I'm always wary of imagining some impossible utopian future in which human nature has been zeroed out. But I do think that the needle can be moved. We would have less climate denial and we'd have a better chance of surviving this crisis. There are studies that show that if you present to people the idea that, for example, nuclear power might be a way of dealing with climate change,. Fewer people deny the fact that human activity is warming the climate in the first place.
For this edition, Intelligence Squared revisits a compelling discussion from 2019 with one of the world's foremost cognitive psychologists, Steven Pinker, whose work often focuses on language, the mind, and human nature. He was joined in conversation by David Runciman, the academic and podcaster who teaches politics and history at Cambridge University, to discuss the themes of Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. This is the first half of a two-part conversation. Join us for part two in the following episode.
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