"The Better Angels of Our Nature" Part 2: Campus Lies, I.Q. Rise & Epstein Ties Artwork

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If Books Could Kill

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

April 11, 2024

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Michael: Peter.

Peter: Michael.

Michael: What do you know about the second half of The Better Angels of Our Nature?

Peter: It took you so long to read this book that society has gotten even better since Part 1.

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Peter: Last time on If Books Could Kill.

Michael: Yes. Recap us, Peter because we did a whole another episode in between.

Peter: Thousands of years ago, everyone was constantly killing each other. Now it's very rare. 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 good and nice.

Michael: 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, women, and gay people have some good ideas, but they're also a little misguided. And haven't they gone a little too far? The question at the heart of this episode is what is the ideology of this book? And so, I think it will be very instructive to start with a video clip that is, I think, emblematic of his ideology and his place in the culture now.

Peter: Huh, huh.

Michael: I think we should watch this at 1.5 because-

Peter: What?

Michael: -all these guys talk really slow.

Peter: Michael Hobbes thinks someone talks too slow. No way.

Michael: [laughs] Do you not watch stuff sped up? I'm like a 2x guy now.

Peter: It makes sense to me that you are, [Michael laughs] but no [laughs] I don't. I like to hear the normal human cadence. All right. And as a result, you and I basically talk at completely different speeds. [laughs]

Michael: Yeah. It's basically like wop. One of us is Megan Thee Stallion and one of us is Cardi B.

Peter: Yeah. That's also the comparison I would make.

[music]

Video Clip: The other way, in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness has done-

Michael: Political correctness.

Video Clip: -an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be, I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right media savvy. When they are exposed to the first time, to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions. Let me give you some examples. So, here is a fact that's going to sound ragingly controversial, but is not. And that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones.

Michael: Capitalism.

Video clip: Ask yourself a- [crosstalk]

Peter: I think no one has ever learned in America.

Michael: That's something no one's ever said.

Video Clip: Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany or in the 1960s? Here's another one. Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality. And men and women give different answers as to what they want to do for a living and how much time they want to allocate to family versus career and so on. But you can't say it.

Peter: You can't say it.

Michael: You can’t say it.

Video Clip: Here's a third fact that is just not controversial, although it sounds controversial, and that is the different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. The homicide rate among African-Americans is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European-Americans. And terrorism, go to the global terrorist database, and you find that worldwide, the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups.

[music]

Michael: All right, Peter, reactions. Peter, reactions.

Peter: Are we not all just tired? [Michael laughs] God.

Michael: We got to start recording this in the mornings. [laughs]

Peter: God, this is just so fucking tedious.

Michael: It is so annoying. [laughs]

Peter: It is the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. [Michael laughs] Let me address, I think, problem number one with this, which is the idea that these facts are censored on campus.

Michael: Unsayable.

Peter: Capitalist societies being more successful than communist societies [Michael laughs] is something that is fucking drilled into your brain over the course of your education.

Michael: The number one major in America is business.

Peter: Then you have, like, “There are differences between men and women.” Like, yeah, dude, everyone believes that everyone.

Michael: The average man is taller than the average woman. That is something you can say in any context.

Peter: Then you have black people commit crimes at higher rates than white people.

Michael: That's not the debate. That's not what people are debating when they debate race. They're debating the causes of that.

Peter: One note about all of these conversations is that it's never truths that are uncomfortable for the white male speaker. Right?

Michael: Right. Michael Clayton is not as good as you think it is.

Peter: All they're really talking about is a certain set of decontextualized facts that they love to bring up to trigger the lips. That is all there is to this.

Michael: It's the same like three facts.

Peter: Right.

Michael: So, okay, I am winding you up in a somewhat disingenuous way. So, in late 2017, the clip that we just watched edited the way that we just watched it. Somebody posts it on Twitter and is like, “Look at Steven Pinker essentially defending the alt-right.” And this goes mega viral. And there's days of just the entire Internet dunking on Steven Pinker and being like, “I always hated this guy.” But there is extra context to this clip. There is eventually a New York Times article called, “Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A” and a photo of Steven Pinker, which is not a great juxtaposition, [Peter laughs] but this article essentially puts back in the additional context and points out that this is an excerpt from a longer clip, where Pinker then gives a bit more explanation. So, let's go back to the clip.

[music]

Video Clip: Now, these are unwarranted conclusions, because for each one of these facts, there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don't license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on. The fact that men and women aren't identical has no implications for whether we should discriminate against women for a number of reasons. One of them is for any traits in which the sex is differ-- the two distributions have enormous amounts of overlap, so that you can't draw a reliable conclusion about any individual from group averages. The principle of opposition to racism and sexism is not a factual claim that the sexes and races are indistinguishable in every aspect. It's a political and moral commitment to treat people as individuals as opposed to prejudging them by the statistics of their group.

Third, we know that some of the statistical generalizations about races and sexes change over time. So, what is true now may not necessarily be true in 10 or 20 years. In the case of terrorism, the majority of domestic terrorism is committed by right wing extremist groups, not by Islamic groups within this country. And finally, in the case of the fact that capitalism is really a better system than Marxism. Every successful capitalist society has a regulation, has a social safety net. Now let's say that you have never even heard anyone mention these facts. The first time you hear them, you're apt to say, number one, the truth has been withheld from me by universities, by mainstream media. Moreover, you will be vindicated when people who voice these truths are suppressed, shouted down, assaulted. All the more reason to believe that the left, that the mainstream media, that universities, can’t handle the truth.

[music]

Peter: Okay, so you made me look quite foolish.

Michael: On purpose, on purpose.

Peter: Using media tactics.

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

Peter: He addressed the idea that these are decontextualized facts. What he didn't address was the other critique, which is a couple of these aren't really facts at all.

Michael: This is like the perfect symbol for the way that Steven Pinker is typically constructed publicly, where something gets taken out of context. And people make some arguments against it that are maybe a little bit overblown. When this clip was first going around, people like, “He's a far-right agitator. He's no different than Steve Bann.” And this kind of stuff, people really got whipped up into a frenzy from this clip that was taken out of context.

Peter: I mean, I did just like two minutes ago.

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

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: There's this weird industrial complex of people who are like, “Oh, you can't even state facts anymore” when Pinker is very clearly involved in an ideological project.

Peter: Right.

Michael: The entire premise of this clip is a lie. 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. They believe a bunch of stuff, it's not true, he's still making a factual claim that you cannot discuss these issues that are routinely discussed on college campuses. And he's also blaming the left for people joining the alt-right.

Peter: 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 necessarily settled. 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. That's what an ideology is.

Michael: There's also a huge difference between people asking questions and people just asking questions. If somebody 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 the differences in crime rates between races?” That's a legitimate, earnest question, and you can have a conversation about that.

Peter: But if a 15-year-old asks you, then you're like, “Mm, I don't know.”

Michael: [laughs] That's libertarian phase. That's libertarian coded. Yeah.

Peter: The fact that this guy is so fucking famous is just like proof that this stuff isn't really true.

Michael: I know it is funny to do like this. And Jonathan Haidt and Yascha Mounk and all these guys who are essentially interchangeable, and they're all just saying the same thing and saying that you can't say it. And it's like, how many bestsellers do we need? [laughs]

Peter: 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.

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

Peter: You know who else believed in animal rights?

Michael: [laughs] Now you're just doing it. Now after [Peter laughs] criticizing this, we're just going to start engaging in it. 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.

Peter: Each of these individual phenomena did occur, it seems right.

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

Peter: “The rights revolutions have brought us measurable and substantial declines in many categories of violence. 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.”

Michael: Activists are denying it.

Peter: The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement played out in lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African-American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. [Michael laughs] The oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and confine their wives. Today, it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a 50:50 ratio of male and female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment. It's just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed. These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.

Michael: All we're trying to do here is seek to understand. All we're doing is pointing out some trends.

Peter: Just a reminder.

Michael: Just a reminder.

Peter: That should be the name of this book. Just a reminder. [Michael laughs] It's true that the civil rights efforts of today are designed to alleviate what you could characterize as lesser harms. But the idea that we need to be reminded, he says in here, look, I'm not trying to endorse the status quo. It's like, okay, but then what are you trying to do, I don't get it.

Michael: The thing is, I think one of the core weaknesses of this book is his, I think, very genuine belief that it is not ideological. The fact that he's like, oh, I'm just pointing out these statistical trends prevents him from saying what his point is, because, like, yes, these things are true, and I think maybe they should be more broadly understood. If we have a reduction in crime rates, it's important for us to know why that happened. That's something that society is interested in. However, there's something weird about bringing every conversation about injustice back to the fact that it was worse 100 years ago.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: This argument things used to be worse would have been true at any point in the nation's history.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael: You could go up to Rosa Parks and say, well, why are you complaining about this bus thing 100 years ago, you would have been enslaved.

Peter: Yeah. I mean, look. Go back and look at what senators and representatives were saying about the civil rights movement.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: Look how much better this has gotten. This has always been a reactionary line of argument. You can't try to reframe it as a non-ideological thing, it’s just not.

Michael: Speaking of civil rights, the first category that he walks us through is civil rights and the decline of lynching and racial pogroms. So, he points out correctly that lynchings were extremely routine in the United States. They began falling in the 1800s. They were relatively rare by the 1940s. And then he gets to hate crimes now. He says five African-Americans were murdered because of their race in 1996, the first year in which records were published, and the number has since gone down to one per year. In a country with 17,000 murders a year, hate crime murders have fallen into statistical noise. He also talks about assaults, which, of course, are much more numerous. He says, though the absolute numbers of racially motivated incidents are alarming. Several hundred assaults, several hundred aggravated assaults, and a thousand acts of intimidation a year, they have to be put in the context of American crime numbers during much of that period, which included a million aggravated assaults per year. We essentially do not have these things anymore. Hate crimes are now so rare in America, it's now in the single digits in a country of 330 million people, which is a massive form of progress. This is his argument.

Peter: Okay, probably relies on the reliability of hate crime stats a little too much, but I hear you.

Michael: It's very telling where he uses different data sources because there's essentially only two ways to measure crime. One of them is reports filed to police, and the other is the National Crime Victimization Survey, where they survey tens of thousands of people across the United States, and they ask them, were you a victim of a mugging this year, did your car get stolen this year? And that basically corrects for the fact that the majority of crimes are not reported to police. If you look at the official rate of hate crimes, it is true. I looked this up for 2021, there were only 18 murders in America that were officially tallied as hate crimes. And that's out of 21,000 murders. So, less than one in 1000 murders is a hate crime. There is also, however, a 2017 ProPublica article called Why America Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics. [Peter laughs]

And of course, this comes out way after Pinker's book. Even at the time, there are numerous publications showing that hate crimes are notoriously difficult to measure. Because obviously, bias can play into a violent act in ways that don't involve somebody yelling a slur at you.

Peter: Right.

Michael: And also, there's huge problems with every link in the chain of reporting hate crimes and first of all, a lot of people do not report if you're the victim of an assault or a mugging or something. Most of those just never get reported to the police anyway. Oftentimes, the police don't really ask about things like whether anything was said or there was any indication that there was a hate crime. Also, a lot of police departments just simply don't gather this as a routine matter. So, they note in the ProPublica article that according to official statistics, Miami has not had a hate crime since 2010 because they don't gather that. A lot of local law enforcement departments, they're supposed to report their numbers to the state, and then the state reports them to the FBI, and then the FBI puts out the statistics.

But a lot of states do not tally these statistics. So, they note that the Orlando Police Department had five hate crimes for 2015. But the Florida law enforcement department says there were zero hate crimes in Orlando in 2015. There is also huge problems with state laws. So, Alabama's hate crimes law does not include sexual orientation as a grounds for hate crimes. So, there's never been a homophobic hate crime in Alabama.

Peter: Congrats to them. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, that's not going to be covered. And when you actually dig into the statistics, most of the, “hate crimes” in America take place in blue cities and in blue states. So, like, the Boston Police Department is famous for having a good hate crimes department, where they look into the motivations behind violent crimes. But that's a function of the fact that they're gathering those statistics and they're being reported. Boston does not have a higher rate of homophobic hate crimes than Alabama.

Peter: I will say this. The only time I felt like I was being discriminated against for seeming gay was in Boston. [Michael laughs] Because I had a cool sweater, sorry, [Michael laughs] at a local pub.

Michael: The one time I have had faggot yelled at me from a car was when I was with a straight friend. He felt such a whirlwind of emotions. [laughs]

Peter: This is actually true. I was saying Boston, but it was actually Portland, Maine. But, it's the same people, if this makes sense, [Michael laughs] Portland, Maine, is one of the most remarkable cities in the country. During the day, it is run by middle-aged lesbians. [Michael laughs] It is delightful. They're just selling you tchotchkes. That's it. At night, the townies from the suburbs or whatever, they all come in to get drunk. Someone screamed faggot out of their car at us that night. That was just last year. So, we've had faggot screamed out of cars at us the same amount. And that's assuming. I'm not forgetting any other times.

Michael: Wow.

Peter: It was just a dark energy from the locals to the point where-- And this is something that is like, never happened. But me and my buddy were like, “Let's get out of here.”

Michael: Yeah [laughs]

Peter: [laughs] Let's leave. They think we're gay and we're not going to be able to prove that otherwise wearing sweaters like this. So, let's just leave.

Michael: The funny thing, Peter, is I've always said that straight people are not allowed to say faggot. They're supposed to say the f-slur. Because unless you've been called that word, then, like, it doesn't-- you're not allowed to use it. But if a straight person has been called that word, I think that gives you the license.

Peter: In a lot of ways. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with you saying it. [Michael laughs] You know, as someone who's only had it shattered at them once.

Michael: And it was in Swedish because it was in Stockholm.

Peter: Yeah. I mean, that does countless, you have to admit.

[laughter]

Michael: Let's do the literal oppression Olympics on this one, whose experience is worse. [laughs] It was like, fur de fur. And then my friend was like, “Ooh, that's bad.”

Peter: [laughs] You're like, are you sure? That sounded beautiful.

Michael: But this is a real problem because if you actually consult the National Crime Victimization Survey, where they ask people, did you experience some sort of bias-related crime last year? The number is 191,000. So, according to official statistics, it's 6 to 10,000. And according to surveys, it's 191,000. So, we're talking about a somewhere in the realm of 20 times higher. So, Pinker is correct again, that hate crimes, especially against black people, were more common in the 1950s than they are now. The overall point is correct. But he is extremely selectively using numbers here to essentially say that the problem no longer exists. And that's not true.

Peter: Right.

Michael: You can't blame somebody for something that happens after their book comes out. But hate crimes have been rising since 2016 pretty significantly. And so, he again talks about this as this, like, shift is like, moral shift that we're all capable of so much more empathy now, but we've seen a huge backsliding.

Peter: This is something that we've seen with a number of our books where on one hand, you want to cut them a little slack because they're saying something that's more true in the era that they're saying it. On the other hand, it's just proof that they were missing something.

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

Peter: Right.

Michael: He calls it a rising abhorrence of violence. And there's also all the changes in law that we saw from the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, all of the structural changes that have happened in America that are very difficult to reverse. And then he also says that people's attitudes, as we've discussed on the show many times, if you look at the survey data, public opinion polls, all of this stuff is moving in the right direction. And he talks about this as a qualitative shift that is not reversible. And then he takes us to college campuses.

Peter: Yes.

Michael: So, I'm going to send you this.

Peter: The campaign to extirpate any precursor to attitudes that can lead to racial violence has defined the bounds of the thinkable and sayable. Racial preferences and set asides are difficult to justify by rational arguments in a society that professes to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Yet no one in a position of responsibility is willing to eliminate them because they realize it would decrease the representation of African-Americans in professional positions and risk a repolarization of society. So, whenever racial preferences are declared illegal or voted out in plebiscites, they are reframed with euphemisms such as affirmative action and diversity and preserved in workarounds such as granting university admission to the top percentage of students in every high school rather than to the top percentage statewide.

Michael: Diversity.

Peter: Okay, I just want to say something very quickly because this is a hot topic. Diversity doesn't necessarily require racial preferences. It could require just recruiting from different spaces. I also think that granting university admissions to the top X percent in every school is a way to control for class differences more than just eliminate racial preference, whatever, very reductive. And I don't know, why do all these guys hate affirmative action so much?

Michael: So, here's where it gets really bad, Peter. Here's the next three paragraphs.

Peter: The race consciousness continues after admissions. Many universities herd freshmen into sensitivity workshops that force them to confess to unconscious racism. And many more have speech codes that criminalize any opinion that may cause offense to a minority group. 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 Ku Klux Klan because it featured a Klansman on the cover and when a Brandeis professor was found guilty for mentioning the term wetback in a lecture on racism against Hispanics. Trivial incidents of racial “insensitivity,” such as the 1993 episode in which a University of Pennsylvania student shouted at some late-night Revelers to shut up, you water buffalo, a slang expression for a rowdy person in his native Hebrew that was construed as a new racial epithet, bring universities to a halt, and set off agonized rituals of communal mortification, atonement, and moral cleansing.

Michael: Real pioneer shit to be complaining about DEI trainings in 2008.

Peter: Just. Who gives a shit? It's just so telling that the stakes of this book have gone from, like-

Michael: I know, I know.

Peter: - the Anshan revolt in China [Michael laughs] to speech codes at Harvard. Like, come on, man, this can't be real.

Michael: And also, you knew I was going to look up these little incidents of this wokeness gone too far.

Peter: Unfortunately, we've already done several of these on this show.

Michael: Yeah, I know. [laughs] Exactly. It's basically the water buffalo one. I was like, “Oh, God, don't make me do the water buffalo one on the fucking show.”

Peter: This is the downside of the one book thesis. Eventually, we are just talking about the same 10 incidents on college campuses over and over again.

Michael: 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.

Peter: Convicted. That doesn't seem like the word.

Michael: 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 Defied the KKK, which honestly sounds dope. And apparently, a colleague was like, “Hey, that's a really sensitive subject for me and I don't want to come into the break room or whatever and see somebody reading a book with burning crosses and Klansmen on the cover.” Do you mind reading that somewhere else? And apparently this became a negative exchange where he basically refused and then repeatedly read the book when she was around in a way that felt insensitive and deliberate. Eventually, the shop steward of his union goes to him and is like, “Hey, man, can you just not read the book around her, it upsets her. Regardless of whether you think that's legitimate for her to be upset, it does upset her.”

And it appears that exchange also escalates and becomes a negative interaction. Eventually, this colleague files a complaint with the affirmative action office at the university. They eventually send him a letter, which of course, ends up getting excerpted in the fucking Wall Street Journal, and it becomes a whole fire.org situation. The letter scolds him for racial insensitivity, but it's pretty clear from the letter that it's scolding him for repeatedly reading this in her presence and refusing to just go somewhere else.

Peter: Ah-huh.

Michael: The letter says you were instructed to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of your co-workers, and when reading the book, to sit apart from the immediate proximity of these co-workers. So, it was never about reading the book on campus. It was about his relationship with this specific employee.

Peter: For sure.

Michael: Then he appeals it or this becomes, of course a big cause celeb on campus of all he was doing was reading a book. And then eventually the affirmative action office rescinds the warning and says, “We're not going to take any action,” so no one was convicted of anything.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael: He also says when a Brandeis professor was found guilty for mentioning the term wetback in a lecture on racism against Hispanics, this does not appear to be true. There is an article about this in the student newspaper at Brandeis where they interview the student who filed the complaint. She says, the thing that pushed me over the edge was a story about a Brandeis student that he had who came from an elite Mexican family. He said he came here and he paid his way, but when he came back here, his back was still wet. 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. When he was talking about the rising costs in reefer, you just wonder and his silly little anecdotes about his daughter watching MTV and listening to bad music. They're things that have no business in a classroom. They're too personal.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: And so according to her, he didn't bring up the slur in a conversation about racism against Hispanic.

Peter: Racism. He was literally just calling a guy [laughs].

Michael: He just called this guy that.

Peter: Oh, my God.

Michael: As in, like, almost all of these cases, it's always like all he did was this. And then you look into it and it's like a long pattern of behavior.

Peter: OJ Simpson accused of murder just for getting mad at his wife. [Michael laughs] 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. But the thing is, if they are emblematic, then you should have more than 10.

Michael: The worst one is, again, Better Angels comes out in 2008. He's using an anecdote from the University of Pennsylvania from 1993.

Peter: And this is like, the guy is shouting at black students, right?

Michael: Yes.

Peter: And he says, “Shut up, you water buffalo.” And the black student is probably like, haven't heard that one before, but it doesn't feel good. [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Yeah.

Peter: And then he's like, “Actually in Hebrew, it's not racist. It's just a rowdy person.”

Michael: This is actually significantly worse than Pinker makes it sound. This became, of course, a fucking national story because it showed up in The Wall Street Journal. The two women who made the complaint, they were practicing a dance routine in the courtyard that was flanked by a bunch of different buildings so people could hear from their rooms. So, this is from the Washington Post. Their faculty advisor says they were called the N word, bitch, and fat asses.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: They said they also heard someone yell, “Shut up, you black water buffaloes. Go back to the zoo where you belong.” When they summoned university police to investigate, only Eden Jacobowitz, this is the guy who yelled the water buffalo thing admitted yelling anything. Jacobowitz said today he did not use the words black water buffaloes. So, they heard him say, “Shut up, you black water buffaloes, which is pretty fucking different than shut up, you water buffaloes.” And he also admits to saying this thing. There's a zoo about a mile from here.

Peter: Okay, okay.

Michael: This was very obviously a fucking racist incident in which students were being called the fucking N word. And then suddenly this becomes a scandal about their oversensitivity.

Peter: Yeah. They're having slurs hurled at them, and then they hear what, in context feels a lot like a new slur.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: Like, oh, this is just a fresh slur. You got five people shouting the N word, and then someone shouts water buffalo. And you're not going to be like, “Oh, well, maybe that's race neutral.”

Michael: The school basically said that they wanted him to apologize. He wasn't expelled or anything. He is defended by the ACLU and he litigates this away, and eventually the two women withdraw the complaint.

Peter: Right.

Michael: And so, nothing happens.

Peter: Incredible.

Michael: So, that was like, I don't even know if that's a detour, but it's like, it's our detour into debunking Pinker's weird fucking detour onto elite college campuses. In his book about societal violence--

Peter: I'm sorry. It's very funny to be like, Chapter One, only 75 million people died in World War II. [Michael laughs] Chapter Two, there's this guy at Indiana University who got in trouble for [Michael laughs] reading a book with a Klansman on the cover.

Michael: Okay, so that was the civil rights movement. And now we're going to talk about women's rights and the decline of rape and battering.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: As you may be able to tell, this is a section that's going to include very detailed discussions of rape and sexual assault and rape statistics and stuff. So, Pinker actually has a relatively good intro to this section. He talks about how rape was extremely routine throughout much of human history, and it's almost always been prohibited in law, but it was prohibited as a violation of property. That when you rape a woman, it's either her father's property or her husband's property. And it's only essentially in the post war world where the victimization of women came to be seen as bad because women were victimized.

Peter: Right. They're like, there's a human being in there.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And so, he gives a lot of this credit to a 1975 book by Susan Brownmiller called Against Our Will. He says, when the book was published, marital rape was not a crime in any American state. Today, it has been outlawed in all 50. Rape crisis centers have eased the trauma of reporting and recovering from rape. Indeed, on today's campuses, one can hardly turn around without seeing an advertisement of their services. He then gets into rape statistics. So, since the 1990s, alongside the decline of all other forms of violent crime, rape has also been falling during that time, and it actually fell more steeply and more dramatically than homicides. So, we've seen a huge decline in the number of women who report that they've been raped in the last year.

And, of course, we have police reports of rapes have also been declining during this time. And this also appears to be the academic consensus too that during the same time that we've seen this decline in the number of reported rapes. We've had a pretty big expansion in popular understandings of what rape is. Like date rape has become a much more accepted concept. In the 1990s, it was considered kind of a joke. And marital rape, as he mentioned, has now become illegal. Like that, again, would have been considered something that was just a total oxymoron to people. And so, as these definitions have expanded, you would actually expect the number of reported rapes to go up. And so, the fact that the reported rapes have gone down does, in fact, indicate that the incidence of rape has gone down.

Peter: Sure. And maps onto broader criminal trends too.

Michael: He chalks this up to the general decline of crime. He talks about the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, that there's all this extra funding for police departments for, you know, rape crisis kits and hiring more female officers and just a lot more infrastructure around getting women to report. And once they report actually being effective at it, he gives some credit to feminist activists, but then he also takes it away immediately. He then says, “Though feminist agitation deserves credit for the measures that led to the American rape decline, the country was clearly ready for them. The feminists won the battle against rape partly because there were more women in positions of influence, the legacy of technological changes that loosened the age-old sexual divisions of labor. But they also won the battle because both sexes had become increasingly feminist.”

Peter: Okay, but that's also because of them.

Michael: Right.

Peter: People didn't become feminists organically. These people really do believe that everyone just gets a little more woke as time passes and something.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah [laughs]. And also, that we've reached the perfect Goldilocks level of wokeness now.

Peter: Yeah. Every time, I see a black person in a position of power, I think that they are the product of affirmative action. But in the 60s, I would have marched with MLK. Yeah, of course.

Michael: After giving Susan Brownmiller a lot of credit, he then starts criticizing her and the broader feminist movement, for now, saying that rape is about power and not sex. So, he ends this section with these paragraphs.

Peter: Man, it's hard to talk about this without doing an hour-long tangent about evolutionary psychologists. But for many years, I've been reading evolutionary psychologist bloggers be like, “Rape isn't really about power, it's about sex.”

Michael: I know.

Peter: Guys, it's both.

Michael: Right.

Peter: It's such a simple thing. Okay. Anyway. All right, I'm going to read it.

Michael: Well, wait till you-- Wait until you get this stuff.

Peter: He says, “Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence. And today, rape centers unanimously insist that “Rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust. It's about aggression, power, and humiliation using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination.” To which the journalist Heather Mac Donald replies, “The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not a reinstatement of the patriarchy.” If the point is rape can't be divorced from sex, then sure, but I think the whole rape is about power concept is meant to illustrate that sex cannot be divorced from power, which, by the way like every alt-right freak actually understands if you just frame it differently. The whole archetype of the isolated male, the incel, who cannot communicate with women, cannot connect with women, isn't getting laid. That archetype is a powerless man. Right?

Michael: Right.

Peter: And the idea that to some degree in our society, women can gatekeep sex, right.

Michael: Right.

Peter: And knocking down that gate is part of what rape is. And that is the basic concept behind, rape is about power. It's just explaining the social dynamic, and Pinker is just reducing it to fucking nothing. It's so stupid.

Michael: Yeah. He's basically saying it has no context.

Peter: Right.

Michael: No one at a frat party says, “Hello, I would like to reestablish the patriarchy, please.” But there are things going on at unconscious levels of what people feel like they have permission to do, what they're entitled to. And that does, in fact, take into account things like patriarchy. How you're socialized is no, you owe me this. That does actually come from broader social structures and that's all anyone is really saying.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: So, read the rest of it. I just sent you the next two paragraphs.

Peter: Because of the sacred belief, rape counselors foist-

Michael: Foist.

Peter: -advice on students that no responsible parent would ever give a daughter. When Mac Donald asked the Associate Director of an Office of Sexual Assault Prevention at a major university whether they encouraged students to exercise good judgment with guidelines like don't get drunk, don't get into bed with a guy, and don't take off your clothes or allow them to be removed. She replied, I am uncomfortable with the idea. This indicates that if female students are raped, it could be their fault. I would never allow my staff or myself to send the message it is the victim's fault due to their dress or lack of restraint in any way.

Fortunately, the students whom Mac Donald interviewed did not let the sexual correctness get in the way of their own common sense, which is another way of saying that they didn't actually need to be given this advice, but whatever.

Michael: Right. Yeah.

Peter: I mean, this collapses a bunch of things, but I love it when people are like, “Why aren't you telling students not to get drunk?” It's like, “Well, first of all, because that would never fucking work. Have you met a college student?”

Michael: Also, they do, do that. I was told not to get drunk all the time.

Peter: Enough has been written about victim blaming around rape that, I don't think I have a ton to add to this conversation, really. It's just that what are we talking about here in the context of this book? How are we-- his whole thing so far has been the world has gotten better in all of these phenomenal ways. We should all appreciate that. But somehow, he has circled around to his reactionary culture war grievances.

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Peter: If his point is that it's gotten better, then why is he nitpicking the victim blaming levels of the sexual assault prevention office or whatever?

Michael: Maybe these understandings of rape as about power have actually helped reduce rape rates. He just takes it as a given that it's now gone too far. And this article by Heather Mac Donald where she goes to a campus rape office and says, “Why aren't you telling people not to drink?” How familiar are you with Heather Mac Donald, Peter?

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

Michael: Her last book was called When Race Trumps Merit. Her book before that was called The Diversity Delusion, which Steven Pinker fucking blurbed. [laughs] She has one before that called The War on Cops. And the one before that was called The Immigration Solution.

Peter: I would love to read a book about The War on Cops. Why do I feel like we don't land on the same page there?

Michael: [laughs] This Heather Mac Donald article that Pinker is pulling from is called the campus rape myth and it's fucking insane. So, Heather Mac Donald puts the term date rape in scare quotes throughout to basically imply that, like, “Date rape is not a real phenomenon” when, like, that's most rapes. And in this article, she says that 50% of rape claims are false, are made up.

Peter: What's that based on?

Michael: Yeah, exactly. She's just like, I think it's probably closer to 50. In this article, she says, a survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped. Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. 65% of what the feminist researchers called completed rape victims and three quarters of attempted rape victims said they did not think that their experiences were serious enough to report its victims in the study, moreover, generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: So, the entire project here with this article is to basically be like, well, there's real rape and there's like fake rape. There is like this friction.

Peter: Right, right.

Michael: Everyone thinks they're being raped, now.

Peter: Even the so-called victims don't think it's rape or whatever, right

Michael: Exactly.

Peter: When obviously the premise is supposed to be that there is an objective definition of rape and it happened to all these women and some of them are saying that it didn't. And that's actually maybe sociologically interesting.

Michael: Yeah, no, this is a real phenomenon. It's called unacknowledged rape. And it appears to be roughly half of rape victims do not consider themselves rape victims because if you're raped by a loved one, you don't want to think of that person as a rapist. You're afraid that if you start thinking that you were raped, then you start to identify as a rape victim, and that means something.

There's still a huge amount of stigma against rape victims in our society. And so, this is something that you find with abuse a lot as well. If you do surveys of, like, “Does your boyfriend hit you in anger?” People say, “Well, yes.” Like, are you a victim of abuse? No. Because that carries with it all these other connotations that you have to take on. And so, the fact that people do not consider themselves victims of rape but they answer yes to have you been forced to participate in a sexual act? That doesn't take away the fact that they were raped.

And it doesn't take away the fact that might be having trauma on them, that they're not necessarily processing in a, like, I was injured physically or emotionally by this. People process this in very different ways, and it's really different over time.

Peter: And the thing is if Heather Mac Donald has a problem with the definition of rape that they're using, then maybe she should talk about that. Rather than looking at the data on who says that they were or were not sexually assaulted and being like, well, that means that some of these are fake.

Michael: It just isn't a myth. And also, Pinker is whitewashing this. He cites her elsewhere in the book too, but he's citing this person who's a far-right psycho.

Peter: Just an absolute lunatic. And he's like, if you listen to Heather Mac Donald, who spends her free time skeet shooting puppies.

Michael: [laughs] There is also, I mean, again, it does appear that rapes over the course of the last 50, 70 years, they do appear to have declined in the population. But also, this is a thing where I don't have any problem admitting that it appears there are fewer rapes in America now than there were in 1950. And also, there's a shitload of rapes in America according to official statistics.

So, just the ones that are reported to police, there's 140,000 rapes a year. And then if you rely on these surveys where they ask people, were you raped in the last year, it then is 430,000 rapes a year. This seems like something that is still a fucking social problem that is worth addressing.

Peter: The existence of these arguments within this book is just very telling. He says at several points I'm not trying to say that the status quo is acceptable. But then when you zoom in a bit, he is in fact arguing for the reactionary side of these modern debates. He is in fact saying, “Well, maybe you're defining rape a little too aggressively.” What he's trying to do is frame this book as if it's just a reminder to everyone that things are good. 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.

Michael: I want to take us on a little detour now. While I was thinking about his record on women, I was like, what is the deal with the Epstein stuff. Because anytime Pinker comes up, someone will post that photo of him sitting at some 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, but they didn't meaningfully interact with him. And this was before anybody would have known about any of the criminal stuff. So, it's sort of like, okay, is Pinker just lumped in with these people or did Pinker have meaningful interactions with Jeffrey Epstein?

Peter: I want to see a chart of financier pedophiles with private islands that happen to have met every single intellectual celebrity in American life. [Michael laughs] I want to see that charted from the year 2000 to the year 2023. You will see a drop off from one to zero, which indicates that things are improving.

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

Peter: [laughs] That's right.

Michael: So, the story of Pinker and Epstein begins in 1996, when Epstein becomes friends with Alan Dershowitz, they were very close friends. So, Dershowitz says at the time that Jeffrey Epstein was the only person he would allow to read drafts of his book before they came out.

Peter: That's why his books are so good.

Michael: [laughs] He would stay at Epstein's house when he went to Florida. And at the time, Epstein was really making a name for himself as a major donor. And in 2003, Epstein gives a $30 million donation to start a biology and something evolutionary dynamics program at Harvard, which is run by this guy, Martin Nowak, who was friends with Steven Pinker. And they pretty soon after that start-- it appears running in the same circle. So, Pinker is friends with Dershowitz. Pinker is also friends with this Nowak guy. So, I'm going to send you this. This is from Steven Pinker's later denial of his associations with Epstein.

Peter: I'm happy to share my encounters with Epstein. The annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him, and always tried to keep my distance. Friends and colleagues described him to me as a quantitative genius and a scientific sophisticate. And they invited me to salons and coffee clutches at which he held court. But I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante. He would abruptly change the subject ADD style. Problematic.

Michael: PO ADHD.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Speaking.

Peter: Dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data. I think the dislike was mutual. According to a friend, he quote, “Voted me off the island.”

Michael: [laughs] Word choice, word choice, word choice.

Peter: There is [unintelligible [00:47:24]. This is a prepared statement.

Michael: This is a prepared statement. He wrote this.

[laughter]

Peter: God, he's panicking like, “No, like on survivor.”

Michael: It's got to be another way to say it, man. He didn't like you. Millions of idioms you could have chosen.

Peter: Oh my God. Steven Pinker, hit me up and I will teach you how to write a denial. [Michael laughs] To go on a three-paragraph description of why you didn't like him interpersonally.

Michael: I know.

Peter: Not only is it beside the point, it just makes me think that you were, in fact, in consistent contact with this guy. Because this is a description of someone that you know well and don't like, you know what I mean.

Michael: I also think we should not allow Epstein's, very well-documented sex crimes to overshadow the fact that he was also a giant piece of shit in every other way. [Peter laughs] So, this is from a New York Times article.

Peter: On multiple occasions, starting in the early 2000s Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies. Yeah, okay, I remember this.

Michael: Yeah. And then this is from later in the article.

Peter: According to another scientist cultivated by Mr. Epstein, Jaron Lanier, a guest at one of the gatherings, told them Epstein based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the repository for germinal choice-

Michael: Germinal.

Peter: -which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool.

Michael: Okay.

Peter: I like hearing about the Nobel laureate gene pool sperm [Michael laughs] idea and being like, yeah, I want to do the same thing, but it's just me, Jeff.

Michael: I know and also I cut a little parenthetical here, where it's like only one Nobel laureate had donated his sperm. I'm like, I want name.

Peter: The man is like the most vile human being in history. And Steven Pinker is like, he just talks about stuff he doesn't really understand.

Michael: Yeah, the chit chat is garbage.

Peter: That's the problem with Jeffrey Epstein, is he's just always changing the topic.

Michael: So, this period of having these salons and running in the same circles with Epstein appears to go from roughly 2000 to 2005 or 2006. In 2005 is when everyone finds out that Epstein is being investigated for sex with underage girls. This is really grisly stuff and I'm not going to get too far into the details, but in the Miami Herald investigation, they quote one of his victims as saying Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right.

Peter: A coordinated system of pedophilia.

Michael: Exactly. And we also know from the fact that his fucking plane was called like the Lolita Express and shit that this was like an open secret among people who knew him.

Peter: Right.

Michael: So, Epstein starts to get investigated in 2005. In 2006, he hires Alan Dershowitz to be his lawyer. And Pinker is friends with Dershowitz remember. A lot of this is from an article nation called Jeffrey Epstein's Science of Sleaze. The entire legal defense of Epstein is under the sort of this underage prostitution federal statute that is known as the Internet lurking statute. The law says that anyone, “Using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce” to entice a minor into prostitution that's the law that you're breaking. If you're using a means of interstate commerce. That's what makes it a federal case. The entire defense of Epstein at the time is he didn't use the Internet. It's not that he's innocent. It's that he was doing this in person.

He would go to the fucking high schools and shit. As part of this defense, Dershowitz asks Pinker to give a linguistic analysis of the actual law in question. So, when the law says using the mail or any means of interstate commerce, Pinker says, “That's the clear meaning of the statute. You must have been using a means of interstate commerce to entice minors into prostitution or else you're innocent of the crime.”

Peter: That is the standard reading of those types of statutes.

Michael: Pinker later says that he basically only did this as a favor to Alan Dershowitz. Yeah, so this is from a Buzzfeed News article where they interview Pinker. Pinker said over the years he has regularly offered his linguistic opinions to Dershowitz for use in various cases. I don't recall his telling me that the question pertained to the Epstein defense. Pinker said, “I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time.” He also says in another interview, he says, “I did it as a favor to a friend and colleague, not as a paid expert witness. But I now regret that I did it. And needless to say, I find Epstein's behavior reprehensible.”

Peter: Nice.

Michael: Epstein famously gets this sweetheart deal where he only serves 13 months in prison. He's allowed to get out during the day to work on hedge fund shit.

Peter: From Pinker’s perspective, it is one of those things where your friend asks you for a favor, and then you don't ask any questions, and it turns out it's for America's most notorious pedophile.

Michael: Dude, I know. Also it's the fact that Pinker is friends with Dershowitz, and Dershowitz is close friends with Epstein. At no fucking point does Pinker, in the course of two years of this case, does Pinker ask, “Hey, what's this guy on trial for? Hey, why am I giving you an assessment of the fucking Internet luring statute?”

Peter: Yeah, my homie sends me a soliciting sex from a child statute. It's like, “Can you interpret this for me?” And I'm like, no questions asked, buddy.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: Here's the interpretation. Don't even tell me what it's for. I'll be on my way. I got dinner in 20.

Michael: 2019 is when Epstein is arrested. And so, in 2019, obviously, there's all these questions for Steven Pinker and everybody else at Harvard and everything. And so Pinker writes a very detailed response. This is where he says, “I only met the guy a couple times and he has ADHD and everything.”

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: So, here is this.

Peter: I only met him a couple times on his breeding ranch. [Michael laughs] He says, since I was often the most recognizable person in the room, someone would snap a picture. Some of them resurfaced this past week, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments. [Michael laughs] This picture of me with a pedophile was ad hominem.

Michael: I knew the voice would come back this time.

Peter: Since some of the social media snark insinuates that I downplay sexual exploitation, it may be worth adding that I have a paper trail of abhorrence of violence against women, have celebrated efforts to stamp it out, and have tried to make my own small contribution to this effort.

Michael: He then quotes himself in Better Angels of Our Nature, talking about how bad rape is. Like the earlier sections of that chapter where he's like, rape was a crime against property. Rape is one of the worst things that happens in human society.

Peter: If you think I hate women, how can you explain my chapter, rape is bad? [Michael laughs] Ask my female friend Heather Mac Donald.

Michael: But then, what's so interesting to me and why I wanted to go on this detour in this episode is because Pinker's whole thing is about the expanding circle of empathy. The counter argument to that we talked about last episode was that humans have always been capable of empathy, but they refuse to extend it to certain out groups. And this is precisely what Pinker is doing here. I have never heard Pinker describe Epstein's crimes in any detail. He's like, well, obviously, I think it's abhorrent. I'm not going to say that, Pinker was instrumental to this plea deal. And if it wasn't for Pinker, Epstein would be in jail, whatever. He doesn't have to take credit for that necessarily.

But it's like, dude, you materially contributed to the sweetheart deal of somebody who got his freedom through this fucking technicality and then used his freedom to rape a bunch of people. You should maybe think about what that feels like for the victims. You should maybe address the victims and just like, a little bit of fucking moral awareness. There's so many fucking interviews with Pinker about this. He keeps coming back to while people are posting the photo online. Anyone can post anything online now. And you're like, dude, you are not the victim of this whole thing.

Peter: I like that you did this whole deep dive into the Epstein situation. But when I found out that Gladwell was on the plane, I just did one throwaway joke at the end of the episode.

Michael: [laughs] This is very typical. I was mostly curious. I was like, how much? I mean, by far, the worst thing is that Pinker flies on Epstein's plane again in 2014. So, it's not like he found out about this, and then he's like, “Hey, fuck this guy.”

Peter: Right? Well, when the hair is big, the ties to Epstein are strong. [Michael laughs] That's what we've learned from our authors.

Michael: I feel like that should have rhymed, Peter. I feel like it should be like a little Johnnie Cochran aphorism. Like, when the hair is silky, we vote not guilty.

Peter: [laughs] I would have buried them under the jail with that line in court.

Michael: Okay, so we have talked about the decline of violence against black people. We have talked about the decline in violence against women. Now Pinker is going to talk about the decline of violence against children. This is one of those chapters that is mostly just genuinely very interesting.

Peter: Ugh. Fine, fine.

Michael: [laughs] I know this goes against the entire tenor of the show, but I'm like, “Oh, this is fascinating.” So, basically, children being hit by their parents was essentially universal throughout most of American history. Pinker cites a survey from the late 1800s asking people if they were beaten with objects with a belt or a stick by their parents in the late 1800s. And, 100% of people say yes. And one of the things that me and Sarah talked about a lot on You're Wrong About was about really the invention of the concept of child abuse.

There was a really famous article in 1962 in JAMA called the battered child syndrome that was basically by this radiologist who had looked at x-rays of kids and had seen many with numerous broken bones or bones that had been broken more than one time, basically being like, “Hey, this is bad for kids.”

Peter: I was picturing two children in a trench coat just typing an article [Michael laughs] called This Sucks.

Michael: So, Pinker cites this survey from 1976 where they ask people, “Is child abuse a problem in this country?” And 10% say yes. And when they do the same poll in 1999, 90% of people say yes. There's a researcher named David Finkelhor who is the country's main expert on child sexual abuse. And he's been writing about this since the 1990s that there's different forms of measurement of this. There is different kinds of ways that you can find out child abuse. Obviously, it's like not the easiest thing to track, but essentially, when you look at the data, every single data source indicates that there is now less child abuse and less child sexual abuse than there was starting in the early 1990s.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: The causes of this are very complicated, of course. Pinker says that it all began with the enlightenment. Quotes this thing from John Locke from 1693.

Peter: I feel like sometimes when people are writing these historical narratives, they compress very long periods of time into shorter periods of time in their brain. Like, 1693 was 250 years.

Michael: [laughs] I know, I know. And this didn't budge.

Peter: Right. And with no movement at all.

Michael: I'm trying to give him some credit because I want to wait to go after him for the bad shit. And this is misdemeanor as far as Pinker goes, I'm like, yeah, whatever the enlightenment, sure. It was John Locke did this, great.

Peter: I feel like a lot of philosophers like to imagine that the philosophical idea came first, right?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: But it sounds like what really happened was one guy working on the ground was, “Hey, I've got a lot of evidence that this is awful.”

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: And that's what worked. That it wasn't some, like, it wasn't some more principled, broader, almost abstract objection to hitting kids.

Michael: Well, there's also all kinds of other longer underlying social shift. So, another thing that happened was this was also a time when people were just having smaller families and waiting longer to have kids.

Peter: You might think you would never spank your kids, but what if you had 11? [Michael: laughs] I don't want to make light of it, but honestly, it feels like you can see with these large families where children might die being the norm.

Michael: You don't even have to explain yourself that much. The correlation between family size and child abuse is pretty well established, okay. Older parents tend to be less abusive. Drug use and alcohol use went down during those times that also tends to drive abuse. A really bleak factor is that by far the best predictor of both child abuse and child sexual abuse is whether you were abused by your own parents.

Peter: Sure.

Michael: Another theory is that we just got better psychological medications. And as therapy began to be destigmatized, people who were beaten by their parents were able to go to therapy and deal with their trauma directly rather than just passing it down to their kids. There's also just this entire infrastructure of child protection.

Peter: Right.

Michael: Shortly after this first article about battered child syndrome comes out, we get mandatory reporting. I think it's like the first laws were passed for mandatory reporting in 1963, and by 1967, every state had them. Something that Pinker doesn't note but shows up in the secondary literature is that one of the reasons why this caught fire so quickly, this concept of child abuse was because it was mostly associated with poor and minority parents.

Peter: It's always a little bit weird when you find out that some objectively good step forward in the human condition was also a little bit racist.

Michael: So, as Pinker describes all of this genuinely very fascinating stuff, he, of course, gets to the end of the chapter where he says that this conception of childhood and our societal obsession with protecting the rights of children has now gone too far.

Peter: Yeah, of course.

Michael: So, I'm going to send you a couple more paragraphs.

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

Michael: They seem to have passed it right in the middle of his lifetime. Total, total coincidence.

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

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

Peter: That's a terrible year to choose, so we're not going to get into that. [Michael laughs] I don't even know what to say.

Michael: Objectively. It's whenever you were 24. Okay, fine.

Peter: For a gay man, to go pre gaga [Michael laughs] is just-- all right. The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase. [laughs]

Michael: I told you, man. He's just saying it.

Peter: Sorry. Decadent phase. Holy shit. 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, experts have racked their brains for ways to eke infinitesimal increments of safety from a curve of diminishing or even reversing returns. Children are not allowed to be outside in the middle of the day (skin cancer) to play in the grass, (deer ticks) to buy lemonade from a stand, (bacteria on lemon peel) or to lick cake batter off of spoons (Salmonella from uncooked eggs). Lawyer vetted playgrounds have had their turf padded with rubber, their slides and monkey bars lowered to waist height and their seesaws removed altogether.

Michael: Lawyers. The lawyers did it, Peter.

Peter: God, that'd be a sick job. [Michael laughs] When the producers of Sesame Street issued a set of DVDs containing classic programs from the first years of the series, 69 to 74, they included a warning on the box that the shows were not suitable for children. The program showed kids engaging in dangerous activities like climbing on monkey bars, riding tricycles without helmets, wriggling through pipes, and accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers. Okay, so I feel like this is another thing where I actually do see the salience of his overarching point, which is like, once you have brought the safety of children to a certain level, you get serious diminishing returns on any continued investment.

I think that's unequivocally true, but when he gets into specific examples, you're sort of like, well, the whole playing outside thing, I understand that as a complaint because there are real benefits to kids doing that. But when you're like, the swing should be more dangerous. It's like, why, why who cares?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs] He also has this weird thing about Sesame Street having a warning label, which actually is true, which is very odd. So, I looked this up, and it turns out that when you buy the DVDs of the first seasons of Sesame Street, they have this little disclaimer that says these early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child. He gives a couple of examples here of, why you can't do it because they're showing kids climbing on monkey bars, riding tricycles without helmets, wriggling through pipes, and accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers. He is right about the last one. The first ever episode of Sesame Street involves a little girl playing at a playground and a man comes up and offers her cookies and invites her home to his house.

And, like, of course, you know, it's Sesame Street. So, it's like this wonderful thing. She goes back to his house and they eat cookies and drink milk and she meets his wife and it's just like a lovely afternoon. But, like, yeah, you wouldn't do that now.

Peter: Kids are pussies now. They won't even fucking go home with a stranger.

Michael: Expect a random guy giving them cookies on a playground.

Peter: Unless you would let your child do this, then shut the fuck up about the disclaimer.

Michael: [laughs] There's also apparently a scene of cookie monster with a pipe in his mouth and he then eats the pipe. And I guess they don't like having tobacco products in entertainment for very young children anymore.

Peter: Sure.

Michael: So, yeah, I don't know. The norms have changed. Who cares?

Peter: Right? Exactly. Just, who gives a shit? There's a 10-second disclaimer so that the Sesame Street people don't get sued when you show this to your kid and then they go wriggle through a pipe. [Michael laughs] By the way, I don't know what that example is, but, yeah, your kids shouldn't be trying to go Shawshank Redemption all over town. I don't know why we would want to encourage that in any way.

Michael: He gives a bunch of examples about this. I mean, again, it's like the length of these. He's just kids can't wear scary Halloween costumes anymore. And then his example doesn't hold up at all.

Peter: Oh, my God.

Michael: But then he also has this as another example.

Peter: Another sacrament is the campaign to quarantine children from the slightest shred of a trace of a hint of a reminder of violence. In Chicago in 2009, after 25 students aged 11 to 15 took part in the age old sport of a cafeteria food fight, they were rounded up by the police, handcuffed, herded into a paddy wagon, photographed for mugshots, and charged with reckless conduct. Okay, okay.

Michael: You know what the story is. [laughs]

Peter: Quick. I'm just going to guess the demographics involved here.

Michael: [laughs] This was my first thought too. I'm like, there's no fucking way. This is a bunch of white kids got a lesson for fucking food fight.

Peter: No fucking way, no fucking way.

Michael: And he's why would the liberals do this. All this child safety stuff has gone too far. It's like, this is not a liberal movement to put cops in the fucking schools, dude.

Peter: Yeah, that's the lesson that Steven Pinker takes from this is like, yeah, we're protecting kids from violence when 25 kids just get arrested.

Michael: So, I found this school. It is a charter school on the south side of Chicago. I do not know its demographics and the year when this happened, but its demographics now are 99.6% black enrollment.

Peter: We just got past the, racism is kind of over now section, and now we're in the also children are too safe section. And one of his examples is just an up and down, very clear example of racism. I'm sorry, but how do you not read this and immediately clock what's going on?

Michael: Dude. I know.

Peter: If you can't paint that picture in your mind, then I don't know what to tell you. Don't write books.

Michael: So, the next chapter is called Gay Rights, the decline of gay bashing and the decriminalization of homosexuality. And as you can imagine, it is about violence against gay people. He goes through how homosexuality was prohibited almost everywhere for most of human history. And then, of course, enlightenment thinkers started to lift this a little bit. I was like, fuck off, Pinker. But then I double checked, and it's true. Jeremy Bentham wrote a whole thing about decriminalizing homosexuality and utilitarianism, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Peter: No, all those enlightenment boys were a little bit fruity. You know what I mean?

Michael: [laughs] He’s like, okay, fair enough, fair enough, Pinker. You know, he goes through how people are much more accepting of gays now, how hate crimes against gay people have fallen steadily. And then I'm, like, stealing myself. I'm like, okay, “Here comes the part where it's like, pokey rights have gone too far now, blah, blah, blah.” But he just doesn't do it. He's just like, attitudes have changed and hate crimes have gone down, and like that's pretty cool.

Peter: Nice.

Michael: Anyway, next chapter.

Peter: You know, this is like, maybe what, six or seven years before gay marriage is legalized across the country. Like, maybe if he wrote this chapter now, there would be a little, like, but are things too gay kind of section. But back in 2008, he didn't see it. And good for him.

Michael: He then has this ending weird 300 pages at the end of the book that we talked about very briefly so I could make my Donkey Kong joke last episode. That doesn't really say anything. I looked at a bunch of other writing that he's done. He has this whole thing about human nature and that the blank slate was essentially an argument against the idea that we can program children with whatever we want them to know. He says there's innate things about humans that all of us are programmed with. But then he doesn't have a clear conception of what that actually means. Because he just keeps flopping back and forth. That humans have an innate tendency toward violence, but we also have an innate tendency toward peace. 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. It just is, like, yeah, humans contain within them tendencies for bad things and tendencies for good things.

Peter: Yeah. When he's ready he's ready.

Michael: And I found it generic, too. He does like the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram stuff and the marshmallow test, and it's just like a standard walkthrough.

Peter: Here's an experiment from the 1960s that was less ethical than any experiment that's ever been conducted since.

Michael: We just hit a bunch of kids with hammers to see what would happen.

Peter: The famous hammer experiment.

Michael: [laughs] So then, we finally get to the conclusion of the book and I think this is where Pinker's ideology really comes to the forefront. So, he's quite explicit about the fact that there is a moral arc of the universe. We are getting better basically. So, I'm going to send you this. You're familiar with this concept of Whig history.

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: What is it?

Peter: Hold on, let me google it.

Michael: Oh. [laughs]

Peter: The gag was going to be that I was going to obviously read the first line of the Wikipedia.

[laughter]

Peter: No, of course. Whig history or Whig historiography is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a glorious present. That's what I remember.

Michael: [laughs] You probably didn't know that it was coined by Katy Perry when she said wig snatched. And she does that on RuPaul. She's actually talking about this. So, we have to know this to go through this section of Pinker's book. So, this is like I think this is the paragraph before the conclusion or something. This is wrapping up Jerry's final thoughts.

Peter: 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, it is a Whig history that is supported by the facts. 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. 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.

Michael: So, he's basically saying, “No, there is an escalator.” Like, things are getting better and this is whiggish conception of history as we used to be bad and now, we're good is actually, if you look at the evidence, is roughly true.

Peter: Sure. Yeah, okay. Whatever. I mean, I really hate these analyses, mostly because I feel like they downplay the scale of history a little bit. The last couple thousand years seem to have been pretty good. The last couple hundred years very good relative to the prior 100,000 or whatever. I'm not like super sure that at this point we can draw a conclusion, like, things are getting better for everyone.

Michael: Right, right.

Peter: That just feels a little bit dramatic. I don't know.

Michael: He does take this a little too far. So, Peter, are you familiar with the Flynn effect?

Peter: The Flynn effect? That sounds familiar, but I don't think. No, I don't know.

Michael: This is the thing whereby they have to keep re-norming the IQ tests.

Peter: Yeah. Because IQ’s get higher.

Michael: Yeah. So, every generation is eight IQ points smarter than the previous generation.

Peter: That's why if you're listening to this podcast in 100 years, you're so embarrassed for us.

Michael: Yeah. We're basically apes. [Peter laughs] Yes. To me, I think it's probably a sign that what we're measuring in IQ tests is probably not intelligence. And the fact that it's getting better probably just means that formal education is becoming more common or it's measuring something else. But then, so he goes from this Flynn effect that IQs are rising over time. And then he notes that if you look at the data, IQ is correlated with various measures of morality. So, IQ is correlated with violent crime. People who have higher IQs are less likely to commit violent crime.

Peter: That's right.

Michael: People who have higher IQs are more likely to cooperate. So, maybe because everybody's getting smarter, maybe that's why we see more cooperation between economies and different groups. He then has this really weird thing where he says IQ is also correlated with political ideology. So, there's a study of 20,000 people. There's just a straight line from the most conservative people have the lowest IQs and the most liberal people have the highest IQs.

Peter: This all makes sense to me because as a high IQ guy, when I beef with someone, [Michael laughs] I use math and logic to defeat them.

Michael: I've had to cut out of so many episodes. You saying, as a high IQ guy, I'm going to send you this.

Peter: The smarter respondents in the survey were less likely to agree with the statement that the government has a responsibility to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, while being more likely to agree that the government should help black Americans to compensate for the historical discrimination against them. A formulation of a liberal position which is specifically motivated by the value of fairness.

Michael: He is basically saying that, like, IQ doesn’t necessarily map onto partisan identity, but it might match onto philosophical ideology.

Peter: The enlightened centrist is the highest IQ. That is where he’s headed.

Michael: Wait for it. Wait for it.

Peter: Intelligence need not correlate with other ideologies that get lumped into contemporary left of center political coalitions, such as populism, socialism, political correctness, identity politics, and the green movement. The escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself. You can't tell me that sentence makes sense.

Michael: Classical liberals are the smartest, but they can't write sentences about what they believe.

Peter: Classical liberalism is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason.

Michael: I think what he's trying to say is, as a classical liberal, you're non-ideological, so you can pick and choose from different ideologies according to what's true.

Peter: But that's just not true.

Michael: No, I know,

Peter: Classical liberalism is an ideology.

Michael: But also, I just love the thing of ending your book being like, we're getting more intelligent over time. And the most intelligent people are people who believe what I believe, just like, would you look at that? [Peter laughs] And also that he's essentially made this up, that in this study, he says the smartest people are less likely to redistribution, but they're more likely to want redistribution specifically to black people. And he's like, “Oh, well, that's a classical liberal thing.” It's like, isn't that an identity politics thing? You just said that it doesn't have to be identity politics, but you're only doing it for black people. That's doesn't scream classical liberal to me.

Peter: Classical liberalism. I define that as just being really smart and cool. [Michael laughs] I feel like you could probably spend hours picking this apart. But I also just don't feel like it's serious enough to warrant that sort of treatment.

Michael: We've been recording too long. You're like, all right, get me out of here, Mike. [laughs]

Peter: It just seems like he's talking out of his ass. Honestly, I don't really get it. And I don't think that he could make me get it.

Michael: And also, I mean, for the record, I don't really believe in any of this shit. I don't think that leftists are the smartest and have the highest IQs. I think this entire fucking exercise is stupid.

Peter: Yeah, look, the smartest people are podcasters and everything else I don't care about.

Michael: [laughs] But then he, after all of this with these intelligence is rising over time, and intelligence is correlated to all of these other social goods. He says that we're experiencing a moral Flynn effect. That we are becoming qualitatively more moral overcome.

Peter: [Laughs] okay.

Michael: And these are the paragraphs-- He doesn't quite end with this, but he ends the intelligence moral Flynn effect section with these paragraphs, which I think are extremely telling, and we're going to dive into a little bit.

Peter: 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. A century ago, dozens of great writers extolled the beauty and nobility of war and eagerly looked forward to World War I. One progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the decimation of Native Americans was necessary to prevent the continent from becoming a “Game preserve for squalid savages.” Another, Woodrow Wilson, was a white supremacist who kept black students out of Princeton when he was president of the university. A third, Franklin Roosevelt, drove 100,000 American citizens into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the Japanese enemy. Nor was it just lawmakers who were intellectually challenged when it came to moral reasoning.

In the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, many literary intellectuals, including Yeats, Shaw, Woolf, Bell, and Eliot, expressed a contempt for the masses that bordered on the genocidal. Many others would come to support Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. This has happened to us a couple times where 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 misunderstands how common some of these positions are now. Like a century ago, dozens of great writers extolled the beauty and nobility of war that is still a feature of conservatism. It still does manifest and it still is something that guides how conservatives think about public policy.

Michael: He's doing the same thing here that he did with the Enlightenment earlier, where he's trying to draw this clean line between people of the past and the morally enlightened people of now. But if you look at his own career after this book comes out, you see him in league with a lot of pretty far-right people.

Peter: Right.

Michael: In the video that we watched. The video, I don't know if you noticed it, but at the beginning it says presented by Spiked UK, which is the publication that's putting on this event. Spiked UK is basically the Breitbart of the United Kingdom. And he's citing Heather Mac Donald in this book, who's like a lunatic. He's saying like, “Wow, it's weird in the midcentury,” all these literary intellectuals found themselves in league with fascists. Wow, isn't it great? [Peter laughs] We're so different now.

Peter: 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 you're probably not going to see it coming when you are.

Michael: That's a really good way to put it. I mean, this basically brings us to the actual ideology of the book. So, The Better Angels of Our Nature is all about how things are getting better. So like, why don't activists basically stop complaining. After this, he then puts out a couple more books. His most recent book is called Enlightenment now where he extends this idea of the Enlightenment had the best ideas and how they're echoing in the present, etc. I'm going to send you his paragraph on climate change.

Peter: Oh no. It may be satisfying to demon-- [laughs] Oh, go fuck off.

Michael: Satisfying.

Peter: It may be satisfying to demonize the fossil fuel corporations that sell us the energy we want or to signal our virtue by making conspicuous sacrifices. But these indulgences won't prevent destructive climate change. The human moral sense is not particularly moral. It encourages dehumanization (politicians are pigs) and punitive aggression (make the polluters pay).

Michael: Stop dehumanizing the politicians and the polluters.

Peter: The climate change thing, it's always lurking behind these conversations that, yeah, it's true that things have gotten very, very good in many ways across many metrics. But there is this one thing.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: Isn't improving. And if it doesn't improve, there are some indications that it might never improve, and things might get very bad relatively quickly. And a lot of these guys just pretend that it's just not that big of a deal. It makes it seem like their underlying assumption is that things are getting better, rather than this being a book about, here's the evidence that things are getting better.

Michael: That's the thing for this. I read the Climate Change chapter of his latest book and the Inequality chapter. Inequality is another thing that is getting worse. He's like, yes, yes. Domestically, inequality, concentration of wealth, top 1%, etc. But globally, inequality is falling, which is just totally fucking irrelevant to domestic politics plays out on domestic conditions.

Peter: Sorry, but, like, if it were the opposite, he would make the same argument in reverse. Sure, inequality is getting worse globally, but domestically, it's getting better. So, relax.

Michael: And this, to me, is what reveals his ideology. Because when things are getting better, you should stop complaining. When things are getting worse, you should stop complaining. The actual ideology is just, you should stop complaining. And things are fine as they are. But I genuinely don't think that he's aware of this. There's this extremely frustrating two step that whenever he writes something where he's like, “Okay, things are great, and activists should stop complaining,” people will then point out, be like, you're in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement. You're saying, things used to be a lot worse. It's a little bit racist to be bringing this up right now. And then he steps back and he's like, “Oh, so it's racist to point out basic facts.”

Peter: 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.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Yes.

Peter: When he's basically arguing, this is not a conservative tome. This is just a statement of non-ideological facts. I think the response to that is like, “Okay, what are the policy prescriptions implied by this book?” Every single one of them is just throwing cold water on activists in some form or fashion.

Michael: Yeah. Don't raise taxes on the rich. Don't do anything ambitious about climate change. Yeah, yeah. yeah. It's always-- This is the one book theory too. They all end with the same policy prescriptions. It's all just like center right stuff at the end of the day.

Peter: Like, mental note, we can't keep doing these books. You know what I mean?

Michael: [laughs] Peter leaves the podcast episode, like, what is it, 25 or something? You're like, fuck it.

Peter: I feel like we keep getting baited into reading the same books.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: They're like, all right, we've done The Coddling of the American Mind, and we've done the identity trap. Let's do Steven Pinker's book about The Arc of Human History.

Michael: Right. Right.

Peter: Oh, surprise. It's also just complaining about identity politics somehow.

Michael: When the hair is big, the history is wig-ish.

Peter: Nice. Nice.

Michael: It is little confusing. It's a little confusing.

Peter: Let's sit here for an hour until we can get there.

Michael: [laughs] Let's just keep workshopping.

Peter: See, the problem with your version is that it doesn't reference Epstein at all. When the curls are long, the ties to Epstein are strong. There we go.

[music]

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Michael Hobbes

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Peter Shamshiri

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