This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning
Hey everybody, this is Razib Khan, and I am here with Dr. Steven Pinker, who has been on the podcast before. And yeah, so most of you probably know who he is. So he is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He's written a bunch of books, he writes a bunch of stuff. Steven is out there. And I wanted to talk to him. So our previous time, we talked about the book on rationality. It's kind of like appropriate to the time and like what he had at the time, but but I want to talk now in 2023, as we're recording about “The Blank Slate” which is - I don’t know there's a lot of - you've written a lot of great books, Steven, “Blank Slate” seems to be - Can I say that that's your breakout in terms of you became, like, kind of like a next level public intellectual after that you were kind of the psycho linguist evolutionary psychologist. And then you wrote a book on human nature? I mean, is that correct? A correct characterization?
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.
Yeah. And so I want to talk to Steven about “The Blank Slate:” Well, more than 20 years later, now, when I read “The Blank Slate” as a young man, you know, there wasn't anything I necessarily disagreed with it or that I was shocked by, but I think it clarified a lot of things. It introduced many of us to think there's like Judith Rich Harris, the late Judith Rich Harris. I mean, that was a big deal. I mean, I have told people read ‘the blank slate’, at least to be introduced to Judith Rich Harris, like that's the minimum, there's other things in there, obviously, but I do, I do think that was great of you, you know, to make her more well known to people, and “The Blank Slate” is divided into basically three, you know, themes, I guess. So the blank slate itself, you know, talking about behavioral genetics, that sort of thing, evolutionary psychology, that goes to the machine, which, you know, like, kind of like the dualism, the idea that people have souls, and, you know, maybe like questions relate to freewill. And then there's the noble, noble savage, which, you know, comes kind of through Rousseau but has been around in the culture in various ways related to kind of like utopian ideas of the plasticity of our nature and our nature being fundamentally good. And so I wanted to talk about these things in sequence. More than two decades later, we've talked a little bit, you know, in the previous podcast about how things are today, and like looking back, and when I read “The Blank Slate” so I'll just say, let's start, we'll start with the behavioral genetics part, when I read ‘the blank slate’, I knew some of what you had written about, but I got exposed to a lot more of the literature. And so for example, Judith Rich Harris, who I just mentioned, she talked about, or she reported results that are pretty robust, that shared environmental effects - So what's your family, how your family's choices shaped who you are, as opposed to the genetics of who your family is. And as opposed to non shared environment, which is basically a residual, it's everything else. She thought it was peer groups, but you know, that's still a hypothesis being tested. You know, that was kind of a revelation. It's influenced a lot of people I know, Bryan Caplan's book about, you know, why ‘Selfish reasons to have kids’. Like there's a lot of books out there that were influenced by that sort of thinking. And then obviously, you talked about heritability. And this was 20 years ago, before educational attainment, three, four, all of these things had happened. And now we have a whole science based on genome wide associations, and complex trait analysis in genomics. Looking at the material biophysical substrate that produces heritability, which is just variation, genetic - the variation of the population due to genes. All of these ideas. And when starting out with “The Blank State” I think you teed it up for the next 20 years, on the other hand, entirely- like, you know, entirely Honestly, I feel like something has happened in our culture. And I can tell you that many people who have graduate level backgrounds still will tell me ‘well I don't think IQ…’ Well, one ‘IQ is not real, because…’ - you start there, two; ‘if it's real, it's not heritable…’ In terms of Judith, Rich Harris and shared environment they don't know any of that. A lot of the behavior genetics is perceived to be quote, “problematic” that's the term we would use today. You know, and Paige Harden had a book and you know, she It was a book explicitly avowing wokeness. But she was attacked as a eugenicist by people on the left, I feel like of the various things starting out with “The Blank Slate” We have many more discoveries. But the culture is much more avowedly ‘blank slate’ than it was 20 years ago. Am I wrong?
Yeah, well, they're, they're different strands of the culture. So by and large, you're right, the, and also things have changed a bit over time. So in the first 15 years after “The Blank Slate” came out, the idea was a little less taboo in the sense that you could open up an intro psych textbook, and there'd be a discussion of behavioral genetics and heritability, and sex differences. That probably was less likely to have been true. 20 years ago, 25 years ago, in newspaper op eds, columnists, they would sometimes talk about the evolutionary basis of a trait, they might mention heritability. And so the the window opened somewhat, but then after 2020 As you know, there has been a huge backlash, and in some ways, the kind of moral revulsion against the very idea of human nature has spread outward. So even for example, many cultural explanations are now taboo in favor of attributing everything to bigotry, racism, transphobia, prejudice, and so on. So I can just take a step back, the reason I wrote “The Blank Slate” was, after having written “How the Mind Works” I saw that a lot of the pushback against the very idea that there's such a thing as human nature, and the ways in which it was being fleshed out by evolutionary psychology and Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and behavioral genetics - A lot of the opposition wasn't just scientific, there was a scientific opposition there, that's good and proper, but a lot of it was moralistic. It was we that can't be reality, because it would just be too awful to think about if that was true, the moralistic fallacy that reality has to conform with our - our values, our dreams of what would be the best world we'd want to live in. And I especially appreciated after I wrote “Rationality:” the idea that I think you and I have that most people who sign on to science we ought to have that journalist’s ought to have is there's a real world is out there. It doesn't care particularly about our values, as James Flynn of the Flynn effect said the truth can't be racist. Likewise, the truth can't be sexist. But at the same time, as Chekhov said, I should have used this an epigraph as an epigraph from a book, “man will be better if you show him what he is like”. Now, this doesn't - nothing that we can discover about human nature would compromise basic commitments like all people have equal rights, like we ought to work to reducing scourges like violence and exploitation, like human life has meaning and dignity and purpose. You can have all those things at the same time as you find out what makes us tick and accept whatever the truth turns out to be. But that mindset that there is a distinction between facts and values, that it there is a moral value of finding out empirical reality about the world, including ourselves, so as to inform our values. More and more, I've come to realize that is a weird, exotic, delicate mindset. And that it isn't just non western peoples isn't just uneducated peoples, it's people with the highest position, the highest degrees of education, the highest degrees of responsibility for our institutional and intellectual intuitions, institutions, they fall back on the idea that when it comes to particularly human nature, you can't really find out and so let's advance the view that it is as morally uplifting as possible, as edifying as possible. So that was what I was pushing against when I wrote “The Blank Slate” and that has gotten, I'd say, worse. So just if I could just recap why I wrote the different sections in “The Blank Slate” - “The Blank Slate” itself is the idea that we have no inborn talents, or motives or emotions. And I kind of diagnosed the the appeal of the blank slate, the moral appeal, despite the fact that we don't have obvious reasons to think it's false. Like, we're not chimpanzees, like, not all of us are identical the results of behavioral genetics, that men and women aren't indistinguishable, despite a lot of social and cultural forces trying to make us interchangeable. We still aren't. A lot of our tastes are adapted to a pre modern environment, not to the costs and benefits of our current environment. All those are reasons to think that the blank slate is wrong. But people want to believe the blank slate I think is a think that it's the ultimate guarantor of equality. Because it kind of from the from the truism, zero equals zero equals zero, if we're all blank slates, we have to be equal. Anything's written on the slate, some of us could have more than others. And, you know, that'd be too terrible to think about, because that would mean that discrimination and oppression are okay after all. So my point was, that doesn't follow that's a non sequitur, we can be committed, as the founders of American democracy were to the idea that all people are created equal in terms of their rights without saying that we're all clones. We don't have to be clones in order to have equal rights. We as long as we treat individuals, as individuals, and don't prejudge them by the statistics of a group, the statistics of a group are irrelevant to the to the political commitment to equality. But that's a very hard, I have learned very hard message to get to sink in to the point where, when it comes to the the most incendiary, possible implication of the of human nature, namely could could races differ? A topic that I did not discuss in “The Blank Slate” I don't think there's strong enough evidence. I don't think it's scientifically important enough. But there's such revulsion against the even the possibility that that might be true, that the very idea of intelligence has been dismissed by a lot of our intellectuals, as you note, they're still the myth debunked decades ago, promulgated by Stephen Jay Gould that IQ tests don't measure intelligence that there's no such thing as intelligence, that intelligence predicts nothing. And I think that is fun to build several rings around the possibility that races differ by saying, well, there, there is no such thing. So they couldn't differ. But it has bled so far, that what used to be the politically correct alternative to innate differences in race, namely cultural differences. Well, that's taboo now too, because that's blaming the victim. And the only acceptable explanation for any group wide differences is racism, or homophobia, or transphobia, or sexism, even the cultural differences which used to be the acceptable alternative to biological differences - Well, even that is taboo. So it isn't just the blank slate, it's more generally trying to make reality conform to the easiest shortcut to equality. My argument in that part of the book was, let's just be clear as to what our commitment is, and yes, discrimination is bad and oppression is bad, and exploitation is bad. But the results from your population study your behavioral genetic study, no matter which way they come out, don't compromise the ideal of, of political and moral equality. So that was, that was ‘the blank slate’ part. Things haven't, as you note, haven't gotten better. You still have intellectuals who are reiterating the canards from from Gould from his “Mismeasure of Man” book, even though they were debunked within a few months of the book being published. You still find people not in discussions of economic inequality. The vast majority, nine out of 10 or more, don't even mention the possibility that some people are, might be more conscientious than others. Some people might be smarter than others, it's simply not even mentioned, even to be refuted, its unmentionable. That has not gotten better, at least in the last few years. Although there was an opening, I think, in the decade after the book came out.
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a lot. That's a lot out there. And it's true. I mean, you have to say, you know, I think you alluded a little bit to this, maybe more the ghost that in the machine part, you know, intelligent design creationism, that was a thing. 20 years ago, you know, George W. Bush had just been elected. So it was a it was a whole different time. Like, there's people were, were gonna be, you know, listening to us, let me just like, they, they were, they don't remember 911. Like, that's the thing now, you know? So, okay. Okay. So they don't understand what the environment is and I use one of the, like, let's, let's outline, especially for non Americans, because some of these things we're gonna be talking about is American specific. Now, this idea that Ibram X. Kendi is proposing, is that any differences between - okay, this is not true. He's not - It's not a general assertion, but any differences between blacks and whites that - and where there's a gap that's, you know, people would want to shrink the gap, you know, let's say, test scores, you know, achievements on various like academic performance, you know, whatever you There's only one explanation, that explanation is systemic racism. Now, you know, on one hand, it's an easy concept to understand. But on the other hand, it's almost like the æther or karma, or God, it is a force in the universe that is hidden, and shaping everything around us it is the ultimate cause. So I just think in some ways, we're seeing, instead of the blank, you know, instead of the overthrow of the blank slate understanding of human nature, it's almost like a reenactment of the universe with the sociological forces. And yes, they're not explicitly made supernatural. But once you try to try to define it, it is very similar to theological debates where you cannot really define God because God is beyond comprehension and understanding
Yeah, God isn’t the kind of guy that would make himself comprehensible to us. So if you think you understand him, you don't understand him. Yes. And in the case of again, in the case of the blank slate did not discuss race. But you know, ironically, the what was, for awhile called a cultural turning sociology. And I'm talking to you hear from William James Hall at Harvard, where we have a psychology department in the sociology department in the same building. And my very good friend, and colleague, Orlando Patterson, who's a couple of floors down, wrote about a couple of decades ago, around the time that I wrote “The Blank Slate”, and he was he gave me comments on it, you read about the cultural turn in sociology, something we've actually he kind of hoped for, namely, culture is important. Not every ethnic group has the same set of norms and mores and habits and equilibria. And sociology should pay more attention to it. And he noted, Riley in his book, “The Ordeal of Integration” came out in 1999. The fact that back then, in his own field, the the culture was already starting to become suspect - it seemed like blaming the victim, and that the only explanation was racism. And Orlando Patterson pointed that out in 1999. But that has was a kind of a.on the horizon when he wrote presently, and now it has exploded, just going back to “The Blank Slate” for a moment, another manifestation. I mean, aside from just the denial of the possibility of individual differences, and again, forget, forget race, let's just talk about individuals. Some people are more neurotic than others, and some people are more conscientious than others. Some people are more agreeable than others. That is often taboo. Some people are smarter than others, then there's, of course, the difference between the sexes, which has, again, a lot of discussions in disparities in representation in different professions. Don't even mention the possibility that men and women on average, of course, not every last individual, but if you compare the means they're not identical in their, their priorities, their tastes, their interests, their their portfolio of, of talents, and again, not true of any of every man and every woman, but on average, there are differences, that possibility is often not even mentioned, when you find that there someone reports that there are more proportionately more women in psychology, more men in mechanical engineering, that hasn't gotten any better, I don't think and in fact, in some ways as with the bleed out into cultural explanations, the bleed out of this case of the the diffusion or spreading is, it used to be not okay to talk about any innate sex differences, although Ironically, it was always politically okay to talk about innate differences in sexual orientation. That was one of the exceptions were there, the blank slate theory was what the right wingers believe in, if you were a progressive in good standing, you believe that that homosexual orientation is innate, at least in men. But now you have the transgender phenomenon, where it's not only which traits you have that are not a matter of your chromosomes in your gametes, but even the sex that you identify with, that that itself has nothing to do with your biological endowment. It's either maybe it's the ghost in the machine, maybe your soul is male or female and doesn't accept the body who had the bad luck to be incarnated in or I don't think it's a particularly coherent view of where sexual identity comes from or gender identity, I should say. But that's a case where two ideas that have gotten far more extreme and far more in departure from a biologically grounded understanding even two sexes, yes, how controversial my colleague got canceled for saying that biologically speaking there are two sexes.
Yeah, I mean, so I've, you know, Carol's been on the podcast, I've talked to her, like, we've hung out at the Quillette conference, too. So yeah she's great. And I told - this is a long time ago, but in 2014, I could tell something was up. I was in graduate school at the time, I ran into Chris Mooney, who had written “The Republican War on Science”, and I'm just like, You people are going to come after sex. And I just met the left, you know, and he just started laughing. He's like, that's done. The science wars are over. Who's right, Chris? Who was right, I was totally right. You know, the idea of there being sex differences was kind of like, I feel like that's where evolutionary psychologists started to. This is so manifestly self evidently true that there are men and there are women. And they are different, that this is where you start. Yeah, yeah. On average, although, you know, when you look at upper body strength, they're quite close to disjoined, which, most people, I believe most people in like upper middle class, professional, managerial class backgrounds, the United States are not aware of this. Because to be entirely candid, it's extremely taboo, for like a man to hit a woman in that sort of cultural environment. And this is like, again, I'm gonna be generalizing about cultures. But I'm sure sorry, it's not taboo in some other cultures. So they know very clearly the difference between males and females in upper body strength. I do not think we do actually, in a lot of
it's a benevolent- a beneficial taboo, I'm glad we have it. But
yeah,
It doesn’t also mean that there are certain biological realities that people are less familiar with, you know, I think,
Exactly
well, when you're a kid, and you played in sport, especially in the in the era in which they were, you know, pickup teams, and where not every childhood activity was regimented by adults. And you play mix, mixed sex teams, it became pretty obvious that with some exceptions, there are always some super strong athletic girls. But you know, on average, you don't have a boys team against a girls team.
Yeah, and that's common sense. Although, you know, in the last, I think I first heard about it in 2016, or 2015. There are sociologists, of course, it's going to be sociologists, sorry, who are arguing for the elimination of all gender, or sex, I don't know, what were they want to use now? Because it's always changing. You know, separation in the NCAA. And so I, I can look, I look this up, but I'm trying to put the show notes. I was listening to NPR. I think this was this - was when I was in Davis. So that means it was before 2017? 16? or 17. And the NPR reporter was, well, I mean, don't you think that men and women are kind of different. And sociologist, she was at University of Alabama, she had played NCAA basketball, she said, you know, what, this sort of segregation, they used to argue about that for races. And so the reporter was like okay, let's move on. You know, you know.
There is a phenomenon that, and this this came up in when I wrote “The Better Angels of Our Nature” that people do sometimes beneficially transfer lessons from the, from one struggle for justice and equality to another not acknowledging the differences. And it is true that say, sexism and the women's rights revolution came on the heels of racism and the civil rights revolution. And that was good. And then gay rights in turn, borrowed some of the tactics some of the the mentality that although the moral transfer was relevant, it should be okay. Also to acknowledge where you got to make some some substitutions and differences. The black and white, male and female, they're not the same. There's, you know, as far as we know, black, black and white could be biologically interchangeable except for skin pigmentation. That could be perfectly plausible, but that just is not true for for the sexes going back, you know, a couple of billion years. And you know, race is really is. Well, you've written much about it, how it's very recent, and we are all mongrels. We're all just -
I think that's a problematic term, but -
I wear it proudly. We should all be proud of being mongrels. Because it means that race, you know, this is a case where, you know, there is some truth to be it's not completely true, but there's no biological reality to race. You know, just statistically there's a little bit but you know, it's pretty superficial. Whereas male and female that That really goes back a long ways in our evolutionary history and that we're biologically significant in a way that racism, it's a bunch of, at most variation in allele frequencies. But anyway, better and - again, you know, I think it's a confusion. It's lazy moral thinking that it really is bad to, for women to be exploited for women to be harassed, to be women to be assaulted, for women to be discriminated against. Those are all evils, we should fight them, both sexes should fight them, we should try to combat them in many different ways. None of it depends on men and women being indistinguishable. But because rewind the clock, 60 years and a lot of the arguments for treating women differently, hinged on bogus theories of sex differences, you know, women can't, they can't reason abstractly and they can't do math, and so good riddance to those. And indeed, those did prop up a lot of discrimination and oppression. But on the other hand, it doesn't mean that men and women have to be indistinguishable in every respect for you to be opposed to sexism and assault, physical assaults on women and all the other evils. So again, it's kind of lazy, moral thinking that the commandeer or takes over empirical scientific thinking you're forcing reality to be such that it gives you a kind of cheap shortcut towards your political goals - thats the argument in “The Blank Slate”.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I have to say, so a couple years after “The Blank Slate” came out with like, again, talk about history, what's happening in this 21st century? I think 2004 The Larry Summers affair. Very. Yeah, yeah.
Also just down the street from where I am sitting at this very moment.
I think of that as a bit of a turning point, because Larry Summers is a mainstream intellectual. Arguably, many people argue that he'd never became chair of the Federal Reserve because of that, because of that incident. Just to recap, there were some discussions about the representation of women in science. And Larry Summers, mooted the possibility that maybe this is due to differences in the variance in, you know, mathematical aptitude, males having higher variance, females, having lower variance, even though the average is the same. So males would be more represented the tails, top and bottom. Okay, this is an idea he put out there was part of a broader suite of issues, the faculty had with Summers, he was no longer president. And it's dogged him in various ways for a couple of decades. But today, look, I think that men and women have different cognitive profiles, the details, I'm not a psychometrician. But I think that's true, objectively, but why not something that
On average, with lots of exceptions lots of exceptions,
on average. Yes, and I know those exceptions.
Yeah yeah, me too
My daughter has a … yeah, go go.
I was married to a woman who's 3d spatial cognition, just trounced me. Left me in the dust.
yes, yes, yes, I know,
And happy that’s true - it’s diversity is great. There's diversity between sexes, there's diversity within the sexes, which we should celebrate,
we should be inclusive of all this diversity,
we should be.
Like, you know, this is not a discussion that I can bring up anymore, because I know it's a non starter. Not that I, I'm not like shy to bring it up. But we have moved the Overton window to use another word, so much in our culture, that there are a lot of things that I just don't, there's no point in bringing it up, because people, frankly, flip out at me, you know, so it's like, whatever. I'm just like, you know, I'm just just kind of like, shrug. And I think there's a lot of things that it's like that where we just don't bother to because the defenses, and you know, the group think, and whatever I mean, so for example, let's go back to Paige, Kathryn Paige Harden’s book. This was an explicitly left wing book in many ways or the intent and I know her some - she’s a very left wing person. And she tried really hard. I mean, I think she was explicit. She was honest about it. She told me, she tried really hard for it not to be interpreted in an invidious, you know, racial way. Right. Now, even if you read, she explicitly rejects a lot of things in it. Well, it doesn't matter. She's just called a white supremacist. She's calling eugenicist. It doesn't matter. So why would anyone want to talk about this?
You're exactly right. By the way in her in her book, which is in many ways quite brilliant, and some of the arguments actually I anticipated in “The Blank Slate” where I had a section- the chapter on politics. That is why, in general, historically, there's a little bit of an affinity with human nature and maintenance on the right and with plasticity and the blank slate on the left. But I ended that and I asked the question, why should that be? But I ended the chapter with a how that that alignment was being broken down. I talked about a number of Innatist leftists or Darwinian leftist - Noam Chomsky an obvious example, Peter Singer. Herb Gintis, and I did mention some of the arguments that that Harden picked up in her book as to why if you believe that people do have inborn differences among individuals, why that could be a call for compensatory measures for reducing explicitly trying to reduce economic inequality as a - for moral reasons, because no one chose or earned or deserved their innate endowment. She ran with that argument, and I did mention it. So and to her credit, she does separate the empirical state of affairs, from the political and moral did very well. It didn't save her from an idiotic attack from the New York Review of Books, which for about 50 years, as had idiotic attacks on - it's been kind of the Vanguard are the establishment, the Empire striking back consistently, for any claim that there is any biological, genetic evolutionary basis to anything. They're the enforcer of the blank slate dogma. And it was true when Gould was one of their and Richard Lewington were their major repeated contributors. Now it's been picked up by Marcus Feldman, and Paige Harden was the was the victim of that.
Yeah, yeah. So that was the I don't even want to that really angered me. But I will post a link to that that exchange actually also in the notes, there's a lot of stuff that's happening. I'm you know, I apologize to the people out there, I’m being a little negative, there's a lot of great science that’s happened we know so much more, but we do so do so little with it, I want to move off the blank slate and I want to move on to ghost in the machine - But I do want to say, you know it is from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs. That presupposes that there's variation in abilities, just putting that out there.
You can agree or disagree with that. But but that what you said is exactly right, one could defend that, while acknowledging that people differ in their abilities and in their needs. By the way just one other thing on the ‘noble savage’ which was the second in the kind of trilogy
Oh, I was gonna
I was gonna, I was going to talk about the noble savage last.
Oh we wait for that
I think I have the spiciest takes on that So I’ll just put it in the last, you know. Okay, so ‘ghost in the machine’ - obviously, you know, this is about soul. And just like ideas of, you know, maybe consciousness or human self, that have to do with the duality, that we have a spiritual, then we're basically immaterial spirits animating a body. So there's a little bit like Cartesian Dualism in the philosophical sense. But really, a lot of people have a strong intuition about ghosts, and all these other things. And I think this is inextricably tied in American mentality or psychology to religion. And when you were writing around the year 2000 There was already evidence in the CUNY surveys that there was some erosion of religious belief in the United States. But most people did not know that we're not paying attention. I remember reading what was it? Who didn't Huntington, his last book “who we are” I think… and he was, it was 2004. And he was not, I was pointing out like, there's evidence of like some erosion. It wasn't in his like, I emailed - I think of New York Times in 2007. No, bro, we're getting more secular and he just rejected it. Now, I think everyone accepts that like there's been a massive disaffiliation with organized religion within the last 15 years. New atheism did not succeed, but it left some serious bruises. When it comes to the generations. The generations below the Zoomers, like the largest cohort are no religion. Now, a lot more people are saying they're atheists. When I was younger, there were a lot of people who basically were atheists where if you ask them, they didn't really believe in God, but they wouldn't want to use the word because in association with communism and radicalism, today, it's not as big of a deal. So a lot of the issues around religion in particular, have an attenuated creationism and Intelligent Design are out there, but they're very, very Toothless compared to what they were, you know, with all like the court cases and other things. You know, social conservatives have lost a lot of wars. Like, let's set aside the recent abortion ruling, which that's a separate, you know, judicial issue. But social conservatives have lost a lot of ground in the last 20 years religion has lost a lot of ground, you know, materialist, naturalistic understandings of the universe are much less taboo. It's not a big deal that Bernie Sanders is quite clearly a secular Jew with a with a you know, bold face capital Secular, you know, like, nobody makes a big deal about it. Donald J. Trump. Yeah, he was Christian wink wink, probably one of the most secular presidents we've ever had. He clearly has no idea about Christianity, no offense. And you know, Obama, in his biography said that he believed in evolution more than he believed in angels. So I feel like in terms of the Ghost in the Machine, in the official ways, we really moved on. But but this isn't, you know, Richard Dawkins is not very popular. On the left today, you know, the New Atheists are not - they’re problematic, you know, people like you who I think espouse a, you know, like, Carl Sagan 1990s, demon haunted world, we know what we're talking about secular humanists, kind of objective reality, science will, you know, bring a better future understanding of ourselves understanding of the universe - And, you know, the superstition will will fade away? Well, I mean, I think religion organized religion has faded away, but you can call it a different different word. But superstition? I don't know, I mean, some of these discussions that I have with people, I mean, I don't want us to both get cancelled for the 27th time, but you know, with the gender stuff. What is this but the ghost in the machine, the dualism, like what we're born with? Male or female souls, this is what they're talking about. They don't say that in those words, and like, the people will probably say that they're atheists, many of them if you ask them. But what do they believe in? Like, what is their intuition here?
Yeah, I think this is an idea that Paul Bloom ran with in his book “Descartes’ Baby” and another cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists, that because we deal with each other interpersonally by imputing, minds to to others, that is, you know, I don't treat you like a robot. I don't feel you're like a wind up doll. I don't treat you like a piece of meat. I assume that in there somewhere there is this locus of beliefs and desires and consciousness just like I have, I kind of deal with you my mind to mind. And from there, it's a short step from from everyone has a mind and a body to think well, maybe there could be minds without bodies, and so that you have belief in souls of gods and spirits and ESP and clairvoyance, think they do come naturally to us. And then they get formalized in in religions. Now, in terms of the temporal trajectory of religion, I looked at this when I wrote enlightenment now. And what you say is right, that there's been a huge falling off from organized religion. It was slow for Americans to notice, because America lagged the rest of the, of the affluent democracies, we were slow in moving away from religion. But then but we caught up. So the number of religiously affiliated people has been in sharp decline. It doesn't mean though, that people that that people who used to be Methodists are now atheists. As you noted, people don't like the word atheist. It sounds like amoral. And also, one that I all that I've discovered is that they have the mindset that someone immersed in science has, where you want to get a coherent picture of the universe and us in it. Namely, there was the big bang and 13.7 billion years ago, and the universe is governed by the gravitation and the electroweak force and the strong force and leptons and hadrons. And, you know, and we're products of evolution, and our consciousness comes from our brain, that whole kind of continuous story where we're bothered when there's something that's inconsistent, and we try to resolve it, we consider it to be, you know, an area of research. But a whole demand for intellectual consistency is very exotic. Most people live with all kinds of vagueness and contradictions and paradoxes. They're just, you know, they have other things to worry about. And so the people who are falling away from religion, suddenly would say, they were atheists, and you can say, Well, wait a second, I do believe in God or you don't. But for many people, it's like, oh, I'm spiritual, but not religious. And maybe there's a higher force and don't ask me the theological details. I haven't thought that much about it. And so people are in this limbo where they're not atheists, but they don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God and died for our sins either. Now the other the one of the reasons that this secularization has gone unnoticed one of them was that America was in was lagging. A second is that I think all over the world, people who are religious have more unprotected sex, they have more babies. And so fertility rates are hugely different between the secular and the religious. And so in many countries, even though when people change their religious affiliation is one way from religious to irreligious. On the other hand, the religious make up for it by having more children. And then the third reason that it's hard to appreciate that people tend towards becoming more secular with modernization is that at least in the United States and also in several other parts of the world, religions are really well organized, that one of the reasons that people fall away from religion, if they fall away from any institution, they're just disengaged, they belong, they don't belong to the Elks, or the Kiwanas, or the Boy Scouts, or the bowling leagues, they you know, they they sit home and they stream movies. People who are religious, often will do it with others, and there'll be politically organized and monolithic and they’ll vote. So the evangelicals are outnumbered by the so called nones that that is by the way, N O N E not N U N , that has no religion when you ask them, but the thing is that the evangelicals all vote, and the nones don't, they stay home. So the political power doesn't reflect the sheer numbers. That's another reason why the secularization is often unnoticed.
Well, so, you know, speaking of secularization, I mentioned new Atheism. I mean, were you at the beyond belief?
I missed that. But my other half Rebecca Goldstein was at it.
Okay. Yeah.
She's also lumped in this…
Yeah, I'm so beyond believe. You guys can Google others beyond belief, one beyond belief to you know, if you are you the type of person who loves Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker, you read Stephen Hawking, you know, you'd love beyond belief. Like, I feel it captured a point in our culture, where the sort of like scientifically informed secular humanism as we’ll call it, new Atheism was the more edgy part of it, but it wasn't exclusively new Atheism. They had like a discourse between people like Atran and Sam Harris, Scott Atran. So that's 2007 2008 Annie Druyan was there - Carl Sagan’s widow. And I feel like sometime in the early teens, like right around the early awokening, that whole movement, scattered and there's like a rub that still kind of like, let's call it old school, like Dawkins, Harris. And then there's other people, you know, started with something called atheism plus, atheism and social justice, really, which is mostly about social justice. And it seems that some of the energies that were knocking against evangelical conservative hegemony in the 2000s Remember, for the listeners out there, George W. Bush was arguably the peak of evangelical power in America. And it's kind of like one of those things where it's the peak, it was, you know, like hubris before the fall. Because, you know, there was all this anti gay marriage initiatives and stuff and look where we are now, you know, like, you know, everything that they found Precious has been, like, ripped away, and now we're, like, you know, denying male versus female. I mean, you know, they're going crazy right now. But, you know, maybe, maybe this is a counter reaction, but a lot of the people that were opposing that, you know, the liberals, the secularists, the atheists, now, many of them. Like, how do I say this? When I was growing up? You know, I'm atheist, I'm pretty candid about my views. I get into arguments with people. And religious people seem so self righteous, it’s just like really annoying. And now I just like, I can't be pointing fingers because I encounter many, many, supposedly free thinking atheists that are the most incredibly smug, self righteous people in the world. So I don't know, I just like put that out there. You know, 20 years on, I'm really not sure if the secularization you know, like Richard Dawkins would be like, “what if we had a world with no religion?” Well…
“imagine there’s no religion” Dawkins wasn’t the first to say it.
Yeah, I'm not Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure.
Lennon circa 1970
Yeah.
Lennon - not Lenin just for the People out there. But anyway, I see a lot out there. I mean, how are you felling? You've seen this happen?
Yeah. So when it comes to the people, you know, like, like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett and The Center for Inquiry I actually don't and Skeptic magazine they're I would not call them self righteous I don't think they are. However, what has happened is that a lot of the and I think this may be what you're, you're you're calling attention to - is that some of the moral and political energy that went into secular movements got diverted to so called Social Justice, wokism, identity identity politics. We see this most clearly with the American Humanist Association, which actually revoked Richard Dawkins humanist of the Year Award, because he said, How come you can choose your gender but you can't choose your race if race is a biological construct, referring to the Rachel Dolezal scandal. For that they revote the AHA revoked his Humanist of the Year even though if you look at past Humanist of the Year winners, they include Alice Walker, a vicious anti Semite, and conspiracy cook. They include Margaret Sanger, who was a eugenicist. They include BF Skinner, who called autistic people biological mistakes, they include Thomas Szász, who was funded by tobacco and had a number of noxious beliefs. So there are all kinds of Kooks and characters over the years, whose Humanist of the Year Award was not revoked but Dawkins, for just asking the question, what's the difference was - they tried to cancel him. This was the clearest example of humanism, which was the idea to have us as my colleague at Harvard, Greg Epstein put a good without God. So it got it was a locus of a lot of secularist energy in the first decade of the 21st century. But now it's basically the American woke Association, the International humanists are much better, they've stuck to the program more consistently. But you're right, that I think that is a lot of institutions. We've seen previously sound institutions which have been just sapped and stained by wokism. The American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center, American Humanist Association, kind of ruined as organizations in terms of their original mission because of the creep of awoke ism. Now, it may be part of what I know, if you’re familiar with with Conquest’s third law, from the historian Robert Conquest any, any institution that is not explicitly on the right, goes to the left. Interesting why that would be true. But but that seems to be true of a lot of our philanthropic organizations that formerly had very clear missions. But now have become identity politics workshops.
Yeah. So you were talking about identity politics now. So I want to get and this was the second of your three things, but I wanted to like save it for last because, you know, maybe the spiciest. so ‘noble savage’, identity politics so I think you said wokism what is that a lot of people will argue about what woke ism is, I think it's hard to deny that woke ism and identity politics are strongly connected. Identity Politics existed long before wokism. But it's, it's it's a core plank, right? It's the collective identity of groups are very, very important. As opposed to, you know, like, I would say, I'm talking to my friend, Steve. He's Canadian. He's Jewish, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I don't really care.
Male cisgender straight.
Yeah, but now Yeah, exactly. Now, it's like, all of these things are, like, super important. And so I will, I'll tell this story really quickly, because I think some of the listeners have heard this. I grew up in the United States in 1980s 1990s. The 80s people would ask me, like, once a week, where I came from, and like, how I can speak English so well, and I'll explain to them and they'd be like, Oh, but you don't have an accent. And I'm like, well explain to them critical period. I didn't know what a critical period was, but let's just I knew. Okay, 90s it's happened like once a month, maybe even less tend to be boomers. 2000s it kind of faded away. Okay. I was like, Oh, this is I'm American now. I mean, like, you know, I've been a citizen for a while but now I'm like, people don't look at me and they don't think anything, you know, the last five years it's come back like people have really started to care about where I'm from, what my race and you know, what my religion, all these things. And these are mostly you know, woke people I guess what I would say I don't hang out with many conservatives. Well, I do but you know, not the type of people I grew up with, you know what I'm saying? So, but yeah, it's from like liberal people. So identity politics, like This is what I tell, you know, a lot of woke people, it's like, you know, it's like, I don't want white people to be obsessing about race. That's just not good. At least for me, you know? So like, you know, yeah, it's just it doesn't have a good track record.
It’s not a good track record. That is yes, pigeonholing people into racial categories and treating them as indistinguishable representatives of a single set of beliefs on the basis of their, the color of their skin, you know, no good can color that we kind of thought we were over it, or at least, surmounting it not over and over, you
know, we're aspiring to something aspiring, to something better - we had a goal, we have a goal.
And, yeah, and so that you can't predict someone's opinions based on their racial categorization. You know, that was really a triumph of humanity, a true example of moral progress that people were not subjected to racial, or less so to racial stereotyping, stereotyping and bias and discrimination and oppression. You know, hurray for that. As far as it went, let's try to make it go farther. But as you point out, that's not the direction we've seen, especially in the last three or four years.
Yeah, but yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, and, you know, I'm glad to see people like Coleman Hughes like John McWhorter renew the case for moral colorblindness, that is, individuals are to be treated as individuals and not pre judged by the category they happen to fall into. I until recently, how that was a no brainer, until I saw the New York Times starting to write about whiteness, and calling attention to the fact that an author is white, which, not so long ago, was kind of taboo, like you reviewing someone's book, you know, unless it's about their experience as Indian American or African American or whatever, you don't call attention to their race, it's kind of rude or it's racist. That then just about starting maybe about five years ago, that happened when it came to commentators who are white, like ‘Well, of course, he says that he is white’ - ‘that's the kind of thing that that we that we're sick of white people telling us this, that or the other thing’ despite the fact there's a lot of diversity and white opinion as there's a lot of diversity in black opinion and Asian opinion. And I mean, it's kind of Yeah,
I mean, I honestly, honestly, I don't even like like I like have like a shiver. Just hearing you say white opinion and black opinion and Asian opinion.
Well, yeah me too
right?
I'm not saying that like you're saying it because you want to say it but like this is how we talk today.
No, it's it's it's ugly. It is. It's evil. I completely agree. But going back to Yeah, so we're what took us to this point. So let's try
identity politics the noble savage. One thing, I will just give a really, really quick, really quick anecdote of like where I think the noble savage has come back. And the noble savage is this idea, you know, we were like these good, noble people, blah, blah, blah, nature's you know, I've, I've read that apparently, before European colonialism, male and female, were not ideas that we colored people knew. Is what I’ve heard. Now. You can talk to my grandparents, and they will explain we always knew - but, you know, there's this like, weird idea that we were in a state of nature that we were inclusive, and we had gender diversity, and it was the evil White people that introduced into the garden of our Eden, all of the oppression and hierarchy. That's where I think the noble savage has really come back in terms of removing agency from non white peoples, turning them into a blank slates of noble savage utopias that were touched by the influence of colonialism. Part of systemic racism, white people are the only agents in the world and they're agents of evil. So just throw that out there. That's what I hear.
I mean, no, no, no, no. I hear it as well. So there is no noble savage in in. In that assumption, of course, in surveys, ethnographic surveys of cross cultural diversity and universals, the idea that men and women have different natures is pretty close to a human universal, and the stories of sex reverse cultures turned out to be academic legends. Now, of course, there is diversity in gender roles across cultures. There's been a huge change in my lifetime in this culture. So things can change. But the cultures in which the women as a sex wield the political power are more physically aggressive. Where all division of labor is sex blind? Those cultures almost certainly don't exist. The other, of course, manifestation of the noble savage recently is the idea of defunding the police or of just reacting to the genuine need for reform in American policing. Which of which there clearly is our police beat up and shoot too many people. Nonetheless, the way that that discussion should be framed is how do we prevent, minimize the number of innocent people who are harmed by police, while preserving their absolutely necessary function of keeping the predators from exploiting everyone else? And only if you believe in the noble savage, could you even think for a microsecond about the insanity of defunding the police? Police a really good although American police where we do harm people above and beyond their mandate of preventing people from harming one another.
Yeah, so one of the, you know, those of you who have not read “The Blank Slate” should read it, but one of the sections in there is how your youthful anarchism was debunked by I was like, was it a police strike?
Montreal police strike. Yes, in 1969. We can, Canadians are certainly capable of, of rioting and shooting and and vandalism. When the when, as often happens in Quebec, a sector of the civil service goes on strike until they brought in the Mounties to to restore order. Since then, you know that that could have been a one off. So I did a little survey of police strikes, I have never published this. And just to make sure this wasn't a fluke, in about half of the ones that I could find. Violence went up in the aftermath, the other half there, there wasn't an update to tell. So I don't think it was a freak occurrence of my youth. That was mixed in with some of the politics of the era with some labor union stuff. But but that's what happens when the police walk off off their, their job. And in general, when I looked at the distribution over space and time of violence in “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” There's a pretty good correlation between anarchy in the sense of absence of government and anarchy in the sense of violent chaos, that the violent parts of the world, like the American Wild West, which really was violent, according to the data, the Sicilian origins of Mafia, the Scottish Highlands, the New Guinea Highlands, the Amazon rainforest, when you have no court system, no judicial system, the nearest sheriff is 100 miles away, then people have to defend themselves with a credible threat of violence, which can escalate into vendettas and blood feuds. It can happen even within a state society in economic zones of contraband, like in drug dealers and booze - rumrunners during Prohibition, where you can’t settle your disputes via lawsuits or call 911 If you're threatened, and so you've got zones of violence in those contraband economies for for the same reason. But anyway, this is something that is often amazingly even though it's one of the oldest lessons in history is just not registered in a lot of the debates on policing. Debates, often they're just one sided demands, but but the idea that police at least when they're properly regulated as they should be, serve an indispensable function is is often completely ignored.
Yeah, as I like to say the experiments been tried. So just go look at the results. And but that's not how people you know, I mean, I think you were writing around the year 2000, the crime decline had been going on for a while, you know, it was like, okay, you know, the chaos of the 70s 80s. You know, it's abated. And now there was a recent homicide spike in the United States. I think a lot of that was organized or not organized- but it was people in gangs, guys and gangs and that's one reason that didn't touch us, quote unquote, “normal people”. Because, you know, the police taking off like didn't impact us nearly as much aside from street crime. Okay, so we've been talking for a while and blank slate, ghost in the machine, noble savage. These are three things you were talking about. You know, I've been pretty bearish about where our culture has been going, especially the last five years. Steve, like, as we like, end this - give me an evaluation of these three and where we are retro,
So, we've got to go and got over them. In many cases, it has not been good, although there's a lot of diversity you got, because of the rise of podcasting and substacks and blogs. They're all these forums for exchanging views that may not be the New York Review of Books, but are allowing ideas to be shared and amalgamated and criticized and evaluated. So the intellectual landscape is fractionating, where some of the mainstream outlets have - and universities, have become more dogmatic and often divorced from reality. But there's an ecosystem of other sources where, where these ideas are being booted and evaluated.
Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's true. And so you know, glass half empty glass half full. I would say for me, the biggest thing, that's just I don't know about interesting, but almost like, absurd is we actually know more about human nature, like behavior, genetics, evolutionary psychology, etc, etc. You know, this isn't like we're talking about, like, metaphysics or something that’s been going on for 1000s of years, we've made progress. We know now, genome wide association, I think we get three top hits for same sex behavior in the British biobank, you know, like all the talk of the gay gene, we got some genes now, we -
It won't be one. Well one thing we have learned.
Yeah,
is it won’t be one gene, the so called fourth law of behavioral genetics, formulated by by I think, you know, James Lee, my former student.
Yeah.
That virtually all traits are product of 10s, hundreds, maybe even 1000s of genes, each with a tiny effect, or very rare genes with a large effect, rare enough that we can't find them in our genotyping scans.
Yeah, I mean, I do wonder, like, there have been some articles and pieces about how the awokening has peaked and receded. You know, hopefully, that's true. But
what has? Sorry,
the awokening, the Great Awokening,
the Great Awokening, yeah
Yeah, yeah.
You know, people call me an optimist. But just because I document positive trends. I'm not optimistic about that yet, just because there's so many positions of power that have been commandeered by by some very dogmatic, aggressive people, and they're not going to relinquish these positions anytime soon. So there's a push back, I think, I think the optimism would be that there's a push back, not that the that we haven't reached peak woke yet.
You know, be as that, you know, may be but, you know, hopefully, there's a new generation that will be reading “The Blank Slate”, and of course, your other books. I just like, you know, I can't like, you know, this is like the end of the podcast. So there's been, like, say, it's like, blank slate has been one of the most, you know, it has shaped my, like, you know, life of the mind and why I write, maybe on the internet, and why I communicate. And so I just want to thank you for that. And I know, it's impacted a lot of people. You know, this has been kind of like a little bit of a bearish podcast about where we are as a culture, but you made a difference. The book has made a difference. One of the reasons that it got some negative reviews is because I think people knew, people knew that it was a powerful book, they were scared. I remember like a New Yorker, I think, I think Menand like had a really like harsh review. I remember that. And so I would suggest everyone, if you haven't read it, read it. Yes, it's more than 20 years old. But there's large aspects of it that I feel are very timely. And if there is a map in there, you know, some of the real science that we've seen over the last two decades, and also it captures, it captures like a sense of wonder about the world, and the scientific spirit that whatever ideology, whatever race or gender or sex, sexual orientation, yes, our religion, we can all be united by that. And that's what I really hope we recapture in the next couple of decades. And we get over this crap about like, all our identity categories, because you know, I don't care. Sorry, cancel me.
Well, I want to say I appreciate you saying that it means a lot to me. I'll just throw in just a couple of remarks. What is it the current edition has an update of the science of what what turned out to be right what turned out to be wrong. So it isn't the science itself is not very kind of fossilized as of 2002. The other is that partly as a result I have feedback of an early draft from my colleague Orlando Patterson the sociologists from Jeffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist. When I first wrote it, I was kind of bearish about the human condition. And these friends and colleagues said pointed out that the the idea of human nature is itself uplifting and should be stated that way. But for one thing it means we're all humans, we all suffer, we all flourish. The ideas of fundamental categories of inferior people and superior people and I mean, we're just the big message of acknowledging human nature is we all have it. It is the ultimate statement of the the unity of of humankind.
Yeah, I am human and no one else is alien. So that's just the truth
or as Terence said, ‘I am a ‘- I’ll updated a bit “I am a human and nothing human foreign to me” he said “I am a man, nothing is foreign to me” but that’ -
yeah, yeah. All right. Thank you, Steven.
Thanks so much Razib. It’s a great pleasure.
Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorite podcas.
