Professor Steven Pinker is on a mission to spread the good news of human progress. He asserts that human life, for all its problems, has overwhelmingly improved in recent generations. But how is the progress of humanity threatened by our inability to appreciate it? And how is that progress threatened by our inability to communicate respectfully with one another?
Professor Pinker (Enlightenment Now, The Better Angels of Our Nature) joins John Wood, Jr. to discuss polarization, cancel culture in the academy, his friendships with Noam Chomsky and Thomas Sowell, and how we can reason together toward a better future.
Twitter: @braverangels, @sapinker, @JohnRWoodJr
1 thought on “Cancel Culture, Communication, & the Quest for Humanism | Steven Pinker with John Wood, Jr.”
Unfortunately, Professor Pinker is completely unaware of how his discoveries impact his own thinking. His total ignorance about the limits of growth, the trajectory of human consumption toward an ecological collapse which was laid out in 1970 in the Limits of Growth which has never been seriously challenged by a scientific analysis, as opposed to being shut out by denial (something Pinker understands, but doesn’t believe it applies to himself).
The trivial things he talks about avoid the big things he doesn’t want to talk about.
Its as if he was on the uphill slog of a roller coaster, and had never done it before, and had no idea that the down sweep was coming.
His friendships with other elite academics who are equally out of touch with the real world, like Chomsky, who has the same blind spot, despite his having different views from Pinker on many issues doesn’t help
The example of keeping up with the Joneses , the relative versus absolute level, is only a situation in a society which has a fundamental narrative that everyone has to be rich and continue getting richer, and is relatively recent in human history.