♪ >> Welcome to Canada Files .

I'm Valerie Pringle.

My guest today is Steven Pinker.

Who has been listed as one of the most influential thinkers by Time and Foreign Policy magazines.

He is a professor of psychology at Harvard The author of many prize-winning and best-selling books including The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of our Nature, Enlightment Nowand Rationality.

He's endlessly curious about the mystery of who we are and why.

>> Valerie: Steven Pinker, hello >> Steven: Hello.

>> Is your most singular quality curiousity?

>> I would like to think that.

>> What led you to want to study psychology in the first place?

>> What could be more interesting than the human mind?

We all have one and are all interested in other people's minds.

When I discovered there was a science of the mind, thanks to the Time Life series of books on science.

Which my parents bought for me when I was a young teenager.

It had monthly volumes.

Each had a different colour on the spine.

Electricity and Magnetism, Evolution, Stars and Planets .

One of them was The Mind.

It was a revelation that you could actually study the mind the way you studied electricity and magnetism or the planets.

>> You were that kid, weren't you?

Reading the encyclopedia.

Fun stuff like that.

>> I did.

We had the World Book Encyclopedia.

And I would pull out a volume and read articles at random.

This is, of course, way before the internet.

>> It seems with the books you've written, you've become expert not only in psycho-linguistics and cognitive science, etc, but ecology, economics and biology.

All those other sciences to fill out the arguments you want to make.

>> That's the great thing about studying the human mind.

In that it is related to everything else.

Social sciences are about products of the human mind-- societies, legal systems and social contracts that we implicitly negotiate with each other.

The arts and humanities are also about products of the mind.

Music, fiction and sculpture.

So it can take me anywhere.

Because I'm interested in human nature including its emotional, moral and political baggage, it leads me to questions like, does human nature confine us to a single social organization.

So that hopes for progress are futile.

Because as they say, "You can't change human nature".

I push back against that in looking at how we have made progress.

It does push me to learn some history of medicine, public health, technology, law, government, war and many other topics.

>> But you still maintain science is mankind's greatest achievement.

You know why.

>> One, just the intellectual beauty, power and wonder of it.

The fact that we can answer questions like when did life and the universe originate.

We know how old the universe is.

That's amazing!

We know what the basis of heredity is.

Or how the planet was shaped.

Also, it is science that enriched and expanded human welfare.

We live more than twice as long as humans did for a millennia.

Life expectancy, birth--most traditional societies is around 30.

Today, it's around 80 in developed countries.

And more than 70 worldwide.

That's thanks to advances in public health and medicine.

We see more of the world.

We have access to drama, music and art from different centuries Technology and science has really enriched what it means to live a human life.

>> ...what you were just saying is so much the basis of Enlightenment Now.

Which is probably your best-known work.

You say it was sparked by a student asking the question, "Why should I live?"

You listened to that and this sense that perhaps, the world is a dark and hopeless place.

You decided to be a defender of reason and objectivity.

And you were sick of stupid.

So you went after that--not students but at the question.

>> I answered it sincerely.

...it wasn't meant sarcastically or facetiously.

The very fact that we're asking these questions shows that we've been endowed with a capacity for reason.

The one that evolution gave us was kind of puny.

But we can expand it with education, open discourse and exchange of ideas.

We can apply it to extend to others what we want for ourselves.

We want certain things for ourselves because that's the reason we're here to begin with.

Our ancestors depended on food, sex, love, caring for children and an appreciation for a natural world.

Those are wired into us for good reason.

They're why we're here.

Given that reason tells me that there's nothing special about me, just because I'm me.

At least I'm not going to convince you of that.

That provides the basis for ethics and morals.

Namely treating others as one would demand to be treated oneself.

So it's a positive vision for what we ought to care for.

Does not depend on scripture, dogma, violent revolution or struggle.

...I localize it mostly around the enlightenment of the 18th century.

But it had antecedents in ancient Greece and other parts of the world.

Then I had to make a case-- is this utopian?

Is it idealistic, romantic?

That's where the data came in.

No, it's actually worked.

If you look how we've done since the 18th century, you'd rather be alive now.

For one thing, you'd probably be dead if you were in the 18th century.

Because life expectancy was barely more than 30.

>> There are a couple of things from that book that were interesting.

..there's so many facts, points, anecdotes that are amazing.

Public health stuff was interesting to me.

The people who've found germs or vaccines.

You talk about the day that Salk's vaccine was approved for polio.

The global celebration.

We forget all about that!

What aren't we throwing ticker-tape parades for the COVID vaccine?

>> Why not?

I agree.

I introduced that historical anecdote, because part of the problem with this philosophy, world view-- call it enlightenment, ideals or humanism, is that it doesn't get people's pulse going.

You can salute the flag, sing anthems and hymns.

But no-one really sings hymns to the human race.

Or to reason or science.

But there have been moments where people really do appreciate the science as a glorious human undertaking.

And the day that the efficacy and safety of the Salk vaccine was announced--when there was a worldwide celebration.

Factory whistles blowing and church bells ringing.

People hugging strangers.

I think it would be good if we re-captured some of that.

Because it's better for all of us than celebrating victories in war.

Or rallying around the flag or all the other things that get people's blood pumping.

>> One of the other lines I remember from that section was you say, as a psycho-linguist who has written a whole book on the past tense, that your favourite sentence in the history of the world, as you're reading Wikipedia.. is the phrase "smallpox was".

>> Smallpox was a disease.

That fact that it is in the past tense indicates that is a disease that has been eradicated.

A mind-blowing accomplishment, given that it killed 100's of millions of people in the 20th century alone.

Then for it to be finally eradicated, wiped off the face of the earth, is something the species should be proud of.

>> In spite of endless examples in this book-- it was received and widely read, it's still a controversial book.

A lot of people really took issue with you being a defender of the status quo.

Just keep going the way we're going--all good.

We're going in the right direction.

>> ...you wouldn't think that a defensive reason, humanism and science, would be particularly controversial.

In an era where it would seem these ideals need all the help they can get!

But it was controversial.

There's a mindset that the whole system is so corrupt and rotten that we should just burn it to the ground.

Because anything that rises out of the ashes is bound to be better than what we have now.

I think that comes from a spoiled society that fails to appreciate how much we have accomplished, compared to the way life is usually lived.

With early death, infectious disease, constant raiding and feuding.

And people not travelling more than a few miles from where they were born.

That was the way human life was lived for a millennia.

It is easy to take for granted what we now enjoy.

And to fail to appreciate how easily things can degenerate.

Which we can see if we look at war zones.

Where people drop like flies from cholera.

Have to walk for miles to get drinking water.

All these accomplishments are like wallpaper.

We don't thank anyone for flush toilets.

But it's really good that we have them.

>> You do acknowledge that we do have some serious existential threats, of course.

It isn't, oh things are just vastly improving and it's an upward trajectory.

You do cite climate change, for sure, and populism.

>> It is an upward trajectory but it's not a linear one.

Or a monotonic one, namely one that keeps going up and up, without any back-tracking or wiggles.

That's because problems are inevitable.

The laws of the universe don't particularly care about our well-being.

If anything, they try to grind us down.

It's only through human effort and ingenuity that we've seen any progress.

Far from being a licence to complacency, it's the exact opposite.

The only reason we achieved this progress is because people have recognized problems, tried to think up and implement solutions.

Sometimes in the face of fierce opposition.

And that's what we have to continue to do to deal with the problems we face today.

...it seems like a silly thing to have to point out but I do find myself often having to point it out.

That is, improvement isn't perfection.

A decline doesn't mean a disappearance.

There's less poverty than there used to be-- doesn't mean there's no poverty.

There are fewer wars than there used to be- doesn't mean there are no wars.

You've got to think both those thoughts at the same time.

We want to drive down the bad things as low as possible.

We're nowhere near having eliminated them but we're better off than we were.

That's an eensy-weensy bit of math that you've got to keep in mind in appreciating human progress.

>> When or why did you decide to move from the academic to the cultural sphere?

And say I'm going to be a public and popular, you hope, communicator of science and how these things work?

>>...I did the academic thing of publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals and I still do.

I appreciated accessible science in other fields like evolution, paleontology, cosmology and medicine.

But no-one had done it for my field-- cognitive science including the psychology of language.

I thought maybe I could try my hand at it.

I'd written a couple of academic books.

Editors at the university presses--Harvard & MIT press, said "We think you could do it.

Your writing doesn't suck as much as other academics."

>> Your writing is fun, really good writing.

You must have gotten pleasure from that.

>> I did.

In fact, I even wrote a book on writing.

>> Yes.

>> Defining what I know from the science of language to the challenge of writing clear and graceful prose.

I tried it with a book called, The Language Instinct .

Partly because when people would say what do you do for a living?

I'd say I study language.

The response would be, "Wow, that's really interesting."

And it is really interesting!

>> How humans acquire language.

>> Yes exactly.

How we acquire and use it.

Where languages come from.

Why are there so many of them.

Why they change over time.

Who decides what's correct and incorrect.

Lots of questions that everyone's curious about.

I thought I would try my hand at explaining them in clear language.

I was told by some of my colleagues, "Well, it'll be in the bookstores for 6 weeks.

Then you'll go back to your life as an academic."

But...people bought and read it.

I tried to tell a coherent story about language.

Not just an encyclopedia.

By unifying the idea that language is an instinct.

I took the term from Darwin who said man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children.

So I called it a language instinct.

I ended the book by raising the question, what are our other instincts?

What are our fears, loves, desires, aesthetic reactions, habits of learning and thinking.

So that led to a book called How the Mind Works.

Which is what I tried to do for everything else.

What I did for language-- why do we enjoy music, why are we afraid of snakes.

Why do we remember recent things more than long-ago things.

One thing leads to another-- that led to the question since I did try to explain the mind in an overall evolutionary framework.

What did the different parts of the mind allow our ancestors to do.

That allowed them to be shaped by Darwin's process of natural selection.

Then it actually is not a reactionary doctrine.

It doesn't mean we can't improve.

Because No.1: we have improved!

So it's got to be possible.

No 2: if you believe that human nature is complex as I do.

That is, it's not just some instincts we've inherited from our primate ancestors.

But we have the ability to come up with new ideas.

To share them with language.

We have a sense of empathy, self control.

We have these big frontal lobes that can inhibit our impulses.

It means there's a lot that we can above and beyond what our ancestors did.

By coming up with and sharing new ideas.

Figuring out ways of bringing out our better angels .

As I later alluded to them.

One thing leads to another and I wrote a book called, The Better Angels of our Nature.

From the phrase by Abraham Lincoln.

On the parts of human nature that allow us to be peaceful.

And on the historical fact that whenever you measure violence over the course of history, you see that it's come down.

That is why I wrote those books.

To push back against the idea that if there is human nature, then we're doomed to perpetual strife and greed.

And to point out that we have made progress therefore it's possible to make more progress.

>> When you look at the brain cognition, as you've studied these things, is there anything that has most astonished you?

>> Oh, everything?

...How does a child acquire a language and then express his or her thoughts?

Understand new sentences and talk about abstract imaginary worlds and hypothetical possibilities?

How we can both conceive those things and share ideas about them with one another.

Kids are doing it at the age of three.

That's pretty amazing.

But really, especially when you look at the limitations of artificial intelligence, the fact that self-driving cars should be easy.

It's just...you turn a wheel, press the gas and brake.

And you don't bump into things.

How hard can it be?

Turns out to be fantastically hard and we don't have safe, self-driving cars.

We don't even know when we're going to get them.

Despite billions of dollars invested in them.

That's because things like seeing the world, achieving several goals-- like getting where you want but not killing anyone.

Motor control--controlling arms and limbs, common sense.

If a guy is holding up a cardboard sign that says, "Detour".

If there's a billboard with a school bus, that's not the same as a school bus.

All these things that a human mind does effortlessly, but we are learning are really, really hard to duplicate in silicon.

>> Are you among those who's afraid, concerned about AI?

Or embracing what it might do?

>> I'm somewhat concerned.

I'm not among the people sometimes called AI Doomers .

Who think AI will lead to the extinction of the human race.

I don't stay up at night worrying about that for a number of reasons.

But as with any technology, there are misuses.

Like impersonating people and large-scale fraud.

Possibly large-scale unemployment--hasn't happened yet.

And other potential dangers-- engineering superbugs or bio weapons.

On the other hand, the promise is spectacular too.

Because as someone who studies the human mind, I know that our minds are kinda limited in a lot of things.

We can't process lots of data.

Artificial intelligence in principle can.

I go to my doctor.

There's no way he can digest the implications of the 3 billion base pairs of my DNA and my entire medical history.

And the entire medical literature which grows every year!

Why would any human be able to accumulate all that information?

That's something that an artificial intelligence system, in principle, can do much better than a human brain.

>> What do you want to study next?

What makes you curious about the brain that you haven't been able to pull apart yet?

>> I'm working on a phenomenon called common knowledge.

Which in the technical sense means everyone knowing that everyone knows something.

That is, I know something.

You know it.

You know that I know it.

I know that you know that I know that you know it-- ad infinitum.

It seems like a impossible cognitive feat.

Your mind starts to spin.

But we have a sense that something is kinda out there.

That everyone knows it and knows that everyone else knows it.

I think it drives a lot of our social life, language, economic and political arrangements.

That's going to be the topic of my next book.

>> It seems there is still so much that we don't know about the brain.

In terms of pathology, disease and mental illness.

>> Our ignorance is stupendous, particularly about mental illness.

About everything really.

The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

>> You say education is basically the flagship of progress.

It seems like at heart, you're a teacher.

You love that.

>> I do love it and even before I decided to become a professor, I was a high school math tutor.

That's how I put myself through college.

Math and science.

But also just the mindset of being curious.

Challenging one's own beliefs.

Both because that's what science does, but also the more you know about the brain, the more you know it is a fallible system.

So you can't trust your own intuitions.

That's why we need science.

Because a lot of things we believe, aren't true.

Therefore to get into the habit of questionning, asking for evidence and evidence that the evidence is good.

Just that open mindedness.

>> Well, open mindedness is interesting.

But one of the things you've become more involved in, laterally at Harvard is the whole issue of academic freedom.

Which is a really challenging topic.

I guess in your career, it must interest and confound you-- that maybe what people can say and not say is more problematic in the academy.

>> It's happening more and more in academia.

Where there are attacks, both from the right and left.

At least in the US, the attacks from the right tend to come from outside the university.

From legislatures, politicians, particularly in southern states.

Within academia though, it comes from the left.

There are a lot of things about race, sex, gender, sexuality, colonialism that, as they say, are getting cancelled.

People are driven out of their careers.

Articles get censored or withdrawn.

This is bad, both for the advancement of knowledge because you can't advance knowledge unless you can explore ideas.

Also, for the reputation of academia and science.

So I have co-founded a council on academic freedom at Harvard.

Harvard is just a university but it is a kind of a brand.

People care about what happens.

I hope it will be an inspiration to other universities.

>> At this point in your career, how do you feel?

Do you think, have I started to understand who we are and why?

Am I part way or a lot of the way there?

>> I'd like to think I'm part way there.

I'd like to think I have more insight into what makes us tick.

Then when I was a undergraduate.

Both because I learned more and the sciences of mind have advanced.

>> But nowhere near the end.

>> Oh, that's an understatement.

>> And your office is full of books.

>> A lot of books, yeah.

>> The last question we usually ask is what does being Canadian mean to you?

You know--lasting effect, impact, how it shaped you.

>> I think it does promote a kind of a calm rationality of problem-solving mindset.

Of not getting caught up in various fanaticisms.

A kind of benevolent moderation.

Canada...for all its problems, and Canadians above all are aware of them.

As you always are when you're right up against them.

Canada is the 11th or 12th happiest country in the world.

And in indexes of really good countries-- social progress indexes, all the good things you want in a country.

Safety, health, affluence, equal rights.

Canada is also about 10th or 11th-- it's very Canadian not to be No.1, I guess.

>> But America should be happier.

That's always the weirdest thing, isn't it?

>> Canada beats the pants of the US in any of these measures.

>> But America should be happier-- economically things are stronger, things are good.

But Americans not so happy.

>> Not so happy and the French aren't so happy.

Even though France is a pretty nice place to live.

So Canada has a lot of things right.

It has a lot of great accomplishments, peace-keeping forces.

The world's longest undefended border, welcoming of immigrants including my grandparents.

And continuing to do so.

A parliamentary system that is...if you're a Canadian you're well aware of all the follies but still, as far as political systems go, it's not so bad.

Compared to other countries.

I appreciate being Canadian and Canada.

>> Well, it's been a pleasure to spend time with your brain!

>> And thank you so much.

>> Thank you so much and for having me.

>> We'll be back next week with another episode of Canada Files .

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