I was really struck by the pushback to that people, made people angry to be told that violence was in decline. It evoked really strong passions. Often because they are committed to a political ideology that is driven by the belief that things are getting worse. And pointing out that we have now have actually made things better, not worse, undermines a basic belief of certain political ideologues and there are lots of them.
For the second part of our conversation between cognitive psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker and academic and podcaster David Runciman, who teaches politics and history at Cambridge University, we rejoin the discussion with the two looking at the roots of skepticism. This interview first appeared on Intelligence Squared in early 2019 at the time of the publication of Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
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