Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead? The Munk Debates by Steven Pinker

Author:Steven Pinker [Pinker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781487001698
Google: 2O5LDAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2016-05-31T20:12:16+00:00

Pre-Debate Interviews

malcolm gladwell in conversation

with rudyard griffiths

Rudyard Griffiths: Welcome to our pre-debate interviews for the Munk Debate on Progress. We’ll be debating the resolution, “Be it resolved: humankind’s best days lie ahead.” Arguing against the motion will be Malcolm Gladwell, internationally bestselling author and staff writer at the New Yorker. Malcolm, let’s start by having you unpack some of the key arguments that you’ll be putting on the table tonight. I think you may be running a little bit against the current of our culture right now, where there’s so much excitement around technology and some of the big global forces that are revealing themselves.

Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah, and I think it’s important to distinguish that we can make progress in individual areas without necessarily being better off as a whole, right? So, I imagine the other side is going to provide the specific incidences where we genuinely are better off than we were in the past, and where every expectation is we will continue to improve in the coming years. And I will concede all that to them — they’re absolutely right. I can sit here and simply list things that I think will get better in the future, but that doesn’t even begin to answer the question of whether we will be better off as a whole in five, ten, or twenty-five years from now.

I’m more interested in questions like, When you make progress against an individual problem do you create additional problems? What are those additional problems, and are those new problems bigger, the same as, or less than the problems you’ve just solved?

Rudyard Griffiths: Atomic weapons would be a great example. If we want to light up cities we can blow up cities.

Malcolm Gladwell: Exactly.

Rudyard Griffiths: We invent nanotechnology, weaponize it, and it wipes us out. Is it that kind of dual use in a lot of technology that worries you?

Malcolm Gladwell: As technology and some other areas progress, the size and the catastrophic nature of the flipside grow exponentially. So for every huge leap you make in one area, you also create a huge leap in, for example, the ability of humankind to destroy itself.

I think it’s important for us, for my side, to not come across as pessimists. We can be the furthest thing from it. And my position is simply that the world is different, and as we go forward, I don’t know whether we’re better off or worse off. It strikes me that the other side’s incumbent to prove the proposition. I simply have to shrug, and if the audience agrees that we ought to shrug, we win.

Rudyard Griffiths: A very French debate. Tell me about human progress in relation to morality. There is an argument out there that we’re not only improving the external world, but that we’re somehow improving ourselves. Steven Pinker is one of its key proponents.

Malcolm Gladwell: Pinker’s argument, which he expresses in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, is at once commonplace and also utterly beside the point.

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