 It's Sunday, March 14th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grohthy. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. I'm happy that my guest this week is Jennifer Michael Hecht. She's the author of award-winning books of poetry, of philosophy, of history, including The End of the Soul, Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology, and also Doubt, A History, The Happiness Myth, and her books of poetry The Next, Ancient World, and Funny, which publishers weekly called one of the most original and entertaining books of that year. Jennifer Michael Hecht, welcome to the new show. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be on the new show. Jennifer, you were one of my favorite guests on Point of Inquiry. Wanted you on For Good Reason because here you've written a best-selling book on skepticism, another book on happiness studies, but you're not some scientist or psychologist like all the other big-name skeptics, you're an award-winning poet and artist. Correct. Yeah. I have a PhD in the history of science, and I've written about science, so I certainly have that perspective too, but I definitely have more on the humanity side than most in the skeptics camp, yeah. So for you, the poetry goes perfectly well with the doubt, with the serious skepticism of silly claims in our society. You've said it actually kind of can help fuel the doubt. In fact, you've said, and this is controversial among some of our ilk, that you actually champion poetry above the science. Yeah. Well, I definitely have felt the resistance to that and have given thought to how I want to phrase it in the future because I really am not interested in provoking people for its own sake, but it is very much true that a history of science education, a PhD and then doing real archival work and really studying the history of science gives you an unshakable feeling about how much of science is very culturally determined. It's clear that there is a physical world out there that human beings interact with, and there are clearly things that we can measure that stay pretty consistent, and so those do feel scientific in that mathematical way. But certainly the closer you get to the human, the more science breaks down and is really more science-inflected cultural studies. You can't really study what human beings are and how they behave here in the 21st century. We've only been a writing species for about 10,000 years, and for 100,000 years, wandering around being human beings. There's no way that we can be making these kinds of evolutionary guesses as to how things helped us in the past the way we do. We can try it, we can play at it, but to think of it as physics is wrong. I'm afraid it's way more like pop songs. A lot of it is cultural moments. Even measurements generally fall into a kind of their measurements, they're solid, they're definite, but the category in which they're in changes. It's determined by what we want to measure, not about what should be measured, etc. So you use a phrase culturally determined. I think some folks in the skeptics world kind of the big pro-science booster community that we're all part of organizing, their heckles get up when they hear terms like that because it sounds what post-modernist, where any idea is just as good as any other idea. You're saying you still buy into science with all of its limitations, just that it sounds like you're kind of just against the certainty of a lot of the new sciences. That's well said. That's correct. I'm trying to keep science clean so a century from now they won't be laughing at us. Yeah, there is science that stays pretty solid over a couple of centuries, and there are other kinds of science that we see change every decade. Now, if you're talking about a science that changes every decade, it's sheer temporal prejudice to think that our version is somehow that much better than the ones in the past, just because we can get to the moon and cure our TB does not mean that we know what's important. So first of all, the longevity studies about what you should eat in order to live longer, many of those have profound problems in terms of the science that goes into it. It's very difficult to figure out what causes what, whether being healthy makes you drink a little bit more, whether drinking makes you healthy. There's a ton of actual statistical issues with it. But to go farther, what about the question of whether longevity is what we should be studying? We live longer than anybody throughout history has ever lived and we are more greedy for a few more years at the end of it than any before. We're as obsessed with longevity as the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife, and it is quite bizarre because we really do have a finite amount of time to live. It's much more important to think about how to live well. And these were some of the insights in your book, The Happiness Myth. Now, I appreciate those insights, even as I would self-describe as what a transhumanist. Look, I want to live the phrases long enough in order to live forever, right? Because of technology. Thomas, my partner, gave me a present once a t-shirt that said, don't trust anyone under 500, right? Hoping that, you know, maybe we'll continue to extend to a lifespan. That's what I don't feel that way. I think it's much, it's both more realistic and more, I guess, I'm going to say, fun to recognize life for what I see it as being and just including death in that. Look, death is not as scary as we pretended it is. It's part of our little cultural dance, but the truth is, we're here for a while, the important part is to pay attention while we are here because it ends eventually and there's an eternity on either side of it. So the real session with staying longer, I think is a mistake, but I certainly see it as a companion at goal and I wouldn't say no to more years being given to me, but I do think it's one of those places where I can point to and say, look, science changes its desires because human beings are who funds the science, who promotes the science, who does the science and who reports the science. And what we find most important and concerning and exciting, that's what ends up being the science of our day. What I can add to that is that while I love science and I'm entirely on the side of science as versus religion, I also want to point out that science makes proof that are testable within its own sphere and poetry makes proof that are testable in a very different way. Does life matter at all? I can ask you and we can say, well, you know, we're kind of a fungus on the third rock from the sun and there's a million years before and after us. So what happens in your life really kind of doesn't matter. It looks like I've made a pretty good proof for that. Now I ask you to look through a one way mirror and see your own father or your own child in a room with someone who's trying to hurt them. And your, your father turns around and is able to disarm the person and is about to either kill them or let them go. Does it matter whether your father kills somebody he doesn't need to kill? Does it matter? And I say that we all look into that one way mirror and we say, I feel something as certain as I feel one and one is to it matters. It matters. And what happens is we have gotten so used to allowing religion to make us think that everything that feels. It's proof is an indication of some hidden world. Well, it's not. There's no reason to think that morals or feelings are an indication of a hidden world, but what they are is true here in this world. They are real because they are real. The feeling of meaning is sufficient to the definition of meaning. And that gets to what you were talking about a minute ago about paying attention. So you would rather live just your three score years and 10 if it's a fully fleshed out life rather than 500 years of a diminished kind of cardboard flat existence. It sounds like you're really making this philosophical artistic poetic argument. Everyone could get behind. Yeah, sure, it's not bizarre. What I'm pointing out is that there are conflicts in the in the way that we see these things and that look, if you study 19th century science, it was so close. We still have these names in our textbooks. We still think of them as the people who were building on. But if you study what they were writing at the time, the amount of pages of stuff that now is nonsense, that these same people generated, who also generated some true stuff, it really gives you pause. You start to realize, oh, and now craniology obviously is a particular thing that we now see as pseudoscience. But you have to understand how profoundly real scientists at the time, not all of them, but many of them believed that look, we don't know what the craniometry of the measurements of the skull mean, but we're going to be like Tycho Bra and we're going to take the measurements down. And someday a Kepler will figure it out, except that the future comes and nobody thinks craniometry means anything at all anymore. So millions of pages, I am not exaggerating. Millions of pages of stockpiles of useless numbers are now shredding in the annex libraries because nobody even keeps the stuff in the libraries anymore, but they don't throw it out. I'm saying that every generation has this and it makes sense for us to notice that we are human beings. So that's not anti science. That's humble science. Yeah, protecting it from its own folly. Yes. Right. You look at the history of the American founding. You look at people like Dr. Benjamin Rush or something. The bleeding. Yeah. Yeah. And he was really the founder of American medical science. He's considered that, but he was not only pseudoscientific, but destructively so. And yet he's held up as a forerunner on whose shoulders we're standing. I get your point there. Which came first for you, a kind of skepticism informed by this understanding of history or your artistic side, your artistic instinct, your poetry? They came together when I was first being a historian of science. I didn't know what the connection of it was with my poetry, except that they were both disciplines that required looking very broadly and stepping back a little and thinking. But other than that, I had actually gone to Colombia to get a PhD in cultural history. I thought I'd study sort of poetry and history, but they simply didn't hire a cultural historian. They kept threatening to, but they never quite managed it. But we had some wonderful historians of science and I just fell in love with the discipline as a species of intellectual history of watching how ideas travel through time and really of epistemology. You know, I always joke that philosophy of science is how science works and history of science is how things doesn't work. And that really is a discipline that I came to already in that guide. It was already more interested in critiquing things and seeing how the cultural masks, the truth for a whole century. And then and then something changes in the culture and suddenly we're able to see something that's that's quite different. I want to kind of get back to the literature in your, you know, you preach literature, you preach poetry a while ago now at a meeting of the Venerable Rationalist Society of St. Louis. It's the oldest continually existing skeptic or atheist group of its kind, right, founded back in the forties. Jennifer, a boy showed up at one of these meetings and he mentioned something about skepticism and Harry Potter about getting something out of reading Harry Potter as a skeptic or as a rationalist. And the whole place, it was like he was an infidel, you know, the curmudgeonly old skeptics in the group jumped down his throat. One fellow even said, that's fantasy. Why would you ever read fantasy? It's as if some skeptics think that literature is a big waste of time, that, you know, they say psychics is for suckers, so is literature. It's also for suckers. Let me first say that in every period, there are these issues that are a little bit on the edge. So, you know, imagine how it was in the late 19th century when they've just discovered bacteria, which is this hidden world that no one can see with their own eye. That's actually been running the show in many ways for a long time. They discover radioactivity, another hidden thing that's running the show that explains the universe. And so in the 19th century, it's very hard to then say, well, what about hypnotism? Well, what about speaking to ghosts? You know, Charles Richet was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. And he's the one who made up the word ectoplasm because he was trying to make scientific what these mediums were doing. The mediums had the will oversize. I mean, they tricked him. But when they would have their medium sessions, they would have this frothy stuff come out of the movie stuff. And he named it ectoplasm to help bring it into the scientific community because he's, in his lifetime, watched these changes happen. So it's not surprising that there are issues of, you know, which part of this is fake and which is real. And certainly there must be things that are on the edge of science right now that will eventually be in it. And some things that are in that will eventually be out. I mean, that's the wonderful thing about science. It can disprove itself, which means it's always going to do so, which means we're always gonna be in a position of knowing more tomorrow. So that humility is really, it should be built in. And that way fringe science is not the same thing as pseudoscience. Well, how could you possibly define pseudoscience without including the tricky part of how we don't know anything until we know it and until we know it, it's fringe. So if we want science to keep progressing, we have to keep making wild surmises and then testing them. And many times those things end up not to be true, but it's a heroic effort to try to put together what causes what. The thing about literature is that it can certainly teach us truths, though we must rely on the clatter of recognition as our truth-telling tester. Like I said, is it wrong to kill someone? We can intellectualize it, but most human beings can access a feeling that is reasonably dealt with on its own terms. The feeling is the answer. We don't, what could a third party like a God out there do to increase the notion of meaning and truth and justice? If he showed up, what could he possibly say that would justify the suffering that's around us beyond whatever we could make of it ourselves here and now and say, this is just how the world is, but there's also beauty and kindness and I am going to give my effort and strength to the beauty and kindness. There's notion that even a God could show up and make proofs is hilarious. Like why would we give him the ability to do it? Couldn't he be just as mistaken? It makes much more sense to rely on what we have, some evidence, some indications of. I mean, even people talk about how God and we don't have any contact with him. Look, if ants were sentient, I think they'd wave at us and we'd have a clue. Dogs are sentient and they do wave at us. They get in our line of sight, they jump up and down. Communication happens when something's there, you get it communicated at some point and this God thing is really much more of a, it's a frightened answer to a question that doesn't need to be so scary. And once the question isn't so scary, you can't even think of a reason why you'd want him in the equation. He doesn't help. The thing about literature that I want to point out is that the world beyond a human being is vast and huge. The universe is tremendous and deep. And the world inside a human being is just as vast and deep. The physical world, the body itself and how long it should live and what it should weigh. I mean, it's the one thing we can get our hands on and so we talk and think a lot about it and we obsess a lot about it. But it's really the least interesting of the three things, the world, the vast world and the world inside our minds. And I do believe that the world inside our minds is as great and as real a thing. I mean, how could you argue otherwise as the vast world outside of us? And that's accessed through literature as well as say the cognitive neurosciences. That's right, all literature really is, is trying to feel our way around something that in fact we get proof by the feel of it. There's an aspect to this which is slightly to the side of just thinking about literature as a source of truth. And that is that the great poets throughout history have mostly not been religious believers. The truth is we have one or two great poets who really seemed to at least some of the time believe in the religious stuff. Hopkins and John Don. But the truth is the vast majority of people who become poets seem to do so because they don't believe the simple stories. And the poetry is about, well, then what's going on here? How can I cope with it? What is life? What is death? That's what the poems are about. So Emily Dickinson's poems, Yeats' poems, Keats' poems, these are not marginal figures. They are the top people and they are full of direct questioning, direct saying the Christian model does not make sense, the religious model doesn't make sense and full of saying, well, then how shall we deal? And I can give you some little examples. There's the famous Emily Dickinson little poem that it's just a few lines. It goes, faith is a fine invention when gentlemen can see, but microscopes are prudent in an emergency. And she's just smart as a Cheshire cat. She makes these kinds of jokes. The first thing she stopped going to when she stopped going out of the house was she stopped going to church. That was years before she stopped doing other things. And her poetry is full of these direct confrontations, but even more so with the deep thought of well, then how should I think about life and death? And she gets to some wonderfully philosophically encouraging, deep, beautiful places. Keats, some very early juveniles, he's got some angels in the poems, but this is a guy who watched his mother die, who helped her to her death, who helped his own brother who was dying of TB. And then soon after he helped his own brother through his dying, he himself starts coughing blood into a tanky. So he knows what's gonna happen. This is a deep guy. And he does not say, Jesus help me. He doesn't say, God help me. He leaves those questions completely to the side. It's as loud a statement as if he said, I'm an atheist. And instead he said, how shall I deal? So there's a poem, which one should I give you? When I have fears that I may cease to be, okay? He already knows he's dying. When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has gleamed my teeming brain, he goes on with some beautiful imagery about that. He says, and when I feel fair creature of an hour that I shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the fairy power of unreflecting love, then on the shore of the wide world, I stand alone and think to love and fame, to nothingness to think. He goes to the beach and looks at the ocean and it's pretty good advice. He goes to the beach and looks at the ocean and love and fame, to nothingness seek. He can see that the great world is this vast and complicated and deep thing and he's part of it, but he's not the whole of it. And he's gotta be here while he's here and let go of the grasping feelings and that it's really just that internal change. And he's left us that and many others like it that can encourage and keep us company in the real reality that requires no hoping, no wishing. There's no, I hope there's a God or I hope I live forever here. There's just, just realize that you have the company you need to deal with the trouble that we're in and the company is not something you have to hope exist with God, the company is each other and we're right here. So Jennifer, if a listener, a self-identified skeptic who gets riled up about all the nonsense in the world, you know, a skeptic of God or ghosts or whatever, if she wants to flesh out her tough mind of science and skepticism with a tender heart of poetry and art, right, really flesh it out, where does she begin obviously aside from your poetry? As I read Faust or Shakespeare or the English romantic poets, I get all kinds of meat to put on the bones of my rationalism and skepticism. Are there writers, are there novelists or poets that you find yourself going back to again and again? Oh, absolutely. Shakespeare, you mentioned that Shakespeare is one of them who pretty much every time somebody prays something bad happens to that person. It's like he's laughing and but also when he looks for meaning, he never says God will say, he never goes there. Instead, he does just what Keith did, that the great globe itself will, you know, will all disappear and leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep. The point is to get into the poetry of the reality of our situation and you stop feeling it as a lacking. You just see that we're in the greatest thing in the world and we're here and we've got it now and that's what matters. You're never gonna do the scientific experiment of am I dead and have it come out any other way than no, you're not. So it's not really any of your business to worry about when you're dead. The whole time you're alive, you're very alive. But yeah, Yates is another one, one of my absolute favorite poems of his called Vacillation and he talks about meaning in all these different ways throughout it and at the very end, he starts talking about this guy, Von Hergel, who was a Christian apologist at the time. He was the rich guy, he never actually trained for the clergy but he was a very well-known scientific-minded guy who was always talking about how really it fits in. Jesus really could have come down. Really there is a way that we could explain the saints and this sort of thing. So you'd say almost a rationalist on our side almost, but religion. And Yates, at the end of this beautiful poem, he thinks about it and says, it must we part Von Hergel though much alike for we accept the miracles of the saints and honor sanctity because he's talking about honor sanctity, we can all honor sanctity. Miracle of the saints, he's found some rationalist explanations for it. But at the very end of it, he says, Homer, Yates is saying, Homer is my example and his un-Christian heart, the lion and the honeycomb, what has scripture said, so get you gone Von Hergel though with blessings on your head. You know, and it's this beautiful, big rhyming end to this brilliant man saying, no, I can't pretend that just because it might feel good to imagine myself living forever, that I actually think that's the most intelligent and true and even the nicest way of solving this issue of the mortal life. Yeah, there's a lot of people I go back to and you asked about novelist. Well, I'll give a little plug for our good friend, Rebecca Goldstein, who's a new book, a novel takes on these issues. Right, right, I hope to have her on eventually. We began by talking about your, well, you had said you champion poetry over the sciences, but maybe that's too adversarial or pushes too many buttons, but I get your point. You know, you're a big booster for the arts and not just looking to what science says to explain our lot and life, you're informed and nourished by the arts. So just to put a finer point on it, you're not anti-science, you're just humble about science. Correct, and I also think that it's important to notice that we're losing too many people who might be interested in the skeptics atheist side because we sound pompous and obnoxious and it's not just the way we sound, it's that our members are overly pleased with our truth-seeking abilities in the scientific realm when in fact we don't have to overplay that card because the truth is our description of the universe is the one that seems to match anybody's looking around reality. We just, we don't have to go all the way over to this kind of... Scientism or something. That's correct. Yeah, and what ends up happening is it's an excuse for a certain kind of bloviating that is just, it's not helping anybody and it really is turning people away from the movement and there's no reason to do that. So that's your criticism of the kind of smarty-pants, scientistic view. How do you handle the mumbo-jumbo that I think both of us would acknowledge sometimes comes out of the humanities or the post-modernist quarters of the academy where they would think that you're just steeped in Western culture spouting what you're spouting right now? I don't actually think I could lose a debate on that issue. When the humanities overplays the relativism, it's not really the best of them. I really think that the humanities is basically saying we don't know how much we can know but when they go so far as to start saying we can't know anything, they've forgotten some of the very straightforward philosophical lessons that I think could be pointed out. So look, I'll tell you this. Reporters ruin humanities and science way more than the humanities or science people do because reporters are trying to say something shocking so someone will buy the paper. So it's always the most goofy interpretation of these things. Jennifer, before we finish up, so you're nourished by art. I get that. I feel like I am too. In fact, I read the Bible frequently and that boggles the mind of some of my skeptic friends. Center of the Western Canon, it's nourishing. You can get stuff out of it if you treat it as literature fine. It seems to me that some skeptic folks or atheists or real hardcore science types, they lead a kind of life that is distinguished from a really superstitious or religious person's life in ways other than what they believe. It's also in how they face the world and how full-bodied their life is. So it almost sounds like you're suggesting art and poetry can come together with skepticism and science for those of us who aren't churchgoers, right? To give us what they got. That's right. That's absolutely right. I do want to add that the experience of looking over good, rich texts with other people in the context of what we used to think of as religious, but as a gathering that comes together for this kind of sustenance, that may be something that we actually want to encourage into the future. You mean in the skeptics movement? I think even the skeptics movement has to recognize that while religion has done a lot of bad in the world, if we take out the make-believe and the nonsense, well, let me just put it one way, that many, many people who don't believe in God still go to churches and temples for the most important ceremonies of their life because it's very hard to convince yourself that this person you met in the bar is now flesh of your flesh, or that the person that you've spent every day with is now dead, or that you actually brought a human being into the world. You need some fancy ritual. You need some liturgy. So people on the most important moments of their lives do something which I've called drop by and lie. And that is a tragedy. It would be much better if they put a little bit of effort into making a community that they actually believe in so that on these most important moments they can get together and say things they really believe in a sacred sort of setting. A sacred, end quotes, but you mean not... That's right, the sacred of humanity, the beauty of the strange situation we're in together, yes. I wanna let our listeners know that your books of poetry, the next ancient world and funny are available for our website forgoodreason.org. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I also wanna let our listeners know, Jennifer, that you are going to be appearing at the amazing meeting this July. I really look forward to seeing you there. I look forward to it too. I so enjoy talking to you. I think you're one of the great interviewers we've got these days, and you just, you incite some really beautiful conversations, so I wanna thank you for that. Well, thank you, Jennifer. Glad to have you on the show. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. To get involved with an online conversation about this episode yourself, join the discussion at forgoodreason.org. Views expressed on For Good Reason aren't necessarily the views of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to infoatforgoodreason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. For Good Reason's music is composed for us by Emmy Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Christina Stevens contributed to today's show. I'm your host, DJ Groathy.