Steven Pinker: Progress, Despite Everything

Dr. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and has taught, additionally, at he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He’s an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his ten books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress was his most recent and bestselling book, published in February 2018 (see Penguin/Random House at or at ). - Chapters - (0:00) Intro (2:00) Running toward controversy (4:45) Unsung positives of human flourishing (9:15) Despite inequality… (11:50) The hard right and the hard green (13:45) Progress is human led (15:24) The most important graph in the world (17:50) Ayn Rand, objectivism, the Pareto principle (19:42) Optimal hierarchies (23:22) Montreal and gilded prisons (25:10) The debate over inequality (28:11) Group identity and cultural microcosms (32:30) Multiculturalism, blood and soil nationalism (34:55) The American experiment: conceptual nation building (39:04) The basis in human worth, divine or self evident? (49:00) Tribalism and puritanical corruption (53:47) Nationalism, the rise of global consciousness (56:25) The IDW’s most surprising member (58:10) A ridiculous club, the uniting factors (1:00:02) Respecting the viewer (1:02:13) Personal consequences (1:04:34) Credible optimism (1:09:05) Being a force for good (1:12:28) The apocalypse is behind us (1:17:58) What’s next for Steven Pinker (1:21:14) Relationships and rejection, (1:25:58) An invitation, Ben Shapiro - BOOKS - 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: - LINKS - Website: 12 Rules for Life Tour: Blog: Podcast: Reading List: Twitter: Instagram: Facebook: