-- she take sadistic or. he has powerful friends. one of whom is steven field. steven field would be the longest-serving supreme court justice, u.s. supreme court, and steven field stays at the palace hotel ian ralston had built. he stays there, and he advises sharon to sue in federal court. well, sharon can do that because he claimed that he the citizens of nevada. so now it's nevada versus california, so could be a federal issue in that era, and so he does. he countersues against center you. it's a scandal of the century.

you can imagine an ex-senator, an older gentleman, she is young and beautiful, and it's going to go to trial. and it does, and it's a scandalous trial. there are voodoo us who testified that they have helped sarah hill, the once testifying for sharon are saying yet, she was trying to gain his heart so had her do whatever. in her defense though, they would say yes, she did that stuff but she was doing it to hang onto her husband. so the trial was really a crazy circus of an affair. in the end she is going to win at the state level, she will be granted a divorce. well, at that point she marries david terry, her attorney.

but now it goes to the federal court, and steven field, the supreme court justice is the circuit judge out here, he comes out and goes all the way to him. he wants a contract and those letters. he said -- there've been testimony at the state trial, some experts had said oh, they are forgery. others have said they are authentic. it depends on who they were testifying for. now he, field, is saying they are forgeries and i want them. when he says that in court, sarah hill, who was a feisty woman, she stands up and says, how much are they paying you? how much other sharon people paying you to make this decision? field will find for the sharon family, but none of this matters to sharon because he had died a couple years earlier.

he died after the state court decision, and he will say on his deathbed that court case was a dagger in his heart. >> what is william sharon's legacy here in the comstock and the state of nevada? >> you know, it's not as great as you would imagine, for all that he did. the railroad is probably his outstanding legacy. they are running again from carson city up here, and so they will talk about william sharon some. there's a building in town called the sharon house, but there's way more stuff named for william ralston, for example. he is not as renowned as you would have thought. >> when did you first hear about william sharon? >> you know, i have read a lot of western history and always when you read history about the comstock, there's something about william sharon that it would only be a few lines or a

paragraph. so i was intrigued to find out why. and i believe the reason, the book i write, the first one about william sharon and get all these great things, but he really was a bill into an awful lot of people and i think that's what no one picked up this story before this. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to carson city, nevada, and the many other cities visited by our local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/localcontent. >> next, curtis white argues that authors like jonah lehrer, richard dawkins, and christopher hitchens are misguided in the faith that science will eventually provide all the answers we have regarding the nature of human beings in the physical world. he says that the religion versus science debate that's left of the role that philosophy, art and culture have historically played in shaping the way we

understand the world. during this event hosted by melville house mr. whip is in conversation with lewis lapham, former editor of harper's magazine and current editor of lapham's quarterly. this is an hour. >> well kaw included a ride over to curtis. i'm a longtime admirer of curtis white. he is now on the editorial advisory board of the quarterly, and i turned to him for wisdom, and darkness, which often comes over me. and i'm going to let him begin by explaining, wanting to talk as much as possible. so if you can set up the premise of the book and then i have a few stray questions that i will ask you if silence falls. >> well, from what i can tell so far, one of the things that people out there, whoever they

are, readers, journalists, want to know is why i decided to write this book. now, i'm a novelist and not a science writer. and the answer to that question is familiar for me but curious probably for everybody else. >> i just had to turn it off, sorry. [laughter] >> as has happened more than once in my writing lifetime, i was driving in the car, listening to npr, and i just happened to hear, -- [inaudible] for those of you who know my book "the middle mind" you know i have a certain attitude towards rush era, and they were interviewing jonah lehrer this book to just come out, imagine

how creativity works. and as i drove along i was doing a low boil as lehrer explained how creativity was basically the mechanical function or even a chemical function of the brain, a drop of oxycontin for whatever was he was saying here, and out comes the idea. the other thing i was quite surprised at was how little resistance he seemed to get from our into your. and basically the interviewer's attitude was how interesting. how interesting that is. but for me it was sort of the big lebowski moment where i was saying, this aggression will not stand, man. you know that famous line from the big lake oust the -- the big

lebowski. usually underreport as a writer as sort of being told or given ideas for what to write and a really a very dependent on these big lebowski moment. psych out the book i started thinking about, you know, what it amounted to. it sort of grew over time to become and much broader kind of critique of scientific and technical rationality in the united states. and it's important social applications. this book, "the science delusion," has many moving parts. and so i thought that it would be good for all of us, but especially good for me, if i, rather than try to explain it by the city my pants, if i simply read from the introduction which

is very short but we will give it some common ground to proceed into the evening. so if you'll bear with me, one of the most astonishing spectacles off popular intellectual culture in the first decades of the 21st century has been the confused alarms of struggle inside writing from the classics evangelical and the scientist. at the very moment that the neocons make the child might of mythologies of the christian right's the defining ideology of the republican party, scientific produce a series of triumphal books for punditry of science and reason over religion. the commercial success of these works led by richard dawkins, christopher hitchens, god is not great, alex rosenberg, the atheist guide to reality, sam harris, the moral landscape and, of course, bill morris lethal dose, the movie, is a phenomenon

as the book world likes to say but in any case it is clear that the stores these writers have to tell is one that are very powerful part of our culture once told and emphatically so. more recently a separate series of extraordinarily successful books, lectures and articles have appeared concerning the events that of scientific knowledge about the human brain, that works and how possesses the mystifying capacities that until now we have called consciousness and creativity. i will be focusing on three science writers, besides journalists jonah lehrer and the neuroscientists antonio. these writers are i think the typical representative of the fields but their work is just a sliver of the total outlay. each winner of scientists and their allies among the advocates of artificial intelligence, the literature explaining the brain's wiring is vast and technically intimidating.

unlike those scientists and critics at war with religion, it is much less clear that these writers have an antagonist or are part of our culture wars, but it is obvious that neuroscientists are trying to explain phenomena that until a few decades ago were thought to be in the domain of philosophy, the arts and the humanities. the surprising thing is how much interest and enthusiasm neuroscientists and their advocates have generated in the media, and among readers. for example, until his unfortunate fall from grace, lehrer imagine how creativity works was a bestseller him and sebastian lecture on the -- has had over half a million views. there have been a few critiques of his work from academic philosophers like thomas nagel and alfred, but there's been nothing remotely like popular response under a scientists on the humanity.

shouldn't there be voice is as prominent as lehrer's asking very different questions? are we really just a percolating as philosopher of science alex rosenberg believes? are we just matter of bang laws of physics? in our emotional lives, have we been for all assigned nothing better than the lover of eta hoffmann, the sandman, who falls in love with olympia, a subjective piece of clockwork? for all the centuries have our soulmates, as notre dame linebacker called electronically simulated girlfriend, mere congeries of wire and chemical? are our best ideas, are our ideas best understood as jean like means for which the most important consideration is not truth, but adaptive sickness and? is the best way to understand

our social behavior by tagging it to genes the selfish genes, the violent genes, the compassion gene, the romance jean? these are real things by the way. google them. or real claims. most importantly whether there's news sciences are correct about all this or not, what are the social and political consequences of believing that they're correct, or nearly so? so i would like to ask in his interest do these signs upon pillars and provocative is right, and to what end? they would like us to think that they're only interested in establishment of knows but what i will suggest is that the claims are based upon an assumption many of which are dubious if not outright deluded and that the kind of political culture their delusion supports is lamentable. eisai lamentable because it is too late to say dangers. but it's already here and well established. one thing that can be safe is

that these ideas are not entirely new, nevermind the fact that they are the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. the truth is that the fundamental assumptions of modern scientific culture are part of the ideological baggage of the enlightenment. in his famous lectures on the roots of romanticism, isaiah berlin express that ideology in this way, the view is that there's a nature of things such that if you know this nation and no yourself in relationship to this nature and understand relationship between everything that composes the universe, then your goal as with the facts about yourself must become clear to you. about all these things, disagreement may occur but that there is such knowledge, that is the foundation of the entire western civilization. the view is that of a jigsaw puzzle of which we must fit into fragments of the secret treasure which we must seek, the essence of this view is that there is a body of fact to which we must

submit. science is submission to science is being guided by the nature of things. screwed with regard for what there is, non-deviation from the fact understanding knowledge, adaptation. my claim in this book is that the message of nurse i advocates is much the same as that of the so-called new atheists commented to should be should be considered together. the new atheists become on behalf of science just as they have no scientist do and the message of both camps is this myth. it is not only true evangelicals, it is also sent to another historical adversary arts, philosophy, and the humanities. they are the directive goes something more like this. the human mind and human creations are not the consequence of something called the will or inspiration or communion with news or diamond,

least of all our they -- all that is nebulous. it is the weak minded religion of the poets. the human mind is a machine of flesh, neurons and chemicals. daniel calls it moist robots. you know, sometimes i think that scientists don't see their own sense of humor, but i don't think he's kidding. with enough money and consuming power, the jigsaw puzzle of the brain will be completed and we will know what we are and how we should act. the problem is to know just who it is that continue to believe and repel this enlightenment story. this is what signs and such banks, or is it just what "popular science" thinks? or excessive and abuse of science by people with social and political agenda. i think the varying and a noble

degrees it is all three. it is certainly historically what most scientists and heart of hearts have thought and still thing. is usually the fundamental assumption of "popular science," and it certainly and abuse of the real value of science as one of the great ongoing human endeavors. it is in its essence science ideology, or scientism as it is often called. unfortunately, scientism takes is to go to place in the broader ideology of social relation, economic exportation, environmental destruction and conceptual militarism. that for lack of a better word we still called capitalism. how the ideology of science measures with the broader ideology of capitalism will be consistent interest of my investigations year. the only remaining question is to what degree western culture are so meaningful part of that

culture can free itself from the delusions, so they are dilutions, which the ideology of science's face. and signs of resources to propose an alternative narrative about what it means to be human. i hope to show that many of those resources are to be found in the poorly understood tradition of romanticism. it was that nebulous movement the first challenged sciences jigsaw view of the world, and yet on what grounds it did so in the name of what contrary idea of nature and humanity it acted, all that is mostly lost to us now. the romantic tradition certain has none of the public presence that science and rationalism presently enjoy. they cannot organize equivalent of richard dawkins, reason rally, a 20,000 atheists in front of the washington monument. my more modest hope is to begin a process of remembering some part of the worthy movement of artists, philosophers, and yes, social revolutionaries in order

to see just what they might have to say to us now. i hope you will find that they can still speak very powerfully to us. >> welcome that should be clear enough, but maybe you can begin, let's take down, you know, continue with the lebowski moment and take down some of the sides and then take down what you call a disgraceful book by hitchens in god is not great. >> and intellectually shameful book i think. >> but one of the ways that you approach the dilution of science, let me read two sentences of your own. physics made written in the language of mathematics but it is a very different thing to say that nature is written in the language. physics is dependent upon mathematics but mathematics is not a science.

math validity cannot be tested. in fact, mathematics has no relation to experience at all. be made equal in to score but that does not mean we know what e is. that to my mind extremely pertinent and correct takedown of the people whom i can't bear the so go on about that. i'm, explain why -- >> well, i think you are touching on the heart of science as an ideology. and that goes back to what is essentially the galilean perspective on things. which is very close to what berlin calls the jigsaw puzzle approach. in other words, galileo helped to things. one, that ultimately everything was explicable.

and, too, that reality, that mathematics was adequate to all of reality. so that's sort of the starting point for a description of the ideology of science. beyond that, you can also say that a sort of fundamental dogma of science is this simple idea that there are objects, there are objects and those objects are related to each other mechanically. and that makes it possible for a complete and mathematical descriptive of the world. of course, what is left out of that account and what is underestimated by the galilean point of view is the fact that in order to have these objects

one must have an observer. so we are very from it with einstein's theory of relativity which argues that, you know, that time can vary depending upon where the observer is. whether it is the observer is traveling a something close to the speed of light, time will slow down, right? but what the einstein tradition is interested in because the question, was an observer? in other words, science presupposes the existence of an observing subject in order to do its story, and it's not curious about just exactly what we mean by an observing subject. of course a lot of 19th century philosophy was very, including the romances, were very interested in what it meant to be a subject, what it meant, and unicode what it meant to be in relationship to a world.

and one of the primary discoveries of the tradition and 19th century philosophy was of course that you never seem to be able to get back to a pure consciousness. there's always something contaminating you. and that contaminant for them, although you can use the word in a pejorative sense, was that contaminant for them was language, or the symbolic. so from the point of view of many of the artists and philosophies that talk about in the book, it's critical to understand that our relationship to the real is always mediated in one way or another. no matter how thin that distance between itself and its world is

it's always there. and that needs to be explained. that needs to be taken into account. but it is something that most scientists, especially of the ideological swords, are very impatient with. they don't want to talk to how the i's custody, what it means to be an observer. they want to be able to say like dr. johnson famously did, does the world exist? i say it does. so that's, you know, that's, that sort of gesture for them cuts through the malarkey of having to think through the function of language and the subject. but to me when science behaves in that way or things in that way it is guilty of thoughtlessness. it's obvious to me at least that it's important to be able to account for what it means to be an observer of

language and observation is, what the role of symbolic systems and observation is. because with no, this goes back to the philosopher emmanuel todd. he called the thing in itself unknowable. right? so what we have instead of the thing itself was -- the only way we knew how to make sense of experience for kant was through what he felt were a prioritized structures of language and mathematics. that's the only way we know how to make sense of the experience and i go so far in the book as to say that, you know, this universe that scientists are so interested in is the creation. it's not present at all without

the presence of language bears or symbol bears. the universe exist because of language, as a philosopher second language is the house of being but anabolic been very persuaded by something like that point of view. >> the point is that the it is and the i am is a joint venture. venture. >> exactly. >> the world is something that we find but we also invented. >> exactly. >> the mathematics is a very poor language. i mean, it's not like poetry, pure and simple. you talk about between faith on one hand and reasons on the other hand. and then you suggest a third motive operand i, which is home

all analogous, the making of metaphor, the making of symbol. and man is the maker of symbols and the maker of language. and reality in which we all live is each and every one of us is again a joint project of what is there and reflect the heisenberg principle. everything that is so wonderful about your book is that not only do you show the dilution of the scientists who think that some of that mathematics is a science, but then like hitchens and dawkins who have this ideology of the oxley don't know anything about religion. i mean, and they assume that human decency is any.

they assume that the reason is defined, but they offer no proof of that and they cannot say what reason is. so talk about that, too, because -- and then, you know, take apart the scientific wisdom, take apart the dilution on the part of the people like hitchens. and then get the german romanticism and where you are finding the -- i was not fully with, i love this book, okay, because i am a romantic -- [laughter] get us back, do a little bit on the hitchens reasons crowd and then get back to german romantics. >> right.

i think one of the saddest things i discovered in writing this book was just how woefully ignorant the new atheists are of the history of religion. i mean, i'm an atheist myself, if they been a this means not to believe in sort of a ceo god that sources out there beyond things and twiddles his thumbs, two thumbs, we hope. i have been a student, i've been a student of theology and religion and i find it really fascinating. and it's fascinating as a human document, as a metaphorical document. but there's no evidence that

hitchens, or dawkins, know anything about it. in other words, the gospels do not speak with one voice. they come from very different intellectual world. one jewish, one is not to the book of john is not fixed, and, of course, paul is them of course he wasn't one of the gospel writers, but paul is his own creature. ..

>> more over, they seem to have no interest in the romantic or existential secularizing of the christian traditions and christian theology in the works, for example, of some of the german idealists like kirkegaard's famous works that were criticisms of christiandom, as we called it. that just seems to me completely absent. and what seems to me to be sad about that a is not simply that they were willing to be so intellectually dishonest about what they were doing, but that

the culture is such or at least a part of the culture as such was so enthusiastic about the condemnation of christianity. because what that implied to me is that nobody seems to know these stories anymore. and so we're willing to take what is, essentially, propaganda, you know, ideology in the raw sort of sense to heart as their own position, you know? gather with richard dawkins in front of the washington monument. >> but they're so late in arriving. i mean, when these thoughts, these ideas were dangerous in the 17th and 18th centuries. >> right. >> i mean, they're clip jobs on voltaire and mark twain and robert ingersoll. i mean, it's pathetic. >> yeah. hitchens in particular i just -- other than to say he was an utterly dishonest person, i

can't understand how he didn't know that stuff and why he didn't feel responsible for, you know, providing it in his work. >> well, he was -- i knew christopher and liked him, but he was a softist. >> you probably drank scotch with him, right? >> i did. [laughter] he could drink more of it than i could, though, but he was the washington correspondent for harvest magazine for a while. a brilliant polemicist and softist, but he was very good about making the argument where the money was. so as you say, i mean, that retreading of the discovery that god is not great which was old news -- >> right. >> -- but that it was, it sold. all right. talk about the, talk about the german -- no, you have a

wonderful passage in the book where you're talking about metaphor, and you talk about your parents. and you say that parents don't do metaphor. now, explain that and explain why human beings do metaphor and so that the human being is the only creature that can say what it's like to be a parrot. >> right. >> you see? >> this was a brief aside in the book in which i take issue with the philosopher thomas nagel's famous issue called on what it's like to be a bat. and he argues essentially that there must be something that it's like to be a bat, and the problem for philosophy and the problem for science is to find out what it's like to be a bat. and my reply to that was, you know, using my pet parrots as an

example as i often do for anything -- [laughter] is that for my parrots it's like nothing finish -- nothing is like being a parrot, they're simply a parrot. and they're very good at being a parrot. and i have this one little footnote that i put in there just because i can't entirely suppress my comic vein in which i claim to have asked one of my pet parrots what she was like, and she said good girl. [laughter] to which i said, i replied, that made me think that, you know, parrots didn't have any idea what they were like because -- [laughter] she's the farthest thing from a good girl. [laughter] we actually call her, her name is albertine, but we call her teeny, and we call her teeny one too many, one too many birds.

>> all right. now, let's take the other idea or one of the other ideas -- this book, by the way, is magnificently rich with ideas. you can go in all kinds of directions. but in the introduction you read, you talked about scientific as the -- [inaudible] capitalism x. the language of numbers, the human being as product, as code and the strength of your romanticism is in language, it's in poetry. and let me read you something and ask you to comment on it along those same lines, all right? this is the essay of george steiner. he's talking about the loss of language that has happened to us over the last, you know, 50 odd years with the incoming of the television media, internet.

the true catastrophe of babble is not the scattering of tongues, it is the reduction of human speech to a handful of planetary, multi-national tongues. anglo american standardized vocabularies, grammar shaped by military technocratic megalow mania and the imperatives of greed which is the voice of money talking of money in the voice that toni morrison, when she accepted the nobel prize in literature in 1993, denominated as the language that creates blood -- that drinks blood. happy to admire its own paralysis, possessed of no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of narcotic and narcissism. dumb, predatory, sentimental. exciting reverence in school children, providing a shelter for despots. language designed to preserve privilege and that, to me, is

the language of scientists. and talk about capitalism. talk about the barbaric heart, another one of your books, and connect the ideology of scientism with the capitalist devouring of the earth. >> right. one of the constant means, if you will, of scientism is the idea that we're machines, that we're like computers. if we want to talk about the brain, we have to talk about its wiring. and this is not only, you know, false on the face of it, there is actually no evidence that the brain is like this. they are using a metaphor. the brain is far more dynamic and changeable than, you know, wiring will allow.

this assumption has been one of the things that most of the books on neuroscience has been most insistent about and most consistent about. and the ideological function of that idea is, i think, pretty clear. for example, in relation to the sort of creativity in general lehrer's book -- in jonah lehrer's book, there's this idea that if the same part of the brain lights up when beethoven writes a symphony or bob dylan writes a song and when somebody comes up with a logo for a tennis shoe, if same part of the brain lights up, they must be the same. because wouldn't it be elitist for us to say that, no, dylan -- that part of dylan's brain lights up, it must be in some

sense better than that part of the brain when it lights up for the i heart new york insip bid thing that you must live with every day? so what that allows, that sort of slight of hand, what it allows lehrer to do is to move creativity without denying -- it allows him to move creativity almost seamlessly into the workplace. so, for example, i cite the ge motto at present is imagination at work. which i point out is rhetorically identical to -- [speaking german] work makes you free, but it also makes you creative, apparently. free, creative, whichever. and so that seems to me to be a really powerful and troubling ideological consequence of

thinking that you're a machine. so the more they can convince you that you are like a machine, the tendency would be that you will be more likely to accept the idea that you should accept a position and a role and a function within your society that is as much machine like as that society can make it. so we have very, you know, we have very limited roles, job and jobs -- jobs that we are obliged to claim as our own. >> yeah. i mean, that's division of charlie chaplin. >> exactly. >> it's also simon -- >> modern times. >> yeah, it's modern times. we live in a world where it's the machine that thinks and the man that does the function of the machine. >> yeah. these are not themes that are new, but they are sort of sadly out of the way right now. >> no, no, they've been suppressed. and you're here to revive them. >> i'm trying. [laughter]

>> okay. >> in my own little way. >> talk about art. i mean, the end of the 18th century, 19th century romanticism, it is in art that -- and particularly in music -- >> right. >> -- that the, you know, you can quote. >> laying l, all those wonderful people, but what do you mean by the human being reaching the height of philosophy through art rather than through mathematics? >> right. you know, i talk a hot about romanticism in the book, and one of the things i try to do is to redefine it -- >> yeah, because it's got a -- now it's a dirty word, right? >> right. oh, he's just a romantic. it's a pejorative. and most people associate the idea of row romanticism with sof

walks in the woods and, you know, read a poem while you're out there and get inspired by a waterfall. [laughter] that is actually a really lazy way of thinking about romanticism and a gross stereotype. the roots of romanticism are really in german philosophy with, and i take great pains to make accessible for nonprofessional realizers the philosophy -- readers the philosophy of shiller and friedrich shelling. shiller in particular is the touchstone for romanticism in general, as i understand it. and the primary thing is not nature mysticism for shiller, it's anything but that. he didn't even like nature. say, well, you can go out and see a flower. fine. it was alienation. that's how we should think about

romanticism. it's a philosophy that starts with the idea of alienation, of feeling that you're not part of your own world. now, shiller blames this alienation on what he calls the misery of culture, and i would say that in the present the ideology of science is substantially responsible for the misery of culture. >> and that reinforces it, right? yeah. it's the defender of the misery. >> you're right. work in this country, the nature of work. the bright parking lot in shiller -- part in shiller is his idea that the romantics as artists, their primary responsibility, their primary chore as artists was to, you know, refuse the world as it was and the roles in that world that had been provided for them as

people -- people liker like wordsworth. and move into art for the purpose of creating an alternative world and for the purposes of self-creation. so if they didn't like the limited roles that the culture had provided for them, they would invent their own roles. so the idea of the genius or the poet are really new roles for people to inhabit just as the beatnik was, just as the bohemian was, just as the dandy was. all of those new kinds of roles for human beings to inhabit as a way of fleeing the roles that the dominant culture had provided for them. so that's a very different way of thinking about the function of romanticism, and it allows us to think that romanticism is not something that existed merely in a very limited kind of age, you know, period at the end of the

18th and beginning of the 19th century, but it's something that has never stopped functioning because we've always had artists who have -- there have always been art movements in the west in which, which were primarily identified with a certain kind of dissidence through the creation of art discourt. one of my favorite philosophers says that all art is real governed deformation. and if it's not deforming, it's not art. and the reason for that deformation is not a joy in the ugly or something like that, it's a desire to be free of a dominant culture. >> let me read again one of your sentences on precisely this point. for the romantic, the most desirable society is not one organized for the benefit of the nobility or the church or

capitalism or even science and reason, but one that maximizes the tolerance for play. art is play. the spirit is play. >> right. >> freedom is play. >> right. >> and the -- i'm totally in agreement with that statement. >> right. >> but you can go on about it. >> i, in the preparing to write this book, i read a lot of the early primary texts, you know, in german philosophy and english romanticism, and i was stunned by how often the word "play" was evoked as a primary ethic. for the romantics nature was playful. nature was dynamic. nature was always sort of rolling the dice as, you know, einstein famously said. god did not roll the dice. well, nature does. it certainly does. and play then became kind of an

ethic for the romantics, and the most desirable human society was one where people were freest to create their own world, to create their own roles within that world. that was the sort of ethical principle that moved the romantics most. and i was really surprised at how often i found that word play in their texts. and it's taken up by coal ridge because coal ridge, of course, was the one who brought german idealism and by the great romantic poets of the period. >> it's also in mccluhan. he's got a long riff on the object of life being play. what kind of time are we -- we're now an hour. >> i think i see the interview --

[inaudible] >> [inaudible] >> okay, questions. >> yeah, let's just go to questions. i think we've got all the things out that we wanted to get out. >> [inaudible] and science itself is probably [inaudible] i apologize, i haven't read the book yet. i'm sure you're familiar with his book, wrote a book called "against method," where he argues that anything that has a sort of rigorous formulation is not true science. everything that was called science before that point was overturned by the work that galileo did and, you know, similar things happened with einstein. and i was wondering if you had anything -- [inaudible] on the idea that science itself may be an antarctic process

rather than one that follows the rules. >> i do talk about that at some length. in other words, the randomness that functions within science proper. this is not an anti-science book. i like science. i love reading science books, you know? one of the great pleasures of retirement for me was that i finally got to from my university gig was finally being able to read the shelf of books about science that -- the history of science, books about spring theory, super symmetry, all this stuff which i find -- who knows if string theory is true. it is absolutely an antiempirical kind of theory. but it's, for me, a delightful story. and i think one of the things that sort of, that science as a community but certainly the science ideologieses don't

understand is that they're telling a story too. certainly, the idea that everything is -- that there is no such thing as nature, this is an ecosystem, right? that everything is systematized, that's a story. and the problem, i think, becomes when a culture begins to believe that story. but science is such, it has always been dependent upon, you know, what, what's his name -- somebody. [laughter] >> you actually say in the book that science is happiest when it's overturning. >> yeah. >> it's that old -- >> right. i mean, that's much to science's credit. i mean, if science gets most excited when it's turning over what it already had established and knew, that's much to scientists' credit. and i think that's a form of play. the thing that's disturbing is how much science eyedologists

want to dismiss philosophy from the room. they want to say it's dead, you can't learn anything from it, and i have extensive quotes in the book about this, or that it's for entertainment only. so they don't really believe that art thinks, but that is a fundamental function of art, to think. >> george steiner has a book, and he analyzes the prose of important thinkers, materialist thinkers. do you think part of the problem with lehrer and gladwell and people like that is just the paucity of their very language? do you think if they were writing more complexly, they would just have more room for and allowance for metaphor in there? >> i think they would need a brain transplant. [laughter]

frankly. or a very additional drug than the -- a very different drug than the one they're taking. yeah. it's hard to imagine. they seem, you know, i mean, they're idealogues. they're doing what they want to do, which is to push a certain point of view. because for some reason today think it's in their interest to do that. scientists like dawkins are very jealous of the idea, as is lawrence krause, the cosmologist, very jealous of the idea that science has a privileged perspective on what will count as fact or truth. but in dawes' phrase, for me, they are purveyors of truth. they are truth pimps. [laughter] >> you've been reduced to an

awed silence. [laughter] >> everyone agrees. that's what i take it to mean. >> one of my favorite passages in the book is where you talk about the crazy fox, is -- crazy fucks is the word you use. sort of having their labor alienateed. can you e elaborate on that? >> well, for example, silicon valley is most famous for it, but by claiming a certain kind of hippie genealogy and bringing everybody in with their skateboards and their tattoos and their nose piercings or whatever. but the sort of that -- i call that a fake bohemian geek culture. so the silicon valley and that kind of capitalism, you know,

the new creative economy is sort of knowingly manipulating the idea of dissidence that is part of the romantic tradition by putting it to work for very, you know, commodified, capitalist purposes. and there's a quote, there's a long quote in there that uses words that we can't have on c-span in all likelihood in which i'll use the word dude, that isn't the word that they use. this one guy who was, you know, employing what he called weird dudes -- [laughter] in his madison avenue company, you know? makes no bones about it, he says, you know, we can't have all these straight guys guys ano advertising. we need creative types. so we bring in these weird dudes, and we milk them of their weirdness, and after a couple of years we bring in a couple more

weird dudes. so there's not real respect for that, you know, that appearance of the counterculture. it's a very fraudulent appearance. >> well, yeah. in large part, also, the sort of flower children of the '60s were an invention of the media in order to sell clothes. [laughter] i mean, if you look it up, you'll see that's the way it worked. >> [inaudible] another round as well. when you were talking about, and i respect that you're not calling out science or really any of the scientific, the advances that we connect to science, only the ideology behind it, but i was curious what you think of some of the more mathematic -- because i was a little upset at some of the math bashing that was going on. there's been some beautiful formulations in mathematical language to talk to -- to

quantify the imprecision in the mathematical language and really in almost any language that you can think of. and i was wondering if you think that is germane to your point or a different thing. >> ah. well, you know, my problem with mathematics has nothing to do with mathematics per se, it's with the claim that a mathematics is entirely adequate to the real, which is false. >> [inaudible] prove that mathematics is inadequate in his argument. >> right. but -- >> music is mathematics in a higher form. [laughter] >> [inaudible] so the -- i forget what i was going to say, so math. yeah, i like it. [laughter] i have nothing against math. >> [inaudible] use mathematics as a

substructure like the golden section, you see that in a lot of -- >> sure. absolutely. i'm, you know, that's the next thing on my retirement list is to learn -- [inaudible] >> joan that lehrer, he was -- jonah lehrer, he was a bestseller. when it all came apart, there was a great deal and almost joy in taking him down. is there any -- does that speak well of our society? [laughter] >> i, frankly, i mean, you have journalists getting in trouble all the time. "the view," as you say, it was almost kind of like a lynch mob. and the attitude towards him now is he can never have a job again. how is the poor guy supposed to live, you know? cut him some slack. but i think a lot of that ire comes from the fact not just that he committed journalistic

sins, but that he was a spokesperson for a point of view that, you know, he was doing -- he was carrying a load. he was carrying a master's load, and he screwed it up. >> right. [laughter] >> so it's really the mainstream that's gone after him the hardest. >> in recognition of that -- >> right. well, they never say that, but a lot of their ire is that, you know, you've made the position we gave you, responsibility, soto slow they and no one has to say it, that he messed up with the master's chore. shall we call it there? i know i'm tired. [laughter] well, they're obviously in good shape. thank you all so much for coming out. it was great, a lot of fun.

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