Humor, the Causes of War, and Everything in Between with Steven Pinker

There are few (if any!) people alive whose work I think more highly of than Steven Pinker, or whose books have done more to shape my worldview. As he was in Los Angeles as part of his latest book tour, I took the opportunity to invite him on the show for an in-person interview. I did a podcast with him on Rationality, his last book, and wrote the following at the time: “One of the best parts of becoming (sort of) famous in the last year has been getting to meet and form relationships with some of my intellectual heroes. Seeing those I’ve looked up to for years not only become friends but in many cases return the admiration has been extremely rewarding.”

That remains true, and although we’ve corresponded over the years, this discussion was the first time we met in person. The topic was his new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

We begin by discussing the Aumann Agreement Theorem, which I thought sounded trite from the book but came around to believing was endlessly fascinating after hearing Steve explain it. We spend a bit of time on humor, which is such an important part of social relations but rarely given the scholarly attention it deserves, or else we might say the theories that do exist are usually unsatisfying.

I liked our discussion of how presidents and leaders engage in self-deprecating humor, and different public figures that either poke fun at themselves or the other side. I feel like the topic of politics and humor could make a fascinating PhD dissertation. If I had time, I would listen to podcasts and classify when people laughed and according to what criteria, and try to theorize about differences between groups like conservatives and liberals, or centrists and extremists. I think AI could probably help with that at this point. As I told Steve, perhaps we should all decide to support political movements that engage in more self-deprecating humor on the grounds that they are less likely to violate the rights of others! If you’re a graduate student or professor who is interested in doing such work, please reach out, as I would like to help find ways to make it happen.

Moving on from the new book, I got to ask Steve something I’ve been wondering about for a few years, which is whether recent events, particularly the war in Ukraine, have shifted his views on what maintains peace in the international system. As it turns out, we were both surprised that under contemporary conditions you could see two European countries kill each other in such large numbers. Maybe the great run of peace we’ve had since 1945 isn’t a result of, as John Mueller has argued, people realizing that war is stupid, but rather has depended on Western military, economic, and diplomatic power. Were the dreaded neocons perhaps correct? As international norms look a lot more fragile than they did fifteen years ago, this is a question we probably should be asking.

We close with some discussion about the Trump administration’s war on the universities, particularly Harvard. I loved the essay Pinker published in the NYT on “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.” The key passage is here.

Why does this matter? For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes, and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon (Arguable! – RH). They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.

Ongoing research at Harvard includes methane-tracking satellites, robotic catheters, next-generation batteries and wearable robotics for stroke victims. Federal grants are supporting research on metastasis, tumor suppression, radiation and chemotherapy in children, multidrug-resistant infections, pandemic prevention, dementia, anesthesia, toxin reduction in firefighting and the military, the physiological effects of spaceflight and battlefield wound care. Harvard’s technologists are pushing innovations in quantum computing, A.I., nanomaterials, biomechanics, foldable bridges for the military, hack-resistant computer networks and smart living environments for the elderly. One lab has developed what may be a cure for Type 1 diabetes.

This was published only ten days after my own piece in The Economist touching on many of the same themes.

Given the range and depth of the conversation, I walked away from it wondering how I would summarize Pinker’s career, or how to make sense of my intuition that there’s a line that extends through his books on psychology, linguistics, interpersonal communication, the history of violence, behavioral genetics, and political philosophy. If there is a unifying theme to his career, it’s a belief in reason to illuminate the most important human phenomena, from seemingly trivial – but actually quite deep! – questions like what makes us laugh or blush, to topics as weighty as, at an individual level, what determines the content of our personalities, and, from a more macro perspective, the causes of genocide and how we should arrange our political life. There’s been a progression from embodying enlightenment values in addressing important scientific questions regarding human nature, to explicitly advocating for those same principles in some of his more recent books, most clearly in Enlightenment Now. His two-front war against both wokeness in universities and the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump era is part and parcel of the same story.

As liberalism seems to be on the decline, at least in the short run, there’s never been a better time to delve into Pinker’s articles and books if you haven’t already. Not only for the overt defenses of what Western Civilization has built, but also for his non-political books that show us how the acquisition of knowledge can itself be joyful and life affirming. You will breeze through a joke from Curb Your Enthusiasm or a Woody Allen film (yes, the books are very Jewish), and before you know it you will have grasped a deep insight into the human condition – in a way that is understandable and relatable, but never dumbed down. I hope that this conversation encourages listeners who are not familiar with Pinker’s body of work to decide that it is worth exploring.

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