement tends to argue that we have to reduce our consumption, slow down or reverse
#
economic growth with a more frugal lifestyle closer to nature.
#
And what we know is people don't want to do that, especially people in poor countries
#
who quite rightly want to get rich or at least want to achieve the standard of living that
#
countries in the US enjoy.
#
The ecomodernist movement says that what we should aim to do to protect the planet, which
#
we must do, it is an imperative, is to achieve the greatest human benefit with least environmental
#
And a lot of that requires densification, getting the same human benefit with less land
#
so that the land that is not exploited by humans can be preserved or even revert back
#
to a natural situation.
#
So that includes more intensive agriculture, that is growing more food on less land, which
#
means not more organic agriculture, but higher tech agriculture, especially bred, hybrid
#
varieties, genetically modified organisms, precision agriculture of the kind developed
#
in Israel that delivers the least amount of water and fertilizer to exactly where it's
#
needed, when it's needed.
#
And as farms contract, forests expand, which is a good thing.
#
Likewise, cities are good for the environment because you have people concentrated on less
#
It means that more land can revert to natural conditions.
#
It also means that people use less energy because if you live in a city, you can walk
#
a block to get a quart of milk.
#
You don't have to get in your car and drive several miles as Americans often do.
#
It means that there's less energy expended in heating homes in the winter because if
#
people live in apartment buildings and one person's ceiling is another person's floor
#
and the heat can be shared, it means that you're just spending less time in cars
#
and more shorter trips or pedestrian traffic.
#
So general cities, paradoxically, are good for the environment.
#
And also the general advantages of urbanization that you have denser economic networks, therefore
#
you have more specialization, more division of labor, more wealth.
#
The next chapter is on wealth where you go back to entropy and about how poverty is like
#
the default condition, which people don't understand.
#
People often feel entitled to wealth, not knowing that poverty is really the default
#
And you quote the economist Peter Barr here saying, poverty has no causes.
#
And then you lay out some of these causes for us.
#
And that is a consequence of entropy and evolution.
#
Entropy is, of course, that in general things that we find useful because they are highly
#
structured like food, as opposed to sand or dust, don't arise by themselves.
#
They require special processes, including the input of energy, sunlight, and fertilizer.
#
And that evolution implies that our sources of food will be exploited by other organisms,
#
And so the creation of wealth always requires a struggle.
#
Left to itself, the natural state of humanity is poverty, deprivation, and disease.
#
And from here, even a lot of people who accept that, yes, we are much wealthier, however
#
you measure this, often argue that there's greater and greater inequality.
#
And whenever I talk about inequality, for example, the hypothetical question I ask is,
#
in which of these two countries would you rather be poor, Bangladesh or USA?
#
And of course, people would rather be poor in USA, but the USA has far higher levels
#
And you illustrated this with a story about two guys called Boris and Igor.
#
Yes, it's an old story that was told in the Soviet Union of two dirt poor farmers, barely
#
able to scratch out a living.
#
The only difference between them is that Igor had a goat, a scrawny goat.
#
One day a fairy godmother appears to Boris, says, I will grant you one wish.
#
He said, I wish that Igor's goat should die.
#
That captures, first of all, the intuition that equality is not inherently a virtue if
#
it consists of simply depriving people who have more without benefiting those who have
#
It also captures the mindset of life under communism in which there was a greater desire
#
to let everyone be equally miserable than that some people are happy or well fed, even
#
We'll take a quick commercial break, we'll come back in just a minute.
#
Welcome to another awesome week on the IVM Podcast Network.
#
If you're not following us on social media, please make sure that you do.
#
We're IVM Podcasts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
#
We had a Christmas party in the office last week and you can see pictures of that on our
#
So please do make sure that you do check it out.
#
On CIDRUS says, CIDRUS, Abbas and I do a 2018 rewind edition of Cock and Bull.
#
The year's biggest political stories, controversies, sporting triumphs to viral memes, we try and
#
pack it all in an hour.
#
I don't think we made it.
#
On Advertising is Dead, Varun and Karthik Nagaraj and Chief Content Officer at WaveMaker
#
recap the year in advertising and give their predictions for 2019.
#
On Simplify tune into part two of their year end special with special guest Tony Sebastian.
#
On Thalle Harata, our Kannada podcast host Pawan Srinath talks about how the internet
#
can be a scary place as nefarious plots are hatched against companies, governments and
#
people online all the time.
#
On the year end special of Woody Wattpecker, Rachel takes a look back at the most popular
#
This week on Puliyabazi Pranay discusses the impact that space research has on an aspirational
#
society and why the argument poor nation shouldn't spend on luxuries like space exploration makes
#
And guys, it's been a great 2018 and we hope you enjoyed your journey with IVM.
#
We're looking forward to bigger and better things in 2019.
#
Please do tell a friend about the podcast that you've enjoyed.
#
Try and spread the word.
#
That's very important for us.
#
And with that, let's continue on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Steven Pinko.
#
Steven, in your chapter about the environment, which is something that people have great
#
legitimate worries about, and there's a great quote by Stewart Brand, quote, no product
#
of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist.
#
You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground and
#
hammer it into perpetual early succession.
#
You bust a sod, flatten it white and drench it with vast quantities of constant water.
#
When you populate it with uniform, mono-chips will profoundly damage plants incapable of
#
Every food plant is a pathetic, narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years
#
to a state of genetic idiocy.
#
These plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them,
#
And yet everybody wants organic food, naturally grown food.
#
Yes, and organic food is terrible for the environment because it uses so much more land.
#
That was Stewart Brand, who is kind of a hero to the counterculture and the whole organic,
#
I think, small movement in the 1970s when he published the famous book, The Whole Earth
#
Catalog, often considered a predecessor of the World Wide Web, although it was on paper.
#
And he changed his mind.
#
He's an environmental activist, but then in his book, Whole Earth Discipline, he helped
#
found the movement of eco-modernism by arguing that what's best for the environment is density.
#
It's people having less of a footprint on the environment, and that includes growing
#
more food on less land.
#
And for those who worry that the environment is getting worse, you also talk about the
#
environmental Kuznets curve, where things appear to get worse as far as the environment
#
is concerned, but after a while when societies get more prosperous and they start caring
#
more about the air around them, it gets better again.
#
It is a general trend, it doesn't happen by itself as no kind of progress happens by itself,
#
but as countries do get more developed and richer, they devote more of their resources
#
to protecting the environment, to pollution control devices, to laws and enforcing those
#
laws, and their citizens' values change.
#
If the main thing you're worried about is getting electricity, then you can put up with
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a certain amount of environmental damage.
#
Your top priority is cooking your food and heating your home and lighting your lights,
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even to the point that the worst forms of pollution are those suffered by poor countries
#
such as indoor cooking smoke, such as contaminated water.
#
As countries get wealthier, they can devote their attention to the worst kinds of pollution,
#
namely indoor cooking smoke and contaminated water, but also to the cleanliness of their
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harbors and rivers and atmosphere, and they can start enforcing laws to curb pollution.
#
This is certainly obvious to an American visiting Mumbai, as we are now, where looking out the
#
window we can barely see the skyline of the city just a couple of miles away because of
#
the thick smog, which you'd never see in an American city, although of course American
#
cities in the 1950s and 1960s were notorious for their smog, but then because of technology
#
and laws and regulations, American and European cities have managed to bring the rate of air
#
pollution considerably down.
#
If you think Bombay is bad, you should go to Delhi.
#
You also talk about how sort of technology, we kind of take technology for granted and
#
assume when we're extrapolating for the future that it's going to stay as it is, but we keep
#
You point out how throughout history there's been this process of decarbonization.
#
To quote again from your book, quote, the oldest hydrocarbon fuel, dry wood has a ratio
#
of combustible carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms of about 10 to one.
#
The coal which replaced it during the industrial revolution has a ratio of two to one.
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A petroleum fuel such as kerosene may have one to two.
#
Natural gas is composed mainly of methane with a ratio of one to four.
#
We are just getting better and better and more and more efficient and part of it is
#
of course that as the costs of all of those earlier fuels rise, people innovate.
#
People innovate and people when they can afford it, they don't want to breathe polluted air
#
and they figure out ways of getting the energy they need with less pollution.
#
If they recognize that pollution is a problem and if they apply their ingenuity to reducing
#
it, that could continue with the development of both renewable energy sources like solar
#
and wind and the development of nuclear power which in another heresy of the eco-modernist
#
movement, many eco-modernists are advocates of nuclear power as the most abundant scalable
#
form of zero carbon energy.
#
Even though nuclear has a terrible reputation, it actually is extraordinarily safe compared
#
to coal and oil and gas which kill far more people every single year and of course nuclear
#
power does not generate CO2.
#
Now it may be that we need within the next couple of decades, a whole new generation
#
of nuclear technology, the so-called fourth generation, small modular reactors that are
#
much less expensive, much less prone to accidents than existing reactors and it may be that
#
that technology will be the next leap in the process of decarbonization if we encourage
#
That also explains why you make a very convincing case for why nuclear energy is something that
#
is unnecessarily given a bad rap and you also talk about the false binary between environment
#
One did not come at the cost of the other.
#
Yes, there are some areas in which there is some tension but with technology, with knowledge,
#
we can apply human ingenuity to figure out how to get more human benefits with less environmental
#
It won't happen by itself, it has to be a goal to reduce the environmental damage but
#
that does tend to become a goal as people satisfy their most basic needs of just feeding
#
themselves and their children and getting to work and lighting their homes and they
#
do tend to be more concerned about the environment, no one wants to breathe smog and so they encourage
#
In rich countries like the United States and Europe, over the last 40 years, at the same
#
time as population has grown, GDP has grown, even number of miles has increased but the
#
levels of air pollution and water pollution have decreased.
#
You know there are a bunch of other chapters where you go through metrics like safety,
#
democracy, equal rights, knowledge but since we're running out of time, I'll just skip
#
over them, encourage my listeners to sort of just buy the book and read all of them
#
and go over to the big questions that are kind of safe for the end.
#
At one point you talk about the post-truth era and I'm quoting from you, you say editorialists
#
should retire the new cliché that we are in a post-truth era unless it can keep up
#
a tone of scatting irony.
#
The term is corrosive because it implies that we should resign ourselves to propaganda and
#
lies and just fight back with more of our own.
#
We are not in a post-truth era, mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary
#
popular delusions and the madness of crowds are as old as our species and so is the conviction
#
that some ideas are right and others are wrong.
#
Where I would kind of say that modern times are possibly different because what social
#
media does is it pushes us into echo chambers where we are sort of, we find like-minded
#
people, we confirm our prejudices, we confirm our biases and within those echo chambers
#
there's really no talking to each other, you know we just get stuck in those, is that something
#
that kind of worries you?
#
I mean that does happen although the polarization in the United States was really begun before
#
the advent of social media, it was begun in large part by cable news channels and even
#
before that there were right-wing magazines and left-wing magazines and right-wing newspapers
#
and left-wing newspapers and the thing about the internet is that you're one click away
#
from an opposing viewpoint whereas in print media you have to actually go out and buy
#
a newspaper or magazine from the other side of the political spectrum.
#
So even though there has been a trend toward polarization, at least in the United States
#
and Europe, I think it's become a lazy habit to blame everything that goes wrong on social
#
I think this process began before social media and it may have occurred even without it.
#
I think part of it is driven by the increasing division by education and income where people
#
are much more likely to live with people who have the same level of education as they do.
#
Neighborhoods have become more segregated by education and education tends to go with
#
political opinion or by profession.
#
The business people, the doctors and lawyers and professors, the small business owners,
#
the factory workers tend to live with others of the same type and so some of the residential
#
segregation is another factor.
#
But social media only became popular starting in the late 2000s so we can't blame things
#
Well absolutely but there's a theory that for example the rise of Trump in the USA and
#
Modi here is partly exacerbated by that because it led to what you would call preference cascades
#
where say in the context of India I often say that people who were closeted bigots would
#
do preference falsification where they would not express their feelings in public because
#
hey it was uncool but suddenly the internet shows them that hey there are a lot of other
#
closet bigots out there and they feel validated and empowered by that.
#
That is true because even as opinions that used to be taboo are now expressed on social
#
media, overall worldwide in India, in the United States, everywhere the rate of actual
#
bigotry has gone down, the rate of sexism, the rate of homophobia but the minority and
#
they still exist who are bigoted are able to express their views, find people who are
#
of like minds and therefore have a forum for expressing ideas that used to be taboo even
#
if they are becoming numerically less common.
#
When you were earlier asked at the talk you gave at the Times-Litfest here about populism
#
and you said you were optimistic populism would go away and you gave three reasons for
#
that and those reasons were that one, older people tend to be populist and they will die
#
off, two, it is a factor of education that the more education you have the less populist
#
you are likely to be and the third is that the more urbanized you are the less likely
#
you are to be populist but I would actually venture to say that all of these might be
#
true in the US, it is the exact opposite in India.
#
You find that the most populism comes from all the engineers, it is rampant in the cities
#
and it is probably more widespread among young people than otherwise.
#
Well it is true in the United States, in Europe and in Britain so I do not know about data
#
So we need to know, it is not a question of whether it is rampant in cities, the question
#
is is it more rampant than it is in the more rural areas.
#
Right, fair enough, at some point I will get you data on that.
#
Another interesting thing you sort of talk about is the dangers of tribalism in the academy.
#
You know earlier during this conversation you mentioned how Chris Rock when he cracked
#
that joke may not be able to get away with it today with all the political correctness
#
and you know we know the dangers of the right, what the populists are doing and so on because
#
their dangers are, you know if they are bigoted they are openly bigoted but what you often
#
have from some factions of the far left is that there is a lot of sanctimony which hides
#
the identity politics that is playing out.
#
I think that is a problem and in fact the two problems are not independent because many
#
people who have been attracted to populism list among their top reasons that they are
#
sick of political correctness.
#
That was the very first thing that Donald Trump said in the very first debate among
#
the Republican candidates, he got a huge reaction and it is true that within many mainstream
#
publications within universities there are certain, there is definitely a shift toward
#
the political left accompanied by a suppression of hypotheses and opinions that do not conform
#
to a certain left wing orthodoxy.
#
Now of the two polls that we are seeing the movement to the left in academia and the movement
#
to the right in politics, the movement to the right in politics is much more worrying
#
because politicians have power and professors don't, it is much less power.
#
Nonetheless since they do feed each other, since I know former students and people who
#
write to me who are, they are not idiots, they are intelligent, they are educated but
#
they feel so excluded by the confines of left wing political correctness that they are tempted
#
to join the right just because they think well that is a place where at least the opinions
#
So I think that to prevent that from happening academics should be careful to preserve diversity
#
of political backgrounds, expression of ideas even if they are unpopular, the marketplace
#
Right and in your book you make a very strong case for progress, you believe it will continue
#
but you don't think it is inevitable.
#
What are the threats to humanism?
#
Well certainly the rise of the whole family of movements that we tend to call authoritarian
#
These include religious identity, they include ethnic and national chauvinism and jingoism,
#
they include the cynicism toward institutions such as liberal democracy, regulated markets,
#
international organizations like the UN and treaties and international pacts.
#
The idea that progress comes from charismatic leaders who authentically voice the soul of
#
the people rather than by rules and laws and fiduciary duties and responsibilities that
#
are built into the institutions rather than the virtue of the particular people who hold
#
those positions of power, we see that in the United States and of course in other countries
#
including India and the tendency of leaders to try to run around the safeguards written
#
into law simply because they are popular, they know the truth, they have the people
#
That of course is the path toward a dictatorship and disaster.
#
So all these trends and they tend to correlate, tends to be some of the same people who believe
#
all of them are threats to humanism.
#
There's also of course a trend against humanism in more radical forms of Marxism and leftism
#
that prioritize the interests of the class above the well-being of individual people
#
and that tend to encourage demonization of one class by another.
#
Like you point out, one of the strengths of the Enlightenment is that we think in terms
#
of individuals rather than groups and all classes of people.
#
Very much and not because of some a priori commitment to individualism but simply because
#
it's individuals who can suffer and flourish and feel pleasure and pain.
#
Only metaphorically can an entire religion or an entire ethnic group flourish or suffer.
#
It's the individual people who actually feel the pain.
#
So I know you're in a hurry so I'm going to end with one last question and I'm going
#
to ask you to be your sport on this.
#
In your book you pointed out that students in Talmudic debates are often asked to argue
#
So can you tell me briefly why the world is going to hell?
#
Well if we don't deal with the problem of climate change, things could get a lot worse.
#
If a nuclear war were to break out, even though it's improbable but it could do such tremendous
#
damage that it could cancel out all of the incremental advances, it's been said that
#
if India and Pakistan had a full-fledged nuclear war, that could send enough debris and soot
#
into the atmosphere to cause a period of cooling that could lead to mass famine and crop failure.
#
There could be pandemics, there could be cyber terrorism or cyber sabotage, there may be
#
vulnerabilities of the system that we don't yet understand that could be exploited.
#
And it could be that the future belongs to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Viktor
#
Orban rather than to the world's liberal democrats.
#
Thank you for that very bleak vision.
#
You should have called your book Enlightenment Never.
#
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Stephen.
#
If you enjoyed listening to the show, do head on over to your nearest bookstore and pick
#
up a copy of Enlightenment Now.
#
You can follow Stephen on Twitter at SA Pinker One Word.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A and you can browse past episodes of The Seen
#
and the Unseen on www.seenunseen.in and www.thinkprakati.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Hey, this is Shridhar Ditya and I'm Ahmed Doshi and we host Shunya One.
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It's a really fun podcast where we talk to some of the best entrepreneurs in the country.
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Yes, talking about everything from their startup challenges to what they're building and all
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the future of technologies right here.
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So catch us on the IVM podcast website app or wherever you listen to your podcast from.
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Do you wish you were smarter?
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But the next best thing?
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