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“Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, ’Sir, you did not give us enough information.’ I would add to that, ’All the same, Sir, I’m not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.’

“Our most dismaying failure is in the use of our knowledge of what human beings need in the way of bodily and spiritual nourishment. And I suspect that some of the guesses made by our ancestors are partly responsible for the starved bodies and spirits we see everywhere.

“Shame on us. Less shame on our ancestors.

“I myself am an ancestor, having reproduced, having written books, being fifty-one years old. I come from simpler times. When I was a boy, all a commencement speaker had to say was, ’Go out and kill Hitler, boy. And then get married and have a lot of kids.’

“Some of you might still go looking for Hitler, in Paraguay, say. He might be there. He would be eighty-five years old now. He has probably shaved off his mustache.

“Some of you might go out and kill Communists, but that is no longer a fashionable thing to do. And you wouldn’t be killing real Communists anyway. This country has fulfilled more of the requirements of the Communist Manifesto than any avowedly Communist nation ever did. Maybe we’re the Communists.

“Our politicians like to say that we have religion and the Communist countries don’t. I think it is just the other way around. Those countries have a religion called Communism, and the Free World is where sustaining religions are in very short supply.

“I am about to make my own ancestral guess as to what Ufe is all about, and what young people should do with it. I will again issue the caveat that I am as full of baloney as anybody, and that anybody who says for sure what life is all about might as well lecture on Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and tooth fairies, as well.

“I am, incidentally, the world’s greatest authority on tooth fairies. That is how most of my life has been spent: in the study of tooth fairies. That should be carved on my tombstone. I was the one who discovered that tooth fairies are cannibals. Mostly, Tooth Fairies eat june bugs, of course. But under crowded conditions and in an atmosphere rich in carbon monoxide, tooth fairies eat each other, too.

“And who can blame them?

“Okay.

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. Young people should also identify and expound theories about life in which sane human beings almost everywhere can believe.

“I suggest that we need a new religion. If suggesting that we need a new religion is sacrilege, then the emperor Constantine was guilty of sacrilege, and the emperor Nero was an admirably pious man. And I want to point out that it is impossible to discard an old religion entirely. The religion of Nero survives today, determining as it does the dates and even moods of so many of our so-called Christian holidays.

“Easter is a time for the renewal of life, and it always has been, apparently, even when people ate mastodon meat. Nothing is more human than to wish for renewal when springtime comes. And, out of respect for our ancestors, it is in the area of spiritual renewal that we are the most conservative. We must become less conservative.

“What makes me think we need a new religion? That’s easy. An effective religion allows people to imagine from moment to moment what is going on and how they should behave. Christianity used to be like that. Our country is now jammed with human beings who say out loud that life is chaos to them, and that it doesn’t seem to matter what anybody does next. This is worse than being seasick.

“Might not we do without religion entirely? Plenty of people have tried—not in Communist countries, as I’ve already said, but here. A lot of people have been forced to do without it—because the old-time religions