Steven Pinker

Evolution has permanently saddled our species with many irrational and destructive psychological traits, including revenge, dominance, nepotism, tribalism, lust, and magical and anecdotal thinking. It’s only institutions and norms that bring out the better angels of our nature that allow progress to be possible, and they face a Sisyphean struggle against our uglier instincts. What people call “optimism” is only an acknowledgment of the evidence that these institutions and norms have had some success.

2 thoughts on “Steven Pinker

  1. shinichi Post author

    Steven Pinker: ‘Evolution Has Saddled Our Species With Many Irrational And Destructive Psychological Traits’

    by Rainer Zitelmann

    Forbes

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2020/03/02/steven-pinker-evolution-has-saddled-our-species-with-many-irrational-and-destructive-psychological-traits/#20954bb71a6f

    Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. Pinker has won numerous prizes for his research and he is one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

    Rainer Zitelmann: In your opinion, why do most people underestimate positive developments and so dramatically overstate negative developments?

    Steven Pinker: One reason is an interaction between the nature of cognition and the nature of journalism. People estimate risk and probability by the anecdotes, narratives, and images that come to mind–the mental operation that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call the Availability Heuristic. Journalism focuses on sudden events, and events are more often bad than good—a shooting, a terrorist act, a battle, an epidemic. Good things unfold gradually, a few percentage points at a time, and can transform the world without ever creating a headline. On top of this built-in bias, journalism has added two conscious biases: the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads,” an attempt to parlay our morbid interest in disasters into commercial advantage, and a moralistic commitment to raking the muck and exposing scandal and corruption in the belief that this is the only route to social progress.

    There is another reason, though, and that is competition among social groups, particularly elites. To acknowledge progress is to endorse some of the institutions of the status quo—democratic government, science, experts, international organizations—and members of other elites may execrate the state of the world as a way of attacking their rivals. It’s a way for businesspeople to discredit governments, academics to discredit business, religious spokespeople to discredit secular organizations, and so on.

    Zitelmann: In your book Enlightenment Now, you frequently refer back 200 or 250 years into the past. You make a powerful case that the main line of history since the Enlightenment has been one of progress in all areas of life. But this was also the same period that saw the birth of capitalism. Doesn’t it have to be said that the majority of the positive developments you describe are a result of capitalism?

    Pinker: That would be a stretch. Certainly capitalism deserves credit for the spectacular increase in prosperity that the world has enjoyed since the 18th century, including the global east and south in the past forty years. Prosperity, on average, tends to bring other good things in life: democracy, peace, education, women’s rights, safety, environmental protection, to name a few. Also, the spirit of commerce pushes nations toward peace. It’s bad business to kill your customers or your debtors, and when it’s cheaper to buy things than to steal them, nations are not tempted toward bloody conquest. And as morally corrupting as the pursuit of wealth can be, it’s often less murderous than the pursuit of the glory of the nation, race, or religion.

    But capitalism can coexist with many evils, as we see in authoritarian countries, and progress depended as well on science (particularly advances in public health and medicine), on the ideals of human rights and equality (which propelled the women’s and civil rights movements, and declarations of rights), on movements which led to legislation protecting laborers and the environment, on government provision of public goods like education and infrastructure, on social welfare programs that protect people who are unable to contribute to markets, and on international organizations which encouraged global cooperation and disincentivized war.

    Zitelmann: In your book, you criticize the zero-sum belief that wealth is a limited resource and that the rich only get rich by taking from the poor. Why is this theory wrong and, above all, why do so many people still believe it?

    Pinker: One reason is theoretical: prosperity primarily comes from ideas, methods, recipes, algorithms, and other forms of knowledge, which are replicable at marginal or zero cost: If I teach a man to fish, I have not forgotten how to fish myself. The other is empirical: since the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, when global prosperity began to soar, the rate of extreme poverty plunged from 90% of the world’s population to less than 9%. And of course one can see it with one’s own eyes. A relatively poor person in the West today (and increasingly elsewhere) enjoys antibiotics, streaming entertainment, air conditioning, a dozen ethnic cuisines, and other luxuries that were unavailable to the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers 120 years ago.

    Zitelmann: In your book, you argue that nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative in the fight against climate change. It is common knowledge that Germany wants to close all of its nuclear and coal-fired power plants in the belief that the world’s environmental problems can only be solved with renewable energy sources. The Wall Street Journal has described this as the World’s Dumbest Energy Policy: What is your take on this?

    Pinker: I don’t always agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but in this case I do—and I made similar points in my own op-eds in the Journal’s rivals, the New York Times and The Boston Globe.

    Zitelmann: You write that–with the exception of climate change–the condition of the environment has improved massively in recent decades. In which countries and environmental sectors (air, water, etc.) do you think this applies most?

    Pinker: According to the Environmental Performance Index, a report card for the environment, almost every country has shown improvement over the past decade, with wealthier countries having the cleanest environments (this counts the most dangerous forms of pollution, indoor cooking smoke and contaminated water). Since Enlightenment Now came out, there have been reports on worsening trend overall in species extinctions, which I would add to the list of concerns, though we should also acknowledge the successful conservation efforts that have rescued many endangered or threatened species.

    Zitelmann: When it comes to people, you are ever the optimist. You clearly believe that, contrary to what most people think, life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise. At the same time, it seems as if the world is gripped by irrationality and hysteria. For example, there’s the movement that has coalesced around Greta Thunberg, which has distinctly religious traits and, in many ways, resembles an apocalyptic sect. Are people really more rational and reasonable than they were 200 or 2,000 years ago?

    Pinker: No, no, I’m not an optimist—indeed, my previous book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, argued that evolution has permanently saddled our species with many irrational and destructive psychological traits, including revenge, dominance, nepotism, tribalism, lust, and magical and anecdotal thinking. It’s only institutions and norms that bring out the better angels of our nature that allow progress to be possible, and they face a Sisyphean struggle against our uglier instincts. What people call “optimism” is only an acknowledgment of the evidence that these institutions and norms have had some success.

    Zitelmann: You paint an optimistic picture of the spread of liberal democracy around the world. But is that really still true? Isn’t democracy currently experiencing a global crisis? In the United States, it certainly seems as if populists, whether Trump or Bernie Sanders, are dominating the course of events.

    Pinker: Again, the picture I’m painting is not one of optimism but one of “factfulness.” It’s true that liberal democracy is under attack in many countries, but it has advanced in others that we don’t read about, such as Georgia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Armenia, Angola, Malaysia, Tunisia, and Ethiopia. Overall there has been a stagnation in democratization, and perhaps even a small setback, but it has not come close to reversing the massive trend. According to the Varieties of Democracy scorecard, during the past decade the number of democracies in the world has hovered in a record-high range, with 99 democracies in 2018 compared to 87 in 1998, 51 in 1988, 40 in 1978, 36 in 1968, and 10 in 1918.

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  2. shinichi Post author

    (Google Translate)

    進化は、復讐、支配、縁故主義、部族主義、欲望、そして魔法や逸話的な思考を含む、多くの不合理で破壊的な心理的特徴を私たちの種に永続的にもたらしました。 進歩を可能にするのは、私たちの自然のより良い天使を引き出すのは唯一の制度と規範であり、彼らは私たちの醜い本能に対するシシフィアンの闘争に直面しています。 人々が「楽観主義」と呼ぶものは、これらの制度や規範がある程度の成功を収めたという証拠の承認に過ぎません。

    (sk)

    なんのことやら。

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