Tyler Cowen: Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence
Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.
He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).
.. Let me ask you a general question. Let’s say it were possible by spending $10,000 and devoting a few months of your life to it that any person on earth could blow up a significant part of a major city.
They could buy something, some kind of explosive. It would cost them $10,000. How long would it take before someone actually did this?
PINKER: Anywhere on earth?
COWEN: Anywhere on earth. Seven billion people on earth. Any one of them that can come up with the $10K and have a desire to do it, which is not most people of course. How long would it take before this would happen?
PINKER: Oh, I have no idea. By blow up, do you mean like the Tsarnaev brothers? Or do you mean like Hiroshima?
COWEN: Like Hiroshima.
PINKER: Someone on earth anywhere. Maybe not too long. I don’t know. I couldn’t really prophecy that.
COWEN: Let me then work back from that and ask you about your optimism about peace. Is it then your belief it will never be that cheap to blow things up?
PINKER: I don’t know. My optimism doesn’t consist of prophecy in that sense. That is, my optimism consists of looking at what has happened and noting that, first of all, the pessimistic view is factually incorrect. Namely, people believe that we’re living in unusually violent times and we’re not.
.. What I call the euphemism treadmill refers to the fact that the reason there often is a cycling is that the change in attitudes that you want to affect by changing the language will meet resistance in terms of the rest of our psychology. I don’t think it’s true that language determines your attitudes and beliefs, although it can push against them.
As long as there’s still some kind of negative connotation to an entity, then changing the label for it will just result in the new label picking up the emotional aura of the concept rather than the other way around.
As long as there is prejudice against African Americans where the connotation is not as positive as you’d like it to be, there will be the urge to find a new label that has not yet absorbed the taint of the existing one.