Steven Pinker On Enlightenment Values, Liberal Democracy, & Human Progress

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has been named one of the “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy Magazine & one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World Today” by Time Magazine.

By Aiden Singh, October 31, 2024

Introduction

Aiden Singh: Professor Pinker, you’re an experimental psychologist who has used your public profile to advocate for Enlightenment values and liberal democracy. And you’ve championed the idea that adoption of Enlightenment ideals has propelled human progress over the centuries and can continue to do so into the future. 

But you’ve also suggested that we often take these ideals for granted. And you’ve identified what you believe are threats to these ideals, some of which, you’ve suggested, are deeply engrained in our psychology. 

I’d like to discuss with you today why you hold Enlightenment values so dear, why you believe liberal democracy to be key to human flourishing, and your conception of human progress.

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What Was The Enlightenment?

Aiden Singh: But first, for our readers who may not be familiar, what was the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, who were some of its prominent figures, and what ideals did they champion?

Steven Pinker: So the Enlightenment was not a defined period with opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics. 

And it didn’t have a fixed ideology. In fact, almost by definition, it’s opposed to some set of cannon, some dogma, some official statement. And Enlightenment philosophers disagreed with one another - that was one of the points of the Enlightenment. There was no orthodoxy or one correct truth - our understanding emerges from debate. 

But I think the way that I co-opted the term, and I think a reasonable definition would be, it’s the valorization of reason, science, and humanism, with humanism being the commitment that the highest value is the flourishing of human beings - their happiness, their health, their knowledge, and the other things that make life worth living. 

And that might sound obvious - who would be opposed to human flourishing? But there are alternative belief systems, alternative value systems, such as that our values come from religious scripture, that they come from the glorification of the race, nation, or tribe, or that they play out some sort of historical dialectic or destiny or inevitable struggle. So the values are by no means obvious. 

However, I do think that they are entailed by some pretty basic considerations such as the fact that we are having this discussion right now and the fact that you are asking me to justify positions that I have taken means that you and I are already committed to reasoning. It’s too late to question it and it’s too late to question reason in any discussion that raises the question ‘why reason?’. If you weren’t committed to reason, you couldn’t pose or answer that question in the first place. You’d be fighting, you’d be bribing, you’d be having a beauty contest. If you’re elevating which ideas are more coherent, more justified, more supported by evidence from reality, you’ve already signed on to reason.

Science is just the application of reason to the material world and if you put the three of them together - reason, science, and humanism - then there is reasonable expectation of progress. Namely that by applying reason and science to the problem of making humans better off, there is some reasonable hope that we can succeed. If we keep the things that work and try not to repeat our mistakes, then progress is possible.

I should add that humanism, like reason, is entailed in the very grounds for having a discussion. That is, if you have a discussion about anything, namely, if I’m committed to reason, I can’t privilege my own positions, interests, and beliefs over any one else’s just because I’m me and they’re not, because there’s nothing logically compelling about me being me and you being you. And that holds of our interests and our wellbeing: I can’t try to persuade you of some social arrangement that benefits me but not you just because I’m me and you’re not and hope for you to take me seriously.

So the fact that we’re engaged in discourse pushes us to a morality that strives toward equality - not in equality of outcomes - but in everyone having an equal claim to well-being. 

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What Is Liberal Democracy?

Aiden Singh: You’ve previously described liberal democracy as a societal arrangement which embodies the values of the Enlightenment. Could you share with our readers your definition of liberal democracy and why you see it as embodying the ideals of the Enlightenment?

Steven Pinker: It’s a system that empowers government only as a means to an end of securing human well-being. That is that, both because of the possibilities and temptations of aggression, we are all vulnerable to predation by our fellow humans. And a system of laws and monopoly on violence ceded to the state can keep us from each other’s throats and therefore make us better off - but only if that system is itself licensed by the collective will of the people. That is, only if our governments are established as social contracts by which people agree to give up some of their liberty in exchange for not having their liberty usurped by others. 

And liberal democracy - as opposed to just electoral democracy, where any dictatorship could call itself a democracy if it holds elections and people get to choose which dictator is going to oppress them - is one that establishes a number of rights.

That starts with the right to speech: that is, the right to criticize the leadership, which is composed of humans and therefore is not going to be infallible nor omniscient. And so the only way there can be a humane system of government is one in which the government can be criticized.

It also requires freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. And the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, except where they conflict with the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of others. 

So a liberal democracy is one that enshrines certain rights and freedoms, in addition to choosing its leadership by elections, or other methods of preference aggregation. 

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Why Do Enlightenment Values & Liberal Democracy Facilitate Progress?

Also by allowing free speech, it doesn’t get trapped into cults of personality, or dogmas, or orthodoxies, which are bound to fail as ways of maximizing our well-being simply because no human being is omniscient or infallible: we’re saddled with cognitive biases, we’re born ignorant, and the universe doesn’t go out of its way to reveal its workings. It’s only by arrangements that allow people to disagree and to criticize ideas that we can collectively stumble and bumble our way to greater understanding. A system that disables that process by criminalizing the express of opinion will inevitably walk itself into error.  

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Do Enlightenment Values Lead To Inexorable and Indefinite Human Progress?

Aiden Singh: So you’ve championed the idea that reason and science, employed to the best of our ability and embedded into our institutions, lead us to progress. But you’ve also stated elsewhere your belief that progress is not an unvarying force of the universe. I’d like to interrogate and discuss the degree to which human progress is inevitable. 

Let’s consider, for example, the issue of demographic decline. We’ve seen the birth rate in developed nations fall considerably and in many nations it is now below the level needed to keep the population constant. This trend is well entrenched in countries such as South Korea, Japan, and much of Western Europe.

Unaddressed, a significant population decline and rise in the dependency ratio could be expected to have severe consequences - an insufficient number of young caregivers to look after the numerous aged, a diminution of the tax base, social welfare programs coming under strain as the increasing number of elderly draw on them while there are less young workers paying into them, a decline in the size of the economy as the number of consumers declines, and so on.  

This issue has caught the attention of some of prominent public intellectuals. For example, I had a conversation last year with LSE economist Charles Goodhart on the potential social and economic consequences of a decline in the population and I’ve spoken with Oxford economist Andrea Ferrero about the effects demographic changes are having on real interest rates.

This has interesting implications for any conception of continual and unending human progress. The writer Louise Perry has suggested that a decline in birth rates appears to be something which invariably occurs when society reaches a certain level of affluence - other things take priority over having kids. If we accept this, then it’s conceivable that progress, in a sense, may beget its own downfall. 

So, in your view, is human progress inexorable, something that we should expect to continue uninterrupted long into the future as long as we continue to hold enlightenment values dear?* Or could human progress be impeded, perhaps in a permanent way, by new challenges which we’ve not faced before - demographic or otherwise - even if we continue to uphold Enlightenment values and liberal democracy?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, a few things.

So forget inexorable - people reflexively add that adjective to the noun progress, but they are not the same thing. Progress refers to something getting better, but why should anything be inexorable. Certainly progress isn’t because the default is that we make no progress. And in fact, for the vast majority of human history and pre-history, there was no progress. 

Progress really began in earnest around the time of the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution. 

But for systematic reasons - namely that the universe has no benevolent interest in our welfare - left to its own devices, the world will mash us down, not lift us up. 

We’ve got a number of headwinds against progress being permanent. For example, the second law of thermodynamics / the law of entropy, which states that disorder necessarily increases. 

There’s also the fact that when we do carve out regions of order for our own benefit - when we grow food, when we move from place to place, when we keep ourselves warm in the winter - it inevitably leads to greater disorder somewhere else, in other words, pollution. It’s an inevitably product of capturing energy to make life more congenial for ourselves. 

So for all of these reasons, progress is painstakingly carved out of an indifferent cosmos, and there’s no reason to think that it’s inevitable or inexorable. 

And, with regards to the question of whether progress has within it the seeds of its own destruction, any solution to a problem will introduce new problems. There’s just no such thing as perfection, for a number of reasons that I’ve already mentioned, plus others. So every time there is progress, there are going to be some costs. But that sets up the next problem to be solved and we can try to solve the problem that arises as a byproduct of the last solution. And it’s a never ending process.

Now that doesn’t mean that it’s Sisyphean or circular and we can never get anywhere, because the problems raised by a solution can be less severe than the original problem. So, for example, by increasing the abundance of food, we solve the problem of starvation, but introduce the problem of obesity. Now are those equivalent? No, it’s really better to be fat than starving. It’s not great to be fat, but that’s the next problem we solve with, say, Ozempic or with nudging. But we’re better off having that as a problem than starvation. 

So what about fertility decline? Now there’s no small irony in setting that up as our major problem facing the world given that, for decades, the problem that was supposed to do us all in was over-population: it was going to lead to poverty, resource competition, and war. And there was no solution other than forced sterilization perhaps. Then, without any forced sterilization, without any draconian policies, people had fewer children. Affluence is one of the reasons. But also, women’s empowerment: a woman who through social pressure has seven, eight, nine, or ten children is unlikely to accomplish other things. As women are given more choices, they often opt not to be baby factories. 

Now, in addition, there are other temptations of modernity: people surf the web, they stream movies instead of having sex and bringing up babies. 

Will this lead to a disaster? It’s too soon to tell. It could raise problems.

Although again, in another irony, we are warned of the disaster that will come because there won’t be enough people doing the work of society while also being warned of the catastrophe of the robots taking over and doing all those jobs. So there are going to be fewer babies that grow up to be truck drivers and forklift operators, but on the other hand, there are going to be robots to drive the trucks and operate the forklifts.

Now, there’s no guarantee that those will cancel each other out. And, of course, if people just have fewer and fewer offspring indefinitely, then one can imagine a kind of death spiral in which the species goes extinct. 

I doubt that we will get to that point; the world has never faced this problem before.

It is true that conventional solutions like changing the incentives for having children and employing family friendly policies such as child allowances have so far tended not to bring the birthrate back up to replacement level, which is a little bit more than 2 offspring per woman.

But since this is such a recent problem and it is a problem that’s only beginning to make itself felt in much of the world, and is not being felt at all yet in Africa, it’s new and we don’t know how it will play out.

I tend to think that it won’t be a death spiral for the species; that we’ll rise to the occasion, have more unprotected sex and have more children. I don’t know for sure, nor do I know how we will get there. But it’s way too soon to say that we are going to contracept ourselves into extinction. 

Aiden Singh: So, if I’m understanding correctly, your view is that liberal democracy and Enlightenment values don’t guarantee continual progress, but that they are the ideals which are most conducive to human progress; challenges will continue to come up, but as long as we adhere to these values, we can attempt to overcome every challenge as it comes up. It’s not a view of permanent, indefinite progress.

Steven Pinker: That’s right. And there’s no guarantee that we’ll succeed; there’s no guarantee that we will solve the problem of climate change, for example, and prevent the worst case tipping points. Nonetheless, that is a problem that we recognize and that there is considerable effort to solve. We don’t know if we’ll succeed, but we sure as hell better try.

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The State of Liberal Democracy

Aiden Singh: Of course, threats to human progress are numerous and as old as humanity itself. And challenges to the Enlightenment values and liberal democracy, which you believe to be foundational to human progress, are nothing new.

But it does seem that those ideals and institutions are facing particularly trying times. For example, polling shows that Americans’ trust in the mass media is at all-time lows. Data indicates that faith in the American presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, big business, large technology companies, and the criminal justice system all hover near all-time lows. 

Steven Pinker: You forgot academia. (Laughs)

Aiden Singh: (Laughs). Right. Experts and trust in expertize seems to be at a low.

Polling data also shows a record number of Americans identifying as independents, choosing not to register with either of the two political parties that currently dominate American government. Viewed alongside the other data, this could be interpreted as a sign that many Americans feel no party represents their interests. 

And we’ve seen insurgent challenges to the two established political parties in recent years - with Bernie Sanders (generally considered to be further to the left of the political spectrum than most other American politicians) garnering significant support during the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and Donald Trump (who held no previous position in government and many argued at the time was unelectable) successfully seizing control of the Republican Party in 2016.**

And some analysts are concerned about the institutional integrity of the United States. For example, I recently had a conversation with Professor Gary Klein, a historian of the American presidency who’s deeply concerned about what he sees as American institutional decay. He expressed his apprehension that many Americans, particularly in his view on the political right, seem more open to the idea of authoritarian government now than previously in American history.

We’ve also seen the rise of insurgent political parties and the decline of long established political parties in other Western nations.  

Given this, would you say that liberal democracy is in the midst of a particularly trying moment? And if so, what does this say about our present level of attachment to Enlightenment ideals? 

Steven Pinker: Yeah, so I like to put things into historical context, because there are always challenges and there are always crises, so how do we know that the ones today are any worse than the ones five years ago, ten years ago, fifty years ago. People were fretting back then in the same terms. As Franklin Pierce Adams said, ‘The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory’.

Both: (Laugh)

Steven Pinker: And it’s both a political phenomenon and a psychological phenomenon. People do tend to forget how bad things were in the past: the negative affect tends to fade over time and so we’re wired for nostalgia. 

Talking about threats to democracy, let’s go back to when I was a student in the 1970s. The world only had 33 democracies. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain and ruled by Communist totalitarian dictatorships. Spain and Portugal were under the control of right-wing quasi-fascist dictatorships. Greece was under the control of a military junta. All of Latin America was under the control of right-wing or military dictatorships. Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines were all right-wing dictatorships. And all of them are, more or less, democratic today. 

Hungary has gotten worse and the United States is under threat. 

But count up how many countries are democratic and how many are autocratic. And measure how autocratic or democratic they are. Sure the United States has taken a hit, but it’s still unquestionably a democracy. There are organizations that measure this. V-Dem (the Varieties of Democracy Project out of Norway) is one of them. If you plot it, you see that, from a pit in the 1970s you get an increase in the democracy curve. 

Over the last few years it’s drooped a bit, so the democratic decline is real. It’s taken us back to probably the early 2000s, maybe 2010. So the democratic decline is real. It includes hits to democracy such as took place in Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and to some extent, the United States. If you look at the democracy score for the USA, it took a bit of a dip in 2020 for obvious reasons, but has come most of the way back up. 

You and I are speaking now on October 21st, 2024. And it is imminently possible that by the time this interview is posted that United States will take another hit in its democracy score. So yes, it is possible. Certainly a decline of trust in institutions such as the press and the government is correlated with a decline in democracy. 

We should keep in mind that probably the default in American history is distrust in institutions. There was kind of a high point of trust, a peak, in the early 60s during the JFK administration. But that was historically unusual and we’ve kind of been declining ever since. 

It does set out a challenge, which is how are institutions going to regain trust? And we don’t know the answer for sure. 

But I think one of the things that is not being tried and that ought to be tried is to depoliticize them. So many of our institutions, especially the ones that I’m familiar with - universities, scientific societies, mainstream journalistic outlets - consciously or unconsciously brand themselves as leftwing outlets or spokespeople, and that is just guaranteed to alienate people who aren’t on the left. The institutions have been completely obvious to this trend and have not really tried to stake out a reputation for political objectivity and neutrality. That, I think, could be one step they could take to reverse this slide, beginning with universities, and that’s been one of my crusades.

Aiden Singh: Yes, and we’ll discuss your work in this area towards the end of this conversation.

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 Steel Manning A Counter Narrative

Aiden Singh: Now, allow me to attempt to steel man a narrative around the aforementioned data which I suspect many Americans would be sympathetic to and which considers the idea that human progress has stagnated in recent years. 

The story might run something like this: in the aggregate, certain metrics have improved, but within society certain groups are doing better than others. 

Aggregate GDP is rising, corporate profits are strong, and medical breakthroughs continue to be made. 

But houses, once a key pillar of middle class wealth formation, have become unaffordable. Blue collar jobs which once sustained large segments of the American population have left certain parts of the county, leaving behind a swath of the country now known as the Rust Belt. The pain of job losses in coal country have been ignored by both Republican and Democrat politicians. Meanwhile, at the very time when a university degree has become a minimum requirement for many jobs, the cost of attending university has risen astronomically, leaving many young graduates saddled with mortgage-sized debts fresh out of school. Sure medical breakthroughs have occurred, but accessing them through America’s maze of complicated and expensive insurance programs is a challenge for many. Workers’ real wages have remained stagnant for decades. And wealth inequality is rising.

And so, while at the aggregate surface level, society appears to be in a long period of uninterrupted progress, many Americans have taken a step backwards, leaving them feeling that the nation’s institutions are not working for them. Hence the declining trust in American institutions and support for insurgent political candidates. American progress, the story goes, has stalled. Or at least it has left behind a sufficiently large swath of the population that it threatens the institutions and ideals which you’ve argued are key to continued progress. 

What’s wrong with this narrative?

Steven Pinker: I think there are degrees of truth in it. Certainly healthcare, education, and housing have skyrocketed in price for a number of reasons that neither the government nor the other institutions involved are effectively addressing. 

On the other hand, it’s not true that there’s been stagnation for the average or even the poorer American. The poverty rate has plunged from about 30% of the population in the 1960s to about 10% today. That could be lowered further, and ought to be, but it is simply false to say that there has been no economic progress in America. 

Among other things, poverty among the elderly, which was a national crisis through the 1960s - there’s stories that old people had to eat dog food to survive - has plummeted because of social security and medicare. 

In terms of quality of life - things that may not go into GDP or the poverty rate but that change our everyday experience - there are massive improvements. I can talk about my childhood, adolescence, and college years. Long distance phone calls were an exorbitant luxury: you would call and speak in a rush to your parents or your girlfriend or your boyfriend, fearing that the rent money was draining away for every minute that you talk. You would do it after 11pm or on a Sunday afternoon when the rates were lowest. Now, not only is it pretty much free, but you’ve got video. 

In terms of entertainment, once a movie left the movie theater, that was it. Maybe you’d have a repertory theater that would show a Fellini film for one Friday evening. Now you can watch essentially anything, anywhere. 

In terms of air travel, far more people are flying today; it used to be a luxury. We had something called the ‘jet set’: people who could afford to travel by jet. Now poor people fly. 

Now this doesn’t mean this is true in all aspects. We’ve identified three areas where costs have risen precipitously. Those are real problems that we have not solved. In the case of housing, for example, it’s come to peoples’ attention that the basic laws of economics have been flouted, namely, supply and demand. If you pile on restrictions on building, if anyone can veto anything being built next to them, if you have not only NIMBY - not in my backyard - but BANANA - build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything, then that is going to create scarcity. Scarcity is going to drive up prices. That’s a point libertarians have made for decades. Now liberals have kind of woken up to the truth behind it and there’s some pressure toward YIMBY-ism - yes in my backyard. Although, it takes a while to build a house so it’s going to be a while before that makes itself felt, if ever. Likewise, in healthcare there are a number of reasons why the cost has increased, especially in the United States where we spend the most of any affluent democracy on healthcare and get the least from it. 

So yeah those problems are real and there are people trying to solve them. It would be unwarranted to say they’ll succeed, but it would also be unwarranted to say that they’ll fail. 

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The Gap Between Human Progress and Perceptions Of Progress

Aiden Singh: So you’ve laid out your case in favor of the idea that the quality of human life continues to improve today. And yet, one will often encounter a sort of fatalism when talking to people about the state of the world. 

I’ve heard things like, “How could I bring a child into the world today?” and “Well, climate change will wipe us out in a few decades”. How do we reconcile the seemingly contradictory observations that humanity has made so much progress in so many areas yet many people feel resigned to doom and gloom?

Steven Pinker: A couple of things. One is that there is a built-in distorter of our understanding of reality in the news, in journalism. News is about what happens, not what doesn’t happen. And what happens is more often bad than good because it’s easy for something to go wrong all of a sudden - there can be a terrorist attack, a school shooting, a war breaks out. That’s because it’s easier for things to go wrong: if something happens suddenly, it’s almost certainly going to be in the wrong direction.

Things that go right are often things that don’t happen, like a city that has not been attacked by terrorists or a region that is not at war. And things that go right are often things that build up gradually by a few percentage points per year and compound, like the increase in life expectancy, the decrease in extreme poverty, increases in education, women’s rights and gay rights. They build up gradually and they don’t burst into our awareness on a Thursday in October. And so people can be unaware of all the improvements, but all too aware of all of the fails.  

Also there’s, unfortunately, an interest in the elites that often are in charge of informing people to set themselves in opposition to other elites, namely people in technology, people in government, and people in business who actually are often responsible for the improvements that we see. But there’s a built in market for pessimism, for cynicism, for criticism. And that also, I think, misleads people. And maybe has misled an entire generation: even though climate change could make things worse, it’s not going to lead to the extinction of the species. That’s just exotic and an extremely improbable scenario. People who believe that really have been systematically misled. And misled about other things too simply because of the combination of the built-in biases in journalism and the vested interests of many of our cultural and educational elites. 

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What Role Does The Availability Heuristic Play?

Aiden Singh: In the past, you’ve listed the availability heuristic of media consumers, combined with traditional media’s tendency to publish negative attention grabbing stories, to the exclusion of positive headlines, as part of the explanation for this seeming contradiction. Could you elaborate on the role of the availability heuristic?

And so we tend to worry about the wrong things, and worry too much in general.

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What Role Does Social Media Play?

Aiden Singh: So you’ve argued that traditional media is partly responsible for undue negativity about the state of the world. What role do you think social media might play in explaining negative sentiments about human progress? And how does social media’s role compare to that of traditional media?

Steven Pinker: Well, I wouldn’t want to compare them because social media - perhaps with the exception of Wikipedia - has no mandate to seek the truth, whereas responsible journalism does. So, to the extent that people get their impression from social media, it’s far worse than if they get their impression from mainstream media because any institution that isn’t constitutionally designed to seek truth and weed out falsehood will propagate falsehood. That’s because it’s very hard to attain any kind of truth. It’s hard work which requires humility because any one of us is bound to be wrong. And therefore, it’s institutions that allow for ideas to be criticized, fact-checked, and sourced that are our only hope for stumbling toward truth.

So these institutions include responsible journalism, with its demands for fact-checking. As I mentioned, there’s a built-in bias in journalism which I believe is correctable if the news presents events in historical context, if it discusses trends and not just events. It’s leagues better than rumor, superstition, and viral posts. 

It includes science, at least when it’s functioning properly where ideas are subject to experimental tests and falsification.

It includes government record keeping agencies which are mandated to keep records that are as accurate as possible.

It includes the judicial system, with its adversarial proceedings so that people have a right to a defense and can’t just be railroaded into jail. 

And I mentioned that one social media, Wikipedia, which was set up explicitly to try to be objective and truthful. It’s not perfect: we all know about various Wikipedia editing wars. But it’s still pretty darn good.

Anyways, without a system being setup to push towards truth, it won’t. 

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Do Enlightenment Values Always Lead To Progress?

Aiden Singh: You recently had a debate with Professor Jonathan Mearsheimer about your views on human progress. In that debate, Professor Mearsheimer posited a counterpoint to your idea that the enlightenment values of reason and free expression of thought lead toward societal progress. 

He takes a Hobbesian view, suggesting that freedom to reason does not alway mean that we will arrive at consensus: reasonable and intelligent individuals, he argued, may arrive at competing and conflicting conclusions. 

And, as an international relations scholar belonging to the ‘realist’ school of thought, he scales this idea up to the level of the nation-state and international relations: reasonable peoples across different nations, he argues, may reason their way to competing conclusions that can lead to international conflict. 

In his view, this presents a challenge to your idea that progress is the fruit of reason and to Emmanuel Kant’s idea that perpetual peace is possible. 

You disagree with this view. Why?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, I’m a Hobbesian myself; I think he had an excellent analysis of violence. And I’m even more so a fan of Emmanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, which argued for peace, not as a romantic ideal, but as a practical objective which can be implemented by changing the incentive structure of nation states. 

Yes, people will disagree: that’s kind of the point of the Enlightenment enshrinement of freedom of speech and freedom of the press as cardinal values. Namely, it’s only by airing out different opinions that we can sift through them and decide which ones have merit.

Where I disagree with the so-called ‘realist’ theory of international relations - and ‘realist’ has to go in quotation marks because I don’t think there’s anything particularly realist about it; it doesn’t have  a particularly good track record of predicting the trajectory of war and peace - is that, first of all it is not a built-in motive that the leaders of states strive for expansion and glory. Singapore was happy to get rich and didn’t have to conquer Malaysia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Switzerland has been perfectly content to sit within its own borders. 

These things can change and there are different human values. Power and glory are among them. But affluence is another one. And very often, nations will pursue affluence instead of territorial expansion. 

And also, empirically, it’s just not the case that the rate of war has been pinned to a constant level throughout human history. Most significantly, since 1945, there’s been an uneven but unmistakable decline in battle deaths. Even with the increases we’ve had in the last couple of years with the wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Gaza, we’re still at lower levels than the world saw in the 80s, 70s, 60s, and 50s, to say nothing of the world wars. 

And that’s because of Enlightenment analyses such as Kant’s which tried to establish what it would take to bring about perpetual peace. 

Now perpetual peace is, of course, hyperbolic. And Kant himself realized this: he said he got the name of that essay from a sign outside a pub which depicted a graveyard - that was ‘perpetual peace’. So there was a bit of a twinkle in the very concept. 

But if we don’t have absolute peace, we could certainly have a reduction in wars and a reduction in deaths from wars. And they can come about by things that we have seen such as an expansion of trade, which reduces the incentives for conquest and plunder. With an expansion of trade, it becomes cheaper to buy things than to steal them and other people become more valuable alive than dead: you don’t kill your customers, you don’t kill your debtors. A reduction in wars can also come about through a federation of nations that provides for methods of dispute resolution other than war such as international courts. It can come about through establishing international law and norms, such as the norm against conquest. 

Although, like all laws, there are law breakers, such as Russia most recently. But most nations are committed to not launching wars except in self-defense, with the authorization of the security council. Again, there are flouters as there are flouters of laws against armed robberies, murder, and rape. But it’s better that we have those laws than not: laws can reduce the frequency of aggressive acts. 

Reductions in war can also come through peacekeeping forces that get themselves between fighting forces (they don’t always work, but they sometimes do).

There are also changes in the economy so that affluence no longer depends on land the way it used to when the only source of wealth was farming and mining. Now wealth comes from technology, ideas, and trade. So countries without resources and land like Singapore can become fantastically wealthy.

And also just changes in values: how important is it to leaders and to peoples that their country be as glorious, preeminent, and large as possible? Would people rather get rich than have a country with a lot of square inches on the map in its color? That can change as well. How much are people willing to give up their sons as cannon fodder? How likely are people to prioritize intangibles like national glory over life and health? Those can change over time and they have changed over time. 

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The State of the Academy

Aiden Singh: Let’s turn now to the academy. You’re a professor at Harvard and you’ve taught at several other prominent universities, including MIT. What do you believe to be the mission of a university?

Steven Pinker: To acquire and propagate knowledge. 

Aiden Singh: Straightforward. (Laughs.)

Steven Pinker: (Nods in agreement.)

Aiden Singh: Some scholars have argued that the freedom to carry out this mission in the academy is currently under threat. 

For example some, such as Professor Johnathan Haidt, have argued that students have become too sensitive to perceived transgressions to allow for open discourse in the classroom. 

And others have expressed concern that our universities are being politicized in a manner that prevents free discussion. 

Do you believe that academic freedom, and by extension, the expression of enlightenment ideals within the academy are under threat?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, they are demonstrably under threat in the sense that the number of faculty and students who have been censored, expelled, or punished for constitutionally protected speech has increased in the last decade. So they are very much under threat.

Which is why I have co-founded the Council On Academic Freedom at Harvard as an attempt to push back. 

Aiden Singh: I understand that you’re also the co-president of that group. Could you tell our readers a little bit about the purpose of the group, your role in it, and what you hope to accomplish?

Steven Pinker: Yeah. The purpose of the group is to foster academic freedom. That is, to foster the ability to expression opinions without censorship or punishment. To foster civil discourse: the ability to debate things openly without rancour or animosity. And to foster viewpoint diversity, having different opinions represented on campus so that debates can be fully informed.

We’ve pressured for things like institutional neutrality: the university itself not taking stances on national issues but serving as a forum in which the students and faculty can have those debates. We’ve spoken out when there have been attempts to repress the expression of ideas such as articles being withdrawn from journals or public events being shut down by hecklers and protestors. We’ve pushed against the use of so-called ‘diversity statements’ in job applications; that is, statements in which an applicant for a professorial job has to pretty much agree with the agenda of racial preferences - so called, diversity, equity, and inclusion - in order to be considered for a job. We’ve had that eliminated at Harvard. And we’ve hosted events at which the concepts and limits of academic freedom are debated.

Aiden Singh: You’ve founded this group and are putting this energy and effort into it. So you’re of the view that the existing institutions - places like Harvard - can be reformed in a way that academic freedom is no longer under threat? There are some of the opinion that we should start new institutions. Should we salvage what already exists, found new institutions, or a combination of both?

Steven Pinker: Yeah I think we need both. It’s very hard to start up a university. The University of Austin is an example. It was founded just three years ago. 

But among other things, to be an educated person in the 21st century means to be educated in science and to have opportunities to be an apprentice in science. It’s expensive to have the infrastructure of science: you need labs, committees for the protection of animals and humans, procurement and supply chains, and all else. So starting up a new university is not going to be easy if it’s not just a great books university, which you can do on the cheap. 

I think competition is good. But I think it’s more important to change the legacy universities, simply because they’re not going to be replaced any time soon. They’re not even going to make enough space for significant competition any time soon because of their legacy and status. 

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Conclusion

Aiden Singh: You’ve stated repeatedly that the ideals of the Enlightenment and the gifts of liberal democracy are often taken for granted and that their benefits need to be continually restated and championed, lest they be forgotten. So I’d like to close out our conservation by giving you the chance to reiterate for our audience why we should defend those values and institutions - and what losing them would mean for us.

Steven Pinker: Yeah. There are a number of reasons to defend Enlightenment values. One is that they are just an extension of ideas we don’t dispute, such as the primacy of reason: if you’re having a debate about anything, you’re committed to reason. Another relates to the interchangeability of interests: the fact that no one person’s interests can be privileged over anyone else’s.

From those foundations, we see that the institutions that are gifts of the Enlightenment, such as liberal democracy and scientific societies, have demonstrably made us better off: they have more doubled our life span, they’ve increased literacy rates from about 15% to 90% globally, they have slashed extreme poverty from 90% of humanity to about 8% of humanity, they’ve resulted in a decline in war, a decline in disease, a decline in child mortality, and a decline in maternal mortality. They’ve improved all the things that make life worth living. And it is liberal democracies - fruits of the Enlightenment - that are the most pleasant places to live. They have the highest rates of happiness. And they are the places that people choose when they vote with their feet.

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Footnotes

* For the purposes of this discussion, we’re deliberately leaving aside challenges not brought on by progress itself such as an asteroid wiping out humanity. I intend here to interrogate the idea that progress may not always beget more progress.

** Note: I don’t intend here to equate the two candidates nor their policy positions; only to note the concurrent timing of the success of their ‘outsider’ campaigns, which could be interpreted as additional evidence that Americans are disillusioned with their institutions. 

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