PREMIUM-PEL Back-to-School Nightcap 2025

You're about to hear a preview of Partially Examined Life supporter exclusive content. To learn how to get the whole thing, check out partiallyexaminedlife.com/support. But I do wanna hear about your ongoing journey. I was very happy to, a, to, you know, have done my part in editing, listening carefully, writing the summary of your Lincoln et al discussion, but also fine that I wasn't on there. But I did wanna ask you more about the Steven Pinker. So I had read my first Steven Pinker when we did our Thomas Sello. There's a nineteen nineteen ninety four book, The Language Instinct, and I thought it was fine. But my overall impression sort of in secondhand or what little of interviews I've heard with him and, you know, he's another guy that Sam Harris seems to like a lot, is that he is sort of in the scientistic class. You know, seems like very much, sort of a lightweight as far as philosophers would take him. And you guys had very little to say about him, but I was hoping that you would have given me more information so that I wouldn't have to read him. But, like, you really just kinda brushed him aside in two sentences. Did you have any more notes that you wanted to any more points from him that you wanted to explain to me and the people? Well, the reason I grabbed the pinker was I literally was talking about this topic of kind of cultural confluence of science and liberal democracy and the relationship with my dad. And he said, well, what you're saying is exactly what is in Pinker's book. And so I picked it up and I read the first chapter and putting aside lightweight or not lightweight, his summary and extolling the power and virtues of the enlightenment, they did align with what I was interested in talking about and interested in having us engage with about the importance of our institutions and the importance of I'm getting tired of the word norms because it feels like it's been, like, deflated and we need a new word for the ways in which we do things that aren't our laws. But, Pinker does, I think, lean, you called it scientism. He's very quantitative for sure. But I think in the end, that's basically a virtue on his part. I think that his advantage and his maybe you'd make a criticism of it, that he's a cheerleader for progress. Mhmm. Right? He's a cheerleader for the fact that science and liberal democracy and the things associated with it have actually made the world better in quantitative ways ways for more people. And if you put it this way, would you really want to go back in time and live five hundred years ago, one thousand years ago, two thousand years ago? And I think the answer is basically no. I mean, that's what he would say. He would say, no, you don't …