There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the tension between recognizing past injustices towards native peoples and celebrating aspects of Western culture.
In this quote, Steven Pinker highlights a conflict present in modern discourse: the guilt surrounding historical injustices faced by native peoples and a reluctance to acknowledge any positive contributions of Western culture. This duality suggests that while it's important to recognize and lament past wrongs, it is also possible to appreciate the achievements of a culture without dismissing its failings. Pinker calls for a balanced perspective that allows for both critique and appreciation.
In practice
In a lecture on cultural ethics, this quote can be used to discuss the complexity of historical narratives.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes.
A man who is truthful and does not mean ill even to his adversary will be slow to believe charges even against his foes. He will, however, try to understand the viewpoints of his opponents and will always keep an open mind and seek every opportunity of serving his opponents.
When people are not in the moment, they're not there to know that they're not there.
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.
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