I came across a video posted last year in which MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams spoke of astronomer Carl Sagan—who passed away 25 years earlier—and his prescient foreknowledge of our world today, as revealed in his 1996 work The Demon-Haunted World, a plea against ignorance founded on the rejection of science and critical thinking, and the rapid spread of misinformation, and how all of this would negatively affect the world and the society we live in. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection and the continuing belief by many that the 2020 election was “stolen,” accompanied by the acceptance of wild and absurd conspiracy theories by Trump’s supporters, Williams scrolled an excerpt from the book:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Truer words could not be spoken about our world today, when we see the ignorant electing the ignorant, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert, to be their “representatives” in Congress. We have the highest-rated cable news network devoted to conspiracies and hate-mongering.
Having been first fascinated by Sagan’s Cosmos television series on PBS when it first aired, and having read his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Dragons of Eden, I decided to see what else he had to say about what he believed was in store for this country and world, and purchased Demon. I only got around to reading it in the last few weeks, and I’ll share some of other things of interest from the book.
Back in the day, television frequently aired in prime time those National Geographic and Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau specials; I know I found them to be fascinating as a kid. But in today’s world, Sagan bemoaned the fact that
What we almost never find - in public libraries or newsstand magazines or prime-time television programs - is the evidence from sea floor spreading and plate tectonics, and from mapping the ocean floor which shows quite unmistakably that there could have been no continent between Europe and the Americas on anything like the timescale proposed. Spurious accounts that snare, the gullible are readily available.
Nowadays, many people treat science like an annoyance that gets in the way of their belief in the latest conspiracy theory. Science should arouse “a soaring sense of wonder”; unfortunately, “so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.”
Of course a good example of this is the insistence of many people that climate change and environmental damage doesn’t “exist” if they don’t actually “see” it. Sagan notes that “Surveys suggest that some 95 per cent of Americans are 'scientifically illiterate'.” This isn’t exactly new; not just the ancient Greeks but the Sumerians 4,000 years were “lamenting” that “the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding.”
That may not be precisely true at all times in the past, when space exploration grabbed the fascination of the public, and the young could imagine exploring the cosmos, just as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey promised. The next big technological advance that would allow it was just around the corner. But then Richard Nixon ended the Apollo program prematurely and thousands of space flight engineers hit the unemployment lines. Today, there is hardly enough money for NASA to scrounge up for even another trip to the moon. The Christopher Nolan film Interstellar suggests that there is a way, if one finds a “worm hole” nearby, that we can find other habitable worlds; but in his book There is No Planet B, Mike Berners-Lee tells us that this is largely a fantasy, that humankind is going to have to find a way to make this planet last for future generations before it is too late.
Sagan writes that “I don't know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth.”
For Sagan, the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country is also a critical problem, for it also is indicative of a loss of scientific and technological knowhow. Bit by bit, this country is losing its capacity to dictate its own future, and allowing other countries that do control the making of things (like China), will result in this country falling further and further behind. But how many find this “concerning”? The scientifically “skeptical” choose to believe “that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, powercrazed politicians and so decide to get rid of it.” But as Elon Musk said the other day, this country needs to stop the “infighting” and “punching ourselves in the damn face,” and be “competitive here.”
It all starts with the intention to be ignorant. People who choose to believe in QAnon conspiracies even when people who regard themselves as “informed” try to educate them on why these beliefs are absurd can only be “educated” when the insanity becomes so great that even they are forced to feel a little “shame” about it. Unfortunately for some people that is a pretty high bar.
Sagan writes that in regard to beliefs in the logically absurd, “It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. It's disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but it is better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?”
Accepting the science is a way back to rationality and progress, “But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way…Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future.”
But “Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.” Sagan could very well be talking about the absurd 2020 election conspiracies, with one-third of all Americans claiming in polls that they believe the election was “stolen” without a shred of proof, and Donald Trump is still the “president” in their eyes. One can well wonder what Sagan would have thought if he was still alive to witness the January 6 insurrection.
Sagan writes that people think that they are “infallible” simply because they have motor skills that allow them to drive a car, ride a bicycle and even remember how to type after years of disuse. But “Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. A most illuminating book called How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, shows how people systematically err in understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being influenced by the opinions of others.” We can easily conjecture what Sagan would say about the popularity of Trumpism and Fox News “prime time.”
In the vast ocean of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, finding “the occasional straw of truth… requires vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along. An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children on television and radio and in movies, newspapers, magazines, comics and many booksmight easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?”
Sagan also regarded much of modern “therapy” as pseudoscience, such as witchcraft was in the past and the belief in ghosts and claims of alien abduction today. He was skeptical of people like authors Ellen Bass and Laura David, who wrote a book that essentially gives therapists and psychiatrists license to implant memories of abuse (especially sexual abuse) to explain certain psychological issues even if they were not mentioned or were only “suggested” by leading questions but the patient was “unsure.” Bass and David are quoted “If a client is unsure that she was abused but thinks she might have been, work as though she was.”
The “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s led to numerous cases of such “implanted memories” to put innocent people in prison before common sense took hold. The most infamous case was the McMartin Preschool trial where the “evidence” was largely concocted by an unlicensed “psychotherapist” named Kee MacFarlane, who showed children where to touch anatomically-correct dolls, and from there followed hallucinatory tales of underground tunnels, baby sacrifices, children flushed down toilets and even the daycare workers turning themselves into witches and flying about. It took six years for these sordid falsehoods to completely unravel and the innocent freed from prison.
Today, regardless of who is trying to control the national narrative, whether it is coming from the left or the right (although these things are “relative,” given that followers of the “right” seem more uninformed and susceptible to conspiracy theories), it is easy to do when controlled by a small cabal with an agenda, and thus more dangerous. Sagan writes, “In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I'm imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over new stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.”
Considering the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations are “people,” Sagan also saw how those “small numbers of people” were organized: “Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies!”
Sagan seemed to suggest that it was possible to overcome the power of corporations and their political stooges by the rise of what could pass as social media: “The proliferation of cable television channels, cheap long-distance telephone calls, fax machines, computer bulletin boards and networks, inexpensive computer self-publishing and surviving instances of the traditional liberal arts university curriculum are trends that might work in the opposite direction. It's hard to tell how it's going to turn out.” Unfortunately, we live in world where it seems the truth has only become a titanic struggle between matter and anti-matter, with one often cancelling out the other.
There is “hope” of course, but then “Even a casual scrutiny of history reveals that we humans have a sad tendency to make the same mistakes again and again. We're afraid of strangers or anybody who's a little different from us. When we get scared, we start pushing people around. We have readily accessible buttons that release powerful emotions when pressed. We can be manipulated into utter senselessness by clever politicians. Give us the right kind of leader and, like the most suggestible subjects of the hypnotherapists, we'll gladly do just about anything he wants - even things we know to be wrong.” Yes, Sagan foresaw someone like Donald Trump becoming president—and no, the framers of the Constitution did not.
While those on the left are willing to analyze what those on the right are saying—if only to attempt to explain to them why they are wrong—those on the right seem unwilling to listen to the views of anyone who sees the world differently: “In his celebrated little book, On Liberty, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is 'a peculiar evil'. If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the 'opportunity of exchanging error for truth'; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in 'its collision with error'. If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.”
According to Mill, “If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame.” Thomas Jefferson was no less skeptical about a willfully uninformed electorate that allows someone with authoritarian impulses to control national and social policy, i.e. someone like Trump and those of like mind: “A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”
Still, “the framers of the Bill of Rights - and even more so to all those who, at considerable personal risk, insisted on exercising those rights - it's hard now to bottle up free speech. School library committees, the immigration service, the police, the FBI or the ambitious politician looking to score cheap votes, may attempt it from time to time, but sooner or later the cork pops” and “activists and the courts episodically hold their feet to the fire.”
Sagan notes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were composed at a time when those doing the composing were largely of a single mind on the matter. That is no longer true, and “our liberties” are being “slowly eroded and our rights subverted” from within by the willingness of many to have a dumb-downed, paranoid view of the world, and be more susceptible to unscrupulous “leaders” who are only interested in maintaining their own power and greed. Thus Brian Williams was correct, and Sagan was remarkably prescient about how the world was destined to turn.
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