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.
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems.
No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then ... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some.
Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen. suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see.
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