Steven Pinker joins Marian Tupy to discuss the so-called "crisis of meaning," the decline of religion, and what can give life purpose in a modern, largely secular world.
It’s wild how having everything at our fingertips has actually made it harder to feel like we’re doing something meaningful. I’ve definitely felt that "moral vacuum" when things get too comfortable, and I think that’s why I’m seeing so many people I know suddenly obsessing over craft and home projects. There's just something about a physical transformation—like the high-end residential work at https://qualityrenovation.com — that makes you feel grounded in a way that digital stuff never will. It’s like we’re all trying to build our way out of that feeling of being disconnected. Do you think this is why "slow living" is blowing up so much lately, or are we all just reaching for anything that feels permanent?
12.34 your question was about schools, not IQ. The PISA scores in the european oecd countries are dropping dramatically. I strongly revommend the works of E.D. Hirsch to understand this degradation.
Doesn't Deutsch say problems are, "soluble" not "solvable." Maybe it's regional language differences but the latter seems to me to lean towards science while the former includes artificial puzzles and sociology.
I think there’s an important distinction being blurred here between the appeal and transmission of moral systems and their foundations.
Religious mysticism, symbolism, and ritual can indeed make moral communities more cohesive and attractive. They reduce the cognitive burden, create shared identity, and reinforce norms through emotion rather than explicit reasoning. In that sense, they can be an effective vehicle for moral coordination, especially among large and heterogeneous populations.
But that doesn’t mean they are necessary for morality itself. Moral behavior does not originate in fully articulated philosophical reasoning, nor does it require explicit justification to exist. Humans are equipped with a range of social dispositions—empathy, reciprocity, sensitivity to fairness, and norm enforcement—that already orient us toward cooperation and coexistence.
These intuitions can later be rationalized, systematized, or embedded in tradition, but they don’t depend on religion to function. In modern societies, we also rely on secular institutions to enforce baseline norms—particularly the protection of fundamental rights—by constraining or removing actors who violate them.
So while religion can serve as a powerful delivery mechanism for moral norms, especially at scale or under conditions of low reflection, it is not the source of morality itself. Nor is morality ultimately grounded in abstract reason alone. At a deeper level, both religion and reason are better understood as ways of articulating, stabilizing, and transmitting moral intuitions that emerge from human nature. These systems can refine or distort those intuitions, but they do not create them from scratch.
It’s wild how having everything at our fingertips has actually made it harder to feel like we’re doing something meaningful. I’ve definitely felt that "moral vacuum" when things get too comfortable, and I think that’s why I’m seeing so many people I know suddenly obsessing over craft and home projects. There's just something about a physical transformation—like the high-end residential work at https://qualityrenovation.com — that makes you feel grounded in a way that digital stuff never will. It’s like we’re all trying to build our way out of that feeling of being disconnected. Do you think this is why "slow living" is blowing up so much lately, or are we all just reaching for anything that feels permanent?
12.34 your question was about schools, not IQ. The PISA scores in the european oecd countries are dropping dramatically. I strongly revommend the works of E.D. Hirsch to understand this degradation.
Doesn't Deutsch say problems are, "soluble" not "solvable." Maybe it's regional language differences but the latter seems to me to lean towards science while the former includes artificial puzzles and sociology.
I think there’s an important distinction being blurred here between the appeal and transmission of moral systems and their foundations.
Religious mysticism, symbolism, and ritual can indeed make moral communities more cohesive and attractive. They reduce the cognitive burden, create shared identity, and reinforce norms through emotion rather than explicit reasoning. In that sense, they can be an effective vehicle for moral coordination, especially among large and heterogeneous populations.
But that doesn’t mean they are necessary for morality itself. Moral behavior does not originate in fully articulated philosophical reasoning, nor does it require explicit justification to exist. Humans are equipped with a range of social dispositions—empathy, reciprocity, sensitivity to fairness, and norm enforcement—that already orient us toward cooperation and coexistence.
These intuitions can later be rationalized, systematized, or embedded in tradition, but they don’t depend on religion to function. In modern societies, we also rely on secular institutions to enforce baseline norms—particularly the protection of fundamental rights—by constraining or removing actors who violate them.
So while religion can serve as a powerful delivery mechanism for moral norms, especially at scale or under conditions of low reflection, it is not the source of morality itself. Nor is morality ultimately grounded in abstract reason alone. At a deeper level, both religion and reason are better understood as ways of articulating, stabilizing, and transmitting moral intuitions that emerge from human nature. These systems can refine or distort those intuitions, but they do not create them from scratch.