The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Stephen Greenblatt

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

Lawrence joins Shakespearean, historian, and Pulitzer Prize winning author Stephen Greenblatt to discuss renaissance thinking, the crossroads of science and literature, Adam and Eve, Trump and much more. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

The Origins Podcast is supported by listeners like you. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting it on Patreon. Subscribers also get access to full video of each episode, as well as bonus content and exclusive perks, science and culture. Together, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast. Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I'll talk to the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt.

I first read his book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve and found it compelling reading about that myth and its development throughout history with its ultimate adoption by Judeo-Christian theology and its subsequent demise, at least among rational individuals. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his seminal work, The Swerve, which also won the National Book Award. It starts out as a riveting detective story

of the 14th century discovery of Lucretius' poem on the nature of things, and then turns into a brilliant discussion of the significance of the dissemination of this work for helping spur the Renaissance interest in science and nature, and helping remove God from getting in the way of our understanding of the universe. I found his recent book, Tyranny, fascinating. That book returns him to one of the areas of his great distinction

as one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, as well as being a literary historian. It was written after the election of Donald Trump, and it uses Shakespeare to describe how a population can allow a tyrant who lies to gain power. For me, Stephen's great skill, besides his native eloquence, is to describe how literature relates to reality. And that provides us additional insights we can all use. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of all of our programs

as soon as they're released at patreon.com slash origins podcast. It was a pleasure to spend time with this brilliant mind and scholar. I hope you enjoy the show. Well, Stephen, it is so great to be here with you. There's so many things I want to talk to you about. And for me, every time I open a book by you, it's like a feast. And so I'm sure being able to talk to you about, it will be equally exciting. Thank you. We'll see.

Before we get to some of the ideas, and I want to learn about what sort of your take, on why you wrote some of these books in particular that you've written. But I want to, since it's an origins related thing, I wanted to talk about your origins, which I was learning about and have been quite interesting, I think. I don't think so. Well, but, you know, you have sort of had a, had kind of a musical background. I want some point, Art Garfunkel. No, not really. I mean, I was in the summer camp for over-periled children one summer with Art Garfunkel. It was a, A very nice fellow played the guitar and sang in a sweet voice, and I like to sing as well. He introduced me to a friend of his.

At that time, I didn't realize his friend was a genius. I mean, there was a pleasant time together, but he's gone on to a far more glorious career than me. You know, well, I don't know about that. And then you then you had another interaction with it. And then at Cambridge, you were, you were, you performed with some interesting people as well. I did. Cambridge, again, in the most half-assed and modest way, I was a member of somebody called the Footlights, which was a comedy routine place.

We used to wear, they had smokers, they called them. We would go dress up in your black tie and do kind of, comedy. And it turned out that the, again, it was largely because a person lived down the hall from me in my college, Cambridge College, was Eric Idle, who was with his pals, the person who founded Monty Python's Flying Circus. And who actually sings, I think it's his song, he's crucified at the end of life of Brian. And things always look on the bright side of life. Yeah, he always, that's his, that's his, that's one of his claim. That's his, that's one of his claim. to fame he wrote that song yeah Eric is a friend in fact Eric will will we'll become do a podcast

oh really good but I've kept up with him I mean he just wrote his autobiography that's very charming and we've met and talked about signs as well as other things and he's great yeah yeah and and well it was great because it reflected on life and I think that's what I want to want to talk about with your with your things by the way as an aside and I mean did also another friend of mine who was part of that as Trevor Nunn. Did you know Trevor Nunn? No, of course I know who he is. I'm in very well, but that's interesting as your friend.

I just taught, among other things, Merchant of Venice, and I used his, I think, sensational tape video of that production with Henry Goodman. One of the best productions of Merchantin's was I've seen 10,000 times that I've ever seen. Well, yeah, Trevor's also fascinating. Actually, he attends, he attended some of my physics classes when I taught in London. His son is interested in science. Your son is sort of interested in science as well, right? He's interested in science.

I mean, he's also a classicist. He's my youngest son, a 17-year-old. He is interest in science, but maybe relevant to a conversation that we're having is that he has had a powerful version of what I think many of us, most of us, as human beings have at some point of, of you can it comes on you when you look up at the night sky and when you when you when someone that you know dies and so and you think what is this all about yeah what does it mean and he has he's this year as a senior high school he's been grappling in a in a way that I find powerful and

poignant with with questions questions I can't answer you might be a little closer to answer such as what is the relationship between time and space? Well, damn, if I know, I mean, but I get that they're important questions. Well, they are important questions, but the questions are important, and it's great that he's asking them. It's because it's the questions that I often say in teaching and learning. I mean, that's what it's all about, and education should develop questions, and parents like you and teachers should be, when they say, I don't know, let's,

maybe you can, we can figure this out together, or maybe no one knows, or maybe let's talk about it. I had the equivalent of, you know, ask your mother, which is to say, I started by giving him a copy of Stephen Hawkins' book, and then I called my friend Peter Gallison, and I said, do you mind talking to my kid? And so forth. What's interesting, I think, genuinely interesting, again, for our purposes, is that there are questions, for some people, at least, and for him, the question is not simply of a kind of

neutral random curiosity, they're questions that have a kind of existential power, including anxiety or angst about what is this? And the reason that that's important is that lots of the things that you think about and study, lots of the lives that your own life and other lives are driven not simply by random, a passing question, but something passionate, obsessional, full of sound and fury, and it also leads to things like religion. Well, you know, that was a great way of almost segueing to the fact that we, maybe that's why I'm so attracted by part, but not just your scholarship, but the idea is because the connection between science and culture is intimate and should be intimate, but in our society, you know,

ever since the two cultures, has been often, some people think there's some sense. separation between the two. And what I find in your writing that I want to explore is the notion that literature is this yearning to understand reality in one way or another. And if I were trying to think about the ways I would classify the booksters I know the best, the rise and fall of Adam and Eve, the swerve, tyrant, it's in some ways not just what we can learn about the human condition. But what we can learn about life, and you forgive me, life, the universe, and everything, from the way people think about it in terms of passion, anxiety, love, sex, and everything else. And I'm drawn, I see a connection, and maybe I'm inventing one between some of the books

that I want to go into. But I want to, I want to just go back for one second to, so, okay, you've had these interesting, fun experiences with the different groups. And I was going to say, if you could become Montepiathan, you'd be famous, but you're pretty famous, so it's okay. But what initiated your love of literature? Where did that come from? I mean, there are probably, by actually answering this question truthfully,

going back as far as I can, first of all, there's a sort of family history, but not all that, like all of these things, not all that interesting family history, but it doesn't mean it's not deep in one's life. I mean, that is say, my father was a grand storyteller, sort of performer of stories, joke teller. I can't tell a joke to save my life, but I grew up in Boston.

My father knew everyone, and when he was a lawyer, and we walked up and down State Street in Boston, he would stop people and tell elaborate stories, the punchlines of which were usually in Yiddish. I didn't understand what was being said, but the stories were extravagant. And he was wonderful at it. when he was old, he would tell the same stories over and over again on the way he does, but he was good at it. And my mother was a different kind of storyteller.

So she was an intimate storyteller with stories about, just about me, or about some person like me. So that was also important and had the kind of impact. I say that only because, of course, the more approximate answer is that I went to school, I love to read. We had very few books in our house, but one of the books that we had was a golden book copy of the Arabian Nights, and I remember reading over and over again

these stories, especially about Sinbad, the Sailor, and Iraq, and so on and so on. And why did they reach me so powerfully? Well, I mean, maybe, as I say, because I had already been primed for it by my parents or maybe just other things, a desire to escape from suburban Newton, Massachusetts into some fantasy world of the Arabian Nights.

Now, if you're, well, so if you come from that background, your father was a lawyer? Yes. So, okay, so he's educated in that sense and had gone to college. I was wondering, did your parents hope for something other than literature as your future, a doctor or a lawyer? They would have been happy, but I think if I had become a lawyer, my older brother's a lawyer, so in some sense he took the necessary move.

My father, my mother didn't go to college. My father, as a girl, she wasn't part of the family plan. Her brother went to college, which she didn't. People of very modest means. My father was of extremely modest means. His father was a rag picker in Boston. and my father was born in 1897, so we're talking a long time ago. And in those days, you didn't have to go to college to become a lawyer.

You went directly to law school. Yeah, he went, he was briefly in the Army in World War I and then went to directly to law school. So it wasn't a life in which he had, I grew up in a family saturated with academic ambitions. But of course we had the ambitions that, especially Jews of that generation had, that their children would do something with their lives.

Yeah, be educated in some ways. Yeah, yeah, and then do something. But when I said that I was going to, I went back and forth on an extremely tedious way between whether I should go to law school or go to graduate school in English. And I bored myself and everyone to death with this question. And then when I...

I actually had a full break to Cambridge, which is why I know Eric Eidel. And then I had applied when I was a senior in college to law school. I'd get in to just a Yale law school and I'd get in. But I deferred it. And then in the middle of my first year in Cambridge, I was in Istanbul on a vacation. They haven't been pretty much. It has these crazy long vacations six weeks long. So I went to Istanbul and someone forwarded me.

In those days, you got these letters forwarded to Amex. to the American Express office. Someone forwarded to me a renewal of my Fulbright and a renewal of the Yale. Deferment. And I, the law school, and I went out onto the bridge over the Galata, and I held both letters very much of a sense of myself

as a turning point in my life. And I tore up the Yale law school letter. I threw it in the water. I wrote to my parents and said I was going to stay and then go to graduate school, and they didn't make a fuss. quite a dramatic way of doing it. That's really, that's fascinating.

Self-theatricalizing. Well, it's, yeah, and you went to Yale as an undergraduate, right? I did. And so you're this being torn between a world of literature and law. It's interesting, because I taught a course at Yale when I was a professor there, and it's a standard physics course called Physics for Poets, you know, or at least that's what it's often called. I'm sure I took it.

But on the other hand, the interesting thing was I, at one point, wanted to change it to physics for lawyers because in all the time I taught it, yeah, I met a lot of lawyers to be, but no poets to be. But the poetry of your writing, I mean, as I say, I just find the topics that you cover in a context of literature, fascinating. And obviously, the swerve has had a profound impact. It's won National Book Award, pulled surprise. And it's, it is about a little bit of serendipity. I mean, the fascinating aspect that still almost terrifies me to think. think how close in many ways, and also bittersweet, how many amazing bits of knowledge and literature were lost.

Yes. But the fact that certain key things were survived a very improbable history to make it to the modern world, and as you would argue in the case of Lucretius, to help create the modern world. I actually, this is probably not the occasion to do this, but I would love to ask you a question. Sure. which is a question that has haunted me in writing this book and continues to haunt me, what if it had been lost? Wouldn't it have unfolded in, you know, different but ultimately the same way and maybe

even in the same time scale? Well, you know, it's, of course, what of Scudence and should have. It's a fascinating question, what would have happened? And because I've thought about that, what if Einstein hadn't, you know, what if his parents had been killed or what, but you're right. I think that, I do think that all of us feel like we have produced. you know, if we've tried to produce something that somehow's a reflection of us, but I think it's more a reflection of the time that these ideas are often bubbling up.

And in science, at least, if someone, you know, if Einstein had been around, and Einstein, you know, was amazing and did amazing things, the things he developed would have been discovered because the process of science guarantees that. And I suspect creative minds who were yearning to move beyond, at least as far as I can see, the imprisonment of mind that ultimately led to blossoming with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, that would have happened. Well, the question, I suppose, I mean, the question of someone outside your world wants to ask us, what do you mean the process of science would have guaranteed that?

What guarantees are there? Okay, well, okay, this is good because we'll come back. Maybe those guarantees are or aren't there in literature. But science overcomes, the process of science overcome scientists. science, the process of science, because scientists have biases and beliefs and, and sciences are human. It's a little known fact. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,, yourself right. Ultimately, sift out those human biases. And I've written about that. It's fascinating to see how scientists have been caught in fads and fallacies. But because ultimately,

the arbiter of truth is nature, and that's probably the most important thing. It's not beauty, it's not elegance, it's not revelation. All of those things, in fact, are, one could say as one could be suspicious of. I'm certainly, I would argue, and maybe we could have a debate about this, that nothing has ever come from revelation, nothing significant in terms of knowledge, but that nature ultimately determines whether, no matter how beautiful your ideas are,

that if they don't agree with nature, they just get tossed out like yesterday's newspaper. But here's the situation in the case of Lucretius's poem, Deer of Natura. There had been a long process of thinking, starting in Greece and on the island of Abdura, where I've never been, but I mean, where Demarcretus and Lucipus came from, of thinking about what the world is made of, and a set of non-experimental hypotheticals that actually moved in an unexpected and interesting direction toward the idea that they must, this is not the interest. part that there must be smaller and smaller things that they're made of. That's a natural thing to think. But it began to think hard about what it means, the smaller and smaller things. How small could they be? Could they get smaller than dust motes? Or the tiniest things you could see if you're

very nearsighted on an insect? And in that case, would they be small Lawrence Krauses or a little tiny Stephen Greenblatt's or would they be something else and so forth? And they developed over a long period of time when in a set of astonishing experimental non-experimental thinking experiments, not experiments with the world. Which was a key different between the classical world and the modern one.

They developed a set of ideas that get expressed in the remarkable poem that I write my book about. But here's to go back to our the question we started with. Here's what happens. for various reasons having to do, but principally having to do with trouble in the Roman Empire

and with the rise of Christianity, a ethical monotheism, a notion of a single god triumphs. They basically, the drive, including the intellectual drive behind this theory, but also lots of other institutional considerations basically forces this alternative notion of a world made of matter and emptiness and nothing else underground.

Yeah. For 1,500 years. Amazingly effective. I mean, we could say that the process of science guarantees something. It doesn't guarantee the pace that it's going to happen and when it's going to happen. And 1,500 years a long time, because it's not as if they weren't intelligent people

during those 15-100 years. And plenty of people who must have thought, it can't be this notion of a kind of divine father who's made all this stuff, can't be the only account. It doesn't explain why my child has died. I don't feel my child did anything. And so forth,

the 10,000 things that sentient human beings feel is probably wrong with the supposedly ethical monotheistic account of the universe. And there is this alternative idea, but it's way underground. this point. And it's remarkable that it, well, I think it's, it's remarkable that it was so effectively pushed underground. I mean, we were talking the other day about this, about a book, I guess Catherine Nixie, Nixon. Nixon? Nixie. Nixie, yeah. About, it was, it's amazing to me

to have read that about how effective the early Christians were at, they couldn't have, you know, almost unless if there'd been a master plan, if there'd been the final solution at that time, they couldn't have as effectively basically rid the world of not just the polytheism of Greeks and Romans, but the love of philosophy, the love of questioning. And it makes ISIS look tame.

Well, look, the word heresy comes from hyrises, which means choice. They didn't want choice. I mean, choice was you walked, in ancient Athens, you walked and you could decide you were going to go, if you were a thoughtful person, there were a number of philosophical schools that had their locations up on the hill. You could go to think about being a platonist or an Aristotelian. You could be a skeptic or you could be an Epicurean and think about these things. You made a choice. And that was exactly the situation of intellectual free choice that seemed intolerable, intolerable.

because, not because they were, I mean, Catherine Nixie has, and there were plenty of wicked people, but it's not wickedness, dominant. It's a sense that you shouldn't allow people to do that because it's bad for them. It's bad for them, that somehow, once you know the absolute truth, you can tell other people exactly what to do. Thomas Moore said, and Moore was very thoughtful in certain aspects of his life decent person in the early 16th century, but he said, you can't allow heresies to circulate because it's allowing the same. of poison bread. Yeah.

We can't allow the sale of poison bread. Yeah. So you start down that path, then you start burning people to death. Yeah, exactly. It's amazing how, I mean, the intent, very few people, I think, intend to do bad. I think they think that what they're doing is, generally they think that what they're doing is for a higher purpose, you know, other than psychotic people, perhaps, but even those people, perhaps.

And it's interesting, we'll come back to modern times. We'll come back to tyrant. because I think we see some of that in the current times, this effort to squash certain things, including to some extent free speech, figuring that it's bad for people. It's not that people are trying to constrain others. They somehow think that the free speech harms.

And the notion, I think that this dog, what effectively suppressed the kind of open-minded questioning of Lucretius, this dogma, this religious dogma, it's hard to know how, it certainly is very easy and overpowering, but I don't know how sustainable it is. Because ultimately, the point about science, the reason science ultimately triumphs, if you want to put it that way, is that it works. I don't think that it's profound. It's just that science works. It allows you to explain the world better, allows you to make predictions, and it allows you to ultimately, therefore, have more power over your surroundings and potentially others. And I think ultimately, when it's amazing, and I think

it ties into the rise and fall of Adam and Eve. There's a wonderful story of a rise of something, as I think you put it, that begins as a sort of an illusion, becomes dogma, becomes truth, then becomes reality, and then becomes laughable. You know, I can't quote you exactly, but it was, but that I remember reading that trajectory as you describe that. And so that, in some, in some sense, it's kind of interesting. Those two discussions are the two books I view as inversions of one another. Yeah, you're absolutely right. They are inversions of one another. The one is the, one book is about what undid the other. Yeah, it's kind of, I found that that amazing. I don't know. Did you, was that conscious in your mind? mind? Yes, very conscious. Yeah, it's really fascinating. But look, to go back to something you just said, yes, it's, I wouldn't question what you've said about the way in which science enables you to make certain predictions, to do certain things. The trick about this is that the alternative

alternative religious ideas, the polythist ideas against which Lucretius was also arguing. He's writing 50 BCE before Christianity. He might have vaguely known something about what the Jews had in mind, but that probably seemed him completely absurd.

And then Christianity, Judaism, they also allow you to make predictions to do things. The predictions may not always work, but predictions don't always work, so that if it turns out that you have said something is going to happen, it doesn't happen, then you come up with another theory as to why it didn't happen. Prophecies always work only when they're after the fact.

So in other words, at least in this period, particularly, I have about experimental science that you will know more than I. And I, but about... That arose much later. I mean, the science of the Greeks and Romans, of it wasn't experimental. Yeah, and in this period, after all, when a perfectly intelligent person, Cicero,

who takes in what's at stake in Epicureanism, of thinking that the world has no plan, no divine plan, that it doesn't require intelligent design, that it's the result of endless swerves and mutations, and so forth and so on all the rest of the account. When he weighs this, He particularly weighs what the Epicureans said was the, what was the real utility, a therapeutic utility of this,

which is that you shouldn't be afraid of death. You shouldn't be afraid of death because you're not going to exist after you die. There's nothing, you're not going to miss anything. Because you won't exist and so forth. Cicero says, that's the good news? This is terrible. And in other words, it's not always the case that, these, I do think that this account of the world anticipates in interesting ways what I think

rationally we've now, since the late 70th century, come to believe is the case. But the idea that it's consoling is not clear. I don't ever, try never to use the word believe is the case, what appears to be the case. As a scientist, I find myself using that word, but believe is no, is not relevant. It's sort of because, you know, because the, Big Bang happened whether you believe in it or not, and the sun's going to shine today. That's true. And so my belief is not a gesture toward doubt so much as a gesture toward the notion, but you probably deal with it in different ways. We know that in 500 years, our account of the Big Bang and the rest of it won't be their account of the Big Bang.

Well, it'll be subsumed. But again, okay, well, we can, I want to focus in, but I'll just, I'll just give you one of my views here. I'm a mentor. I'm genuinely interested. I know I'm not interested in view of you, but I'm genuinely interested. It's the dialogue. And it's fascinating for me to have these discussions and learn and give and take. But what people don't understand about scientific revolutions, perhaps the biggest misconception about scientific revolutions, is that they do away with everything that went before them. They're not like that.

In fact, real revolutions never do either, although people attempt to. I think we can learn from history. And I think Mark Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes a lot. but that scientific revolutions in particular, no matter what we learn about quantum gravity 500 years from now, when I take a ball here on the surface of the earth and like, oh, it's going to fall, and it's going to fall as it was described by Newton and Galileo before him.

Nothing we learn about the forefront of science can undo that which probably explains the phenomena we see. We're not going to suddenly say the ball is going to fall up. Now, we subsume that, and the underlying picture can be quite different. So our underlying picture of the fundamental structure of the world could be quite different. But ultimately, 500 years from now, people who are, if there are people designing rocket chips and cannonballs, Newton's laws will work just as well then as they did now. And I think... Granted, but wouldn't you, as I say, this is a, wouldn't you say,

and this is a defense of my belief, that the people who thought that Newton's account was the way things are in the natural world, really the way things are they account for, that that turned out to be untrue. And that notion, you're absolutely right. And I think what we realize is that, in fact, one of the great triumphs of science I've written about it, but it's probably one of the least well-understood triumphs of science, is there is no such thing as scientific truth. We've learned that all of our theories have a domain of applicability.

And there is no, there's no one theory that we know of, at least at this point. else some string theorists may have hopes and dreams. But there's no theory that describes the universe on all scales. The best theory we have of nature, something called quantum electronics, which agrees with experiment to 14 decimal places. There's nowhere else in the world where from fundamental theory you can make a prediction

that agrees with nature to 14 decimal places. Even that theory we know breaks down at some scale. So the notion that the way things, in fact, Lucretia's notion or Newton's that that's the way things are, we now understand no one can say, that. That's the way things are in a certain scale and in a certain time and space and on a grander scale, what is interesting and so far has been true in science is that when we go to more and more fundamental scales, we find that these diverse and distinct phenomena are understood

in terms of a simpler whole. That's been very satisfying. And the underlying picture looks quite different. The underlying structure of nature looks completely different than what we see in this room. this is an illusion. But the physics that describes it goes on in this room works darn well, and it's a pretty good way of understanding what happens, but no one thinks it's ultimate truth. You know, in fact, there was one line. I remember one of the reasons I first thought,

boy, I want to talk to Stephen about this, was I think it was in the early on in the swerve that there's a notion, you know, you point out the notion of atoms, which of course wasn't unique to him as Democritus, and others, but the notion, not just that there was some fundamental object from which all other things could be made, but it was eternal. Yes. And that struck me because, you know, I just gave you my book, Adam, but the interesting

thing is that Adams aren't eternal. And I wonder how Luqueus would have felt. As far as we know, there's not only no ultimate reality per se, it's different understanding is a reality that we can explore. But there's nothing that's eternal, even atoms. Adams come as close as anything to eternal, but the thing that motivated me to think about this was actually going to the Rodin Museum and seeing the kiss, that famous. And I looked at it, and I thought, wow, there's an instant captured for eternity. But it's not eternal. The atoms and the marble, the marbles only get around for 10.

or 100 million years? What about, and then the atoms, it turns out, weren't or even around in the early history of the universe. And as our current picture of physics suggests, the atoms won't be around in the far, far future. They're the only parts of us that have a potential grasp on eternity, but even they will be gone in the far future. And so I wonder how Lucretius would have thought of that. I think actually, of course we don't know, but I think that that wouldn't have disturbed him in a way that thinking that the atoms were not what he thought that they were, Seminareareram, he calls them in Latin, the seeds of things. And he thought that they, he took on the Greek notion built into the word atom,

that they were unbreakable, the finalist, which they're also not. Which also not, absolutely. So I think he would have found the unbreakable part a little unnerving. I think the eternal thing, what he didn't want, the reason he, I think, I think, the reason he insisted that they were eternal was that he didn't want the notion of creation. Because the notion of creation seemed to him to get into the full

full-fledged account in which there would be a god. Yeah, well, he's not there. I mean, that's probably, you hit the two things, probably creation and death that are probably the two logical issues that have driven people for millennia and probably will continue to drive people to God or religion. How can you have a world, how can you have something from nothing, which is a subject from another of my books?

But, but, and, and isn't, and how can we start, can we ever conquer death? And is death the end and the ultimate fear? Yeah, I think, you see, the eternal, he wasn't interested in eternal life in the way that most of the distraditions are. He didn't think that he was going to come back. He thought if all the atoms that made him up were reconstituted and he walked around. round again, it wouldn't be him anyway. I mean, that... Absolutely, very prescient, because it's true. Montaigne, who was in the 16th century, maybe the person who took in most completely what was at

stake in the recovery of Lucretius's Zedereman Nador, he thought, he and his sort of sublime egotism thought that, yes, maybe all the atoms could come back and there could be another Montaigne. And he did think it might be he. but I think Lucretius thought that there was a hopeless idea. Not that it couldn't happen in the infinite amount of time,

but that it wouldn't be you. Well, you know, it's fascinating. Again, the more things change more than the same, because one of the, just out of interest for you, perhaps one of the debates in science right now is, is our universe unique?

I don't know if Lucretius ever even thought of that because it means semantically redefining what you mean by you. universe and universe used to mean when you and I were both growing up everything at least that's what I remember it being and but now we have a very specific definition of universe which is all the region is space and time that I could have want or I but in a generic sense I could have once contacted or one day contact so the the region of space in which things can affect other things

either now or in the infinite future. And if there's other regions where you could never have an impact, we tend to call those other universes, and maybe the laws of physics are different in them. But the interesting question that's risen is, in a universe that say, and our universe looks like it's expanding forever, an universe that's infinite in time, could it be that, you know, as Woody Allen said, infinity is a long time, especially near the end.

And if it's infinite, then can, the same things happen over and over again. Because infinity is different than something very long. Could, if it's infinite, there's a non-zero probability that a planet could form and that everything that we see could be the same, except maybe you were doing science and I was doing literature. But then there's an equal, infinite number of worlds in which you're doing almost exactly the same thing or exactly.

It's an interesting question. And I have to say that there's a lot of things. sense and a lot of nonsense being written now in science about that particular subject. And it's fascinating to see that that Lucretius at least addressed that notion, that the same notion of whether you could have a copy of a person either at a different time or a different space. I think he thought that the whole, as I say, he's writing largely, he's writing not so much as a scientist, but as a therapist.

And as a therapist, I think he thought that the encouraging people to think that it's going to keep going on or that it'll come back is actually a very bad thing. It leads to a lot of nasty things in the world. And it's better to think, to be persuaded that it really does come to an end and that that's okay. Yeah, that's what, well, you know, well, he was being a, I mean, one certainly gets a sense that he had a scientific sensibility. I mean, not in the modern sense. You made a point that, I think it's really important to point out, that at that time, science didn't really involve,

it involved speculation, what we might call, or thought, or what we call philosophy now, I guess, but not experimental science, and that's the key difference. And, you know, when I talk to my philosophy colleagues who often, you know, will tell me things that I should know, you know, Aristotle's seemed to be loved by philosophers. And as a physicist, of course, Galileo made fun of him. But more directly, and I believe this is correct,

that he said that women have a different number of teeth than men. And so whenever anyone talks about the wisdom of Aristotle, I say, well, he could have just opened someone's mouth. But that's the difference in the modern world's view. But he had the sensibility of a scientist that, hey, not only there's no evidence that there's anything else other than what we see and the world as it's made and it's not created for us or will it be destroyed for us, but that there is a danger in ultimately letting the fact that we all want to believe.

We all want to believe that somehow we're not going to end. There's a danger in having that govern our existence. And ultimately, you know, that's the danger of religion. And you're talking to your book about whether, I mean, he probably was an atheist in that sense, but he wasn't. And but the notion of, of the danger of religion, actually, to, religion and tyranny are the things that seem to me to connect the three books of yours that I, that I focused on most, tyranny, the swerve and, and the rights of all of Adam and Eve, the danger.

of inventing a world that doesn't really exist and the importance of literature and the enlightenment in exploring reality itself and being willing to accept reality for what it is. I mean, the only qualification I would put to what you summarize is that inventing imaginary worlds is great. I mean, that there's nothing, I mean, And nothing in Lucretius or compare great things to small and me that thinks that this is a bad thing. It's just believing that it's true that's a disaster. And actually acting on that. Of course, we always want the universe to be good to us.

I want to go to my mailbox and open the mail and be told that I've won the Irish sweepstakes. And I could even entertain the fantasy that if I, I walked around this table three times, it would make that more likely. But it's actually thinking that it's true that it leads you down very, very dangerous paths. Exactly. But it's, you know, and that's why I kind of, so accepting religion as literature or literature as literature. I mean, creating false worlds is part of being human. And, but I think the point that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, least, well, I'd like to hear how I'm going to try and put words in your mouth, that the value of it is not just that it's fun and it's part of being creative, but it helps illuminate and some,

one hopes it will help illuminate at some level, some nature of the real world. Yes. It'll give additional insight. Two things to say. One is that the way in which we, there are very, there are multiple ways in which we try to apprehend the world. One is through whatever it is that you. do or that scientists do in a laboratory. I mean, that, but that's not your, you don't spend 24

hours there anyway. I mean that you might spend close to it some days, but yeah, not. So that's one way we do it, but that's very few people in our culture do this professionally. And most of us do actually want to have some grasp on what the reality that we're experiencing is. And there are are lots of ways of trying to have such a grasp, but as far back almost as we can go, to Gilgamesh in the Mesopotamian world or to Homer in the Odyssey and the Iliad, we see that people have told stories, have represented the world. Because representing, or to those cave paintings, representing the world. Humans have done this, actually, as far as we know,

from the very earliest moments in which we became human, whatever we mean by that, we have a memetic impulse. And we've developed this memetic impulse into astonishing things, into those. And it's not that they've been in a curve that makes them better and better. You look at those cave paintings in the Grote de Chauvet, they're as good as anything gets in painting.

Yeah, it's amazing. They're just astonishingly good. They're astonishing modern. And Homer, likewise, one of our earliest poets, there's nothing better than the Eliot. It's not that King Lear is better or that Joyce's Ulysses is better. They're wonderful. People keep doing it. But it seems part of the human equipment to be able to represent the world as a way of trying to grasp,

to understand better than simply what happens when you walk around, what it is that we are experiencing in the world. And this question of why in some sense. And it's a kind of experimental space. You can think of the Iliad as a kind of remarkable, absolutely brilliant experimental space to see what the nature of anger and power and violence is that must have actually gone or been going on,

we know what's going on, in the ordinary lives of Greeks of Homer's time, The artist was just some person who was maybe by divine intervention had developed the art, but they weren't special just because they were great actors. And that notion is so distinct from what we... It's true. It's a little frustrating for literary critics like myself because Shakespeare is a perfect example. I mean, it's the greatest writer in the last 2,000 years.

No one bothered to interview him. No one bothered to have a conversation and record what he said. It's such a different world. No one saved his papers. Probably they were used to wrap fish. I mean, that's kind of maddening. Well, there's no doubt that people have a built-in desire to understand purpose and to reflect. There's a clear evolutionary reason for that, right?

I mean, I'm not the first one to point this out, but by any means. But we're here because of a lot of successful ancestors. And the ones who heard the rustling in the leaves and didn't say, and said, I'm not going to worry about what that is. They didn't get to reproduce. And the ones who said, maybe it's a tiger, maybe it's a lion, maybe it's a... Or the ones who sat around the campfire and told a story and looked carefully at the faces of the people around them to see how they were reacting and were taking in certain things about their community.

Those people probably did manage to reproduce. Or at least there's a recent study of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines. they did a very elaborate survey of them, and what they found was that the people routinely said that they'd much rather have in their group a really great storyteller than a great hunter or a great gatherer. That's extremely odd. And then it was borne out by the fact that their reproductive rates,

the reproductive rates of those identified as the best storytellers were higher. That's incredible. Well, from a group perspective, they bring the group together, right? And I think the stories we, well, that's the purpose of religion. It's not purpose. But, I mean, the stories we tell, in some sense, tribal stories are what hold us together. And religion is so ubiquitous, I think, because it does such a good job of creating in groups and outgroups and us versus them. And creating a kind of a story that somehow binds people in a way that I think the cosmos should, but it's much harder.

It is true that every Adam in our body comes from a star, you know, in different stars. But that somehow seems less immediate than saying we come from Adam and Eve. But it doesn't speak to our, or at least as directly, to our fears and our desires. So it binds us together. The vision of the cosmos may bind us together. The notion that we're made of the stuff that stars are made of is a fantastic idea. and might link us, but does it tell us how to deal with what we're afraid of? Yeah, no.

Well, it doesn't, except maybe. And Lucretius, you know, it's interesting to me that you expressed Lucretia said, because again, it's an issue, it's something I always try and say in my dialogues, we should enjoy our brief moment of the sun. The fact that we'll disappear, for some, is tragic. But I think, I like to think from Lucretius, from my understanding, and my understanding essentially completely comes from you, that we should enjoy our brief moment of the sun for a real reason,

that life is more precious because it disappears. Yes, although that's actually a deep problem in Lucretian philosophy. Why is life more precious? Why is it better to live than not to live? I think that is a problem that's not easily answered in Epicureanism in a way that it is easily answered. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, whatever, there are a variety of,

where it's all part of a divine scheme, it's a way of serving God, and whatever the account would be. It's not clear in Lucretius why essay is better than known essay. Why does it matter? Is that a reason not to fear death?

Well, he thought that was a reason not to fear death, but there's another flip side. of that, which is why then should you savor existence? Not entirely clear. And his way of dealing with that, but it isn't, as to say, philosophically, I mean, there are people who are more expert than I am in this, so they may have a different view. But it seems to me that his way of dealing with that is to take a kind of swerve from that and say, it's the pursuit of pleasure.

The reason that you savor existence is because we should pursue pleasure as our highest good. We don't pursue God as our highest good. We don't pursue moral virtue as a highest good. We pursue pleasure. And in that we share with all other sentient creatures. That's what a cow does. That's what a cockroach does. That's what it is to be alive and to want to reproduce.

And that's what he drew from that. I mean, it's a complex, it actually when you, it seems simultaneously simple than when you push on it, it's rather complex. What you drew from that was, first of all, it's not about you. It's not about you, Lawrence, Stephen, but it's not about you as a species. You're not going to last forever, but also your species is not going to last forever. There's a constant set of mutations and adaptations to, adaptations to, to what's available in the universe, so how to eat and reproduce.

And we do it well at the moment, apparently, but we're not going to do it forever. Something better will come along, or our environment will change. What does that mean in terms of our long-term trajectory? And he recognized that. Totally recognized that. And it's fun to have read your books side by side

in preparation to talk to you again, because the fascinating thing is what you're leading to, of course, is the impact in the more modern world that Darwin had on our understand, or at least confronted the religious worldview. Yes. Not an accident either in terms of timing, or maybe in terms of Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, you know, was a passionate reader of lover of Lucas.

Oh, yeah, wait. No, absolutely. I think that, yeah, exactly. I mean, the fact that Darwin was Darwin, one can argue, is not, is understandable. But the remarkable notion that, that, so if Lucretius was, if the rediscovery of Lucretius was a harbinger or helped create the modern world. And I think, you know, the one thing I didn't answer your other question about is I think the other thing humans are built into is wanting to solve puzzles, which means asking questions. And what was amazing, you know, what was amazing, It's to me, it's not amazing that we recovered from whatever you want to call the Dark Ages. It's amazing that they survived for so long because there's this innate, ultimately, people had to recognize how ridiculous some of the dogmen's word, just asking yourself the question, including Adam and Eve. I mean, ultimately, the self-contradictory issues of good and evil, of taking people, as you describe in Adam and Eve, who are completely innocent and punishing them for something, they have no ideas wrong. These questions must have been there, but there ultimately must have been an incredible fear. Well, there was an incredible fear of questioning because if you questioned, your life was in peril. But look, I agree. And, of course, you couldn't stand up at a certain point and say, this story is absurd as an origin story.

There are, I'll tell you five other ones that are better and so forth and so on. So that's true. You would get in horrendous trouble. You wouldn't reproduce. That said, for me, and you may not agree with this, probably don't agree with this, but I couldn't have written this. I couldn't have spent years thinking about the Adam and Eve story and writing this book on the rise and fall of the Adam and Eve story

if I believed that it was contemptible and ridiculous. Oh, sure. I think that it is incredibly powerful, including the things that are to us the most disturbing about the story, such as the fact that there's a prohibition not to eat at the tree of good and evil when it's only if you understood something about the difference of good and evil that you'd know how to observe a prohibition.

But that's Kafka. That's not absurdity. Well, it is absurdity, but in an existential sense that we're constantly confronted with situations like this. That's what it is to be, for one thing. It's what it is to be a child and not understand the nature of most of the rules and yet have to be told that you have to obey them

without horrendous consequences. And sometimes actually there are horrendous consequences and so forth. In other words, when I thought it was only ridiculous people, if I thought it was only ridiculous people who have a, you know, want a theme park in which they ride dinosaurs in Kentucky, I wouldn't have wanted to take this seriously. It's actually understanding that some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people

for centuries and centuries not only took this seriously, not because they were afraid, but because they thought there was something deep and important to learn from this, that it is one of the great human fictions. It's just a fiction. That's the thing that you have to understand. It's a fiction. It's a work of literature, but a work of literature, a tiny one,

but in its way as powerful as King Lear, as powerful as anything where we think, yes, the Marbarata, this is a deep way of thinking about the world. So could we say, As a work of literature, it's remarkable and worthy of understanding. As a work as a bit of dogma, it's detestable? Totally detestable. Of course. And distract it.

I mean, you write, it's clear that you're, throughout your writing, that at least to me, that you're saying that over and over again, that these ideas are fascinating and interesting, but to take, but it's to take them literally, in that sense is awful. I mean, I think, you know, I think you're referring to Lucretius when you're talking about the swerve and you talked about, you know, the celebration of intellectual aesthetic reasoning and the connection between intellectual distinction and aesthetic reasoning. And then you say,

this triumphed over the superstitious fears that threatened to sap the human spirit. And so, I mean, I'm seeing everywhere the notion that while celebrating these ideas is fascinating, the fears that are, the fears that lead to dogma that lead to religion is ultimately a negative thing. What I imagine happened is that the person who came up with this account, persons, long before we have access to knowing how to do it, came up in the way that human beings we admire human beings for doing for speculative thoughts about our origins. And after all, when I walked through the museum just now, the ethnography museum,

there are dozens of such stories basically being told about our origins, many of which have to do with a single man and a single woman at the beginning of time. Yeah, I mean, and you talk about that, I mean, how that notion comes up over and over again. And the question is, I mean, it's not, well, first of all, I mean, it's not of an accident that we call this the Origins Project. Because origins are at the center of all of our thought and even in science, they're at the center of the forefront of science, is ultimately focusing in origins. And so it's a nice word to encompass everything. What's terrifying is when a very interesting fiction, good to think with, as Lévi Strauss would say, something really good to think of.

Think about the pieces. You're moving pieces around. You have a man and a woman, then somewhat strangely a talking snake and a god, a couple of crazy trees, imagine special trees. I mean, it has all the elements, delicious elements of a story. When that actually becomes dogma, and when it drives out, it's used to drive out any other representation of the world,

and it's because it's said to be the only truth. And then you start punishing people who have alternative speculations, and then you try to crush any questions about this speculation, then we're in terrible trouble. Well, you know, Well, exactly. We are in terrible trouble, and that's, and so the notion that's celebrating ideas and celebrating attempts to understand reality without giving them a, without turning them

into dogma is a, is a huge challenge for humanity, I guess, and it's something that we need to continue to try and do. And of course, it must be true in science as well. That is to say, there is such a thing as dogma and science. Well, that's what I told you. Sure, scientists have dogma. The great thing about science, and the wonderful thing about being a scientist is to be true and wrong and to learn to enjoy that.

Because it's counterintuitive. I mean, we all want to be proven wrong and prove others wrong in science because it's called learning. But the fact that humans are humans mean there is, quote-unquote, dogma, but it's a different kind of dog. It's a dog that can always be questioned. So maybe dogma isn't the right word for it because the whole essence of dogma

is something that's unquestionable, at least in the rest of human. In the case, there's an institution behind it that will hit you over the hat if you don't agree. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think. I think this is maybe pushes in a slightly different direction.

I think one problem that we face now, and maybe that some extent we've long faced, is that the people who are most interested in the fictions, and deeply engaged with them and profoundly moved by them, have had so little access to and actually so little interest, motivation, desire to understand what the sciences are saying. We could reverse it as well. I think now, you can bear me out on this or disagree,

that scientists and particularly technology, they're constantly coming up against problems that do not have scientific solutions but have ethical solutions, that ask ethical questions that need answers that can't be answered entirely from within the technology. So one can't get off from his, as the famous claim. Yes, yes, and I think maybe.

If I have a friend, for example, who tells me that he's working on a gene that, or a set of genes that seems to govern intelligence. And the question as to what to do with that knowledge is not a question that can be answered entirely within. Well, we can have this debate and discussion. Is it a debate? I mean, do you actually disagree? Well, I think what we need to accept, and in fact, we were just talking to George Church a little while ago about the ethics in some sense of doing some of the things they're talking about, which is enhancing humans. I think the argument is, without, I would argue, that without science, you can't make an ethical art. You can't, because.

No, I entirely agree with that. No, no, no. So what I mean by that, to make it clear is that if you want to decide what to do, you need to know. you need to know what the consequences of your actions are. And that is, so science can inform your decision making. And I think ultimately, and if I describe science to be skepticism and rationality and experiment, that's all, I mean, it's nothing beyond that, then I think you come so close to saying, ultimately what you would define as an ethical answer comes from reason informed by experience and that's science.

But some people, but there's still people that people have argued that reason is a slave of passion and I think was Kant or someone who said that. And we want to believe. So we keep rationalizing ourselves. but I think ultimately it's hard for me to see what you and I would think of as an ethical solution to that problem that isn't merely reason informed by experience. But look, what do you mean by experience? All I'm saying to return to the point I was trying to make,

which is that I get started to say that I think that the people who are most interested in the fictions that humans create and takes most seriously, what that means that humans do this and that it's an important part of our grasp of our experience. Literature is the greatest experimental device for representing experience that humans have ever invented. Those people, like myself, have had too little interest in

and too little access to science, but the reverse is also true. Well, maybe. That's interesting. That the people who are doing, I mean, I hold us more responsible in the scientists. But I think that if you want to say reason informed by experience, the field of experience needs to be sufficiently subtle and broad. And it needs, from my perspective,

to include, well, let's say, King Lear as well as Kant. Yeah, sure. Homer as well as Benosa. That is to say, it has to have a sufficiently broad base for what human beings have done to represent. I think that, yeah, the experience of human understanding. and human attempts to understand is part of that. Oh, absolutely. I was going to get to this maybe, and I'm almost about to ask you, I should take it in a fascinating new area?

So it's interesting for me to try and jump to that. But I think that I want to talk about humanists, sort of what one might call humanism versus science, because there's a big debate, or at least not debate. There's a lot of people who say that scientists are somehow trying to usurp humanities, or, and I don't understand it. Because there's this argument,

this is word that's been invented called scientism. That you, I'm happy to see you shake your head because I'm amazed that people even, because it's meaningless. What scientists are saying is reality is all there is. And we need to try and use tools that help us understand reality. And literature is, you know,

I mean, is a beautiful way of doing the same thing, of sometimes not rationally, but emotionally, perhaps, but even, but trying to reflect on the realities we see to maybe get new insights, which may not be testable per se, but they are testable because if the novel is a success or whatever it is of the poem, then it means it resonates with other people. So you must have tapped into something that really does reflect. or reality other people experience. So you're experimenting when you're writing a novel, and it only is successful if somehow it, for other people,

represent something that they can sympathize with or that reflects some aspect of life as they wanted to be or maybe haven't wanted to be. So I think the point is that, but what I want to say in that regard is that I think that, you know, there is this two calls. that were discussed of science and literature and science and culture being separate. And most of my life has been devoted to trying to say there aren't two.

They're one. That science is part of our culture. But I think it's easier for scientists to argue that. I mean, I think more, I think, it's fair to be said that more scientists to read or think about issue, are willing to, because in our society you're called illiterate, first of all. No, no, I agree entirely with what you say. I think it is easier for scientists. It's easier not just because humanists are lazy, though they are.

So or scientists. But because really goes back to Galileo. Mathematics. That is say either you do or you don't do mathematics. If you don't do mathematics, if you don't do mathematics, where are you in relation to almost anything that's happened since the early 70th century. And at least those of us who are too old to go back to our undergraduate days need,

is people, and you are one of them, people who have figured out how to make accessible to those who are largely mathematically illiterate, what the stakes are, what's happened. When I wanted to bring together, biologists and particularly evolutionary biologists with literary people. Because again, I think this is an obvious place in which our interests

deeply. It's an origins project in a place. And so I brought together first in Berlin at the Vysenchaoskuleg and then here at Harvard at the Radcliffe Institute, a quite interesting group of biologists. Some of whom do experimental things with social wasps and lots of interesting things and literary people. And what did we do? We all collectively read Shakespeare play. We didn't all collectively read, I mean, we read a few things by also.

We tried to read some of the things that the biologists had done, but exactly on your principle, the one thing we could assume we could all do was read actually an extremely difficult, after all, literary object, but that somehow we assume that any educated person should be able to sit down and read. If you wanted to talk about, for example, old age and succession issues, we read King Lear. If you want to talk about reproduction, we might read The Winterstale and so forth. I mean, and we all collectively did that and then tried to bring our different perspectives to bear to try to see what kind of conversation.

And it was wonderful, actually. I loved it. It would be wonderful. But it was based on the notion that the scientists had might be. more access to what we do than we have to what the scientists do. Well, you know, it's, and it's, I think it's unfortunate. It's a shame because, you know, I think it, in the, in the turn of the beginning of the 20th century, I think the notion of literate literacy included some understanding of the ideas that were then current in science, to be able to talk about the metacroctal party or, or, or whatever.

And then science appears over the 20th century to become so much exponentially more sophisticated and difficult that a literate person need not, you don't feel you can succeed as quite literate without any fundamental appreciation. And I think the interesting thing is I've said to my students this that I think Galileo is easier to read and funnier than Joyce, okay? And he's certainly easier to read. Yeah. Funny or I don't know, but. Well, you know, he's, there's full of And it's sad to me that when people, that Galeo, for example, is probably not included in courses on world literature in some way. But the notions and his techniques of discussion and the ideas we're talking about are just as central to our understanding of ourselves as joy. You're absolutely right.

But what's sinister really about the division that you're talking about is in conjunction with technological advances in medicine and so forth and so on that are based on scientific work, it's quite possible for people to get the benefits of that. Without that any work. Not only without doing anything work, but holding on to the most bizarre and primitive ideas of the nature of the universe. science has this unfortunate thing is that it produces technology. It produces something of use. So most people, many people say, what's the use of doing this science if it doesn't produce a better toaster or better oven or extend my lifespan? But no one would argue that Shakespeare is useful, directly useful. Obviously, it's useful in the sense that you and I revere. But it doesn't it doesn't allow you to get from one place to another faster,

extend your lifespan or do anything else. And so we learn to appreciate literature and art and music just because they're products of the human brain. But no, that's science stuff. You have to be a scientist to appreciate it. And I think that it's that that is particularly unfortunate. And I think it's because somehow we've divorced the cultural aspect of science, is the same ideas that Lucretius and are raised in Adam and Eve and are raised in Shakespeare.

The same ideas of our, where do we come from, where are we going? The same thing that drives us all is what drives the intellectual aspect of science. Separated that from the technology and some of science has become something separate. And so, and you know, but I found this come to the fore, actually, in reading one of the later chapters of Adam and Eve where you bring up Darwin. Talk about in some ways how in the fall of Adam and Eve, there are two aspects of it. One is the scientific aspect, which is Darwin. The other is the intellectual aspect, and I hadn't known about Twain's work, Mark Witton, until I read your book.

But the arguments that he gives are just devastating, intellectually devastating. And early in this conversation at the very beginning, you asked, people surely must have realized this. And I wonder how many people realize some of the things that Twain brings up, but just were too afraid to say it. Well, I believe they might not have realized it in the form, and even what we mean by realize, they might not have had the thoughts in the same form that Twain does, probably not.

Or, I mean, in the case of Twain, you go back to the late 70th century where people start more or less leaving traces of their saying this. But I tend to believe that in matters of interpretation, of stories, for example, people always had access to this thought because they're human. Yeah, sure. So that the... Thoughts are free. It's quite significant to me that the earliest surviving trace of the story of Adam and Eve

are those Nag Hammadi codices dug up from the sand in Egypt and dating, still not dating anything like the origin of the story, but dating, let's say, from the first century of the common era. So those little books discuss the story of Adam and even they say that Satan is the hero, that a god who says that you shouldn't have knowledge must be the villain. So that means the thought was totally available 2,000 years ago that there's something disturbing about the story. On the other hand, they're buried beneath the sand for a reason. Yeah. Someone had to bury them. Yeah. So the process that you described was clearly already at work. 2000 years ago, which is not an acceptable thing to say.

But it was said, was thought, it's always available. Humans, plenty of humans are stupid, but not all humans are stupid. Yeah, yeah. And that means in almost any of these, the deepest things that creative artists have thought and left traces of, there's always been possible to, I think, think counter, to think at an angle, not to accept the dominant interpretation. I think that's why fiction's are valuable, because they exercise the human ability to move obliquely

in relation to the official account. Okay, that's fascinating because, of course, one imagines that, well, people have, many, everyone throughout history has asked the same profound questions. It's not everyone's given equally profound answers or at least follow their mind through that. And I wonder, you know, when you talked about the story of Adam and Eve being profound

in the philosophical and ethical issues it raises, which it is, I often wonder, I mean, again, as someone who, I remember when I was in high school taking English classes and often wondering, when I was analyzing this, and now that I've written books, I see it when people write about me, but analyzing these poems or stories

and just wondering, well, you know, maybe the person just wrote this down and these deep thoughts and the issues that we're raising when we try and deconstruct it or whatever is, are we imposing some profound aspect that really wasn't there? There's something that moves us.

And I'm wondering with Adam and Eastroy, which clearly raises these issues, but maybe because it evolved, over a long time, thousand years, perhaps, as you point out, in one way or another, the Adam of Eve story is so pervasive throughout early human writing or talking or storytelling. But do you think that those profound issues resided there or were they just, or was Adam and Eve just a simple way of explaining something that people just had no possibility of understanding at the time?

and let's just, let's just classify it and get it out of the way. I mean, you ask a question in effect that's about the nature of myth and all myths. I mean, would equally apply to Oedipus or to innumerable other myths that I believe and you believe don't have divine origin, that they were made up by people, and then they begin to circulate. if you're asking is every thought that's been had about Oedipus or about Adam and Eve already in the head of the first person who circulated that story? Of course not anymore.

It would be true of Shakespeare or Mozart or anyone else. I mean, but the human beings don't, our lives are at least in the traces that we leave behind and not limited to this particular moment or this particular identity and the fantasy that it should all be in the head of this single individual as a kind of quasi-theological fantasy. I mean, that it's, what happens is that, is that we survive as a species because we've developed cultures that keep circulating objects and the, but the, the fact that it didn't all happen in the head of the person who came up with us doesn't mean that the, the questions are, of course, not real, or even not that they're not in the story. It just, it has slightly

naive account of what it takes to create something or how much is conscious in what one does. It's not an accident in Shakespeare's case that he invented virtually nothing. He's always ripping somebody off. But the ripping off is the circulating of stories, the little salt story that the third daughter who says, I love you as much as salt, that goes back a tremendously long time. Shakespeare does a version of it in King Lee. So does that make the original story? Does that mean that it's less powerful?

Yes. Less profound? On the contrary, to me, the circulation actually is part of the profundity. And it goes back to something you said earlier about, you read these things and you realize that the same problems. Well, that's true, but it's true that we experience reading the works by dead people. often that if they matter at all to us, we think, oh my God, this person has written a letter directly to me. Yeah, yeah.

And that's part of the thrill of the survival of anything from the past that actually is reaching you powerfully. But it's much more complicated than that, as we know, if you actually look back and see how many changes that the thing has gone through to reach you and to still be accessible to you. And that those changes include, among other things, you know, things that look simple,

like how they've been translated or what kind of material that they're on. Where did you buy it at the bookstore? What do you mean at the bookstore? And so forth and so on. I mean, a whole set of transactions of institutional transactions is if you actually sit down and try to figure it out,

you're in a much, much more complicated set of exchanges with the past that add hundreds, thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of other human agents who've been able to add something, massage, something, transform something from this ancient record. Your chapter on Darwin and Adam Neve really resonated with me, not just because I'm a fan of Darwin, but because of something, there's two things. One, it reminded me of the whole Adam Neve story and the confrontation that, of course, modern evolution in terms of does to literally, to religion.

And I love the way Hitchens described the Adam and Eve story in some sense that we're born sick and commanded to be well, which is just the perfect, to me, the perfect utter contradiction that makes most of modern religion despicable, in my opinion. Is that what Hitchens?

Yeah. That's interesting because it's a quotation as Hitchens probably knew from a 17th century English poet named Fulke Greville, who was a Calvinist. Oh, weirsome condition of humanity, born under one law, to another bound,

created sick, commanded to be sound. Well, see, there you go. I'm sure, there's no doubt that Hitchens got that. Oh, well, that's lovely. I've learned something. Well, many things. But what you raised about Darwin that had never occurred to me,

what we received from our forebearers is not chastisements, but living traces of success. namely the Bible is all about the fact that what our lives are, we suffer because of the sins of our ancient, you know, ancestors, particularly Adam and Eve and forever will be, will be in sin. But rather, we're here because of the successes of our ancestors, that we're only here because a whole series of unremarkable and improbable survival of success or generations that made it to us. We're the products of success, not failure.

Yes. And that, but the notion that's, that idea would confront Adam and Eve, I found to be fascinating. Yes. It, particularly confront Adam and Eve as interpreted by the Christians. I mean, because the, especially Augustinian Christians, because the story itself doesn't necessarily altogether imply that we're the inheritors of this disaster's past. You could say that it does already from what we read in the Bible,

but the rabbis never quite went there, and nor did the mullahs. So neither of Judaism or Islam is haunted by this, at least centrally haunted by this idea of an inheritance. But because Christianity, after Augustine, embraced the idea that, there's something fundamentally wrong with us. After all, a perfectly reasonable presumption, given how we behave, that there has to be something other than just following bad examples. We must be bad, as it were, intrinsically built in something off about us and tried to figure out how that could be transmitted.

And Augustine came up with the idea that it was transmitted sexually. In fact, it's the first thing to say is it's just not, It's important to understand this not just as a sort of coarse or crude idea, but it's actually quite deep set of attempts to understand why we fuck up the way we do constantly. Generation after generation. And that there has to be some explanation that's built, inbuilt. And then how far would you go back? Would you go back to the very beginning and try to look at that story and so forth?

So the notion that we are the result of successful adaptations is shocking in relation to that perfectly, it's a very deep account. Sure. It's not childish account, deep account of what our woes, the origin of our woes would be. And then it also was, there are a whole set of things, of course, in Darwin, including simply the question of what to deal, how to deal with time. the enormous extent of time that this takes place. It remains actually tremendously tricky to get one's head around. Oh, yeah, it's totally non-intuitive. You know, a thousand years is hard to grasp, much less.

And yeah, that's the central problem of the confrontation of evolution in modern society is the notion of long, long time, which some people get around by saying there isn't long, long time, and therefore evolution has to be wrong. But the interesting thing is, as you speak, that, of course, that negative, that primordial flaw in us is also in some ways built into Darwinian selection in the sense that we retain so many things, so many vestiges of evolution that are not particularly useful or productive or good. No, absolutely. Why else do we eat McDonald's? Yeah. Why do we breathe and eat even through the same? the same place, and there's so many things we could go through, including xenophobia.

We had a meeting and a public event origins on xenophobia. Xenophobia actually is useful at some level. Us versus them is useful at a cellular level. But at a certain point, it becomes counterproductive. Yes, well, as you know, I'm in having with the book, that I end in Uganda, where I went to look at chimpanzees to see what our origin, actually in some as close as we can see them. They're not descended from chimpanzees,

but we think that they're closer to our the last common ancestor. But chimpanzees live together in what looks like an incredibly sweet life of, I mean, not sweet for the ones who are being beaten up by the alpha male, but otherwise, perfectly, when I saw them, they were grooming each other, taking care of each other, taking care of their babies living,

I mean, it looked like the peaceable case kingdom. But if a chimpanzee from another group gets anywhere near, torn apart, they go crazy, they start screaming, they get diarrhea, they go wild, and if they catch them, they tear them apart. They literally tear them apart. I mean, they're vicious and violent. I mean, we've, people often, we've talked about, but we're part bonobo, part chimpanzee, and we could go into that. But by the way, just as an aside, a lot of people say the same thing about science fiction, by the way, that it gives an opportunity to make politically acceptable comments about that really reflect today. I mean, the first interracial kiss on TV was in Star Trek because it was a,

I mean, that it gives you, by inventing an imaginary world, you can, you can show the foibles of our world in a way which is much more acceptable. Makes sense. Yeah, yeah. But the one thing I wanted to, I mean, we don't have enough time to do justice to tyrant, but, but the thing that I found most interesting was almost the same question we began our conversation with. Why did it take so long? Or would it of how did it take so long to overcome the dark ages? The interesting question that you talk about, at least that I got initially out of the discussion in Tyrant, is the question that one is saying in Shakespeare and other places, people are reflecting, how can people, what is it that allows people to buy into someone

who's clearly going to hurt them, who's clearly lying to them, who's clearly boasting, and how can they, what are the process? is by which they allowed themselves to be tyrannized. And that's fascinating about Shakespeare. And I wonder, and the question I want to... Shakespeare has a phrase for it. I mean, voluntary bondsman to be a voluntary servant, to do this, to be, why would anyone be a voluntary bondsman?

Exactly. But we do, and it happens. And it seems to happen over and over again in human history. And the question, and so when we are living in a time when clearly we, we, I think it's fair to say that we're the most tyrannical of sorts leader has been brought in, clearly with many, doing many of the things that ideologues and that demagogues have, have more demagogue than ideologue because you don't think he has any ideals. But throughout history, the question I want to ask is, why did it take so long in some sense?

If you look at writers of at least America, from Oakville to, for me, Sinclair Lewis is the, is the from it can't happen here, and Elberghantri, they all anticipated exactly what we're seeing today. The writers, as good writers do, anticipate those things. In some sense, is it surprising to you that has taken so long? It's not surprising to me that it's taken so long because we had a set of both institutional structures and norms that seem to inhibit it, I would have said, so that we had, as a political culture, certain expectations, the envelope was pushed on various occasions as to how people could behave. But we assume what often happens, we assume that those norms are solid and will hold. And then you're astonished when they don't. So, but they seem to be, for a long time, they seem to be written in stone. And likewise, we have a series of institutional, really, because of the

of the founders. We have a series of checks and balances that seemed to keep separation among three parts of government sufficient to restrain these developments. But over the last, you know, it was a slow process, but it takes a while to break down those separations. And then you get, you're right that, of course, the fact that, at least in Shakespeare's account, this happens because there are a series of an age. that will, it's never the single individual, the tyrant who succeeds. It's a whole structure of enablers who think they're going to get something from this. Sometimes they do, often they don't, often they get screwed.

But there are people who think that it's in their interest. But that's always been the case, you're right. There's always, I mean, people do what they think is in their interest. But the very brilliant people who, I think, they were flawed, they were horribly flawed, and keeping slavery at the beginning, but the people who set up the institutional structure accounted for this because they had had experience of tyranny directly. So they wanted to get out from this,

and they figured out how to impede it. But impeding it doesn't mean prevent it. And the norms are a perfect example. You know, some things are norms, some things we just are mistakes. I thought we had habeas corpus that would keep us from being taken to stuck, in a prison and never put on trial, but evidently not. I thought, really?

Yeah. But evidently not. Well, I thought we had norms that said that if someone was, leader was caught serially lying, that he would actually lose power. No, evidently not. I think that's the key point, that last one, is it seems to me what we've learned is that we are as susceptible to people who can lie. openly and unabashedly and continually in spite of evidence.

You know, it reminds me of getting back to a little bit of science that the amazing Randy, who is a magician who's wonderful in the sense that he's exposed many charlatans demonstrated the problem with scientists is they assume people are telling them the truth. The inherent success of science works by assuming scientific researchers aren't lying. When they do, it causes big problems and there's long, because you, assume when someone's reporting on something there, and he sent some of his protégés into an experiment looking for ESP. And he said, if anyone asked you, are you lying or are you doing tricks?

Say, yes, yeah, I am, I am. And of course, they were the two people that were discovered to have these properties because the scientists assumed they were people of goodwill. And in some ways, in spite of the fact that the system is built on checks and balances, there's this presumption of goodwill. and someone who can lie effectively somehow defeats the system. And I don't know to what, maybe in a future discussion we can have to what extent that lying is an aspect of, or deceit is an aspect of Shakespeare's tyrannies.

Well, Shakespeare did think precisely that. I mean, deeply, deeply, deeply, that is to say, Shakespeare thought, evidently thought that there was a relation, a disturbing relation between, I mean, he was in the business between passing fictions off on people as truths, manipulating their capacity to believe, tricking them into accepting illusions as reality, and what he was doing professionally. That's say that's what Yago does. That's what Anthony and Antointe Cliapatra does.

I mean, there's a whole series of characters in Shakespeare, terrifying characters who do what. Playwrights do. Well, look, you know, I knew this would happen. I could talk to you all day long, and it's just, it's the same feast for my mind as when I read, and I just can't thank you enough for spending the time. The thanks of mine. Thank you.

The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, Gus and Luke Holwerta, and Rob Zeps. Audio by Thomas Amison, edited by Evan Diamond, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.