What a thoughtful scientist saw in our troubled future
I am not, as you might imagine, someone who puts a great deal of stock in the powers of prophecy. But I also pride myself on being someone who, in the best scientific tradition, must reconsider his position when faced with a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. As seems to be the case in this instance.
The other day I was flipping through Carl Sagan’s masterpiece, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It opens with a story of the celebrated scientist being picked up at the airport by a pseudoscience-obsessed driver and finding himself forced to repeatedly deflate the driver’s superstitious enthusiasms by coolly pointing out the falseness of his beliefs.
But the point behind Sagan’s anecdote wasn’t that the driver was stupid or incurious—exactly the opposite, in fact: here was someone who was deeply keen to explore the mysteries of the world around him, but was somehow steered away from the many legitimately fascinating enigmas all around us by a stream of beguiling sensationalist nonsense about Atlantis and extraterrestrials.
“Had he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in 4-million-year-old volcanic ash? What about the raising of the Himalayas when India went crashing into Asia? Or how viruses, built like hypodermic syringes, slip their DNA past the host organism’s defenses and subvert the reproductive machinery of cells? No, he hadn’t heard…
“He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the universe. He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our education system, our communications media had failed this man. What society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works.”
The Demon-Haunted World was written in 1995, and today it makes for a chilling experience indeed—opening it to almost any page at random will subject the reader to a vivid indictment of our contemporary irrational zeitgeist that has, as Sagan balefully predicted, become drastically worse over the past 30 years.
His heartfelt lament, for instance, that, “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”, is not only undeniably spot-on, but also most unfortunately in no way limited to the United States.
But perhaps the most frustrating aspect of re-reading Carl Sagan is the realization that many who bear a considerable amount of the responsibility for his nightmares coming so vividly true are, ironically enough, the very same ones who nowadays unhesitatingly position themselves as his culture war-fighting disciples: those smug, intolerant, “trust the science” types on all sides of us who are so keen to portray their enemies as dangerous knuckle-dragging ignoramuses.
Now I don’t want to get carried away here. I’m certainly not implying that the mess we’re currently in is largely the fault of self-proclaimed science advocates, only highlighting the obvious point that positioning your opponents as intellectually benighted Luddites who are incapable of appreciating your own shining “progressive” insights is not only going to be a deeply ineffective rhetorical strategy, it will also do considerable damage to the very cause that you claim to be representing—knee-jerk invocations of authority being very much against the spirit of the scientific method—thereby palpably demonstrating that, as it happens, you too know nothing about how science actually works.
So there is an obvious tactical issue at play here, as well as one of intellectual consistency. But there is also—even more significantly—a moral one, a human one: a question of empathy. If we want to make genuine progress, if we want to go beyond mere self-righteous posturing and actually convince people that they must change their attitudes so that we can all improve our common lot, then we have to genuinely make the effort to understand how they might have come to such beliefs in the first place.
And for that, once again, we could do far, far worse than look to Dr Sagan:
“In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be, Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.”
The evidence, it seems, is in. Not only do real prophets exist, but so—unfortunately—do Cassandras.
Howard Burton, August 22, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and he is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
