Jim Al-Khalili: The Clash of the Titans
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
TED - Sir Ken Robinson
Do Schools Kill Creativity?
TED - Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.
There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.
The second is, that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.
I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education; don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do," and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my god," you know, "why me? My one night out all week." But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and other things.
I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.
If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.
And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. [applause] Thank you.
That was it, by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ...
I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."
When my son was 4 in England -- actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year -- he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened -- we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah, why, was that wrong?" -- they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-yearolds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.
Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? "Must try harder."
Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody."
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids, he's 21 now, my daughter's 16; he didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn't matter where you go, you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.
And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what's it for, public education, I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it. They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. but they're rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there's something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according to Unesco, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence: One, it's diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus collosum, and it's thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren't you, there's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break." (You know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?")
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware they could have that.
Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long," and they went and left her.
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."
I said, "What happened?"
She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.
She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think -- [applause] What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won't serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future -- by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.
There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.
The second is, that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.
I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education; don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do," and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my god," you know, "why me? My one night out all week." But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and other things.
I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.
If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.
And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. [applause] Thank you.
That was it, by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ...
I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."
When my son was 4 in England -- actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year -- he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened -- we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah, why, was that wrong?" -- they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-yearolds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.
Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? "Must try harder."
Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody."
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids, he's 21 now, my daughter's 16; he didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn't matter where you go, you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.
And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what's it for, public education, I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it. They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. but they're rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there's something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according to Unesco, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence: One, it's diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus collosum, and it's thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren't you, there's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break." (You know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?")
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware they could have that.
Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long," and they went and left her.
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."
I said, "What happened?"
She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.
She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think -- [applause] What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won't serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future -- by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.
Idea City 05 - Sam Harris
Idea City 05: Sam Harris
Introduction by Moses Znaimer(?):
In a progressively more secularised world it sometimes seems that the only religious people out there are fanatics, and frankly I’m fed up with them. You look into any over-the-top, cruel and wanton atrocity in the world today, and chances are you’ll find some scripture-spouting nut bar; judging and condemning, and punishing and happily killing the innocent while cloaked in the garb of faith. They preach love but they practise exclusion, and they display a toxic intolerance to different views. I don’t know about you, but for me, the very definition of arrogance is someone who presumes to know God’s will and to speak in her name. So, our next speaker, Sam Harris, thinks it is time to address the role that religion plays in perpetuating human conflict. Sam?
Sam Harris:
Thank you. So am I on, you can hear me?
I’m going to talk about belief, specifically the problem of religious belief, because I happen to think that how we deal with belief, how we criticise, or fail to criticise the beliefs of other human beings at this moment has more to do with the maintenance of civilisation than anything else that is in our power to influence. Our world has been balkanised, as Moses just said, by incompatible religious dogmas; we have Christians against Muslims against Jews. The books themselves make incompatible claims. We have this founding notion that God wrote one of our texts; unfortunately we have many such books on hand.
Now, before I launch into my heresy, I want to say upfront that I am going to offend a few people in this room. I know you are very likely a secular bunch; I come from a country to your south that is fast growing as blinkered by religious lunacy as the wilds of Afghanistan, but still I think some people in this room will be offended by what I say. I want to say upfront that my intention really is not to offend anyone, I’m not being deliberately provocative, I am simply worried. I am going to worry out loud for the next 20 minutes, because I see no reason for us to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely.
It seems to me transparently obvious that the marriage of 21st century technology, forget about nuclear weapons and biological weapons; even the computational technology we heard about this morning, the fact that a few short years from now, you’ll be able to sit in a cave in Afghanistan, and with your $1000 laptop you’ll essentially have a supercomputer that can kick off its genetic algorithms, its malicious code, to the rest of society. This alone makes this balkanisation of our world, the separate moral identities, the fact that we are not identified just merely as being human beings, but we are Muslims and Jews – it makes it untenable.
So, briefly, what is a belief? What does it mean to believe something to be true? Well, clearly, beliefs are representations of the world, but they are more than that. The difference between a belief and a hope, say... I can hope that I have won the lottery, that is a representation of the world, it is a representation of a possible state of the world, but believing I have won the lottery is the only thing that actually opens the floodgates of emotion and behaviour, to... to behaviour and emotion that is appropriate to actually having won the lottery, then you go an that lunatic shopping-spree and offend all of your friends. What makes the difference is believing that your thought, certain propositions held in your mind actually map on to reality. Now, if you think this is an abstraction, just imagine the transformation on your physiology at this moment, in your neurology and in your psychology, if you came to believe that your child had been taken hostage. First you have to have a child, that child has to be in some appropriately war-torn place, but given the requisite conditions, you get a phone call, mere language, a mere sentence spoken into your ear; should you grant it credence, would completely transform your life, all the panic that would precipitate out of that experience, would be born of believing a certain representation of the world. So, this is why beliefs really are machinery for guiding our behaviour and emotion through time.
We don’t yet understand this at the level of the brain, I’m trying to understand this through functio-neural imaging, but at the level of our conversation with ourselves, at the level of thought, it is pretty clear we are talking about linguistic representations of the world.
So what do people believe? Well, where I come from, the US, 22% of the population claims to be certain, literally certain, that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and save the day sometime in the next 50 years. Certain. Another 22% think he probably will come back in the next 50 years. This is 44% of the electorate. These people not only elect our congressmen and presidents, they get elected as congressmen and presidents.
This should be terrifying to all of us. This belief obviously does not exist in isolation; it is not an accident that 44% of Americans also want Creationism taught in the schools, and evolution no longer taught. Actually 62% of Americans want Creationism taught in the schools, but 44% want it taught exclusively. We are building a civilisation of ignorance. 44% of Americans also believe that the creator of the universe literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, in his role as an omniscient real-estate broker.
It is clear that this belief has geo-political consequences, this is not... these beliefs don’t exist merely on Sundays, when we get together to talk about God and the Bible. Take another belief that seemingly would have very minor consequences. Consider the Catholic belief that condom use is sinful. Ok, now this is obviously, from my point of view, obviously, a total falsification of morality, I mean one thing that religious dogma does is it separates questions of morality from questions of real suffering: human suffering, animal suffering. Here we have no discernable suffering at all, and yet we are told it's a moral proposition that condom use is ethically problematic. What are the possible consequences here? Well, we have millions of people, every year, dying of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and you have quite literally Catholic ministers preaching the sinfulness of condom use, in villages where the only information about condom use is the representation of the ministry.
It seems to me that the time for respecting religious beliefs of this sort is long past. You take another effect of religious dogmatism in my own country: we have college-educated politicians resisting stem-cell research, certainly impeding its progress, not funding it, putting up one road-block after another, probably one of the most promising lines of research in biology to generate medical therapies, is being impeded by this mediaeval notion that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception and therefore blastocysts in a petri dish - literally undifferentiated clumps of cells - have to be given the same kind of moral concern, have the same interests, have the same – no-one even talks about suffering, but presumably we are worried about their experience at some level – and that the interests of these cells trump the interests of eight-year-old girls with diabetes or 40-year-old men with parkinson's. Ok, the conversation never gets had, the moral arguments never even have to be made at a political level, because it is fundamentally taboo to criticise someone’s religious beliefs. Faith is really a conversation-stopper.
Now, in response to these sorts of problems, many of us, many well-intentioned people, have come to think that the appropriate accommodation with modernity is to develop what’s called “religious moderation”, generally. You can have your God, you can talk about him in some - or her – in some unspecified way, it’s considered unseemly to be too sure about what happens after death and about the moral structure to this universe, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, religious moderation is the way to go, and really the soul of religious moderation is this political correctness where everyone should be free to believe whatever he wants about God, there is just no harm, no foul, beliefs are private.
Let me tell you, for a moment, why I think this is a dead end. First of all, religious moderation gives cover to religious fundamentalism, because we cannot criticise religious extremism, religious literalism, because it is politically taboo, it’s considered uncivil, and this is really enforced by religious moderates. Religious fundamentalists, they’ll criticise every faith but their own; you know, the religious fundamentalism in my country will say Islam is an evil religion. Religious moderates balk at that. And so now we can’t ... George Bush can call a press conference and announce to the world that he is going to appoint common-sense judges – this is a quote: “I’m going to appoint common-sense judges who realise that our rights are derived from God.” Now, just imagine... it seems to me the next sensible question by any journalist in the room would be “Mr. President, how is that any different from appointing common-sense judges that realise that our rights are derived from Poseidon?” It’s not like someone in the third century actually figured out that the biblical God exists, but Poseidon doesn’t. You know, this is not data that we have. Ok, this obviously would be the last question that journalist would ever ask! Ok, we can’t call a spade a spade, because it is ...because of this taboo around criticising religion, and I would argue that religious moderates are really the greatest offenders here, the greatest force propping up this taboo.
Another problem with religious moderation is it’s actually intellectually bankrupt. When you... just consider for a moment this notion that you should respect other people’s beliefs. Where else in our discourse do we encounter this? I mean, when was the last time anyone in this room was admonished to respect another person’s beliefs about history, or biology, or physics? We do not respect people’s beliefs; we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. Respecting another person’s beliefs never enters into it, and ... just appreciate for a moment how easy this is to see when we change the subject from “God” to some mundane, grandiose claim... this is actually an example from my book; if I told you that I believe there was a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator, it might occur to you to ask me why. If, in response, I gave the kind of answers you hear from religious moderates, answers that describe the good effects of this ...of believing as I do, so I say things like “Well, this belief actually gives my life a lot of meaning”, or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator!” It’s pretty clear that responses of this sort are deeply inadequate. They are worse than that; they are the responses of a lunatic or an idiot. By responding in that way, I would have disqualified myself for any position of responsibility in a first-world society. Except you change the subject to religion, to the moral demands of an invisible superintelligence, to what happens after death, and all bets are off, then you can say anything you want!
Another problem with the religious moderation is that it’s not only intellectually bankrupt; it is theologically bankrupt, because the fundamentalists have actually read the books, and they are right about them. These books are every bit as intolerant, every bit as divisive as the Osama bin Ladens of the world, or the Jerry Fallwells of the world suggest, and I am not necessarily equating the two of them in moral terms, but there is ...once we dignify the claim that the Bible or the Koran, conspicuously, is a book... is a communication that is fundamentally different from any other book, be it the plays of Shakespeare or the Iliad, [that] these books are not literature, [that] they are the best books we have in moral terms, once we dignify those claims we are really hostage to their contents. I mean... the creator of the universe *does* hate homosexuals; if you read the Bible, at the very least homosexual men, gay sex, is an abomination, it is spelled out in Leviticus, it is ... this edict is ramified in Romans, it’s not ... many Christians imagine that the New Testament fundamentally repudiates all the barbarism that’s found in the Old Testament, in books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and second Samuel and Exodus; that’s not true. You can take Jesus in half his moods and get some really beautiful, ethical precepts like the golden rule, but Jesus also said things like, in Luke 19, ‘anyone who doesn’t want me to reign over him: bring him before me and slay him before me!’ OK, I guarantee you that the inquisitors of the middle ages who were burning heretics alive for five solid centuries, they had read the whole New Testament, they had read the sermon on the mount, they found some way to square their behaviour with the ministry of Jesus.
It’s not an accident that the great lights of the church, people like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, people who are still taught to every freshman in every Great Book seminar in, certainly in my country; in Aquinas’ case, he thought heretics should be killed outright; in Augustine’s case, he thought they should be tortured. Augustine’s argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the inquisition.
Ok, we look back on these events and we think - oh, people being burnt alive, scholars being tortured to the point of madness for speculating about the nature of the stars – we look back from our perch in the 21st century and we think, ok these societies were just unhinged, I mean, these were lunatics! It’s not true, this was totally reasonable behaviour, given what was believed. Heresy ... just think about it, if there is something you neighbour can say to your child that is so spiritually wayward that it could put your child’s future in jeopardy for eternity, ok, that is much worse than the child molester living next door, we’re talking about an eternity of suffering because your child has learned to call God by the right name, or think there is no God. The stakes really are enormously high.
Another problem with moderation, incidentally, is moderates, and certainly secularists, tend to be blinded by their own moderation, it’s very difficult for moderates to actually believe that people believe this stuff. It’s difficult for a moderate, when you see them on the news broadcasts, you see the jihadist, looking into the video camera, saying things like “We love death more than the infidel loves life”, and then he blows himself up; religious moderates, not fundamentalists, religious moderates tend to think “No, well, that really wasn’t why he blew himself up, it doesn’t have anything to do with religion, this is economics, it’s lack of educational opportunities.” I don’t know how many more engineers and architects have to hit the wall at 400 miles an hour for us to realise this is not simply a matter of education. The truth of our circumstance is quite a bit more sinister than that, it is actually possible to be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb and still believe that you are going to get the 72 virgins. That’s how balkanised our discourse is, and that’s how easily partitioned the human mind is. I can tell you, there is no place in the curriculum of becoming a scientist where they tell you, you know, this is bullshit, do you stop believing it.
So to wrap up, I see my time has dwindled mercilessly, um, I just want to say that whatever is true, spiritually and ethically about our circumstances, there are... no doubt there are spiritual truths, there are spiritual experiences human beings can have, and there are ethical truths; whatever is true about that has to transcend culture, it has to transcend our cultural differences, there is a reason why we don’t talk about Christian physics and Muslim mathematics, because these truths actually... an experiment run here and in Baghdad actually works both places if it is teasing out something fundamental about the nature of the universe. That is true ethically, that is true spiritually, and the only thing that guarantees that our human conversation is open-ended is a willingness for us to have our beliefs about reality updated and revised by conversation. Because when the stakes are high we have the choice between conversation and violence, both at the level of individuals and at the level of societies, so my pitch to you is, really, that the end game for civilisation is not political correctness and tolerating all manner of absurdity, it is reason and reasonableness and an openness to evidence.
Thank you very much.
In a progressively more secularised world it sometimes seems that the only religious people out there are fanatics, and frankly I’m fed up with them. You look into any over-the-top, cruel and wanton atrocity in the world today, and chances are you’ll find some scripture-spouting nut bar; judging and condemning, and punishing and happily killing the innocent while cloaked in the garb of faith. They preach love but they practise exclusion, and they display a toxic intolerance to different views. I don’t know about you, but for me, the very definition of arrogance is someone who presumes to know God’s will and to speak in her name. So, our next speaker, Sam Harris, thinks it is time to address the role that religion plays in perpetuating human conflict. Sam?
Sam Harris:
Thank you. So am I on, you can hear me?
I’m going to talk about belief, specifically the problem of religious belief, because I happen to think that how we deal with belief, how we criticise, or fail to criticise the beliefs of other human beings at this moment has more to do with the maintenance of civilisation than anything else that is in our power to influence. Our world has been balkanised, as Moses just said, by incompatible religious dogmas; we have Christians against Muslims against Jews. The books themselves make incompatible claims. We have this founding notion that God wrote one of our texts; unfortunately we have many such books on hand.
Now, before I launch into my heresy, I want to say upfront that I am going to offend a few people in this room. I know you are very likely a secular bunch; I come from a country to your south that is fast growing as blinkered by religious lunacy as the wilds of Afghanistan, but still I think some people in this room will be offended by what I say. I want to say upfront that my intention really is not to offend anyone, I’m not being deliberately provocative, I am simply worried. I am going to worry out loud for the next 20 minutes, because I see no reason for us to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely.
It seems to me transparently obvious that the marriage of 21st century technology, forget about nuclear weapons and biological weapons; even the computational technology we heard about this morning, the fact that a few short years from now, you’ll be able to sit in a cave in Afghanistan, and with your $1000 laptop you’ll essentially have a supercomputer that can kick off its genetic algorithms, its malicious code, to the rest of society. This alone makes this balkanisation of our world, the separate moral identities, the fact that we are not identified just merely as being human beings, but we are Muslims and Jews – it makes it untenable.
So, briefly, what is a belief? What does it mean to believe something to be true? Well, clearly, beliefs are representations of the world, but they are more than that. The difference between a belief and a hope, say... I can hope that I have won the lottery, that is a representation of the world, it is a representation of a possible state of the world, but believing I have won the lottery is the only thing that actually opens the floodgates of emotion and behaviour, to... to behaviour and emotion that is appropriate to actually having won the lottery, then you go an that lunatic shopping-spree and offend all of your friends. What makes the difference is believing that your thought, certain propositions held in your mind actually map on to reality. Now, if you think this is an abstraction, just imagine the transformation on your physiology at this moment, in your neurology and in your psychology, if you came to believe that your child had been taken hostage. First you have to have a child, that child has to be in some appropriately war-torn place, but given the requisite conditions, you get a phone call, mere language, a mere sentence spoken into your ear; should you grant it credence, would completely transform your life, all the panic that would precipitate out of that experience, would be born of believing a certain representation of the world. So, this is why beliefs really are machinery for guiding our behaviour and emotion through time.
We don’t yet understand this at the level of the brain, I’m trying to understand this through functio-neural imaging, but at the level of our conversation with ourselves, at the level of thought, it is pretty clear we are talking about linguistic representations of the world.
So what do people believe? Well, where I come from, the US, 22% of the population claims to be certain, literally certain, that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and save the day sometime in the next 50 years. Certain. Another 22% think he probably will come back in the next 50 years. This is 44% of the electorate. These people not only elect our congressmen and presidents, they get elected as congressmen and presidents.
This should be terrifying to all of us. This belief obviously does not exist in isolation; it is not an accident that 44% of Americans also want Creationism taught in the schools, and evolution no longer taught. Actually 62% of Americans want Creationism taught in the schools, but 44% want it taught exclusively. We are building a civilisation of ignorance. 44% of Americans also believe that the creator of the universe literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, in his role as an omniscient real-estate broker.
It is clear that this belief has geo-political consequences, this is not... these beliefs don’t exist merely on Sundays, when we get together to talk about God and the Bible. Take another belief that seemingly would have very minor consequences. Consider the Catholic belief that condom use is sinful. Ok, now this is obviously, from my point of view, obviously, a total falsification of morality, I mean one thing that religious dogma does is it separates questions of morality from questions of real suffering: human suffering, animal suffering. Here we have no discernable suffering at all, and yet we are told it's a moral proposition that condom use is ethically problematic. What are the possible consequences here? Well, we have millions of people, every year, dying of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and you have quite literally Catholic ministers preaching the sinfulness of condom use, in villages where the only information about condom use is the representation of the ministry.
It seems to me that the time for respecting religious beliefs of this sort is long past. You take another effect of religious dogmatism in my own country: we have college-educated politicians resisting stem-cell research, certainly impeding its progress, not funding it, putting up one road-block after another, probably one of the most promising lines of research in biology to generate medical therapies, is being impeded by this mediaeval notion that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception and therefore blastocysts in a petri dish - literally undifferentiated clumps of cells - have to be given the same kind of moral concern, have the same interests, have the same – no-one even talks about suffering, but presumably we are worried about their experience at some level – and that the interests of these cells trump the interests of eight-year-old girls with diabetes or 40-year-old men with parkinson's. Ok, the conversation never gets had, the moral arguments never even have to be made at a political level, because it is fundamentally taboo to criticise someone’s religious beliefs. Faith is really a conversation-stopper.
Now, in response to these sorts of problems, many of us, many well-intentioned people, have come to think that the appropriate accommodation with modernity is to develop what’s called “religious moderation”, generally. You can have your God, you can talk about him in some - or her – in some unspecified way, it’s considered unseemly to be too sure about what happens after death and about the moral structure to this universe, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, religious moderation is the way to go, and really the soul of religious moderation is this political correctness where everyone should be free to believe whatever he wants about God, there is just no harm, no foul, beliefs are private.
Let me tell you, for a moment, why I think this is a dead end. First of all, religious moderation gives cover to religious fundamentalism, because we cannot criticise religious extremism, religious literalism, because it is politically taboo, it’s considered uncivil, and this is really enforced by religious moderates. Religious fundamentalists, they’ll criticise every faith but their own; you know, the religious fundamentalism in my country will say Islam is an evil religion. Religious moderates balk at that. And so now we can’t ... George Bush can call a press conference and announce to the world that he is going to appoint common-sense judges – this is a quote: “I’m going to appoint common-sense judges who realise that our rights are derived from God.” Now, just imagine... it seems to me the next sensible question by any journalist in the room would be “Mr. President, how is that any different from appointing common-sense judges that realise that our rights are derived from Poseidon?” It’s not like someone in the third century actually figured out that the biblical God exists, but Poseidon doesn’t. You know, this is not data that we have. Ok, this obviously would be the last question that journalist would ever ask! Ok, we can’t call a spade a spade, because it is ...because of this taboo around criticising religion, and I would argue that religious moderates are really the greatest offenders here, the greatest force propping up this taboo.
Another problem with religious moderation is it’s actually intellectually bankrupt. When you... just consider for a moment this notion that you should respect other people’s beliefs. Where else in our discourse do we encounter this? I mean, when was the last time anyone in this room was admonished to respect another person’s beliefs about history, or biology, or physics? We do not respect people’s beliefs; we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. Respecting another person’s beliefs never enters into it, and ... just appreciate for a moment how easy this is to see when we change the subject from “God” to some mundane, grandiose claim... this is actually an example from my book; if I told you that I believe there was a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator, it might occur to you to ask me why. If, in response, I gave the kind of answers you hear from religious moderates, answers that describe the good effects of this ...of believing as I do, so I say things like “Well, this belief actually gives my life a lot of meaning”, or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my back yard, that’s the size of a refrigerator!” It’s pretty clear that responses of this sort are deeply inadequate. They are worse than that; they are the responses of a lunatic or an idiot. By responding in that way, I would have disqualified myself for any position of responsibility in a first-world society. Except you change the subject to religion, to the moral demands of an invisible superintelligence, to what happens after death, and all bets are off, then you can say anything you want!
Another problem with the religious moderation is that it’s not only intellectually bankrupt; it is theologically bankrupt, because the fundamentalists have actually read the books, and they are right about them. These books are every bit as intolerant, every bit as divisive as the Osama bin Ladens of the world, or the Jerry Fallwells of the world suggest, and I am not necessarily equating the two of them in moral terms, but there is ...once we dignify the claim that the Bible or the Koran, conspicuously, is a book... is a communication that is fundamentally different from any other book, be it the plays of Shakespeare or the Iliad, [that] these books are not literature, [that] they are the best books we have in moral terms, once we dignify those claims we are really hostage to their contents. I mean... the creator of the universe *does* hate homosexuals; if you read the Bible, at the very least homosexual men, gay sex, is an abomination, it is spelled out in Leviticus, it is ... this edict is ramified in Romans, it’s not ... many Christians imagine that the New Testament fundamentally repudiates all the barbarism that’s found in the Old Testament, in books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and second Samuel and Exodus; that’s not true. You can take Jesus in half his moods and get some really beautiful, ethical precepts like the golden rule, but Jesus also said things like, in Luke 19, ‘anyone who doesn’t want me to reign over him: bring him before me and slay him before me!’ OK, I guarantee you that the inquisitors of the middle ages who were burning heretics alive for five solid centuries, they had read the whole New Testament, they had read the sermon on the mount, they found some way to square their behaviour with the ministry of Jesus.
It’s not an accident that the great lights of the church, people like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, people who are still taught to every freshman in every Great Book seminar in, certainly in my country; in Aquinas’ case, he thought heretics should be killed outright; in Augustine’s case, he thought they should be tortured. Augustine’s argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the inquisition.
Ok, we look back on these events and we think - oh, people being burnt alive, scholars being tortured to the point of madness for speculating about the nature of the stars – we look back from our perch in the 21st century and we think, ok these societies were just unhinged, I mean, these were lunatics! It’s not true, this was totally reasonable behaviour, given what was believed. Heresy ... just think about it, if there is something you neighbour can say to your child that is so spiritually wayward that it could put your child’s future in jeopardy for eternity, ok, that is much worse than the child molester living next door, we’re talking about an eternity of suffering because your child has learned to call God by the right name, or think there is no God. The stakes really are enormously high.
Another problem with moderation, incidentally, is moderates, and certainly secularists, tend to be blinded by their own moderation, it’s very difficult for moderates to actually believe that people believe this stuff. It’s difficult for a moderate, when you see them on the news broadcasts, you see the jihadist, looking into the video camera, saying things like “We love death more than the infidel loves life”, and then he blows himself up; religious moderates, not fundamentalists, religious moderates tend to think “No, well, that really wasn’t why he blew himself up, it doesn’t have anything to do with religion, this is economics, it’s lack of educational opportunities.” I don’t know how many more engineers and architects have to hit the wall at 400 miles an hour for us to realise this is not simply a matter of education. The truth of our circumstance is quite a bit more sinister than that, it is actually possible to be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb and still believe that you are going to get the 72 virgins. That’s how balkanised our discourse is, and that’s how easily partitioned the human mind is. I can tell you, there is no place in the curriculum of becoming a scientist where they tell you, you know, this is bullshit, do you stop believing it.
So to wrap up, I see my time has dwindled mercilessly, um, I just want to say that whatever is true, spiritually and ethically about our circumstances, there are... no doubt there are spiritual truths, there are spiritual experiences human beings can have, and there are ethical truths; whatever is true about that has to transcend culture, it has to transcend our cultural differences, there is a reason why we don’t talk about Christian physics and Muslim mathematics, because these truths actually... an experiment run here and in Baghdad actually works both places if it is teasing out something fundamental about the nature of the universe. That is true ethically, that is true spiritually, and the only thing that guarantees that our human conversation is open-ended is a willingness for us to have our beliefs about reality updated and revised by conversation. Because when the stakes are high we have the choice between conversation and violence, both at the level of individuals and at the level of societies, so my pitch to you is, really, that the end game for civilisation is not political correctness and tolerating all manner of absurdity, it is reason and reasonableness and an openness to evidence.
Thank you very much.
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