The Institute of Art and Ideas
John Mearsheimer and Steven Pinker go head to head on Enlightement ideals.
Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/the-enlightenment-and-its-alternatives-steven-pinker-john-mearsheimer?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=part-one
The Enlightenment advocated reason, science, democracy, and universal human rights as a grounding for human morality and social organization. In the quarter millennium since, to what extent have these ideals been realized? Has the Enlightenment in fact been successful in bringing about moral progress? Are there viable alternatives to the Enlightenment vision?
#TheEnlightenment #JohnMearsheimer #StevenPinker
Sophie Scott-Brown, Director at Gresham College, hosts a debate between two of the most influential thinkers of our time. Join John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as they discuss the Enlightenment and its alternatives.
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The sinister voice at the end gave me the fright of my life.
Pinker loves to justify the society that he, and his friends, have found themselves very comfortable in. A propagandist for the status quo, which he and his friends sit near the top of. His defense of "democracy" is actually a defense of the oligarchy that exists in the western powers, which he benefits tremendously from, and ignores the brutal effects that imperial colonialism has imposed on the world.
While the enlightenment produced some fascinating ideas, let us not forget that the East produced some equally, if not more, fascinating ideas.
I like how Pinker ignores the fact that the developed nations got there by robbing, raping, murdering and destroying the so called "underdeveloped" world. What he also ignores is the fact that within the so called developed nations, inequality and poverty have risen in the last 40/50 years. I would cut Pinker some slack for being a linguist and not an economist, but he seems to not have taken on board the criticisms made towards his works in the last 10 years.
The fact that people can't agree on truth doesn't mean that there isn't any truth. This is Mearsheimer's fallacy.
The United States routinely ignores the Universal Declaration of Human Rights not to mention most of the countries of the world who are signatories. Eleanor Roosevelt's work is laudable and I support it, but the document is almost entirely ignored. This fact demonstrates how weak Pinker's "evidence" is to support his position. Pinker is incredibly out of touch with the reality of the world. I think he believes that life on earth is lived on paper and not in the real world.
This red love emoji belongs to john ❤
19:01 good job editor. In case some people don't know what is the meaning of this "woman" thing Pinker mentioned, good on you for showing what they look like
'The Enlightenemnt doesn't mean we should exalt those CREEPY OLD DEAD WHITE MALES or 'THE WEST'! It belongs to whoever and whatever I say it does!'
The Enlightenment happened in the West among white men. It didn't happen anywhere else. Pinker is part of an ethnic tribe that is not 'of the West.' His glib impertinence is obnoxious.
Haven't checked in on Pinker in a while and I forgot just how relentlessly tedious he is. He likes to spend as much time as he can saying platitudes so as to (1) crowd out time for points of nuance, where his brittle views would break down (2) create the impression that everything he says is just common sense.
Ahhhh Pinker – the anthropologists thorn
Liberalism has always opposed true progression. MLK gave a famous testimony from a Birmingham jail cell detailing how the biggest obstacle for change in America was the milquetoast liberal and not the far right conservative. Radical change is antithetical to liberal values.
Mearsheimer – the good life and first principles ? This is subjective. It's also absent of education and what people expect and inability for people to compare their current environment vs their historical unlived experience. Pinker's assessment is far more objective and fairer way of assessing this – the weight of his stats heavily supports positive progress over time.
Pinker and Meersheimer live on the same planet.
The problem is that the Enlightenment collapsed as a philosophical movement early in the 19th century.
I'm sorry but the rate of wars has gone down after the second world war mainly due to the invention of nuclear weapons, not enlightenment.
i think the middle grond would be, has society improved ? yes. but this yes doesn't justify a state of being satiated with the improvement, instead another question arises as a follow up, is there room for further improvement? and i think the answer to that is also yes.
Pinker is full of Whiggish delusion
Heck no its worse
In order to properly practice democracy, the electorate must be able to access the truth. to access the truth, people must be able to use reason.
most people cannot do this.
therefore,
you get goofballs like stephen pinker propagandizing about immaterial things to absolutely no real-world benefit
pinker was friends with epstein
What a pleasure to listen to such intelligent human beings !!!
you literally supported dismantling of the anti-genocide student encampments, and here you are talking about free speech and enlightenment?! you are a fraud!
"universal declaration of human rights"! the one that every Western liberal democracy has spat on by collaborating with the Israeli genocide in Gaza?!!
i guess, the point here is never to judge the principles and values by their teachers and practitioners. yet condemn theocrats, autocrats and totalitarians, who are, by the way, saving the planet from Climate Change — China!
yeah, racial segregation and genocide — thats what the academia and "the republic of letters" in the West is supporting and justifying as it defends Israel. and who the heck elected u to determine what counts as an intellectual "pathology"? certainly secular thinkers in the 19th C might have thought of the Abolitionist movement as such, because all the saints of Enlightenment and Secularism were pro or agnostic of slavery!
I love how John grilled him with facs.
LOL, I never knew the Vatican doesn't allow women to vote.
"People who vote with their feet" are usually running away from wars, conflicts and dictatorships that were caused/supported/inflicted by "countries guided by Enlightenment ideals". Those are the same countries that manage to be "the cleanest" because they are the world´s major exporters of waste to Asia and elsewhere…
Gaza is still going on but let us filter that out also. Slavery was happening when they were thinking yet only in the 60s did enlightenment give African Americans the vote, in South Africa for all the pretense, both the most enlightened centers of Europe supported apartheid. Seems enlightenment serves the dominant race-class.
And here we are with All the think tanks in America supporting Trump to go into another war after all we learned from Iraq. I dont see progress, I see prtense.
So Pinker does not agree with teh Jewish State?
Pinker has been on Mars since WW2, he has not been taking his meds and is clearly not up-to-date. What reality is he discussing? Has he read the news recently?
So homosexuality and not genocide is the new standard of progress?