Steven Pinker on Progress
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2018
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We should ignore newspaper headlines, believe that things are getting better and defend Enlightenment values. That's the message from Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He debates his defence of progress and his optimistic outlook with Philip Dodd. Plus culture wars in Britain. Are the divisions we are seeing today different to previous culture wars? Eliza Filby, Alex Massie & Tarjinder Gill debate.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker is out now.
Eliza Filby is the author of God and Mrs Thatcher and a Visiting Lecturer at Kings College, London. Alex Massie is Scotland Editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Times and The Sunday Times Tarjinder Gill is a writer and teacher who blogs on race and identity issues at AllinBritain.
Producer: Robyn Read
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Hello, I'm Philip Dodd and welcome to the Arts and Ideas Discussion Program from BBC Radio 3, |
| 0:38.1 | which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers. |
| 0:42.1 | If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe to the Arts and Ideas podcast, |
| 0:47.4 | and wherever you get your podcast from, do rate and reviewers. |
| 0:51.8 | It'll help other people to find us. |
| 0:54.9 | This is the BBC. This is the BBC. |
| 1:01.3 | Hello. Reasons to be cheerful was the title of an upbeat Ian Drury song. |
| 1:06.9 | Well, my guest in extended conversation thinks that reason itself is reason to be cheerful, |
| 1:14.5 | reason together with science, humanism and progress. |
| 1:18.6 | In a moment, I talk with Stephen Pinker, who is less than kind to his progressive phobic opponents in the US culture was. |
| 1:27.2 | Progressivephobic is his word. |
| 1:29.7 | And later we'll be looking at why culture wars have erupted in Britain. |
| 1:35.4 | Stephen Pinker is often cited as one of the top 100 intellectuals in the world. |
| 1:41.2 | His last book was The Better Angels of Our Nature, an argument that contrary to much |
| 1:46.0 | popular belief, the incidence of war and violence, are declining. His new book, subtitled |
| 1:52.5 | A Case for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress, is a sequel of sorts. Taken on those of left |
| 1:59.3 | and right, who we argue that the world is going to hell in a |
| 2:03.1 | handcart, he floods his argument with graphs which show that health, safety, knowledge, |
| 2:09.6 | quality of life, happiness, they're all ineluctibly on the increase. The pessimists are simply |
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