There are three men I’ve heard speak together a few times: Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and Jordan Peterson. And they often strike me as iconic, representing different schools of thought approaching a similar subject.

Pinker always strikes me as a very brilliant but very limited person with a more abstracted and scholastic view of the world. Jonathan has a wider, more comprehensive and personal scope to his vision, taking in more of the blood and bones and humanity and heart. And Jordan is off the charts in the underworld and mysticism, into either insanity or genius. And all three are trying to understand this marvelous machine we call human civilization.

Pinker sees what the machine can do, but fails to comprehend how it is embedded in an entire ecosystem upon which it is dependent for its development, operation, and maintenance. He just sees the marvelous machine of civilization.

Jonathan sees the people and the community behind and around the machine. And he wants to understand and help them. And Jordan sees the whole sweep of culture and intertwining ideas and ideologies that run beneath the lives of those people. The unseen foundations on which all stand and operate.

Pinker believes that the machine could do its work better if we got rid of all that other stuff messing it up and running it off the tracks. He takes for granted that it would, because he doesn’t see the people or the tides of mythology as significant. They’re interference on or distractions from the one big, great, thing.

And so Pinker unwittingly contributes to orand praises the very process that is contributing to the inability of the machine to function, because the hidden figures upon whom it depends for development, operation, and maintenance are sickened and degraded, and the ennervating and guiding mythology forgotten.

We live in a world of mechanisms and technology and glorious things our civilization has built and consists in and relies on. And I don’t just mean phones. Government, law, social conventions, buildings, signs, 401Ks, even dogs, are all technology. The whole invisible world you live in and by which you live is made of technologies we developed, tested, selected, and codified into machines to help us live. We embedded them into our society, just as we codify and embed subroutines into our mind to help us live, so I don’t have to figure out driving or catching a ball or how to read facial expressions or every time I encounter them. We mechanize the process, we find ways to build these machines into ourselves and into our world, making the whole thing bigger and more complex and more capable.

These technologies, both innate and external, are functional things we’ve assembled to help us get about our business and amplify and broaden the scope of our essential actionable power. And they will keep spinning and keep having an effect for quite a while, maybe even forever. And we inherited a lot of them and have built on them. It’s easy to assume that they’re natural, or exist by default. And that they will run by default and be energized by default and be loved and embraced by default.

Pinker is so in love with civilization and reason, with the eye at the top of the pyramid, that he floats above it, forgetting the greater mass of the structure on which it stands and depends. The vast structure that grounds all human effort. Which is typical for an intellectual. Jonathan works in a field focused on the intersection between people and their beliefs, and so he has a greater awareness of the actual activity that upholds and devours civilization. And Jordan has dug down and excavated the foundations. I see one as pointing upward, like Plato, and another at the earth, like Aristotle.