 Here's one difference between us, perhaps, and we discussed this earlier in the green room. I think of you as believing more strongly in the powers of human reason than I do. So when we hit upon these various, you might call them antinomies. What does consciousness really mean? Is the will really free? How do we think about time? You're quite willing to pull a sort of Kantian or Wittgensteinian move and say, well, it all collapses into contradiction. Call him again. That's knowledge forever denied to us. And then there's this other sphere in which reason operates quite well. And I tend to think of that more as a continuum that if we can't understand some truly fundamental things, the problems in our thinking will bleed into everything we try to analyze. And I tend to think of reason as being fairly weak. Maybe I'm more Hayekian in this way than you are. People being ruled by their passions, as David Hume might have thought. And in this sense, I'm more skeptical about the Enlightenment. So what can you say to talk me out of the skepticism and back into the truly Pinkarian view? Well, what are we doing here if you don't believe in reason? Why don't we have an arm wrestle or a beauty contest? After dinner. Okay. First of all, by the very act of even posing this question, you're committed to reason. That's what we're trying to explore here. So it's too late. You've already committed yourself to reason. That's one. Number two, Hume, even though he was a very insightful psychologist, and he emphasized that humans are subject to all kinds of irrational passions and biases and so on, one of the reasons that he did philosophy was to expose some of those fallacies, the better that we should be able to work around them. And his argument about reason being a slave to the passions was not so much a psychological claim that people will lose self-control and they'll let their emotions get better of them. He was partly making a conceptual point that the ability to go from A to B using reason doesn't tell you what the B should be. That there's just a logical distinction between goals on the one hand or desires and beliefs and that you can't, through a chain of deduction, identify what you ought to aim for. That's just a category mistake. That's different from the psychological claim that people are permanently irrational. People can be made more rational, I think he would say, and I would say, by the act of what we're doing now that is exploring implications of ideas, by science, that is by taking your beliefs and allowing reality to refute them or not. And historically, even though it's true that people do all kinds of crazy things, subject to all kinds of irrational prejudices, passions, and so on, on the other hand, some ideas really do get dropped by, bad ideas get dropped by the wayside. Not necessarily quickly, not necessarily absolutely, but we don't have human sacrifice anymore. We don't throw virgins into volcanoes to get better weather. We don't have too many hereditary monarchies anymore. They don't work badly. Maybe not, but probably on the whole democracy is a better idea. But you could have both. Denmark. I mean, I grew up in Canada, and I grew up with a picture of the Queen in my classroom. So yes, if you have all the pageantry and gossip that you have with having a nice juicy monarchy, but the Queen doesn't actually think up the laws, it's probably not a bad compromise. But in both the progress of science, and I really do believe there is such a thing as scientific progress, I mean, we see it in the fruits of technology, but we also see it just in the depth and satisfying nature of scientific explanation. And not linearly and not inexorably, but in progress in so many dimensions of human life. I've documented the historical declines of violence, and as an economist, you know that we've gotten a lot wealthier and life has gotten better in many ways. We live longer, we're healthier, we have a rich, more breadth of experience. These are all, I would say, fruits of the enlightenment. Despite the fact that as products of evolution, we've got a lot of irrational quirks baked into us. Fortunately, and this gets us back to, say, modularity or specialization, we don't only have irrational passions, we do have this big frontal cortex kind of grafted onto a brain which now and again can override our passions. We can exert self-control, we can count ten, we can save for a rainy day, we can hold our horses, not uniformly, not always reliably, but enough that it's something that we could celebrate and try to encourage.