Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, today we have a very special guest in studio with us. We have here Jennifer Michael Hecht. She is a philosopher and poet who has a PhD in the history of science from Columbia University. And she's also the author of some excellent books, including most recently Doubt the History, The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation From Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, and also the happiness myth, the historical antidote to what isn't working today.

Jennifer, welcome. Hi. Thank you.

Yeah, it was a pleasure reading both both of those books. As you know, we talked about that in the past. So let's get right down to it. I guess we're going to be talking about both books and as well as some of your current projects. And let me start with David, because we've got some comments on our on the on the particle's website about that particular book. And that is, as you know, because you wrote it down, also includes a history of religious skeptics in the sense of people who actually are religious and are skeptic.

And a lot of skeptics think that that is not quite exactly an oxymoron, perhaps, but but something strange that somebody cannot possibly be a religious person and also a skeptic. Obviously, you have a different take on it. Oh, sure.

My interest in the history of doubt was partially just that I was and am an atheist. And I was very much aware that that some of the most brilliant ideas, most exciting intellectual ideas that I had come across were proffered by people who were also religious.

And so in part, I wrote down to figure out why they believed.

And what I found was that many of them did not exactly believe what we think of as believing in God. Today is a very specific idea. And historically, a lot of people who were willing to continue to use the word did not really believe in anything like what you would think of as that description of the universe.

So when I find them doubting all sorts of that is when I find them doubting every single aspect of supernaturalism, I say to myself, OK, these people are doing thinking that's very similar to mine.

But for political and social reasons, they're willing to use different words and terms. And that has been a real learning experience for me.

Can you give us an example? Well, sure.

My manatee's is a is a very interesting figure here because and equally St. Augustine. OK, here's a quick answer. And a Christian figures, both of them who have come up with ideas that I found extraordinarily persuasive in their descriptions of the universe, both of whom decided to use the word God in their understanding of what was going on with the world.

But in both cases, you know, I defy anyone to really find belief in the supernatural among either of these two great thinkers ideas. So my manatee's introduces the notion of negative theology. He takes it straight out of the philosophers.

That philosophy had gone around the Mediterranean Sea in the course of the Middle Ages. And and my manatee's inherits the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers from the the Muslim world, the Muslim golden age. And so he's reading that version of negative theology, which is to say, you can't know anything about God.

You can't know even that he exists. Indeed, in any conception that you have that he exists. You are wrong. He does not exist. You can only say negative things about God. Now, when you read this and your read and you read it in context and you read the body of this man thought, it seems very clear because over and over tells you don't pray.

He over and over tells you the only thing you should hope for is the strength to manage things on your own and the wisdom to listen to to other people who may have something for you that that that's useful.

Within that context, I see someone who, for cultural and political reasons, doesn't feel the need to reject all of religion and yet rejects all of the supernatural aspects to the point of saying whenever the natural world or what you could call science disagrees with the Torah, you should go with the science and forget the Torah.

If there are sages in the Talmud who say that there is that there is predestination. And that we can we can know the future and predict the future. They just made a mistake, even if they were brilliant, he says. You know what? Sometimes brilliant people make mistakes. We're not to at any point side with the book over reality.

Something like that that came out of the Dalai Lama recently where he essentially said, you know, if you find anything between in your understanding of Buddhism that is contrary to what science is, then you have to revise your understanding about the Buddha. Certainly said as much.

Yeah. The Buddha said over and over, look, this is spiritual exercises. And he meant it in a similar way that just as far as we understand that the body will get more toned and muscular if you do any sort of exercise. Doesn't matter which one you do. He was constantly saying you could you can come to these kinds of understandings. You just have to do the stuff. There's nothing to believe. There's nothing magic. If you do the stuff, these are the responses that you'll have.

And he invites people to do them. So it's not surprising to see it there.

But with Saint Augustine, you know, the memory of him that we have is as of a guy who was bamboozled by spirituality.

But if you read the confessions, that's not the guy you meet.

You meet somebody who was who was very close to becoming epicurean, which was a complete rejection of gods, who is very close to being a platonic wisdom seeker, but who said, look, with those systems you reach, you grow, they help you to grow, to learn, to understand the complexity of reality.

But you but they're lonely. And with Christianity, it seemed like what Christianity gave him was a buddy, a sort of spiritual friend to go through these things with.

So my manatee's actually gets rid of the spiritual friend.

Augustine keeps the spirit and makes up the spiritual friend.

But he gets rid of every other aspect of legend. He says straight out, I chose this out of an emotional need to go through Plato's steps, but not quite as alone as described by Plato. So I keep looking and finding profound skepticism within religion.

Jennifer, this discussion about different conflicting sources of truth reminds me of a position I've heard you take before. For example, in an interview you did on point of inquiry a couple of years back with Jay, in which you you said that you thought that the most reliable source of truth, in your opinion, was poetry. Would you define to include a wide ranging things like art and meditation? And and this is this is a position I believe I've encountered before and I've written about it on rationally speaking.

And I so I have to say that initially I really it was hard for me to see merit in that position. But then after listening to you talk to Jay, I got the sense that maybe we were just meaning different things by truth. And so when when you were describing when you explain yourself to did you said, well, you know, fiction and art and poetry can can express these profound truths about our experience of the world, and it can help us communicate with each other, all of which I would agree with.

But that, to me, seems like a very limited subset of the kinds of truths that that all of our endeavors, including science, are trying to get at.

And I characterized your position. No, everything was right.

And just the my my grin came at the moment where where you talked about it as a limited subset, because I would see it the other way around. Interesting.

Science is a methodology and the methodology works by definition. You work it and it works. You check things and you only make statements about things you can check and then you check them. And when what you what you're looking at doesn't pan out, you set up another experiment and check further.

It's a it's a system by falsifiability and that is a great way to work through patterns and figure out what the physical universe is doing. And the physical universe granted is a big and interesting and quite important thing. My my point with what I call poetic theism, I've seen it expressed in many different ways throughout history. I call it poetic theism because it sort of works for me and it makes it very clear to me at least what I'm talking about. And it's a large part of the way I think about the world and what I talk about.

And what I want to say is that most of us, all of us perhaps live our lives in the realm of experience. And the world of experience is very human. It's about feelings, it's about influences, and it's about an extraordinary number of different kinds of feelings and influences all going on at once.

There are also physical things that we have to cope with. But the truth is the vast majority of what goes on for.

For us, is this emotional life or rather forget the emotional life, the experience experience itself is we try to base it on fact, but since we're all coming up with such different readings of same situations, I think it's reasonable to say there's such a thing as experience. And that experience is extraordinarily concerned with a kind of, well, I'll say a poetry or an art between psychotherapy, which I realize is a very it's out of favor right now.

But I think it is a profoundly important part of any aspect of science or are we are we are first going to make sure that we have some idea of what the biases and prejudices and motivations of the individual speaker and the individual researcher. I have seen too many times throughout too many centuries as a historian of science, which is my Ph.D. in the history of science, and that has marked very much who I am.

I have seen too many generations of sciences come and go and their whole world view everything, not just the measurements, but the way you would what you would think of as measuring what you would think of as the objective source of whatever problem it is. I have seen them come and go as a historian of science. One is thrown against the notion that we are people first, that everything is culture.

When I look around at what we are doing in the world, I see. Well, I actually want to pull back and just say in the atheist and skeptical communities, I see a reliance on science that is problematic. It begins to smell of a kind of superstition. And when you do any kind of deep research into the history of science, you begin to recognize that, well, the closer to the human being you get, the more changeable the sciences.

Are you talking about people having more confidence and scientific findings than you think they should or about them applying science when they should be applying something else?

Not really the latter, no, not that they're applying science when they should be applying something else. But for one thing, just the idea of how our movement and and I do see myself certainly as part of a movement of skepticism, atheism, religious and philosophical doubt of questioning and coming to more secular and universally humanistic ideals. Within all of that, I think we rely too heavily on the idea that science is what we have and what they have is religion.

I've I've studied the history of the arts and I've seen as much theism in the history of the arts as in the sciences. Newton certainly seem to be trying to map the mind of God, whereas Shakespeare made the disaster happen after every time someone prayed.

We are we are problematically blinded at the moment.

I knew there was a reason I liked Shakespeare. So we're talking about to some extent what some philosophers refer to as scientism. There is nothing wrong with science as long as it is applied within the proper domain and to questions that are the following of. Sure.

And the only problem comes in, because certainly if you if you're going to say religion is on this side, scientists on the other side of the room, where are you going to go? I'm going to go stand over with the science. Right. There's no question. But once I get over there, I'm listening and I'm saying, well, what can I sign my name to?

And I get a little bit cautious. And the more I have been invited to when I after I wrote out, I was invited to a lot of universities and schools to give talks.

But as time went on, I don't know exactly why I began to be more invited to those places, too, but also to all sorts of doubting religious places, places where there was a priest or a rabbi in front of the room. But that priest or rabbi either didn't believe or was super comfortable with, without.

And in those settings, I talked to a lot of people and I became much less anti religious. That is, I began to believe that religion had a few things right. Community meditation and and ritual. Remembering death turns out to be something that's really healthy for people getting together with other people.

And and and just talking about the human condition, just referring to it is so salutary, especially when it's done on a regular basis. And so my my cautioning about the overuse of science has a lot of different meanings, but none of it is against the doing of science. Right.

So but those are both of those teams, sort of a what I would qualify as a reasoned reasoned. Criticism of science and an emphasis, on the other hand, on what you described as the experience of life as opposed to doing science, I believe those both come out, it seems to me, in the last two parts of their happiness myths, which are the first one is about bodies and the other one is about celebration. The it's about celebration is about what you were just saying about the idea that the rituals are important, the community is important, and all of those things science know has been pretty much nothing to say other than to confirm that.

Yes, on the basis of social scientific research, for instance, reconvicted research. Yes, those are important. But other than that, there's not much else you can do on the part of our bodies, if I remember correctly, has been some time since I read that particular of those three chapters, four chapters. But you come across in that section as particularly skeptical of some science about, you know, eating habits and exercise and so on and so forth.

You want to talk about that? Sure.

Look, studying the course of human history across several centuries makes you come back to this moment in time and find it quite odd. First and foremost is not our particular recommendations for longevity, but the obsession with longevity itself. It is simply true that a great many of us, not all of us, but a great many of us spend a lot of time worrying about what we do in order to live longer without first having asked ourselves what the living longer is for.

It seems to me that when I talk to people who are extraordinarily worried about living longer and who spend every day either eating and exercising for that or very popular, this just plain worrying about the fact that they're not doing those things.

What I find is that they haven't even considered the notion that it's not their job to live to outlive their their high school colleagues, that it's not a competition, it's not a competition.

How long you live is not a competition. This is not a play. You're not going to miss the final act, the the amount of time you spend alive with eternity on either side is relatively not important. And that's something that humanists and secularists have been saying from the earliest recorded history on. Certainly I see it in the ancient Kabaka. You see it in Lucretius, the great, great poet of Epicure theory, just going on and on detailing the important people at the Roman court.

And they're all dead now, he says. And it doesn't matter how long they lived.

No period I have ever looked at in the history of human recor record. Have we ever seen longevity being worried over the way it is right now.

And that, to me, since nobody's ever lived, as long as we do that to me begins to look like a cultural hiccup, something very strange that's making everybody really nervous and really anxious.

That doesn't hold up when you look at the rest of human history. So, yeah, even before I get to what are the suggestions and yes, I do very much doubt that the particular suggestions of diet and exercise that are being offered now, I think that they are profoundly faulty. Yes, I do.

However, there's some there's clearly some experimentally provable stuff. A profoundly restricted calorie diet does seem to extend life. But there's so many other things that are based on the tiniest bit of the worst research you could possibly imagine that have taken over the culture.

I mean, there aren't good studies that show the relationship between jogging and cancer or eating broccoli and cancer. There are a few relationships we have found and we all try to work with them. But even so, a lot of us get taken out by different means.

I feel I feel very strongly that women in particular, but many men as well, suffer from a tremendous amount of self-critical criticism about something which, when examined closely, is of no importance whatsoever. There was a lot of talk in your happiness book about the ways in which science can mislead us about about how to be happy. But this to me to bring this back to our discussion of the conflicting sources of true science and poetry and religion and all this seems to me one of the ways in which science can be really useful and when it contradicts are our sort of common sense intuition about what makes us happy, like the science that that finds that we actually have these happiness set points, that we think that certain events are incredibly important in determining whether we have a good life or a bad life.

And yet when researchers like I believe Daniel Gilbert is very first. This idea follow people over time, over the course of life changing events, both good and bad. Doesn't he find that that people do most of the time tend to return to sort of a baseline level of happiness? That seems like a counterintuitive finding that that science has been useful in showing us. No, look, I I'm not sure that this is you know, I I'm not sure I want to be the person who is showing the criticism of this.

I've done so much research that's shown how much how strong the history of atheism is.

And I see that as the message that I most want to carry. Nevertheless, if you ask me a cogent question and what can I tell you?

No, I do not believe Daniel Gilbert was right. I believe that he checked too few people, that he looked at a couple of twin studies that that the vast majority of experience over the history of humankind proves that if you're a slave, it is really hard to go to work that day. And if you have if you have people complimenting you and looking after you and taking care of you and listening to your orders, you have a better day.

Now, are we really suggesting that because we would like to believe that bad things might not hurt us so much, we are willing to overthrow the experience of so much history? I think what it shows, the reason that we got excited about that information is because it's counterintuitive. But that's a problem with science reporting. Science reporting is only interesting when it's either counterintuitive or surprising in the way that it strokes are our beliefs.

And the only reason you're going to get a headline is when it's at least a little shocking.

So so to say that it becomes interesting when it is counterintuitive, when the only stuff that gets reported is counterintuitive, sends me back to the wisdom writers of the ages. I believe I have much more reason to to get excited about the findings there.

In in some sense, the discussion you just had is a particular example of a discussion that I was involved for many, many years when I was a scientist, a biologist, which is the interaction between nature and nurture. And it may be one can interpret, for instance, this issue of saying, well, look, there's no necessary contradiction in saying that the environmental experience in the social experience in this particular case actually said, you know, being a slave or or being subjected to continuous reinforcement and positive reinforcement.

Of course, those that they ought to make a difference, that doesn't necessarily contradict the idea. And I'm not talking specifically about the data because the data may or may not be debatable. I have not actually looked into this. But it's not doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that. Yes, but for any particular person, there is only a certain range of reactions.

I mean, there are at least anecdotal situations where people that, you know, whose situations are changed dramatically, suddenly, eventually, they don't experience a very, very short period of it's been an observation all along, along with the observation that good follows good is the observation that it only goes so far.

That's right. Exactly. So so what I'm saying is, you know, if we're talking about nature and nurture in humans, unfortunately it's complicated because it's hard. In fact, it's essentially calling science happiness, happiness, studies, science. You're already in really deep. This sport doesn't mean anything. That's a problem.

That's a major point in your book, right?

That the meaning of the very meaning of the word and the conception that people have had happiness has changed dramatically, not only because when you when you I'll say pretend that by standardizing your questions, you've reached an objectivity.

When each individual human being not only has a different definition of happiness, but also has a different idea about what a good person says when asked certain questions. I know that that has a vast range. I also know that the happiness researchers have thought of some extremely clever ways to get around some of these issues.

It's just that it's so far from enough as to be debatable, debatable, since we're talking about happiness and in fact the opposite, I suppose, extreme unhappiness. I like to touch briefly on your current project, which is a new book. The title is Stay. And it's about suicide, right?

Yeah, I'm writing a book that's it's kind of a guide to wisdom through anti suicide.

What I what I found in talking about this issue with various groups and and thinking about it in relation to some tough losses in my own life. I've lost some friends.

They came to believe that we influence each other, human beings influenced each other profoundly, and I believe that that one of the best well, I found that it is it is demonstrable through using sociological methods, scientific methods. We can I can show that suicide very often causes suicide. That is, for instance, a Swedish study recent recently in the last few years showed that children of suicide were twice as likely as children of parents who are both still alive, twice as likely to commit suicide.

I think that's an extreme example of it, because losing a parent in any way is very, very difficult. But nonetheless, it begins to show we have several other means by which we can show suicidal influence. And what I'm arguing is simply that there is a secular argument against suicide. We're so used to listening to to Judeo-Christian arguments that say you're not allowed because your life isn't yours, that the secular position tends to be, oh, yes, you are allowed.

What I'm suggesting is that suicide is similar to homicide. It's not allowed because of the damage it does to others. And the further thought, because I know that sounds harsh and burdensome, is that the moment you recognize that you owe it to other people to stay alive and that they owe it to you to stay alive, that you're desperately grateful to everyone you've met who's chosen life instead of killing themselves? There is a connection between people that becomes visible that wasn't there before, it wasn't there before much because of modernism.

It used to be that because of temperature, climate control and food alone and protection from wild animals, we lived in a heap and it was very hard to forget how connected we were to each other. Very hard indeed. But now it's very, very easy to forget how connected we are.

And I think that this this anti suicide issue both directly meets something that I need to talk about, because, as I said, I. I know well, my background is in the history of science, but I've been a poet for as long as I've been a scholar.

And poetry poetry tends to attract people who are deeply thinking about the meaning of life and sometimes fall off the other end of it.

And I think I think it's possible it's possibly possible to make a difference. And, gee, if you can talk about I mean, this is one of the major American killers, major American killers. It's the eighth killer of all Americans and the third of younger Americans.

So if you could save a life through rhetoric, through just suggesting a counterpoint to the rhetoric that's abroad at the moment, it seems worth trying.

So that's yours. Your answer, I guess, to other secular thinkers. I'm I'm particular thinking of Kanye West. Of course, she pointed out that that if there is any serious problem in philosophy, it is, in fact the problem of suicide. In this case, the question was why not? Considering that, of course, from secular perspective, science, sorry, life does not have a meaning that is imposed by a deed or anything like that.

So but that's your answer, that the answer is, in fact lies in the interconnectedness of existence?

That's correct. I, I believe that that you can sort of do a calculus and say that if you're a famous person, you have more responsibility to stay alive. If you have if you're a parent, you certainly have more responsibility.

The more people you've taught, the more the more you've written, the more you've given other people the experience of you, the more you put them at risk. If you if you yourself give up.

So don't give up. Well, Jennifer, I'm really looking forward to reading that because I've always been a passionate believer in one's right to commit suicide if one's so chooses. The sounds like it might be the first thing that actually has the potential to budge me on that issue.

So back once it comes out now, we're going to have to wrap up this section of rationally speaking and move on to the rationally speaking PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy, but as usual, when we have a guest, we actually ask the guests to have the pick or picks of this episode. And so this time is Jennifer Michael Hecht. Hi.

Yeah, I would like to talk about high low brow dotcom. It's a website.

It's h i l o p r o w dot com and high low dot dotcom is a site where they talk about lots of different cultural heroes with a specific attempt to not sort of watered down either the the the ambitions of the high brow nor the character of the low brow by finding a kind of middle brow, which is so much of how people manage these criteria.

And somehow on this website, what we get is a kind of beautiful purity of looking at the at these cultural heroes as they presented themselves in terms of of these these different aspects of culture. And it's just beautiful and funny. And it's got great writers. And you learn a lot about all sorts of different things.

The other side I thought I'd mention is the best American poetry blog. Best American Poetry is a book series that comes out of Scribner. But the the blog is just has a whole bunch of different poets and writers who talk about all sorts of different things. There's that whole running conversations about about different art and about gardening and about teaching and about reading. But it's just a beautiful site where where there's a lot of good photographs and reports about news. And it's just it's a great art site.

I'm just looking at the high, low brow website right now, and I love that their slogan is middlebrow is not the answer. There you go. The hard line position I can support. That's right. Exactly. Thank you so much for being our guest on rationally speaking. So it was such a pleasure to talk to you and thanks.

I had to come forward to reading your new book and more to come that concludes this episode of Rationally Speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.