ReasonTV
America, observers are fond of saying, is the only country based upon an idea. That idea—that all men and women are created equal and have inalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness—is directly informed by the Enlightenment, the movement that dominated ideas and culture in the 18th century.
_____
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/reasontv
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes: https://goo.gl/az3a7a
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
_____
But are we still an Enlightenment nation?
“The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious,” writes Steven Pinker in his new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. “I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it’s not.”
Pinker is a linguist who teaches at Harvard and is the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Blank Slate, and How the Mind Works. He’s been named on the top 100 most influential intellectuals by both Time and Foreign Policy.
In this wide-ranging interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie, Pinker explains why he thinks Pope Francis is a problem when it comes to capitalism, nuclear energy is a solution to climate change, and why libertarians need to lighten up when it comes to regulation. He also makes the case for studying the humanities as essential to intellectual honesty and seriousness even as he attacks that “cluster of ideas, which is not the same as the humanities, but just happens to have descended over large sectors of the academic humanities: “the deep hatred of the institutions of modernity, the equation of liberal democracy with fascism, the feeling that society is in an ever-worsening spiral of decline, and the lack of appreciation, I think, that the institutions of liberal democracy have made the humanities possible, made them flourish.”
For full text, links, credits, and downloadable versions: https://reason.com/reasontv/2018/03/22/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now
Edited by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Mark McDaniel and Krainin.
Source
God I love Pinker!
And Nick Gillespie ain't bad either 😉
One thing that is actually going down are happiness and people's positivity about the future. Suicide rates have been increasing since the 50s.
Best hair in science?
wow an interviewer who has actually done some research on the topic and doesn't just leaf through the notes handed to him while pretending to listen
People in Ivory towers telling us things are getting better…..I quit reading his book after he started supporting carbon taxes and claimed that gang violence has no root causes….
Pinker is definitely correct about religious dogma leading to great carnage. Good point.
Sincerely,
Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot
The enlightenment is dead.
Terrific interview!
On this moment, I disagree with Pinker on the relative costs of the fukushima incident. And I think it's not unlikely that Pinker will change his opinion on this issue when he explores the costs of this incident in more detail.
I like to see a fact based foundation of his claim on this issue. I can't give a fact based foundation of my claim that the fukushima incident is a example for not letting enterprises use nuclear power for producing electricity.
3rd grade level arguments done as if two intellectuals are talking..
ENLIGHTENMENT + VEGANISM = ?
ENLIGHTENMENT – VEGANISM = ?
SIMPLE MATHS FOLKS
So long, northern white rhino.
Great discussion.
Can we do it tomorrow, I'm busy right now…
The enlightenment is dead, and I have killed it.
I would love to see Steven Pinker discuss the low European birthrates with someone else who is Alt-Right.
Thanks for the discussion. It was perfect.
It would seem to me that nearly everything he is saying is rather obvious and anyone who has ever stopped to really think about these issues would come to the same conclusions and thus, offer up much of the same in the way of solutions. Just sayin' – I'll read through the book of course, but that's my take on this, after watching the interview herein. BTW – he's not totally infallible as he made a couple of incorrect statements, unsubstantiated claims typical of academia, but all-in-all a good intellectual dialogue here today…thanks
First of all, I am a huge fan of Steven Pinker. Though I have not read Enlightenment Now, he seems to suggest that general progress and upward mobility of humankind is on such a positive trajectory, we need not be concerned with any potential obstacles in the way of this progress. For instance, does he acknowledge the argument of globalization doing perhaps more harm than good regarding wages and full time employment for "low-skilled" workers? Has globalization helped developing countries at the expense of American workers? I am no fatalist, but I simply want to know if he acknowledges these problems in his new book. I would love to hear from those of you who have read it.
Professor Picker is truly awesome in his promotion of Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress but misses global warming issues.
I would point out that waste heat is the problem with nuclear power or any power that adds a heat load that the Earth is not equipped to reject to space. Solar power, while not as efficient (25% vs 45% for nuclear) in the conversion to electricity, solar would have otherwise went to heat the planet anyway. So, in that sense solar power reduces the net heat load by converting 25% to useful work, while nuclear, and fossil fuel combustion adds to the heat load even though some goes to useful work. It's like turning on the stove to cook your tea rather than making sun tea. It the first case you need to run the air conditioner to reject the stove heat as well as the sun coming in the window, while in the second case the sun's heat is diverted to the tea and the house might be cooler overall.
The problem with the added heat load from burning or decaying (fossil uranium comes from 10 Ga supernovas and fossil plant matter comes from 400 Ma Carboniferous forests) is that it immediately increases moisture and cloud cover which insulates the planet at least 25 times more than CO2 emissions. A clear dry night sky rejects @ 50 W m-2 more than cloudy nights, while CO2 emissions is maybe 2 W m-2 more than pre-industrial times.
To be fair, nuclear energy would be okay if the reactor were placed at high altitude desert locations where the excess heat could be rejected directly to space using nighttime infrared radiators rather than heating up local reservoirs which increase in humidity and cloud cover. More effort needs to be made to improve the planets Active Thermal Control Systems. IMHO
That's right, America was and is an ENLIGHTENMENT experiment (Successful one, so far). Not a society based and built around the BIBLE.
But what about the human spirit Mr. Pinker ?
OK, I just got my doctorate in smartness :). Wow, I enjoyed this.
Progressivism is just another word for Communism.
How the fuck can people not get how bad nuclear energy is? They do not remember Fukushima? There are hundreds of inevitable Fukushimas coming. Nuclear Annealing renders every reactor a time bomb, though the thousands of tons of spent fuel sitting in pools of water at every reactor on the planet are what could exterminate all human life.
If schools are any good why is it that you can't get but a min wage job after graduation?
The "Enlightenment" movement was a sect of profitors who needed to destroy the catholic church who was against slavery. The same protestant gang who called "Renaissance" the discovery of the Americas. Slavery had to be justified by God and the catholic church did not want any of that.
5:16 Impact of Enlightenment thinking.
7:30 Prison sentences
9:23 Why don’t we acknowledge progress?
11:15 Is there a point where more news counters bad news?
12:16 Does your memory change as you age?
12:35 How do you prevent yourself from becoming Panglossian?
14:00 Anti Enlightenment? Romantic Green Movement (Pope Francis)
18:00 Chinese pollution.
19:17 / 22:15 How did you come to appreciate nuclear energy?
22:53 4th generation nuclear tech.
25:15 What is a solution to a worst case scenario?
26:17 Carbon Tax?
Pinker what are you doing??! Get off this channel bro.
Only lefite which might escape Righty dislike bomb.