- The ideals of the Enlightenment-
that we can use knowledge to improve human well-being-
aren't particularly natural.
For most of our history and pre-history,
there was no knowledge that you could act on
to do things like reduce infection,
reduce tribal warfare, or to extend life.
Until recently, that would've been a crazy thing
even to hope for.
So it's not intuitive,
and there's always a tendency toward backsliding.
For example, there's the blowing off of scientific findings,
of the efficacy of vaccines, the reality of climate change.
The war in Ukraine,
another bloating of enlightenment values:
the idea that the ultimate good is the lives of people.
For Putin, maybe several hundreds of thousands
of people dying, their schools, their hospitals,
their apartments reduced to rubble,
small price to pay for the glory
and the avenging of the humiliation of the Soviet Union.
We're not wired for enlightenment humanism,
but nonetheless, we ought to endorse it.
We ought to advance it.
We ought to remind ourselves of what's so great about it.
One idea that is essential to make sense
of our current predicament comes from 'game theory.'
Game theory is:
What's the rational thing to do
if you are in a situation where the outcome depends
on what other rational people do.
And the 'Tragedy of the Commons' is a game-theoretical
predicament where what everyone does that's rational
for them leaves everyone worse off when everyone does it.
There are lots of situations
in which tragedies of the commons confront us:
If I wait for the bus in the rain instead of driving my SUV,
I'm not gonna save the climate,
so it makes sense for me to take the SUV.
Well, if everyone thinks that,
then we're all in danger of being cooked.
An additional arena in which that we have a tragedy
of the commons is rationality itself.
You got a person who thinks,
"Should I believe this, or should I believe that?
Well, if I believe this, I will be a hero
in all the people that matter to me."
Another member of the group thinks that and another member
and they all think, "Well, if you doubt that,
then you're making us look kind of stupid and evil."
And if everyone believes that, then you can have two sides,
each of which kind of individually rational in the sense
that each one gets the respect of his buddies, his pals,
his colleagues, but the whole society is worse off
because you just have warring tribes instead
of a joint search for the truth.
In the case of the rationality comments,
you want the commitment to truth as more important
than a slogan that makes your side look good in order
for everyone to enjoy what is objectively good for everyone.
With all of the threats from the identitarian left
and the populist right and the nationalist leaders
and the religious fundamentalists, is there any hope?
Civilization, in general, tends to drift slowly
in directions of greater rationality.
Our science really does know more
than it did 50 years ago or 100 years ago.
A lot of superstitious beliefs have been marginalized.
Not just factual beliefs, but moral beliefs.
Slavery, thank goodness we don't have that debate anymore,
but 150 years ago our country did.
Disenfranchising women, criminalizing homosexuality,
segregation of schools.
The list goes on of things
where we really have made progress.
Humanistic values have a kind of built-in advantage
when you think about them in that they're the only things
that you can defend when you have a negotiation
with someone who is like you.
We'd all rather be alive than dead.
We'd rather be healthy than sick.
We'd rather be educated than ignorant and illiterate.
There's a long list of things that we share
because we are human, despite all of our differences in race
and religion and ethnicity and nationality-
enlightenment humanism is just appealing
to that common humanity.
It's not particularly intuitive,
but it always has that built-in advantage.
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