 All right, our keynote speaker, it's time. It's time. Are we set? Yeah. Susan Jacoby is our keynote speaker. Her talk is How to Define Facts When We're Not Entitled to Our Own. She's a New York Times bestseller of the book The Age of American Unreasoned. Freethinker is a history of American secularism. She's also won the Richard Dawkins Award from the Atheist Alliance International. And our haiku is, this is the keynote. This is today's final talk. More tomorrow. Cool. Please welcome Susan Jacoby. Okay, everybody here. Okay. First, I want to say how honored I am to be speaking to your group. No, first I want to say, because I wasn't introduced, I was going to ask the introducer to say, please do not take flash pictures of me while I'm speaking, which someone's already doing. I have a thing in which I can see nothing but spots, including the notes I've made for my speech. So please don't do that. Thank you. I want to say how honored I am to be speaking to your group, which includes, among others, so many illusionists, who are, shall we say, more aware than most people of the difference between facts and appearances. I also felt great at the Las Vegas Airport, and I realized what an honor it is to be asked to speak before this group, because I was on the tram for my gate with a bunch of high school boys who apparently were having their own convention. And when I told them I was speaking here, they said, oh, the amazing Randy. Oh, we wish we could come. That is so cool. We've heard all about this organization, and I thought they obviously have heard about the organization, which is a great thing, because mostly 17- and 18-year-old boys haven't heard of much, so I think that's something to be really, really proud of. But I truly think, and this is the main point I want to stress tonight, that we need to take a closer look at what has now become a commonplace of public and political discourse, which is the statement, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. Now, this sounds good, and I've said it myself, though I wouldn't put it in writing for reasons I'm about to elucidate. The problem, I would say the greatest problem in our public discourse on a wide variety of subjects today, is that too many Americans lack the ability to distinguish between opinions and fact. So often, those of us who are science-oriented operate on the charming, consoling, but entirely false premise, that if only we could get people to listen to evidence, they'd change their minds and see that they're wrong, and we're right. This is the reason, by the way, that I never accept invitations to participate in debates about the existence of God, the validity of religion in general, or the faults and virtues of one religion in particular, because invariably in the course of these debates, someone will come up with a passage from either the Jewish or the Christian Bible as factual evidence that something, say the chosenness of the Jewish people to rule over a particular oil-free plot of ground in the Middle East, or the appearance of a prophet named Jesus as the Messiah designated to redeem all mankind. They will say that this is not an opinion or a belief, but a fact. And at that point, it becomes impossible to debate the question precisely because one's opponent regards the historical reliability of the Bible, not as an opinion, but as a fact. This is why, and it's what's so terribly and intractively frustrating to people who think that science can decide social issues, is that this so seldom works when we try to bring arguments over what are really social or in our country religious opinions into the realm of fact. And this is true whether we're talking about fossil fuel emissions and global warming or the age at which a fetus is likely to survive intact and undamaged outside its mother's womb. Science is a poor way to convince those who believe that science is just another religion. Now, we have an excellent, very recent example of this phenomenon contained in a June 12th statement by Arizona Republican Representative Trent Franks that quote, the incidence of pregnancy resulting from rape is very low. No, he said the incidence are very low. So his grasp of English grammar is very poor and that's a fact. Probably the best study done on this subject published in 1996 by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has found that the pregnancy rate for women raped is around 5%. Since there are nearly 700,000 rapes reported to the police each year which as is well-known is only a percentage of the rapes that escalate 35,000 pregnancies as the lowest possible number of pregnancies resulting from rapes. So there are two questions here. The first is strictly factual. Is 5% rare? Not statistically speaking and not as any of us ordinarily think of these things in real life. That is those of us who understand percentages. If I were to tell you all that the minute we leave this room one out of 20 of us is going to be shot through the head the minute we get in the hall well I suspect everyone would sit right here in their seats until someone came around to tell us that this rare consequence of leaving the room has been rescinded. Sort of like God telling Abraham he didn't really have to sacrifice Isaac after all. The second equally important question is that even if we were to concede which I don't for a moment that a 5% rate of anything qualifies as rare does that mean in a moral and ethical sense that we ignore the 35,000 women who happen to lose this particular lottery? If we believe that it is a fact and not of opinion that pregnancy resulting from rape is rare then it's much much easier to ignore the ethical question of what we do for women who are raped if they become pregnant. So, thank you. The mistaken fact, the problem is there's nowhere to put this. Okay, that's the last one. Now let me give you another example from my personal experience of the ways in which it's difficult to combat belief with facts. My last book, Never Say Die on the Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age which was published in 2010 is one of the few books I've written in the past 10 years to get some really really bad reviews. That's not what I'm here to talk about. But I think the reason for this was that the book conveyed a great many facts about old old age. That is life for many people in their late 80s and 90s that run counter to the ideas so beloved by baby boomers that 90 is the new 50. I know, I wish. But the worst fact, I wish 65 was the new 50. But the worst fact in the book one absolutely established by public health studies throughout the developed world is that if you live to be over 55 you have a 50-50 chance of developing dementia of which the most common form is Alzheimer's disease. There is nothing closer to being a fact than this based on studies of what is on autopsies and the kind of custodial care that people with dementia receive in a variety of developed countries. But hardly anyone including interestingly physicians wanted to deal with this fact. Dr. Sherwin Newlin, a very distinguished retired surgeon and an excellent writer most of the time dismissed what I had to say in the New Republic by writing basically if we behave right will be alright. Now it's understandable that Dr. Newlin who is in his 80s wants to believe this. It's equally understandable that I in my 60s would also like to believe it since if I behave very well eat my vegetables and exercise every day I would like to think that I am not vulnerable to this terrible disease either. But it simply flies in the face of what a doctor of all people ought to know is a medical fact. Now I could say to Dr. Newlin you're entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts. But he believes, he is a scientist his entire life that if you behave right you'll be alright because so far it's worked out for him. And thus by a process of wish fulfillment a belief becomes transformed into a premise for living that's very close to a fact. Whereas the actual medical research shows at this point that everyone in this room who is say over 50 is already destined to get Alzheimer's or not. And all of the healthy eating and exercise and mental stimulation which are valuable for their own sakes not because they guarantee eternal health won't keep us from that destiny. Now we could find out who most of us in this age group are the unlucky ones to do a brain scan of a special kind or a spinal fluid test because the process of Alzheimer's begins long before there are any symptoms. But what would be the point of this given that there is no effective treatment for Alzheimer's today? Through biogenetic research I believe there will emerge at some point in the future more likely a means of preventing than treatment to slow the progress of the disease. That will be for our grandchildren according to every specialist in this I've talked to. Not for us. That's almost as close to a fact as you could get. Now this kind of confusion between opinion and fact would be really of no importance just another part of the human condition if it didn't affect public decisions about how we deal with serious social problems created by facts. For instance if you do believe in the fantasy that 90 is the new 50 if you disregard the actual facts of dementia in the over 85 population any discussion of health care reform can ignore as in fact it has and does what is going to be an exploding need for custodial or a different kind of home care when the older baby boomers start turning 65 in less than 20 years. None of this talk about how to reduce the cost of Medicare from either liberals or conservatives addresses this train that's coming straight at us not in centuries not in many decades but in less than 20 years because the facts are so unpleasant we don't want to face them. In this instance our wishful thinking that if we behave well will remain well serves the same function with regard to public policy about aging that belief in the rarity of abortion after rape serves for those eliminate all abortion rights it prevents us from moving to the ethical and social debate that is really at the heart of how we form our distinctions such as they are between opinions and facts the question I want to put before you today and is what can be done in a society in which both specific educational deficiencies and a specifically American attachment to the supernatural combined with the general human predilection for not wanting to hear bad news that make us downgrade or altogether ignore facts that threaten both our nation and I believe our species and I want to say to this group as I say to secular humanist groups that the one thing that's definitely not helpful is for the secular movement to divide itself say into skeptics and humanists and I can't tell you how happy I was to see the tables of all kinds of groups out there at this convention because I think this distinction between skeptics and humanists which in my opinion and I wouldn't say this opinion is a fact is an essentially stupid distinction without a difference anyone with a working mind is skeptical about a lot of things but not about everything I am not skeptical about the fact that the earth moves around the sun similarly in my opinion anyone who looks straight forwardly at facts as straight forwardly as we imperfect beings a little less than the angels are capable of being is also bound to be a humanist not in the sense of believing that human beings are inherently good that would be a ridiculous rejection of facts but in the sense that we know that we are all we've got to solve whatever problems we have that's what being a humanist means to me and that does not contradict being a skeptic it goes with being a skeptic fact digital marvels including robots are our creation and if we should create machines that overrule our will which is the premise of so many current science fiction movies that's our fault it's not the fault of the machines man and woman may not be the measure of all things but we are the only creatures who are capable of measuring things that is a fact if we cannot succeed in connecting scientific facts with what people see as their ordinary human problems it does us no good to be in the right we have to rid ourselves of the wishful thinking that says if only people knew the facts they'd somehow approach social problems from a more reasonable standpoint to paraphrase Bill Clinton what does no mean it's actually possible for people to know deep down what they don't accept either intellectually or philosophically because very strict and rigid thought systems are preventing them from accepting what they actually know now as a nation and I will be no surprise in this audience I believe we're in serious intellectual trouble a toxic mixture of anti-intellectualism anti-rationalism and sheer ignorance is laying waste to our culture as a whole not just to our political culture in 1837 in a speech known as the American scholar oration which became very famous around the young nation almost as soon as it was delivered at Harvard Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that the mind of this country taught to aim at low objects eats upon itself isn't that a great quote the mind of this country taught to aim at low objects eats upon itself now Emerson was issuing a challenge to a young nation still engaged in building up its intellectual capital but his words resonate much more strongly today in a society that has been engaged in dissipating its intellectual capital except in the digital arena for decades all of our current problems can be traced to the intellectual failings of a society that for too long has aimed its mind at low objects now I think there are three main characteristics distinguishing the current wave of American anti-intellectualism from the endemic forms described so well more than half a century ago by the historian Richard Hofstetter in anti-intellectualism in American life number one is the triumph of the video culture over the culture of print, fostered by the mass infotainment media and our growing dependence on certain passive forms of entertainment the second anti-intellectual force is the quixotic persistence and renewal of religious fundamentalism which Hofstetter predicted when everyone said it was dead fundamentalism of course has been part of the American experience from the beginning it wasn't called that by that name until the 20th century but what's different today is the dissonance between fundamentalism and the state of modern knowledge it didn't really matter that many people in the 19th century believed that infectious diseases were a curse from God because there was really no knowledge in the early 19th century of the role of bacteria and no means for combating bacteria born diseases but it matters very much now the U.S. is the only country in the developed world in which a very large minority population, a large about 30% still believes in the proof of sacred books in the literal truth of sacred books and we'll use the Bible as historical proof when they're having a debate with you the third element shaping the American intellectual scene today is our flawed educational system in which I believe an unprecedented percentage of the population is exposed to at least some form of higher education but the general public in a way that our grandparents or great-grandparents did of what they needed to know when they graduated from eighth grade at the turn of the last century all of these forces have fused anti-intellectualism with anti-rationalism in what I call junk thought our society is drowning in junk thought whose chief characteristics is imperviousness to evidence even though it's often couched in scientific language in fact one of the infallible signs of junk thought is either a word like Scientology that appends science to some ology or the adjective scientific when I lived in the Soviet Union communism was always called communism you can almost tell if the word scientific is appended to something in that way that it's not scientific so what are the sources of these things of this junk thought let's begin with the media the original observation but for the first time in the history of man it's possible to be connected to our video and sound equipment every minute of every hour of every day now I know aggrieved eulogies for print culture and railing against the domination of American culture by video driven infotainment media have become so common except no one except those of us who still try to make a living from the printed word attention to critiques that could easily be titled the decline and fall of everything those who take a dark view of the intellectual and political consequences of the eclipse of print are obliged to establish their bona fides by showing that they love computers as much as everyone else does and agreeing with the dubious proposition that computers are making a smart no really they're not that's like saying that forks made us better eaters in the Renaissance no they didn't they made us neater eaters they made us able also to eat faster and to eat it without spilling stuff down whatever awful clothes everyone but nobles was wearing in the Renaissance but they didn't make us better eaters they made us faster and neater eaters and it's the same in the digital world but it's now become more insulting to call someone a Luddite than to call a cheat a drug addict or a slut now the easiest way to address the cultural and I say that as someone who knows the easiest way to address the cultural ills propagated by the media without sounding like a crotchety Luddite is to focus mainly on infotainment content and that is the tactic adopted by most consumer groups dedicated to changing the media by changing the message the assumption that content determines context rather than vice versa is shared by the many crusaders against relentless advertising on children's TV violence in all television programming and video games the brutus misogynist lyrics and images of many pop music productions and websites and other pieces of broadcast and webcast junk too numerous to mention basic idea is that by eliminating certain kinds of poison the media can be made safe for children and all living things now it's of course important to mount such efforts if only for the sake of being able to walk around with a clear conscience about the world we're leaving for the next generation but consider relatively recent findings indicating that the number of hours a television set is on in the average American home each day did not change measurably between the early 1980s and the turn of the millennium what's happened interestingly and no one predicted it and it happened before all of the talk about how television is getting so great now what's happened is the digital world has not replaced the earlier forms of addictive video but has been added on top of it and although the digital media seems on the surface and can be more interactive than television I would suggest and I'll be glad to make a further case for this in the Q&A period because I'm sure people will have things to say that the fact that we're clicking a mouse during a video game is not really any more interactive than changing a TV channel because the parameters of the game sometimes whether we realize it or not are set by the commercial entity that signed, designed and sold us the game now predictably the video culture has spawned an electronic industry of scholars and writers taking up the cudgels in defense of the multi-billion dollar conglomerates and poo-pooing old fashioned intellectuals a.k.a. curmudgeons for their reservations about sucking at the video tit from cradle to the grave and I do mean that almost literally in everything bad is good for you how today's popular culture is actually making us smarter the author Stephen Johnson acknowledges that he spends a fair amount of his own time immersed in video games but he declares that studies illustrate the decline of reading and writing are deeply flawed because they quote ignore the explosion of reading and writing that has happened thanks to the rise of the internet while conceding that email exchanges or web based dissections of reality TV shows are not the same as literary novels Johnson notes approvingly that both are quote equally text driven unquote such self-referential cod's I have been looking for a way to use that word in a talk for quite a long while by the way is only to be expected from a self-referential digital culture one might as well make the statement that kitty porn and tisha nudes are equally image driven because they are I challenge anyone who has ever written a regular column as I did when I wrote The Spirited Atheist for the Washington Posts on Faith website to look at the anonymous writing on the internet these are the kinds of people when I was writing this column who when the editors pose the question why are women more religious than men which is a damn good question responded with the brilliant answer on my blog because women are stupider than men without signing their names of course because who would want his employer his wife his wife or daughter to read that opinion opinion not fact and these people have the unmitigated chutzpah to contend that their free speech which risks nothing because they don't have to take any responsibility for what they say is on a par with signing your name to the Declaration of Independence when there was a very good chance that you would be executed if you turned out to be on the losing side this free speech with nothing at stake the second important anti-rational factor in American life resurgent fundamentalism is ideally suited to the spread of ignorance by ignorant media today's tech-savvy fundamentalists have not only become masters of their own media but are adept at using the mainstream media which is terrified of voicing any real criticism of religion for their own purposes the media helped drive all of this because there is a strong internalistic conviction that anything controversial and beginning to hate that word is worth covering and that both sides of an issue must always be given equal space even if one side really belongs in an abnormal psychology textbook if enough money is involved and enough people believe the 2 plus 2 equal 5 the media will report this story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting mathematicians however say that 2 plus 2 equals 4 ha ha ha we know about those intellectually snobbish mathematicians now too often this perverted notion of objectivity leads mainstream news outlets to undermine logic and reason by conferring respectability on utter nonsense a perfect example of this phenomenon was the coverage after Newtown of whether there was a need for new gun regulation I'm going to try and do something which is very hard for me speaking and drinking water at the same time without having a place to put the water alright all of the political debate about gun regulation was framed and reported by the mainstream media in the terms of the needs to keep guns out of the hands of the demanded and the criminal without disturbing the constitutional and God given right of law abiding Americans to own guns and all those proverbial little grannies who are living in houses on the prairie and supposedly defending themselves from marauders shouldn't be able to own guns but it seems to me that someone should have at least raised the question of whether our quasi-religious attitudes toward law abiding gun ownership actually might not have some relationship to the darker parts of the gun culture which include not mainly mass murders but the handiness of guns for individuals who might otherwise had there not been a gun in their house been able to resist the impulse to commit suicide or little kids who don't understand about guns and wind up shooting their siblings by accidents through all of this media non-debate I thought of my dad who was not an intellectual now I grew up in Michigan and nearly all of my dad's friends hunted and had guns for whatever reason was a premature anti-gun activist he would get us into a lot of trouble when our next door neighbor would be bragging about a deer he'd shot on his last hunting trip and mounting it in what we called our rec rooms then say Joe, my dad would ask did the deer put up a good fight did he have an equal chance needless to say my mother had a lot of trouble passing up the social trouble but I kept thinking throughout all this debate about the sacredness of the right to own guns where isn't anybody like my dad on morning Joe there must be some people like him Joe is like him in the other direction my point is here that they're all sorts of taboos not only religion all sorts of free information free spaces that free information never goes except on websites that already cater to people who agree with their views and in no cases is more true than of supernatural beliefs one of the most powerful taboos in American life as we all know is speaking ill of anyone else's faith an injunction rooted in confusion or the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions now both the constitution and the pragmatic realities of living in a pluralistic society and join us to respect our fellow citizens right to believe whatever they want as long as that belief in Thomas Jefferson's memorable phrase either picks my pocket or breaks my leg but many Americans have misinterpreted this lacy fair principle to mean that respect must be accorded the beliefs themselves this mindless tolerance which places observable scientific facts subject to proof on the same level as supernatural fantasy has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti intellectualism and anti rationalism millions of Americans are perfectly free under the constitution to believe that the lord of hosts is coming one day to murder millions of others of us who do not consider him the messiah but the rest of the public ought to exercise its freedom to identify such beliefs as dangerous fallacies that really do pick pockets and do break flags and the media should not be treating them as anything else and that brings us back and that brings us back to junk thought which is the product of all of the irrational and anti rational forces in American life today of course you've all heard about junk science which has become a fashionable pejorative in recent years and it's just really a substrate group of junk thought but it doesn't always mean what a reasonable person would expect it to mean to scientists themselves obviously the phrase are generally synonymous with pseudo science all the new systems of thought like astrology whether they attempt to explain the physical and the social universe that can neither be proved nor disproved although frequently cloaked in scientific language the lead in heart of pseudo science is its imperviousness to evidentiary challenge but junk science also is a politicized meaning diametrically opposed to what real scientists believe mean by the phrase it's been appropriated by right wing politicians and journalists to describe any scientific consensus that contradicts their political, economic or cultural agenda the internet offers a boundless array of right wing websites that pin the label junk science on everything from climatological research on global studies indicating the condoms reduced the spread of sexually transmitted diseases again a most recent very recent example of this was the surprising evidence in a double blind study evidence that really amazes the researchers themselves and again one of the differences between science and religion and science and junk science is researchers can get results they don't expect and be amazed by them and not oh that can't be true because I didn't believe it was true this evidence of a dramatic drop by more than half in sexually transmitted diseases among girls who have been vaccinated against the HPV virus which causes general warts and often leads to cervical cancer oh that was junk science said many right wing websites because the girls who are getting vaccinated were already promiscuous by which what they were actually active well yes that's what a vaccine that prevents a sexually transmitted disease is supposed to do is to prevent you from transmitting a disease by having sex but of course if your real objection is to the idea that young women are having sex then of course you're going to be disturbed by these facts about maybe they can have sex without getting cancer later in life as punishment but the real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon not only as a right wing phenomenon and this centrist phenomenon is fueled by that very cradle of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing we again in the last two weeks have had another stunning example of the mainstreaming of junk thought justice John Roberts opinion invalidating a key section of the voting rights act in which his main argument was is that things have improved so much in voting rights in the last 15 years that we don't 50 years that we don't need this law anymore well yes they've improved because there was a voting rights act that made them improve justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissent which believe me one of you who were young and will live to bear me out is going to live illegal history as one of the great minority opinions in the history of the supreme court correctly said that justice Roberts opinion was the equivalent of a person throwing away his umbrella in a rainstorm because he hadn't happened to be getting wet at the moment what a great woman but I get maybe she's religious because women are stupider than men and that's why they're religious the point is that junk thought isn't just something to laugh about it's dangerous antirationalism is dangerous and both are deadly to democracy but what given the tendency of all of us to repackage our opinions as facts and skeptics and secularists are not immune to this at all what can we do to get across to the public the distinction between evidence based logic and junk thought is not hearing nearly as much about as we need to is the responsibility of Americans themselves not the demon entity known as Washington for getting us into the pickle we're in through sheer laziness whenever I hear President Obama say the American people aren't stupid which I know he's obliged to say I cringe I think he really believes that and it's one of his biggest mistakes as a political leader the American people may not be stupid I'm not talking about stupidity in genetic sense I'm sure you understand but the American people are poorly educated in logical thinking most of them a huge number of them cannot distinguish between coincidence and causation which is the essence of the scientific method which means that their facts are all bollocksed up now what might alert the public to the deeper significance of our nation's intellectual shortcomings first real political leadership comparable to Franklin D Roosevelt's effort to educate Americans in the late 1930s about their stake in the future of Europe and the threat posed by Nazism which was not popular then either could take advantage what could take advantage we could take advantage with the right political education of public anger about the wasted blood and treasure in Afghanistan to make this a teachable moment instead of what it's being seen as now but a simple repudiation of a failed policy that people are largely tired of but it would take awesome courage for a politician to say to voters the problem isn't just that you were lied to although you were the real problem is that we as a people have become too lazy to know what we need to know to make sound public decisions the problem is the two-thirds of us can't find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map and many members of Congress many of them are members of Congress by the way and they don't know what she ate from a Sunni and the problem is you you voters out there you elected these ignoramuses you voted for them the problem is that most of us don't bother to read newspapers or watch the television news our own ignorance is our own worst enemy it is so much easier so much safer politically to simply say you were the victims of a lie than to suggest that both voters and their elected representatives must shoulder much of the blame for their own willingness to be deceived it's easy to imagine the chorus of sneers from ignorant talking heads on cable news if a presidential candidate or office holder dared to use the word ignorance in public but political leadership is a symptom not a cause of our cultural decline and if there is any way to resist the worst aspects of our culture today to battle against what I call a culture of distraction it can only be created one person at a time one citizen at a time one family at a time by parents and citizens determined to preserve a saving remnant of those who pried memory and pried memory and true learning above everything else and that is where in this room has a special responsibility I stress the role of parents mainly because it's only an early childhood that parents can to some extent control their children's access to poisonous infotainment like poisonous food adult self control not digital parental controls on computers which any computer literate ten year old can get around easily and if you think otherwise your children have been deceiving you very effectively is the chief requirement for the transmission of his individual and historical memory a parent who sits down in front of the TV after dinner every night while monitoring their children's computer use to make sure that their homework is done before they go online is sending not a mixed message but a thoroughly negative message about books screen time of whatever short is the reward for children who have completed all those boring Gutenberg era chores I know that I became a reader in childhood because my parents read they watch television too of course but books were what always seemed to me like passports to the adult world the endless warning about the dangers for too much screen time for the young evade the fact that today's children are simply following their parents footsteps or more to the point singing into the spreading and round indentations that their parents have left on the couch anyone who values self reliance will be changed for the better by limiting screen time for themselves as well as their children and there is no way for parents apart from the force of example to raise children whose minds are not absolutely enthralled to commercially generated images and I mentioned parents for another vile reason one of the best things parents can do the essential thing is to be involved with education at the local and state level everybody here who has a kid in a public school and everybody who doesn't needs to go home and become the scourge of school boards really on everything having to do with the substitution of opinion for fact I recently received a letter from a man named James McCullum the father of a forgotten figure perhaps not by this group but generally forgotten this 20th century secular history named Vashti McCullum back in 1948 Vashti sued the school board of Peoria in the state of Illinois because the state had a law allowing release time for instruction in religion for school children the children who didn't take advantage of this and go off to the Catholic church or the temple for instruction were put in a special room in the public school and stigmatized in 1948 the supreme court decided in favor of Vashti McCullum who had been fired by the University of Illinois and had her cat lynched among other charming behaviors for the stand she took against release time for religious instruction at the very least we ought to all be standing up at the local and state board of education level on all of these issues on everything from evolution to the teaching of the secular aspects of our nation's history when your state school board does what the Texas school board does and replaces Thomas Jefferson with Thomas Aquinas among people who influenced revolutions people like us ought to be there just talking about science just talking about science in convention halls with other people who agree with us is not going to cut it I like to call myself a cultural conservationist as distinct from a cultural conservative and a cultural conservationist in today's America can only act and hope while living with amply justified fear what each of us needs to strive for I believe is a combination of the fact-based argument and the passion for humanity that was embodied by my 19th century hero Robert Ingersoll so I want to close with a passage from Ingersoll's eulogy for Walt Whitman in which he combined the defense of naturalism and science with his humanism of Whitman Ingersoll said he was absolutely true to himself he had frankness and courage and he was candid as light frank candid pure serene noble and yet for years he was maligned and slandered simply because he had the candor of nature he will be understood yet and for that which he was condemned and for which he was condemned will add to the glory and greatness of his fame Whitman wrote a liturgy for mankind he wrote a great and splendid psalm of life and he gave to us the gospel of humanity the greatest gospel that can be preached unquote it should be our task to expend every last bit of effort in the cause of convincing people that science and a naturalistic approach to the world far from being the enemy of our deepest emotions and passions as human beings are in fact the fulfillment of our most noble dreams not only about the scientific tools we want to invent a further further human progress but about the kind of human beings we want to become the kind of people like Robert Ingersoll who said of Whitman he wrote a great and splendid psalm of life and gave to us the gospel of humanity the greatest gospel that can be preached thank you yes indeed we have time for a few questions if we want to line up right over here off a stage with moving steps a year ago steps were attached at the side and they moved and my need didn't move with them if anyone has a question come on up we have about 10 minutes for questions let me change to my distance glasses just so I can see you people we'll have you right here first question let's do as many as we can there we go hi so I agree with a lot of what you said but I think there's a lot that's worth exploring in some of the new stuff that's appearing there's a lot of games like some of you might recognize Minecraft where it's sort of open-ended and creative rather than you're playing through a script and there's other stuff like 3D printers that are appearing that allow people to experiment with physical stuff and it's a creative process so do you think that sort of stuff has worth in this process yes I don't mean to imply that all of these things don't have worth I think the things you're talking about particularly the 3D thing in which all kinds of creative things and scary things too can be invented I'm not saying that these things are worthless I think like all things our time is limited and if what we do is spend let's say just for the sake of silly argument we have 12 hours of free time a day if we spend 11 and a half of it with screen time that doesn't leave much time for anything else and I think one of the things about thinking and logic and deep concentration is is that you can't be looking at a screen and I think that's true of the best the best of the digital world as well as the worst and I think that one of the things that one has to be cognizant of is you can have too much of a good thing I'm not sure that sitting and reading Dostoevsky all day is a great idea either there are a lot of elements and knowledge and we've gone overboard on just the technological part of it that's my opinion I kind of follow up to that question in a sense given that the internet is unlikely to go away I wouldn't want it to and I totally agree with you on the value of non-screen time based activities but what in your opinion is the end game for a culture which is based on mass consumption of a text based medium and videos on but via the internet and also how would you propose to insulate or inoculate society against the worst evils that could be brought by such a future situation that question is always asked well first of all of course I don't know what the end game is any more than anyone does but inoculation has to realize and again it is why I do stress the role of parents I think that kids have to learn what concentration is at an early age and but I don't mean there's no such thing as inoculating anybody against the internet as somebody in her 60s I mean I can tell you that the web is as big a temptation from things that I consider slightly more important or a lot more important as it is for me as it is for a 16 year old one of the reasons I work in a special writer's room at the New York Public Library is it enables me to detach myself from the web for the hours I'm working there I get roughly three times my writing done because what do I do at home when I get stuck in my writing which is my main job that's what I do I write books, I research when I get stuck at home I go on the internet and tell myself I'm doing research right I'm doing research I'm going to a website to see what the HuffPost says today or to see what I saw today when I turned on the computer I saw a state supreme court that upheld a decision saying male bosses can fire women for being too attractive and threatening their marriages or then of course I can wind up on a site selling Italian shoes what I am not doing when I am on the internet as a writer is concentrating and doing the kind of concentration that I need to do to write a book when I go on it to avoid writing as standing in front of the fridge eating ice cream which I also do to avoid writing goes which is why I think that one of the answers I don't know what the end game is but I know that small children have to be given time to develop some responses to a way of thinking and a way of looking at the world through having parents read to them that is not based on a screen or a case and the fact that now roughly 50% of American two year olds and a much higher percentage of those in higher income homes have TVs or screens in their room when they are under two is a telling thing about what we are not doing as to what the end game is I won't be around to see it maybe you won't either I agree with what you are saying sometimes people use facts like agenda I like the example you use saying how very little women get pregnant from rape and that is to pull you into the anti-abortion ideal system are there any tools that we can use so we don't like blindly other than obviously critical thinking skeptic tools to look at figures or facts did everybody hear that question because I think it's a really important question did everybody hear that okay I think that is actually the most important question and I do think that one of the things we have to do in talking about anything that's dear to our hearts and minds we have to be able to show people how scientific facts far from being threatening to I think everybody wants to be happy everybody with children I really believe wants to see their children do better than they do and I think that one of the things that's wrong with America today is a lot of people are very fearful that their children won't do better than they do I think we have to make an effort and writing books and developing software alone isn't enough I think I actually think there need to be in a way workshops about from people who are effective at talking to people about how to talk to people without and make them realize that these issues have something to do with their personal life look we're just laughing in the presenters room about this new sci-fi made for TV movie Sharknado I believe it's called I don't think I need to tell anybody in this room about it the way junk information moves fast we've all seen pictures of the sharks falling off the water on top of the Empire State Building already but people can pick up ridiculous stuff so fast and why it seems to touch the board and I think one of the reasons I read Ingersoll's eulogy from Walt Whitman is I think one of the things we have to do and I wrote this in an essay for the New York Times after Newtown is we have to make people understand that certain let us say scientific facts such as that the main use of guns in homicides is suicide not homicide of another person and we have to show people how these issues which are subject to scientific research relate to things that may and could happen in their own lives and have hurt them and by the way I think a model for this I also think by the way those of us who are atheists also need to come out with atheists and show that you know atheists are nice people atheists are good people atheists don't have horns on top of their heads because I believe that the gay rights movement has had an extraordinary success success faster than I have ever seen in my lifetime any cause because of coming out and this is a unique thing in that a lot of people who thought of gays as something out there something evil people who had nothing to do with them were made to realize that gay people were their sons and daughters they were the neighbor down the block they were people they worked with they were their boss they were maybe even their minister and I think we've got to make people realize that science and evidence oriented people and or atheists were not just we're not we're not people with horns we are their brothers and their sisters and their daughters and not confront them but talk to them about how these issues affect them where they live and how it affects us where we live the most letters emails I ever got for peace was when I wrote a piece when I mentioned about how my when my partner died of Alzheimer's five years ago but how as I was never more glad to be an atheist in my life because I had to do what a religious person had to do which is ask that theodicy question how a merciful god can allow this I don't see how I could have gone on living I got more emails from people both religious and non-religious people praising me for that question that because it was such a great brilliant original idea on my part because it related atheism to something that they could relate to that unfortunately is our time so once again ladies and gentlemen our keynote speaker Susan Jacoby I should say I'm going out to sign a book but I'll be about five minutes after a break but I am coming and also people have even asked me will I sign old books yes I will sign all right don't forget tonight SGU dinner satiristas and the pan bacon donut party all right kids who needs sleep right we'll see you tomorrow