StarTalk Live! at Kings Theatre: Science and Morality (Part 1)

How do we know if we’re right or wrong? Investigate the intersection of science and morality with Neil Tyson, Eugene Mirman, author Michael Shermer, Rev. James Martin, SJ, and comedians Michael Ian Black, and Whoopi Goldberg. Recorded live at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, NY. (Warning: Adult Language). NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/startalk-live-at-kings-theatre-science-and-morality-part-1/ Photo Credit: Elliot Severn.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brooklyn in the house, yes.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tonight's subject is on the topic of morality. And all the ways that science might or might not inform our future judgments regarding it. And we have a panel specifically tuned for that purpose. People of high and low moral stature, just...

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me first introduce a comedian, Michael Ian Black. Michael, come on out.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only a comedian, an actor, a director. Been seeing The Jim Gaffigan Show, Comedy Central's Another Period. And Netflix, we had a wet summer. Wet hot American summer. Wet hot American summer. Close enough. I'd also like to introduce the founding editor and publisher of Skeptics magazine, Michael Shermer. Michael Shermer, come on out.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael Shermer is author of "The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Towards Truth, Justice, and Freedom." Audacious of you to do such a thing. Who else do we have here? Because not all morality, perhaps, comes from rational thought. Perhaps it comes from religious thought. And we'll bring out Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest. Father Martin, come on out.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hello, Bobby.

• 1:55Michael Shermer?

  Hello.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's actually the bestselling author of A Jesus Pilgrimage. Is that, did I get that name right? The name of that?

• 2:04Michael Shermer?

  Uh, Jesus a Pilgrimage, correct.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jesus a Pilgrimage, and most recently, Building a Bridge. And this is subtitled, How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter Into a Relationship of Reflection, Compassion, and Sensitivity. Whoa, where'd this come from?

• 2:21Michael Shermer?

  Thank you.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will you be excommunicated tomorrow for having done this?

• 2:27Michael Shermer?

  Uh, depends what I say tonight.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Excellent, how many seats we have left? One seat left. Join me in giving a warm, a warm Brooklyn welcome to Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi!

• 2:45Michael Shermer?

  Hey!

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, let's do this.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Live, King's Theatre, Brooklyn, in the house. So, uh, Michael, you've, you're, this is not your first rodeo with books?

• 3:03Michael Shermer?

  My third rodeo.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Third rodeo, okay. Uh, what is your sense of, uh, the origins of what is right and wrong? Do you have some thoughts about that?

• 3:15Michael Shermer?

  I do. Um, I think since you're a physicist and you have the bestselling physics book of all time, I'd start with physics.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the moment.

• 3:25Michael Shermer?

  I'm gonna start with physics. Uh, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, the universe is running down, everything dissolves, hot things get cold, uh, organisms wear out and so forth. So the first, second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life, which is to push back against entropy. That is, to go up the energy gradient by doing things with yourselves, by replicating, by flourishing, by consuming energy and so forth. Okay, so, the most selfish thing you could do would be to hoard all the resources you can. Be selfish. This selfish gene kind of thinking. But the problem with that is that if you live in a social community... Everybody else who acts like that, it's not gonna work. It's gonna fall apart.

• 4:09Michael Shermer?

  If you're super selfish and I'm super selfish and if we're just hoarding resources from each other, this is gonna dissolve. So, the most selfish thing I could do at times-

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, that could dissolve into war and death and bloodshed.

• 4:22Eugene Mirman?

  Or simply into Ayn Rand novels.

• 4:27Michael Shermer?

  Yes, that's a dystopian Atlas Rite. It's true. Well, it's sort of a Hobbes, you know, nasty, brutish and short. So, part of life is like that. But sometimes, the most selfish thing you can do is to be cooperative, altruistic, helpful, nice, be a good friend, be a reliable, respectful person with a good reputation, because that way, when you help somebody, when they're in need, when your time comes, when you need help, then they're more likely to help you. Now, it's not a cold calculation, like, "I'm gonna trick you into thinking I'm nice and then I'm gonna stab you in the back once I get your resources." No, because you'll know that I'm faking, because our brains are fine tuned to notice

• 5:09Michael Shermer?

  when people are lying, or people are dissembling, or where they're narcissistic in an inauthentic way. And so, it's not enough to fake-

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's not talking about any-

• 5:19Michael Shermer?

  No, no one here, no one here.

• 5:21Eugene Mirman?

  Our brains aren't fine tuned enough to tell when someone's narcissistic.

• 5:26Michael Shermer?

  It's those people in California, no, no, that's where I'm from, no. No, it's not enough to fake being a nice person. You actually have to be a nice person.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not in my experience.

• 5:41Michael Shermer?

  There's our one.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 5:43Michael Shermer?

  We have picked out the psychopath on the panel. We found him, because it's about one out of, three out of a hundred or so, anyway. So, my argument is that-

• 5:53Eugene Mirman?

  Three out of a hundred? Three out of a hundred people are psychopaths?

• 5:57Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, about three out of a hun- well, men, three out of a hundred men.

• 6:02Eugene Mirman?

  Sure.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  I could've told you that.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 6:11Michael Shermer?

  It's true, I'm sorry to say.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're describing something that is evolutionarily pre-selected for our own survival.

• 6:22Michael Shermer?

  That's right, so it's not enough to fake being a good person, you actually have to feel it. You have to have the genuine moral emotions of wanting to help and feeling good about that. Now, it's not to say that human nature is, we're all good, because we have a dark side. We have our inner demons and our better angels in competition. So the whole point of structuring a civil society in a way is to nudge the incentives to get people to be nicer and knock back those super selfish tendencies. And it's a constant tug and pull of what we should do in this particular community or society or whatever to get people to be nicer.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying to be moral is for our own collective survival?

• 7:07Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that is sort of self-selecting?

• 7:09Michael Shermer?

  And your survival. I mean, it's better for you, okay, you may, okay, you maybe could, can benefit by being super selfish and betraying your friends and so on. Yes, those people can get away with it, but if too many of us act like that, the whole system falls apart. So we've evolved the propensity where most people, most of the time, are nice.

• 7:32Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, so what number, like in a culture, like in a society, what's the number of assholes that can handle?

• 7:38Michael Shermer?

  Yes, that's right.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The threshold?

• 7:41Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, what's the asshole threshold?

• 7:45Michael Shermer?

  It's about, really, there's studies on this. It's about, it's about 20%. About 20, yes, 20%. Well, if you go out from, you know, the backstabbing psychopaths out to just the not-so-nice assholes.

• 7:58Eugene Mirman?

  Someone who'll eat your donut when you turn around.

• 8:00Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, that's about like 1 out of 5. But those people, most of those 20% are reformable. You can, in other words, if you catch, if you put a mirror in front of the donut stand there at the company...

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Then there's 2 donuts!

• 8:20Michael Shermer?

  That's very good.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're right about him, yeah.

• 8:22Michael Shermer?

  What's the physics of that with the...

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so, so, Father?

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Father, Jesuit father.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Another big laugh line.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, this is not your first time on StarTalk.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  I am very happy to be back.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you, you, you came back. Thank you for coming back.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Thank you for inviting me back.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earlier, we wanted to get cozy with you, call you Jesuit James. That kind of sound like Jesse James, Jesuit James.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Whatever you want. It's your show.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if you can first speak more broadly about religion, certainly as manifested in modern American society, and then perhaps more specifically from the view of Catholicism, does what Michael said, is that embraced as something that God knows about and put in place? Or do you require some other deeper infusion of understanding of morality in religious thought?

• 9:40Speaker 04

  That's a great way of asking the question. A lot of what Michael says makes sense to me and is accepted. And certainly, science and faith, there's no sort of conflict, I think, at least for a Catholic. You know, for example, the idea that we would have certain emotions that would lead us to do good things. I would definitely agree with that, and that those emotions will ultimately lead to the common good, we would say in the Catholic Church. I think the added gloss I would put on that is that for us, for a religious person, those notions and those emotions come from God. And so, I also agree that there are these different forces pulling us apart and pulling in different ways.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  And we all know that. We have sort of selfish and selfless desires, and we can feel that tug of war. And what I would say is that the desire to do good is really God's voice within you, right? I mean, you don't hear voices, but you feel this desire to... To do something good and that's one way that you have of helping other people and in a sense, carrying out God's will. So that's, and what is that called? That's called your conscience, basically. And so that's how I see it. That God, that the moral law is spoken to us through our conscience and then, you know, through reflection throughout thousands of years of history, we have given voice to that, you know, in terms of laws and the Bible and things like that.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  You know, the Ten Commandments are kind of an expression of that for that culture back then. So yeah, so I mean, I would agree with a lot of that.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but the, the, so what I'm curious about here is the, um, there are many people who are not moral. So would you say that all the people who are not moral and all the, which would include everyone who is justifiably in prison, they as a community are without God? That's what you would, I'd be forced to conclude that based on your statement. So that you cannot say this moral imperative is put into everyone by God. It is put into some people and not others by God.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  Well, I would say that actually God is with everyone, right?

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently not those in prison who committed multiple murders.

• 11:46Eugene Mirman?

  Well, there may be their bad guy inside just won over their God conscience. Just throwing out ideas.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  No, I mean.

• 11:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You helping him out here?

• 11:54Eugene Mirman?

  But I'll leave it up to Jesuit Jim to tell us if it's true.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Uh, we also have, um, we also have free choice. God gives us free will and so those people in jail who I still think God is with and, you know, have, have consciences and souls and God loves them.

• 12:08Eugene Mirman?

  You don't think some of them God just likes?

• 12:14Speaker 04

  You know what? Actually, I think God likes them more.

• 12:16Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, that's very sweet.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  I do. Well, no, because that's true. If you think about, I mean, for the Christian, who does Jesus go to? Jesus goes to the people who are seen as in the society sinful or on the outs. And who is more on the outs than an inmate on death row? Right? Who is more forgotten? And so I would say that this is the person who God kind of goes out to first.

• 12:38Michael Ian Black?

  And the Nazis. God also loves the Nazis. They're, they're, people don't like them. People hate them.

• 12:45Eugene Mirman?

  They are, they are, to quote, to quote James, uh, on the outs.

• 12:49Michael Ian Black?

  Yeah, they're on the outs.

• 12:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Whoopi.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Yes?

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  I'm on the outs with everybody. All the time.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, let me be a fanboy here for a minute. You're one of a dozen living humans who have won the Grammy, the Emmy, the Oscar,

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and the Tony Award.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  And still I work every day.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still you work every day.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Still I work every day. It's a wonderful thing, but you know.

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You still gotta work.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  You still gotta get up and go to work and dance for your food.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm just fanboying a little bit there. So you've led what I have judged to be a very real, even raw, life, absorbing reality and manifesting that in the decisions you make for a greater good. Where does your morality come from? How do you decide what's right or wrong?

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Well, I judge it by my mother.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Because my mom pretty much said, "Look, you can go over there and rip those people off, but you can't be surprised when they beat you to death with a baseball bat."

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Now, you can go and do it, you can still do it, but you have to take responsibility for your choice, which is what you're talking about. You know, if you subscribe to the religious, some religious thought, you know, the ideas that God is basically saying, "Listen, I'm not gonna do for you. I'll be here if you need me, but I'm not gonna do for you." Now, not everybody wants to hear that, because you know, you hear first the story, "God got pissed at Gamora, look what happened."

• 14:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Old Testament, there's a lot of getting pissed off.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot of smiting and shit, you know, it's just...

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Sorry, Father.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's here to forgive us all at the end of the night.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  Feel free.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  But you know, so it depends on which book you're... You know, there's so many religions and so many ideas, so you have to at some point make a decision, what's gonna work for you. You know, now, sometimes people end up killing people, they don't mean to, but they did. Does that make them a godless person? I don't know.

• 15:18Eugene Mirman?

  We'll have to ask Dick Cheney.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Michael.

• 15:23Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  I didn't do it.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back in 04, you wrote a book called "The Science of Good and Evil."

• 15:32Michael Shermer?

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why people cheat, gossip, care, share, and follow the golden rule.

• 15:36Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 15:38Michael Shermer?

  Clicks, right? It's for clicks?

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that works. But, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this.

• 15:43Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You spent the opening remarks saying that there's a force in our culture that leads people to be honest and moral.

• 15:51Michael Shermer?

  Well, in our nature.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In our nature, fine.

• 15:53Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So whether that was sort of genetically inbred, evolutionarily.

• 15:56Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or imparted by God, the point is, it is clear that not everybody behaves this way.

• 16:03Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me hear a little bit more about that 20% that can percolate up, because in every office environment, we know people who lie, steal, cheat.

• 16:12Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 16:13Michael Shermer?

  They take the paper clips, they don't pay for the donut. But the point of the mirror was if you put a mirror in front of them, they're more likely to pay for the donut. They see themselves, and that reflects, literally, their conscience. So what you're doing with the mirrors is reminding them, like Whoopi's mother, "Don't forget to be a good girl." Okay. And, so think of the moral sense like a language. We all evolved the capacity to learn a language, everybody. Which language you learn depends on which culture you grow up in. So think of, like, a moral sense. Moral emotions are like a language. We all get it, just by dint of being human. Which thing, like, the capacity to feel guilt. Everybody can feel guilt.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Not everybody.

• 16:54Michael Shermer?

  Except the 3%. Except for the 3%.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the 3%.

• 16:57Michael Shermer?

  They're guiltless, but most of us. Now, what you feel guilty about specifically depends on your culture. Now Catholics feel guilty about certain things that Protestants don't feel guilty about, or Buddhists don't feel guilty about.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catholics feel guilty about everything, yes. Right? Am I approximately correct there?

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Not this Catholic.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, do you feel guilty about your predecessors prosecuting Galileo? Yes, I do. Good, good, okay.

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just got, had to get that off my chest.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you took it all the way back, huh?

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I took it all, I go back.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  That was all the way back in the day.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah, in the day.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Galileo.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Galileo, Jesuit priest.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 17:41Michael Shermer?

  But it wasn't until 1992 that the Pope forgave Galileo back in 16, early 1600s.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Michael Shermer?

  Religion does change. I'm still not over it.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Live from King's Theatre, Brooklyn, New York.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are talking about the science of morality with bestselling author Michael Shermer, Father James Martin, he's a Jesuit priest. We have a special guest appearance, Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi, thanks for coming out for this. Uh, we got Michael Ian Black. Michael, thanks.

• 18:25Michael Shermer?

  Yep.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Eugene Mirman. Eugene!

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, Michael, so what of the people who are not just simply passively or opportunistically cheaters, the people who are presumably not only in the 3%, who are actively aggressive?

• 18:43Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Huge armies set to lay waste onto what are declared enemies.

• 18:49Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, so the myth is that...

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you...

• 18:51Michael Shermer?

  The myth is that they're not moral. In fact, they're overly moral. They're uber moral. They, the most homicides, the majority of homicides are moralistic in nature. They're not instrumental, well, I killed him to take his Rolex or his car. No, it's, "The bastard scratched my car. He insulted me in front of my girlfriend. He cheated at cards." That's why mostly men...

• 19:10Eugene Mirman?

  He cheated at cards?

• 19:13Michael Shermer?

  Oh, this used to be a thing in the, you know, the Wild West, yeah.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smith and Wesson beats four aces.

• 19:19Michael Shermer?

  So, I mean, there, there are studies of, of all these guys on death row. Like, in the, in, I've studied the database in the state of Texas. They've executed 545 people since 1982.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  And only two were guilty.

• 19:32Michael Shermer?

  Was it?

• 19:33Speaker 03

  I sent in only two were guilty.

• 19:35Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, well, a lot of them are, yeah, so probably a good 10 to 15% didn't do it. But a lot of them did do it. And when you ask them, "Why'd you do it?", they don't say, "Because I'm a bastard or an asshole." You know, it's like, "Well, the guy cheated, she cheated on me", or "He stole my, insulted me in front of my girlfriend", this kind of thing. In other words, the murderer acts as, in a form of self-help justice, as judge, jury, and executioner in one shot.

• 20:03Michael Ian Black?

  Can I ask a question? It seems like what you're saying is morality is a narrative we tell ourselves to justify our actions. So to flip that around, you would then say that Texas, the state, is acting morally by killing these people, and therefore, if you extrapolate further, any state or nation, which is basically what you said, tells themselves the narrative of they are acting morally to commit genocide.

• 20:30Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 20:31Michael Ian Black?

  But stepping back from that, we go, "Well, that's not moral behavior." So then, it seems like morality can be anything you say it is, as long as you tell yourself you're doing the right thing.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Michael Shermer?

  So...

• 20:47Eugene Mirman?

  Great joke, Michael.

• 20:51Michael Shermer?

  He's hilarious.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These psychopaths, they have their moments, you know.

• 20:57Michael Shermer?

  Okay, so here's what happens with this. Here's the problem. Because there are bullies...

• 21:01Michael Ian Black?

  The problem is people are killing each other. That's the problem.

• 21:04Michael Shermer?

  Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so...

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:08Michael Shermer?

  Because of this 20% or so of free riders, bullies, assholes, you have to stand up and fight back. You gotta just slap this guy back. You have to develop a reputation. You don't spit into the wind, you don't, you know, take, and so forth. You gotta fight back. And that's the one way, like your mom said, "If you go steal that, they're gonna punch ya."

• 21:29Eugene Mirman?

  Well, she said she'd...

• 21:30Michael Shermer?

  Okay, well, maybe I better not do it. So...

• 21:31Eugene Mirman?

  Kill her with a bat.

• 21:34Eugene Mirman?

  And I believe she was talking about robbing a baseball team.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  I grew up in New York.

• 21:42Michael Shermer?

  Could have been a baseball. So, let me just finish that thought. So,

• 21:46Michael Shermer?

  individuals, all the way up to groups, to states, to nations, develop this belief that comes from nature. Like, you gotta fight back, you gotta stand up to bullies and free riders and people that steal your stuff. You gotta stop 'em. Alright, so then this ends up getting into this sort of just war theory. When is it okay to go to war? And the problem is, is exactly what you said. Um, there's a new database I've just been reading about in this book called The Internationalist. 500 war, um, statements by nations, this is why we're going to war. It's 500 different versions of why we should kill these people and take their stuff. And it's all rationalization. So, everybody that commits a crime, or an immoral act, or whatever, they don't think they're doing that. They think they're doing good.

• 22:32Michael Shermer?

  But what's happened over the centuries is that we've been adjusting that rationalization to be less and less, hopefully violent, aggressive, justified violence, and more and more toward international courts, the UN, the Hague, all these kinds of international laws that said, and this really is just the last 50 years. You can't do that anymore. War is illegal. And so to get around it, because you've noticed people have gotten around that over the last 50 years, but, but the idea is, first you outlaw it, like slavery, you outlaw it. Now, it still goes on, but then you enforce the law, and eventually it stops, and then we stop thinking about it as an option.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Except that, you know, that sounds really great, but people get really pissed off when they lose a war. They just, they can't let it go.

• 23:22Michael Shermer?

  Well, if you think about Germany and Japan...

• 23:25Speaker 03

  I'm thinking about the US.

• 23:27Michael Shermer?

  Oh.

• 23:29Michael Shermer?

  You're talking about us?

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Civil war. And people can't let it go. You know, you're dealing with, we're dealing with statues that were put up in the 50s.

• 23:38Michael Shermer?

  Yes, yes. Well, here's an, this is a perfect example of the adjustment of our sensibilities. These used to be heroes, these martial statues honoring military men. That's just not cool anymore, and that's good.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  No, no. The statues that have gone up were of the guys who actually broke the law.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  They were the, the, the, you know, a lot of the, a lot of those statues that went up were...

• 24:04Michael Ian Black?

  What happened?

• 24:05Michael Shermer?

  He said traitors.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Okay, they were, alright, they were traitors.

• 24:08Eugene Mirman?

  We'll take care of it, thank you, sir.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  You know.

• 24:12Eugene Mirman?

  We all...

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me ask, let me ask, are, is there any sense that other animals have any sense of morality? Or is it purely human thing?

• 24:21Michael Shermer?

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 24:22Eugene Mirman?

  Other than penguins?

• 24:26Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 24:26Eugene Mirman?

  The most moral animal in the world!

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we need, another penguin movie, yeah, we don't have enough, yeah.

• 24:33Michael Shermer?

  Uh, we know that, uh, chimps and bonobos, uh, fight a lot and then they have make-up sex afterwards. So, it's, it's usually the females that break up the fights and, you know, and, and smooth things over. They have, they have all kinds of behavioral ways of calming things down after, uh, hostile interactions. Uh, we know that we've seen dolphins and whales, like, push their wounded, uh, brothers and sisters up to get air. Um, we know that elephants grieve, you can see dogs that feel guilt.

• 25:03Michael Ian Black?

  Grieve, grieve.

• 25:03Michael Shermer?

  Grieve.

• 25:04Eugene Mirman?

  What kind of, well, dogs that feel guilt, like, like if they eat too many snacks, or they, like...

• 25:09Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, they steal your stuff and they, you know, you come in and go, "Hey!", and they go, you know, the tail goes down and, you know...

• 25:14Michael Ian Black?

  But is that guilt, or is that, uh, fear of punishment? Or is that, is, or, or are those two distinguishable?

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I was visiting some folks' house, and we left some cheese on the table, and went out for an hour, and came back, and the cheese was gone. It was a big slab of cheese, and we said, "Where, where'd the cheese go?", no one knew. And then we all looked at the dog, just, just looked at the dog! And the dog cowered and went behind, we didn't even say anything!

• 25:41Michael Ian Black?

  But if you did that...

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was, that, wait!

• 25:44Eugene Mirman?

  You didn't even use language?

• 25:46Michael Ian Black?

  But, but guilt, guilt implies the ability to, uh, correct. If you did that a hundred times, that dog would eat that fucking cheese a hundred times!

• 25:56Michael Shermer?

  Until he tried to poop.

• 26:03Eugene Mirman?

  It's... It's... It's God in a thieving dog soul.

• 26:09Michael Shermer?

  Well, there's a famous experiment by Franz de Waal at Emory University with two capuchin monkeys in side by side.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of monkey?

• 26:15Michael Shermer?

  Capuchin monkeys. They're little tiny ones. Cute little... They're like... Like that. Yeah. Yeah, they're like... Yeah, yeah, just... Anyway, they're like badly...

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I the only one who didn't know what a capuchin monkey was?

• 26:26Eugene Mirman?

  I didn't know, but I felt like you had already got to the question.

• 26:28Michael Shermer?

  Just think of a tiny-brained little monkey. Just tiny, you know, like 20 pounds.

• 26:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:31Michael Shermer?

  Anyway, so there's two of them side by side in this cage. Translucent wall, they can see each other. And they've been trained to give a pebble to the experimenter who gives them a piece of food in exchange. So they just learn to associate that. So the pebbles are like money for exchange, all right? So, in comes the experimenter. You can watch this on YouTube, it's quite hilarious. So she gives him a pebble and he gives it back to her and she gives him a cucumber slice and he's all excited, oh boy, and he eats his cucumber slices. They like cucumbers. Then the other one does the same thing and she gives him a grape. Now, they like grapes even more because, you know, who doesn't? And, and so, but, but the first one now sees that this one got a grape and he's very excited, like, oh boy, I'm gonna get a grape.

• 27:11Michael Shermer?

  And he gives the pebble to her and she hands him a cucumber and he goes, boom, like this. And then he's like pounding on the cage and rattling the cage wall. He is pissed. He, he can clearly see, I did the same amount of work as that guy and he got paid twice as much as... And that is not cool!

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa!

• 27:29Michael Shermer?

  Now, they don't have language. They can't say, you know, "I hereby protest and I'm gonna unionize." Yeah, but they got pulled, you know, they thought right out of it.

• 27:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, wait, what kind of monkey is it again?

• 27:37Michael Shermer?

  Capuchin.

• 27:38Eugene Mirman?

  Is there a capuchin Bernie Sanders?

• 27:42Michael Shermer?

  That's right. We're gonna smooth out the income equa... Yes, okay.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, interesting. So, this is the frustration felt by not being compensated for the same work.

• 27:51Michael Shermer?

  Exactly. Right. It's there. And we are evolutionarily separated from these capuchins by about 30 million years. So this goes way back in mammals. So it's the social mammals that you have to have a sense of right and wrong in order to get along with your other fellow group members.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Father, does the Catholic Church have some definition of or operational discussion, a way to describe what is judged as pure evil?

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Well, I'm evil in general is what distances you from God, or an act that itself distances you from God. And it's contrary to, you know, what we would say would be the moral law. But there's different kinds of evil, too.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, so I'll grant that. But historically, what we may have judged to be evil has evolved.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are people, not blaming you for this, but we can say without hesitation, there are many people who justified slavery as the moral thing to do to help out the African savages, okay? As a moral imperative. And so, and now that is not viewed in that context. So something is evolving, a sense of morality and judging what is evil and what isn't. What is that? Wait, wait, what are you doing? What's the matter?

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Well, I never heard that explanation. I always thought it was like, "Look, we can get them cheap."

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  And they went and grabbed people, which makes it immoral.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you a descendant of Ham? Your skin is darkened and you are cursed. And so this is in Christianity, sects of Christianity.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  But so when does the moral compass stop? Because there's...

• 29:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or is it always in flux?

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Well, depends, doesn't it?

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm asking.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Well, you would hope that it's always evolving and that it's always improving, that, you know, as the community reflects on what is good and what is bad, that we have a greater sense, you know, as one gets when one ages, right, or gets older. And so we see that that's clearly immoral now and evil, which you're right, they didn't see that back in the day. And also, that was in the Bible. You had slaves in the Bible, you have slaves in the New Testament. And so they not only looked at it as, you know, kind of justifiable, but something that's in Scripture. And so now with more...

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only that... Not, from my read of scripture, there is no indictment of the possession of slaves. So it's not even just a neutral thing, there's not even any negative statements.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  Right, right. And so, the question is, to your point, Michael, about, you know, how do we discern and how do we develop, I think as an individual can develop a sense of right and wrong, and kind of deepen it, right, as you get more mature and understand more about the world, I think a community can do that too, right? And so, a community can look at a statue and say, "There's this person who now we no longer, you know, want to honor," right? Because we are developing our sense of morality.

• 30:54Michael Ian Black?

  But if, if this is laid down by God, shouldn't it be an eternal truth? If you went to heaven, and you had slaves, and then you were like, "I was a great person, I had these slaves, and that was the moral thing to do," and then a hundred years later, people are like, "You shouldn't have slaves," does that person get kicked out of heaven?

• 31:09Speaker 04

  That... Yeah, yes. That's a, no, and that's a, that's a very important question. I mean, how much of, and I don't have an easy answer to that, how much of morality is culturally conditioned, and is also conditioned in the time that you live? And I sometimes wonder, what are the things that we are doing today, that 100 or 500 years from now will be seen as, you know, unbelievably immoral, that we're fine with?

• 31:33Michael Ian Black?

  Animals.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Well, I, I sometimes think that.

• 31:34Michael Ian Black?

  Candy corn.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Candy corn. Well, I think we can all agree on that.

• 31:40Michael Shermer?

  The cultural change, though, is not random. It's not just, cultures are just bouncing around, believing different things. It's moving in a certain direction. The ark is bending towards justice. Thank you, thank you, Neil. Available at fine bookstores everywhere. That, that is to say, the moral art, moral sphere is expanding to include more people as equal, under the law, under rights, under treatment, dignity, respect, and so on, such that, that more and more, we are tending to think of people that are different from us, whoever that is, are equal to us. And that's what's been changing. It's taken centuries to do it, but it's slowly, gradually, so civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that sequence, that was...

• 32:24Michael Shermer?

  In that sequence, that's right.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's how that unfolded.

• 32:26Michael Shermer?

  And so, the, so Father... Coming out and defending LGBTQ rights is a big step because somebody on your team that comes out and says, "We are gonna treat these people equally," whatever your argument is, "God created them all equally," I don't care, that's good, that's part of the step to one more step.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The moral arc.

• 32:46Michael Shermer?

  The moral arc, we're getting there.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  This is Startalk Live from King's Theatre, Brooklyn, New York.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are talking about the science of morality. So, Michael, can science inform or even determine human values? If that's the case, that's opposite or very different from what so many people have learned or been taught throughout their lives. You attend some religious service and most people's understanding who are religious is that your morality comes from God. And so, it seems like you're not even going there, you've got other explanations for this. So, how is it that facts that drive science can inform values, which are the products of our feelings and of society that we create?

• 33:51Michael Shermer?

  Yep, so this is the hard problem. Almost all scientists and philosophers say you can't, and they always turn to the great philosopher David Hume, who said, "You can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is.'" This is the way nature is, that doesn't mean it ought to be this way, we can change it, okay.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, scientists can describe nature, but not offer, not use science to inform how nature ought to be?

• 34:15Michael Shermer?

  That's right. So, I would like to challenge that a little bit in this sense. Just think about, say, mathematics or physics, again, we'll go back to that. If you're doing your calculations correctly, there are certain things you will find out that are more likely to be true than other things. So, say Kepler discovering that planets travel in elliptical orbits rather than circles.

• 34:38Michael Shermer?

  Given that he was doing his calculations correctly, and planets really do travel in ellipses, he could hardly have discovered anything else. Okay. So this is true in biology. Had Darwin not discovered the theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, somebody else would. In fact, somebody else did, Alfred Russell Wallace. And then, so I would say the same thing with the moral sense. What we've been doing for centuries is discovering that there's certain ways of structuring a society, a community of people that live together, that are more harmonious to our collective and individual well-being, our survival and flourishing as sentient beings.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying we're discovering a pre-existing fact?

• 35:22Michael Shermer?

  Yes, that are there in nature. It's there in our nature. We desire to be free, to be autonomous, to be treated equally. That is, for me to convince you to be nice to me, I have to appeal to your sense that I will be nice to you back. This is the golden rule. This is the kind of thing that's been discovered up here.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoopi, what?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  I think I don't understand what you're saying because...

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means she doesn't understand. Be polite. Okay, Whoopi, go.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Because if it is in fact morally in us because of science to do and make these decisions, why is it that it isn't, it hasn't morally been able... We haven't morally been able to treat women equal to men. We haven't been able to... If it's a science, if it's in our... If it's in there and it's in our DNA...

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is it so hard to do that?

• 36:26Speaker 03

  That's what I'm asking.

• 36:27Michael Shermer?

  Okay, good question.

• 36:30Michael Shermer?

  My answer is, is that 2017 is the best year in the history of hu- human civilization for women. It's never been this good. It's got a long ways to go.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Oh, you about to get, I wouldn't say that. I, I might, I might walk that back a little bit.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, I, I, let me.

• 36:52Eugene Mirman?

  You wouldn't put it at 2015 or so?

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, I got this. If you were female, or if you were black, and you walked into a time machine, is there any time in the past where you would say, "Yeah, things were better than, than today"?

• 37:07Michael Shermer?

  But that, but Neil, that's-

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there, is there? Pick a, give me a, give me a year where that was the case.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  I can't give you the year, but I'll tell you, Egypt seemed a lot more interesting when Cleopatra was running shit, okay?

• 37:18Michael Shermer?

  Oh!

• 37:19Speaker 03

  I'm just saying.

• 37:21Michael Shermer?

  Oh!

• 37:23Speaker 03

  She seemed to, she seemed to have it together, and, you know.

• 37:27Eugene Mirman?

  Well, just, I mean, yeah, but then I guess, but like, Jews wouldn't go back.

• 37:33Michael Shermer?

  That's right. Yeah, that's right. Very few people had it good in those days.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Jewish women would go back and change shit around and make it work. See, if women ran things, we would actually, I, I, I believe if women actually ran things, we could help men adjust to a lot of things.

• 37:55Michael Ian Black?

  Typical woman.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Oh, no, a typical woman would be much nicer about it. But I, I-

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me get back to a time that we generally think of as the scientific revolution, after the, the, the scientific method was advanced by Galileo, Francis Bacon, and the Enlightenment that generally we think of in Europe, where science flourished, culture flourished, art flourished. There were wars and things and the rest of that, but that's kinda has always been happening. The rest of this was different. And there was great cathedral building, church building over that time. Would you say that over that time, there was moral progress?

• 38:40Michael Shermer?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What about some examples?

• 38:42Michael Shermer?

  Okay, abolition of slavery, abolition of torture, abolition of capital punishment, except for the United States. Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, these things have all happened.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, go back to 1600.

• 38:57Michael Shermer?

  Well, okay, so it begins with the idea that the universe is discoverable and it's governed by natural principles and laws that we can understand. That starts with the physical sciences, into the biological sciences, into the social sciences. The idea that a society, a political system, is a system we can study and look at it and go, "Look, these systems are better than these over here. Democracies are objectively better than dictatorships and theocracies by every measure." And this is my point, these are experiments.

• 39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, objectively better would mean it spreads happiness more...

• 39:32Michael Shermer?

  Well-being, survival, flourishing, rights, all that stuff. Okay, our mutual friend, the late, great Carl Sagan, has a great chapter in "The Demon-Hunted World" on these kinds of experiments. We have 50 different states with 50 different laws, constitutions, different gun control laws, different alcohol laws, and so on. These are experiments, and we can look and go...

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Social experiments.

• 39:54Michael Shermer?

  Social experiments. So this is called the comparative method of natural experiments. You can't control the variables in a lab, but we can look at what happened. So just go back to 1970s Korea. So North and South Korea are divided. In the early 70s, they split economically and politically. One went super dictatorship, the other liberal democracy. You can see the difference from space. One is dark and impoverished, the other one is light and enlightened. The South Koreans are five inches taller than North Koreans. Okay, so a liberal democracy is objectively better than a dictatorship. That we can measure and say with confidence. And not just democracies, but all these other concepts of like civil rights and civil liberties. Just ask the people that are affected, "Would you rather live..."

• 40:38Michael Shermer?

  in which you are treated equally under the law or not. Of course, people say, yes, I want to be treated equally. Okay, when is that? It's not perfect. So if our metric is it has to be perfect. We're not there and we're never going to be in utopia. But it's better than it was last year, better than it was 20 years ago, better than a century ago. And so on.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Overall.

• 40:56Michael Shermer?

  Your time machine. Overall, on average, on average.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Father, is there, uh, what do you see as the?

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Whoopi, what?

• 41:12Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna say it again, you know? If you go back and trace, when you're talking about science, female scientists in Galileo's time were not, they were burned as heretics. And women.

• 41:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Witches, witches.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Witches, witches.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  See, the H word is because I was talking to you. But, but I just, I, I just think to myself, yeah, lots of things have changed, but some things have taken an inordinately long time in doing. And education for people who are not wealthy, women, for women. I mean, science and, and all of these things you all are talking about are things that kept women out.

• 42:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so let me add something to what she said.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I want to back up my woman here, okay? If what you guys are saying is true, it shouldn't have required centuries of bloodshed to get to the bits of equality that we have today. It should be, it should have flowed naturally. Martin Luther King would not have, would have had to march on Washington. You wouldn't have had to have all the women's demonstrations. You wouldn't have had to have the gay rights movement because it would have just been natural for people to think of equality that way. And the fact that it has been so delayed, thousands of years of history argues against your thesis and, Father, your thesis, that this is somehow deeply within us and that

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it is an inevitable consequence of being rational.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  No, but I, yeah, can I respond?

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did I get your back on that?

• 43:00Speaker 04

  No, and I think that's, I mean, I think that's, I think that's a very important question. But I also think that it is deeply within us, but it is also deeply within us to choose the wrong thing. I mean, we're also, we are, I mean, it's a word that's not popular, but we are sinful people in many ways, and we have, you know, subjugated people. A lot of it is about power. We have been selfish. We have been selfish as community, towards another community. So, yeah, it's taken a ridiculously long time to get to a place of women's rights and African American rights and LGBT rights, because, you know, we are, you know, as you were saying in the beginning, there are those conflicting forces that we see, I would say, on a small scale within us. You know, you struggle with selfish and selfless, as the society does.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  I also think a lot of it has to do, not only with power, but who we see as other, right? Who is the other, right? And as we understand more and more people as ourselves, right, there's no us and them, there's just us, then we can come to understand what their needs are. And, yeah, it's terrible it's taken so long, but I think that's, a lot of that is human nature and our own, you know, terrible sinfulness.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also morality is deep in there. This book, trying to put an olive branch out between the Catholic Church and LGBT community, I would say, most of the nation's resistance to the equality of that community, if you part the curtains, has religious foundation.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  That is absolutely right.

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, they are making a moral judgment-

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Yes, they are.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -on people's private lives.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Right, and so, one of the things is that-

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what, this is what put you on the shit list of the, of the right-wing-

• 44:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -conservative Christian right.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:38Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, but in 20 years, you wouldn't be on the shit list, because no one's gonna-

• 44:41Eugene Mirman?

  They'll all be gay.

• 44:46Eugene Mirman?

  An army of fuckable conservatives.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so the challenge for people is to be able to see, in my case in the Catholic Church, LGBT people not as "other" anymore, not as the "them" but as the "us."

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why you wrote this book.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you know, I mean, part of it is, this is what Jesus does in the Gospels. Jesus is always going out to people on the margins, right? The Roman centaurian.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Margins of the day.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Exactly, which were different than the margins of our time. And he's getting, to use a theological term, he gets shit for it too.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  And I think that...

• 45:27Michael Shermer?

  But think about how fast this has happened for the gay community versus, say, women, African-Americans, slavery, death penalty, and so on, which took centuries to change. You know, the equal marriage laws and all that changed pretty quick, once it started cascading. In other words, there's kind of an acceleration as one moral movement uses the techniques and methods and strategies of the previous moral revolution, because they know, they can see what works. So like when Martin Luther King Jr. did his marches and so on, these were calculated to do certain things to change the laws, and subsequent generations of moral crusaders

• 46:12Michael Shermer?

  can look and see what worked, now let's try that. It turns out, violence doesn't work, almost never works.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me find out. Father, you make an argument about a two-way bridge. Could you describe that from your book?

• 46:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I say that there are two groups. There's the institutional church, which is the hierarchy and the bishops and anyone who works in any sort of official capacity in the church, including laypeople who would run schools, women and men. And there's the LGBT, in this book, it's very sort of specific, the LGBT Catholic community. And the onus is on the institutional church to reach out to the LGBT community, because it is the institutional church that has marginalized the LGBT Catholic. But it is a two-way bridge, because the LGBT community has to kind of enter into a dialogue as well, even though it's more difficult, because they're the marginalized ones. And so it's... It's an attempt to try to build a bridge between those two groups. And frankly, just to start the conversation.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  And it's a difficult conversation, as, you know, since I'm on the shit list. But the point is, you know, I would say this. I think your point is, Gubba Michael, that it is up to, see, it is up to the religious person to stand for the other. At least in the Christian point of view, it is up for the, Jesus always takes the side. You know, Desmond Tutu said, "The simplest way, God sides with the outsiders, period." Right? And so it's actually up to religion, which unfortunately has been used against the outsiders, you know, as an excuse, right?

• 47:42Eugene Mirman?

  But the only time in history that's happened.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Well, no, but I mean, you look at, I mean, for example, like, you look at Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, you know, who comes out of this Christian tradition, right? And who uses his Christian background.

• 47:53Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, but Dr. King's mentor, his sort of role models were Gandhi and nonviolent social change. Because nonviolence works faster and better than violence to bring about social change. And that itself has progressed over the last half-century. So let me make one final statement that'll bring a heap of hate on me, just because I don't have enough tonight. Conservatives today are more socially liberal than liberals were in the 1950s.

• 48:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's probably right. Yeah.

• 48:20Michael Shermer?

  Just think about how people talked about Jews and blacks and women in the 1950s than now, yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  Still.

• 48:26Michael Shermer?

  Okay. I know, it's not, we're not there yet.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  No.

• 48:30Michael Shermer?

  But we've all shifted, that the whole moral zeitgeist has shifted through a thousand different little avenues.

• 48:37Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, today you can hook up in a car and nobody would care. In the 50s, you were a judge.

• 48:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Michael Shermer?

  That's right, yes.

• 48:44Michael Ian Black?

  If it's a Kia, I'm still judging.