If Books Could Kill - ＂The Better Angels of Our Nature＂ Part 2： Campus Lies, I.Q. Rise & Epstein Ties

00:00:00.000 Peter, Michael, what do you know about the second half of the better angels of our nature?

00:00:07.260 It took you so long to read this book that society has gotten even better since part one.

00:00:25.760 Last time on If Books Could Kill.

00:00:28.600 Yes. Recap us, Peter, because we did a whole nother episode in between.

00:00:33.680 Thousands of years ago, everyone was constantly killing each other. Now it's very rare.

00:00:40.480 This is due to society growing over the years, mostly because some very smart white boys in the 1700s published some books about how it actually makes tons of sense to be to be good and nice.

00:00:55.520 Yes. If last episode was about all of the things we learned from some very smart white boys, this is all about how some black people and women and gay people have some good ideas, but they're also a little misguided. And haven't they gone a little too far?

00:01:11.880 the the question at the heart of this episode is what is the ideology of this book and so i think

00:01:18.860 it will be very instructive to start with a video clip that is i think emblematic of his ideology

00:01:25.560 and his place in the culture now uh-huh i think we should watch this at 1.5 because what all these

00:01:31.360 guys talk really slow michael hopps thinks someone talks too slow do you not watch stuff sped up i'm

00:01:38.240 I'm like a 2X guy now.

00:01:39.660 It makes sense to me that you are, but no, I don't.

00:01:43.580 I like to hear the normal human cadence, all right?

00:01:46.180 And as a result, you and I basically talk at completely different speeds.

00:01:50.020 Yeah, it's basically like WAP.

00:01:51.760 One of us is Megan Thee Stallion and one of us is Cardi B.

00:01:53.700 Yeah, that's also the comparison I would make.

00:01:57.160 The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness

00:02:03.540 has done an enormous amount of harm.

00:02:06.740 in the sliver of the population that might be, I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but

00:02:13.860 certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly literate,

00:02:22.680 highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right, media savvy, when they are

00:02:28.220 exposed to the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses

00:02:35.320 or in the New York Times or in respectable media

00:02:38.260 that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity

00:02:44.060 and no defense against taking them to what we might consider

00:02:50.180 to be rather repellent conclusions.

00:02:51.880 Let me give you some examples.

00:02:53.500 So here is a fact that's going to sound ragingly controversial but is not,

00:02:59.260 and that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones.

00:03:03.660 I think no one has ever learned in America

00:03:06.280 something no one's ever said 0.79

00:03:07.300 would I rather live in West Germany

00:03:10.200 in the 1970s or East Germany

00:03:12.360 or in the 1960s

00:03:13.600 here's another one

00:03:15.160 men and women are

00:03:17.420 not identical in their life priorities

00:03:20.480 in their sexuality

00:03:21.660 and men and women give different answers

00:03:24.080 as to what they want to do for a living

00:03:25.460 and how much time they want to allocate to family

00:03:27.480 versus career and so on

00:03:29.040 but you can't say it

00:03:31.400 You can't say it.

00:03:32.240 Here's a third fact that is just not controversial,

00:03:36.860 although it sounds controversial,

00:03:38.040 and that is the different ethnic groups

00:03:39.620 commit violent crimes at different rates.

00:03:42.580 The homicide rate among African Americans

00:03:45.520 is about seven or eight times higher

00:03:47.080 than it is among European Americans.

00:03:49.780 And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist Database

00:03:52.820 and you find that worldwide the overwhelming majority

00:03:56.820 of suicide terrorist acts are committed

00:03:59.380 by Islamist extremist groups.

00:04:03.100 All right, Peter, reactions.

00:04:05.300 Peter, reactions.

00:04:07.200 Are we not all just tired?

00:04:10.840 God.

00:04:12.000 We got to start recording this in the mornings. 0.95

00:04:14.040 God, this is just so fucking tedious. 0.97

00:04:17.000 It's so annoying. 1.00

00:04:18.240 Just shut the fuck up. 1.00

00:04:18.860 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

00:04:20.660 Let me address, I think, problem number one with this, 1.00

00:04:25.040 which is the idea that these facts are censored on campus unsayable capitalist societies being 0.98

00:04:32.880 more successful than communist societies is something that is fucking drilled into your

00:04:38.820 brain over the course of your education the number one major in america is business then you have 0.90

00:04:45.340 like the there are differences between men and women like yeah yeah dude everyone believes that

00:04:51.400 Everyone. The average man is taller than the average woman. That is something you can say

00:04:55.680 in any context. Then you have black people commit crimes at higher rates than white people. 1.00

00:05:01.720 That's not the debate. That's not what people are debating when they debate this. They're 0.98

00:05:05.540 debating the causes of that. One sort of like note about all of these conversations

00:05:10.380 is that it's never truths that are uncomfortable for the like white male speaker. Right. Michael

00:05:18.720 Clayton is not as good as you think it is. All they're really talking about is like a certain

00:05:23.300 set of decontextualized facts that they love to bring up to trigger the lips. That is like all

00:05:29.620 there is to this. Right. It's the same like three facts. Right. So, OK, I am I am kind of winding

00:05:34.720 you up in a somewhat disingenuous way. So in late 2017, the clip that we just watched edited the

00:05:42.280 way that we just watched it. Somebody posted on Twitter and is like, look at Steven Pinker

00:05:46.280 essentially defending the alt-right. And this goes mega viral. And there's like days of just

00:05:51.140 like the entire internet dunking on Steven Pinker and being like, I always hated this guy.

00:05:55.400 But there is extra context to this clip. There is eventually a New York Times article called

00:06:02.400 Social Media is Making Us Dumber. Here's exhibit A and a photo of Steven Pinker,

00:06:07.340 which is not a great juxtaposition. But this article essentially puts back in the additional

00:06:12.980 context and points out that this is an excerpt from a longer clip where Pinker then gives a bit

00:06:18.900 more explanation. So let's go back to the clip. Now, these are unwarranted conclusions because

00:06:26.120 for each one of these facts, there are very powerful counter-arguments for why they don't

00:06:31.440 license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on. The fact that men and women aren't

00:06:37.080 identical has no implications for whether we should discriminate against women for a number

00:06:42.040 of reasons. One of them is for any traits in which the sex is different, the two distributions

00:06:47.040 have enormous amounts of overlap so that you can't draw a reliable conclusion about any

00:06:52.200 individual from group averages. The principle of opposition to racism and sexism is not

00:07:01.320 a factual claim that the sexes and races are indistinguishable in every aspect. It's a

00:07:07.740 political and moral commitment to treat people as individuals as opposed to

00:07:11.700 prejudging them by the statistics of their group. Third, we know that some of

00:07:16.500 the statistical generalizations about races and sexes change over time, so what

00:07:21.860 is true now may not necessarily be true in 10 or 20 years. In the case of

00:07:26.460 terrorism, the majority of domestic terrorism is committed by right-wing

00:07:31.680 extremist groups, not by Islamic groups within this country. And finally,

00:07:37.660 in the case of the fact that capitalism

00:07:41.340 is really a better system than Marxism.

00:07:44.740 Every successful capitalist society has regulation,

00:07:49.440 has a social safety net.

00:07:51.420 Now, let's say that you have never even heard anyone

00:07:54.980 mention these facts.

00:07:56.500 The first time you hear them, you're apt to say,

00:07:58.880 number one, the truth has been withheld from me

00:08:02.120 by universities, by mainstream media.

00:08:05.500 Moreover, you will be vindicated when people who voice these truths are suppressed, shouted down, assaulted.

00:08:14.780 All the more reason to believe that the left, that the mainstream media, that universities can't handle the truth. 0.99

00:08:23.600 Okay, so you made me look quite foolish. 0.98

00:08:26.160 On purpose, on purpose. 0.99

00:08:27.360 Using media tactics.

00:08:28.500 I woke up this morning and chose violence, the kind that is rising in our society, sharing links out of context.

00:08:33.680 He addressed the idea that these are decontextualized facts.

00:08:38.160 What he didn't address was the other critique, which is a couple of these aren't really facts at all.

00:08:43.380 This is like the perfect symbol for the way that Steven Pinker is typically constructed publicly where something gets taken out of context, right?

00:08:52.220 And people make some arguments against it that are like maybe a little bit overblown, right?

00:08:56.300 When this clip was first going around, people were like, he's a far right agitator, right?

00:08:59.660 He's no different than Steve Bannon, this kind of stuff.

00:09:01.980 People really got whipped up into a frenzy from this clip that was taken out of context, right?

00:09:06.440 I mean, I did just like two minutes ago.

00:09:08.300 But then it's also true that some of the defenses of Steven Pinker go too far.

00:09:13.260 Yeah.

00:09:13.580 There's this weird industrial complex of people who are like, oh, you can't even state facts anymore.

00:09:19.900 When like Pinker is very clearly involved in an ideological project.

00:09:24.800 Right.

00:09:25.120 The entire premise of this clip is a lie, right?

00:09:28.640 Even if you accept all of the extra context that he's putting back into these facts, and he's basically saying that, like, there's no logical reason to join the alt-right.

00:09:35.960 They believe a bunch of stuff that's not true.

00:09:37.900 He's still making a factual claim that you cannot discuss these issues that are routinely discussed on college campuses.

00:09:44.360 And he's also blaming the left for people joining the alt-right.

00:09:48.900 There's something so frustrating about this because, like, all right, if you're on the left, if you're in a lefty space, right, there are certain questions that are sort of necessarily settled, right?

00:09:57.040 Which is not to say that we consider it not up for a debate so much as like the debate happened and we landed on one side and that's why we're all in this room together.

00:10:06.180 That's what an ideology is.

00:10:07.900 There's also a huge difference between people asking questions and people just asking questions.

00:10:12.560 If somebody kind of comes up to you in a very good faith way or like a 12-year-old kid or something and it's like, hey, what do we know about like the differences in crime rates between races?

00:10:21.160 That's a legitimate, earnest question and like you can have a conversation about that.

00:10:24.660 But if a 15-year-old asks you, then you're like, I don't know.

00:10:29.900 That's libertarian phase.

00:10:31.360 That's libertarian coded.

00:10:32.580 Yeah. 0.95

00:10:32.740 The fact that this guy is so fucking famous is just like proof that this stuff isn't really 0.97

00:10:37.460 true. 0.97

00:10:38.060 I know.

00:10:38.360 It's funny to do like this and Jonathan Haidt and Yasha Monk and all these guys who are

00:10:42.720 essentially interchangeable.

00:10:44.160 And they're all just saying the same thing and saying that you can't say it.

00:10:48.040 And it's like, how many bestsellers do we need?

00:10:49.960 These guys have all basically written a book titled, I am to the right of your average 22-year-old college student, and they're all getting rich somehow.

00:10:59.800 So with all of that in mind, we are now going to jump into the parts of the book where he walks us through what he calls the rights revolutions.

00:11:08.220 Last episode, the first kind of third to one half of Pinker's book covers this like, OK, from our primate ancestors until roughly World War II, the world has become significantly less violent.

00:11:19.120 The next third of the book, it's actually a much shorter section of the book that we're going to be covering, is everything that happens after World War II when we get better civil rights for black people, we get better conditions for women, we get the rise of the gay rights movement, we get better children's rights, we get better animal rights.

00:11:36.100 You know who else believed in animal rights?

00:11:40.120 Now you're just doing it.

00:11:41.720 Now, after criticizing this, we're just going to start engaging in it.

00:11:45.500 Basically, you look around and like I as a gay person, I am safer holding hands with my boyfriend now than I was in 1955.

00:11:53.600 Each of these individual phenomena did occur.

00:11:56.720 It seems right.

00:11:57.340 So I am going to send you the section where he lays out what he will be laying out in the next couple of chapters and the rest of this episode.

00:12:07.120 The rights revolutions have brought us measurable and substantial declines in many categories of violence.

00:12:12.020 But many people resist acknowledging the victories, partly out of ignorance of the statistics, partly because of a mission creep that encourages activists to keep up the pressure by denying that progress has been made.

00:12:22.320 Activists are denying it.

00:12:23.580 The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement played out in lynchings, night raids, anti-black pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box.

00:12:33.020 In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African-American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways.

00:12:38.220 the oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape beat and confine their 0.98

00:12:44.980 wives today it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a 50

00:12:49.800 50 ratio of male and female professors the battle for gay rights has progressed from appealing laws

00:12:54.680 that execute mutilate or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a

00:12:59.000 contract between a man and a woman none of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo

00:13:03.780 or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment.

00:13:07.860 It's just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed.

00:13:14.420 These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.

00:13:20.120 All we're trying to do here is seek to understand.

00:13:21.880 All we're doing is pointing out some trends.

00:13:24.020 Just a reminder.

00:13:24.900 Just a reminder.

00:13:25.620 That should be the name of this book.

00:13:27.120 Just a reminder.

00:13:27.840 i like okay yeah it's true that the um like the civil rights efforts of today are designed to

00:13:35.900 alleviate what you could characterize as lesser harms but the idea that we need to be reminded

00:13:40.840 right he says in here like look i'm not trying to endorse the status quo it's like okay but then

00:13:47.920 what are you trying to do i don't get it the thing is i think one of the core weaknesses of this book

00:13:54.540 is his, I think, very genuine belief that it is not ideological. The fact that he's like,

00:13:59.620 oh, I'm just pointing out these statistical trends prevents him from saying what his point is.

00:14:05.780 Because like, yes, these things are true. And I think, you know, maybe they should be,

00:14:08.900 they should be more broadly understood, right? If we have a reduction in crime rates,

00:14:12.780 it's important for us to know why that happened, right? That's like something that society is

00:14:15.900 interested in. However, there's something weird about bringing every conversation about injustice

00:14:22.260 back to the fact that it was worse 100 years ago. This argument, things used to be worse,

00:14:27.860 would have been true at any point in the nation's history. You could go up to Rosa Parks

00:14:32.440 and say, well, why are you complaining about this bus thing 100 years ago? You would have been

00:14:36.380 enslaved. Yeah. I mean, look, go back and look at what senators and representatives were saying

00:14:41.900 about the civil rights movement. Look how much better this has gotten. This has always been a

00:14:46.180 reactionary line of argument. You can't try to reframe it as like a non-ideological thing. It's

00:14:52.160 just not. Speaking of civil rights, the first category that he walks us through is civil rights

00:14:57.800 and the decline of lynching and racial pogroms. So he points out correctly that lynchings were 0.98

00:15:03.860 extremely routine in the United States. They began falling in the 1800s. They were relatively rare by

00:15:08.720 the 1940s. And then he gets to hate crimes now. He says, five African-Americans were murdered

00:15:15.820 because of their race in 1996, the first year in which records were published. And the number has 1.00

00:15:21.000 since gone down to one per year. In a country with 17,000 murders a year, hate crime murders

00:15:26.560 have fallen into statistical noise. He also talks about assaults, which of course are much more

00:15:31.460 numerous. He says, though the absolute numbers of racially motivated incidents are alarming,

00:15:36.460 several hundred assaults, several hundred aggravated assaults, and a thousand acts of

00:15:40.220 intimidation a year, they have to be put in the context of American crime numbers during much of

00:15:44.340 that period, which included a million aggravated assaults per year. We essentially do not have

00:15:49.800 these things anymore. Hate crimes are now so rare in America, it's now in the single digits in a

00:15:54.460 country of 330 million people, which is a massive form of progress. This is his argument.

00:15:58.460 Okay. Probably relies on the reliability of hate crime stats a little too much, but I hear you,

00:16:07.060 you know? It's very telling where he uses like different data sources, right? Because there's

00:16:13.240 essentially only two ways to measure crime, right? One of them is reports filed to police,

00:16:18.180 right? And the other is the National Crime Victimization Survey, where they survey tens

00:16:23.160 of thousands of people across the United States and they ask them, you know, were you a victim

00:16:25.780 of a mugging this year? Did your car get stolen this year? And that basically corrects for the

00:16:30.640 fact that the majority of crimes are not reported to police. If you look at the official rate of

00:16:35.500 hate crimes, it is true. I looked this up for 2021. There were only 18 murders in America that 0.57

00:16:40.540 were officially tallied as hate crimes. And that's out of 21,000 murders. So less than one in 1,000

00:16:46.560 murders is a hate crime. There is also, however, a 2017 ProPublica article called Why America

00:16:53.420 Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics. And of course, this comes out way after Pinker's book.

00:16:59.000 But even at the time, there are numerous publications showing that hate crimes are

00:17:04.200 kind of notoriously difficult to measure, right? Because obviously, bias can play into a violent

00:17:09.380 act in ways that don't involve somebody yelling a slur at you. And also, there's huge problems

00:17:15.740 with every link in the chain of reporting hate crimes. First of all, a lot of people do not

00:17:20.460 report if you're the victim of an assault or a mugging or something. Most of those just never

00:17:24.580 get reported to the police anyway. Oftentimes, the police don't really ask about things like

00:17:28.420 whether anything was said or there was any indication that there was a hate crime.

00:17:31.880 Also, a lot of police departments just simply don't gather this as a routine matter. So they

00:17:37.140 note in the ProPublica article that according to official statistics, Miami has not had a hate

00:17:42.300 crime since 2010 because they don't gather that. A lot of local law enforcement departments,

00:17:47.720 they're supposed to report their numbers to the state and then the state reports them to the FBI

00:17:51.240 and then the FBI puts out the statistics. But a lot of states do not tally these statistics. So

00:17:57.200 they note that the Orlando Police Department had five hate crimes for 2015, but the Florida

00:18:03.320 Law Enforcement Department says there were zero hate crimes in Orlando in 2015. There's also huge

00:18:08.080 problems with state laws. So Alabama's hate crimes law does not include sexual orientation

00:18:14.140 as a grounds for hate crimes. So there's never been a homophobic hate crime in Alabama.

00:18:19.580 Congrats to them. Yeah.

00:18:20.900 So that's not going to be covered. And when you actually dig into the statistics,

00:18:25.640 most of the quote unquote hate crimes in America take place in blue cities and in blue states.

00:18:31.080 So like the Boston Police Department is kind of famous for having like a good hate crimes

00:18:36.040 department where they like look into the motivations behind violent crimes but that's a

00:18:41.480 function of the fact that they're gathering those statistics and they're being reported

00:18:44.240 boston does not have a higher rate of homophobic hate crimes than alabama right i will say this

00:18:48.960 the only time i've felt like i was being discriminated against for seeming gay was in 0.99

00:18:55.860 boston because i had a cool sweater sorry at a local pub the uh the one time i have had faggot 0.98

00:19:05.340 yelled at me from a car was when i was with a straight friend he felt he felt such a whirlwind 0.96

00:19:10.120 of emotions so i this is actually true i was saying boston but it was actually uh portland

00:19:16.240 maine but but like it's the same people if this makes sense portland maine is one of the most

00:19:21.480 remarkable cities in the country at during the day it is run by middle-aged lesbians it is 0.75

00:19:30.100 delightful they all they're just selling you tchotchkes that's it at night the townies from 1.00

00:19:35.200 the suburbs or whatever they all come in to get drunk someone screamed faggot out of their car 1.00

00:19:41.220 at us that night that was just last year so we've had faggot out of car cars at us the same amount 1.00

00:19:47.080 and that's assuming i'm not forgetting any other times it was just a dark energy from the locals 0.97

00:19:52.080 to the point where and this is something that is like never happened to me but me and my buddy

00:19:55.420 were like let's get out of here let's yeah they think we're gay and we're not going to be able

00:20:00.060 to prove otherwise wearing sweaters like this.

00:20:02.120 So let's just leave. 0.95

00:20:03.220 The funny thing, Peter, is I've always said that like straight people are not allowed 1.00

00:20:07.060 to say faggot. 0.99

00:20:08.040 They're supposed to say the F slur because unless you've been called that word, then 1.00

00:20:11.660 like it doesn't, you know, you're not allowed to use it.

00:20:14.240 But if a straight person has been called that word, I think that gives you the license.

00:20:18.100 In a lot of ways, I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with you saying it, you know, as someone who's

00:20:21.980 only had it shouted at them once.

00:20:24.140 And it was in Swedish because it was in Stockholm.

00:20:27.040 Yeah, I mean, that does count less, you have to admit.

00:20:30.060 let's do the literal oppression olympics on this one whose experience is worse

00:20:35.920 it was like and then my friend was like oh that's bad you're like are you sure that sounded

00:20:42.780 beautiful but this is a real problem because like if you actually consult the national crime

00:20:47.620 victimization survey where they ask people did you experience some sort of bias related crime

00:20:53.280 last year, the number is 191,000. So according to official statistics, it's 6 to 10,000. And

00:21:01.080 according to surveys, it's 191,000. So we're talking about a sort of somewhere in the realm

00:21:06.900 of 20 times higher. So Pinker is correct, again, that, you know, hate crimes, especially against

00:21:13.700 black people were more common in the 1950s than they are now. The overall point is correct. But 1.00

00:21:18.160 he is extremely selectively using numbers here to essentially say that the problem no longer

00:21:23.060 exists. And that's not true. Right. You can't blame somebody for something that happens after

00:21:27.740 their book comes out. Right. But hate crimes have been rising since 2016, pretty significantly.

00:21:32.220 And so he again talks about this as this like shift is like moral shift that we're all capable

00:21:37.880 of so much more empathy now. But we've seen a huge backsliding. This is something that we've

00:21:42.980 seen with a number of our books where on one hand, you want to cut them a little slack because

00:21:48.240 they're saying something that's more true in the era that they're saying it. On the other hand,

00:21:54.620 it's just sort of proof that they were sort of missing something, right?

00:21:57.600 And also, he's quite explicit about the fact that he thinks the shift is permanent.

00:22:00.840 Right.

00:22:01.040 He calls it a rising abhorrence of violence. And there's also, you know, all the changes in law

00:22:06.520 that we saw, you know, from the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, you know, all of the

00:22:10.160 structural changes that have happened in America that are very difficult to reverse. And then he

00:22:13.720 also says that, you know, people's attitudes, as we've discussed in the show many times,

00:22:16.420 If you look at the survey data, public opinion polls, all of this stuff is moving in the right direction.

00:22:21.240 And he talks about this as a qualitative shift that is not reversible.

00:22:26.060 And then he takes us to college campuses.

00:22:31.960 Yes.

00:22:32.260 So I'm going to send you this.

00:22:34.480 The campaign to extirpate any precursor to attitudes that could lead to racial violence has defined the bounds of the thinkable and sayable.

00:22:42.200 Racial preferences and set-asides are difficult to justify by rational arguments in a society

00:22:46.480 that professes to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of

00:22:49.900 their character.

00:22:50.920 Yet no one in a position of responsibility is willing to eliminate them because they

00:22:55.020 realize it would decrease the representation of African Americans in professional positions 0.99

00:22:59.100 and risk a repolarization of society.

00:23:02.240 So whenever racial preferences are declared illegal or voted out in plebiscites, they

00:23:06.520 are reframed with euphemisms such as affirmative action and diversity and preserved in work

00:23:11.380 workarounds such as granting university admission to the top percentage of students in every high

00:23:16.100 school rather than to the top percentage statewide. Okay. I just want to say something

00:23:20.540 very quickly because this is a hot topic. Diversity doesn't necessarily require racial

00:23:24.500 preferences. It could require just recruiting from different spaces. I also think that like

00:23:31.380 granting university admissions to the top X percent in every school is a way to like control

00:23:39.080 for for class differences more than just like eliminate racial preference whatever this very

00:23:44.720 very reductive and uh i don't know why do all these guys hate affirmative action so much so

00:23:50.700 here's where it gets really bad peter here's the next three paragraphs the race consciousness

00:23:54.840 continues after admissions many universities heard freshmen into sensitivity workshops that

00:23:59.800 force them to confess to unconscious racism and many more have speech codes that criminalize any

00:24:05.460 opinion that may cause offense to a minority group. Some of the infractions for racial harassment

00:24:10.580 cross over into self-parody, as when a student at an Indiana university was convicted for reading a

00:24:16.300 book on the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan because it featured a Klansman on the cover, and when a

00:24:21.300 Brandeis professor was found guilty for mentioning the term wetback in a lecture on racism against

00:24:26.420 Hispanics. Trivial incidents of racial quote-unquote insensitivity, such as the 1993 episode

00:24:32.740 in which a University of Pennsylvania student shouted at some late night revelers to shut

00:24:37.080 up, you water buffalo, a slang expression for a rowdy person in his native Hebrew that

00:24:42.380 was construed as a new racial epithet, bring universities to a halt, and set off agonized 0.71

00:24:47.920 rituals of communal mortification, atonement, and moral cleansing. 0.98

00:24:51.620 Real pioneer shit to be complaining about DEI trainings in 2008. 0.99

00:24:54.920 Right. 1.00

00:24:55.240 Just who gives a shit? 0.98

00:24:56.640 It's just so telling that like we have the stakes of this book have gone from like the 0.99

00:25:02.260 The Anshan Revolt in China to speech codes at Harvard.

00:25:06.840 Like, come on, man.

00:25:07.740 This can't be real.

00:25:08.760 And also you knew I was going to look up these little incidents of like, get this wokeness

00:25:13.460 gone too far.

00:25:14.280 Unfortunately, we've already done several of these on this show.

00:25:16.740 Yeah, I know.

00:25:17.100 Exactly.

00:25:18.020 It's basically the water buffalo one. 0.99

00:25:20.640 I was like, oh, God, don't make me do the water buffalo one on the fucking show. 0.97

00:25:23.560 This is the downside of the one book thesis. 0.98

00:25:27.680 Eventually, we are just talking about the same 10 incidents on college campuses over and over again.

00:25:33.680 So the first one that he mentions is, he says, some of the infractions for racial harassment cross over into self-parody, as when a student at an Indiana university was convicted for reading a book on the defeat of the KKK because it featured a Klansman on the cover.

00:25:49.280 Convicted? That doesn't seem like the word.

00:25:50.860 Yeah, no. What actually happened was this guy who's a janitor but was also taking classes as well was reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan, How the Fighting Irish Defeated the KKK, which honestly sounds dope. And apparently a colleague was like, hey, that's like a really sensitive subject for me. And like, I don't want to like come into the break room or whatever and see somebody reading a book with like burning crosses and like Klansmen on the cover.

00:26:16.740 Do you mind reading that somewhere else? And apparently this became like a negative exchange

00:26:24.000 where he basically refused and then kind of repeatedly read the book when she was around

00:26:30.700 in a way that like felt insensitive and kind of deliberate. Eventually the shop steward of his

00:26:37.200 union goes to him and is like, hey man, can you just not read the book around her? Like it upsets

00:26:42.160 her, regardless of whether you think that's legitimate for her to be upset. It does upset her,

00:26:46.720 and it appears that exchange also kind of escalates and becomes a negative interaction.

00:26:51.740 Eventually, this colleague files a complaint with the affirmative action office at the university. 0.94

00:26:57.620 They eventually send him a letter, which of course ends up getting excerpted in the fucking 0.76

00:27:01.460 Wall Street Journal, and it becomes a whole like fire.org situation. The letter kind of scolds him 0.96

00:27:07.560 for racial insensitivity, but it's pretty clear from the letter that it's scolding him for

00:27:12.280 repeatedly reading this in her presence and like refusing to just go somewhere else.

00:27:18.080 The letter says, you were instructed to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of

00:27:23.060 your coworkers and when reading the book to sit apart from the immediate proximity of these

00:27:28.300 coworkers. So it was never about reading the book on campus. It was about his relationship with this

00:27:33.360 specific employee. Then he sort of appeals it or this becomes, of course, like a big cause celeb

00:27:39.680 on campus of like, all he was doing was reading a book. And then eventually the affirmative action

00:27:44.020 office rescinds the warning and says like, we're not going to take any action. So no one was

00:27:48.760 convicted of anything. He also says, when a Brandeis professor was found guilty for mentioning

00:27:54.600 the term wetback in a lecture on racism against Hispanics, this does not appear to be true.

00:28:00.220 There is an article about this in the student newspaper at Brandeis where they interview the student who filed the complaint.

00:28:08.000 She says,

00:28:08.800 Jane also felt Hindley made inappropriate comments regarding drug use and alleged that another student told her Hindley made inflammatory comments about religion last semester.

00:28:27.880 When he was talking about the rising costs in Reefer, you just wonder.

00:28:31.320 And his silly little anecdotes about his daughter watching MTV and listening to bad music.

00:28:35.320 They're things that have no business in a classroom. 0.88

00:28:37.300 They're too personal.

00:28:38.480 And so according to her, he didn't bring up this slur in a conversation about racism against

00:28:43.820 Hispanic.

00:28:43.840 Racism.

00:28:44.420 He was literally just calling a guy.

00:28:45.980 He just called this guy.

00:28:48.380 Oh my God.

00:28:49.340 As in like almost all of these cases, it's always like, all he did was this.

00:28:53.480 And then you look into it and it's like a long pattern of behavior.

00:28:57.040 O.J. Simpson accused of murder just for getting mad at his wife.

00:29:01.880 Obviously, the point that they're all trying to make in bringing these up is that these are emblematic incidents, emblematic of a PC culture run amok.

00:29:12.600 But the thing is, if they are emblematic, then you should have more than 10.

00:29:17.860 The worst one is, you know, again, Better Angels comes out in 2008.

00:29:21.580 He's using an anecdote from the University of Pennsylvania from 1993.

00:29:24.660 And this is like the guy is shouting at black students, right? 0.99

00:29:28.840 And he says, shut up, you water buffalo. 1.00

00:29:31.820 And the black student is probably like, haven't heard that one before, but it doesn't feel good. 0.99

00:29:37.820 And then he's like, actually, in Hebrew, it's not racist. 0.60

00:29:41.780 It's just a rowdy person.

00:29:44.600 This is actually significantly worse than Pinker makes it sound. 0.98

00:29:47.640 This became, of course, a fucking national story because it showed up in the Wall Street Journal. 0.95

00:29:51.160 the two women who made the complaint they were practicing a dance routine in like the courtyard 0.98

00:29:58.240 that was sort of flanked by a bunch of different buildings so people could hear from their rooms

00:30:03.180 okay so this is from the washington post their faculty advisor says they were called the n-word 1.00

00:30:09.720 bitch and fat asses okay they said they also heard someone yell shut up you black water buffaloes 1.00

00:30:16.680 Go back to the zoo where you belong. 1.00

00:30:19.560 When they summoned university police to investigate, only Eden Jacobovitz, this is the guy who

00:30:24.840 yelled the water buffalo thing, admitted yelling anything.

00:30:27.900 Jacobovitz said today he did not use the words black water buffaloes. 0.99

00:30:32.360 So they heard him say, shut up, you black water buffaloes, which is pretty fucking different 1.00

00:30:36.840 than shut up, you water buffaloes. 1.00

00:30:39.260 And he also admits to saying this thing, there's a zoo about a mile from here. 0.99

00:30:44.980 Okay. 0.98

00:30:45.280 so okay this was very obviously a fucking racist incident in which students were being called the 0.99

00:30:52.340 fucking n-word and then suddenly this becomes a scandal about their oversensitivity yeah they're 0.99

00:30:56.940 having slurs hurled at them and then they hear like what in context feels a lot like a new slur 1.00

00:31:03.100 yeah like oh this is just a fresh slur you got five people shouting the n-word and then someone

00:31:07.740 shouts water buffalo and like you're not going to be like oh well maybe that's race neutral the

00:31:12.160 school basically said that like they they wanted him to apologize he wasn't like expelled or

00:31:17.260 anything he is defended by the aclu and he kind of litigates this away and eventually the two women

00:31:22.920 withdraw the complaint right and so nothing happens incredible so that was like i don't 0.96

00:31:28.080 even know if that's a detour but it's like it's our detour into debunking pinker's weird fucking

00:31:32.660 detour onto elite college campuses in his book about societal violence i'm sorry it's very funny

00:31:37.900 to be like like chapter one only 75 million people died in world war ii chapter two there's

00:31:45.880 this guy at indiana university who got in trouble for reading a book with a klansman on the cover

00:31:52.380 okay so that was the civil rights movement and now we're going to talk about women's rights and

00:32:00.400 the decline of rape and battering okay as you may be able to tell this is a section that's

00:32:06.420 going to include like very detailed discussions of like rape and sexual assault and rape statistics

00:32:11.640 and stuff so okay pinker actually has a relatively good intro to this section he talks about how like

00:32:18.940 rape was extremely routine throughout much of human history and in you know it's almost always

00:32:24.920 been prohibited in law but it was prohibited as a violation of property right that when you rape a

00:32:30.840 woman it's either her father's property or her husband's property and it's only essentially in 0.97

00:32:36.240 the post-war world where the victimization of women came to be seen as bad because women were

00:32:41.320 victimized. Right. There's a human being in there. Yeah, exactly. And so he gives a lot of this 0.97

00:32:46.660 credit to a 1975 book by Susan Brownmiller called Against Our Will. He says, when the book was

00:32:52.140 published, marital rape was not a crime in any American state. Today, it has been outlawed in

00:32:56.860 all 50. Rape crisis centers have eased the trauma of reporting and recovering from rape. Indeed,

00:33:01.980 on today's campuses, one can hardly turn around without seeing an advertisement of their services.

00:33:07.400 He then gets into rape statistics. So since the 1990s, alongside the decline of all other forms

00:33:14.400 of violent crime, rape has also been falling during that time. And it actually fell more

00:33:18.860 steeply and more dramatically than homicides. So we've seen a huge decline in the number of

00:33:23.920 women who report that they've been raped in the last year. And of course, we have police reports

00:33:27.360 of rapes have also been declining during this time. And this also appears to be the kind of

00:33:33.300 academic consensus, too, that during the same time that we've seen this decline in the number

00:33:37.940 of reported rapes, we've had a pretty big expansion in popular understandings of what

00:33:43.240 rape is, right? Like date rape has become a much more accepted concept, right? In the 1990s,

00:33:47.680 it was considered kind of a joke, right? And marital rape, as he mentioned, has now become

00:33:51.700 illegal. Like that, again, would have been considered something that was just a total

00:33:54.380 oxymoron to people, right? And so as these definitions have expanded, you would actually

00:33:59.000 expect the number of reported rapes to go up. And so the fact that the reported rapes have gone down

00:34:03.740 does in fact indicate that the incidence of rape has gone down.

00:34:07.060 Sure. And maps onto broader criminal trends too.

00:34:09.800 He chalks this up to the sort of general decline of crime. He talks about the Violence Against

00:34:16.100 Women Act in 1994, that there's all this extra funding for police departments for rape crisis

00:34:21.720 kits and hiring more female officers and just a lot more infrastructure around getting women to 0.99

00:34:27.020 report. And once they report actually being effective at it, he gives some credit to feminist

00:34:31.440 activists. But then he also takes it away immediately. He then says, though feminist

00:34:36.860 agitation deserves credit for the measures that led to the American rape decline, the country was 0.84

00:34:41.160 clearly ready for them. The feminists won the battle against rape partly because there were 1.00

00:34:45.200 more women in positions of influence, the legacy of technological changes that loosened the age-old 1.00

00:34:49.900 sexual divisions of labor but they also won the battle because both sexes had become increasingly 1.00

00:34:54.560 feminist okay but that's that's also because of them right people didn't become feminist organically

00:34:58.740 this is these people really do believe that like everyone just gets a little more woke as time

00:35:04.100 passes yeah and also that we've reached like the perfect goldilocks level of wokeness now

00:35:10.300 yeah i every time i see a black person in a position of power i think that they are the 0.82

00:35:15.140 product of affirmative action. But in the 60s, I would have marched with MLK. Yeah, of course.

00:35:21.160 He then, you know, after giving Susan Brown Miller a lot of credit, he then starts criticizing her

00:35:25.800 and the broader feminist movement for now saying that rape is about power and not sex. So he ends

00:35:32.140 this section with these paragraphs. Man, it's hard to talk about this without doing an hour-long

00:35:38.700 tangent about evolutionary psychologists but for many years i've been reading like evolutionary

00:35:45.200 psychologists bloggers be like rape isn't really about power it's about sex i know guys it's it's

00:35:52.000 both right it's it's such a simple thing okay anyway all right i'm gonna read it well wait

00:35:55.520 until you're doing this stuff he says common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom

00:35:59.920 that has accompanied a decline of violence and today rape centers unanimously insist that quote

00:36:05.200 rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust it's about aggression power and humiliation

00:36:11.080 using sex as the weapon the rapist's goal is domination unquote to which the journalist

00:36:17.220 heather mcdonald replies quote the guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing

00:36:23.060 only and it's not a reinstatement of the patriarchy if the point is like rape can't be divorced from

00:36:29.540 sex then sure but i think the whole rape is about power concept is meant to illustrate that sex

00:36:37.080 cannot be divorced from power which by the way like every like alt-right freak actually understands

00:36:43.100 if you just frame it differently like the the whole like archetype of the isolated male the

00:36:50.780 incel who cannot communicate with women cannot connect with women isn't getting laid the that

00:36:57.220 archetype is a powerless man right right and the idea that to some degree in our society women can 0.90

00:37:02.900 gatekeep sex right right and knocking down that gate is part of what rape is and that that is

00:37:08.640 the basic concept behind like rape is about power right it's just sort of explaining the social 1.00

00:37:14.180 dynamic and pinker is just reducing it to fucking nothing it's so stupid yeah he's basically saying 0.98

00:37:19.460 like it has no context right no one at a frat party says hello i would like to re-establish 0.98

00:37:23.740 the patriarchy please but like there are things going on at unconscious levels of what people

00:37:28.800 feel like they have permission to do what they're entitled to and that does in fact take into account

00:37:33.620 things like patriarchy right how you're how you're socialized is like no you owe me this that does

00:37:38.940 actually come from like broader social structures and like that's all anyone is really saying yeah

00:37:43.740 so read read the rest of it i just i just say you the next two paragraphs because of the sacred

00:37:47.680 belief rape counselors voiced advice on students that no responsible parent would ever give a 0.97

00:37:52.880 daughter. When McDonald asked the associate director of an office of sexual assault prevention

00:37:58.040 at a major university whether they encouraged students to exercise good judgment with guidelines

00:38:02.520 like don't get drunk, don't get into bed with a guy, and don't take off your clothes or allow

00:38:07.900 them to be removed, she replied, I am uncomfortable with the idea. This indicates that if female 1.00

00:38:12.980 students are raped, it could be their fault. I would never allow my staff or myself to send

00:38:18.060 the message it is the victim's fault due to their dress or lack of restraint in any way.

00:38:22.880 And fortunately, the students who McDonald interviewed did not let the sexual correctness get in the way of their own common sense.

00:38:29.500 Which is another way of saying that they didn't actually need to be given this advice, but whatever.

00:38:34.400 Yeah.

00:38:34.800 I mean, this sort of collapses a bunch of things, but I love it when people are like, why aren't you telling students not to get drunk? 0.80

00:38:41.100 It's like, well, first of all, because that would never fucking work.

00:38:43.340 Had you met a college student? 0.95

00:38:44.800 Also, they do do that.

00:38:45.940 I was told not to get drunk all the time.

00:38:47.460 Enough has been written about victim blaming around rape that, like, I don't think I have a ton to add to this conversation.

00:38:52.880 really. It's just that like, what are we talking about here in the context of this book? How are

00:38:59.320 we like his whole thing so far has been like the world has gotten better in all of these phenomenal

00:39:06.800 ways. We should all appreciate that. But somehow he has circled around to his reactionary culture

00:39:14.400 war grievances. Yeah, exactly. If his point is that it's gotten better, then why is he nitpicking

00:39:19.980 the victim-blaming levels of the Sexual Assault Prevention Office or whatever.

00:39:25.260 Maybe these understandings of rape as about power have actually helped reduce rape rates.

00:39:30.080 Right.

00:39:30.280 He just takes it as a given that it's now gone too far.

00:39:32.720 And this article by Heather MacDonald, where she goes to a campus rape office and says,

00:39:39.800 like, why aren't you telling people not to drink?

00:39:41.840 How familiar are you with Heather MacDonald, Peter?

00:39:44.420 I feel like I've heard that name before, but I can't pin it.

00:39:46.840 Her last book was called When Race Trumps Merit. 0.90

00:39:49.980 her book before that was called The Diversity Delusion, which Steven Pinker fucking blurbed. 0.79

00:39:56.980 She has one before that called The War on Cops and the one before that was called The Immigration 0.75

00:40:01.520 Solution. I would love to read a book about The War on Cops. Why do I feel like we don't land on

00:40:05.460 the same page there? This Heather MacDonald article that Pinker is pulling from is called

00:40:10.500 The Campus Rape Myth. And like, it's fucking insane. So Heather MacDonald puts the term date 0.99

00:40:16.320 rape in scare quotes throughout to basically imply that like date rape is not a real phenomenon 0.98

00:40:22.840 when like that's most rapes right and in this article she says that 50 percent of rape claims 1.00

00:40:28.340 are false are made up what's that based on yeah exactly she she's just like i think it's probably

00:40:33.140 closer to 50 in this article she says a survey of sorority girls at the university of virginia

00:40:38.700 found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims

00:40:43.340 felt that they had been raped equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis

00:40:49.000 of the department of justice 65 of what the feminist researchers called completed rape victims

00:40:54.640 and three quarters of attempted rape victims said they did not think that their experiences were 0.77

00:41:00.260 serious enough to report its victims in the study moreover generally did not state that

00:41:06.060 their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries okay so the entire project

00:41:12.680 here with this article is to basically be like, well, there's real rape and there's like fake

00:41:17.580 rape. There's like this fiction. Everyone thinks they're being raped now. Even the so-called

00:41:22.580 victims don't think it's rape or whatever, right? Exactly.

00:41:25.700 When obviously the premise is supposed to be that like there is an objective definition of rape and

00:41:30.300 it happened to all these women and some of them are saying that it didn't. And that's actually

00:41:34.460 maybe sociologically interesting. Yeah, no, this is a real phenomenon. It's called unacknowledged

00:41:38.420 rape, and it appears to be roughly half of rape victims do not consider themselves rape victims,

00:41:43.900 because if you're raped by a loved one, you don't want to think of that person as a rapist,

00:41:48.400 right? You're afraid that if you start thinking that you were raped, then you start to identify

00:41:52.640 as a rape victim. And that means something, right? There's still a huge amount of stigma 0.95

00:41:56.220 against rape victims in our society, right? And so this is something that you find with abuse

00:42:00.340 a lot as well. If you do surveys of like, does your boyfriend hit you in anger? People say,

00:42:04.460 well, yes, like, are you a victim of abuse? No, because that carries with it all these other

00:42:08.780 connotations that you have to take on. And so the fact that people do not consider themselves

00:42:12.780 victims of rape, but they answer yes to have you been forced to participate in a sexual act,

00:42:18.460 that doesn't take away the fact that they were raped. And it doesn't take away the fact that

00:42:22.540 that might be having trauma on them that they're not necessarily processing in a like, I was

00:42:27.360 injured physically or emotionally by this. People process this in very different ways. And it's

00:42:31.620 really different over time and the thing is like if heather mcdonald has a problem with the 0.98

00:42:36.200 definition of rape that they're using then maybe she should talk about that right rather than

00:42:40.880 looking at like the data on who says that they were or were not sexually assaulted and being

00:42:46.040 like well that means that some of these are fake it just isn't a myth and also like pinker is pinker

00:42:50.120 is kind of whitewashing this he he cites her elsewhere in the book too but he's citing this

00:42:54.400 person who's like a far-right psycho right just just an absolute lunatic yeah and he's like if

00:43:00.140 If you if you listen to Heather McDonald, who, you know, spends her free time skeet shooting puppies. 0.69

00:43:07.580 There's also I mean, you know, again, it does appear that that rapes kind of over the course of the last sort of 50, 70 years, they do appear to have declined in the population.

00:43:16.340 But also, this is a thing where I don't have any problem admitting that it appears that there are fewer rapes in America now than there were in 1950.

00:43:25.580 And also, there's a shitload of rapes in America. 0.93

00:43:28.500 Right. 1.00

00:43:28.620 Right. According to official statistics. So just the ones that are reported to police, there's 140,000 rapes a year.

00:43:35.420 And then if you rely on these surveys where they ask people, were you raped in the last year?

00:43:39.320 It then is 430,000 rapes a year. This seems like something that is still a fucking social problem that is worth addressing. 0.98

00:43:45.600 The existence of these arguments within this book is just very telling. 0.93

00:43:50.980 Right. He says at several points, I'm not trying to say that the status quo is acceptable.

00:43:57.460 Right. But then when you zoom in a bit, he is, in fact, arguing for the reactionary side of these modern debates.

00:44:04.680 Right. He is, in fact, saying, well, maybe you're defining rape a little too aggressively.

00:44:08.880 Right. What he's trying to do is frame this book as if it's just a reminder to everyone that things are good.

00:44:15.200 But it's so transparently actually a book that is designed to remind everyone that things are good such that the existing civil rights movements should be slowed down.

00:44:29.700 I want to take us on a little detour now. While I was thinking about kind of his record on women, I was like, what is the deal with the Epstein stuff?

00:44:38.560 Right? Because anytime Pinker comes up, someone will post that photo of him sitting at some sort of luncheon table with Jeffrey Epstein. I've always been really curious about this. And I also think there's a chance that he is unfairly criticized for this. After all the Epstein stuff came out, it also came out that he had met Stephen Hawking. He had met one of my idols, Stephen Jay Gould. He had met Oliver Sacks. And it's sort of like, well, these people shook his hand. They were in the same room as him.

00:45:06.180 But they didn't like meaningfully interact with him. And this was before anybody would have known about any of the criminal stuff. So it's sort of like, OK, you know, is Pinker just kind of like lumped in with these people or did Pinker have like meaningful interactions with Jeffrey Epstein?

00:45:18.400 I want to see a chart of financier pedophiles with private islands that happen to have met every single intellectual celebrity in American life.

00:45:29.100 I want to see that charted from the year 2000 to the year 2023.

00:45:34.260 You will see a drop off from one to zero, which indicates that things are improving.

00:45:39.720 But if you adjust for the population, Peter, it's less dramatic.

00:45:42.540 That's right.

00:45:43.200 So the story of Pinker and Epstein begins in 1996 when Epstein becomes friends with

00:45:49.380 Alan Dershowitz.

00:45:50.600 They were like very close friends.

00:45:52.600 So Dershowitz says at the time that Jeffrey Epstein was the only person he would allow

00:45:57.840 to read drafts of his book before they came out.

00:46:00.600 That's why his books are so good.

00:46:04.100 He would like stay at Epstein's house when he went to Florida.

00:46:07.640 And at the time, Epstein was really making a name for himself as a major donor.

00:46:11.700 And in 2003, Epstein gives a $30 million donation to start like a biology and something evolutionary dynamics program at Harvard, which is run by this guy, Martin Novak, who is friends with Steven Pinker.

00:46:27.400 And they pretty soon after that start, it appears to sort of running in the same circle.

00:46:31.940 So like Pinker is friends with Dershowitz.

00:46:33.800 Pinker is also friends with this Novak guy.

00:46:35.840 So I'm going to send you this.

00:46:36.720 This was from Stephen Picker's later kind of denial of his associations with Epstein.

00:46:42.800 I'm happy to share my encounters with Epstein.

00:46:45.460 The annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him, and always tried to keep my distance.

00:46:51.900 Friends and colleagues described him to me as a quantitative genius and a scientific sophisticate.

00:46:57.060 And they invited me to salons and coffee clutches at which he held court. 1.00

00:47:01.420 But I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante. 1.00

00:47:04.000 He would abruptly change the subject ADD style. 1.00

00:47:08.080 Problematic.

00:47:08.760 PO ADHD?

00:47:09.660 Yeah.

00:47:10.040 Speaking?

00:47:10.400 Dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data.

00:47:17.020 I think the dislike was mutual.

00:47:18.700 According to a friend, he, quote, voted me off the island.

00:47:22.100 Word choice.

00:47:23.360 Word choice.

00:47:23.880 There's gotta go.

00:47:24.360 Word choice.

00:47:25.340 Word choice, Stephen.

00:47:27.060 This is a prepared statement.

00:47:29.080 He wrote this.

00:47:30.760 God.

00:47:31.600 He's panicking like, no, like on Survivor. 0.83

00:47:34.000 it's gotta be another way to say it man he didn't like you millions of idioms oh my god

00:47:40.260 steven pinker hit me up and i will teach you how to write a denial to go on a three paragraph

00:47:48.320 sort of description of why you didn't like him interpersonally i know not only is it beside the

00:47:53.500 point it just sort of makes me think that you were in fact in consistent contact with this guy

00:47:58.420 because yeah this is a description of someone that you know well and don't like i also think

00:48:03.160 we should not allow Epstein's like very well documented sex crimes to overshadow the fact 0.99

00:48:09.020 that he was also a giant piece of shit in like every other way. So this is from a New York Times 1.00

00:48:14.600 article. On multiple occasions, starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and

00:48:19.160 businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be

00:48:23.620 inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies. Yeah. Okay. I remember this. Yeah. 0.99

00:48:29.300 And then this is from later in the article. According to another scientist cultivated by

00:48:32.300 Mr. Epstein, Jaron Lanier, a guest at one of the gatherings, told him Epstein based his idea for

00:48:36.960 a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with

00:48:43.540 the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool. Okay. I like

00:48:49.600 hearing about the Nobel laureate gene pool sperm idea and being like, yeah, I want to do the same

00:48:55.180 thing, but it's just me, Jeff. I know. And also I cut a little parenthetical here where it's like

00:49:00.700 only one Nobel laureate had donated his sperm i'm like i want names the man is like the most

00:49:07.220 vile human being in history and yeah and stephen pinker is like you know he just talks about stuff 0.98

00:49:13.700 he doesn't really understand yeah the chit chat is garbage that's the problem with jeffrey epstein 0.63

00:49:18.900 is he's just always changing the topic so this period of having these like salons and kind of

00:49:24.360 running in the same circles with Epstein, appears to go from roughly 2000 to 2005 or 2006. In 2005

00:49:30.880 is when everyone finds out that Epstein is being investigated for sex with underage girls.

00:49:37.400 This is really grisly stuff, and I'm not going to get too far into the details,

00:49:41.140 but in the Miami Herald investigation, they quote one of his victims as saying,

00:49:47.320 Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after

00:49:52.640 girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right a coordinated system yes of pedophilia 0.99

00:49:59.240 exactly and we also know from the fact that his fucking plane was called like the lolita express 0.99

00:50:03.000 and shit that this was like an open secret among people who knew him right so epstein starts to 0.97

00:50:07.520 get investigated in 2005 in 2006 he hires alan dershowitz to be his lawyer and pinker is friends 0.94

00:50:16.080 with dershowitz remember a lot of this is from a article in nation called jeffrey epstein's

00:50:20.760 science of sleaze. The entire legal defense of Epstein is under this sort of this underage

00:50:27.220 prostitution federal statute that is kind of known as the internet lurking statute.

00:50:32.660 The law says that anyone, quote, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign

00:50:39.300 commerce, unquote, to entice a minor into prostitution, that's the law that you're breaking,

00:50:44.880 is you're using a means of interstate commerce. That's what makes it a federal case.

00:50:50.280 The entire defense of Epstein at the time is he didn't use the internet, right? It's not that

00:50:55.760 he's innocent. It's that he was doing this in person. He would like go to the fucking like

00:50:59.920 high schools and shit. As part of this defense, Dershowitz asks Pinker to give a sort of linguistic 1.00

00:51:07.780 analysis of the actual law in question. So when the law says using the mail or any means of

00:51:14.400 interstate commerce, Pinker says that's the clear meaning of the statute. You must have been using

00:51:20.560 a means of interstate commerce to entice minors into prostitution or else you're innocent of the

00:51:25.460 crime. That is the standard reading of those types of statutes. Pinker later says that he basically

00:51:31.800 only did this as a favor to Alan Dershowitz. So this is from a BuzzFeed News article where they

00:51:37.560 interview Pinker. Pinker said over the years, he has regularly offered his linguistic opinions to

00:51:42.720 Dershowitz for use in various cases. I don't recall his telling me that the question pertained

00:51:47.180 to the Epstein defense, Pinker said. I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time.

00:51:52.000 He also says in another interview, he says, I did it as a favor to a friend and colleague,

00:51:57.060 not as a paid expert witness, but I now regret that I did it. And needless to say,

00:52:01.400 I find Epstein's behavior reprehensible. Nice. Epstein famously gets the sweetheart deal where

00:52:06.520 he only serves 13 months in prison. He's allowed to get out during the day to like work on hedge

00:52:11.500 fun shit. From Pinker's perspective, it is one of those things where like your friend asks you for 0.97

00:52:16.220 a favor and then you don't ask any questions. And it turns out it's for America's most notorious

00:52:21.320 pedophile. Dude, I know. It's also it's the fact that Pinker is friends with Dershowitz and 0.95

00:52:28.480 Dershowitz is close friends with Epstein. At no fucking point does Pinker in the course of two

00:52:33.280 years of this case, does Pinker ask, hey, what's this guy on trial for? Hey, why am I giving you 0.93

00:52:39.000 an assessment of the fucking internet luring statute yeah my my homie sends me a soliciting 0.98

00:52:45.340 sex from a child statute it's like can you interpret this for me and i'm like no questions 0.99

00:52:50.140 asked buddy yeah here's the interpretation don't even tell me what it's for i'll be on my way i

00:52:56.160 got dinner in 20. 2019 is when epstein is arrested and so in 2019 obviously there's all these questions

00:53:02.740 for steven pinker and everybody else at harvard and everything and so pinker writes a very detailed

00:53:07.680 response this is where he says like i only met the guy a couple times and he has adhd and everything

00:53:11.360 yeah so here is this i only met him a couple times on his breeding ranch

00:53:16.720 he says since i was often the most recognizable person in the room someone would snap a picture

00:53:23.040 some of them resurfaced this past week circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics

00:53:28.020 and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments

00:53:31.300 uh this picture of me with a pedophile is ad hominem i knew the voice would come back this

00:53:39.940 time since some of the social media snark insinuates that i downplay sexual exploitation

00:53:44.640 it may be worth adding that i have a paper trail of abhorrence of violence against women

00:53:50.400 have celebrated efforts to stamp it out and i've tried to make my own small contribution to this

00:53:56.120 Hevert. He then quotes himself in Better Angels of Our Nature talking about how bad rape is. Like

00:54:02.480 the earlier sections of that chapter where he's like, rape was a crime against property. Rape is

00:54:06.720 one of the worst things that happens in human society. If you think I hate women, how can you 0.96

00:54:10.700 explain my chapter? Rape is bad. Ask my female friend, Heather McDonald. But then what's so 1.00

00:54:17.340 interesting to me and why I wanted to go on this detour in this episode is because, you know,

00:54:22.500 Pinker's whole thing is about like the expanding circle of empathy. The counter argument to that

00:54:28.540 we talked about last episode was that humans have always been capable of empathy, but they refuse

00:54:33.040 to extend it to certain outgroups. And this is precisely what Pinker is doing here. I have never

00:54:38.900 heard Pinker describe Epstein's crimes in any detail, right? He's like, well, obviously, I think

00:54:44.180 it's abhorrent. I'm not going to say that like, Pinker was instrumental to this plea deal. And if

00:54:50.180 it wasn't for pinker epstein would be in jail whatever he doesn't have to take credit for that

00:54:54.080 necessarily but it's like dude you materially contributed to the sweetheart deal of somebody 0.95

00:55:00.720 who got his freedom through this fucking technicality and then used his freedom to 0.95

00:55:05.060 rape a bunch of people right you should maybe think about what that feels like for the victims 0.99

00:55:09.560 you should maybe address the victims and just like a little bit of fucking moral awareness 0.99

00:55:15.980 Right. 0.99

00:55:16.100 There's so many fucking interviews with Pinker about this. 0.98

00:55:19.300 He keeps coming back to like, well, people are posting the photo online. 0.98

00:55:22.980 Anyone can post anything online now.

00:55:24.980 And you're like, dude, you are not the victim of this whole thing.

00:55:28.240 I like that you did this whole deep dive into the Epstein situation.

00:55:31.960 But when I found out that Gladwell was on the plane, I just did one throwaway joke at

00:55:35.580 the end of the episode.

00:55:38.600 This is very typical.

00:55:40.020 I was mostly curious.

00:55:41.620 I was like, how much?

00:55:43.180 I mean, the by far the worst thing is that Pinker flies on Epstein's plane again in 2014.

00:55:49.460 Right. 1.00

00:55:49.660 So it's not like he found out about this and then he's like, hey, fuck this guy. 1.00

00:55:53.080 Right. 0.99

00:55:53.740 Well, when the when the hair is big, the ties to Epstein are strong.

00:55:57.880 That's what we've learned from our authors.

00:55:59.860 I feel like that should have rhymed, Peter.

00:56:01.600 I feel like it should be like a little Johnny Cochran aphorism.

00:56:04.520 Like when when the hair is silky, we vote not guilty.

00:56:07.900 i would i would have buried them under the jail with that line in court okay so we have talked

00:56:15.300 about the decline of violence against black people we have talked about the decline in 0.96

00:56:19.760 violence against women now pinker is going to talk about the decline of violence against

00:56:25.120 children okay this is one of those chapters that is mostly just like genuinely very interesting

00:56:29.820 fine fine i know this goes against the entire tenor of the show but i'm like oh this is

00:56:36.280 fascinating. So basically like children being hit by their parents was like essentially universal

00:56:43.280 throughout most of American history. Pinker cites a survey from the late 1800s asking people if they

00:56:50.120 were beaten like with objects, like with a belt or a stick by their parents in the late 1800s and

00:56:55.760 like 100% of people say yes. And one of the things that me and Sarah talked about a lot on 0.93

00:57:00.400 You're Wrong About was about really like the invention of the concept of child abuse. There

00:57:05.100 was a really famous article in 1962 in JAMA called the battered child syndrome that was

00:57:12.460 basically by this radiologist who had looked at x-rays of kids and had seen many with like

00:57:17.220 numerous broken bones or bones that had been broken more than one time basically being like

00:57:21.700 hey this is bad for kids i was picturing like two children in a trench coat just typing an article

00:57:28.080 called like this sucks so pinker cites this survey from 1976 where they ask people is child

00:57:34.720 abuse a problem in this country? And 10% say yes. And when they do the same poll in 1999, 0.97

00:57:41.400 90% of people say yes. There's a researcher named David Finkelhor, who is kind of the country's

00:57:47.160 main expert on child sexual abuse. And he's been writing about this since the 1990s, that

00:57:51.840 there's different forms of measurement of this. There's different kinds of ways that you can find

00:57:56.500 out child abuse. Obviously, it's not the easiest thing to track. But essentially, when you look at

00:58:00.140 the data, every single data source indicates that there is now less child abuse and less

00:58:04.900 child sexual abuse than there was starting in the early 1990s.

00:58:08.580 Okay.

00:58:08.780 The causes of this are very complicated.

00:58:10.980 Of course, Pinker says that like, it all began with the Enlightenment.

00:58:13.920 He quotes this thing from John Locke from like 1693.

00:58:17.880 I feel like sometimes when people are writing these historical narratives, they compress

00:58:21.420 very long periods of time into shorter periods of time in their brain.

00:58:26.060 like 1693 was 250 years i know i know and this didn't budge right and with no movement at all 0.99

00:58:35.760 i'm trying to give him some credit because i want to wait to like go after him for the bad shit 0.76

00:58:39.760 and this is like all like this is misdemeanor as far as pinker goes i'm like yeah whatever the 0.94

00:58:44.620 enlightenment sure it was john like john locke did this great i feel like a lot of philosophers

00:58:48.640 like to imagine that like the philosophical idea came first right yeah yeah but it sounds like what

00:58:55.920 really happened was one guy working on the ground was sort of like, hey, I've got a lot of evidence

00:59:03.000 that this is awful. Yeah. And that's what worked, right? That it wasn't some like,

00:59:07.160 it wasn't some more principled, broader, almost abstract objection to hitting kids.

00:59:13.620 Well, there's also all kinds of other longer underlying social shifts. So another thing that

00:59:19.260 happened was, you know, this was also a time when people were just having smaller families and

00:59:23.880 waiting longer to have kids you might think you would never spank your kids but what if you had

00:59:28.480 11 i don't want to i don't want to like make light of it but honestly right it feels like

00:59:33.580 you can sort of see with like these large families large families where children might die being the

00:59:40.220 norm you don't even have to explain yourself that much the the correlation between family size and

00:59:44.780 child abuse is like pretty well established okay older parents tend to be less abusive uh drug use

00:59:50.060 and alcohol use went down during those times, that also tends to drive abuse. A really bleak

00:59:54.940 factor is that by far the best predictor of both child abuse and child sexual abuse is whether you

01:00:00.980 were abused by your own parents. Another theory is that we just got better psychological medications,

01:00:06.740 right? And as therapy began to be de-stigmatized, people who were beaten by their parents were able

01:00:11.700 to like go to therapy and deal with their trauma directly rather than just passing it down to their

01:00:15.780 kids, right? There's also just this entire infrastructure of child protection. Shortly

01:00:21.220 after this first article about battered child syndrome comes out, we get mandatory reporting.

01:00:26.380 I think it's like the first laws were passed for mandatory reporting in 1963. And by 1967,

01:00:32.460 every state had them. Something that Pinker doesn't note, but shows up in the secondary

01:00:37.760 literature is that one of the reasons why this caught fire so quickly, this concept of child

01:00:42.820 abuse was because it was mostly associated with like poor and minority parents. 0.91

01:00:47.600 It's always a little bit weird when you find out that some objectively good step forward

01:00:52.580 in the human condition was also like a little bit racist.

01:00:56.480 So as Pinker describes all of this like genuinely very fascinating stuff, he of course gets

01:01:01.320 to the end of the chapter where he says that this conception of childhood and our societal

01:01:07.680 obsession with protecting the rights of children has now gone too far.

01:01:11.900 Yeah, of course.

01:01:12.820 So I'm going to send you a couple more paragraphs.

01:01:16.020 Lest you forget that the entire point of the book is to say that we are at the Goldilocks point in history.

01:01:22.640 It seemed to have passed it right in the middle of his lifetime.

01:01:24.880 Total, total coincidence.

01:01:26.660 You're not going to believe this, but the best point in human history was 15 years ago.

01:01:30.920 This is like how I think that music objectively peaked in like 2006.

01:01:34.220 That's a terrible year to choose, so we're not going to get into that.

01:01:37.160 I don't even know what to say.

01:01:38.540 Objectively, it's whenever you were 24.

01:01:40.040 Okay, fine. 1.00

01:01:40.500 For a gay man to go pre-gaga is just. 1.00

01:01:46.080 All right. 1.00

01:01:47.180 The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase.

01:01:52.120 I told you, man.

01:01:53.320 He's just saying it.

01:01:54.300 Sorry.

01:01:54.860 Decadent phase. 1.00

01:01:55.860 Holy shit. 1.00

01:01:57.200 Now that children are safe from being smothered on the day they are born, beaten to death by fathers, cooked in pies by stepmothers, worked to death in mines and beaten up by bullies. 1.00

01:02:07.380 Experts have racked their brains for ways to eke infinitesimal increments of safety

01:02:12.500 from a curve of diminishing or even reversing returns.

01:02:16.560 Children are not allowed to be outside in the middle of the day,

01:02:19.340 parentheses, skin cancer.

01:02:21.120 To play in the grass, parentheses, deer ticks.

01:02:23.720 To buy lemonade from a stand, parentheses, bacteria on lemon peel.

01:02:28.180 Or to lick cake batter off of spoons, parentheses, salmonella from uncooked eggs.

01:02:34.520 Lawyer-vetted playgrounds have had their turf padded with rubber,

01:02:37.760 their slides and monkey bars lowered to waist height,

01:02:40.400 and their seesaws removed altogether.

01:02:42.440 Lawyers. The lawyers did it, Peter.

01:02:44.300 God, that'd be a sick job.

01:02:45.460 When the producers of Sesame Street issued a set of DVDs

01:02:48.800 containing classic programs from the first years of the series, 69 to 74,

01:02:53.540 they included a warning on the box that the shows were not suitable for children.

01:02:57.420 The program showed kids engaging in dangerous activities

01:03:00.060 like climbing on monkey bars, riding tricycles without helmets,

01:03:03.080 wriggling through pipes and accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers okay so um i feel

01:03:11.640 like this is another thing where i actually do sort of see the salience of his overarching point

01:03:16.920 which is like once you have brought like the safety of children to a certain level you get

01:03:22.880 serious diminishing returns on any continued investment right i think that's sort of

01:03:27.340 unequivocally true but when he gets into specific examples you're sort of like well

01:03:32.440 home the whole playing outside thing i understand that as a complaint because there are real benefits

01:03:37.340 to kids doing that but when you're like the swing should be more dangerous it's like why

01:03:42.220 why he also has this weird thing about sesame street having a warning label which actually

01:03:48.940 is true which is very odd so i looked this up and it turns out that when you buy the dvds of

01:03:53.760 the first seasons of sesame street they have this little disclaimer that says these early sesame

01:03:58.800 street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child

01:04:04.040 he gives a couple of examples here of like why you can't do it because they're they're showing kids

01:04:10.640 uh climbing on monkey bars riding tricycles without helmets wriggling through pipes and

01:04:16.620 accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers yeah he is right about the last one the first ever

01:04:22.200 episode of sesame street involves a little girl playing at a playground and like a man comes up

01:04:28.400 and offers her cookies and invites her home to his house i'm like of course you know it's sesame

01:04:33.460 street so it's like this this wonderful thing she goes back to his house and like they eat cookies

01:04:37.040 and drink milk and she meets his wife and it's just like a lovely afternoon but like yeah you 0.99

01:04:41.020 wouldn't do that now kids are pussies now they won't even fucking go home with a stranger it's 0.99

01:04:45.760 a random guy giving them cookies on a playground if unless you would let your child do this then 1.00

01:04:50.220 shut the fuck up about the disclaimer there's also apparently a scene of cookie monster with 0.98

01:04:55.300 like a pipe in his mouth and he then eats the pipe and i guess they don't like having tobacco 0.98

01:05:00.540 products in like uh entertainment for very young children anymore sure so like yeah i don't know 0.97

01:05:05.000 the norms have changed who cares right exactly just who gives a shit there's like a 10 second 0.93

01:05:09.080 disclaimer so that the sesame street people don't get sued when you show this to your kid and then 0.98

01:05:14.800 they go wriggle through a pipe by the way i don't know what that example is but yeah your kids

01:05:20.100 shouldn't be trying to go shawshank redemption all over town i don't know yeah why we would want

01:05:24.860 to encourage that in any way there's also he gives a bunch of examples about this i mean again it's

01:05:30.340 like the length of these he's just like kids can't wear scary halloween costumes anymore and then his

01:05:34.080 example doesn't hold up at all oh my god then he also has this as another example another sacrament

01:05:40.300 is the campaign to quarantine children from the slightest shred of a trace of a hint of a reminder

01:05:45.020 of violence in chicago in 2009 after 25 students aged 11 to 15 took part in the age-old sport of

01:05:51.800 a cafeteria food fight they were rounded up by the police handcuffed herded into a paddy wagon

01:05:57.200 photographed for mugshots and charged with reckless conduct okay okay you you know you know what the

01:06:04.160 story is quick let me let me just i'm just gonna guess the demographics involved here this was my 0.99

01:06:11.300 first thought too i'm like there's no fucking way this is how much white kids got no fucking way no 0.97

01:06:16.180 fucking way and he's kind of like why would the liberals do this right like all this child safety 0.99

01:06:20.820 stuff has gone too far it's like this is not a liberal movement to put like cops in the fucking 0.99

01:06:24.820 schools dude yeah that's that's the lesson that steven pinker takes from from this is like yeah 0.94

01:06:30.460 we're protecting kids from violence when like 25 kids just get arrested so i i i found this this

01:06:38.300 school it is a charter school on the south side of chicago i do not know its demographics in the

01:06:42.720 year when this happened but its demographics now are 99.6 black enrollment we just got passed to

01:06:49.220 The like racism is kind of over now section.

01:06:53.780 And now we're in the also children are too safe section.

01:06:56.820 And one of his examples is just an up and down, very clear example of racism.

01:07:02.620 I'm sorry, but how do you not read this and immediately clock what's going on?

01:07:07.200 If you can't paint that picture in your mind, then I don't know what to tell you.

01:07:10.620 Don't write books. 0.64

01:07:11.260 So the next chapter is called Gay Rights, the Decline of Gay Bashing, and the Decriminalization of Homosexuality. 0.96

01:07:20.600 And as you can imagine, it is about violence against gay people.

01:07:24.180 He goes through how homosexuality was prohibited almost everywhere for most of human history.

01:07:30.360 And then, of course, Enlightenment thinkers started to lift this a little bit. 1.00

01:07:34.980 I was like, fuck off, Pinker. 0.99

01:07:36.680 But then I double-checked and it's true. 1.00

01:07:38.400 jeremy bentham wrote a whole thing about like decriminalizing homosexuality and like

01:07:43.260 utilitarianism blah blah blah no all those enlightenment boys were a little bit fruity

01:07:48.160 you know what i mean just like okay fair enough fair enough pinker you know he goes through

01:07:55.240 how people are much more accepting of gays now how hate crimes against gay people have fallen

01:07:59.440 steadily and then i'm like stealing myself i'm like okay here comes the part where it's like

01:08:03.740 but gay rights have gone too far now blah blah blah but he just doesn't do it he's just like

01:08:08.380 attitudes have changed and hate crimes have gone down and like that's pretty cool nice anyway next

01:08:13.400 chapter you know this is like maybe what six or seven years before gay marriage is legalized across

01:08:19.420 the country right like yeah yeah maybe if he wrote this chapter now there would be a little like

01:08:23.760 but are things too gay kind of section but yeah back in 2008 he didn't see it and good for him

01:08:30.100 He then has this like ending, like weird 300 pages at the end of the book that we talked

01:08:36.300 about very briefly so I could make my Donkey Kong joke last episode that doesn't really

01:08:40.220 say anything.

01:08:41.520 He has this, I looked at a bunch of other like writing that he's done.

01:08:45.640 He has this whole thing about like human nature and that like, you know, the blank slate was

01:08:49.100 essentially an argument against the idea that we can like program children with whatever

01:08:54.140 we want them to know, right?

01:08:55.260 He says there's like innate things about humans that all of us are programmed with.

01:08:58.880 But then he doesn't have a clear conception of what that actually means, right?

01:09:02.500 Because he just keeps flopping back and forth that like humans have an innate tendency toward violence, but we also have an innate tendency toward peace, right?

01:09:09.820 We have an innate tendency to hate each other, but we also have an innate tendency to form links of love and family bonds and community bonds.

01:09:17.740 It just is sort of like, yeah, humans contain within them tendencies for bad things and tendencies for good things.

01:09:23.540 Yeah, when he's right, he's right.

01:09:24.680 And I found it kind of like generic too.

01:09:26.620 He does like, you know, the Stanford Prison Experiment and like the Milgram stuff and like the marshmallow test.

01:09:30.700 And it's sort of just like a standard walkthrough.

01:09:33.420 Here's an experiment from the 60s that was less ethical than any experiment that's ever been conducted since.

01:09:38.980 We just hit a bunch of kids with hammers to see what would happen.

01:09:42.340 The famous hammer experiment.

01:09:45.180 But then so then we finally get to the conclusion of the book.

01:09:49.820 And I think this is where Pinker's ideology like really comes to the forefront.

01:09:55.500 So he's quite explicit about the fact that, like, there is a moral arc of the universe.

01:10:01.780 We are getting better, basically.

01:10:04.040 So I'm going to send you this.

01:10:06.420 You're familiar with this concept of, like, Whig history, right? 1.00

01:10:08.880 W-H-I-G? 0.96

01:10:09.920 Yeah.

01:10:10.360 Yeah.

01:10:10.800 What is it?

01:10:11.680 Hold on.

01:10:12.080 Let me Google it.

01:10:12.820 Oh, do you?

01:10:14.980 The gag was going to be that I was going to obviously read the first line of the Wikipedia.

01:10:18.620 Okay. 0.75

01:10:18.820 No, of course, wig history or wig historiography is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a glorious present. 0.83

01:10:34.800 That's what I remember.

01:10:38.520 You probably didn't know that it was it was coined by Katy Perry when she said wig snatched.

01:10:43.080 She's actually talking about this.

01:10:46.180 So we have to know this to sort of go through this section of Pinker's book.

01:10:51.460 So this is like, I think this is the final paragraph before the conclusion or something.

01:10:55.900 This is kind of his like wrapping up like Jerry's final thoughts.

01:10:58.140 The metaphor of an escalator with its implication of directionality superimposed on the random walk of ideological fashion may seem Whiggish and presentist and historically naive. 0.86

01:11:08.820 It is a kind of Whig history that is supported by the facts. 0.77

01:11:11.500 We saw that many liberalizing reforms that originated in Western Europe or on the American coasts have been emulated after a time lag by the more conservative parts of the world.

01:11:21.460 And we saw correlations and even a causal relation or two between a well-developed ability to reason and a receptiveness to cooperation, democracy, classical liberalism, and nonviolence.

01:11:31.360 So he's basically saying like, no, there is an escalator, like things are getting better, right? And this kind of wiggish conception of history as like we used to be bad and now we're good is actually if you look at the evidence is roughly true.

01:11:42.360 Sure. Yeah. OK, whatever. I mean, I really hate these analyses mostly because I feel like they they downplay the scale of history a little bit. The last couple thousand years seem to have been like pretty good. The last couple hundred years, very good relative to like the prior hundred thousand or whatever. I'm not like super sure that at this point we can draw a conclusion like things are getting better forever.

01:12:06.380 Right. Right. Right. That just feels like a little bit dramatic. I don't know.

01:12:09.280 He does take this a little too far. So, Peter, are you familiar with the Flynn effect?

01:12:14.360 The Flynn effect? That sounds familiar, but I don't think I know. I don't know.

01:12:17.400 This is the thing whereby they have to keep re-norming the IQ tests.

01:12:22.560 Yeah. Because because because IQs get higher.

01:12:24.880 Yeah. So like every it's like every generation is like eight IQ points smarter than the previous generation.

01:12:30.860 That's why if you're listening to this podcast in 100 years, you you're like so embarrassed for us.

01:12:35.920 Yeah. We're basically apes. Yes. To me, I think it's probably a sign that what we're measuring

01:12:41.480 in IQ tests is probably not intelligence, right? And the fact that it's getting better probably

01:12:45.100 just means that formal education is becoming more common or like it's measuring something else.

01:12:49.820 But then, so he goes from this Flynn effect that IQs are rising over time. And then he notes

01:12:55.600 that if you look at the data, IQ is correlated with various measures of morality. So IQ is

01:13:03.920 correlated with violent crime. People who have higher IQs are less likely to commit violent

01:13:08.640 crime. That's right. People who have higher IQs are more likely to cooperate. So maybe because

01:13:13.900 everybody's getting smarter, maybe that's why we see more cooperation between like economies and

01:13:18.800 different groups. He then has this really weird thing where he says IQ is also correlated with

01:13:26.660 political ideology. So there's a study of 20,000 people. There's just a straight line from like

01:13:32.440 the most conservative people have the lowest IQs and the most liberal people have the highest IQs.

01:13:39.020 This all makes sense to me because as a high IQ guy, when I beef with someone,

01:13:42.780 I use math and logic to defeat them.

01:13:46.740 I've had to cut out of so many episodes you saying as a high IQ guy, I'm going to send you this.

01:13:52.800 The smarter respondents in the survey were less likely to agree with the statement that the

01:13:56.860 government has a responsibility to redistribute income from the rich to the poor while being 0.56

01:14:01.400 more likely to agree that the government should help black Americans to compensate for the

01:14:05.300 historical discrimination against them, a formulation of a liberal position which is

01:14:09.960 specifically motivated by the value of fairness. He's basically saying that IQ doesn't necessarily

01:14:15.820 map onto partisan identity, but it might match onto philosophical ideology. The enlightened

01:14:21.600 centrist is the highest IQ. That's where he's headed. Wait for it. Wait for it. Intelligence

01:14:25.720 need not correlate with other ideologies that get lumped into contemporary left-of-center

01:14:30.320 political coalitions, such as populism, socialism, political correctness, identity politics,

01:14:35.660 and the Green Movement. The escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be

01:14:40.580 correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-being of individuals over

01:14:45.760 the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with

01:14:50.700 classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability

01:14:55.800 of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself.

01:14:58.640 You can't tell me that that sentence makes sense.

01:15:00.560 Classical liberals are the smartest,

01:15:02.520 but they can't write sentences about what they believe. 0.92

01:15:04.700 Classical liberalism is a consequence

01:15:06.460 of the interchangeability of perspectives

01:15:08.960 that is inherent to reason.

01:15:10.440 I think what he's trying to say is like,

01:15:11.800 as a classical liberal, you can, you're non-ideological.

01:15:14.640 So you can sort of pick and choose

01:15:16.160 from different ideologies according to like what's true.

01:15:18.520 But that's just not true.

01:15:19.500 No, I know.

01:15:19.960 Classical liberalism is an ideology.

01:15:21.240 But also, I just love the thing of like ending your book

01:15:24.560 being like, we're getting more intelligent over time. And the most intelligent people

01:15:28.380 are people who believe what I believe. Just like, would you look at that? And also that he's

01:15:32.740 essentially made this up that in this study, he says, you know, the smartest people are less

01:15:37.960 likely to like redistribution, but they're more likely to want redistribution specifically to 0.72

01:15:42.700 black people. And he's like, oh, well, that's a classical liberal thing. It's like, isn't that

01:15:46.540 an identity politics thing? You just said that it doesn't have to be identity politics, but like

01:15:50.620 you're only doing it for black people. That doesn't scream classical liberal to me.

01:15:54.560 classical liberalism i define that as just being like really smart and cool

01:15:58.560 i feel like you could probably spend hours picking this apart but i also just don't feel

01:16:02.940 like it's serious enough that sort of treatment we've been recording too long you're like all 0.97

01:16:07.240 right get me out of here mike it just seems like he's talking out of his ass honestly i don't i

01:16:12.100 don't really get it and i don't think that he could make me get it also i mean for the record 0.98

01:16:15.800 i don't i don't really believe in any of this shit like i don't think that like leftists are 0.99

01:16:20.140 like the smartest and have the highest iqs i think this entire fucking exercise is stupid 0.99

01:16:24.720 yeah look the smartest people are podcasters and everything else i don't care about 0.99

01:16:28.320 but then he he after all of this with you know these the you know intelligence is is rising over

01:16:35.100 time and intelligence is correlated to all of these other social goods he he says that we're

01:16:40.020 we're experiencing a moral flynn effect right that we are becoming qualitatively more moral over time

01:16:47.140 That's OK. And he these are the paragraphs. He doesn't quite end with this, but he ends like the intelligence moral Flynn effect section with these paragraphs, which I think are extremely telling.

01:16:57.600 And we're going to dive into a little bit. Lest you think this judgment a slander on our forebears, consider some of the convictions that were common in the decades before the effects of rising abstract intelligence began to accumulate.

01:17:07.740 A century ago, dozens of great writers extolled the beauty and nobility of war and eagerly looked forward to World War I.

01:17:14.920 One progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the decimation of Native Americans was necessary to prevent the continent from becoming, quote, a game preserve for squalid savages.

01:17:26.620 Another, Woodrow Wilson, was a white supremacist who kept black students out of Princeton when he was president of the university.

01:17:31.840 A third, Franklin Roosevelt, drove 100,000 American citizens into concentration camps

01:17:36.300 because they were of the same race as the Japanese enemy.

01:17:39.220 Nor was it just lawmakers who were intellectually challenged when it came to moral reasoning.

01:17:44.080 In the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century,

01:17:46.660 many literary intellectuals, including Yeats, Shaw, Wolf, Bell, and Elliott,

01:17:51.040 expressed a contempt for the masses that bordered on the genocidal.

01:17:54.420 Many others would come to support fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.

01:17:58.560 This has happened to us a couple of times where like, you know, if the argument is like these sorts of positions are less popular than they used to be, then sure. But I do think that this sort of like misunderstands how common some of these positions are now.

01:18:14.900 Like a century ago, dozens of great writers extolled the beauty and nobility of war.

01:18:19.420 That is still a feature of conservatism.

01:18:22.260 It still does manifest and it still is something that like guides how conservatives think about public policy.

01:18:29.640 He's doing the same thing here that he did with the Enlightenment earlier where he's trying to draw this clean line between sort of people of the past and the morally enlightened people of now.

01:18:39.340 But if you look at his own career after this book comes out, you see him in league with a lot of, like, pretty far-right people.

01:18:47.860 In the video that we watched, the video – I don't know if you noticed it, but at the beginning it says, like, presented by Spike UK, which is, like, the publication that's putting on this event.

01:18:55.900 Spike UK is, like, basically the Breitbart of the United Kingdom.

01:18:59.260 And, like, you know, he's citing Heather MacDonald in this book who's, like, a lunatic. 0.69

01:19:04.220 Right, right.

01:19:04.560 He's saying like, wow, it's weird in the mid-century, you know, all these literary intellectuals found themselves in league with fascists.

01:19:11.900 Wow.

01:19:12.840 Isn't it great we're so different now? 0.78

01:19:15.440 If what you believe is like my morality is so fucking good, like my moral north star is just so clear that I could never be pulled into a fascist political movement, then like you're probably not going to see it coming when you are.

01:19:31.320 That's a really good way to put it because, I mean, this basically brings us to, like, the actual ideology of the book, right?

01:19:36.560 So The Better Angels of Our Nature is all about how things are getting better.

01:19:40.160 So, like, why don't activists basically stop complaining, right?

01:19:43.600 After this, he then puts out a couple more books.

01:19:45.700 His most recent book is called Enlightenment Now where he extends this idea of, you know, the Enlightenment had the best ideas and how they're echoing in the present, et cetera.

01:19:54.240 I'm going to send you his paragraph on climate change.

01:19:57.900 Oh, no.

01:19:58.260 It may be satisfying to deem in –

01:20:00.460 It may be satisfying to demonize the fossil fuel corporations that sell us the energy

01:20:07.720 we want, or to signal our virtue by making conspicuous sacrifices, but these indulgences

01:20:13.360 won't prevent destructive climate change.

01:20:15.420 The human moral sense is not particularly moral. 0.98

01:20:18.180 It encourages dehumanization, parentheses, politicians are pigs, and punitive aggression, 0.53

01:20:25.280 parentheses, make the polluters pay.

01:20:27.920 Stop dehumanizing the politicians and the polluters.

01:20:30.460 The climate change thing, like, it's always lurking behind these conversations that, like, yeah, it's true that things have gotten very, very good in many ways across many metrics.

01:20:41.860 But there is this one thing, right, that, like, isn't improving.

01:20:48.320 And if it doesn't improve, there are some indications that it might never improve and things might get very bad relatively quickly.

01:20:56.580 Right. And a lot of these guys just pretend that it's like just not that big of a deal. Like, yeah, it makes it seem like their underlying assumption is that things are getting better rather than this being a book about like, here's the evidence that things are getting better.

01:21:09.600 That's the thing. I mean, for this, I read the climate change chapter of his latest book and the inequality chapter. Inequality is another thing that is getting worse, right? He's like, yes, yes. Domestically, inequality, concentration of wealth, top 1%, etc. But globally, inequality is falling, which like is just totally fucking irrelevant to like domestic politics plays out on like domestic conditions.

01:21:31.940 Sorry, but like if it were the opposite, he would make the same argument in reverse, right?

01:21:37.420 Like sure, inequality is getting worse globally, but domestically it's getting better.

01:21:42.000 So relax.

01:21:42.800 And this to me is what reveals his ideology, right?

01:21:45.600 Because when things are getting better, you should stop complaining.

01:21:48.180 When things are getting worse, you should stop complaining, right?

01:21:50.900 The actual ideology is just you should stop complaining and things are fine as they are.

01:21:55.480 But I genuinely don't think that he's aware of this, right? 0.73

01:21:58.560 Like there's this extremely frustrating kind of two-step that whenever he writes something where he's like, OK, things are great and activists should stop complaining, people will then point out – be like, you know, you're in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement.

01:22:12.500 You're saying, ah, you know, things used to be a lot worse, right?

01:22:15.480 That's – you know, it's a little bit racist to be like bringing this up right now, right?

01:22:19.020 And then he sort of steps back and he's like, oh, so it's racist to point out basic facts.

01:22:24.460 And yet if someone were to do a whole speech about his connections to Epstein and say that they were just stating facts, all of a sudden he would understand the importance of context.

01:22:34.500 Yeah, exactly. Yes.

01:22:35.500 When he's basically arguing this is not a conservative tome, right? This is just a this is just a statement of non-ideological facts. I think the response to that is like, OK, what are the policy prescriptions implied by this book?

01:22:50.740 right every single one of them is just throwing cold water on activists in some form or fashion

01:22:57.540 yeah don't raise taxes on the rich don't do anything ambitious about climate change yeah

01:23:01.720 it's always right this is the one book theory too right they all end with the same policy

01:23:05.380 prescriptions it's all just like center right stuff at the end of the day let's just like

01:23:08.420 mental note we can't keep doing these books you know what i mean 0.98

01:23:11.780 peter leaves the podcast episode like what is a 25 or something you're like fuck it i feel like we 0.97

01:23:18.440 keep getting baited into reading the same books yeah like all right we've done coddling of the 0.86

01:23:24.080 american mind and we've done the identity trap let's do stephen pinker's book about like the

01:23:30.680 arc of human history right right oh surprise it's also just complaining about identity politics

01:23:36.000 somehow when the hair is big the history is wig ish nice nice little confusing it's a little

01:23:42.220 confusing let's sit here for an hour until that we can get there just keep workshopping

01:23:47.640 See, the problem with your version is that it doesn't reference Epstein at all.

01:23:53.160 When the curls are long, the ties to Epstein are strong.

01:23:56.820 There we go. 1.00

01:23:57.520 Oh, shit. 1.00

If Books Could Kill - April 11, 2024

＂The Better Angels of Our Nature＂ Part 2： Campus Lies, I.Q. Rise & Epstein Ties

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